‘Shifting Territories: Modern and Contemporary Poetics of Place’

This postgraduate and early career researcher conference is being organised by Reading and Oxford Brookes University in association with the Institute of English Studies, British Academy Literature Week and the Royal Society of Literature.  It will be held the Institute of English Studies, London, 22-23 May, 2013. The conference is funded by Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre and The University of Reading’s Poetry and Poetics strand of the Modern Studies Centre.

Keynote speakers are: David Morley (Enchantment, The Rose of the Moon, The Invisible Kings), Eóin Flannery (Oxford Brookes), Alice Oswald (A Sleepwalk on the Severn, Woods, Dart) and Hugh Haughton (York) in association with British Academy Literature Week, in partnership with the Institute of English Studies and Royal Society of Literature. Steven Matthews (Reading) will run a training workshop on modern and contemporary poetry-related research. 

The conference will examine the ways in which poets negotiate the relentlessly shifting concepts of identity and place and how particular locations, or states of flux, have shaped their aesthetic. It will consider the recent wave of new nature writing and poetry which goes beyond traditional representations of landscape to venture into borderlands, edgelands and urban environments: a development which has been addressed in texts like Granta 102: The New Nature Writing (Summer, 2008), Tim Dee’s ‘Nature Writing’ essay in Archipelago 5 (Winter, 2010–2011) and Poetry Review 102: The Poetry of Place (Spring, 2012). By creating a space for dialogue about modern and contemporary poets’ use of place, ‘Shifting Territories’ seeks to address the development of this subject in the 20th and 21st-centuries.