Hannah Voss of Durham University and co-editor of Postgraduate English shared her strategies for remembering the 60th anniversary of H.D.’s death on the 27th of September.
Using a guerrilla poetry strategy, Voss is making cards and stickers of ‘Oread’ along with a QR code that takes you to H.D.’s poetry foundation page. Voss is calling on the H.D. community to share the small remembrance with students, in bookstores, and on social media with #HDday.
Link to Voss’s card template.
Focused on H.D.’s late writing in The Sword Went out to Sea and Helen in Egypt, Lheisa Dustin takes a psychoanalytic approach to what she calls the “language of suffering.” Dustin’s book is Ghost Worlds and Invisible Giants: H.D., Djuna Barnes, and the Language of Suffering (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2021).
The book is available in hardback and ebook formats.
About the book:
“Lheisa Dustin draws on Lacanian theory, Buddhist thought and feminist scholarship to offer densely argued interpretations of work by H.D. and Djuna Barnes. Focusing particularly on the two women’s challenging use of language, Ghost Words and Invisible Giants acknowledges academic and spiritual sources while suggesting fresh ways of making sense of enigmatic linguistic tendencies and patterns. This study will be of particular interest to readers in literary modernism, spirituality and psychoanalytic theory.”
— Caroline Zilboorg, is the editor of Richard Aldington and H.D.: Their Lives in Letters and H.D.’s Bid Me to Live. Among her other books are Transgressions, a historical novel about H.D., and the two-volume Life of Gregory Zilboorg (Psyche, Psychology and Psychoanalysis and Mind, Medicine and Man)
In Light’s Music, Charlotte Mandel focuses on both beginnings and ends. In her grandchildren and great grandchildren, she celebrates new life and her legacy going forward, her Jewish heritage honored and preserved—all from a voice reconciling and making close getaways from the inevitable as she prepares for the day “shadows come forth” and she can “dissolve” and rise “to rose-red smoke.” This chapbook is a strong distillation of precision in poetry and hope for us all.
–Mary Francis Wagner
Charlotte Mandel’s new chapbook, Light’s Music, has been published in Delphi Volume VIII with Blue Lyra Press.
Published by Dos Madres Press, Jane Augustine’s High Desert (2019) shares with H.D. a sense of the living landscape and an attention to the underlying connections between disparate spaces, experiences, and even times. As Mary Mackey notes, ” In High Desert, Jane Augustine brings us vast stretches of wilderness, richly textured images, political awareness, and the transformative power of paying close attention to ordinary objects. The range of the poems in this collection is all-encompassing, stretching from an intense, almost mystical, contemplation of the angled shadow of a deck rail to Syrian bombings, tsunamis, Suzuki roshi, and the Kaliyuga.”
This gorgeous collection not only evokes H.D., but also pays tribute to her in specific poems.
The H.D. International Society will sponsor one session at the 2020 annual conference of the American Literature Association, May 21-24, 2020, at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego, CA. The range of new work in H.D. studies has included new approaches to H.D.’s response to war, to the environment, to gender and sexuality, to film, to life writing, to avant garde experimentation, to the archives, and much more. We look forward to sharing your fresh insights at the ALA conference.
Please send proposals (up to 250 words), along with a brief biography or curriculum vitae, to Celena Kusch, co-chair of the H.D. International Society) at ckusch@uscupstate.edu. Submissions must be received no later than January 25, 2020.
Erwin Tiongson’s Slate article (11 Dec. 2019), “The Most Famous Photograph of Poets Ever Taken,” features a 1948 photo published in Life Magazine. Although H.D. was not part of this group and indeed was convalescing in Switzerland at the time, the image features many members of her literary and personal circles.
Nearly all of the 16 poets featured in the image contributed to Life and Letters Today, the magazine owned by Bryher from 1935-1950. The magazine was edited by Robert Herring, but correspondence between Herring and H.D. shows that she made hands-on, substantive contributions both to the content of the magazine and to the scope of contributors.
Of the poets pictured, the following were all Life and Letters Today contributors: Horace Gregory, Marya Zaturenska, Edith and Osbert Sitwell, Richard Eberhart, Charles Henri Ford, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, and Delmore Schwartz. Most of the rest were one degree of separation from those contributors.
Discussing the insufficiency of labels and categories for gender and sexuality, panelists in the History 2 Workshop explored the cases of Bryher, Havelock Ellis, and several other twentieth-century artists, writers, and intellectuals. The panel was part of Transformations: Exploring the History of Science and Gender, an interdisciplinary conference in Exeter, UK.
Lara Vetter’s A Curious Peril: H.D.’s Late Modernist Prose (2017) is a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, and now it is available in paperback. The book provides both a political and intellectual context for H.D.’s late prose that extends far beyond H.D. and makes the work an excellent anchor for any course on late modernism, literature and WWII, or literature and war in general.
from the University Press of Florida Web page:
“Vetter’s book stands as an important corrective to accounts of H.D. as ethereal and disconnected. She shows, carefully and persuasively, that H.D.’s engagement with politics was not merely the interest of a woman who happened to live through some seismic shifts in political and national history, but that H.D. was engaged to the extent of the imaginative construction of possible social and political futures.”—Review of English Studies
Lehigh University, the Bethlehem Area Public Library, Mock Turtle Marionette Theater, and the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center are joining forces to promote a year of community engagement with H.D. and her legacy. The year of events will culminate in the debut of a new play in October 2019.
A complete calendar of events is available online.
Find out more about the people and projects in this Morning Call news article.
