DOCSLIB.ORG

Elizabeth Bishop's Influence On

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Elizabeth Bishop's Influence On GREATEST NATIONAL TREASURE: ELIZABETH BISHOP’S INFLUENCE ON JAMES MERRILL by Alexandra Lopez-Nadal A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Wilkes Honors College in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences with a Concentration in English Literature Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University Jupiter, Florida May 2019 GREATEST NATIONAL TREASURE: ELIZABETH BISHOP’S INFLUENCE ON JAMES MERRILL by Alexandra Lopez-Nadal This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate’s thesis advisor, Dr. Gavin Sourgen, and has been approved by the members of her/his supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of The Honors College and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences. SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: ____________________________ Dr. Gavin Sourgen ____________________________ Professor Rachel Luria ______________________________ Dean Ellen Goldey, Wilkes Honors College ______________ Date ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS James Merrill met Elizabeth Bishop as a 22 year old professor. I wrote this thesis as a 22 year old thanks to the constant motivation from my mami. Thank you Viviana Nadal for always believing in me. Endless gratitude to Gavin Sourgen and Rachel Luria for working with me through periods of doubt, procrastination, and my move across the world. Thank you also to Yasmine Shamma for your guidance early on that kept me at the honors college. Thank you to my sister Virginia for saying “good job” every time I needed it most. iii ABSTRACT Author: Alexandra Lopez-Nadal Title: Greatest National Treasure: Elizabeth Bishop’s Influence on James Merrill Institution: Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. Gavin Sourgen Degree: Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences Concentration: English Literature Year: 2019 At the 1993 Key West Literary Seminar dedicated to poet Elizabeth Bishop, Merrill shared his poem “The Kimono” and “The Victor Dog”, which he dedicated to Bishop. He then recited three short poems by Bishop: “Exchanging Hats”, “The Shampoo”, and ended with “One Art.” The event is crucial to understanding Bishop’s influence on Merrill’s work as a valuable resource that provides insight directly from the authoritative wordsmith. Close reading the poems side-by-side allows for comprehension and appreciation of their friendship and work. The indirect confessional mode, traditional forms, and literary devices of Bishop’s poems are found in Merrill’s work as well. Examining “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia”—not only as Merrill’s late elegy for Bishop but as his ultimate attempt to contend with her loss and understand her guidance—provides a thorough fleshing out of his relationship with Bishop and its effect on his life and work. iv To the memory of my Papi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………1 CHAPTER ONE: INFLUENCE………………………………………………………………………………………………3 CHAPTER TWO: EXCHANGING HATS & THE VICTOR DOG………………………………32 CHAPTER THREE: THE SHAMPOO & THE KIMONO………………………………………………50 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………78 vi LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1. James Merrill wearing a life mask of John Keats (© Photo by Kimon Friar, WUSTL Digital Gateway Image Collections & Exhibitions)……………………………………………………………………………………3 Figure 2. The cover of The Changing Light at Sandover a 1930s photograph of the ballroom in James Merrill’s childhood home. The 30-acre estate known as “The Orchard” is in Southampton, New York and belonged to his father, Charles E. Merrill of Merrill Lynch. (© Atheneum Books, 1982)……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………6 Figure 3. James Merrill in his home in Key West during the early 1980s. A photo of Elizabeth Bishop in Key West, taken by Rollie McKenna, is on display beside him. (© WUSTL Digital Gateway Image Collections & Exhibitions…………………………15 Figure 4. James Merrill backstage during the reading in New York on April 11, 1973. (© Photo by Mara Pilatsky, 92nd Street Y)………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………18 Figure 5. James Merrill and Elizabeth Bishop receive laurel crowns. (© Photo by Mara Pilatsky, 92nd Street Y)……………………18 Figure 6. James Merrill reading outside of Elizabeth Bishop’s Key West home at 624 White Street during the Key West Literary Seminar of 1993. Photograph by Richard Watherwax. (© KWLS)……………………………………………………………………………………………………29 Figure 7. Elizabeth Bishop wearing a hat with a “shady, turned-down brim” circa 1940. She would have been 29 around the time. (© Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Louise Crane Papers, Yale University)……………………………………………………32 Figure 8. Elizabeth Bishop also painted, as seen in the book Exchanging Hats: Paintings (Lives & letters) where this piece Brazilian Landscape was printed in 1997. Her work was curated by writer William Benton. (© Carcanet Press)………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………38 !1 Page Figure 9. Elizabeth Bishop in Key West.(© Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Louise Crane Papers, Yale University)…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………48 Figure 10. Elizabeth Bishop holds a cat in Brazil, in the year 1954. (© Photo by J.L Castel, Vassar College Archives and Special Collections Library)…………………………………………………………………50 Figure 11. James Merrill happens to be wearing a blue kimono in the 1988 Voices and Visions hour feature on Elizabeth Bishop. (© Produced by New York Center for Visual History……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………58 !2 Fig. 1 James Merrill wearing a life mask of John Keats. (© Photo by Kimon Friar, WUSTL Digital Gateway Image Collections & Exhibitions) CHAPTER ONE: INFLUENCE In living as in poetry, your art Refused to tip the scale of being human By adding unearned weight. “New, tender, quick”— Nice watchwords; yet how often they invited The anguish coming only now to light In letters like photographs from Space, revealing Your planet tremulously bright through veils As swept, in fact, by inconceivable Heat and turbulence—but there, I’ve done it, Added the weight. What tribute could you bear Without dismay?1 In September 1948, at the age of twenty-two, James Merrill took a temporary teaching position at Bard College. He had just graduated from Amherst College and was only slightly older than 1. James Merrill, “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia,” Voetica Poetry Spoken, accessed November 2, 2018, http://voetica.com/voetica.php?collection=1&poet=669&poem=6513 !3 his students. At the time, Merrill’s literary talent was already lauded. Having read Merrill’s senior thesis on novelist Marcel Proust, a professor told his Amherst class that they were “all privileged to be students at the same time and in the same place as Jim Merrill, who was destined for some sort of greatness.”2 His position at Bard manifested after Theodore Weiss, editor of the Quarterly Review and professor in the literature department, read Merrill's submitted poems. It was the first and last time Merrill would interview for a job. That November, Merrill first saw Elizabeth Bishop on campus among poets such as William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, and Richard Wilbur. They were present for a poetry conference. Merrill had read Bishop’s North & South after a mutual friend supplied him with a copy. Bishop was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for her efforts. After Merrill “bowled over”3 her poem, “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” which had appeared in the Partisan Review, he invited her for lunch: I naively thought I could spend most of the lunch telling her how wonderful I thought the poem was. It only took a couple of minutes, and whatever we talked about from then on, we were on our own. Elizabeth wasn’t affected at all. I 2. Langdon Hammer, James Merrill: Life and Art (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 102. 3. Hammer, 108. !4 think she knew how much she had put into her poems. She must have known they were wonderful.4 Thereafter, Merrill began to correspond with Bishop and they formed a friendship independent of literary means. Merrill later called Bishop and Proust, his “surrogate parents.”5 The term sheds light on two important factors of their friendship. Bishop was fifteen years older than Merrill. He must have treasured the maternal aspect of her friendship, as with her age came experience and therefore guidance. The phrase also calls to Merrill’s use of W.H. Auden and friend Maria Mitsotáki as parental figures in his work Mirabell: Books of Number. When Helen Vendler mentioned this “ghostly father and ghostly mother” in 1979, Merrill said, “Strange about parents. We have such easy access to them and such daunting problems of communication.”6 He had a privileged upbringing as the son of Charles E. Merrill, a founding partner of the large investment firm, Merrill 4. Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 266. 5. James Merrill, Recitative: Prose (New York: North Point Press, 1986), 7. 6. Helen Vender and James Merrill, “James Merrill’s Myth: An Interview,” The New York Review, May 3, 1979, accessed November 3, 2018. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1979/05/03/james-merrills-myth- an-interview/ !5 Lynch. His mother Hellen Ingram Merrill worked as a publisher and editor, having moved to New York from Jacksonville, Florida to study at Columbia University. Merrill’s parents had separated by the time he was eleven. They had quite an impact on his life and Merrill subsequently wrote of them, most notably with the narrative poem “The Broken Home” which appeared in his volume Nights and Day in 1966. Fig. 2 The cover of The Changing Light at Sandover a 1930s photograph of the ballroom in James Merrill’s childhood home. The 30-acre estate known as “The Orchard” is in Southampton, New York and belonged to his father, Charles E. Merrill of Merrill Lynch. (© Atheneum Books, 1982) !6 Merrill writes how, as a child, his mother laid in bed with “hair undone, outspread, / And of a blackness found…” and when she woke “startled strange and cold”, the passage ends with complexity regarding their kinship: “She reached for me.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • April 2005 Updrafts
