Acknowledging Our Contributors

We are pleased to announce a new initiative underway here at NPF — we will be compiling a digital catalogue of the names of our many valued contributors. We wish to acknowledge those scholars and writers by providing an easily searchable archive of everyone whose writing has ever been published/featured in our academic journals, Paideuma and Sagetrieb, as well as all those who have contributed to our Person and Poet series or other volumes, and finally those who have participated in our summer conferences. The complete archive of Sagetrieb and Paideuma contributors is already available on the Sagetrieb blog (here) and on the Paideuma blog (here). We chose to begin this project with Sagetrieb to commemorate  the release of the journal’s 20th and final volume, published earlier this year. In our initial surveying of our archives (which is still far from complete), we were particularly moved to see the names of so many well-known contributors no longer with us, including Michael Andre Bernstein, Robin Blaser, Robert Creeley, Barbara Guest, Hugh Kenner, A. Walton Litz,
and Mary Ellen Solt, just to name a few. We are filled with gratitude as we look back on the many years worth of contributors; we hope you too will enjoy the chance to look over the names, perhaps including your own.

Please let us know if you notice any errors or omissions. We will continue to update the blog as our archive list grows!

 

 

 

Announcing Paideuma 40 / Sagetrieb 20!

We are long overdue in announcing the combined publication of Paideuma 40 and Sagetrieb 20.

Information for ordering copies of the journals can be found HERE.

In the present volume—simultaneously published as Paideuma 40 and Sagetrieb 20—the National Poetry Foundation’s two journals are are joined in their labor for the first time within a single cover, in celebration of the late Burton Hatlen, Sagetrieb’s longtime editor.

Find below an excerpt from our editor’s preface to the current volume:

 The testimonials and essays that follow only begin to indicate Burt’s enduring influence on his former students and surviving colleagues. Edited by his longtime friend Demetres Tryphonopoulos, the Festschrift is further enriched with a version of Burt’s last editorial project: a selection of essays on George Oppen. At the time of his death, Burt was shaping these essays into a sequel to his own George Oppen: Man and Poet (1982), a foundational collection, a few of whose contributors also appear here. In his introduction to that vol- ume, Hatlen summed up his editorial perspective nicely—words well worth recalling in the context of this Festschrift: “If criticism is (as I believe) a dialectical mode of discourse, then disagreements such as those which appear in this volume should be welcomed as opening to further critical work. In any case, my goal here has been to let a hundred voices sing.” With the present volume, Sagetrieb now ceases publication. Burt helped to plan this conclusion and he hoped to see it through; his gathering of new essays on George Oppen was intended for the final issue. The work of the journal will continue, however, as it has for the past half-decade, within the pages of Paideuma, whose expanded man- date since volume 35 has covered all poetry in English from the twen- tieth and twenty-first centuries. Yet despite this continuity, the end of the journal will be met with sadness by the scholars it long served, who will remember a time when no other venue was available for their work. That the situation is so greatly improved makes the discontinu- ing of the journal a bittersweet sign of its success. Today, serious study of H.D., Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, the Objectivist poets, the language writers, and other once-marginal individuals and groups can be found in a broad range of journals, including the most prestigious in our discipline. Within this new environment, the main- tenance of two journals, never easy, ceased to be necessary. Moreover, the division of subjects between the two, ever evolving, had become quite fuzzy in recent years, fuzzy enough to make a combining of efforts logical as well as thrifty. Our decision to end Sagetrieb (unofficial for some time, as no new issue has appeared since 2006) was difficult to reach, but seems inevitable in retrospect.

Editors’ Preface for Paideuma 37

As part of our showcase of the new volume of Paideuma, here is our editors’ preface — more previews to come soon:

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.

◊

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.

Announcing Paideuma 37

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.

Editors’ Preface for Paideuma 36

The essays in this volume of Paideuma have been arranged chronologically by poet, beginning with two essays on Ezra Pound and continuing through H. D., Mary Barnard, and Charles Reznikoff, concluding with several figures associated with the post-war generations that first came to prominence in The New American Poetry. The chronological presentation is not entirely adequate to the material surveyed: the last essay, by Tony Brinkley and Joseph Arsenault, looks at recent poems by Rosmarie Waldrop, Barbara Guest, and Alice Notley, but with a conceptual framework established through close readings of Hegel, Wordsworth, and Wallace Stevens. Since the first essay in the issue, by Robert Stark, digs deep into the archive of Scots dialect poetry to illuminate the antiquarian diction of Pound’s earliest poems, the eight essays form a circle of sorts, beginning and ending with the eighteenth century. But the twentieth century is emphatically on display here: as traumatic event for Aimee Pozorski, as material culture for Kaplan Harris, as a confluence of social forces for Andrea Brady. History also informs Patrick Barron’s essay on Edward Dorn’s western landscapes, while Sarah Barnsley discovers a poetics of history in the Imagist landscapes of Mary Barnard and H. D. In Barnsley’s account, poetry becomes “a series of compressed, ground-up moments carrying marks of other moments much as sand carries traces of all contact with rocks and waves.” For Sean Pryor, poetry is instead a series of moments of instruction—vexed and vexing ones, since he is looking at Pound’s late cantos.

