Poetries of the 1940s: American and International
In memoriam
Carroll F. Terrell
February 21, 1917-November 29, 2003
Founding Editor of Paideuma
Founding Director of the National Poetry Foundation
Hugh Kenner
January 7, 1923-November 24, 2003
Senior Editor of Paideuma
Lifelong friend and supporter of the NPF
Program
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 23
Poetry Reading #1: Robert Creeley
Chair: Tony Brinkley
Special Event #1: Tribute to Louis Zukofsky
On the 100th anniversary of his birth
Chair: Burton Hatlen
Robert Creeley, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Mark Scroggins
Special Event #2: A Dramatic Reading from Powers: Track, Volume III
For Armand Schwerner
Norman and Alice Finkelstein
Group Poetry Reading #1
Chair: Kevin Killian
Greg Biglieri, Barbara Cole, Kathleen Johnson, Kevin Killian, Jayne Marek, Peter Middleton, Peter O’Leary, Mark Scroggins
Open Reading
Chair: Bill Howe
THURSDAY, JUNE 24
Panel Session #1
Panel 1A. Wallace Stevens
Chair: Tony Brinkley
Gregg Biglieri: “Let Be Be the Finale of Be: A Transitional Moment in Stevens’ Poetics of the Copula”
Ross Leckie: “Wallace Stevens Imagining the Postwar”
William Sylvester: “Wallace Stevens and Henry Rago”
Panel 1B. Louis Zukofsky I
Chair: Kenneth Sherwood
Jeff Twitchell-Waas: “‘An eye to action’: Spinoza and the Politics and Poetics of ‘A’”
Mark Scroggins: “‘The Men in the Kitchens’: Zukofsky’s Second World War”
Louis Cabri: “Zukofsky, Myth, and the Inertial Word”
Panel 1C. Mina Loy
Chair: Jamerson Maurer
Jamerson Maurer: “The Becoming-Body of the Loyian Poetic”
Susan Rosenbaum: “Mina Loy’s American ’40s: Surrealist Aims, National Designs”
Suzanne Young: “‘The Compensations of Poverty’: Mina Loy’s Urban Poetry of the 1940s”
Panel 1D. Roethke/Jarrell
Chair: David Adams
Karen Alkalay-Gut: “The Self and the World: Theodore Roethke’s Open House, and The Lost Son”
Suzanne Ferguson: “Letters and/in Poems: Ruminations on Randall Jarrell and Letter-Writing”
Panel 1E. The Visionary Poetics of Robert Duncan
Chair: Jeff Hamilton
Stephen Fredman: “‘Passages of a Sentence’: The Invention of a Visionary Postmodernism in Robert Duncan’s Letters”
Burton Hatlen: “Duncan’s Early Poetry and the Poetics of the Modernist Sublime”
Peter O’Leary: “In My Psychological Concept: Sin and Conflict in Duncan’s Early Poetry”
Poetry Reading #2: Jackson Mac Low
Chair: Steven Evans
Poetry Reading #3: Harvey Shapiro
Chair: Norman Finkelstein
Panel Session #2
Panel 2A. The Second World War: Pound, Jeffers, Everson
Chair: Albert Gelpi
Albert Gelpi: “Pantheism and Pacifism: William Everson and the War”
Robert von Hallberg: “War Poetry: The Pisan Cantos”
Robert Brophy: “Jeffers, Inhumanism, and a War-Driven World”
Panel 2B. African American Poetry I
Chair: Donald Wellman
Grant Matthew Jenkins: “Melvin B. Tolson’s 1940s: An Ethical Experiment”
Astrid Franke: “Beyond The Waste Land and the New Deal: the Modernist Documentaries of Muriel Rukeyser and Robert Hayden”
Fahamisha Patricia Brown: “The Early Poems of Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker”
Panel 2C. Ezra Pound I
Chair: Ellen Stauder
Kathe Davis: “Berryman, Pound and the Imp of the Personal”
Youngmin Kim: “Remaking It New in The Pisan Cantos: Ezra Pound in the 1940s”
Kamran Javadizadeh: “The Mad Poet in the Institution”
Panel 2D. Objectivists
Chair: Lyn Hejinian
Thomas J. Nelson: “Rhetorics of Silence: Objectivists and the 1940s”
Steven Shoemaker: “The Poetics of Silence: George Oppen and World War II”
