This seminar warmly invites papers exploring the postures of the human figure as they appear in poetry. By posture, we mean the shapes bodies can take. Whether entwined, taking a knee, lying prone, gesturing, leaping, or with hands clasped in devotion or grief, postures are historically and culturally variable as well as intensely resonant--especially those drawn upon by poets. In poetry, so close to dance and its vocabulary of attitude, posture may be conveyed by means of imagery, rhetorical stance, voice or tone, scripts for the reader’s movements, and more.

We want to make room for papers that explore the spectrum of cultural valences of the human form: the relationship of figural poses to action, dominance, habitus, theatricality, spatial orientation, social relations. After all, postures can enforce hierarchies and they can also resist them. The ability to stand tall may constitute the privileged perspective of the overseer, but it may also be how to get up, to stand up for human rights. As scholarship in disability studies would suggest, postures’ received meanings may seem fixed but their lived embodiment is not: disability and nondisability change over a lifetime. From phenomenological approaches to spatiality studies, affect theory to performance studies, what are the affordances of such tensions? What are their limitations? Recent attention to poetic form and embodiment by Sarah Dowling—on figuration and recumbency—and Alex C. Purves—on gesture in Homer—suggests the range of possible poetic objects and as well as the seminar’s timeliness. We look forward to receiving proposals on poetry and poetics across a wide spectrum of time periods, traditions, schools, forms, and national literatures.