New Poetries—New Poetics?

Organized by the American Studies team at Konstanz.

The conference program can be downloaded here.

Recent decades have seen the emergence of a wide range of poetic forms that reach more people than printed poetry ever did. Poetry slams draw large audiences on site and on television; rappers and songwriters who position themselves in the poetic tradition have a global fan base; YouTube and Instagram poets reach thousands of immediate readers and easily outsell conventional poetry volumes in the bookstores. Performance, musical, and digital poets are exploring new ways of shaping language. Their explorations take them to new media, new idioms, and new topics, but also to old techniques such as rhyme, lyric, and the confessional voice—techniques that were declared dead by conventional poetry but are spectacularly resurrected and taken into new directions on stage and online.

These observations suggest that poetry and the poetic might currently be undergoing a shift comparable in scope to the emergence of Romantic poetry in the late eighteenth century and the modernist redefinition of poetry in the early twentieth. In examining various new poetries alongside one another, our conference is the first to take stock of this epochal shift in its full complexity and range.

The conjunction of poetry and poetics in the conference title indicates two lines of inquiry that participants will pursue and interrelate. For one thing, in speaking of poetics the conference invites reflection on the significance of predetermined rules in the new poetries. From the neoclassicist ‘poetics of rules’ to twentieth-century formalism, poetological inquiry sought to determine general principles according to which poems are shaped. While literary poetry has discarded principles such as meter and rhyme, the new poetries attach striking importance to traditional devices and prescriptive rules. Rappers are judged by the inventiveness of their rhymes; instapoetry draws on the most conventional of stylistic devices; slam poets operate in strictly regulated time frames; and hypertext poems are not only shaped by but actually consist of rule-based codes. In attending to the poetics of these forms, the conference encourages discussion of their productive engagement with the aesthetic strategies of traditional poetry.

Secondly, the conference draws on the broader meaning of the Greek poiesis to situate these aesthetic considerations within a comprehensive range of inquiry into the socio-cultural environments in which the new poetries participate. Poems are ‘made’ or ‘shaped’ in particular ways, as the etymology of the term suggests, and this shape is decisive for the effect they exert on readers’ opinions, perceptions, and ways of communicating. With this effect poems in turn help shape their social environments. This double shaping power has engendered key debates about the nature and uses of the poetry, ranging from Plato’s rejection of poetry from his ideal state all the way to constructivist accounts of its role in identity formation. In discussing the poetics of the new poetries, the conference asks how their aesthetic strategies feed into their negotiation of broader sociocultural questions.