The First Postmodernists: American Poets of the 1930s Generation
Program
THURSDAY, JUNE 17
Session #1, First Plenary Session
Chair: Burton Hatlen
Albert Gelpi, “I Am Your Woman: The Erotic Mysticism of William Everson”
Session #2, Panels
Panel 2A: Muriel Rukeyser I
Chair: Anne Herzog
Fran McManus, “‘God’s Blood’: Muriel Rukeyser’s Communion of Poetry and Politics”
Jane C. Penner, “‘A Scene of Power’: Muriel Rukeyser and the Uses of History”
Panel 2B: Politics, Plurality, and Poetry: The Harlem Renaissance and American Transformation
Chair: Linda Taylor-Kinnahan
Danette DiMarco, “Cane: Inventing Modernist Alienation”
Elizabeth Savage, “‘Toward New Beliefs’: Robert Hayden and the Poetics of Identity”
Alexis Southard, “(Post)modern Rhythms: Hughes’s Collective Vision”
Panel 2C: Louis Zukofsky I
Chair: Ken Pottle
William Howe, “LZ’s Playing with Ink?”
Kent Johnson, “A Fractal Music: Some Notes on Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers”
Bob Perelman, “The Sound of Allegory: Louis Zukofsky, Music, and Writing”
Panel 2D: William Carlos Williams in the 1930s
Chair: Ed Foster
Thomas F. Bertonneau, “The Temple of Savage Slaughter: Williams’s Beautiful Thing as Primordial Signifier (An Anthropoetics)”
William Melany, “A Prelude to Objectivist Poetics: W. C. Williams and The Descent to Winter”
Jonathan Veitch, “William Carlos Williams, Nathanael West, and the Textualization of the ‘Real’”
Panel 2E: Genevieve Taggard and Marya Zaturenska
Chair: Richard Flynn
Anita G. Gorman, “Genevieve Taggard’s Poetics: Biography, Radicalism, Experiment”
Gwendolyn S. Sell, “Genevieve Taggard and the Conflict Between Formalist Poetics and Activist Politics”
Richard and Janis Londraville, “The Poetry of Marya Zaturenska”
Panel 2F: Laura Riding I
Chair: Karl Precoda
Bruce Campbell, “‘Like a Sacred Frontier to Content’: The Works of Laura (Riding) Jackson”
Susan Beth Koenig, “Experimental Reading and Laura Riding’s Later Essays”
Rosanne Wasserman, “Laura (Riding) Jackson and Good Poetry”
Panel 2G: Kenneth Fearing I
Chair: Naomi Jacobs
Rita Barnard, “Movies, Politics, and Poetry”
James A. Perkins, “Kenneth Fearing’s American Rhapsody: A Modern Poetic Sequence”
Matthew Sweney, “The Juke-box Spoke and the Juke-box Said: ‘Kenneth, What is the Frequency?’”
