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New Poetics Colloquium
August 21-25, 1985
"Jeff Derksen writes of the New Poetics Colloquium (NPC): “By organizing the well-publicized New Poetics Colloquium in 1985 (perhaps the first large-scale gathering of the language writers), KSW was associated with and made nearly synonymous with language poetry by a discursive exterior that used cultural nationalism to frame the poetics. This frame had already been utilized in the reception of the early-sixties TISH poets as they took up and modified New American poetry for their own investigations of place, history and poetic practice.”
Throughout the conference, a number of key topics were kept in view, as the advertisements for the event stated: * New Feminist Theory and Practice * Language and Philosophy * Translation * New Narrative * Post """"Language"""" Writing * Documentary / Identity / Rhetoric * Language and Performance * The Book * Language and Ideology * Long Forms * Music & Language * Dissemination: Publishing & Distribution.”
The New Poetics Colloquium was a defining event in the development of the KSW. If the school's political orientation originally created an aesthetic identity split between straightforward protest-writing (see the Split/Shift Conference of 1986), and language-centred writing, the success of the NPC put the KSW on the course that it finally took, towards the tactical rejection of “work poetry” poetics." |
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