American Poetry in the 1950s
Program
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 19
Session #1, Plenary
Chair: Burton Hatlen
M.L. Rosenthal, “Karl Shapiro and the Rich Continuities of the Fifties”
Session #2, Panels
Panel 2A: H.D.
Chair: Cassandra Laity
Crystal Anderson, “Lifting the Veil of Cytheraea: H.D.’s Revisionist Modernism in Helen in Egypt”
Anita George, “Re-Visions of Helen: Sappho Fr. 16 and H.D.’s Helen in Egypt”
Charlotte Hussey, “‘A rhythm as yet unheard to challenge the trumpet note’: Analyzing the Poetic Line Used in H.D.’s Helen in Egypt”
Panel 2B: John Berryman
Chair: Constance Hunting
Jori Finkel, “The Sloppy Modernism of St. Pancras Blaser: Berryman’s Unpublished Dream Songs”
Tony Moore, “Dying to Write: Death and the Repetition Compulsion in John Berryman’s The Dream Songs”
Ernest Smith, “John Berryman’s ‘Programmatic’ for The Dream Songs, and an Instance of Revision”
Panel 2C: Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac
Chair: Batya Weinbaum
Jonathan Ivry, “The Poetics of Obscenity: Ginsberg and Mapplethorpe on Trial”
Batya Weinbaum, “Women as Bitch, Dead or Mad in the 1950s Poetry of Allen Ginsberg: Groundwork for Revolutionary Change?”
Kurt Hemmer, “The Western Haiku: Kerouac as Imagist”
Panel 2D: The Poem in the Ear and on the Page
Chair: Dean Taciuch
Jill K. Randall, “Just Space: Joanne Kyger’s Poetic Line”
Michael Alpert, “City Lights Books from a Printer’s Point of View”
Hank Lazer, “Toward the Lyric Valuables: The Short Line in the Early 1950s”
Panel 2E: Elizabeth Bishop I
Chair: Jennifer Craig Pixley
Wendy VerHage Falb, “‘Resolution and Independence’ in the 1950s?: Elizabeth Bishop and the Crisis of Lyric Poetry”
Renee R. Curry, “‘A Sort of Inheritance; White’: Elizabeth Bishop, Poetry, and Selective Self-Reflection on Whiteness”
Leslie Hatcher, “Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Visits to St. Elizabeths’”
Panel 2F: Frank O’Hara I
Chair: Rosanne Wasserman
Peter R. McGahey, “Frank O’Hara’s Visual Poetry: Abstract Expressionism in Verse”
Chris Stroffolino, “Design and the Figure in Selected Frank O’Hara Poems from 1952”
Session #3, Panels
Panel 3A: Stephen Jonas and Melvin Tolson
Chair: Aldon L. Nielsen
Mark Scroggins, “Stephen Jonas and the Exercise of the Ear”
Keith Leonard, “Melvin Tolson’s Rattling of Eliotic Bones: Black Culture, New Art, and the Transformation of the Word”
Aldon L. Nielsen, “Carrying Deconstruction to Cleveland in the 1950s”
Panel 3B: Denise Levertov
Chair: Albert Gelpi
Paul A. Lacey, “‘To Meditate a Saving Strategy’: Denise Levertov’s Religious Poetry”
Nancy K. Gish, “‘Imaginations of Velvet’: Levertov in the Fifties”
Jose Rodriguez Herrera, “The Myth of Eros in the Poetry of Denise Levertov”
Panel 3C: Robert Duncan
Chair: Maria Damon
David Cuthbert, “Robert Duncan and the State of Emergency”
David Peterson, “The Queer Who Came in from the Cold: Robert Duncan’s Mid-Century Construction of Homosexual Identity”
Joseph Conte, “Robert Duncan’s Polymathic Postmodernism”
Panel 3D: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, and Paul Blackburn
Chair: Harvey Kail
Tyler B. Hoffman, “‘Clear Your Throat and Speak Up’: Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Beat Poetics and a Hermeneutics of Performance”