Session #3, Panels
Panel 3A: Edna St. Vincent Millay in the 1930s
Chair: Kathleen Lignell
David A. Epstein, “‘The Time Wrongs Us’: Edna St. Vincent Millay in the 1930s”
JoAnn Pavletich, “When Death Sells Poems: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Modernism, and the New Woman”
Panel 3B: Lorine Niedecker I
Chair: Bruce Campbell
Michelle Gibson, “A History of the Criticism of Lorine Niedecker: Making and Unmaking Myth”
Michael Tomasek Manson, “The Example of Lorine Niedecker: Toward a Materialist Feminist Theory of Poetic Form”
Panel 3C: Jacob Glatshteyn
Chair: Mathew Sweney
Rachel Rubin, “‘The Dream of His Kingdom’: A Jewish New World in Jacob Glatshteyn’s Sheeny Mike”
Dan Shiffman, “Modernist Intimacy in the Poetry of Jacob Glatstein”
Panel 3D: Laura Riding II
Chair: Suzanne Young
Jeanne Heuving, “Laura Riding Jackson’s Transgressive Purifications”
Anne Shifrer, “Believer Too Much in Words: Laura Riding, H.D., and the Quest for Totality”
Panel 3E: Robert McAlmon and e. e. cummings
Chair: Harvey Kail
Colleen Hamilton, “e. e. cummings: Writing in a New Technological Age”
Ed Lorusso, “A Romantic Malgré Lui: Robert McAlmon’s Return to Whitman”
Panel 3F: W.H. Auden
Chair: Paul Bauschatz
Laura Cowen, “Auden and/in America”
Denise Weeks, “Auden’s ‘Low Dishonest Decade’: A Prelude to the Postmodern”
Panel 3G: Marianne Moore in the 1930s I
Chair: Jennifer Pixley
Philip Cavalier, “‘Box-Bordered’ Identities: Assimilation and Appropriation in Moore’s ‘Virginia Britannai’”
Bonnie Costello, “Marianne Moore: Shaping Poetry for the 1930s”
Session #4
A Program of Songs Based on Poems by Poets of the 1930s Generation
Nancy Ogel, soprano
Joe Arsenault, piano
Session #5: Second Plenary Session
Chair: Alan Golding
Marjorie Perloff, “1931: Entering the New Decade”
Session #6A, Poetry Reading
David Ignatow and Virginia Terris
Session #6B: Poetry Reading
Kathleen Lignell and Sylvester Pollet, followed by open reading
FRIDAY, JUNE 18
Session #7, Panels
Panel 7A: Lorine Niedecker II
Chair: Mary Ellen LeClair
Burt Kimmelman, “The Subjectivity of Objectivism and the Search for Truth Values: The Case of Lorine Niedecker”
Judith Schwartz, “Lorine Niedecker’s Circular ‘Objectivism’”
Panel 7B: The Long Poem After Modernism
Chair: Michael Fournier
Charles Boultenhouse, “Parker Tyler’s The Granite Butterfly”
Sharon Fleming, “Memories of Childhood: Long Poems by Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, and Laura Riding”
William Keeney, “Hunting and Killing the American Muse: Epic Invocation and the Problem of Authority in the American Epics of Steven Vincent Benét, Hart Crane, and Archibald MacLeish”
Panel 7C: Langston Hughes
Chair: Anthony Dawahare
Rosemary L. Gates, “Syncopating Glory: Langston Hughes and the Identity of American Free Verse”
Jahan Ramazani, “Langston Hughes, the Blues, and African-American Elegy”
Kathy Rugoff, “Bebop and Bach: Music and the Cultural Spheres of Langston Hughes and Louis Zukofsky”
Panel 7D: Poets in Their Youth in the 1930s
Chair: Thomas Travisano
Celeste Goodridge, “The Politics of Poetic Practice: Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop”
Richard Flynn, “‘The End of the Line’: Randall Jarrell, the ‘30s, and Postmodernism”
Thomas Travisano, “Voicing the ‘30s: Berryman’s Artistic Struggle”
