Image, Map of the Human Heart, by Marc Quinn
The Line of Contemporary Poetry
22nd-24th September 2006
Hosted by St Anne’s College, Oxford
Aims, Objectives and People
The primary aim of the conference is to stimulate academics to engage with and write papers on British and Irish contemporary poetry written originally in English. In order to encourage consideration of issues of practice, there will also be readings and lectures by leading poets. The aims of the conference are in line with the extract from an interview with the late Michael Donaghy.
The conference will provide an environment for the exchange and consideration of ideas. It is intended to promote grounded, literate academic criticism, and serious dialogue between poets, critics and the academy.
From an interview with the late Michael Donaghy:
‘The poetry I value makes use of the various musics, forms and narrative structures that are natural to our speech, however unusually they might manifest themselves. It also acknowledges the primacy of linguistic sense - even if that sense is hidden, or strange, or up for subversion. Most especially, we can read in the orientation of its spirit a particular relationship with the literal or imaginative truth. So it embodies the fact that poems are written by people, and their desire to communicate the truth - the deepest truth of which they have an inkling - at the sophisticated limit of their comprehensible speech. (By the way, this is why we have to safeguard the literary study of such poetry, since it is exclusively concerned with poetry's success or failure in its own terms - which necessarily include sense.) It is writing on the side of humanity, as this is how we, as human beings, speak, think and, by extension, live.’
Management Committee/Editorial Board
Professor Robert Crawford, Chair
John Stammers, Conference convenor and Editor of Journal
Clare Brown, Conference coordinator
Dr Matthew Reynolds, St Anne’s, Oxford
Don Paterson, St Andrews
Professor Fran Brearton, Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen's, Belfast
Dr Deryn Rees-Jones, Criticism, especially women's writing;
Professor John Kerrigan, Academic Standards;
Professor Sean O'Brien, Critical Standards;
Paul Farley, Associate conference coordinator.ex officio:
Gary McKeone, Literature Director, Arts Council England,
Isobel Dixon, Blake Friedmann, Literary Agency.
David Cooper, Associate conference administrator.Advisory Panel
Professor Ciaran Carson
Professor Neil Corcoran
Professor Fred D’Aguiar
Dr Mark Ford
Dr Lilias Fraser
Professor Edna Longley
Professor Andrew Motion
Professor Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Dr Bernard O’Donoghue
Dr Ruth Padel
Professor Christopher Ricks
Dr Tony Sharpe
