The Workshop in Poetics

The Workshop in Poetics was founded in 2007 and has been meeting regularly since then, serving a core group of about twenty graduate students and several members of the Stanford faculty. Everyone is welcome to participate in its activities and events. Its long history may be found under Past Events. 

The workshop’s agenda is driven by a transcultural, translingual, and transnational range of interests, providing a forum where scholars with distinctive methods and historical concerns can test their claims and assumptions about poetic objects against the broad linguistic and historical knowledge of the workshop’s members.

The main purpose of the workshop is to offer Ph.D. students a venue to present their work in progress in a community of peers and faculty. Unound by language or period, the group has discussed all of the literatures studied at Stanford. Many participants, especially Ph.D. students, join the workshop upon arriving at Stanford, and see their interests develop in conversation with the group. We often hear from regular members that their projects have been deeply influenced by the informed and supportive setting of the workshop. Student members in particular tend to participate avidly in the workshop because it augments their coursework and dissertation writing with fresh perspectives and an attentive, often challenging community of interlocutors. Many advanced dissertations in the group have been discussed in two meetings, and in principle nearly every chapter by a member can find an occasion to be presented.     

Meetings follow several formats. The most common format is a discussion of work in progress by either a member of the group or a visiting speaker; for these events, the paper under discussion is circulated in advance. Some events concern the state of the field, identifying a topic or issue or a recent book for general discussion, often introduced by the author. A third category deals with neglected classics in poetics, usually books or articles that were widely known in the past and are still important, but are now seldom found in curricula or criticism.

Certain conventions of the group encourage students to develop their critical voices. For instance, a less advanced student is often asked to serve as a respondent, and the faculty members typically speak only in the final half hour of a two-hour meeting, after most of the students have joined the conversation and staked out positions. The ethos of the group is communicated to new members, especially that people should make a point of attending those events that are remote from their interests both as a way of absorbing new methods and angles and as a show of support for other members.