The Modernist Long Poem and Its Discontents

The Modernist Long Poem and Its Discontents - Colloque International

Please join us for two days of short talks on the topic of the modernist long poem and its discontents in Paris, France. This conference will bring together thirty speakers and scholars from around the world to discuss the complexities, challenges, and innovations of this unique mode and model of poetry across the twentieth century and into our own. We'll be meeting first at the École Normale Supérieure and then at NYU Paris for talks from experts on the subject and younger writers of long poems themselves. Our keynote speakers are Virginia Jackson (UC Irvine) and Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Temple, emerita). Free entry: all welcome. More details to follow soon.

Thursday 19 September 2024: 45 rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris

Friday 20 September 2024: 55 Boulevard Saint-Germain, 75005 Paris

With special thanks to our partners and collaborators at NYU Paris, Ecole Normale Supérieure, the Société des études modernistes, the Modern and Contemporary Colloquium (NYU English), and the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS).

We hope to see you there!

Your organizers,

Richard Aldersley (NYU), Mantra Mukim (CYU), and Samantha Lemeunier (ENS)

Speakers:

Keynote: Virginia Jackson (UC Irvine) -- Impossible Poetry

Keynote: Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Temple, emerita) -- A Poet-Critic Muses on Long Modernist Poems

C.D. Blanton (UC Berkeley) -- Qualitative Epic

Xavier Kalck (Lille) -- The Great American Long Poem: Indexing Song to Size

Vladimir Lucien (NYU) -- The Epic as “Long Documentarian Song” & “Ongoing Answer” in the Work of Kamau Brathwaite

Ane Thon Knutsen (Oslo) -- Parallax, Nancy Cunard and The Hours Press

Charlotte Estrade (Paris Nanterre) -- Joseph Moncure March’s The Set-Up: “Visions and Revisions” of a “Lost Classic”

Colin Vanderberg (NYU) -- “A Criticism-Ridden Art”: Karl Shapiro's Polemic Epic

Martina Morabito (Bologna, Siena) -- Aleksandr Blok’s Vozmezdie: Discontent, Discord, Disease

Josef Hrdlicka (Charles Prague) -- The Modernist Long Poem in the Czech Context

Benjamin Paul (Boston) -- H. D.’s Long Poems: Towards an Inward Epic

Deven Philbrick (Michigan) -- “A Work of Enormous Dailiness”: Rachel Blau Duplessis’ “Drafts” as Process Feminism

Baptiste Rembert (Sorbonne) -- Active Presence in Long Poems: Tommy Pico’s Poetics of Survivance

Celine Shanosky (Harvard) -- The Modernist Long Origin Story: Moore, Milton, and Lyric Reading

Anastasia Gladoshchuk (Grenoble) -- Octavio Paz’s Sunstone and the Problem of Peripheral Modernity

Brendan Johnston (UC Davis) -- The Mythopoetics of Relation, Remaking the Modernist Long Poem at Midcentury: Tolson’s “Demiurge” in Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953)

Julius Greve (Oldenburg) -- Hauntological Ventriloquism: Zong! and the Afterlives of the Modernist Long Poem

Corentin Jégou (Nantes) -- Derek Walcott's Omeros: The Long Poem as a Generic Laboratory

Mahdi Alaoui (Stanford) -- Problems of Historical Change in the Composition of the Serial Modernist Epic

Mae Losasso (Warwick) -- Breathwork: On Respiration, Labour, and Poetry

María Matilde Morales (Harvard) -- The Socialist Long Poem: Versification and Montage in Vladimir Mayakovsky’s About That

Juliette Bouanani (Nanterre Université) -- “Faust's female counterpart”: Lyn Hejinian's Book of a Thousand Eyes (2012)

Valentina Mele (Leeds) -- The Long Poem as Receptacle of Voices: Jack Spicer’s The Heads of the Town up to Aether

Susan Harrow (Bristol) -- Reading in Revisionary Modernism: Apollinaire’s Singular “Song of the Poorly Loved”

Britton Edelen (Duke) -- Vers Libre, Vers Épuisé: Rimbaud, Long Poetry, and the Rhythms of Modernity

Damian Maher (All Souls, Oxford) -- Poiesis as Process: Francis Ponge’s Efforts to Come to Terms with Poetry

Anita Frison (Padua) -- Colonial Space and Nikolai Gumilev’s Mik

Manan Kapoor (Harvard) -- Creolizing the Modernist Long Poem: Derek Walcott’s “The Schooner ‘Flight’”

Matilde Manara (UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles) -- (Late) Modernist Long Poem and its ‘Aesthetic Illusion’: Diegetic and Epideictic Elements in Elizabeth Bishop’s The Moose and In The Waiting Room

Heidi Hartwig (Central Connecticut State) -- “To make things sub specie aeternitatis”: The Postsecular Poetics of David Jones’s The Anathemata

Motonori Sato (Keio) -- Invention of the Modernist Long Poem in Japan

Siting Yang (Harvard) -- The Post-mortem Long Poem: After Nature and the Biographistic Afterlife of Modernism

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Ecole Normale Supérieure, 45 Rue d'Ulm, Paris, France