National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine
June 27-July 1, 2012

Direct 300-500 word proposals for 20 minute papers
to NPF_Paideuma@umit.maine.edu

The Editorial Collective of the National Poetry Foundation invites paper and panel proposals for the next in our sequence of “decade” conferences, to be devoted to The Poetry and Poetics of the 1980s, American and international, and to be held from Wednesday to Sunday, June 27-July 1, 2012, on the flagship campus of the University of Maine System in Orono, Maine.

The NPF welcomes paper and panel proposals on any and all aspects of poetic practice in the decade of the 1980s. What emerged? What changed? What happened just out of frame? What connections brought poetry into dialog with other fields? What social and political contexts mattered most? What of the present can be traced back to that moment? What poets, poetic formations, tendencies in poetics warrant our continued attention? What accidents of reception might we now revisit and perhaps repair?

Prospective participants are encouraged to draw on the full range of archival resources in conceiving their projects, including the digital audio, digital video, and digital facsimile holdings now widely available on-line.

As with previous NPF conferences, the scholarly presentations and panels will be amply supplemented by a variety of poetry readings, including plenary readings by notable figures associated with the decade being explored.

Paper proposals consisting of a title and a brief (300-500 word) abstract should be directed to the NPF Editorial Collective at NPF_Paideuma@umit.maine.edu. Panel proposals should include, in addition, a brief rationale for the envisioned grouping. Proposals for alternative forms of intellectual practice/presentation, such as roundtables or seminars, will be read with interest.

The deadline for proposals has been extended to March 15, 2012.

Visit our website and blog for information about previous NPF conferences. To receive updates on the conference, visit the NPF page on Facebook & hit “like.”

Queries may be directed to any member of the Editorial Collective:

Carla Billitteri, Associate Professor of English, NPF
Carla_Billitteri@umit.maine.edu

Steve Evans, Associate Professor of English, NPF
Steven.Evans@umit.maine.edu

Benjamin Friedlander, Associate Professor of English, NPF
Ben_Friedlander@umit.maine.edu

Photo by Pearl Pirie (Pesbo) by way of Flickr

Archambeau’s Samizdat Blog has a lovely tribute to Kroetsch that pays particular attention to the poetry,  (link). Sandra Martin  has a broader overview of Kroetsch’s career in the Globe and Mail (link). There she writes, “Although Kroetsch walked on two legs, he had four literary pillars: fiction, criticism, teaching and poetry.” The last three, at any rate, are well represented in his essay on the long poem.

Some sample sentences:

The long poem, by its very length, allows the exploration of the failure of system and grid. The poem of that failure is a long poem.

•

Homer wrote poems without stanzas. We threaten to write stanzas (fragments, pieces, journals, ‘takes,’ cantos even) that cannot become the poem.

•

The paradox becomes this now: that art does not quite narrate, while life, possibly, does.

•

My own continuing poem is called, somewhat to my dismay, Field Notes.

When the poem finally appeared under the revised title Completed Field Notes (1989), Kroetsch’s dismay was apparently matched by that of his readers. As Archambeau reports (he was a student at the time at the university where Kroetsch was a presence), “I remember the arguments in the student pub about whether that word, ‘completed,’ represented a transcendence or a betrayal of Kroetsch’s project.” Reading Fred Wah‘s introduction to the 2000 reprint (link), one can see why the arguments were had. “Kroetsch’s poem,” writes Wah, “attempts to avoid design, to occupy a position of unresolved tension.” And then, noting “our desire … to make meaning from the fragments, to see pattern and connection,” he adds:

If our reading is not [to be] directed by the need for completion, we must syncretize dissonance, seemingly unconnected particles ‘going nowhere,’ in order, by chance, to intersect with a present moment that leads, perhaps, somewhere. And that present moment, given the phenomenological status of Kroetsch’s poetics, seems to be the action of writing itself.