Panel 7E: The Pose of Prose: Identity and Poetics in the Work of Jean Toomer, William Saroyan, and John Berryman
Chair: Kathryne V. Lindberg
Joseph Donahue, “Imaginary Fascist, Imaginary Jew: John Berryman and the Poetics of Fascism”
Edward Foster, “Ethnicity, Process, and the Poetics of William Saroyan”
Kathryne V. Lindberg, “Jean Toomer and the Race Card: The Avant-Garde’s Raising of Cane”
Panel 7F: Mina Loy I
Chair: Marisa Januzzi
Maria Bennett, “Erotic Absence: The Love Songs of Mina Loy”
Susan Glimore, “Imna, Ova, Mongrel, Spy: Anagram and Imposture in the Poetry of Mina Loy”
Von Underwood, “‘Behind God’s Eyes There Might Be Other Lights’: Virginity, Eroticism, and Automatism in Mina Loy’s ‘Songs to Joannes’”
Panel 7H: David Ignatow
Chair: Rosanne Wasserman
Gary Pacernick, “David Ignatow, Objectivists, and Objectication”
A. Sandy McIntosh, “A Poet Among People: David Ignatow’s Poetry of Engagement”
Virginia R. Terris, “‘Brother to the Tree’: Symbol in the Poems of David Ignatow”
Session #8, Third Plenary Session
Chair: Denise Weeks
Cary Nelson, “Poetry Chorus: Dialogic Poetics in 1930s Political Poetry”
Session #9, Panels
Panel 9A: Muriel Rukeyser II
Chair: Fran McManus
Anne Herzog, “‘Anything Away from Anything’: Muriel Rukeyser’s Postmodern Poetics”
Janet Kaufman, “Reading Muriel Rukeyser’s Jewish Postmodern Poetics”
Laura Severin, “Refashioning Art, Refashioning Science: Muriel Rukeyser’s Challenge to T.S. Eliot”
Panel 9B: Kenneth Rexroth I
Chair: Albert Gelpi
Linda Hamalian, “The ‘High’ Regionalism of Kenneth Rexroth: How to Create a Common Literary Sensibility”
Panel 9C: Fugitives
Chair: Karl Precoda
Karl Precoda, “New Criticism and Postmodernism: Ransom in the ‘30s”
Mary Louise Weaks, “The Confederate Dead and Their Southern Waste Land: Fugitive/Agrarian Poetry and Modern Poetics”
Harte Weiner, “Culture, Made or Begotten?”
Panel 9D: Objectivist Perspectives I
Chair: Marjorie Perloff
Norman Finkelstein, “Objectivism, Introspectivisim, and the Ordeal of Civility”
Michael Heller, “1930s Poetry and Poetics: Utopocalyptic Moments”
Peter Quartermain, “The Poetics of Procedural Composition: The Case of Louis Zukofsky”
Panel 9E: Mina Loy II
Chair: Suzanne Young
Linda A. Taylor-Kinnahan, “Silence and Social Revision: Mina Loy in the ‘30s and ‘40s”
Maeera Shreiber, “Saint Mina: Canonizing the Material”
Panel 9F: African-American Post-Modernism
Chair: Murray E. Jackson
Peter J. Grieco, “Reading the Poetic Subject in the Works of Claude McKay”
Bill Mullen, “Sterling Brown’s (Post?) Modern Blues”
Mark Rank, “A Self-Reflexive Text: Jean Toomer’s Cane as a Metaphor for Relation”
Panel 9G: Nathanael West, Archibald MacLeish, Tillie Olsen
Chair: Marie Urbanski
Catherine Howard, “The Post-Modern Journey: Nathanael West and the Road to Nowhere”
Anthony Dawahare, “The Anti-Aesthetics of Tillie Olsen”
D. Quentin Miller, “The Tension Between Modern Aesthetics and Political Duty in the Poetry of Archibald MacLeish”
Session #10, Panel of Poets of the 1930s Generation
Chair: Allen Ginsberg
Vincent Ferrini, David Ignatow, Carl Rakosi
Session #11, Poetry Reading
Chair: Steve Shoemaker
Allen Ginsberg and Carl Rakosi
Session #12, Fourth Plenary Session
Chair: Burton Hatlen
Allen Ginsberg, “The Impact of the Imagist/Objectivist Tradition on Postwar American Bards”
Session #13, Poetry Reading