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.

Announcing Paideuma Volume 36

We are pleased to announce the publication of Paideuma Volume 36. To order, please visit our main website (here) or click on the Ordering tab of this blog.

•

CONTENTS

Preface

Essays

Robert Stark, “‘Toils Obscure An’ A’ That’: Romantic and Celtic Influences in ‘Hilda’s Book'”

Sean Pryor, “Particularly Dangerous Feats: The Difficult Reader of the Difficult Late Cantos”

Sarah Barnsley, “‘Sand Is the Beginning and the End / of Our Dominion’: Mary Barnard, H.D. and Imagism”

Aimee Pozorski, “Traumatic Survival and the Loss of a Child: Reznikoff’s Holocaust Revisited”

Patrick Barron, “Unmasked Representations of Space in Edward Dorn’s ‘The Land Below’ and ‘Idaho Out'”

Andrea Brady, “Making Use of This Pain: The John Wieners Archives”

Kaplan Harris, “Gender Performance, Performance Enhancement, and Poetry: Reading Ted Berrigan After Viagra”

Tony Brinkley and Joesph Arsenault, “‘This is where the serpent lives’: Wordsworthian Poetics and Contemporary American Poetry”

Reviews

Ronald Bush (Ezra Pound: Canti postumi, a cura di Massimo Bacigalupo)

Robert Kibler (Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, A Critical Edition, ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein)

Mariacrstina Natalia Bertoli (Ezra Pound, Language and Persona, ed. Massimo Bacigalupo and William Pratt)

Joseph Conte (Anne Day Dewey, Beyond Maximus: The Construction of Public Voice in Black Mountain Poetry)

Justin Parks (Peter Nicholls, George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism)

Lara Vetter (Mark S. Morrisson, Modern Alchemy: Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory)

In Memoriam

Paul Montgomery, 1936-2008 by Massimo Bacigalupo

Giano Accame, 1928-2009 by Massimo Bacigalupo

G. Singh, 1926-2009 by Massimo Bacigaluopo

Omar Pound, 1926-2010 by Tim Redman

•

Cover: William Aikman, Allan Ramsay. Courtesy Scottish National Portrait Gallery. The website of the National Galleries of Scotland includes the following caption beside this portrait:

Allan Ramsay began his career in Edinburgh as a wigmaker; he went on to become a bookseller, successful poet and an important member of Edinburgh’s literary and artistic circles. He was a close friend of the artist, William Aikman, and this portrait was owned by another friend, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik. Clerk wrote on the back of the canvas, imitating Ramsay’s verse: “Here painted on this canvas clout by Aikman’s hand is Ramsay’s snout.”

Preview of Paideuma 36: Tony Brinkley and Joesph Arsenault

Tony Brinkley

Tony Brinkley and Joseph Arsenault’s “‘This Is Where the Serpent Lives’: Wordsworthian Poetics and Contemporary American Poetry,” presents a complex application of Hegelian dialectic and Wordsworthian poetics onto the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Rosmarie Waldrop, Barbara Guest, and Alice Notley. Operating on destabilized terrain, Brinkley and Arsenault propose that deitic gestures found in Wordsworth are explored to interesting limits of potentiality, first in Stevens, and later in Waldrop, Guest, and Notley. A central question of their essay is: “Can we see a Wordsworthian poetics of this sort in contemporary American poetry?” Their answer:

The this is a universal, indifferent to its content, indifferently night or day, house or tree, [as] Hegel writes, but the deixis of the poems we are considering is hardly indifferent in its reference. The ‘body-bags’ in Waldrop’s poem turn recent history into deitic insistence – not insistence on the specific referent, but grammatical insistence, as a shifter. …Whatever the deictic gesture refers to is added to the referring, presencing gesture…so that when Waldrop writes “what can I do but tie ribbons to the idea of body and its wholeness,” we think of war mementos (a yellow ribbon among other possibilities, tied around a car antenna for example).

Joe Arsenault

Tony Brinkley and Joe Arsenault have worked together for years, and the conversation that led to this article began as a thought experiment on Paul de Man, who wrote that literary criticism became literary theory when literary critics embraced linguistics. The linguistics de Man had in mind was Saussure’s and its engagement with arbitrary signs. As a point of departure, Brinkley and Arsenault wondered what might happen if they adopted de Man’s insight but instead substituted indexical for arbitrary signs. On the one hand, this seemed to them to be imperative as they were working with historical realities (at the time, the Shoah). On the other hand, an emphasis on arbitrary signification seemed to lead to hopeless misinterpretations of many of the poems they cared for most (de Man’s impossible reading of Shelley’s “Triumph of Life” for example). From this, an interest in the deictic gestures of Wordsworthian poetry developed, of how the poetry says “of what we see in the dark / That it is this or that it is that.” And so the essay followed…

Tony Brinkley teaches English at the University of Maine where Joseph Arsenault works as a program manager in Surface Engineering. Their other co-authored articles included “Toward an Indexical Criticism” (Postmodern Culture 5.3) and “Traumatized Words” (Sagetrieb 16.3).

