SMU Symposium on Poetic Form
Monday, March 18
8:30-9:00 Check in, Bridwell Library. All events, unless otherwise noted, will be held in Bridwell Library’s Methodist Collection Reading Room (Blue Room).
9:00-10:15 Welcome and keynote panel: David Caplan, Chair, Jahan Ramazani, “How Poems World the World,” Evie Shockley, “Taking a Look at Voice,” and Maureen McLane, “Poetic Form: Dis/Contents, Possibilities, Provocations”
10:25-11:40 “Sonnots”: HL Hix, Chair, Lucy Alford, “‘Our Home is Our Voice’: Polyphony in Tyehimba Jess’s Olio,” Lisa L. Moore, “Feminist and Queer Sonnet Sequences in Protest of Anti-Black Violence,” Timo Müller, “The Black Protest Sonnet in the 1910s and 1920s: A Prehistory of the Harlem Renaissance,” and Alexis Sears, “The Confessional Sonnet: Struggle and Structure”
12:10-1:00 Lunch and creative conversation, Jericho Brown and Virginia Jackson
1:20-2:20 “New & Selected: Poets on Formal Innovation & Inheritance”: Roundtable discussion, Mag Gabbert, Tarfia Faizullah, and Chen Chen
2:30-3:45 “Figures for Form in the Eighteenth Century”: Sarah Ellenzweig, “Bound,” Amelia Worsley, “Echo,” and Courtney Weiss Smith, “Remain”
3:55-5:10 “Prominence and Perception”: Roundtable discussion, Andrew Osborn, Roi Tartakovsky, Natalie Gerber, and Frederick Turner
5:30-6:30 Keynote lecture: Jonathan Culler, “Lyric Form in Contemporary Poetry,” DeGolyer Library Foyer
6:40 Reception/dinner at Professor Bonnie Wheeler’s house.
Tuesday, March 19
9:00-10:15 “Conceptualisms and Erasurism”: Benjamin Friedlander, Chair, Leah Souffrant, “I Am Never and Always Not I: Autotheory and the Problem of Categories,” Michal Calo, “Ekphrasis as Archive: Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus,” Ronnie Stephens, “Against Formalism: Erasure and the Poetics of Counterpublics,” and Michel Delville, “Hauntological Blurrings and Cancelations”
10:25-11:40 “Historical Poetics: What and Why and How”: Charles LaPorte, “What Poetry Meant in the Nineteenth Century,” Meredith McGill, “Why Format Matters: Beyond Form and Genre in Nineteenth-Century Poetics,” and Meredith Martin, “How We Write Sound”
11:40-1:10 Lunch break
12:00 to 1:00 The Historical Poetics Reading Group conducts a discussion of the first chapter of Francis Barton Gummere’s The Beginnings of Poetry. (Entire volume available here.) Bridwell Library Benefactors Room
1:10-2:25 “Lyric Exercises”: Dan Moss, Chair, Hannah Crawforth, “Constraint,” Jeff Dolven, “Compression,” and Colleen Rosenfeld, “Variation”
2:35-3:50 Keynote panel: Rosanne Brooks, Chair, Anthony Reed, “Folk Forms in a Digital Age,” Stephanie Burt, “Exaptations: a Darwinism of Forms,” and Virginia Jackson, “What is Poetry?”
4:20-5:20 Keynote poet: Jericho Brown reading, McCord Auditorium, 3rd floor, Dallas Hall
5:30-6:15 Book signing and wine reception with heavy hors d’oeuvres
6:30 Group poetry reading: Participants will include Stephanie Burt, Maureen McLane, Evie Shockley, Mag Gabbert, Katie Condon, Samyak Shertok, Chen Chen, and Tarfia Faizullah. Deejay: Kendra Allen Hosted by the Southwest Review in the Club Room at Ozona Grill (4615 Greenville Ave).