2018-2019 Sessions

For our April session, the accent falls on contemporary Canadian and American poetry. Poster by Suvij Sudershan.

We are pleased to announce a roundtable sponsored by “Poetry Matters,” Friday, March 29, 10:00-12:00. Please join us for a discussion of Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. We envision this event as a forum for conversation around literary, critical, and cultural forms and why they matter. Poster designed by Suvij Sudershan.

For our March session, the accent falls on Victorian poetry, media/sound studies, and the poetics of empire.

In this session, we will cover the following readings:

Christina Rossetti, "In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857”

Rudyard Kipling, "The White Man's Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands”

Alfred Tennyson, "The Charge of the Light Brigade"

Sound recordings made by Victorian actors and elocutionists

Tricia Lootens, The Political Poetess

Jerome McGann, Poetics of Sensibility

Moderators:
Jason Camlot, Associate Professor of English and Associate Dean, Faculty Affairs, Concordia University
Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Assistant Professor of English (LTA), Concordia University

 

Karis Shearer is Associate Professor of English at UBC's Okanagan campus, where she directs the AMP (Audio-Media-Poetry) Lab and coordinates the Digital Arts & Humanities Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies Program. From a feminist perspective, her research focuses on literary production in Canada, the literary audio archive, and the modernist poet-professor in Canada. She is the editor of All These Roads: The Poetry of Louis Dudek(WLUP 2008), a co-applicant on the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership Grant, and with Deanna Fong, she is currently co-editing the collected works of G. Maria Hindmarch for Talonbooks.

Co-sponsored by Poetry Matters and ROAAr, McGill Library

During this session, the spotlight falls on contemporary electronic verse and digital approaches to the study of poetry and poetics. 

Poetry Matters, So, Precis

This gathering builds upon and extends the October session, "The Ghazal in Persian, Urdu, and English," which traced the ghazal from Persian and Urdu into English across an array of cultural and historical contexts from Anglo-American modernism to the Arabic poetry of Umayyad and Norman Sicily.

In this session, we will be covering the following readings:

Translations from the Sicilian

Khamriyya: On Autumn

"O Merciful and O Mercyable"

Petrarch's Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics: 170 and 174 

Poetry Matters, Keshavmurthy, Precis

During this session, the spotlight falls on a selection of seventeenth-century English poetry. 

Poetry Matters, Kilgour, Precis

We will spend this afternoon tracing the journeys of the ghazal from Persian and Urdu into English, taking this as an occasion to explore issues of the politics and poetics of translation in the contexts of 18th century British Orientalism and the politics of recognition in 20th century North America; the importance of the non-European lyric in translation to new moods, new forms and new themes in Anglo-American poetic modernism; the family resemblances between the earliest poetry in an Italianate vernacular, that of 13th century Sicily, and the Arabic poetry of foregoing Umayyad and Norman Sicily. This workshop assumes no prior familiarity with the ghazal or languages and literatures other than English and will thus serve as an introduction to the ghazal to those seeking it, especially as it entered English literary consciousness.