David Briggs: “Location, Occupation, and Locomotion in Lorine Niedecker’s ‘New Goose’ Manuscript”
Panel 2E. American Poets and World War II
Chair: Norman Finkelstein
Norman Finkelstein: “Again I am the death- instructed kid: Harvey Shapiro’s Poems of World War II”
Susan Gilmore: “My poetry for my country: Propaganda as Genre in the World War II Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay”
Andrew Rosen: “Condition Thyself: Robinson Jeffers Confronting World War II”
Panel 2F. British Poetry I
Chair; Laura Cowan
Bradford Haas: “The Poetry of Morris Cox in the Context of 1940s London”
Jamey Hecht: “Elegies of Two World Wars: Wilfred Owen and Dylan Thomas”
David Huntsperger: “Aestheticism and Loyalty: Basil Bunting’s Response to World War II”
Panel Session #3
Panel 3A. H.D. I
Chair: Albert Gelpi
Barbara Cole: “‘We Know Not Nor Are Known’: H.D.’s Poetics of Negation”
Sarah Graham: “Falling Walls: H.D.’s Traumatised Poetic”
Anne Dewey: “Against Ideogram: The Intersubjective Origins of Language in H.D.’s Helen in Egypt”
Wendy Galgan: “Air Raids, Alchemy, and Redemption: H.D.’s Trilogy”
Panel 3B. African American Poetry II
Chair: Michael Bibby
Aldon Nielsen: “Russell Atkins and the Road Not Taken”
James Smethurst: “Kitchenette Correlatives: African American Neo-Modernism, The Popular Front, and the Black Avant Garde in the 1940s”
Lorenzo Thomas: “Soldiering On: Waring Cuney’s Campaigns”
Panel 3C. Robert Duncan and the Berkeley Renaissance
Chair: Stephen Fredman
Kelly Holtz: “Medieval Frames: Ernst Kantorowicz, the Berkeley Renaissance, and 1940s Transformations in Political and Poetic Practice”
Jeff Hamilton: “Robert Duncan’s ‘Grammar of Poetics’ and the Pre-Chomskyan Linguistic Sublime”
Andrew Mossin: “A Book of ‘First Things’: Homosexual Subjectivity, Poetic Vocation and Revisionist Politics in Robert Duncan’s ‘The Venice Poem’”
Don Byrd: “Cybernetics and the Poetry Of the 1940s: A Proposal”
Panel 3D. Marianne Moore
Chair: John Beer
Ellen Levy: “Theater of Ambivalence: Marianne Moore, Joseph Cornell and Lincoln Kirstein’s Dance Index”
Kirby Olson: “Marianne Moore and the Just War Tradition”
K. Silem Mohammad: “Marianne Moore’s What Are Years? and Nevertheless”
Panel 3E. Beginning in the 1940s I
Chair: Matthew Cooperman
Michael Basinski: “The Mid-1940s: Charles Bukowski’s First Literary Career”
Matthew Cooperman: “Here Then, Here Now: Discursive Centering in the Arc of Theodore Enslin”
Donna Hollenberg: “Robert Creeley’s Role in Denise Levertov’s Post-War Transition”
Panel 3F. International Perspectives I
Chair: Ellen Stauder
Elizabeth Losh: “Temporary Americans: Emigres, Exiles, and the Work of Bertolt Brecht and Max Ernst”
Demetres Tryphonopoulos: “The Homeric Nekuia in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos and George Seferis’ The Thrush”
Ela Kotkowska: “Breton, Char, and Eluard: Poetic Acts of Love and Revolt in the 1940s”
Lisa Smorto: “Asphodel: The Dying Gardens of Gottfried Benn”
Plenary Speaker #1: J. Hillis Miller
“The Individual (Poet) and the Community:
Stevens’s and Williams’s Poetry of the 1940s”
Chair: Cassandra Laity
Plenary Speaker #2: Alan Trachtenberg
“The Noir Decade: Historical Perspectives on the 1940s”
Chair: Burton Hatlen
Group Poetry Reading #2
Chair: Susan Schultz
Karen Alkalay-Gut, Robert Archambeau, John Beer, Suzannne Ferguson, Aaron Kunin, Ross Leckie, Kenneth Sherwood, Susan Schultz, Jonathan Skinner, Ellen Smith
Open Reading
Chair: Bill Howe