What is the relationship between poetry and politics in contemporary poetries from the Spanish-speaking world? How do we think the relationship between technology and experimentality in a way that does not surrender itself to the asphyxiating discourse of the ideology of marketization, and that resists its crippling power structures? How far and wide do the ‘territories’ of Spanish –- so widely spoken across the world -- extend? How does contemporary poetry reflect on, and intervene into debates and practices around the complexities caused by the status of Spanish as, on the one hand, a counterweight to the dominance of English, and on the other hand, as a language fraught with the cultural baggage of external and internal colonialisms? How do we create a dialogue between the many different ‘Spanishes’, Portuguese, Galician, French?

These were some of the questions explored by members of the research project Poetry and Politics II together with members of the research institute INCAL at the Université Catholique Louvain-la-Neuve, organized by Professor Geneviève Fabry and her team of postgraduate research students, Camille Dasseleer, Isabelle Gribomont, and Marco Flores Alemán. The colloquium had a rich and varied program, including presentations, round table debates, presentations of books and special issues, poetry readings, and keynote lectures. The ambiance during the three days was characterized by the spirited, co-operative, inspired and inspirational debates on all the contributions, and by the ongoing conversations during breaks.

Each day started out with a keynote lecture along three lines of enquiry: poetry and decolonisation, poetry and reception, and poetry as a transmedial practice. On the first day, Magda Sepúlveda (Pontífica Universidad Católica de Chile) spoke about about the critical-poetic decolonisation of ethnographic photographs of indigenous peoples in contemporary Chilean poetry. She highlighted the poetic intermediality of the work of poets like Juan Luis Martínez and Jaime Luis Huenún, who are trailblazers in highlighting how pervasive the racist and supremacist ideologies of colonialism still are in contemporary Chilean discourse and hegemonic thinking. Intermedial poetry specifically emerges as one of the most powerful discourses of social and political transformation.

On the second day, Gustavo Guerrero (Université de Cergy-Pontoise Paris) offered a historically grounded analysis of the many transformations that poetry in print has undergone over the centuries. Marginalized on the book market since the 19th century, poetry has drawn on intermediality in an ongoing, dynamic, and often playful experimentation with the relationship between form and content, and in a staunch and successful resistance against its own marginalization by market forces.

Finally, Claudia Kosak (Universidad de Buenos Aires) started the third day with a thorough analysis of the intermedial dynamics in contemporary digital poetry from Latin America. She offered a sharp analytical language to distinguish, for example, between the experimental ‘new’ of poetic avant-gardes, and the concept of ‘innovation’ that is grounded within the ideology of the market. The analytical language proposed by Kosak enables analytical lucidity and the drawing of clear boundaries.

Each keynote lecture was followed by lively debates and, throughout the rest of the day, presentations along the same lines of enquiry, from researchers based in the Americas and in Europe.

Students of Spanish and of Comparative modules can look forward to Moodle announcements with educational ‘goodies’ brought back from the event.

Lancaster Uni and the School of Global Affairs have benefitted from Dr Cornelia Gräbner’s long-term cooperation with POEPOLIT II and its predecessors: Poetry in Public Spaces co-funded a symposium on Poetry in Public Spaces at Lancaster and a symposium on oppositional speech co-organised with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, it supported the editorial costs of a special issue with the journal Liminalities, and sponsored collaborative events with the ó Bhéal Winter Warmer festival on poetry projects (Nurturing Poetries: Organizing and the creation of Poetry Scenes in Port Cities - YouTube), on a showcase of poets from three port cities (Nurturing Poets: Eight Poets from Port Cities – Liverpool, A Coruña and Cork (youtube.com) and on the poetic and critical engagement of poets with port cities (Poems from Port Cities & Round Table Discussion on Vimeo).

Congratulations to Professor Geneviève Fabry and her organising team for an inspiring event, and to POEPOLITII and PI Professor Burghard Baltrusch (Universidad de Vigo, Galicia) for consistent, dedicated, intellectually groundbreaking work and successful international networking.

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