Editors, "After Contingency"

RECONFIGURATIONS:
A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture

ISSN 1938-3592

VOLUME ONE (2007):
Contingency

After Contingency: Reflections On/Following Volume One

Our call for work, which you may find reprinted below, proposed an issue addressing various aspects of contingency. Thanks to a robust field of submissions, we have achieved more than we had initially hoped to accomplish in this inaugural volume.

38 + 1(6) = five essays, three interviews, seventeen poems, six prose works, seven book reviews, and one special feature written by six other contributors. All submissions and works accepted for publication were reviewed by the editorial board and/or by other external reviewers. Nearly all of the final documents were revised prior to launching/publishing.

Reconfigurations is an open-access, annual, independently managed, peer-reviewed journal for poetics and poetry & literature and culture that aims to build bridges among different national and international communities.

Our work here turns upon generative contradictions. We are both outside of established institutional hierarchies of process and production (we are online in the form of a blog) and we are the epitome of such systems (we are peer-reviewed). We seek to gather and present both creative and scholarly texts—a judiciously selected diversity of genres/modes and forms of discourse. We exist as a dynamic space for readers and writers invested in tradition and innovation. Such dedication to both/and, such inclusion of opposition, is required by our project of reconfiguration.

Works are accepted for editorial review between April 1 and August 1. Reconfigurations launches/publishes during the month of November.

Reconfigurations is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. For permissions beyond the scope of that license, please contact the Editor <showard@du.edu>.

We welcome your participation. Comments and suggestions may be submitted via the post-a-comment links.

The theme for volume two will be Process: Fields of Signification. CFW forthcoming.

—The Editors, November, 2007

158 / 120 / 38 + 1(6) = submissions / rejections / publications
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2007 CFW: Contingency

RECONFIGURATIONS:
A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture

Volume 1: Contingency

Submission Deadline: August 1, 2007

Publication Date: November, 2007

Call for Work: Abstracts, criticism, dialogues, essays, fictions, interviews, manifestos, poems, reviews, statements, translations, vectors & whatnots.

Guidelines: The inaugural issue of Reconfigurations <http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/> seeks innovative writing that devises/defends (aptly, playfully, seriously) relationships between poetry and the world. In many journals (major and minor) one of the recent topics of vigorous debate has been informed by a cluster of perennial questions about the relevance (artistic, cultural, intellectual) of experimental poetics and poetry. Who can read and enjoy such work? Must innovative writing be difficult? What does contemporary poetry contribute to the world-at-large? The word contingency conjures an array of nuanced meanings: affinity, immanence/imminence, willfulness, hap, autonomy/conditionality, uncertainty, collaboration, accident, particularity/possibility, incidence . . . . Reconfigurations invites submissions that engage with that diversified field of signification.

Electronic Submissions: Send attachments, URLs, etc. to <showard@du.edu>.
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CONTINGENCY: Close connexion or affinity of nature; close relationship. The quality or condition of being contingent. The condition of being liable to happen or not in the future; uncertainty of occurrence or incidence. The befalling or occurrence of anything without preordination; chance; fortuitousness. The condition of being free from predetermining necessity in regard to existence or action; hence, the being open to the play of chance, or of free will. The quality or condition of being subject to chance and change, or of being at the mercy of accidents. A chance occurrence; an event the occurrence of which could not have been, or was not, foreseen; an accident, a casualty. A thing that may or may not happen. A conjuncture of events occurring without design; a juncture. An event conceived or contemplated as of possible occurrence in the future. A possible or uncertain event on which other things depend or are conditional; a condition that may be present or absent. A thing or condition of things contingent or dependent upon an uncertain event. A thing incident to something else; an uncertain incident; an incidental expense, etc.

—OED

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