    Chaparral from the California Federation of Chaparral Poets, Inc. serving Californiaupdr poets for over 60 yearsaftsVolume 66, No. 3 • April, 2005 President Ted Kooser is Pulitzer Prize Winner James Shuman, PSJ 2005 has been a busy year for Poet Laureate Ted Kooser. On April 7, the Pulitzer commit- First Vice President tee announced that his Delights & Shadows had won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. And, Jeremy Shuman, PSJ later in the week, he accepted appointment to serve a second term as Poet Laureate. Second Vice President While many previous Poets Laureate have also Katharine Wilson, RF Winners of the Pulitzer Prize receive a $10,000 award. Third Vice President been winners of the Pulitzer, not since 1947 has the Pegasus Buchanan, Tw prize been won by the sitting laureate. In that year, A professor of English at the University of Ne- braska-Lincoln, Kooser’s award-winning book, De- Fourth Vice President Robert Lowell won— and at the time the position Eric Donald, Or was known as the Consultant in Poetry to the Li- lights & Shadows, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2004. Treasurer brary of Congress. It was not until 1986 that the po- Ursula Gibson, Tw sition became known as the Poet Laureate Consult- “I’m thrilled by this,” Kooser said shortly after Recording Secretary ant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. the announcement. “ It’s something every poet dreams Lee Collins, Tw The 89th annual prizes in Journalism, Letters, of. There are so many gifted poets in this country, Corresponding Secretary Drama and Music were announced by Columbia Uni- and so many marvelous collections published each Dorothy Marshall, Tw versity.
    [Show full text]
  • James Merrill: a Postmodern Poet? Yes & No (With a New Poem by James Merrill)
    ANDREA MARIANI James Merrill: A Postmodern Poet? Yes & No (With a New Poem by James Merrill) Scripts for the Pageant, so far the most extraordinary and contro­ versial of Merrill's texts, which was published in 1980 as the third part of his monumental poem The Changing Light at Sandover, is itself divided into three sections: "Yes," "&," and "No." 1 The reader, however much puzzled by the heterogeneity of Merrill's materials and linguistic strategies, cannot but acknowledge the final message of the "pageant": men, their lives, science, poetry, the "supernatural" powers which acted in order to dictate hundreds of ambiguous and contradictory truths, all belong to a universe which is both positive and negative: Yes and no came to be especially telling, the more I realized how important it was—not only for the poem but for my mental bal­ ance—to remain of two minds about everything that was happening. One didn't want to be merely skeptical or merely credulous. 2 In his amazement, the "chosen" poet is forced to see and, at the same time, is frightened by what he sees; "therefore, singing, he tells" (Heidegger 505). Ten years before the publication of the trilogy, Merrill was already aware of the full implication of this dualism; in an interview with David Kalstone based on a discussion of the poem "Yannina" (Divine Comedies, FF9 327-31), he concludes: People are always asking, Was it real? Did it happen? . As if a yes-or­ no answer would settle the question. Was it really Yannina I went to? Was my companion real or imaginary? I can only say yes and no to questions like this.
    [Show full text]
  • Hammer Langdon Cv18.Pdf
    LANGDON HAMMER Department of English [email protected] Yale University jamesmerrillweb.com New Haven CT 06520-8302 yale.edu bio page USA EDUCATION Ph.D., English Language and Literature, Yale University B.A., English Major, summa cum laude, Yale University ACADEMIC APPOINTMENT Niel Gray, Jr., Professor of English and American Studies, Yale University Appointments in the English Department at Yale: Lecturer Convertible, 1987; Assistant Professor, 1989; Associate Professor with tenure, 1996; Professor, 2001; Department Chair, 2005-fall 2008, Acting Department Chair, fall 2011 and fall 2013, Department Chair, 2014-17 and 2017-19 PUBLICATIONS Books In progress: Elizabeth Bishop: Life & Works, A Critical Biography (under contract to Farrar Straus Giroux) The Oxford History of Poetry in English (Oxford UP), 18 volumes, Patrick Cheney general editor; LH coordinating editor for Volumes 10-12 on American Poetry, and editor for Volume 12 The Oxford History of American Poetry Since 1939 The Selected Letters of James Merrill, edited by LH, J. D. McClatchy, and Stephen Yenser (under contract to Alfred A. Knopf) Published: James Merrill: Poems, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, selected and edited with a foreword by LH (Penguin RandomHouse, 2017), 256 pp James Merrill: Life and Art (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 944 pp, 32 pp images, and jamesmerrillweb.com, a website companion with more images, bibliography, documents, linked reviews, and blog Winner, Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography, 2016. Finalist for the Poetry 2 Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism, 2015. Named a Times Literary Supplement “Book of the Year, 2015” (two nominations, November 25). New York Times, “Top Books of 2015” (December 11).
