Chen asks how should we understand poetic speech, if poetic speech is understood not as referential or representational, but as constitutive—that is, not as a second-order relationship to the world, but as part of the world itself and the making of the world? Theories of language in premodern China diverged on whether language was best characterized as performative social utterance or as inadequate expressive medium, and yet poetry—possible only in language—was somehow held to possess an ontological power that exceeded the narrower conceptions of language. This paper will begin by delineating a certain normative conception of poetry in medieval China and then discuss how this understanding of poetry and its capacities become strange and uncanny when the poem is voiced by the ghostly spirits of the returned dead.

Kadue discusses how French Renaissance poets sought to revivify their moribund language and to make a garden of letters bloom. As Joachim Du Bellay put it in his 1549 manifesto, their task was horticultural: to transplant the best of classical Latin into French soil, to prune away any useless linguistic branches and graft better ones on in their place, and to cultivate the French language so that it would flower and fructify. Yet for all this emphasis on linguistic vivacity, the poems of Du Bellay and his peers often feel mechanical and inorganic in both content and form: from the death-driven repetition compulsion of Maurice Scève’s Délie, to the rote anaphora and ticked-off commonplaces of Du Bellay’s Roman sonnets, to Remy Belleau’s decision to write love poems about stones. This paper will explore how these poets used dead matter and cliched language to reimagine, reiterate, or reify the poetics of desire.

Sanchez Prado explores the question of the poem as a refusal against the structuralist revolution in 1968 Mexico. The paper focuses on poets who translated structuralist theory into Spanish but write poetry against the very idea of the arbitrariness of the sign, murdering the idea of the signifier, as suggested in a poem by Gerardo Deniz. In doing so, the poets attack the linguistic turn to assert the supremacy of baroque and romantic language in poetic practice. Sánchez Prado will illustrate this idea through short examples from Deniz, a translator of Levi-Strauss and Octavio Paz (who wrote extensively on structuralism).

Michelle Clayton looks at the question of breath in poetry. She focuses on the idea of a breath shared. The primary example an online encounter between Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña and Caribbean-Canadian poet M NourbeSe Phillip during the pandemic. Against the backdrop of a moment in which breathing together was a source of danger, two poets working in quite different regional and artistic languages attempted to speak to and with one another across the ether. Here a new idea for poetic dialog began to emerge: a return to sounds before language, and an enfolding of the virtual listeners needed to complete the poetry event. A conspiracy showing how poetry can still teach us how to breathe together.