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