Papers are invited for a proposed special session at MLA 2002 in New York entitled, "Poetic Cartographies: Tracing the Geopoetic and the Geopolitical in Contemporary American Poetry." Following Graham Huggan's argument that "maps are neither copies nor semblances of reality but modes of discourse which reflect and articulate the ideologies of their makers," this panel seeks to investigate intersections between poetic cartographies and their corresponding geopolitical claims. The insistence of simulated landscapes in contemporary American verse points up questions of the relationship between space and its reproducible image. The panel will explore linkages between the poetics and politics of space, invoking contemporary poetic mappings in order to test the status of the "postmodern" landscape as a place beyond "geographical monumentality," a nexus of placelessness, overrun by "the rising hegemony of standardized, undifferentiated spaces, areas depleted of history, drained of the possibility for relations, identity, narrative and significant social action" (Brian Jarvis, _Postmodern Cartographies_). Please send brief c.v. and 1-2 page abstracts by March 15 to Daniel Turner by address or via email. Participants must be members of MLA by April 1, 2002.