    [Show full text]
  • COVER Web.Indd
    Poetic Patriarch The singular Richard Wilbur displays a “Mozartean felicity” with verse. During the extended World War II battle of Monte Cassino, Richard Wilbur spent a lot of time in a foxhole. The Germans had pinned down his army division in a valley, firing their 88s from the hills above. “As Waugh said, a lot of war is just waiting around,” says Wilbur, who used that waiting time to read Edgar Allan Poe, among others, and to write poems. Years later, he observed that if there were no atheists in foxholes, there were plenty of poets. “Poems were a way of putting your world in order, a bit,” he explains. Wilbur, A.M. ’47, JF ’50, sent one of those battlefield poems to Wilbur’s Collected Poems 1943-2004, critic Adam Kirsch ’97 wrote, his wife, Charlee, who showed it to a friend who was an editor at “No other twentieth-century American poet, with the possible the Saturday Evening Post. The magazine immediately published it. exception of James Merrill, demonstrates such a Mozartean fe- Wilbur mailed many more poems home; when he left the army, licity in the writing of verse. This is partly a matter of formal he had $400, a wife and daughter to support, and a stack of mastery: Wilbur has written the best blank verse of any Ameri- wartime poetry. On the GI Bill, he enrolled in a Harvard doctoral can poet since Frost.” program in English literature. “I figured I’d become a great scholar of Europe in the seventeenth century,” he recalls. The Near the fairgrounds in the western Massachusetts town stack of poems, joined by others that he continued to write, grew of Cummington, a gently winding country road leads to the in a desk drawer.
    [Show full text]
  • Smithbradley.Pdf (368.3Kb)
    CANON ____________________________________ A Dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri-Columbia _______________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy ____________________________________________ by BRADLEY HARRISON SMITH Dr. Scott Cairns, Dissertation Supervisor May 2019 The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the dissertation entitled CANON presented by Bradley Harrison Smith, a candidate for the degree of doctor of philosophy, and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. ______________________________________________ Professor Scott Cairns ______________________________________________ Professor Frances Dickey ______________________________________________ Professor Alexandra Socarides ______________________________________________ Professor Aliki Barnstone ______________________________________________ Professor Carsten Strathausen ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Scott Cairns for directing this project, Frances Dickey for graciously and patiently working with me over the years as I struggled to hone my academic prose, Alexandra Socarides for her wisdom and emotional support, Aliki Barnstone for her inspiration and guidance, and Carsten Strathausen for his encouragement and insight. I would also like to thank Dean Young, Michael Adams, David Wevill, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Mary Ruefle, Tomaž Šalamun, Matt Hart, James D’Agostino, Jennifer Jesse, Willis
    [Show full text]
  • Pound/Stevens: Whose Era? Author(S): Marjorie Perloff Source: New Literary History, Vol
    Pound/Stevens: Whose Era? Author(s): Marjorie Perloff Source: New Literary History, Vol. 13, No. 3, Theory: Parodies, Puzzles, Paradigms (Spring, 1982), pp. 485-514 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/468795 Accessed: 05-05-2019 13:21 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/468795?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to New Literary History This content downloaded from 174.203.1.64 on Sun, 05 May 2019 13:21:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Pound/Stevens: Whose Era? Marjorie Perloff O N 26 October 1955 William Carlos Williams wrote to Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth's, asking him if he would care to com- ment on the obituary essay he had just written on Wallace Stevens, then two months dead, for Poetry magazine. Pound replied: ... as to yr/ pal/ Wally S/....it wd/ be highly improper for me to have opinions of yr/ opinion of a bloke I haven't read and DOUBT like all hell that yu will be able to PURR-suade me to venture on with such a hellUVAlot I don't know and WANT to find out.1 If this sounds unnecessarily dismissive, compare it to Stevens's curi- ously similar response to Pound.