Chairs: Kathleen Lignell and Sylvester Pollet
Charles Bernstein, David Bromige, Bob Perelman, Joan Retallack, and Barrett Watten
SATURDAY, JUNE 19
Session #14, Panels
Panel 14A: Louis Zukofsky II
Chair: Sandra Stanley
Barry Ahearn, “The WPA and ‘A’”
Alec Marsh, “Pound, Zukofsky, and the Labor Theory of Value”
Ira Nadel, “Louis Zukofsky: American Design and Cultural Politics”
Panel 14B: Laura Riding II
Chair: Karl Precoda
Barbara Adams, “Influences: Laura Riding Among the Poets”
Steven Meyer, “Laura Riding Reading Gertrude Stein”
Barrett Watten, “Writing After History: Laura Riding as Finality”
Panel 14C: Mina Loy’s Insel
Chair: Maeera Shreiber
Susan E. Dunn, “Post/modern Subjects: Surrealism and Mina Loy’s Insel”
Marisa Januzzi, “‘Something to Do, Something to Undo’: From Feminine Poetics to the Prose Narrative of Mina Loy’s Insel”
Tyrus Miller, “‘Jedermann sein eigenes Fluoroskop’: Loy’s Insel Between Aura and Image Machine”
Panel 14D: Hart Crane
Chair: Laura Cowan
James McCorkle and Cynthia Williams, “Ecstasy and Emancipation in the Work of Isadora Duncan and Hart Crane”
Russell Elliott Murphy, “Heroic Sap: Hart Crane and the Poetry of Hope”
Susan Schultz, “Hart Crane and the Impasse of Formalism”
Panel 14E: George Oppen
Chair: Alan Golding
David Bromige, “The Meaning of Being Numerous: Oppen at Various Speeds”
Ruth Grogan, “‘Stone universe, but we are not’: George Oppen’s Poetry and Prose”
Jefferson Hansen, “George Oppen’s Stanzas: Fragments of the Whole”
Panel 14F: Three Poets of the 1930s Generation
Chair: P. Michael Campbell
Joseph Conte, “John Wheelwright: Argument for a Postmodern Sonnet Sequence”
Edward J. Gleason, “Postmodern Pictorial Sensibility in the Poetry of James Agee”
Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, “‘So Much Depends’: James Laughlin as Poet”
Panel 14G: “And They Know in Their Bodies Other Places”: Three Women Poets of Modernity and Dislocation
Chair: Page Delano
Nancy Berke, “‘Different Fires’: Transforming the Urban Landscape in Lola Ridge’s Poetry”
Page Delano, “Continuing the Discussion: Muriel Rukeyser’s War Poetry: The Female Body and Power”
Caroline MacKenzie, “Atavistic Imagery in the Poetry of Gwendolyn B. Bennett”
Panel 14H: Marianne Moore in the 1930s II
Chair: Jeanne Heuving
Elizabeth H. Davis, “Faulty Decorum: Marianne Moore’s Irregular Syllabic Stanzas”
Sheila Kineke, “Rereading Marianne Moore: Moore, Eliot, and the Literary Magazines of the 1930s”
Session #15, Fifth Plenary Session
Chair: Burton Hatlen
M.L. Rosenthal, “Chief Poets of the American Depression”
Session #16, Panels
Panel 16A: Louis Zukofsky III
Chair: Joseph Conte
Marnie Parsons, “‘The nonsense recorded its own testimony’: Zukofsky’s ‘A’-24”
Nicholas Sloboda, “Non-sequential Juxtaposition and Indeterminate Narratives: Louis Zukofsky’s Preview of Postmodernism”
Susan Vanderborg, “Transforming the Bottom: Language Games in Louis Zukofsky’s Poetry”
Panel 16B: Charles Reznikoff II
Chair: Steve Shoemaker
Charles Bernstein, “Reznikoff’s Nearness”
Rob Franciosi, “By the Waters of Manhattan Beach: Reznikoff in Hollywood”
Tom Lavazzi, “Walking with Reznikoff”
Milton Hindus, Respondent
Panel 16C: Elizabeth Bishop
Chair: Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos
T. Colson, “Elizabeth Bishop’s Postmodernist Negative Capability”
