CONGRES DE LA SAES 2026 POITIERS/ POETS AND POETRY PANEL / CFP
For the 2026 “Poets and Poetry / LOOP” panel, papers are invited that fall within the remit of the general CFP on the topic of Emancipation.
In the spirit of Blake’s declaration, in the Preface to Jerusalem, that “Poetry Fetter’d, Fetters the Human Race!”, a welcome is extended to proposals that understand emancipation either thematically or formally – or, as Blake himself did, both thematically and formally.
The panel is thus open to papers that address the acts of, or struggles for, emancipation that poetry has represented, or has sought to advance; and will equally welcome those that investigate formal or generic norms by which poets have felt constrained, and from which they have sought to break free. Papers may touch on any relevant aspect, zone or period of poetry in English, or of English-speaking countries.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- How does poetry, from Shelley through Mangan and Whitman to Brooks, Ginsberg, Rich and beyond, imagine emancipation or the emancipated citizen?
- How have excluded or oppressed classes or groups used poetry as a vehicle for emancipation?
- How have particular struggles for political freedom been represented, advanced or resisted in poetry? What different positions has religion occupied in emancipatory poetry?
- What other social, racial, sexual or community constraints and norms has poetry struggled against? Which preoccupy contemporary poets? How do different forms of emancipation interact? Are there ecological limits to emancipation (Craig Santos Perez)?
- What role have fetters, manacles, shackles and handcuffs (from Blake’s “mind-forg’d manacles” to Dunbar’s “Never again shall the manacles gall you”) played in constructing a poetics of emancipation?
- What have been the causes, modes or consequences of the rejection of formal constraints: rhyme (Milton’s prefatory note to Paradise Lost), metre (the free verse of Blake, Whitman, and the early Modernists), the left-hand margin, the page, the book, syntax, speech? Or of the swapping of one set of constraints for another: sprung rhythm (Hopkins), syllabic metres (Moore, Gunn), procedural poetry?
- How have poets sought to escape generic norms and constraints? What has been the role of hybrid genres such as concrete poetry, the verse novel (e.g. Vikram Seth, Liz Berry), the prose poem, or multi-generic works such as Claudia Rankine’s Citizen? Of works in dialect (e.g. William Barnes), Scots (e.g. Hugh MacDiarmid, Tom Leonard), patois (e.g. James Berry, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Benjamin Zephaniah)? Of works that include found material? Of works that combine different languages, from David Jones and Ezra Pound to Caroline Bergvall and Cathy Park Hong? Of small presses, little magazines and alternative performance spaces?
- Are formal and generic emancipation still live issues in contemporary poetry? Have such constraints lost their power?
- Is emancipation an operative concept in writing a history of poetry? Do succeeding generations seek freedom from the norms of their predecessors?
In addition, we would be particularly happy to receive proposals on the work of Tony Harrison (1937-2025).
Please send your abstracts and short bios to Claire Hélie (claire.helie@univ-lille.fr) and Lacy Rumsey (lacy.rumsey@ens-lyon.fr) by Dec. 1. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by Dec. 8, 2025.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
The LOOP team (13 octobre 2025). CONGRES DE LA SAES 2026 POITIERS/ POETS AND POETRY PANEL / CFP. LOOP. Consulté le 15 janvier 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/14xzw

