Event
Plotting Poetry 8
Plotting Poetry is a conference series focussed on computational, statistical and other quantitative approaches for the study of poetic texts, and of poeticity more broadly.
This quantitative focus, this insistence on the formalization and operationalisation of texts, from simple pen and paper counting and compiling to complex algorithms, provides us with a number of paths to analyze, describe, interpret, attribute, classify, track and generally access the texts. The Plotting Poetry conferences bring together a friendly community of researchers, and articles rooted in the conference papers have given rise to several peer-reviewed collective volumes.
This year the conference’s theme is skeletons in the closet: everything hidden and peculiar in poetry that stands out, makes one uneasy, or does not fit common theoretical and historical narratives. We welcome all kinds of scholarship about outliers, unexpected and misunderstood phenomena, formal and conceptual transgressions. We encourage presenting negative and confusing results, methodological hurdles and mistakes that were recognized too late.
Poetry itself is a skeleton in a closet: a speech shifted away from the norm that makes language anew, in an often overly intimate process, hidden from the public's prying eye. It is almost a criminal act: fitting words into a metrical pattern is like fitting a corpse in a cabinet. Poetry is impulsive, but measured, driven by rules, but creating uncertainty, valuable, but not a commodity. In short, poetry is an outlier.
The event is organized by the Institute of Czech Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and the University of Basel.