And here is a poem from that book, showing Kroetsch-the-novelist to advantage. It comes from the middle section, “Advice to My Friends,” and speaks directly to the desire cited by Wah:

Sounding the Name

In this poem my mother is not dead.
The phone does not ring that October
morning of my fourteenth year.
The anonymous voice on the phone

does not say, Call Arthur to the phone.
Our hired man, a neighbour’s son, quiet,
unpretentious, a man from the river hills
near our farm, does not turn from the phone,

he does not say, seeming to stress the time,
Your mother died at ten o’clock. My sister and I
do not look at each other, do not smile,
assuring each other (forever) that words are
pretenders.

In this poem my mother is not dead,
she is in the kitchen, finishing the October
canning. I am helping in the kitchen

I wash the cucumbers. My mother asks me
to go pick some dill. The ducks are migrating.
I forget to close the garden gate.

Elizabeth Willis, Address

(Wesleyan University Press, 2011)

• Willis has shared her poetry in the New Writing Series and presented her scholarship in the pages of Sagetrieb and at our Forties and Sixties Conferences. This new collection follows Meteoric Flowers (2006), also brought out by Wesleyan.

• From the publisher: “Address draws us into visible and invisible architectures, into acts of intimate and public address. These poems are concentrated, polyvocal, and sharply attentive to acts of representation. They take personally their politics and in the process reveal something about the way civic structures inhabit the imagination. Poisonous plants, witches, anthems, bees: beneath their surface, we glimpse the fragility of our founding, republican aspirations and witness a disintegrating landscape artfully transformed. If a poem can serve as a kind of astrolabe, measuring distances both cosmic and immediate, temporal and physical, it does so by imaginative, nonlinear means. Here, past and present engage in acts of mutual interrogation and critique, and within this dynamic Willis’s poetry is at once complexly authoritative and searching: “so begins our legislation.’”

• The publisher’s page has a table of contents and sample poem.

• More on Willis at the EPC and Pennsound.

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Paul Celan, The Meridian: Final Version — Drafts — Materials

Ed. Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull
Tr. Pierre Joris
(Stanford University Press, 2011)

• Joris read in the New Writing Series in 2006 and will be returning in the Fall.

• From the publisher: “Originally presented as a speech to the German Academy for Language and Poetry on the occasion of Celan’s acceptance of the Georg Büchner prize for literature, The Meridian is one of, if not the most important poetological statement of the second half of the twentieth century. Much more than a personal statement or occasional piece, it is a meditation on the state of poetry and art in general and a rigorous attempt to account for what poetry is, can, and must be after the Holocaust. This definitive historico-critical edition, available for the first time in English, presents not only the first drafts, but also a vast array of notes and preparatory work and a brief essay on Osip Mandelstam, all of which work to expand the field of reference of Celan’s manifesto and reveal its true scope. Rich commentaries clarify Celan’s notes to authors as diverse as Leibniz, Scheler, Kafka, Hofmannsthal, Husserl, Pascal, Valéry, Heidegger, and others.”

• Download excerpts from The Meridian over at Jacket magazine.

• More on Joris at the EPC and Pennsound.

Tyler Babbie

Last month NPF editorial assistant Tyler Babbie attended The 39th Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 and he wrote a report on his experience, which I am only just now getting around to posting. NPF alumni are always in ample evidence at this three-day event — as presenters and also as subjects of presentations — and this year the NPF list include two of the keynotes: Michael Heller and Rae Armantrout. Tyler unfortunately arrived too late to catch Heller (but you can read all about it on Aldon Lynn Nielsen‘s blog). As for the rest, here is Tyler’s report — with the names of NPF and University of Maine alumni in bold:

This was the first time I have attended the Louisville Conference — I found it friendly and fascinating.  There were plenty of panels on topics that were immediately relevant to the NPF, especially on modern poetry, but there were also panels with more unusual themes (zombie apocalypse!).  You can see the whole program here.

There are over 135 panels crammed into nine time slots and so I only saw a fraction of what was going on. Here are some observations on a few of things I saw:

On Friday the 25th, I attended a panel titled “Re-envisioning H. D.’s Late Writings,” which was sponsored by the H. D. International Society.  I was also going to present on H. D., so I found this one particularly interesting.  Marsha Bryant presented on H. D.’s Helen in Egypt in the context of contemporary epic film — she found that there are many similarities in the ways that Hollywood and H. D. reimagine Homeric epic.  Lheisa Dustin presented on the psychological underpinnings of H. D.’s work, teasing apart some of the difficult passages in Helen in Egypt and The Sword Went Out to Sea. Finally, Jane Augustine read a paper by Emily McCann, who could not attend the conference.  It was on “Queering H.D.’s Trilogy.”  Donna Krollick Hollenberg — like Augustine a longtime contributor to NPF publications and conferences — offered many insights in a lively discussion after the presentations.