Bruce Holsapple, “Whalen’s Work: Break Through and Stay Out”
Brian Spector, “East Tenth Street and Other Foreign Places: Landscape in the Poetry of Paul Blackburn”
Panel 3E: Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, and Muriel Rukeyser
Chair: Susan E. Dunn
Joshua Weiner, “An Otherwise Beat: Mina Loy’s ‘Hot Cross Bum’”
Meg Schoerke, “Efforts of Affection: Marianne Moore’s Elegies for Her Mother from Collected Poems (1951)”
Marisa Anne Pagnattaro, “Muriel Rukeyser’s One Life: The Law vs. the Law of Process”
Panel 3F: John Ashbery, A.R. Ammons, and Kenneth Koch
Chair: Steven Schneider
Rosanne Wasserman, “A House Tour: John Ashbery’s Paintings at Home”
Kevin McGuirk, “Ammons and the Nuclear Gaze”
David Chinitz, “Kenneth Koch and the Invention of Postmodern Poetry”
Session #4, Reading: Ruth Stone
Chair: Rosanne Wasserman
Session #5, Plenary
Chair: Alan Golding
Robert von Hallberg, “Robert Hayden: Aspiration to Universality”
Session #6, Reading: Armand Schwerner
Chair: Norman Finkelstein
Session #7, Reading: Maine Poets
Chair: Constance Hunting
David J. Adams, Bruce Holsapple, Terrell Hunter, Constance Hunting, Kathleen Lignell, Ken Norris, Jennifer Craig Pixley, Sylvester Pollet, Don Wellman
THURSDAY, JUNE 20
Session #8, Panels
Panel 8A: Audre Lorde and Ruth Stone
Chair: Rosanne Wasserman
Shirley Zenthoefer Campbell, “From Mexico to Mississippi: Poetry from the Early Years in the Life of Audre Lorde”
Jennifer Craig Pixley, “A Particular Woman: Scientific Language in the Poetry of Ruth Stone”
Rosanne Wasserman, “Ruth Stone: Shaming the Ghost”
Panel 8B: James Schuyler, Jonathan Williams, and Ronald Johnson
Chair: Sylvester Pollet
Paul Bauschatz, “James Schuyler’s Picnic Cantata: The Art of the Ordinary”
Wendy Kramer, “‘A Curious Occasion’ or ‘Why Jonathan Williams is My Gertrude Stein of Content”
Peter O’Leary, “ARK as a Spiritual Phenomenon: An Approach to Reading Ronald Johnson’s Poem”
Panel 8C: H.D. and Others
Chair: Cassandra Laity
Joan A. Burke, “‘Into Deep Woods’: H.D. and Denise Levertov”
Susan Kayorie, “The Worm and the Rat: Transformations in the Poetry of H.D. and Anne Sexton”
Margaret Anne Smith, “The Transformative Powers of the Sea in H.D.’s Helen in Egypt and Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck”
Panel 8D: Theodore Enslin and Edward Dorn
Chair: Craig Watson
Mark Nowak, “Ethnographic Method and Theodore Enslin’s ‘New Sharon’s Prospect”
Mark Hammer, “Theodore Enslin in the 1950s”
Burton Hatlen, “After Olson: Place, Space, and Language in the Poetry of Edward Dorn and Theodore Enslin”
Panel 8E: Figuring Jewish-American Poetics in the 50s
Chair and Respondent: Norman Finkelstein
Maeera Shreiber, “The Unkindest Cut: Karl Shapiro and the Anxieties of Jewish/American Poetry”
Stephen A. Fredman, “Allen Ginsberg: ‘Eastern Jew’”
Eric Murphy Selinger, “From Bop Kabbalah to Jews with Horns: The Fifties Roots of ‘Radical Jewish Culture’”
Panel 8F: Ezra Pound I
Chair: Demetres P. Tryphonopolous
Stephen Sicari, “Pound as Archaeologist: Reconstructing Nature”
Brian M. Reed, “Ezra Pound’s Utopia of the Eye: The Chinese Characters in Rock-Drill”
Robert Kibler, “A Taoist Understanding of the Word and Pound’s Magic Characters”
