‘Queer Irish Poetry Now’ Symposium
Sat 25 Jan 2025
Trinity College Dublin, Long Room Hub

Coordinated by Ellen Orchard (TCD) & Dr. Mícheál McCann (QUB)

Call for Papers Deadline - 14 Oct 2024
Abstracts of 250-300 words and a 50 word biog
Send to queeririshpoetry@gmail.com

With a decade since the thirty-fourth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland, and the array of queer Irish writers greeted with new visibility and attention in anthologies like Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry (Lifeboat Press, 2021) and Green Carnations, Glas Na Gile (Book Hub Publishing, 2020), we invite papers which celebrate and investigate what queer Irish poetry means today.

What makes a poem queer? Must it be written by a queer person or is it more to do with something inherently queer about its form or contents? Paul Maddern’s assertion in his Queering the Green that ‘every poem is a queering of language’, speaks to a tension at the heart of this debate: how do we recognise and celebrate poets as queer if, as Eric Keenaghan argues, ‘as a category, queer poetry is a fiction’?

In the spirit of these unanswerable questions, we hope this symposium will speak to the complex and amorphous spirit at work in much queer Irish writing today, and propose more questions and horizons that reach beyond this day-long event. It is intended that this symposium, and aspects of its contributions will lead to an edited collection of academic articles on queer Irish poetry.

This symposium is a cross-institutional, cross-border collaboration by Ellen Orchard (ECR Fellow of Trinity Long Room Hub; poetry critic) and Dr. Mícheál McCann (Publishing Fellow, Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University, Belfast; poet). We invite contributions from all institutions, and researchers of all backgrounds and sexualities. We particularly welcome research from Early Career Researchers. If there is any financial barrier to attendance, please get in touch with us.

Subjects and themes for papers might include (but are not limited to):
– close readings of popular and forgotten queer voices
– problematics of publishing queer work; the 'commodification' of queer writing
– readings of queer poetry outside of queer themes ('what makes a poem queer'?)
– ‘queer’ vs. ‘gay’ readings of poetry
– influences/uses of the past: how older figures in literature, Irish and beyond, influence contemporary-day queer writers
– archiving queerness in Ireland; exploring ephemeral poetic work
– queerness in Irish language poetry
– spoken word poetry as vessel and venue for queer voices

This is a non-exhaustive list. Our main premise for this symposium is to consider how or if we might broaden critical inquiry into queer literature beyond identity categorisation. Please send abstracts of 250-300 words, and a 50 word bio note, to queeririshpoetry@gmail.com by 14 Oct 2024 at 5pm.