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

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The Center for Poetry and Poetics