CFP: What Kind of Poetry World Should We Have?
The poetry world has entered a new period of severe financial crisis. As federal funding for the arts retreats, presses, poetry centers, and academic programs are having to make hard decisions about how and what to cut. So far, the response to this crisis has been largely business as usual—more calls for donations, more private money of questionable provenance sloshing around to cover the shortfall. One might say that this reflects the limitations of our institutional imagination. In the face of an existential crisis, the liberal establishment that governs the poetry world, like the liberal establishment more broadly, falls back into a posture of retreat, defending institutions and practices which are, obviously, bankrupt, morally and financially.
The folio begins with an open question: why should we defend the institutional poetry world that has come into being since the late 1970s, with its culture of scarcity and prestige? The poetry culture we operate within has dramatically failed to make poetry a livable practice for most working poets—concentrating resources in the hands of a very small minority who are able to command major prizes, honoraria, and stable teaching jobs. The results for the art itself have been predictable and abysmal. We all know people who have left the art because it is impossible to make a life here; likewise, we all know people whose values have been corrupted, utterly, in their pursuit of prestige and power within the poetry world.
To quote the former mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emmanuel (himself an architect of our current liberal episteme), “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” What if, instead of, defending our institutions, we radically reimagined them? What would a poetry world that is just, equitable, open, democratic, look like? How could we make solidarity and mutual aid the basis of our lives as poets? In what spaces within the poetry world are poets and organizers already practicing viable alternatives to the neoliberal structures which have otherwise dominated our field?
This folio discussion is intended as a place to pose these questions, and to imagine their answers; to engage in utopian dreaming and to get into the nitty-gritty practicalities of alternate institutional structures and possibilities. The vibe is manyness and contradiction; we want to assemble lots of competing possibilities; we solicit papers that address a wide range of histories and possibilities, including:
The folio, edited by contributing editor Toby Altman, will appear in the fall of 2026 and will remain open for future contributions on a rolling basis. If you’re interested, please send 1,000-4,000 words via word doc to annuletpoetics@gmail.com by July 1st, 2026.
The folio begins with an open question: why should we defend the institutional poetry world that has come into being since the late 1970s, with its culture of scarcity and prestige? The poetry culture we operate within has dramatically failed to make poetry a livable practice for most working poets—concentrating resources in the hands of a very small minority who are able to command major prizes, honoraria, and stable teaching jobs. The results for the art itself have been predictable and abysmal. We all know people who have left the art because it is impossible to make a life here; likewise, we all know people whose values have been corrupted, utterly, in their pursuit of prestige and power within the poetry world.
To quote the former mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emmanuel (himself an architect of our current liberal episteme), “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” What if, instead of, defending our institutions, we radically reimagined them? What would a poetry world that is just, equitable, open, democratic, look like? How could we make solidarity and mutual aid the basis of our lives as poets? In what spaces within the poetry world are poets and organizers already practicing viable alternatives to the neoliberal structures which have otherwise dominated our field?
This folio discussion is intended as a place to pose these questions, and to imagine their answers; to engage in utopian dreaming and to get into the nitty-gritty practicalities of alternate institutional structures and possibilities. The vibe is manyness and contradiction; we want to assemble lots of competing possibilities; we solicit papers that address a wide range of histories and possibilities, including:
- Institutional histories. How did we come to have the poetry world that we have? What other kinds of institutions could we have?
- Independent institutions. What kind of space can you build outside a university / without a major endowment? What does it look like to organize outside of an institutional context? What happens when those independent initiatives get folded into larger institutional structures? We’re thinking here of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People workshops and Mark Nowak’s Workers Writers School, among many others.
- Alternate strategies for teaching and mentorship—especially models of pedagogy drawn from work with young children and in alternative educational institutions and traditions.
- Literary magazines as spaces of resistance and possibility; literary magazines as spaces of careerism and aspiration.
- The independent reading series as a shared space, an alternate scene of pedagogy and mentorship.
- Working within institutions. How can we be the barnacle of the whale of the academy, to borrow a phrase from Fred Moten? What happens when poetry takes place in university contexts but outside of English departments and Creative Writing programs?
- The gig economy as it manifests in poetry. Some poets have taught independent workshops both in-person and remote (think Hoa Nguyen, Sophia Dahlin, Ben Fama); others gravitate towards the prestige-driven strata of residencies, fellowships, and honorariums. In what ways do these practices continue or diverge from previous strategies for economic survival? What advantages, disadvantages, or socioeconomic phenomena do these extra-institutional practices express, or indicate?
The folio, edited by contributing editor Toby Altman, will appear in the fall of 2026 and will remain open for future contributions on a rolling basis. If you’re interested, please send 1,000-4,000 words via word doc to annuletpoetics@gmail.com by July 1st, 2026.