Panel 8G: Frank O’Hara II
Chair: Joseph Conte
Andrew Epstein, “‘The Inexorable Product of My Own Time’: Frank O’Hara’s Poetry and the Cinema”
Nick Lawrence, “Frank O’Hara, Situtionniste”
George Guida, “Moment and Truth in the Poems of Frank O’Hara”
Session #9, Plenary
Chair: Barrett Watten
Michael Davidson, “Managing the Margins: Poetry and the Politics of Containment”
Session #10, Plenary
Chair: Alan Golding
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Manhood and its Poetic Practices: Some Examples from the Fifties”
Session #11, Plenary
Chair: Ann Charters
Albert Gelpi, “Denise Levertov and Robert Creeley: The Dialectic within Black Mountain Poetics”
Session #12, Panels
Panel 12A: John Berryman and James Wright
Chair: Constance Hunting
Kathie Davis, “Berryman as Mother: American Manhood in the Fifties”
David A. Rice, “The Cell, the Containment”
William Thompson, “James Wright’s The Green Wall: Poetry and Technique”
Panel 12B: Jack Spicer
Chair: Michael Davidson
Peter Gizzi, “Jack Spicer and the Practice of Reading”
Paul Naylor, “The Politics of Not Being Political: Pure Poetry and Jack Spicer’s A Book of Music”
Don Wellman, “Spicer’s Conceptualization of the Book”
Panel 12C: The New American Poetry Revisited
Chair: Henry Weinfield
Henry Weinfield, “Projective Verse Revisited”
Alan Golding, “The New American Poetry: A Trip through the Archives”
Norman Finkelstein, “‘Lyrical Interference’ in The New American Poetry”
Panel 12D: Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath
Chair: Priscilla Paton
Elise Aasgaard, “‘We are magic talking to itself’: Rhyme and Ritual in the Early Poetry of Anne Sexton”
Ethan Lewis, “Sylvia Plath – An Appreciation”
H.C. Phelps, “New England Elegies: Sylvia Plath and the Regional Tradition in Poetry”
Panel 12E: Frank O’Hara III
Chair: Charles Altieri
Terence Diggory, “Frank O’Hara’s Urban Pastoral”
Katherine M. Davis, “Melodramas of Object-Choice in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara”
Vainis Aleksa, “Versions of Frank O’Hara in the Literary Magazines”
Panel 12F: Ezra Pound II
Chair: Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos
Michael Golston, “Inaudible Rhythms: Form in Pound’s Cantos of the Fifties”
William Cole, “Pound’s Web: Hypertext in the Rock-Drill Cantos”
Jonathan Ausubel, “Seeing Postwar Poetry: What Pound Studies and Concrete Can Show About How We Read”
Panel 12G: Historical Contexts
Chair: Jenny Goodman
Elizabeth Losh, “After Auschwitz: American Poetries of the Holocaust”
Jeffrey Peterson, “The ‘Two Cultures’ of Postwar Anglo-American Poetry”
James Smethurst, “America I Used to Be a Communist When I was a Kid I’m Not Sorry: The Popular Front and the Rise of the New American Poetry”
Session #13, Panels
Panel 13A: Randall Jerrell
Chair: M.L. Rosenthal
Ralph Savarese, “Randall Jarrell: The Poet as Dromomaniac”
Jennifer L. Holden, “An Indistinguishable Heart at the Supermarket: Examining the Discourse of Erased Identity in Randall Jarrell”
David J. Adams, “Inside and Outside: Randall Jerrell’s Path Through 1950s American Poetry”
Panel 13B: The School of Boston I
Chair: Joseph Donahue
Albert Gelpi, “Kerouac and Lowell: The Catholic Connection”
Marisa Januzzi, “Kerouac, Berrigan, and the Poetics of Providence”
