“I dwell in possibility...”
Emily Dickinson

The study and practice of poetry is crucial to our society’s ability to reflect upon its self, its divergent subjectivities and values. Poetic language, in all it diversities of style and idea, can be described as the distilled heartbeat of language, the place where attention is focused upon the reciprocal and dynamic acts of looking – looking at the world and at the self. Poetry and the Trace seeks to bring together a range of voices, national and international, poets and critics, to foreground the centrality of the poetic impulse, and to celebrate the multiplicity of ways in which poetry as a genre can speak to the questions which drive our human experience – in particular, the elusivity of what Derrida described as the “trace,” be it of memory, desire, the past, the goal of ethics etc.

Poetry and the Trace will be the first international, broad-based poetry conference to be held in Australia in over a decade. It is hoped that this conference will inspire ongoing dialogues between poetries from different regions, and encourage debate about the role of contemporary poetries and their histories both in the context of Australian culture and beyond.

The conference will be held across three days at the inspiring and central venue of the State Library of Victoria. It will commence with a welcome reception and poetry reading (open to the public) and offer three days of concurrent academic papers and plenary sessions designed around key issues to draw all delegates, both practitioners and academics, into the liveliness of shared debate.A refereed publication of conference proceedings consisting of both scholarly and creative work is planned.