Apocalyptic Innocence: Poetry, Power, and the Risks of Utopia (Roundtable)

updated: Monday, September 21, 2026 - 2:45pmfull name / name of organization: Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)contact email: nsurendr@nd.educategories (up to 5): poetrytheorydeadline for submissions: September 30, 2026Amidst the collective and intimate violations of authoritarianism (and its contemporary attendants like neoliberalism, genocide, and geocide), devotees of poetry and the arts face pressures to justify the value of their study. This pressure comes not only from the regimes that depend on circulating demonizing platitudes and the profit-oriented institutions that host our studies, but also from the telescoping scales of suffering itself. To what extent can poetry actually “empower communities”? What fantasies do academics often indulge about the “power” of their work, and how might poetry help us experience ways of being and valuing that scramble binaries like power/weakness, large/small, global/local, innocence/irony? While the micro-scenes in which poetry is most often composed and shared are not inherently revolutionary, poetic attention can open into counter-intuitive devotion to the small and apparently trivial: the precise image, the breath-catching syncopation, the aural recall of rhyme. In this roundtable, we invite papers centered on contemporary poetry that investigates the ambivalence of “innocence” as (paradoxically) strategy: as a myth of purity that masks the drive to dominate, naïve idealism that denies the reality of suffering, and perhaps a radical commitment to communal care despite defeat. How does troubling the notion of poetic “innocence” complicate visions of Edenic pasts, utopian futures, or post-apocalyptic worlds? Elaborations on the theme may include, but are not limited to: the lyric or the epic poem, poetic media, the local and the global in contemporary poetry, gendering of apocalypse and innocence, children’s or child-like poetry, empire and postcoloniality, post-apocalyptic poetry and/or the fetishization of linguistic world-making. Submit your abstracts here:https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22537 Email nsurendr@nd.edu (Nidhi Surendranath) or sh9525@nyu.edu (Sally Hansen) with any questions.