Reframing Poetics: Language, Structure, Form

‘Forms are’, as Caroline Levine notes, ‘at work everywhere’. From early modern pattern poetry to the clarified forms of Imagist verse and the minimal grids of the post-war concretists, poetry has always suggested a specific, material attunement to language as a structural agent. To see poetic form itself not just as artifice, however, but as an organisational schema that is meaningful in its own right suggests new and exciting avenues of inquiry. Like Leon Battista Alberti’s veil or Albrecht Dürer’s drawing device, the concept of ‘the frame’ and of form as a mediating interface has been widely employed in material text studies to draw attention to language’s false claim to transparency. As Craig Dworkin has recently proposed, ‘We might learn to look at the opaque materiality of language in the way one might look at rather than through the pane of a window, registering the artifice of its framing rather than focussing on the scene beyond’.

In an era of heightened and extreme digital connectivity, at a moment when our systems and structures—whether political, social, or economic—seem particularly precarious, it feels right to focus our attention towards the frameworks that make up our world, both critical and material. In line with Dworkin’s intention to look at rather than through form, this one-day symposium seeks to reorient our gaze towards the frameworks which not only make meaning possible but carry their own significance.

We therefore invite 15-20 minute critical, practice-led poetic or interdisciplinary proposals which take form, frameworks, matrices, and organisational structures broadly as their focus or point of departure, including (but not confined to):

• Visual poetics from classical antiquity to the contemporary (as varied as Optatian to e. e. cummings, and George Herbert to Irma Blank)
• Frameworks broadly conceived (both material and social, political, ideological etc.)
• Physical and metaphorical mediative boundaries (frames, windows, mirrors, planes etc.)
• Poetry and architecture, or the architecture of poetry
• Spatial and topological relations (such as gridding, mapping, pinpointing, locating etc.)
• Digital poetics and computational structures
• Constraint-based poetics (Oulipo, conceptual poetry, etc.)
• Histories of the book
• Facture and processes of formation, compositional techniques and tools, and material aids or supports in poetic construction (including typewriters, handwriting, collage etc.)
• Space and structure in poetics across physical forms and critical vocabularies

Please send 250-word abstracts along with a short bio to Lola Gabellini-Fava at [email protected] and India Oswin at [email protected] by 15 May 2026.

This event is generously supported by the UCL Department of English Language and Literature. If you are a low-income applicant (including graduate students and researchers on casual or non-full-time contracts) travelling from outside of London and wish to apply for travel subsidy, please indicate so on your application, along with the estimated cost. Travel subsidy will be allocated on a first-come, first-serve basis.

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Host or Publisher Lola Gabellini-Fava, India Oswin