CFP: H.D. at the American Literature Association, Boston, May 25-28, 2017

Posted on December 27, 2016 by HDSociety

The H.D. International Society will again be sponsoring a panel at the American Literature Association conference, May 25-28, 2017, at the Westin Copley Place in Boston, MA. The call for paper proposals is open ended, although projects working with some aspect of H.D.’s later writing 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 26, 2017.

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

Using a Visual Understanding Environment to Understand H.D.’s Networks of Influence

Posted on November 18, 2016 by HDSociety

H.D.’s archival records include correspondence from 213 individual correspondents, ranging from family and childhood friends to the central writers and editors of literary modernism.

See Bryher’s influence throughout H.D.’s Network of Correspondents in this Node Map of the people in H.D.’s archives of correspondence.

By mapping the inter-relationships among these correspondents, we can retrace the shape of Modernist networks that are often female-centered, America-centered, and familial.

Correspondents are sorted in nodes based upon the people who introduced H.D. to members of the wider network. Major nodes are anchored by Frances Gregg Wilkinson, Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, Bryher, Edith Sitwell, Sylvia Dobson, and Norman Holmes Pearson.

Readers who would like to view the full map can download the VUE application at the Tufts Visual Understanding Environment Website. Then use it to open this file (file will download to your computer).

This Map of H.D.’s correspondence was developed by Dr. Celena E. Kusch and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

New Novella Explores Alice Modern, H.D., and Bryher

Posted on November 16, 2016 by HDSociety

Xoxox Press, a small press publisher in Gambier, Ohio, has issued a novella by Michelle Auerbach, titled Alice Modern.

Book Cover image for Alice Modern, a novel by Michelle Auerbach

Book Cover for novella, Alice Modern, a novel by Michelle Auerbach

Modernist poet H.D. and her lover, Winifred Ellerman (known as Bryher), are central protagonists in a graceful, erotically lush novella of 1930s Europe. Young Alice Modern tells the tale of leaving her bourgeois Jewish home in Vienna to work as a nanny in the household of H.D. and Bryher, caring for their young child Perdita. Entranced by the keen literary lives of “Kat” and “Gryphon” in Switzerland, Alice begins to transcend her tightly-bound life and discover who she is and might become. Her world opens and her sexuality awakens in a time of political turmoil and existential hazard, reckoning with her own inner storms and the approaching flames of fascism and holocaust.

“This taut, handsome tale brings the gone world so gleamingly to life you could imagine it was all happening just yesterday or earlier today or even tomorrow. Not only does Auerbach write excellent sentences, she deploys them with great care and craft to build a gripping tale of war, love, friendship, and the deep wells of the mind.” — Laird Hunt, author of Neverhome and Kind One

Excerpt from Larry Jordan’s 1990 film The H.D. Trilogy

Posted on September 3, 2016 by HDSociety

View a scene from Larry Jordan’s 1990 film The H.D. Trilogy, featuring poet Joanna McClure reading passages from H.D.’s Hermetic Definition.

Tandy Cronyn Recites H.D.’s “Sheltered Garden” for PoetryTheatre

Posted on September 3, 2016 by HDSociety

PoetryTheatre offers a dramatic recitation of H.D.’s “Sheltered Garden,” which just happens to be my favorite poem from Sea Garden. Show this alongside “Helen” or “Sea Rose” when teaching H.D. out of limited anthologies, and watch the students’ readings open up in delightful directions.

Paul Robeson’s Transatlantic Welsh Concert Audio

Posted on September 3, 2016 by HDSociety

Listen to the introduction and first song of the Transatlantic Welsh Concert performed by Paul Robeson in 1957 after his passport was revoked and he was unable to travel to the UK. The clip on YouTube includes the introduction to the concert by Will Paynter, president of the South Wales Miners, as well as Paul Robeson’s comments and “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel.” The SAIN Wales label includes a biography of Robeson through a Welsh lens as well as a downloadable copy of Robeson’s complete Transatlantic Exchange Concerts.

“Borderline Breakdown” Montage by Brianna Harris

Posted on September 3, 2016 by HDSociety

Brianna Harris’s YouTube site notes that she uses this montage of Borderline scenes when she teaches the film at Hampshire College. She writes, “I used the footage from the silent film “Borderline 1930″ to emphasize the themes of relationships, affairs, and racism vs. romance. You also see themes of gender roles and betrayal, truth, shame, and murder.” The contemporary soundtrack adds emphasis to those themes as well. This montage is great for those wishing to teach the film without showing the whole film in class as well as for anyone wishing to contrast the experience of the 1930 silent film with contemporary film viewing practice.

Paul Robeson’s Welsh Connection Video by Visiting Wales

Posted on September 3, 2016 by HDSociety

Visiting Wales’s YouTube site includes a brief profile of Paul Robeson highlighting his performances and political work in Wales, a connection begun with the POOL Group circle that produced Borderline.

Off the Beaten Track in H.D. Criticism: “H.D. and the Archaeology of Religion”

Posted on August 4, 2016 by HDSociety

Screen Capture of the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory

Though published in 2010, the H.D. special issue of the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory offers fascinating resources about H.D. and Robert Duncan, Sigmund Freud, the British Museum exhibits, spiritualism and the occult, and much more. The special issue, “H.D. and the Archaeology of Religion,” is introduced by Colbey Reid. Other articles are by Amy Evans, Lisa Simon, Erin M. McNellis, Amaranth Borsuk, and Merrill Cole.

A nice summary of the journal contents appears in H.D.’s Web: An E-newsletter, Winter 2009. Since the journal is indexed in religion and humanities databases, rather than ones devoted to literature, these citations may be hard to find.

University of Maine at Orono Performs “Until the War Is Over” Opera based on H.D.’s Bid Me to Live

Posted on June 24, 2016 by HDSociety

Poet Jennifer Moxley and composer Beth Wiemann have collaborated to produce a one-act opera based on H.D.’s Bid Me to Live. Wiemann has shared clips from three scenes of the opera, Until the War Is Over, on Soundcloud. The opera was performed on June 23, 2016, at the University of Maine School of Performing Arts.