Conference

What Miracle: New Revelations on the Prose Poem

October 15 and 16, 2026, in Rome, Italy

In his preface to Spleen de Paris, Charles Baudelaire wonders, “Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience?” (tr. Louise Varèse).

Through his expression of this collective dream of formal hybridity, Baudelaire not only gave voice to the desires of his contemporaries in the French avant-garde, but he also helped establish “le petit poème en prose” as an enduring mode of literary experimentation that links his moment to ours. By investigating the provenance of the prose poem as a formal and aesthetic departure from metrical verse and its disciplinary strictures, we wish to highlight the entangled lineages of poetic innovation.

Moreover, by examining it alongside an array of related phenomena that preceded the prose poem or have extended from it—such as the haibun, the qasīdat al-nathr, and the lyric essay, to name a few—we seek to unite disparate traditions, from medieval Japan to contemporary global letters to nineteenth-century France and beyond.

Our conference, which will be hosted at the Notre Dame campus in Rome, in the heart of the Eternal City, will bring together esteemed practitioners of the prose poem, leading theorists, emerging scholars and doctoral students, and even skeptics of prose poetry as a medium of lyric expression. Now is the perfect moment to embrace cross-cultural dialogue and reinforce global scholarly networks as we consider together this relatively little-studied modality, especially given the explosion in scholarship surrounding matters of hybridity as well as broader critical and creative interest in devising new means of pushing against the boundaries of form and genre.

We will enjoy a keynote by Will Schutt, esteemed poet and translator from the Italian; a gala reading featuring poets Ellen Dillon and Johannes Göransson; two dialoghi about the vicissitudes and delights of translating the prose poem and the art of critical fabulation; two pranzi, a banchetto, and an aperitivo; and, most crucially, eight scholarly panels on myriad dimensions of prose poetry found in French, Italian, American, Irish, Japanese, Russian, English, Korean, Canadian, German, Swedish, Singaporean, Danish, and Chilean literary contexts, from the medieval period to the present.