Poetry City: Call for Papers for a Collection about the SUNY-Buffalo Poetics Program

I'm very happy to announce the call for papers for Poetry City: The Founding of a New American Poetry at Buffalo, 1963-2003.  It will be the first book in the LF Critical Documents series from Lake Forest College Press, and will be edited by Robert Zamsky. The call for papers below gives details (and is also archived at the University of Pennsyvania's "Penn English Calls for Papers" site). 

The LF Critical Documents series is projected to publish one title of literary criticism per year, begining with Zamsky's Poetry City in 2017. Books may be by a single author or edited collections, and inquiries about possible future titles may be directed to me.

Poetry City: the Founding of a New American Poetry at Buffalo, 1963-2003. (Abstracts due: Oct. 1, 2015; chapters due Dec. 1, 2016)

full name / name of organization: 

Robert L. Zamsky / New College of Florida

contact email: 

rzamsky@ncf.edu

This is a call for an essay collection to be published by the Lake Forest College Press.

Poetry City explores the establishment, evolution, and impact of the Poetics Program at SUNY-Buffalo. The program has its roots in the academic fervor of the 1960s, the period in which the dynamic and visionary Chair of the English Department, Al Cook, filled the faculty roster with an unlikely array of influential literary scholars working in a wide range of periods and genres. In 1991, this commitment to innovation found a further iteration in the founding of the Poetics Program by Robert Creeley and Charles Bernstein. Identified with a tradition of innovation in American poetry and poetics, the Poetics Program was envisioned as an alternative to both conventional doctoral programs in English and traditional creative writing programs. Poetics at Buffalo was to be a place where poets taught graduate level courses in literature , literary history, and literary theory, and where graduate students learned to work creatively as literary critics. The book takes its chronological frame from the arrival of Charles Olson in 1963 to the departures of Creeley and Bernstein in 2003.

Parallax Landscape is especially open to contributors working in unconventional forms.
Possible topics might include but are certainly not limited to:

• The relationship between the Poetics Program and the Poetry and Rare Books collection in the SUNY-Buffalo Library;

• The Poetics Program in the context of the nationwide proliferation of MFA programs;

• Gender in the Poetics Program;

• The influence of the tradition of experimental education in the United States on the formation of the program;

• Pedagogy and innovative poetics;

• The Poetics-List and Electronic Poetry Center;

• Small press publishing in the program;

• Performances and readings;

• Lives of the Poetics degree – career paths in/out of academia.