My own presentation came later.  Adra Raine of UNC Chapel Hill chaired our panel, “American Modernism and the Life of Things,” a topic suggested by Paideuma contributor and University of Maine professor Tony Brinkley. We were joined by Rebecca Griffin, who is attending UMass Amherst.  The four of us are friends from our time at Maine, though Adra and Rebecca have moved on.  My paper was on H. D. and Mikhail Bakhtin.  Rebecca worked on George Oppen.  Adra presented a paper on the late poetry of Wallace Stevens.  Tony ended our panel with thoughts on William James and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Rae Armantrout reads at the Louisville Conference

After the presentations, we attended a great reading by Rae Armantrout, who was a keynote at our own conference on The Poetry of the 1970s and who has read twice in the New Writing Series.  Here’s a photo, but I am afraid it is not very good — my camera seems to be having trouble focusing.  This wasn’t a problem for the audience, as Armantrout kept us rapt, and managed to draw laughs from all corners of the auditorium.

On Saturday I attended a panel on “Regions of Practice: American Poetics of Relational Space,” which was packed with NPF alumni.  It was very pleasant to meet Ondrea Ackerman, who presented on geopoetics in Gertrude Stein and Robert Grenier.  Her article “The Periplum of the Pisan Cantos” will appear this fall in Paideuma 38.  George Hart presented on Larry Eigner.  His work has appeared in Sagetrieb and he has attended our conferneces.  The panel was chaired by Barrett Watten, who has been a keynote at our conferences and contributed to NPF publications as both poet and scholar.

Another panel I attended was on music, text, and poetry.  Robert Zamsky presented on Robert Creeley‘s relationship to music, Mark Scroggins on the music of the Mekons, and William R. Howe on the unusual poetry and music of Bob Cobbing.  Howe received his M.A. at Maine, working with Burt Hatlen and Carroll Terrell. Scroggins, a longtime friend of the NPF, has contributed to Sagetrieb numerous times and been to several of our conferences.

The last presentation I attended was also on modern poetry.  Rachelle Katz Lerner, a biographer of Kenneth Rexroth, wrote on the contemplative nature of his poetics.  She has also presented on Rexroth at the NPF conferences.  Donna Hollenberg presented on Denise Levertov’s poem “During the Eichmann Trial.”  She has contributed to Paideuma, Sagetrieb, and many of the NPF’s conferences.  George Hart’s presentation on Guy Davenport and Ezra Pound came last.

The conference ended with a party at the house of another longtime friend of the NPF, Alan Golding. This party included a poetry reading that will be on PennSound. At the party I was particularly fortunate to spend time talking to Lerner, who regaled me with off-the-record stories from the life of Kenneth Rexroth.

For this special volume of Paideuma, we go back to our roots with an eighty-fifth birthday celebration of Mary de Rachewiltz, an important member of the scholarly community that gave rise to this journal and made its continued publication possible. De Rachewiltz’s contributions to the field are substantial. In addition to her magisterial translation of the Cantos (I Canti [Mondadori, 1985]), she is the author of a beautiful memoir, Ezra Pound, Father and Teacher: Discretions (New Directions, 2005). After having long labored at Yale’s Beinecke Library, where she lent her special familiarity with her father’s work to the organization and cataloguing of its Ezra Pound Archive, she has made a permanent home for Pound scholarship at Brunnenburg Castle in the Italian South Tyrol. We are pleased to honor her here with a portfolio of documentary material edited and introduced by Richard Sieburth.

