Call For Papers

Conference website

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most seminal events in modern American poetry, the Vancouver Poetry Conference 1963. Following the publication of Donald Allen’s prescient The New American Poetry in 1960, Warren Tallman and Robert Creeley gathered together a number of the New American poets (including Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Allen Ginsberg) in Vancouver for three weeks of poetry readings, public lectures, workshops and roundtable discussions on contemporary experimental poetics. This occasion helped to consolidate some of the primary theoretical arguments informing American experimental poetry of the period and facilitated an unprecedented level of cross-fertilisation and dialogic exchange between current and successive generations of experimental poets.

To coincide with UEA’s own fiftieth anniversary, the School of American Studies will be hosting a one day conference to reassesses the continuing legacies of the Vancouver Poetry Conference and its participants. We welcome proposals on topics related, but not limited, to:

•  The poetry/poetics of the contributors to the conference; Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Philip Whalen, Margaret Avison, etc.
• A cross-border (Am-Can) avant-garde: for example, the influence of the conference in establishing a relationship between experimental poets associated with Robin Blaser in British Columbia and those associated with Robert Duncan in San Francisco.
• The transgression of borders in experimental American poetry (formal, stylistic, thematic, etc and/or political, philosophical, sexual, religious, etc)
• The importance of the border (spatial, conceptual, literal, ethical, textual, etc) in experimental American poetry
• Instances of direct inter-generational influence and/or dialogue between the contributors and successive experimental poets/poetry collectives

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to davidmccarthy.uea@gmail.com by 31^st August 2013. The conference poster can be found Here.