Notice Board

Join us for the next Department of English Research and Teaching Colloquium on Friday, April 9th at 4:00 p.m.

Friday, April 9, 2021
4:00 p.m.
Register in advance for this meeting: uleth.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAtc--qpjIvH9H9VErw1OjhdEYc9jIget80 
Presenter: Prof. David Hobbs
Research Work: "Stone alive in my hand / & I hear the roots / talking together:  Reading Ezra Pound & Marianne Moore after the Beats"

Abstract: In 1968, W.H. Auden takes Diane di Prima to a party where she sees Marianne Moore and decides to move to California. Explaining her resolution years later, di Prima is unsparing, even cruel: "being a literary person is not fun . . . . I just knew that if I didn’t get out of New York and away from the literary world someday I was going to wind up on that couch like Marianne Moore in a little black silk hat." This memory comes as something of a shock, as di Prima often appreciated the poets of The Dial and The Little Review, and had printed a chapbook of Moore's on the mimeo machine at The Phoenix bookstore. She also visited Ezra Pound in St. Elizabeth's and continued to send her magazine, The Floating Bear, to him and his friends after her move. But I am less interested in di Prima's ambivalence than in the question of generational shift, and the possibility of response.  

Following historian-theorist Reinhart Koselleck's call to attend to the "[a]bsolute generational divides" that striate the "sediments of experience," this paper considers the late-1960s poetry of Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound as written with awareness of — and in response to — the Beats, who took these doyens of High Modernism for poetic institutions to resist (and be seen to be resisting). To do so, I will draw on Pound's still-unpublished post-Cantos writing, which I located at Yale's Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscripts Library in the summer of 2019 and which I will be helping to prepare for publication next year. 

Everyone is welcome.