Mary de Rachewiltz’s long relationship with the NPF began in 1985 at the Ezra Pound Centennial Conference, where she sat on a panel with Hugh Kenner to give a talk entitled “Remembering Pound the Poet.” She was also part of a roundtable at the end of the conference that included Robert Creeley, Donald Davie, Allen Ginsberg, Hugh Kenner, James Laughlin, Marjorie Perloff, M.L. Rosenthal, Olga Rudge, and Walter Sutton. At the William Butler Yeats-Ezra Pound Celebration Conference in 1990, she gave a keynote address, “A Pilgrim to Erin Shrines,” and was part of a discussion group that included Kenner, Sutton, Peter Dale Scott, and Carroll Terrell. Her first contribution to an NPF publication appeared in H.D.: Woman and Poet (1986). She subsequently contributed to three special issues of Paideuma, festschrifts for Mary Barnard (1994), Carroll Terrell (1997), and James Laughlin (2002).

In her 1994 tribute to Mary Barnard, de Rachewiltz described Barnard’s Assault on Mount Helicon as “the most dignified, informative and sincere literary memoir I have ever read.” This is a statement Evelyn Haller might apply to de Rachewiltz’s own Discretions. Haller’s “Shadows on the Rock: A Book in American English Ezra Pound Gave His Daughter” is the first of four scholarly essays that follow the portfolio edited by Sieburth. A shorter version of Haller’s essay was printed in the proceedings for the 17^th International Ezra Pound Conference. We are happy to include the full text here, in conjunction with Sieburth’s portfolio. The other three essays are also appropriate to this context. Sean Pryor’s “‘How Will You Know?’: Paradise, Painting, and the Writing of Ezra Pound’s Canto 3” looks at Pound directly in a reading of Canto 3 as an early attempt to “write paradise.” Jeffrey Westover and Joshua Clover look at two Poundian themes: economics and history. Westover (who, like Pryor, is appearing in Paideuma for the second time) brings fresh insight to Lorine Niedecker’s work by reading it in the context of local history. “‘My Sense of Property’s / Adrift’: Attitudes toward Land, Property, and Nation in Lorine Niedecker” juxtaposes colonial and native attitudes about ownership. Clover’s “‘A Form Adequate to History’: Toward a Renewed Marxist Poetics” closes the issue with a programmatic statement on poetry’s significance for theory. His perspective is global, with examples (Apollinaire, Frank O’Hara, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann) drawn from three stages of capitalist development.

Paideuma 38, slated for publication in 2011, includes articles by Ondrea Ackerman, Russell Brickey, Natalie Gerber, Matthew Hofer, Charles Kraszewski, and Catherine Paul, as well as an interview with Basil Bunting conducted by James Laughlin and Lawrence Pitkethly, prefaced by Richard Swigg.

—Tyler Babbie, Alison Fraser, and Benjamin Friedlander

There is also a preface by Richard Sieburth to the portfolio he edited. We will give some excerpts from that in the coming days.

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To get the word out about this volume we are pleased to be able to offer it at a special discount. Paideuma subscriptions for individuals are $30 a year domestic and $40 outside the U.S. Through March readers of this blog can purchase Paideuma 37 (and our previous volume, 36 [link]) at the low price of $20 (or $30 for orders outside the U.S).

To order, please call Gail Sapiel at  207-581-3813 or send her an email at gail [dot] sapiel [at] umit [dot] maine [dot] edu.  Tell her that you read about the new issue on the blog to receive this promotional discount.

Tyrolean mask from the cover of Tiroler Masken by Mary de Rachewiltz (Milan: All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro, 1960). Ezra Pound: “where the masks come from, in the Tirol, / in the winter season / searching every house to drive out the demons” (Canto 74).

Hello everyone!

The National Poetry Foundation blog has been quiet for a few months, as we have been working overtime in the preparation of two volumes of Paideuma. If both volumes appear this year, as we fully expect (and by “year” we mean the academic year, Fall 2010-Spring 2011), the journal will truly be caught up, on schedule, and ready to move forward at a brisk pace. This is the culmination of a lot of planning and a lot of work over the last four years, about which we will have more to say in the near future. For now, we wanted to announce the appearance of the first of those two volumes, Paideuma 37 (2010), a handsome collection of documents and essays — over 350 pages! — the majority celebrating Mary de Rachewiltz, whose 85th birthday we mark with a special section. This section (edited by Richard Sieburth) features several facsimiles that will be of keen interest to readers of Ezra Pound. In the coming days we will be posting brief excerpts.