    [Show full text]
  • Richard Hugo Awarded $10,000 Academy of American Poets Fellowship
    University of Montana ScholarWorks at University of Montana University of Montana News Releases, 1928, 1956-present University Relations 12-1-1981 Richard Hugo awarded $10,000 Academy of American Poets fellowship University of Montana--Missoula. Office of University Relations Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/newsreleases Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation University of Montana--Missoula. Office of University Relations, "Richard Hugo awarded $10,000 Academy of American Poets fellowship" (1981). University of Montana News Releases, 1928, 1956-present. 7225. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/newsreleases/7225 This News Article is brought to you for free and open access by the University Relations at ScholarWorks at University of Montana. It has been accepted for inclusion in University of Montana News Releases, 1928, 1956-present by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at University of Montana. For more information, please contact [email protected]. /^University yi# of Montana Office of University Relations • Missoula, Montana 59812 (406) 243-2522 braun/rv MEDIA RELEASE 12/1/81 state, w/pic RICHARD HUGO AWARDED $10,000 ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS FELLOWSHIP MISSOULA-- Richard Hugo, professor of English and director of the creative writing program at the University of Montana, has been awarded a $10,000 fellowship for "distinguished poetic achievement" by the Academy of American Poets. The announce­ ment was made by Mrs. Hugh Bullock, academy president, at the 47th annual mem­ bers' meeting in New York Nov. 18. The fellowship of the Academy of American Poets was the first award of its kind in the United States.
    [Show full text]
  • Welcome Remarks
    [Written by Joel Minor, Curator of Modern Literature Collection] Hello everyone. I am Jeffrey Trzeciak, University Librarian, and on behalf of the Washington University Libraries it is my pleasure to welcome you to the James Merrill Symposium. Please silence your electronic devices before we begin. [Acknowledge anyone you wish to here.] It’s been over 50 years now since Washington University Libraries Special Collections, with the help of Mona Van Duyn, Donald Finkel, Constance Urdang, Stanley Elkin, among others, started the Modern Literature Collection. Van Duyn, Finkel and Urdang were in charge of identifying 15 promising poets who might be willing to donate their literary manuscripts as founding collections of a contemporary literature research library. In the case of James Merrill, we got to him just in time. Other universities were starting to ask him about his papers too. Luckily for us, Merrill was already a friend of Mona Van Duyn’s, and her personal letter of inquiry to him was enough to convince him to choose Washington University over the others. For the next thirty years, Merrill would regularly send us his latest manuscripts, or deliver them in person when he was on campus. And now, twenty years after his death, we are still collecting James Merrill manuscripts and other research material. Just this past month alone we have purchased Merrill letters to William Meredith and William Packard; Harold Bloom’s personal copy of Merrill’s book From the First Nine, annotated by Bloom; and a copy of The Changing Light of Sandover that Merrill used to identify excerpts for adapting the book into a stage play.
    [Show full text]
  • The James Merrill Digital Archive: Channeling the Collaborative Spirit(S)
    Kansas State University Libraries New Prairie Press Central Plains Network for Digital Asset Planning and Digitizing Yesterday to Preserve It Management for Tomorrow (2016) The James Merrill Digital Archive: Channeling the Collaborative Spirit(s) Shannon Davis Washington University in St Louis, [email protected] Joel Minor Washington University in St. Louis, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/cpndam Part of the Archival Science Commons, Cataloging and Metadata Commons, Computer and Systems Architecture Commons, Data Storage Systems Commons, Digital Communications and Networking Commons, Digital Humanities Commons, Management Information Systems Commons, Modern Literature Commons, and the Technology and Innovation Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Davis, Shannon and Minor, Joel (2016). "The James Merrill Digital Archive: Channeling the Collaborative Spirit(s)," Central Plains Network for Digital Asset Management. https://newprairiepress.org/cpndam/ 2016/day1/7 This Presentation is brought to you for free and open access by the Conferences at New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Central Plains Network for Digital Asset Management by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The James Merrill Digital Archive: Channeling the collaborative spirit(s) Shannon Davis, Digital Library Services Manager Joel Minor, Curator of
    [Show full text]
  • Merrill, Greece, Poetics a Conversation Between Stephen Yenser and Stathis Gourgouris
    Occasional Paper 12 Editor: Neni Panourgiá Merrill, Greece, Poetics A Conversation between Stephen Yenser and Stathis Gourgouris James Merrill in a kimono ca. 1980, at the Yenser house in West Los Angeles. Photograph by Stephen Yenser. __________________________________________________________________ This is a section of Journal of Modern Greek Studies hosting occasional papers on current Greek matters. Some of these are interviews, others are short commissioned position papers, yet others are reports of collaborative projects. This is an open access publication distributed from John Hopkins University Press in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0. 1 Page Journal of Modern Greek Studies Occasional Paper 12, September 2016 This year marks the 90th anniversary of James Merrill’s birth on 3 March. It is also the year that the first biography of Merrill appeared, written by Langdon Hammer and published by Alfred Knopf. Occasional Papers hosts a commissioned discussion between Stathis Gourgouris and his first poetry teacher Stephen Yenser on the poetry of Merrill, the significance of Merrill’s relation to Greece, as well as the art of poetry and poetics in general. The conversation took place at UCLA on April 19, 2016. Stephen Yenser is a poet and a critic, as well as Professor of English at UCLA and (along with J.D.