Joseph Donahue, “Nothing Deserves to Live: Abjection and the Occult in John Wieners”
Panel 13C: Elizabeth Bishop II
Chair: Leslie Hatcher
Mary M. Lacey, “The Violet was Flawed on the Lawn: Problems of Religious Belief in Elizabeth Bishop’s A Cold Spring”
Elizabeth Nettrour, “Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Geography III’: ‘The Art of Losing’ Referential Meaning”
Priscilla Paton, “Lost Prospects: Elizabeth Bishop and Poetic Landscape”
Panel 13D: George Oppen
Chair: Theodore Enslin
John Lowney, “Remapping Oppen’s ‘Return’”
Josh Charlson, “‘The Air Perhaps of Love and of Conviction’: Envisioning Love in George Oppen’s Later Poetry”
Grant Jenkins, “‘A Poetics of Obligation’: The Trace of Ethics in George Oppen’s Poetry”
Panel 13E: Robert Creeley
Chair: Alan Golding
James J. Zeigler, “Robert Creeley’s Language Games”
Willard (Skip) Fox, “Discordia Discors: Ironic Subversion of the Self and Other in Creeley, O’Hara, and Spicer”
Peter Baker, “Creeley’s Gift”
Panel 13F: Robert Lowell I
Chair: Tony Moore
Sean P. Connelly, “Father, Son, and Genteel Objects: The Mourning of an Imaginary Genealogy in Robert Lowell’s Poetry”
Steven Gould Axelrod, “Robert Lowell and the Shattered Image of Home”
Panel 13G: Other Voices I
Chair: Kathleen Lignell
Kathleen Crown, “H.D. in the 1950s: The Apparitional Figures in Sagesse”
Barrett Watten, “Being Hailed In and By the 1950s: Cultural Poetics and Social Negativity”
Panel 13H: In and About San Francisco
Chair: William Thompson
Laban Carrick Hill, “Weldon Kees in San Francisco: The Poetics of Dis-Solution/Illusion”
Vic Tulli, “Posing, Passing, Crossing, Clashing: Thom Gunn and the Naturalization of a U.S. Poet”
Robert Pickford, “Words, Music, and Beat: Developing a Listening Methodology for the Beat/San Francisco Poetry and Jazz Recordings”
Session #14, Song Recital
Nancy Ogle, Soprano
A program of songs based on poems by poets of the 1950s
Session #15, Plenary
Chair: Marjorie Perloff
Charles Altieri, “The Poetics of Personal Contingency in Plath, Creeley, and O’Hara”
Session #16, Reading: Jerome Rothenberg
Chair: Michael Davidson
Session #17, Group Reading
Chair: Burton Hatlen
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Alicia Ostriker
M.L. Rosenthal
FRIDAY, JUNE 21
Session #18, Panels
Panel 18A: Frank O’Hara IV
Chair: Geoffrey O’Brien
Timothy F. Waples, “Frank O’Hara’s Nerve: The Individual Artist’s Stake in Cold War Cultural Politics”
Benjamin Friedlander, “‘The Most Difficult Relationship’: Frank O’Hara on Race in the 1950s”
Steve Evans, “Frank O’Hara and the Politics of Emergence”
Panel 18B: Other Voices II
Chair: Michael Davidson
Fred Wright: “‘My Life by Water’: The Connection Between Consciousness and Water in Lorine Niedecker’s Poetry”
Anita Plath Helle, “American Cold War Elegy: ‘Lost to Lust and Prosecution’”
Sarah E. MacDonald, “Writing Out of War”
Panel 18C: Charles Olson
Chair: Jonathan Ausubel
Carla Billitteri, “Olson and the Symbiotic Economy of Speech and Writing”
Loss Pequeño Glazier, “‘AD VALOREM CAGLI’: Olson’s Projective Moebius”
Dean Taciuch, “Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’ and Anti-Intellectualism”
Panel 18D: Robert Lowell II
Chair: Tony Moore
