CFP for NEMLA 2000, April 7-8, 2000, Buffalo, NY
DEADLINE EXTENDED, October 1, 1999
Maneuvering against the word: multi-mediated challenges to the primacy of
the verbal in postmodern British and American Poetry
The panel will explore extra-generic experiments in poetry ("expanded"
poetry) that interactively engage non-verbal material--not in the
conventional sense of illustrated or "illuminated" manuscripts, but as
fully hybridized cultural forms. We will be concerned not only with work
that reconfigures the poetic field by opening itself to (breaking itself
over) non-verbal discourses, but also with the way audio-visual elements
re- or dis-figure language. We are especially interested in collaborative
form-benders that play upon (without necessarily attempting to resolve)
the tensions/ contentions of various media within a work. Thus, while the
panel is focused nominally on "poetry," it will more broadly and inevitably
consider language experiments and multimedia events that incorporate verbal
language as one dialogic strand: in addition to rebus writing, concrete
poetry, and sound poetry, we may consider a range of ventures, including
relatively straightforward collaborations (such as John Yau's writing on or
to the images of contemporary painters and photographers, as in _Big City
Primer_ with Ben Berrette, and Frank O'Hara and Grace Hartigan's
poem/paintings series _Oranges_), as well as more experimental work (such
as Ronald Johnson's graphemic play in _Radi Os_, which writes through
Milton's Paradise Lost to reveal a deep-image lyric; the TEZ Critical
Performance group's incorporation of cartoon templates to generate a
poem-by-number reinscription of Ginsberg's _Howl_ ; Daniel Spoerri, Robert
Filliou, and Emmett William's intertextual/intermedia game _An Annotated
Topography of Chance_, Ron Padgett and Spoerri's heteroglossic _Bean
Spasms_, and Jerome Rothenberg's multi-track reworkings/reperformances of
Native American oral poetry in, for example, the "Horse Songs" series).
These few examples by no means exhaust the possibilities; we can also, for
example, look at the impact of postmodern, text-intensive European art
movements, such as _Tel Quel_, Lettrism, and Situationism, on
Anglo-American poetic practices.
By opening up productive lines of inquiry into the relationships between
print and non-print media, such a panel engages issues in literary and
cultural theory, deterritorializing critical studies and expanding the
scope of critical praxis in literary studies.
Depending on response and interests, we may expand the panel to include
examinations of theatrical experimentation (The Wooster Group, Richard
Schechner's East Coast Players, Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric
Theater Company and spin-offs) and forays into multimedia performance and
installation art (Theodore Skirpitares, Mabou Mines, Laurie Anderson, the
Critical Art Ensemble, U.K.-based Brith Gof, etc.). Currently, I would
like to see proposals in any of these areas (the list of specific artists
mentioned above is exemplary, not prescriptive).
queries to lavazzit@savstate.edu
abstracts to:
Tom Lavazzi
2420 Reynolds
Savannah, GA 31401 Humanities Department
Savannah State University
Savannah,GA 31404
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