Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, Lancashire, Wednesday 8^th March 2017
Chairs: Joanne Ashcroft, James Byrne, Tom Jenks & Christopher Madden

The format will be panel sessions throughout the day and a reading during the evening (please specify if you would like to be considered for both). Papers are to be no more than 20 minutes and may wish to consider:

• ‘Linguistically innovative poetry’ techniques. Use of form, measure, line, enjambment, poetic diction. 

• Form(ing)s, sequences. New approaches to Complete Twentieth Century Blues and/or History or Sleep. 

• The Necessity of Poetics as a speculative, flexible discipline. 

• The poem as a musical score. ‘Smokestack Lightning[s]’. Blue Sinatra’s. Voice, performance. Notation as compositional method. 

• Continuities: educating desire / the reader as participant. “The aim [is] to activate the reader into participation, into relating differences, to sabotage perceptual schema, to educate desire, not to fulfil it in a merely entertaining emptying of energy. To create, above all, new continuities.” ‘Poetic Sequencing and the New’, in Complete Twentieth Century Blues, p. 83.

• Archival schematics. [Empty] Diaries. Arrangements of the book. 

• The shadow work of history. Unwritings and pluralities of self. René Van Valckenborch meets Orpheus / Sparagmos. 

• Assembling the ‘autrebiography’ (CF Attridge). ‘Thinking of someone else’. Self-othering. Unwritings and the orchestrations of history.

• RS as critic (A Poetry of Saying, When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry). Spheres of influence.

• Kinship: Lee Harwood, Bill Griffiths, Bob Cobbing, etc. Dedicated works. 

• The European Union of Imaginary Authors. Hoaxes, satires, humouring[s]. Wayne Pratt and The Penguin Book of British Parrots.

• Ars erotica, ‘Fucking Time’. The ‘Erotic elegy’: sex, smut, innuendo.

• Kitsch: In both versions of ‘Poetic Sequencing and the New’, RS states his sensibility as being “to refunction kitsch”.

Please send a 150-200 word proposal to byrnej@edgehill.ac.uk by October 3^rd 2016