Symposium: Poetry, Representation and the Archive, 25 May 2023

Towards a Centre for Contemporary Poetry in the Archive was a pilot project funded by the Mellon Foundation at the British Archive for Contemporary Writing (BACW) at UEA between 2022 and 2023. The proposed Centre will have at its heart a pioneering collection of underrepresented poetries. Our approach to understanding and defining underrepresentation aims to be alert to cross-cutting forms of discrimination in British and Irish literary culture relating to class, gender and ability. We also aspire to critically- value and promote innovative formal approaches to contemporary poetic composition – such as the conceptual, the visual, the performed and the digital – as well as the poetic use of dialects and creoles spoken by communities which have been historically marginalised in the UK and Ireland.

The one-day symposium held at the University of East Anglia, 'Poetry, Representation and the Archive', brought together researchers in these areas to discuss the kinds of question such a project raises. Here is the full programme for the event which includes abstracts of the papers given and biographies for the speakers. 

The keynote speaker was Bhanu Kapil. 

For further information about the symposium, please email the Chair of the Symposium, Jeremy Noel-Tod.