Wendy VerHage Falb, “The Uncanny as Other in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop”
Margaret Dickie, “The Politics of Elizabeth Bishop’s Polished Forms”
Panel 16D: Lola Ridge
Chair: Elaine Sproat
Penelope Austin, “‘We Must Labour to be Beautiful’: Nonmodernist Politics in the Works of Lola Ridge”
Susan V. Facknitz, “‘War, Revolution or SONG’: Lola Ridge’s ‘American Renaissance’”
Mary Ellen LeClair, “Lola Ridge: From Modernism to the 1930s”
Panel 16E: Objectivist Perspectives II
Chair: Alan Golding
Rocco Marinaccio, “‘Speaking about epics, mother’: Objectivism, the Avant-Garde, and the Politics of Cultural Tradition”
Ken Pottle, “Louis Zukofsky’s Use of Spinoza’s Poetics to Question Santayana’s ‘Filial Involvements’ with Modernity”
Keith Tuma, “Belatedness, Nationality, and Other Problems of ‘30s Poetry”
Panel 16F: Two West Coast Poets of the 1930s
Chair: Anita Helle
Cynthia Kimball, “‘Some Center of Motion’: Rosalie Moore’s ‘Activist’ Poetry”
Kathleen Lignell, “Josephine Miles and the Mock Lyric”
Lisa M. Steinman, “Inclusiveness and Appropriation in Josephine Miles’s Lines at Intersection (1939) and Poems on Several Occasions (1941)”
Panel 16G: Kenneth Fearing and Others
Chair: T. Jeff Evans
Cynthia Edelberg, “Kenneth Fearing, H.D., and William Everson: War Poems Written During the Late 1930s”
Kenneth Rosen, “Kenneth Fearing’s ‘Denoument’: Satire in the City of Self-Pity”
Robert Ryley, “Kenneth Fearing and the ‘Ozymandias’ Problem”
Panel 16H: T.S. Eliot and Others in the 1930s
Chair: Tony Brinkley
Jill Cunningham-Crowther, “‘You Talk Too Much, Too Much Leave Out’: Editing The Antiphon”
Deirdre Day-MacLeod, “Visits to the Madhouse: Ezra Pound and Charles Olson and Elizabeth Bishop”
Shyamal Bagchee, “Eliot’s 1930s American Landscape”
Session #17, Sixth Plenary Session
Chair: Marjorie Perloff
Jerome McGann, “Postmodernisms in Mediation, or Misunderstanding Poetry”
Session #18, Poetry Reading
Chair: Burt Kimmelman
Armand Schwerner, Michael Heller, Jane Augustine, Norman Finkelstein
Session #19, Seventh Plenary Session
Chair: Carroll F. Terrell
Hugh Kenner, “Star Wars on the Metrical Front”
Session #20A, Poetry Reading
Chair: Constance Hunting
Vincent Ferrini and M.L. Rosenthal
Session #20B, Poetry Reading
Constance Hunting and Ken Rosen, followed by open reading
Sunday, June 20
Session #21, Panels
Panel 21A: Lorine Niedecker III
Chair: Burton Hatlen
Kim Bernstein, “Monkey Trials and Marsh Fog: Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker”
John Lowney, “Poetry, Property, and Propriety: Lorine Niedecker and the Legacy of the 1930s”
Tandy Sturgeon, “‘Nothing in it but my hand’: Niedecker, Writing, and Marital Politics”
Panel 21B: Louis Zukofsky IV
Chair: Joseph Conte
Ming-Qian Ma, “A ‘no man’s land’! Postmodern Citationality in Zukofsky’s ‘Poem Beginning “The”’”
Mark Scroggins, “‘The Revolutionary Word’: Political Radicalism and Louis Zukofsky in the ‘30s”
Sandra K. Stanley, “Adams and Zukofsky and the Question of Marx”
Panel 21C: Women Poets in/of the 1930s
Chair: Sheila Kineke
Kathe Davis, “‘Gonna Harden My Heart’: Art as Armor for American Women Poets”
Laura Hamblin, “Vision of Earth: Feminist Aesthetics in Louise Bogan’s ‘Three Songs’”
Elaine Sproat, “Modernist and Nonmodernist Tendencies in the Poetry of Lola Ridge”
Panel 21D: Delmore Schwartz and Weldon Kees
