News and Comments

The first John N. Serio Award for the Best Article Published in The Wallace Stevens Journal was awarded to Natalie Gerber for her contribution entitled “Stevens’ Mixed-Breed Versifying and His Adaptations of Blank-Verse Practice” (Fall 2011). The award was judged by a committee of three: two members of the Editorial Board (Charles Altieri and Juliette Utard) and one Society Officer (Lisa Goldfarb). It was officially presented at the 2013 MLA Convention in Boston. Please join us in congratulating the author.

In 2011, the website The Hooded Utilitarian organized an Illustrated Wallace Stevens roundtable. Twenty-one artists created illustrations and/or artwork based on a range of Stevens’ poems. The results may still be enjoyed at http://hoodedutilitarian.com/2011/07/illustrated-wallace-stevens-index-and-introduction/.

The 2012 Wallace Stevens Award of the Academy of American Poets, a $100,000 lifetime achievement award “for outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry,” went to Gary Snyder.

The Journal’s Editorial Board Member and Book Review Editor, Bonnie Costello, will be the featured speaker at the 18^th Annual Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash, to be held on November 3, 2013, at the Hartford Public Library. Birthday cake and champagne will follow the presentation. The annual celebration is sponsored by the Connecticut Center for the Book at the Hartford Public Library, with help from the Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens (www.stevenspoetry.org).

In March 2013, Sebastian Currier’s Vocalissimus was performed at Boston University’s Tsai Performance Center. A fascinating and virtuosic composition for soprano and chamber ensemble, the work takes Stevens’ brief poem “To the Roaring Wind” and sets it eighteen different ways. The soprano soloist sings the text as various characters, including a recluse, a miser, a satirist, a chameleon, a somnambulist, a scientist, a mystic, an interrogator, a lunatic, a child, and a dying woman.

The 2012 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama (Canada) went to Catherine Banks for her play It Is Solved by Walking, which was inspired by Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” According to the Jury Statement, the play “creates a singular and inspired love story” that is simultaneously “a poetic deconstruction” of Stevens’ poem.

A fine selection of Stevens titles appeared on the rare book market in the past year. Among the highlights: the William Reese Company of New Haven, CT, offered in a November catalog the first edition of the 1985 Arion Press Poems, with an introduction by Helen Vendler, for $6,000. In February, Reese listed the first edition of Stevens’ first book, Harmonium, at $4,000. The same title was offered for $6,500 by Ralph Sipper of Santa Barbara. This volume is a fine association copy, bearing the ownership signature of Yvor Winters, who ranked Stevens as the greatest poet of his time. Triolet Books, Pasadena, CA, included in its April offerings a copy of Cap and Gown, a 1903 publication of verse from various college publications. Priced at $900, the volume included Stevens’ poem “Sonnet,” which had first been published in the Harvard Advocate in 1899. Triolet Books also exhibited first editions of Stevens’ Ideas of Order and Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (both at $750) in February for the Santa Monica, CA, Book, Print, Photo & Paper Fair.

For a recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York entitled Birds in the Art of Japan (February–July 2013), the curator John T. Carpenter aligned thirteen leaves from an album by Kyosai on one wall in juxtaposition to an enlarged printout of Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” In his caption, Dr. Carpenter observed (quoted with his permission): “Though none of the succinct stanzas exactly replicates the three-line structure and five-seven-five syllable count of haiku, ’Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ has earned esteem for evoking traditional Japanese poetry. The moods of the poem resonate with those of Kawanabe Kyosai’s album paintings selected here, created in the late 1880s, on avian themes, especially crows in autumn or winter settings.”

The 50^th Annual Wallace Stevens Poetry Program at the...