Calls for Papers

* * * Deadline Extended * * *

Modern Language Association 2026 (Toronto, Canada; January 8–11, 2026): “Wallace Stevens, Influence, and Poets of Color”

“This song is for my foe, / the clean-shaven, gray-suited, gray patron / of Hartford, the emperor of whiteness / blue as a body made of snow.” Those four lines of dedication close “Snow for Wallace Stevens” (2009) by the African American poet Terrance Hayes—an ambivalent ode, blending wintry detachment and “love without / forgiveness,” “lost faith” and faith regained. Hayes is far from the only poet of color, from the United States or elsewhere, to write a poem after or against Stevens. To list only a few poems that mention Stevens by name: Hayes’s “Snow for Wallace Stevens” joins Michael Ondaatje’s cartoonish juxtaposition “King Kong meets Wallace Stevens” (1973), Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s prosecutorial “I Defy You” (1989) (“I defy you Wallace Stevens / to prove ‘the exquisite truth’”), and most recently Kwame Dawes’s “Deathwatch” (2024), which casts “Mr. Stevens” as a circumspectly businesslike grim reaper: “he says, with a ticking / dry tongue, ‘Well, it is all in order now, / you can have a good death.’” The lion’s share of critical attention to Stevens’s influence (not to mention nearly all the articles and special issues) has been devoted to white poets, from Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery to Jorie Graham and Jay Hopler. There’s plenty to be said about the many circuits of influence connecting Stevens to poets of color—about Stevens’s influence on generations of poets (in scales ranging from the inflected phrase to the entire career), and about the reciprocal influence of poets of color on how we should read and remember Stevens today.

Anticipating a special issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal, the Wallace Stevens Society invites proposals for 15-minute presentations that address the mutual influence between Stevens and poets of color of any region or period. Welcome topics include:

Examples of poets of color responding to Stevens—allusions to particular poems, riffs on Stevens’s style, homages and parodies, portraits of and addresses to Stevens himself, in poetry or prose
Comparisons between different poets, generations, or traditions influenced by Stevens
Hybridizations of Stevens’s influence with other aesthetics and inheritances
Reconsiderations of Stevens in light of writing by or readings into poets of color
Conjectures on what Stevens’s poems and poetics could lend to theories of poetry and race

Send questions or abstracts of roughly 250 words (accompanied by a brief biographical note) to Christopher Spaide at Christopher [dot] Spaide [at] usm [dot] edu by Saturday, March 29, 2025.

* * * Deadline Extended * * *

The Wallace Stevens Society – International Conference: “Transnational Conversations, Partial Perspectives” (Singapore, June 2025)

Recent work on Stevens’s transnational aesthetic sensibility has explored how Stevens’s poetry, prose, and philosophy opens a dialogue with Noh Theatre, Eastern intellectual thought, and non-Western poetic practices. The partiality of Stevens’s references to “othered” spaces and places are increasingly understood to invite the textual and cultural mechanisms of reception and translation as they unfold beyond Stevens’s own time and place. Participants are encouraged to reflect on what Gül Bilge Han calls the “border-crossing capacities of the poetic imagination” (“Transnationalism” 74) in Stevens as part of the global circuitry of Stevens as poet-figure of world stature.

The Wallace Stevens Society is organizing an international conference around the theme of “Transnational Conversations, Partial Perspectives” in Singapore from June 27 to June 28, 2025. Welcome topics include but are not limited to:

Responses to Stevens from international poets
Stevens’s representation of nations and cultures beyond the United States
The relationship between Stevens’s poetic philosophy and the poetic practices of authors from other cultures
Stevens in translation (how fungible are his coinages?)
Teaching Stevens in the multicultural classroom
World literature and the cultural reception of Stevens
The indigenous and exotic in Stevens
Stevensian climates and ecologies

The conference will take place at The Arts House, a multidisciplinary venue and cultural hub in downtown Singapore. The event will include a dinner for all participants as well as a tour of the historical districts of central Singapore.

If interested, please submit an abstract of 150 words and a brief bio to Dr. Ian Tan at ian.tan@nie.edu.sg by January 31, 2025.

ALA Annual Conference (May 21-24, 2025, Boston, MA) — Wallace Stevens’s Essays

Writing in 2003 with Wallace Stevens in mind, John Ashbery observed that “We expect poets to give a first-hand account of what poetry is. But some poets, when they write criticism, produce a kind of prose that is itself on the verge of being poetry.” Stevens’s essays, though a relatively overlooked part of his oeuvre, constitute in this vein a remarkable performance of the role of poet-critic, which had assumed a new importance following the institutionalization of modernism within the university. Departing from the textual hermeticism and technical vocabulary pioneered by his contemporaries the New Critics, the prose collected in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (1951), as its subtitle hints, aims at a more expansive understanding of poetry and employs a wide variety of stylistic means to direct us there, incorporating invocatory myth, ekphrasis, invective, anecdotes, and even illustrative poems. In this light, the essays’ magpie willingness to combine genres and cross disciplinary borders places them in a distinctly American tradition of discursive yet poetic writing, running back to Emerson and Thoreau, through to Ashbery, and on to later poet-theorists including Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, and Fred Moten.

Organized by the Wallace Stevens Society, this panel invites 300-to-500-word abstracts for presentations that address Stevens’s essays as a contribution to his “theory of poetry,” as an experiment in criticism, and/or in terms of their subsequent legacy. So-called uncollected prose works that were not included in The Necessary Angel (e.g., “The Irrational Element in Poetry,” “Two or Three Ideas”) or composed after its publication (e.g., “A Collect of Philosophy”) are also welcome objects of consideration.

Please direct all inquiries and submissions (including a brief bio) to William Burns at william.burns.15@ucl.ac.uk and Andrew Osborn at aosborn@udallas.edu (subject heading: ALA25 Stevens) by Monday, January 13, 2025.