CALL FOR PAPERS for "Contemporary Poet's Theater: L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E and Beyond": A panel on critical approaches to poet's theater to be proposed to the 20th Century Literature Conference in Louisville
Please respond with an essay abstract and bio by SEPT. 12. A print project may be in the future on the poet's theater topic, so we are happy to learn of your interest.
Description of panel proposal with submission instructions:
In recent contemporary poetics, the term "poet's theater" has become linked with the "Language" group of writers and often directors of poetry-plays produced as low-budget staged performances in the late 1970's and '80's. Today, new productions of classic "Language"-orientedpoet's theater abound, by writers including Leslie Scalapino, Carla Harryman, Charles Bernstein, among others. Yet there are also many contemporary playwrights in other settings doing work that is not only aesthetically related to "Language"-oriented theater, but which might be productively critiqued in terms articulated by Language writers and others writing on avant-garde performance art. These "other" are theater writers are those who are engaging in "poet's theater," by virtue of treating a written text as an act of performance -- the drama thus emerging not from some external "signified," but from within the "signifier," the poetic language, itself.
This panel is an attempt to ground a definition of the term "poet's theater" in a potentially expanding notion of the contemporary working scene of today's American theater, both through under-financed ssm all public venues (cafes or coffee houses or art-spaces) or in venues like Off-Broadway. It is also an attempt to take the recent use of the term by the Language writers into other realms of "language"-oriented theatrical poetics. We wish for presenters to look at what the embodied stage and poetic experiment have to offer one another, in practice and/or in conceptual theories. We are proposing this panel to the Louisville conference directors (conference to take place in February '08), with the hopes that we can bring new perspectives into a discussion of an often under-considered form of contemporary poetics: that which is written to be staged. We are looking for papers that consider specific poet's-theater works and their authors, approached from some knowledge of contemporary poetics theory or performance theory (or both).
Since our topic concerns CONTEMPORARY poet's theater, please submit paper proposals only on poets of the theater who have emerged during or since the early stages of "Language" writing (including John Ashbery, Bernstein, Ntozake Shange, Harryman, Scalapino, Amiri Baraka , Cherie Moraga, Tracie Morris; as well as "non-poet" playwrights like Adrienne Kennedy, Anna Deavere Smith, or Suzan-Lori Parks -- the latter of whose works are based in a non-linear use of lyrical language). Historical influences, however, are also of interest.
Send a 250-300-word abstract and title describing your paper topic no later than SEPTEMBER 12, by e-mail, to Laura Hinton ( laurahinton12@gmail.com).
Accompany this abstract with the following cover-sheet information needed per conference requirements: * 1)Name 2) Address (preferably home) 3) Telephone number 4) Academic or other affiliation (if applicable) 5) Personal Biographical note (100-150 words)