Von Underwood, “Clean Laundry, Caste, and Pop-Culture in Robert Lowell’s ‘Memories of West Street and Lepke’”
Michael Thurston, “Robert Lowell’s Monumental Vision”
Nick Halpern, “Robert Lowell: Prophecy and Domesticity”
Panel 18E: Ezra Pound III
Chair: Ellen Keck Stauder
Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, “‘The Enormous Tragedy of the Dream’: The Later Cantos in Light of Pound’s Correspondence with Olivia Rossetti Agresti”
Tony Tremblay, “Ezra Pound and Prince Boris de Rachewiltz: Their Correspondence, 1953-58”
Miranda B. Hickman, “‘To Facilitate the Traffic’ (or, ‘DAMN Deluxe Editions’): Ezra Pound’s ‘Descent’ into Trade Editions”
Panel 18F: Gwendolyn Brooks
Chair: Robin A. Morris
Jenny Goodman, “Gwendolyn Brooks’s Annie Allen and Postwar Constructions of the American Epic Tradition”
Susan Gilmore, “‘We cut our poems out of air’: Gwendolyn Brooks in the Fifties”
William T. Lawlor, “Gwendolyn Brooks as a Poet of the Fifties”
Panel 18G: Elizabeth Bishop and Others
Chair: Meg Schoerke
Camille Roman, “Writing Against the Cold War: Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath”
James McCorkle, “John Ashbery and Elizabeth Bishop and the Lyric Temperament”
Kim Vaeth, “Revealing and Concealing: Elizabeth Bishop’s Use of Form”
Panel 18H: Influences
Chair: Virginia Nees-Hatlen
Mary Adams, “Monstrous Seers: Poetic Progeny of Frankenstein in the 1950s”
Rebecca Hurst, “Theodore Roethke’s Oedipal Rivalry with T.S. Eliot”
April D. Fallon, “‘A Chaos of Sensations’: The Nietzschean Influence from High Modernsim to Ginsberg and Plath”
Session #19, Plenary
Chair: Armand Schwerner
Jerome Rothenberg, “Poetry in the 1950s: A Global Awakening”
Session #20, Plenary
Chair: Burton Hatlen
Louis Martz, “Watching the Fifties: A Reviewer’s Retrospect”
Session #21, Group Reading
Chair: Kathleen Lignell
Norman Finkelstein, Benjamin Friedlander, Hank Lazar, Aldon L. Nielsen, Geoffrey O’Brien, Bob Perelman, Joan Retallack, Mark Scroggins, Craig Watson, Barrett Watten, Henry Weinfield
SATURDAY, JUNE 22
Session #22, Panels
Panel 22A: William Carlos Williams and Others
Chair: Dean Taciuch
Sergio Rizzo, “Allen Ginsberg in Paterson: A Study of Poetic Paternity and Social Displacement”
Steve Miles, “The Thing In Itself: Approaches of William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein”
Christopher MacGowan, “Williams and Auden in the 1950s”
Panel 22B: Adrienne Rich
Chair: Albert Gelpi
Jonathan Gill, “Rooted at the Split: Adrienne Rich and Judaism”
Sylvia Henneberg, “Writing Like a Radical: Political Awareness in Adrienne Rich’s Early Poetry”
Jeannine Johnson, “Adrienne Rich’s Autocritography of the 1950s”
Panel 22C: John Ashbery
Chair: Virginia Nees-Hatlen
Jeffrey Gray, “Maps without Territories: John Ashbery’s Travel Agency”
Thomas Lisk, “Toward a John Ashbery Grammar”
Bruce Campbell, “‘A Torn Page with a Passionate Oasis’: John Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath”
Panel 22D: Lorine Niedecker
Chair: Jeffrey Peterson
Jenny Penberthy, “Beyond the Pale: Lorine Niedecker’s FOUR PAUL Poems”
Glenna Breslin, “Lorine Niedecker and Æneas McAllister”
Susan E. Dunn, “‘In the great snowfall…’” Lorine Niedecker’s Cold War”
Panel 22E: Words and Things
Chair: Sylvester Pollet
