Poetry and the State in the 1960s
Description
Poetry and the State in the 1960s
This seminar gathers new research on poetry and state power in the 1960s, with attention to two interlocking issues: 1) the postwar legacies of international modernism 2) how state power mediates and influences poetry across disparate global political contexts. Framing—or, indeed, reifying—“the 1960s” as our historical period links key developments and inflection points: the flourishing of national liberation and decolonization movements in Africa, Asia, and South America; US political instrumentalization of culture and the recuperation of modernism during the Cold War; Soviet and “red world” literary production and “cultural diplomacy”; public reckonings—and evasions—of the history and legacy of World War II. Our interest in modernism is not prescriptive; instead, we’re interested in the fraught status of modernism in the period, its susceptibility to being assimilated to various state-sponsored narratives, and its potential as a site of liberatory identification or disidentification.
Potential topics include but are not limited to:
-How poets of the 1960s are beneficiaries, representatives, and/or victims of state power
-The ways in which state power produces and intervenes in poetic production
-Coterie activities and collaborations of poets across regional, national, transnational, imperial, and internationalist scales
-Translation and multilingualism
-Poetry/poetics of the 1960s and the advent of modern “world literature”
-Poetry of the 1960s as an evasion of state power and national identification
-Connections between poetry of the 1960s and the other arts
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Muhamed Osman Al Khalil is professor of Arabic and the founding director of the Arabic Studies program at NYU Abu Dhabi. He holds a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Arizona (2005) and teaches courses in Arabic Studies and Literary Translation. He is involved in archival preservation and has recently helped the university purchase the papers of poet Muhammad al-Fayturi (1930-2015). Professor Al Khalil is currently editing al-Fayturi’s complete poetical works for publication.
Speaker Bio
Samia Rahimtoola is an assistant professor of English at Bowdoin College. She has published numerous articles on twentieth-century American literature, poetry and poetics, and political ecology. Her book, Poetry from Spaceship Earth: Empire and Ecology in Post-1945 American Poetry, will be published by the University of Iowa Press in Spring 2026.
Speaker Bio
Marlene Oeffinger is a sixth-year PhD student in English Literature at Concordia University, Montréal. Her work focuses on the integration of the poetry, critical theory, and concepts of molecular biology to interrogate the concept of an allostatic self, examining notions of auto-affect/ation, sociality, and collective and embodied memory as means of closing the gap between a transcendental self and biological lived body. Her work has been published in Symphilosophies (2023, 2024).
Papers
Speaker Bio
Jane Malcolm is an Associate Professor at the Université de Montréal. She is the co-editor of A Description of Acquaintance: The Letters of Laura Riding and Gertude Stein 1927-1930 (UNM Press) and a scholarly edition of Laura Riding's 1928 treatise, Contemporaries and Snobs (UAlabama Press), as well as essays and articles on the work of Muriel Rukeyser, Alice Notley, Yoko Ono, and Gail Scott, among others.
Speaker Bio
Anthony Reed is The Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of Fine Arts and Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. His publications include Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing and Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production.
Speaker Bio
Stephen Ross is associate professor of English at Concordia University.
Speaker Bio
Joshua Kotin is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Gonzalo Montero is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Virginia Tech. He works on modern and contemporary Latin American literature and culture. He has published articles in Latin American Literary Review, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, Chasqui, Textos Híbridos, Confluencia, among other journals. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled Cultures of Emancipation. Intellectuals and Artists Imagining Chilean Socialism.
Speaker Bio
Rebecca Kosick is associate professor of comparative poetry and poetics at the University of Bristol where she codirects the Bristol Poetry Institute. She is the author of Labor Day (Golias Books 2020) and Material Poetics in Hemispheric America (Edinburgh UP 2020), as well as editor-translator of Hélio Oiticica's Secret Poetics (Winter Editions and Soberscove Press 2023). Her next book, Dispatches from the Avant-Garage: The Alternative Press is forthcoming from Wayne State UP in 2026.
Speaker Bio
Ariel Resnikoff’s recent works include raisin in every bite (Furniture Press, 2022), A Paradise of Hearing (The Swan, 2021), and Unnatural Bird Migrator (The Operating System, 2020) which was awarded an Anne and Robert Cowan Writers Prize. He is a contributing editor at Jacket2 magazine and a member of the Board of Directors of Ether Sea Projects and Litmus Press.
Speaker Bio
I am a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, originally from the UK. I research in the fields of Global Modernism, Caribbean and Black Diaspora Poetics I am an Editorial Assistant for the peer-reviewed journal Modernism/modernity. Poetry chapbooks published include Pangea (Slub Press, 2023) and flood, forthcoming with Turret House Press. I am a contributor to the New Cambridge Chapbook Review.