C.D. Wright in Context: Call For Papers
—A Contemporaries at Post45 ClusterThough famously reluctant to claim membership of any single aesthetic school, C. D. Wright’s poetry remains enigmatic for most beyond her immediate circles, and has yet to be clearly situated in the history of American poetry. While gratifying, and aligned with Wright’s singular perspective, the idea that her work resists categorization flattens its sociality and the depth of both her poetics and influence—if there’s a fraught corner of American poetry, Wright’s work engages with it. We invite work for this cluster that explores and engages methods and conditions for understanding Wright’s work as such, or examines aspects of her work’s range of formal and contextual affinities, which is itself a living archive of the tides, trends, and crosscurrents of twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry, from “experimental” marginality to “mainstream” popularity, the regional to the transnational, and the documentary and the narrative lyric, among others. Papers or creative multimodal responses (up to 4000 words) considered for this cluster might bring into fuller view Wright’s poetry and essays in more detailed context, but also her ongoing significance as a poet, teacher, and touchstone.
Contemporaries at Post45 provides a forum for writers to converse with one another more directly and informally than in traditional academic publications. These curated conversations, or “clusters,” range from sets of relatively autonomous short essays on a common theme to extended epistolary exchanges. Your work or paper should be both convivial and accessible while also rigorous and rooted in your expertise.
Potential topics may include, but are not limited to any of the following in dialogue with Wright’s work: documentary poetics, ecopoetics, writers or scholars influenced by her work or teaching, twentieth century American poetry, international readership and reception, contemporary poetry and/or poetic forms (including the long poem, serial poems, or lyric/narrative modes), hybrid forms, regional, rural, or aesthetically-oriented poetry communities, Southern studies, carcerality, antiwar poetry, race, collaborative poetry or artistic practices, intersections of poetry and activism, or small press publishing networks. Other topics, such as reading, teaching, publishing, or editing Wright’s work, are also welcome.
Please send your 300 word abstracts, along with a brief bio, to Alicia Wright at j.alicia.wright@gmail.com by June 15th, 2022. *Abstracts will be accepted through noon, June 16th.
Responses will be sent by June 30th, 2022
First drafts deadline: September 30th, 2022
Second drafts deadline: November 15st, 2022 *updated
Intended publication: Early 2023
If you have any further questions, please feel free to direct them to Alicia Wright* at the above address.
*To the best of her knowledge, Alicia Wright is not related to C.D. Wright.