News and Comments

The fifth John N. Serio Award for the Best Article Published in The Wallace Stevens Journal was awarded to Roi Tartakovsky for his contribution entitled “Acoustic Confusion and Medleyed Sound: Stevens’ Recurrent Pairings” (Fall 2015). The award was judged by a committee of three Editorial Board Members (Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, Lisa Goldfarb, and James Longenbach). It was officially presented at the 2017 MLA Convention in Philadelphia. Please join us in congratulating the author. We would like to seize the opportunity also to express our deep gratitude to the donor who has been sponsoring the annual Serio Award for recently deciding to extend the term of his support by another ten years.

At the National Governors Association’s annual Summer Meeting, in Providence, RI, on July 14, 2017, the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau surprised his audience by confessing to a personal fondness for the poetry of Wallace Stevens. “Maybe,” he told the assembled US governors, “like me, you agree with Wallace Stevens that, ‘Perhaps, / The truth depends on a walk around a lake.’ I have to tell you, Wallace Stevens is my favorite American poet. By day, he worked in insurance, up the road in Hartford, Connecticut, and by night he wrote some of the most thoughtful poetry this country, and indeed our world, has ever seen. As I get to know this beautiful historic corner of America a little better—the neatly tended fields and low stone walls, the apple orchards and spectacular ocean vistas—I’ve been thinking a lot of Wallace Stevens. In his poem ‘Theory,’ he declares, ‘I am what is around me.’ That makes me think of the concept of home—what it means, and how we define it.” We are grateful to Alexander Burns of The New York Times for alerting us to this speech (www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TMPU9N3mHM#t=58s).

The 2016 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 Sharon Olds.

On October 15, 2016, the Vittorio Bodini Translation Prize was awarded to Massimo Bacigalupo for his Italian edition of Wallace Stevens’s collected and later poems, Tutte le poesie (reviewed in WSJrnl 41.1). The ceremony took place in the Teatro Paisiello of Lecce, a baroque city in Southern Italy. Vittorio Bodini (1914–1970) was a notable poet and translator of Spanish poetry (Lorca, Alberti, Neruda) and the author of a highly regarded translation of Don Quixote. The jury mentioned in its encomium that Tutte le poesie was widely reviewed not only by poets but also by critics who do not usually write about poetry or specialize in American literature.

The 54^th Annual Wallace Stevens Poetry Program at the University of Connecticut featured A. E. Stallings, the author of three books of poetry and an admired translator. She read from her own poems on two successive days: on March 8, 2017, at UConn Storrs, and on March 9 at the Greater Hartford Classical Magnet School. This annual event is sponsored by the Hartford Financial Services Group to honor Stevens as a former company executive.

From May 10 through September 3, 2017, coinciding with the 2017 Venice Biennale, the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia presented the work of the preeminent American painter Philip Guston (1913–1980) in a major exhibition exploring the artist’s oeuvre in relation to critical literary interpretation. In a spirit reflective of how Guston himself cultivated the sources of his inspiration, “Philip Guston and the Poets” considered the ideas and writings of five major twentieth-century poets as catalysts for his enigmatic pictures and visions. Featuring paintings and drawings that spanned a fifty-year period in Guston’s artistic career, the exhibition drew parallels between the themes reflected in these works and the language of D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Eugenio Montale, and T. S. Eliot. It was curated by Professor Kosme de Barañano and organized in collaboration with the Estate of Philip Guston.

The market for books by Stevens has been fairly active this year, with a number of offerings...