Poetry and the essay
Victoria’s Associate Professor of English Literature and conference organiser Anna Jackson says papers ranged from a discussion of the aphorism—given entirely in aphorisms—to an account of engineering bacteria to write poetry, in which the bacteria themselves turned pink as they described their "rosy glow".
In addition to academic papers, the conference included readings from poets and essayists, and panel discussions on topics such as form and fragmentation, poetry and politics, memory and media.
Ian Rae, a Canadian scholar and author of From Cohen to Carson: The Poet's Novel in Canada, gave a keynote speech; as did Jenny Bornholdt, who read from her landmark poetry collection The Rocky Shore.
Associate Professor Jackson says a lively poetry reading at Wellington’s ‘Meow’ was part of the conference, and was open to the public. It was presented by acclaimed experimental Canadian poet Christian Bök and American Brian Blanchfield—a poet from the United States with a rapidly growing readership around the world since the publication of his “extraordinarily wide-ranging, startlingly intimate collection of essays, Proxies, in 2016,” she says.