The H.D. International Society will sponsor one session at the 2019 annual conference of the American Literature Association, May 23-26, 2019, at Westin Copley Place in Boston. We have had excellent panels at ALA lately, and we hope you can join us. 

The American Literature Association’s 30th annual conference will meet at the Westin Copley Place in Boston on May 23-26, 2019 (Thursday through Sunday of Memorial Day weekend).  For further information, please consult the ALA website at www.americanliterature.org.

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 15, 2019.

All the best, 

Celena Kusch & Rebecca Walsh, Co-Chairs, H.D. International Society

Book Cover: Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book by University of California Press, 2011. Features a cover black and white photo of Robert Duncan.

“Passages”: The Robert Duncan Centennial Conference at the Sorbonne Université, Paris, June 12-14 2019, welcomes papers on the H.D./Duncan connection (The H.D. Book, the correspondence, etc.) among many other possible topics. Anyone who remembers the 2013 H.D. and Modernity Conference in Paris will remember many of these conference organizers as well.

Conference keynotes:

Stephen Fredman
Miriam Nichols
Michael Palmer

“I am speaking now of the Dream in which America sleeps, the New World, moaning, floundering, in three hundred years of invasions, our own history out of Europe and enslaved Africa.”—Robert Duncan, Ground Work

American poet Robert Duncan would be turning 100 in January 2019. With his direct address to his contemporaries and the broad forces and structures—psychological, political, cosmological—at work in the world, and with his aspiration to write a holistic “grand collage” sweeping up all possible inputs to his poetry, it could be argued that we need Duncan’s work and his vision now more than ever.

Duncan’s work on a poetry and poetics of “passages,” in particular, remains key. The “Passages” poems spatialize poetry as an “area of composition,” embrace discontinuity and incompletion (they remain part of a work always “larger than the book in which they appear”) and seek intertextual and psycho-social connection at every moment of their unfolding.

Radically open, Duncan’s work thus calls for re-engagement—for the following of new connecting passages through and out of his work, for drawing new poetic passages from a resource that remains inexhaustibly “beyond.” This is all the more important since Duncan’s creative heterodoxy eschews habitual notions of genealogy or tradition. Because his is a rare case of great relevance which does not easily translate into lineage, it seems most appropriate that one should now turn to Duncan, standing as we are today Before the War and In the Dark, and listen to the cadence of his verse anew.

The Paris Conference, as a centennial celebration of Robert Duncan’s works, invites proposals from scholars and poets. Possible topics may include:

Organizers: Hélène Aji (Université Paris Nanterre), Stephen Collis (Simon Fraser University), Xavier Kalck (Sorbonne Université), James Maynard (University at Buffalo), Clément Oudart (Sorbonne Université) 

CFP: Graphic Eroticism in Women’s Modernism

Web site for the MSA 2018 conference in Columbus, Ohio

This panel seeks to examine graphic eroticism in its myriad modernist forms. From the graphically risque or taboo to the textual representations of non-normative sex and sexuality in poetry and prose, modernist women writers often embedded eroticism within their literary experiments.  With H.D., for instance, her letters describe trips to erotica shops in Vienna to find pornographic photos for Bryher and the pressure she received from publishers to write a tell-all memoir about her relationship with Ezra Pound and other male modernists, while her prose and poetry codify seduction and sexual encounters in less literal, though no less “graphic” ways. This panel encourages explorations of the relationship between the explicit, the erotic, and the graphic in the queer, straight, and mixed networks of women modernists. We welcome papers that interrogate modernist eroticism through a women-centered lens and that move past critical models of “romantic thralldom” or gendered revision in their approaches to gender, sex, and sexuality.

While sponsored by the H.D. International Society, the panel welcomes proposals that address a range of women modernists.  Consider scholarship like Jeanne Heuving’s The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics (U Alabama 2016), Miranda Hickman’s The Geometry of Modernism (U Texas 2005), Susan McCabe’s Cinematic Modernism (Cambridge UP 2005), Diana Collecott’s H.D. and Sapphic Modernism 1910-1950 (Cambridge UP 1999), Cassandra Laity’s H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siecle (Cambridge UP 1996), not to mention work by Cynthia Hogue, Rachel Blau du Plessis, Eileen Gregory, and many more.

Please send a 250 to 300 word proposal with short bio to Celena Kusch (ckusch@uscupstate.edu) by April 7, 2018.

The  H.D. International Society will again be sponsoring a panel at the American Literature Association conference, May 24-27, 2018, at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, CA. The call for paper proposals is open ended, although projects working with some aspect of H.D.’s later writing or new approaches to teaching H.D. would be particularly welcome given the recent publications of H.D. editions and their scholarly framings. Please send a brief paper proposal (250 words) along with a short biography/CV to Celena Kusch, ckusch@uscupstate.edu, no later than January 25, 2018.

For further information, please consult the ALA annual conference website at http://americanliteratureassociation.org/ala-conferences/ala-annual-conference/