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  • News and Comments
  • Sara S. Hodson

The third John N. Serio Award for the Best Article Published in The Wallace Stevens Journal was awarded to Rachel Galvin for her contribution entitled “‘Less Neatly Measured Common-Places’: Stevens’ Wartime Poetics” (Spring 2013). The award was judged by a committee of three: two members of the Editorial Board (Lisa M. Steinman and Krzysztof Ziarek) and one Society Officer (Glen MacLeod). It was officially presented at the 2015 MLA Convention in Vancouver. Please join us in congratulating the author.

One of Stevens’ biographers, Alison Johnson, produced and directed a 135-minute documentary under the title The World of Wallace Stevens. Its focus is primarily biographical. Among the scholars who featured in it are John N. Serio, Glen MacLeod, and Paul Mariani, who reads out several poems in full. The DVD may be ordered through Johnson’s website, www.wallacestevensbiography.com.

On June 2–5, 2015, an international conference entitled “Wallace Stevens in France” was organized by Juliette Utard, Lisa Goldfarb, and Bart Eeckhout at the Sorbonne in Paris, France. The participants gathered from eight countries to discuss Stevens’ relation to all things French, as well as issues of translation and appropriation, and the relevance of French theories. One of the side events was a performance of Stevens’ play Bowl, Cat, and Broomstick. The conference was organized in preparation of a joint book on the topic, which is to be published by Éditions Rue d’Ulm / Presses de l’École normale supérieure.

The 2014 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 Robert Hass. [End Page 279]

The Chicago puppeteer Blair Thomas gave a performance of The Blackbird at the University of Connecticut in Storrs on October 23, 2014. This multi-screen shadow puppet performance, inspired by “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” is set to a string quartet by the contemporary composer Ben Johnston.

A 22.5-minute voice recording of Stevens reading out the entire section “It Must Change” from “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” together with “The Auroras of Autumn” and various other poems, was recently recovered in the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University. Stevens went up to Boston to make the recordings at the Trans-Radio Studio on October 8, 1954. The reading of “The Auroras” had already become available, but that of “It Must Change” was discovered on a lacquer disc by coincidence. All recordings have now been digitized and put in The Listening Booth on the website of the Woodberry Poetry Room, where they may be accessed for free.

Book and manuscript sales for Stevens were not as brisk as in some years, but several excellent rare items appeared on the market. Bonham’s auction house (San Francisco and New York) offered in its September 22, 2014, sale a fine first edition of Harmonium at an estimate of $7,000 to $9,000. Another first edition of the same title, also in dust jacket, appeared in the February 20, 2015, catalog of Thomas A. Goldwasser Rare Books, priced at $10,000. Two more first editions of Harmonium were offered by R. A. Gekoski on March 2, 2015, each priced at £4,750. His catalog also featured first editions of Parts of a World (£4,200), The Man with the Blue Guitar Including Ideas of Order (£950), and The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (£950).

Elliott Carter’s musical setting of five Stevens poems under the title “The American Sublime” was given its world premiere at Carnegie Hall in New York on March 8, 2015. It was sung by the baritone Evan Hughes and accompanied by the MET Chamber Ensemble conducted by James Levine. [End Page 280]

Carter composed the work the year before he died at the age of 103. It was not his final composition, though it was the only one still awaiting its world premiere. In his review for the New York Times on March 9, David Allen described the work as “a petite, almost bashful setting” and talked of “a graceful performance.” The West Coast premiere of the same composition was performed on...

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