Cover of January 1939 issue of Reijokai (Young Ladies’ World), a Japanese girl’s magazine. A Japanese translation of “Gais: The Beauties of the Tirol,” written in 1937 by then-twelve-year-old Mary de Rachewiltz, was published in this issue.

Longtime readers of Paideuma will need no introduction to Mary de Rachewiltz. Ezra Pound’s daughter and translator, and a fine poet in her own right, she is the author of an extraordinary memoir, Ezra Pound, Father and Teacher: Discretions, and a longtime supporter of Pound scholarship, first at Yale (home of the Ezra Pound Papers), now at Brunnenburg Castle, Italy, where she founded The Ezra Pound Center for Literature.

In addition to the documentary material in our birthday tribute, Paideuma 37 features essays on Ezra Pound, Lorine Niedecker, and Marxist poetics. More on these soon! For the full contents, see our entry for the volume on the Paideuma blog, which includes tables of contents for the entire run of the journal (link).

◊

To get the word out about this volume we are pleased to be able to offer it at a special discount. Paideuma subscriptions for individuals are $30 a year domestic and $40 outside the U.S. Through March readers of this blog can purchase Paideuma 37 (and our previous volume, 36 [link]) at the low price of $20 (or $30 for orders outside the U.S).

To order, please call Gail Sapiel at  207-581-3813 or send her an email at gail [dot] sapiel [at] umit [dot] maine [dot] edu.  Tell her that you read about the new issue on the blog to receive this promotional discount.

Several NPF alumni presented at the conference:

Kaplan Harris, who recently contributed to Paideuma 36, presented on the Olson-Creely correspondence.  He is currently editing the forthcoming Selected Letters of Robert Creely. Here is a link to a preview of the forthcoming book in Jacket.  He also presented at our Poetry of the 1970s conference.

Don Byrd is another Paideuma alum who presented at the Olson conference.  His contribution to Paideuma an issue from farther back–he wrote in the Louis Zukofsky memorial issue, back in 1978.  He also contributed to Sagetrieb, in 1985.  He has also presented at our 1940s conference.  He will be presenting on Olson’s views of verse as “essential.”

Michael Boughn has contributed three articles to Sagetrieb–two on H.D. and one on William Carlos Williams.  He presented on poetics as transformation.  He is currently editing Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book–a project that this blogger is excited to see come to fruition.  The version floating around the internet is a real pain.

Our own Carla Billitteri also presented at the conference, on “Diversional Events: Singularity and Multiplicity in Olson’s Poetics.”

Click on the text below for a link to the audio:

PETROS: Leading off Rin Tin Tin and Roger Maris for your dead guy birth of the day is H.D., a.k.a. Hilda Doolittle, 124 years old, American poet and novelist. She had a cool bob haircut. She was an early twentieth-century avant-garde imagist. Hung out with dudes like Ezra Pound. She was the daughter of academics in Pennsylvania. She was married to the poet Richard Aldington. And she underwent psychoanalysis from Sigmund Freud. How many people can say that?

MONEY: I’m gonna say . . . not a lot . . . of people can say that?

And then it’s on to John William “Bill” Stevenson of the Descendents, born the same day as H. D. . . . and still living.

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(For podcasts of the show go here; scroll down to “9/10 PMS Hour 4″ for the whole segment.)

Session One 9:30 – 11:00 a.m.

Moderator: Mark Jacobs

Carla Billitteri, University of Maine
A “Visibility of Blindness”: Laura (Riding) Jackson’s Poetics of Intuition

Jack Blackmore,Nottingham Trent University
Notes for a reading of “One Self” by Laura Riding

Christina Whitney, University of Denver
Poetry as “Lying Discourse”: Laura (Riding) Jackson’s Growing Distrust of Rhetorical Poetics

Session Two 11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Moderator: Elizabeth Friedmann

Jeff Hamilton, Washington University
Kairotic Rhetoric and the Counter-pastoral in Laura Riding’s Though Gently

Roxanne Warwick, Nottingham Trent University
‘The Courtesies of Authorship’: Laura (Riding) Jackson and the Establishment of English

Barrett Watten, Wayne State University
The House of Language: Laura (Riding) Jackson’s Rational Meaning and the Truth of Experience

Lunch Break

Session Three 2:00 – 3:30 p.m.

