Egyptian Cat Postcard from H.D. files. Public Domain.
Just a reminder. There are three quick ways to stay posted on H.D.-related news and information:
Please pass along society contact information to your friends and colleagues who are studying H.D. and her circle.
Book Cover for Skin Acts by Michelle Ann Stephens
Finding H.D. Studies in unexpected places….
Michelle Ann Stephens’s Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer (Duke UP, 2014) devotes a chapter to Paul Robeson, including his work on Borderline. Her chapter, “Bodylines, Borderlines, Color Lines” takes up Robeson’s physical performance as well as the meaning of his performance situated within the H.D./Bryher/Macpherson group within the film.
Book Description from the Duke Press page:
Photo images of Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and H.D. from the cover image of the (Modernist) Social Network Facebook Group Page, posted by Eric Alan Weinstein. UPenn.
Join this Facebook Group, The (Modernist) Social Network Williams H.D. Pound Moore, for a weekly free, open seminar hosted by Eric Alan Weinstein at UPenn.
Recent seminars have featured Susan McCabe discussing Paint It Today (written in 1919) and Rebecca Bowler introducing Borderline (1930).
Check out this blog post about the material details of a first edition of H.D.’s Palimpsest by a student researcher at the Watkinson Library at Trinity College.
Book Cover H.D.,’s Palimpsest from the I Found It at the Watkinson! Blog
Amy Evans, whose poetry collections are deeply influenced by H.D.’s work, has released a video/audio reading of her recent poetry installation, SOUND((ING))S.
From her YouTube page description: “SOUND((ING))S takes place at sea. It constitutes part of an ongoing poetic sequence, the first sections of which were text-based: Collecting Shells (2011), The Sea Quells (2013) and CONT. (2015). The latter was performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London as part of Poetry and Sound on 5 February 2016. This section will be played as a sound-based installation on board a chartered vessel as it crosses the English Channel, sailing between Dover and Calais with provisions for refugees based near the French port.”
Amy Evans’s article about this poetic installation is published in the Performance Research Journal 21.2 On Sea/At Sea at http://www.performance-research.org. It explicitly mentions the role of H.D.’s Sea Garden in informing Evans’s poetry.
Jeanne Heuving’s The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics is now out from the Modern and Contemporary Poetics series of the University of Alabama Press. Heuving claims that this writing of love is defining for avant-garde poetics, identifying how such important discoveries as Pound’s and H.D.’s Imagism, Pound’sCantos, and Duncan’s “open field poetics” are derived through their changed writing of love. This book places H.D. at the center of Modernist invention. There are chapters in the book on “Imagism as Projective Love” and on “Being in Love and Writing Love,” as well as individual chapters on H.D., Pound, Robert Duncan, Nathaniel Mackey, and Kathleen Fraser.
REVIEWS
Jeanne Heuving has written an ardent study of the metamorphosis of Western love and its classic poetic tropes involving desire and the poetic objects of longing, by proposing an altered configuration of eros in modern and contemporary poetry. Resisting the attack on or the reduction of love as only a literary or social convention, and acknowledging changed relations of gender and altered knowledge of sexualities in modernity, Heuving treats the poetic practices of Pound, H.D., Duncan, Fraser and Mackey and offers serious theorizing on the poetics of Amor. This vibrant contribution to poetic criticism makes claims for love as ecstatic perception, the I as “othered” in love, and the affects and effects of this eros, all going beyond the poetry of the yearning gaze and the static beloved into a wider libidinal field. In fascinating readings and deft theoretical insights, she tracks the implications of this re-articulation of eros for poetic languages, formal innovations, textual subjectivities, and poetics.”
—Rachel Blau DuPlessis, author of The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice, Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work, and Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry
“The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics proposes that the engagement of sexual love and its energies is the source of the creative power in some of the most interesting poetry written in the past one hundred years. Asserting the value of a ‘projective love and libidinized field poetics,’ Jeanne Heuving astutely draws our attention to the erotic transformations that animate the poetry of Pound, H. D., Duncan, Mackey, and Fraser, assessing changes through the psychodynamic propositions of Plato, Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva. The result is a truly enlightening insistence on the connections between these poets’ formal innovations and the topic of sexual love, whose permissions Heuving ingeniously finds submerged as a slowed down, introjective set of relations in Olson’s ‘Projective Verse,’ a discovery I find revelatory. The whole book, sharply written and superbly argued, should alter the way American avant-garde poetry is read.”
—Peter O’Leary, author of Phosphorescence of Thought and Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness
University Press of Florida is now offering Annette Debo’s edition of H.D.’s Within the Walls and What Do I Love? in paperback ($19.95). It will be available from the University Press of Florida at a discounted rate of $15 until the end of May.
We invite paper proposals for a panel called “New Directions: H.D. and/or Her Circle” at this year’s South Atlantic MLA in Jacksonville, FL, November 4-6, 2016.
Papers may focus on work by H.D. and/or any of the many writers, filmmakers, and artists in her circle (Bryher, Kenneth MacPherson, Marianne Moore, Richard Aldington, Robert Herring, Sigmund Freud, John Cournos, Ezra Pound, and Paul and Eslanda Robeson constitute a partial list). The thematic focus of the panel is open to a range of new approaches, though we welcome papers that address SAMLA 2016’s conference theme, “Utopia/Dystopia: Whose Paradise Is It?”
Please send 250-word abstracts, a brief bio, and A-V requests to rawalsh@ncsu.edu by May 15, 2016.
For more information about SAMLA 2016, please visit
The H.D. International Society invites paper submissions for a proposed panel, “The Pool Film Group and Beyond: Modernism’s Media,” at the Modernist Studies Association conference, November 17-20, 2016, in Pasadena, CA. We are especially interested in work that considers Bryher, H.D., and/or Kenneth Macpherson’s involvement with the Pool film group or that in other ways focuses on media technologies and/or media industries in relation to their circle. Please send a brief bio and 250 word abstract to Rebecca Walsh (rawalsh@ncsu.edu) and Celena Kusch (ckusch@uscupstate.edu) by April 12.
The Ezra Pound Society is organizing the following panel as a guaranteed session at the Modern Language Assn. Convention, January 5-8, 2017, in Philadelphia, PA. Due to an electronic glitch this CFP does not appear on the MLA website, but it does appear on the Ezra Pound Society website.
CFP: “Pound, H.D. and Bryher”:
Examinations of H.D.’s and Bryher’s engagement/disengagement with Pound’s aesthetics, literary works, and political activities throughout their careers. 250-word abstract and a brief bio. by 28 March 2016 to Demetres Tryphonopoulos (tryphonopoulosd@BrandonU.ca) and Sara Dunton (sara.dunton@unb.ca).
Please direct any preliminary questions to Sara Dunton. For more information about MLA 2017, here is the conference website:
https://www.mla.org/Convention/MLA-2017
Please contact Sara Dunton with any preliminary inquiries
