The organisers of the project Poetics–New Perspectives, an initiative funded by the Polish National Programme for the Development of the Humanities, is issuing a call for papers for the second issue of the bilingual (Polish-English) online magazine Poetics Forum. The issue, entitled Transnational and Translocal Poetics, encourages discussion on the theoretical approach proposed in Jahan Ramazani’s his book A Transnational Poetics (2009). In it Ramazani presents works of literature that avoid the vertical tensions that define both cosmopolitan, globalized literature and “rooted” writing, unabashedly local and convinced that it arose without significant help from outside influences. In contrast to these projects is horizontally oriented literature, in which there is continual contact between the local (whose power one can no longer deny without being labelled naive) and that which is elsewhere. Writing of this kind deliberately provides a communicative bridge between the local and non-local, making connections and contrasts between things that would be otherwise impossible, and, in doing so, produces a distinct transnational literary and cultural collectivity that is neither global and local. Ramazani’s concept is an original one, inspired by the study of world literature, research on writing viewed from the perspective of globalization, and contemporary post-colonial discourse. What challenges are faced by poetics in its efforts to describe literature analyzed in such a way? Ramazani illustrated transnational poetics on the basis of examples of English-language poetry from a variety of world literatures. But can this concept potentially be applied to other literary realities? Finally, to what extent does A Transnational Poetics need to be read critically, with caution, in order to use it to create a new, competing poetological model? We also encourage writers to formulate their own approaches to this area of research.

Articles accepted for publication will be translated by into Polish by qualified translators and published simultaneously in both Polish and English. Please send your text to one of the following addresses by the end of May 2015: forumpoetyki@gmail.com; forumofpoetics@gmail.com.