About the Center

The Stanford Center for Poetics provides a home for research in poetics across periods, languages, and methods. Its members represent all of the literatures at Stanford—notably those of Western Europe, North and South America, and east Asia, and Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, and Persian—as well as linguistics, drama, classics, history, and medicine.

Certain events at the Center carry the names of distinguished figures in the history of Stanford's contributions to poetics. The Marjorie Perloff Lecture, the Yvor Winters Conversation, and the Paul Kiparsky Seminar represent discrete strands in that history, such as Perloff's attention to experimental poetics, Winters' career as poet and critic, and Kiparsky's interest in prosody. Many more scholars and poets might be considered in this company, such as Gordon Brotherston, Jean Franco, Albert Gelpi, Denise Levertov, Herbert Lindenberger, Diane Middlebrook, Arnold Rampersad, Adrienne Rich, and Sylvia Wynter. The Center looks for opportunities to honor this ample tradition.

The Center builds on the history of the Workshop in Poetics, a group that met for sixteen years under the auspices of the Stanford Humanities Center and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. As a site for discussion of the state of the field and an incubator for research by Ph.D. students, the record of that group was extensive. Now with the Workshop at its core, the Center embraces other activities and occasions.