Andrew Klobucar, “The Kinetics of the Thing: From Ideology to Ecology in Projective Verse”
Kenneth Sherwood, “For the Common: A Poetics of Locating ‘Particulars’ in a Generalizing Time”
Bob Perelman, “Teaching Transcendence: The Poetry and Politics of Charles Olson and Adrienne Rich”
Panel 22F: Bob Kaufman and Langston Hughes
Chair: Aldon L. Nielsen
Maria Damon, “Other Beats: Bob Kaufman’s Bagel Shop Jazz”
John Millett, “Towards a ‘Projective’ Community: Musical Conventions and Langston Hughes’s Blues and Jazz Poems”
Joe Lockard, “Langston Hughes and the Modernism Color Line”
Panel 22G: Edwin Rolfe and Thomas McGrath
Chair: Joshua Weiner
Walter Kalaidjian, “‘Deeds Were Their Last Words’: Edwin Rolfe’s Poetry in the 1950s”
Bill Stobb, “Keeping ‘The Winter Count’: Responsible Memory in the Poetry of Thomas McGrath”
David Blake, “Exiled from the Republic: Thomas McGrath in Joseph McCarthy’s America”
Panel 22H: Soundings
Chair: Colleen J. Hamilton
Paris De Soto, “Self-Affirmation or Aggrandizement? ‘Loudness’ in Postmodern American Poetry”
Chris Funkhouser, “Multimedia Effects: American Poetry Layered Since Black Mountain”
Joseph Duemer, “The Search for an Absolute Rhythm”
Session #23, Plenary
Chair: Ann Charters
Alicia Ostriker, “Howl Revisited: Allen Ginsberg and Prophetic Lamentation”
Session #24, Plenary
Chair: Harvey Kail
Ann Charters, “Encounters Across a Continuum: Charles Olson/Ann Charters/Herman Melville”
Session #25, Reading: Louis Simpson
Chair: Steven Schneider
Session #26, Panels
Panel 26A: A Sense of Place
Chair: Elisabeth Joyce
Timothy Gray, “Two Versions of the Pastoral in Cold War America: The Construction of the New York and San Francisco Poetry Communities as Cultural Havens”
Abie Hajitarkhani, “Beats on the Pro”
Bernard Quetchenbach, “The Search for Community in the Work of Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry”
Panel 26B: Louis Zukofsky
Chair: Mark Scroggins
Colleen J. Hamilton, “‘The sound is a mollycoddle’s’: Sound and the Body of the Text in the Zukofskys’s Catullus (Gai Valeri Catulli Veronensis Liber)”
William E. Grim, “Zukofsky’s ‘A-12’: The Faust of the Fifties”
Luke Carson, “‘Sir, I am a tourist!’: Zukofsky and Adams in Rome”
Panel 26C: Ezra Pound IV
Chair: Charles Altieri
Alec Marsh, “The Sign of the Four in Pound’s Rock-Drill”
Diane A. Reid, “‘Honey, Barley, and Blood’: Re-Examining the Role of Archaic Ritual in The Cantos of Ezra Pound”
Ellen Keck Stauder, “‘Crystal waves weaving together’: Visual Notation and the Phrasal Music of the Rock-Drill Cantos”
Panel 26D: Marginalities
Chair: Libbie Rifkin
Virginia M. Koudis, “Anthology Omissions: Rukeyser, Brooks, Bishop”
Gary Roberts, “Disingenuous, Intrigued, Inviting More: The Limits of Precedent Anthologies”
Piotr Parlej, “The Naked Speech: Burroughs and the Others”
Panel 26E: Allen Ginsberg
Chair: Alicia Ostriker
John H. Lardas, “America When Will Your Cowboys Read Spengler? Allen Ginsberg’s Response to Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West”
James Kelley, “Contradictions of Desire: Ginsberg, the Critics, and the Whitman ‘Problem’ of the 1950s”
Panel 26F: The Charles Olson Connection
Chair: Joseph Conte
Sharon Thesen, “Drafts and Responses: Some Poems and Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff”