Moderator: John Nolan

Julia Fiedorczuk, University of Warsaw
A Home Made of Words: Some Remarks on The Telling

Carroll Ann Friedmann, University of Virginia
The Spirituality of Being Men and Women

Anett Jessop, University of California, Davis
Laura (Riding) Jackson’s “Universal Linguistic Solution”

Reception 4:00 – 6:00 p.m.

The finding aid for the Laura  (Riding) Jackson papers is available online from Cornell (link).

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Several of the scholars presenting at the conference have NPF connections:

Carla Billitteri is a member of the NPF’s editorial collective and has participated in a number of our conferences. She published her article “The Passion of Becoming an Object” in Paideuma 35.1-2.

Jeff Hamilton attended our 2004 conference on Poetries of the 1940s, where he presented his paper “Robert Duncan’s ‘Grammar of Poetics’ and the Pre-Chomskyan Linguistic Sublime.”

Mark Jacobs contributed to Paideuma 33.1, in which he reviewed A Survey of Modernist Poetry and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies, both by Laura Riding and Robert Graves.

Barrett Watten has attended all of our conferences since 1993. His keynote talk from 2000, “The Turn to Language after the 1960s,” subsequently appeared in Critical Inquiry. In 2006, he organized a panel for the NPF at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Tulsa. Those papers subsequently appeared in Paideuma 35.3 with Watten’s introduction, “Faultlines in Poetics: Culture / Politics / Economics / Generation.” His review of Libbie Rifkin’s Career Moves appeared in Sagetrieb 18.1.  A well-known poet as well as scholar, he is one of the anchoring figures in the NPF’s anthology of Language Writing, In the American Tree, edited by Ron Silliman.

The essays are as various and complementary in method as in subject. Several of this volume’s authors draw on archival material, none more so than Andrea Brady, who surveys and reads the John Wieners papers at nine institutions. Robert Stark and Kaplan Harris instead turn to print culture, the former historicizing Pound’s “jargoning,” the latter “the ubiquitous presence of pills” in the work of Ted Berrigan. Sarah Barnsley’s rich account of Mary Barnard’s poetics makes judicious use of manuscript material, while Aimee Pozorski’s powerful reading of Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust looks at the author’s source materials and notes in light of trauma theory. Critical theory also informs Patrick Barron’s reading of Edward Dorn, which demonstrates the value of Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space for ecopoetics. Tony Brinkley and Joseph Arsenault read Hegel, and also, to a lesser extent, Heidegger and Deleuze, but the theory most important for their essay is Wordsworthian. That poetic practice implies a theory is a key tenet for Barnsley too, and also for Sean Pryor, who examines the pedagogy of Pound’s “Ezuversity” and discovers a fissure, another reason why the Cantos “cannot make it cohere”: “the pedagogic structure of guidance and instruction is in conflict with the occult structure of illumination and revelation”; “the poem brings the great ball of crystal, only to discover that this avails nothing, for the crystal cannot ever be lifted, entered, or known.”

We are also happy to be publishing seven reviews encompassing primary texts by Ezra Pound and Ernst Fenollosa, and new scholarship on Pound, George Oppen, Black Mountain poetics, and the modernist occult.

With this double issue Paideuma shifts to a biannual format (the journal has been a de facto biannual since volume 14), and for the foreseeable future the year’s two issues will be printed together as a single annual. Our primary aim is to streamline the publication process, in order to get the journal back on a regular publication schedule. We believe that this format is best suited to the goal. Note that the date range assigned to this volume brings the current issue in line with the current calendar year. Volume 37 will cover the year 2010 and feature an eighty-fifth birthday tribute to Mary de Rachewiltz edited by Richard Sieburth. We also look forward to publishing in this forthcoming volume essays by Joshua Clover, Evelyn Haller, Sean Pryor, and Jeffrey Westover.