Chair: Sylvester Pollet
Jonathan N. Barron, “Death by Modernism: The Case of Delmore Schwartz”
Robert Niemi, “Robinson Crusoe in New York City: The Dissolution of Identity in Weldon Kees’s Robinson Poems”
David Zucker, “Fugues of the Ego: Delmore Schwartz’s Lyric Achievement”
Panel 21E: Wallace Stevens and H.D. in the 1930s
Chair: Mary Bartosenski
Jane Augustine, “H.D. in the ‘30s: Film, Freud, and a Dead Priestess”
Alan Filreis, “Wallace Stevens’s Blue Guitar and Popular Front Poetics”
Suzanne Young, “Publishing, Psychology, and the Self in H.D.’s Nights”
Panel 21F: Hughes and Others: Gender in African-American Poetry of the 1930s
Chair: Murray A. Jackson
Christina DuVernay, “Female Trouble in Langston Hughes and W.B. Yeats: Madam Alberta and Crazy Jane”
Julie Rambo, “Hear Them Speak: Langston Hughes’s Poetic Treatment of Women”
James Smethurst, “The Strong Men Gittin’ Stronger: Gender and the Construction of the Folk Voice in African-American Poetry of the 1930s”
Panel 21G: Political and Cultural Contexts
Chair: Rita Barnard
Eric Anderson, “The Krazy Kat Inside: Modernism and Cultural Exchange in the Urban Desert”
Elizabeth Davey, “‘The Road to the Left’: The Scottsboro Trial and American Poetry in the 1930s”
Alan Golding, “The Last Pre-Modernist: Whitman in the 1930s”
Panel 21H: Kenneth Patchen and Paul Goodman
Chair: William Lockwood
Ted S. Blake, “Kenneth Patchen’s Dark Kingdom”
Mitchell J. Smith, “From Before the Brave to ‘Lonesome Boy Blues’: The Proletarian Roots of Kenneth Patchen’s Jazz Poetry”
George Adams, “Paul Goodman: The Searcher in the City”
Session #22, Eighth Plenary Session
Chair: Constance Hunting
Betsy Erkkila, “Elizabeth Bishop, Modernism, and the Left”
Session #23, Panels
Panel 23A: Gwendolyn Brooks and Muriel Rukeyser
Chair: Laura Cowan
Anne Dewey, “‘For having first to civilize a space’: The Forms of a Black Women’s Tradition in Gwendolyn Brooks’s Annie Allen”
Jenny Goodman, “Muriel Rukeyser as Modernist Innovator: The New Combination of Thirties Literary Discourses in ‘The Book of the Dead’”
Panel 23B: Thomas McGrath
Chair: Cary Nelson
David Pink, “The Resurrection Man: Thomas McGrath in Letter to an Imaginary Friend”
Donald S. Smith, “‘Heaven is a sometime thing’: Ideals in the Poetry of Thomas McGrath”
Panel 23C: Alternative Publishing in the 1930s
Chair: Michael Alpert
Adam Muller, “Anticipating Postmodernism: Little Magazines, Small Presses, and the Reconsideration of Language”
Steve Shoemaker, “An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology and the Alternative Publishing Scene”
Panel 23D: Kenneth Rexroth II
Chair: Ed Foster
Christopher Cokinos, “Defenders of the Earth: Robinson Jeffers, Kenneth Rexroth, and the Greening of Modern American Poetry”
Rachelle Katz Lerner, “‘Counterblasts’ and ‘Perpetual Revolution’: Kenneth Rexroth’s Objectives as an American Poet During the 1930s”
Panel 23E: Louis Zukofsky V
Chair: William Howe
P. Michael Campbell, “The Comedian as the Letter Z: Influence and Effluence in Zukofsky’s Comic Poetry (Reading Zukofsky Reading Stevens Reading Zukofsky)”
Sharon Jo Portnoff, “Related is Equated: The Holocaust’s Effect on Zukofsky’s Concept of Object”
Session #24, Ninth Plenary Session
Chair: Burton Hatlen
Alan Wald, “Exiles from a Future Time: Left-Wing Poets Reconsidered”