PLOTTING POETRY 8: Skeletons in the Closet
16-17-18 June, 2025, Prague, Czechia
Call for papers
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.
The name of the group stems from an effort to translate a (perfectly serious) pun by the French modernist poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who in 1917 wrote that poets should “[machiner] poetry as has been done for the world”, where the verb machiner is visibly used for mechanize, although it really means to plot, as one would plot a coup. In this group, we are plotting against our own limitations by trying to plot literature on graphs, devising mechanized approaches to dissect the mechanics of poetry.
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, everything that you rather won’t show your guests on a party night. 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.
Some of the topics to consider include but are not limited to:
Outliers
Features not (easily) captured by quantitative approaches
Unexpected results
Peculiar forms
Failed experiments
…
For this 8th Plotting Poetry conference, we will be convening in Prague. Conference fee is 100EUR.
Please, submit your abstracts (max. 1600 characters including spaces) via this form until March 1, 2025.
Should you have any further questions, you can get in touch at: plottingpoetry8@gmail.com