Call for Papers — Phyllis Webb at One Hundred

Deadline: October 1, 2026 (Pacific Time)

Submission length: 7,000–8,000 words (including works cited and notes)

Guest Editors: Stephen Collis (Simon Fraser University) and Sam Weselowski (University of Warwick)

2027 marks the centenary of Governor General’s Award-winning poet Phyllis Webb. A major Canadian cultural figure from the 1950s through the 1980s, Webb published ten celebrated collections of poetry and prose, co-founded the CBC Radio program Ideas, and hosted the CBC TV program Extension,which featured interviews with major Canadian writers such as F. R. Scott, George Bowering, Roy Kiyooka, and Dorothy Livesay, among others (McLeod). When “words abandoned” her in the early 1990s and she was no longer able to write, she took up photography, photocollage, and eventually painting, with her visual work later collected in A Dream in the Eye: The Complete Paintings and Collages of Phyllis Webb (2023).

Since the 1960s, Webb’s oeuvre has been a recurring focus within Canadian literary and cultural criticism. Her early work was the subject of formalist readings that emphasized her poetic style and invocations of timeless human experience (Hulcoop, “Phyllis Webb”; Sonthoff), whereas more recent accounts have deployed a versatile range of feminist, queer, ecological, and postcolonial readings to underscore the experimental open-endedness and critical edge of her practice (Cameron; Winger; Relke; Butling). While the initial reception of her work positioned Webb as an emerging canonical figure associated with a centrally East Coast CanLit tradition, contemporary scholars have averred the properly West Coast contexts of her writing, with its direct address to the colonial afterlives permeating the landscapes and coastlines of peripheral British Columbia (Collis, Almost Islands; Collis, Phyllis Webb; Hulcoop, Phyllis Webb). There has also been illuminating research on Webb’s often neglected extra-literary contributions to Canadian culture, with critics spotlighting her radio and television programming for the CBC and her status as a public intellectual in postwar Canadian life (McLeod; Butling).

This special issue seeks to build and expand on these critical insights while charting new approaches to reading Webb’s body of work. More precisely, we aim to re-historicize and re-spatialize Webb’s poetic production, stressing the (perennially underacknowledged) material and global relations that have shaped her oeuvre while reinterpreting the formally inventive ways her project responds to the transformative effects of modernity in the postwar period. Insomuch as Webb’s poetry frequently pursues the direct apprehension of place, her project is anything but insular. With financial support from the Canadian Government Overseas Award program, she lived in Paris during the late 1950s, brushing shoulders with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir while writing about France’s brutal colonial war in Algeria (Hulcoop, Phyllis Webb). In 1963, she participated in the legendary Vancouver Poetry Conference, which brought influential writers associated with the New American Poetry—Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Denise Levertov, among others—to the University of British Columbia and served as a key point of poetic cross-pollination between American and Canadian experimental writing. With her “long minimalist poem,” Naked Poems (1965), Webb produced the first openly queer work of poetry in Canada, a text that signalled a decisive shift in her textual practice from a focus on the individual poem to the book as a unit of composition, resulting in one of the key documents associated with the Canadian long poem tradition (Kamboureli). By recognizing how her art tracks the tremendous shift from late modernism to postmodern and contemporary cultural life, we aim to present Webb as a poet and thinker whose work, while rooted in the West Coast, is deeply informed by its contact with the coteries of the global avant-garde alongside the ongoing histories of empire and settler colonial capitalism.

A number of events will mark Webb’s centenary, including the reissuing of her landmark queer work Naked Poems by Invisible Publishing’s Throwback Books. As a celebration of Webb’s practice and legacy, this special issue of Canadian Literature invites essays that address any feature of her poetics, but the guest editors will be especially interested in work that explores her aesthetic experimentalism and political radicalism and/or the formal development of her work, and in interpretive methods that open up novel ways of reading her poetry, prose, and visual art. How did Webb’s poetic project generate new experimental possibilities for Canadian literature and art in the postwar period? In what ways are Webb’s contributions to Canadian literary culture still relevant today? What can reading Webb tell us about the dominant trends and pervasive omissions that characterize CanLit studies? How might we grasp the conditions of aesthetic possibility that shaped Webb’s literary and artistic career, and how might we recognize the material and political limits of her project? Potential topics include but are not limited to:

• Decolonization and settler colonialism as frames for reading Webb
• Webb as late modernist and the afterlives of modernism in her project
• Webb and the global 1960s
• Webb and the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference
• Canadian, transnational, and cosmopolitan literary cultures in Webb’s oeuvre
• The historicity and politics of poetic form in Webb’s corpus
• Webb’s queer poetics
• World-ecological and ecopoetic approaches to reading Webb
• Poetic community, coterie, and communality in the work of Webb
• Reading Webb as world literature
• Webb as public intellectual and media theorist, particularly in radio and television

Works Cited

Butling, Pauline. “Phyllis Webb as Public Intellectual.” Wider Boundaries of Daring: The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women’s Poetry, edited by Di Brandt and Barbara Godard, Wilfred Laurier UP, 2009, pp. 237–52.

—. Seeing in the Dark: The Poetry of Phyllis Webb. Wilfred Laurier UP, 1997.

Cameron, Laura. “‘The Great Dreams Pass On’: Phyllis Webb’s ‘Struggles of Silence’.” Gendering the Archive, special issue of Canadian Literature, no. 217, 2020, pp. 72–86, https://doi.org/10.14288/cl.v0i217.192674.

Collis, Stephen. Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten. Talonbooks, 2018.

—. Phyllis Webb and the Common Good: Poetry / Anarchy / Abstraction. Talonbooks, 2007.

Hulcoop, John F. Phyllis Webb and Her Works. ECW Press, 1990.

—. “Phyllis Webb and the Priestess of Motion.” New Wave in Canadian Poetry, special issue of Canadian Literature, no. 32, 1967, pp. 29–39, https://doi.org/10.14288/cl.v0i32.195058.

Kamboureli, Smaro. On the Edge of Genre: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem. U of Toronto P, 1991.

McLeod, Katherine. “Listening to the Archives of Phyllis Webb.” Moving Archives, edited by Linda M. Morra, Wilfred Laurier UP, 2020, pp. 113–32.

Relke, Diana M. A. Greenwor(l)ds: Ecocritical Readings of Canadian Women’s Poetry. U of Calgary P, 1999.

Sonthoff, Helen W. “Structure of Loss: The Poetry of Phyllis Webb.” Canadian Literature, no. 9, 1961, pp. 15–22, https://doi.org/10.14288/cl.v0i9.195184.

Winger, Rob. “How to Know Now: ‘Zen’ Poetics in Phyllis Webb’s Naked Poems and Water and Light.” Studies in Canadian Literature, vol. 35, no. 2, 2010, pp. 206–32.

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Submission Guidelines

Submissions should be sent online through our Open Journal Systems (OJS) portal.

All submissions to Canadian Literature must be original, unpublished work. Essays should follow current MLA bibliographic format (MLA Handbook, 9th ed.).

Please limit images accompanying submissions to those receiving substantial attention in the article. Contributors will be required to obtain permission to reproduce images in their article and pay for any permission costs. The journal will provide a template for permission requests; such requests must be completed before publication. Please send high-quality images as separate attachments along with your article file.

Please review our full submission guidelines prior to submitting.

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Contact Us

Feel free to contact the guest editors Stephen Collis (stephen_collis@sfu.ca) or Samuel Weselowski (samuel.weselowski@warwick.ac.uk), or Canadian Literature, with any questions or concerns.