Reframing Poetics: Language, Structure, Form

‘Forms are’, as Caroline Levine notes, ‘at work everywhere’. From early modern pattern poetry to the clarified forms of Imagist verse and the minimal grids of the post-war concretists, poetry has always suggested a specific, material attunement to language as a structural agent. To see poetic form itself not just as artifice, however, but as an organisational schema that is meaningful in its own right suggests new and exciting avenues of inquiry. Like Leon Battista Alberti’s veil or Albrecht Dürer’s drawing device, the concept of ‘the frame’ and of form as a mediating interface has been widely employed in material text studies to draw attention to language’s false claim to transparency. As Craig Dworkin has recently proposed, ‘We might learn to look at the opaque materiality of language in the way one might look at rather than through the pane of a window, registering the artifice of its framing rather than focussing on the scene beyond’.

In an era of heightened and extreme digital connectivity, at a moment when our systems and structures—whether political, social, or economic—seem particularly precarious, it feels right to focus our attention towards the frameworks that make up our world, both critical and material. In line with Dworkin’s intention to look at rather than through form, this one-day symposium seeks to reorient our gaze towards the frameworks which not only make meaning possible but carry their own significance.

View the Call for Papers (closes 15 May 2026)