Trent Keough, “Charles Olson and Canadian Literature: The French Connection”
Trevor Code, “The Theater of Poetry: The Analogue of Theatricality in the Theory and Poetry of Williams and Olson”
Panel 26G: “The Beat Games”: A Multimedia Presentation
Presenter: Tom Lavazzi
Panel 26H: William Bronk
Chair: Burt Kimmelman
David Clippinger, “The Mind’s Landscape: Accumulating Position in the Poetry of William Bronk and Charles Olson”
Don Prues, “We Always Miss It: Bronk, Frost, and the Reality of the Undefined”
Ed Foster, “Moonscapes in Spicer and Bronk: Poetry Doesn’t Reflect”
Respondent: Henry Weinfield
Session #27, Panels
Panel 27A: William Bronk Reading
Videotape prepared for this conference
Chair: Henry Weinfield and Stephen A. Fredman
Panel 27B: John Cage and Jackson Mac Low I
Chair: Armand Schwerner
Joan Retallack, “____________:____________”
Charles A. Baldwin, “‘letting in’: Jackson Mac Low’s Systemic Chance”
Joel Kuszai, “Jackson Mac Low in the 1950s”
Panel 27C: Barbara Guest
Chair: Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Linda A. Kinnahan, “Women and Experimental Poetics: Barbara Guest and Kathleen Fraser”
Lynn Keller, “Barbara Guest’s Feminine Mystique”
Sara Lundquist, “‘The Imagination at its Turning’: Barbara Guest’s Ekphrastic Poems from the 1950s”
Panel 27D: Kenneth Rexroth
Chair: George Hart
Richard Blevins, “Rexroth’s Signature, or the Romantic, versus Creeley’s Epistemology, or the Postmodern”
George Hart, “In Defense of the Subject: Rexroth’s Argument with the ‘Corn Belt Metaphysicals’ and the Postromantic Lyric”
Rachelle K. Lerner, “Creative Crossfires: Kenneth Rexroth and Some Third Generation American Poets”
Panel 27E: The New Poets of England and America Revisited
Chair: Camille Roman
Colin A. Clarke, “In the Ward: The Poetry of Confinement in the 1950s”
Jane Hedley, “‘I made you to find me’: Authority, Experience, and the Gender of Poethood”
Elizabeth Joyce, “Self-Portraits of the Decade: Poetic and Psychoanalytic”
Panel 27G: Jack Kerouac
Chair: Albert Gelpi
Nancy Grace, “Blowing Deep: The Lyric Roots of Jack Kerouac’s Poetry”
Ronna C. Johnson, “Unbordering Form: Beat Dissolutions of Genre in Jack Kerouac”
Panel 27H: John Montague, Kenneth Patchen, and Robert Lowell
Chair: Laura Cowan
George Layng, “The New American Poetry from Ireland: John Montague and The Rough Field”
Mark Dunphy, “Kenneth Patchen’s Cacademic Heroics”
Elizabeth Gregory, “‘Confession’ in the Poetry of Robert Lowell”
Session #28, Reading: Samuel Menashe
Chair: Barry Ahearn
Session #29, Plenary
Chair: Burton Hatlen
Marjorie Perloff, “1956: Re-Aligning the Things of This World”
Session #30, Reading: Edward Dorn
Chair: Burton Hatlen
Session #31, Reading: Theodore Enslin
Chair: Mark Nowak
SUNDAY, JUNE 23
Session #32, Panels
Panel 32A: Ginsberg and Others
Chair: Alicia Ostriker
David Zucker, “Dugan’s and Ginsberg’s Anti-Poetry”
Andrew Rosen, “Against the Monolith: Berryman, Lowell, and Ginsberg”
Lily Phillips, “Legislating ‘Howl’: The International Dimension of the Censorship Trial”
Panel 32B: Marianne Moore, Robert Duncan, and Others
Chair: Kathleen Lignell
Heather White, “Marianne Moore: Tones and Tactics”
Donna Hollenberg, “‘First Permission’: Robert Duncan’s Poems for H.D.”
