This is all very encouraging, but it's also quite a strange announcement. The interest in "innovative" techniques seems to be greater than the interest in Irishness. Indeed I've never before seen a declaration from Ireland which dismissed national Irishness as "provincial". Of what can it be a province but Britain? The subject categories are so broad that they could be interpreted as "almost any poetry we like", and the list of possible poet-subjects confirms this by the fairly random inclusion of three English poets. Tom Raworth does particularly well for this sort of thing, having been previously included in a conference on women's poetry. John James was in a Welsh thing last year. Well good luck to them, I don't know how they do it. The anomalies thrown up by a poetry world split into two are endlessly entertaining. 

PR

On 15 Mar 2011, at 11:34, JIMMY CUMMINS wrote:

apologies for cross posting 

please not that the deadline has been extended until March 28th. also could you please forward it on to anyone else who might be interested.

very best

Jimmy

Call for Papers: deadline extended until March 28th 

Conference: Innovation in Irish Poetry. University College Cork, Ireland. July 12th 2011 

This conference investigates issues surrounding innovation in Irish poetry. Its aim is not only to re-examine the influence that Irish writers have had on 20th Century literature, but also to explore the current status of Irish innovative poetics in the 21st Century. 
Due to the historical, and yet ever present, issue of emigration from Ireland, this conference will not restrict itself to provincial ideas of national identity. Instead it aims to consider “Irish poetry” as transnational, considering not only poets born, raised or living in Ireland, but also those who have emigrated, those who are part of the Irish diaspora and those who have been significantly influenced by Irish innovative writing. The conference will take place in University College Cork on the 12th of July 2011 so that it coincides with the 15th SoundEye festival of the Arts of the Word (13th – 17th). Papers should be approx. 20 minutes in length. 


Some possible areas of interest for papers might include
- Cadence in Irish poetry
- The influence of international poetics on Irish poetry
- The influence of Irish modernism on British and American writers
- Irish poetry and the historical avant-garde
- Constructions of Irish Modernism
- Irish small presses
- National identity
- Religion
- Post colonialism
- Emigration
- Irish poetry’s engagement with critical theory
- The Irish poetic canon

Below is a possible, but not exhaustive, list of writers whose poetry papers could explore.
W.B. Yeats, Mary Devenport O’Neill, Sheila Wingfield, Blanaid Salkeid, Thomas MacGreevey, Denis Devlin, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Brian Coffey, Michael Smith, Trevor Joyce, Geoffrey Squires, Maggie O’Sullivan, Tom Raworth, John James, Catherine Walsh, Billy Mills, Randolph Healy, Maurice Scully, Mairéad Byrne. 

Abstracts should be 300 words in length (approx) and should be emailed[log in to unmask] no later than the new deadline March 28th 2011.