    [Show full text]
  • Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky, 1931-1970
    Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 1931-1970, Jenny Penberthy; Cambridge University Press, 1993. This is a list of books mentioned by Lorine Niedecker in her letters. The review is of Selected Letters of Lorine Niedecker to Louis Zukofsky starting on page 123. Pg. 123; letter #1, dated 1937? Mention of a book on the songs of birds which came with 2 small victrola records. No reference to specific book. Pg. 124; letter #2, dated July 14, 1938 Anton Reiser, Albert Einstein: A Biographical Portrait. Translated anonymously by Louis Zukofsky (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1930). Pg. 125; letter # 4, dated May 18, 1941 The Federal Writers Project, Wisconsin: A Guide to the Badger State (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1941). Pg. 126; letter #4 Angie Kumlien Main, Yellow-Headed Blackbirds at Lake Koshkonong and Vicinity, reprinted from Transactions of Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters(January, 1923). Angie Kumlien Main, Thure Kumlien of Koshkonong, Naturalist. The Descendants of Thure and Christine Kumlien, reprinted from the Wisconsin Magazine of History (March, 1944). Pg. 128; letter # 4 Black Hawk, J.B. Patterson, Editor, The Life of Black Hawk (Boston, 1934). Pg. 129; letter # 4 Louis Zukofsky, ‘History of Design’ see Terrell, Carroll, ed. Louis Zukofsky: Man and Poet (Orono Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1980). Pg. 130; letter # 5 dated Labor Day, 1944 Mentions the manuscripts of: Lorine Niedecker, New Goose and Louis Zukofsky, Anew. She typed both manuscripts which were both published in 1946 by The James Decker Press, Prairie City, Illinois. Pg. 132; letter # 7 dated April 25, 1945 Saturday Review of Literature (a magazine) read reviews of August Derleth, The Edge of Night (The Press of James Decker, 1945) & review of Ruth Lechlitner, Only the Years (The Press of James Decker, 1944).
    [Show full text]
  • First Poet Laureate Wants Lafayette and Orinda to Resonate with This Art Form
    LAMORINDA WEEKLY | First poet laureate wants Lafayette and Orinda to resonate with this art form Published April 18th, 2018 First poet laureate wants Lafayette and Orinda to resonate with this art form By Sophie Braccini The Lamorinda Arts Council poet laureate committee recently announced the selection of Amy Glynn as the first Lafayette/Orinda poet laureate. Glynn, who is a Lafayette resident and published poet, is full of ideas to make poetry an accessible and popular discipline in Lafayette and Orinda, and thus contribute to the artistic vibrancy of the area. The cities of Lafayette and Orinda have entrusted LAC to fund and manage this program. Glynn sees poetry as one of the art forms that can give sense to the chaotic world where we live. "Whether it is in a formal way or not, poets write poetry for the same reason scientists conduct experiments, to test hypothesis," she ventures. "You think that an idea might be true, and writing a poem about it is a way to figure out if it is." Reading or writing poetry is her way of Amy Glynn Photo provided observing and explaining the world. She believes that this art form is accessible to all, and that the poet laureate program is going to be a way to develop it in Lafayette and Orinda. Words, written or told, in the form of stories or poems, have been a part of Glynn's world as far as she can remember. The young mother of two daughters always knew that writing would be what she would do.
    [Show full text]