“…She Had a Cool Bob Haircut…”

This past Friday was H. D.’s birthday. Didn’t expect to hear it marked on Sports Talk Radio. But Petros and Money would do it, if anyone. How much did I enjoy this? Enough to overlook the snicker when Petros says “American poet.”

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.)

Announcing “Laura (Riding) Jackson in the Twenty-First Century,” a conference at Cornell

The Laura (Riding) Jackson Board of Literary Management, established by Mrs. Jackson’s Will in 1991, is scheduled to transfer its responsibilities to the Cornell University Library at the end of December 2010, also in accordance with her Will. To mark the occasion, the Board has arranged to hold a scholarly conference centered on the theme “Laura (Riding) Jackson in the Twenty-First Century” (.pdf link).  The conference will be held in the Carl A. Kroch Library at Cornell on Thursday, October 28, 2010, where the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections will host a reception and assemble an exhibition. Here is the program:

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.