Steven Meyer, “Reading Gertrude Stein in the 1950s: Robert Duncan, John Ashbery, James Merrill”
Panel 32C: Gary Snyder
Chair: Bernard Quetchenbach
Louis H. Palmer III, “The Labor of Autobiography: Gary Synder’s Political Turn”
Richard Deming, “The Form that Vision Takes: Gary Synder’s Myths and Texts”
Karen Bartlett, “Zenki and Muga in the Poetics of Gary Synder and Lucien Stryk”
Panel 32D: John Cage and Jackson Mac Low II
Chair: Joan Retallack
Tony Brinkley, “John Cage and the Politics of an Open Form”
Ming-Qian Ma, “Chance Operation, Mesostic Method, and the Cagean Aesthetic of Counter-Memory”
William R. Howe, “What’s So Great About Intentionality: or The Poetry of John Cage and Jackson Mac Low”
Panel 32E: The Fifties as Resource and Ancestor for Contemporary Poetics
Chair: Linda A. Kinnahan
Lynda Szabo, “‘The Muses are little female fellows’: Adrienne Rich, Lyn Hejinian, and Hannah Weiner”
Elizabeth Savage, “‘Some Manuscripts and Versions’: Susan Howe and Lorine Niedecker”
Ellen Smith, “‘Truth or Dare’ and the American Confessional: Offshoots from Lowell and Snodgrass”
Panel 32F: William Bronk, Samuel Menashe, and George Oppen
Chair: Colleen J. Hamilton
Barry Ahearn, “Introducing Samuel Menashe (Again)”
Burt Kimmelman, “The World(lessness) of George Oppen and William Bronk”
Session #33, Plenary
Chair: Aldon L. Nielsen
Lorenzo Thomas, “Afrocentric Modernism in Melvin B. Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia”
Session #34, Panels
Panel 34A: Jack Spicer, Frank O’Hara, and Others
Chair: Beverly Rubin-Dolrup
Kevin Killian, “‘Faggot Vomit’: Jack Spicer versus ‘the Maidens,’ 1957-58”
Scott Penney, “Camp and the Sublime in Frank O’Hara’s ‘Biotherm’”
P. Michael Campbell, “Irony or Hyper-Sincerity?: Homosexuality and Poetry in the 1950s”
Panel 34B: Robert Duncan and Charles Olson
Chair: Richard Blevins
Robert J. Bertholf, “Robert Duncan’s Version of Charles Olson’s Vision”
Alex Irvine, “‘We Can Be Precise’: Charles Olson and the Language of Indeterminancy”
Libbie Rifkin, “‘Go Contrary, Go Sing’: Charles Olson’s Amateur Poetics”
Panel 34C: The School of Boston II
Chair: John Millett
Joseph Torra, “School of Boston 1950s”
Ed Foster, “Steven Jonas, On the Edge of Time”
Susan Vanderborg, “Unverting the Poet’s Community: Jack Spicer in Boston”
Panel 34D: Jackson Mac Low Reading
Videotape prepared for this conference
Chair: Joan Retallack
Panel 34E: Beats and Deadbeats
Chair: Andrew Analore
Terrell Crouch, “Thrilling the Trillings: Another Night at Columbia”
Michael Basinski, “FLOWER, FIST AND BESTIAL WAIL: Charles Bukowski’s First Poetics”
Matthew Sweney, “Pomes All Sizes: Kerouac’s Prosody”
Panel 34F: Wallace Stevens
Chair: Jeannine Johnson
Kenneth Rosen, “Wallace Stevens and the Pathos of Idealism”
Christian Moraru, “Ethical Vision and the Definition of Poetry in Wallace Stevens’s Esthetique du Mal’”
Panel 34G: Stanley Kunitz and Hayden Carruth
Chair: Kathleen Lignell
David Kellogg, “‘Shapes of Things Interior to Time’: Historicizing Stanely Kunitz’s Selected Poems”
William J. Lavigne, “Uncertain Refuge: The Poetics of Hayden Carruth’s ‘The Asylum’”
Session #35, Plenary
Chair: Burton Hatlen
Panel Discussion with Poets of the 1950s Generation, including:
Edward Dorn
Theodore Enslin
Samuel Menashe
Jerome Rothenberg
Armand Schwerner