Preview of Paideuma 36: Sarah Barnsley

Sarah Barnsley‘s article, “‘Sand Is the Beginning and the End / of Our Dominion’: Mary Barnard, H.D. and Imagism,” explores a poetics of history in the Imagist landscapes of these two poets. The article makes good use of the archive, offering unpublished work by Barnard for attentive reading. Using the metaphor of sand, “a substance [that] lends itself well to poetic appropriation,” Barnsley develops a particular understanding of perspective and of Barnard’s and H.D.’s articulation of time through sensitive and perceptive examinations of their poems.

Barnsley fully and thoughtfully pursues the versatility of sand in the poems of Barnard and H.D., which she sees sometimes as Imagist “‘verbal grit,'” while at other times as simultaneously “solid and liquid” or even “fruity.” The porous texture of sand allows it to adhere to poetics with startlingly adaptive ease that results in fascinating new readings of these poets.

Please enjoy this short excerpt from Barnsley’s essay:

For Barnard and H.D., sand possesses a translucence replete with possibilities, from the “reflecting sands” in “Shoreline” to “grains…clear as wine” in “Hermes of the Ways.” Theirs is an elegant yet raw poetic program, producing a spare poetry that is both coarse and irregular in places, like a handful of sand grains, yet that conceals a portal to the sublime when perceived as a whole, like the awe-inspiring visual spectacle of the beach that has enthralled poets particularly since the Romantic period.

Sarah Barnsley is a Tutor in English and American Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she is also Director of the English distance-learning program. Her other scholarship on Mary Barnard includes the recently-published “Mary Barnard’s ‘North Window’: Imagism and the Pacific Northwest” in Western American Literature 44.3 (Fall 2009). Additionally, she is completing a book manuscript, “Mary Barnard, Late Imagist,” and co-organizing a Mary Barnard centenary event to take place in June 2011 at Reed College, Portland, Oregon.

Preview of Paideuma 36: Patrick Barron

Patrick Barron‘s essay, “Unmasked Representations of Space in Edward Dorn’s ‘The Land Below’ and ‘Idaho Out,’” offers keen close readings of these poems in the larger discussion of the history, geography, and politics of the American West. Although “it can be quite problematic to apply theory to Dorn’s work,” as Barron admits, his application of Henri Lefebvre’s space representation theory provides a new, productive lens through which to understand these poems. Working with issues of space and ownership in the West, Barron deftly maneuvers his way through Dorn’s politically charged poetic landscape.

Please enjoy this short excerpt from Barron’s article:

Dorn’s spatial practice in much of his poetry — the way in which he perceives everyday space – is almost always accomplished through wandering over long distances, often by car. …Dorn’s laconic poetics, however, tends to construct knowledge of the production of space in the West through an insistent unmasking of representations of space. He encourages exploration into and beyond known limits, and embraces increasingly complex fields of geographic awareness.

Patrick Barron’s poetry, essays, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in a number of journals, including Poetry East, Ecopoetics, Two Lines, The Worcester Review, The North Dakota Quarterly, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, and The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry. His books include Italian Environmental Literature: An Anthology and The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto (U of Chicago P), for which he was recently awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts  (read the press release here). Barron was featured on Adam Penna’s Best Poem blog (read it here). He is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

The NPF is no stranger to scholarship on Dorn’s work. To see the Table of Contents from Sagetrieb‘s special Dorn issue, click here.

Preview of Paideuma 36: Sean Pryor

Sean Pryor‘s “Particularly Dangerous Feats: The Difficult Reader of the Difficult Late Cantos” explores the relationship between the reader and Ezra Pound’s late cantos. The article, which deals with the pedagogical concerns of Pound as expressed by The Cantos, naturally arose “from the always strange but stimulating experience of trying to teach Pound,” as Pryor puts it, especially the later cantos.

Pryor traces readers’ difficulty and frustration with the late cantos by beginning with W. D. Snodgrass, who complained in a review that “life with Ezra has become more and more to be a daily mid-semester test.” It is clear even to the most naïve observer that Ezra Pound’s “Ezuversity” has no fluff courses or easy As. As Snodgrass expressed, this creates a sometimes frustrating tension between reader and poem. However, this tension goes both ways, Pryor argues:

To offer explanations to the novice whom you have abandoned is to confess an inability to abandon your novice. This is the fundamental tension to which Snodgrass [and others] respond, a clash between the poem’s compulsion to judge and its compulsion to teach. The poem is actually in desperate need of its reader, and that need is often most visible when the poem mocks, abuses, or damns the reader.

“Particularly Dangerous Feats” was developed out of a larger project on Pound and Yeats, which will appear in W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and the Poetry of Paradise (Ashgate Press 2011). Sean Pryor teaches English at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. His research focuses on modernist poetry and poetics. His next project is on a poetics of fallenness in the twentieth century, which will examine W.H. Auden, Pound, Wallace Stevens, Louis Zukofsky, and others. Pryor also has another article on Pound forthcoming in Paideuma 37, titled “‘How Will You Know?’: Paradise, Painting, and the Writing of Ezra Pound’s Canto 3.”