Written in Stone: Lithic Inscription and the Poethics of Monumentality

Written in Stone: Lithic Inscription and the Poethics of Monumentality 

The invocation and use of stone in poetry – as image, metaphor, medium – has a long and varied history. Quarried, shaped, displaced and put to use in both material and symbolic constructions, with all the use and misuse of place and power that these involve, stone is a medium within and upon which the tensions between permanence and impermanence, order and disorder, form and formlessness, nature and culture play out in remarkable ways.

Lithic inscription – in this case both writing inscribed on and written about stone or inscriptions on stone – has been used both to witness and to memorialize, to mark and to remark, in ways often hyperbolic, monumental, solemn, and melancholic. Yet, much as in the case of sculpture, both at a material and conceptual level, the poetics of stone necessarily involves both positive and negative space. After all, stones are only available to use as a result of internal fissures and imperfections; stone structures are always constructed through a careful arrangement not only of stones but also the gaps between them; and the inscription of stone itself habitually involves the chiselling of negative space into a stone surface.

What might we learn about the contingency and constructedness of poetic form by considering the tension between of positive and negative, stone and gap, that emerge when we consider the lithic inscription within or as a poem? What are the poetic works that have represented or formally engaged with stone, or are written or inscribed in stone, in ways that help us to develop alternative poethical strategies for questioning the often hegemonic, totalizing, fetishizing or imperialist forces that underpin monumental structures, material and symbolic, in both their historical and contemporary contexts? 

We invite papers exploring the relationship between poetry and stone, and in particular inscription on stone – concrete poems, illustrations of inscriptions or descriptive accounts of inscriptions and their significance – across a range of cultures and contexts, literatures and media. From gravestones to concrete poems, graffiti to elaborate memorials, inscriptions in stone reveal a great deal about configurations of power and authorized and dissident versions of history.
We wish to explore the aesthetic and poetic, ecological and spatial, imperial and colonial, postcolonial and decolonial significance of writing in stone, and how lithic inscription remains both a site of cultural memory and contestation.