The Centre for Expanded Poetics is based in the Department of English
at Concordia University, Montréal 

The CEP consists of two spaces: 1) a reading/screening room for study, viewings, classes. and seminar presentations; 2) a workshop with desktop computers and production equipment. The reading room houses a substantial library of twentieth century poetry, art catalogs, and little magazines — including full runs of Transition, Origin, Caterpillar, Sulfur, Floating Bear, 0-9, Language, and Apex of M. Several of these are available as digital editions on our Archive page.

Vancouver poet and teacher Fred Wah generously donated his archive of Canadian little magazines to the Centre, including full or substantial runs of Open Letter, The Capilano Review, Rampike, Fireweed, West Coast Line, and others. We encourage researchers and students who would like work with these collections to get in touch with CEP Director Nathan Brown. Materials do not circulate but are available for consultation in the reading room, which overlooks downtown Montreal.

The equipment in our production workshop includes a Risograph digital duplicator for small press printing; v-bed scanner for archival reproduction of printed texts; 75" touch screen and 120" cinema screen for viewing films and digital poetry; a suite of digital photography and video equipment. From 2017-2025 our publishing imprint, DOCUMENTS, was produced at the Centre and in collaboration with Anteism Books. It is now published by Invisible Books.

We are interested in collaborating on projects that deploy the affordances of our equipment to study and produce texts, objects, and images linking poetics with other arts and fields of formal inquiry (e.g. architecture, design, textiles, the sciences). We also maintain a program of study in philosophy, critical theory, and the poetics of embodiment. Our goal is to sustain a critical model of interdisciplinarity, attuned to the ideological functions of such work in the contemporary university while pursuing theoretical and material possibilities made available by digital technologies and new production techniques.  

We organize talks, film screenings, equipment workshops, conferences, and symposia.

We take an expanded approach to formalist analysis through materialist media studies and collaborative interdisciplinary research.

 

A materialist approach to the study of form and structure emphasizes the mediation of text, image, and object by specific technologies of writing, coding, reading, viewing, and hearing. An interdisciplinary approach brings the study of poetics into contact with the production and conceptualization of structure and form in other disciplines.

How can new media technologies enable a collaborative, hands-on practice of critical, materialist, interdisciplinary, formalist analysis? 

 

 

Our work grows from and is directed toward collaborative projects, exhibitions, symposia, and publications.  

MaMa, Zagreb

Conjuncture: 21st Century Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics

Since 2009, Petar Milat of MaMa and CEP Director Nathan Brown have coordinated a series of symposia taking place in Zagreb each June. These have featured major philosophers, artists, and theorists, combining formal lectures with roundtables, performances, and exhibitions. Lectures are recorded and available online. 

Topics
Untimely Imagination (2023)
Form (2018)
Structure (2017)
Poiesis (2015)
Sophistry: The Powers of the False (2014)
Modernity: The Bitter End (2013)
The Art of the Concept (2012)
To Have Done With Life (2011)
21st Century Materialism (2009)

Anteism focuses on special editions exploring diverse artistic and cultural practices: artist monographs, artist books, exhibition catalogues, and other formats. From 2017 to 2023 Anteism was the co-publisher of the CEP’s DOCUMENTS imprint, binding and distributing our Risograph printed books.

Anteism Books

Organism for Poetic Research 

The Organism for Poetic Research (OPR) is an experimental critical-poetic platform and a vehicle for the performance of research in poetics and poetic research.

Department for Architectural Theory and Philosophy of Technics 

The Department for Architectural Theory and Philosophy of Technics is led by Vera Bühlmann at the Vienna Technical University. 

Broken Dimanche Press

The Parapoetics series at Broken Dimanche Press in Berlin publishes experimental poetry working within and beyond the form of the book to explore asemic writing practices and narrative vantage points eccentric to human language.