The Hirslanden Notebooks, written from 1957-1959, offer autobiographical reflections and dream interpretations from this productive period in H.D.’s career. For the ELS Editions publication announcement, see http://www.elseditions.com/forthcoming.html.
The Beinecke Library is currently publishing new images from the H.D. Papers to the Digital Collection. Among the latest is http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3472749
In light of the new international recognition of H.D.’s Trilogy and after discussion with many H.D. Society members, the H.D. International Society is launching two new wikis–The H.D. Trilogy Wiki and The H.D. Biography Wiki. These wikis offer a collaborative space for H.D. scholars worldwide to share annotations, connections, notes, and details that might not otherwise surface in scholarly publications. By leveraging the collective knowledge of the group, together we can create valuable teaching tools and research resources for expanding our knowledge of H.D.’s life and writings.
The wikis include detailed instructions for citing and crediting individual contributions. Anyone wishing to contribute need simply to send an email requesting a username and password to rawalsh@ncsu.edu or ckusch@uscupstate.edu. We ask that you follow any new contributions you make with your name in boldface brackets: [contributed by Firstname Lastname] to assist in proper citation by any wiki users.
To celebrate the publication of Within the Walls and What Do I Love, Annette Debo discussed the publication on AshevilleFM’s WordPlay radio show. Listen to her interview here: http://stream.ashevillefm.org/afm-word-play-06222014.mp3
A
nnette Debo’s new edition of Within the Walls and What Do I Love? (University Press of Florida) is now available. This makes a great addition to the expanding collection of writing from later in H.D.’s career. For more information see the University Press of Florida Web site.
From Annette’s summary:
Within the Walls is a grouping of fourteen short stories, which H.D. wrote between the summer of 1940 and the spring of 1941. These short stories chronicle H.D.’s experiences during the Blitz, which she spent in London. Her first-hand impressions describe a daughter driving a mobile canteen, the tens of thousands of civilian casualties in only 1941, the English response to reports of the concentration camps, the nightly Nazi bombing raids, the political climate and Russia’s participation, Virginia Woolf’s suicide and the role of the artist, and the hope that spring brings. Within the Walls also pre-visions and illuminates H.D.’s most famous epic poem Trilogy, as well as The Gift. Within the Walls was published in a limited art edition of 300 copies in 1993 by Windhover Press and then went out of print.
What Do I Love? is a series of three long poems about World War II-“May 1943,” “R.A.F.,” and “Christmas 1944.” These poems address the deprivations caused by the war, the death of the ambulance driver Goldie, a wounded Royal Air Force pilot, and Christmas at the war’s end. In a letter to her close friend and literary executor Norman Holmes Pearson, H.D. wrote that while these poems did not fit in Trilogy, she was fond of them and thought they worked well as a group.
What Do I Love? was printed in 1950 by the printer of Life and Letters Today as a chapbook in a run of 50 copies, which H.D. sent to her friends for Christmas that year, and she hoped they would be published with Within the Walls. In H.D. by Delia Alton, she wrote, “We are Within the Walls, but only just. This is a series of sketches, written in situ as it were, 1940, 1941. I place ‘Before the Battle,’ the earliest sketch, dated summer 1940, at the end of Within the Walls, as the dream of the mother in the old grave-yard at Bethlehem not only pre-visions The Gift, the child memoirs, begun about this time, but also acts as an introduction to the selection of poems What Do I Love which it now seems to me should be included in this volume.”
To frame H.D.’s short stories and poems, I have written a 104-page historical and biographical introduction that presents H.D. as a person with her boots on the ground in war-torn London. Illustrated with war propaganda posters from London’s Imperial War Museum, it addresses Dunkirk and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, realities of life in London, women’s war work, concentration camps and refugees, the role of art during wartime, the conscription of women, the Women’s Land Army, rationing, a Reading by Famous Poets, D-Day and doodle-bugs, and V-E Day and the coming of spring.
Lara Vetter’s edition of By Avon River has just been published by the University Press of Florida. It is an exciting addition to the increasing availability of and attention to H.D.’s later work. For more information: http://upf.com/book.asp?id=VETTE001
Paper proposals are invited for an H.D. International Society panel at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, February 26-28, 2015, hosted each year by the University of Louisville in Louisville, KY. The focus of the panel is open. Although the interdisciplinary emphasis of the conference (which expressly embraces literature’s relationship to other arts and disciplines) means that an interdisciplinary angle might be especially appropriate, we are happy to consider work focusing on any aspect of H.D. and/or her circle.
Please send 250 word abstracts and a brief bio to Rebecca Walsh, rawalsh@ncsu.edu, by Friday, September 30 (note the extended deadline). Feel fee to get in touch with any questions.
The second English-language collection of essays from the 2013 H.D. and Modernity Conference in Paris has been released (September 2014). H.D.’s Trilogy and Beyond, edited by Hélène Aji, Antoine Cazé, Agnès Derail-Imbert, and Clément Oudart, includes essays by Hélène Aji, Jane Augustine, Christine Battersby, François Bovier, Annette Debo, Vincent Dussol, Xavier Kalck, Céline Mansanti, Susan McCabe, Fiona McMahon, Sanna Melin Schyllert, Christanne Miller, Cyrena Pondrom, Matte Robinson, and David Ten Eyck.
A book overview (in French) and complete table of contents (in English) are available at the Presses universitaires de Paris Ouest.
Please note the following H.D.-related programming at the upcoming American Literature Association conference, Washington, D.C. May 22-25, 2014 at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill.
On Friday, May 23, the H.D. International Society Business Meeting will take place from 11:10 AM to 12:30 PM, Bryce Second Floor (Session 9-L). All are welcome.
There are two panels of note:
New Approaches to H.D. and/or Her Circle (Session 8-G)
Friday, May 23, 9:40-11:00 AM (in Capitol B, Lobby Level)
Organized by The H.D. International Society
Chair: Rebecca Walsh, North Carolina State University
1. “Exchanging Hours: Tribute to Freud and Queer Time,” Valerie Rohy, University of Vermont
2. “Sea Garden’s Love Poems and Darwin’s Beagle Geology’s Coral-Island ‘Blooms,’” Cassandra
Laity, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
3. “Orphism as Autobiography: Painterly Vision and the New Physics as Structural Motifs in H.D.’s Her,” Chris Townsend, Royal Holloway, University of London
4. “Reading H.D. from the Ground Up: Notes on H.D.’s Notes to The Gift,” Jane Augustine,
Independent Scholar
A second panel that features papers on H.D. and/or her circle:
Ezra Pound and Other World Cultures (Session 4-B)
Thurs, May 22, 1:30-2:50 PM
Organized by the Ezra Pound Society
Chair: Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, University of New Brunswick
1. “Ezra Pound’s Poetics of Chinese Economics,” Kristin Grogan, The University of New South Wales
2. “The Temple is not For Sale: Ideogrammatic History and Citizenship in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos,” Christopher McVey, University of Wisconsin-Madison
3. “Let Them Love Tomorrow: Pound, H.D., and Eliot on the ‘Pervigilium Veneris’,” Miranda Hickman, McGill University
4. “Pound in Dilation: Stepping Through the Poet’s Window into the Language, Ceremony, and
Paradise of the Naxi Tribespeople of Southern Tibet,” Robert Kibler, Minot State University
Charlotte Mandel’s poem “Perdita’s Mother: Photograph, the Poet H.D., 1919”
is published in Mom Egg Review 12 (2014).
