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All Astir A copy of Wild Orchids has come across my desk. This new annual, edited by Sean Reynolds and Robert Dewhurst, graduate students in the Poetics Program at the State University of New York at Buffalo— with two epigraphs from Friedrich Nietzsche (“All great problems demand great love”) and the poet Lorine Niedecker (“We are gawks / lusting / after wild orchids”)—bills itself as a “journal of affective and otherwise inspired forms of literary criticism.” The first issue, published in 2009, is devoted to Herman Melville. This focus is not surprising, given the tradition of critical and creative responses to Melville’s work, including D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael (1947), C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways (1953), Paul Metcalf’s Genoa (1965), Ian Weddes’s Symmes Hole (1986), Susan Howe’s The Nonconformist’s Memorial (1993), Frank Lentricchia’s Lucchesi and the Whale (2001), and K. L. Evans’s Whale! (2003). Such books, intense and immersive, confront the personal attachments that readers experience, and they savor the distinctive pleasures and frustrations of Melville’s writings. These critical experiments form a self-reflexive counter-tradition that often (and hyperbolically) casts its statements at odds with the academy. These writers take aesthetic risks. Evans has the opening piece in Wild Orchids, an excerpt from her bookin -progress Missing Limb, in which she continues her pursuits in Whale! by taking Ahab’s quest seriously in philosophical terms: “Moby-Dick is not something one can simply go through, as if it were a tunnel, to see what’s on the other side. It must be read or followed along with, and following something, as Ahab demonstrates, isn’t simply a matter of keeping pace or sticking to a prearranged schedule.” Other contributors “follow” Melville across his career from a variety of perspectives, sensitive to the intellectual and verbal textures, often attending to the margins and the fragment. Benjamin Friedlander juxtaposes passages from Clarel and from the 1856-57 journal, in a meditation on stones, faith, and Melville’s “debris-scape.” Alan Halsey sutures phrases from Melville, Poe, Thomas Beddoes, and Mary Shelley into a shared reverie on the “last last man,” raising questions about syntactical coherence and authorial signature. In the most striking piece of the volume, Jennifer Scappettone rearranges the words of Melville’s poem “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight.” She cuts and pastes text from a printed page, creating a new version, and interlaces it with strips from Piranesi’s etchings of imaginary prisons, whose “interiors measurelessly strange” Melville invokes in Clarel. In a prose passage accompanying this collage, Scappettone explains that she seeks to emphasize Melville’s statements c  2011 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 119 E X T R A C T S about the multiplication of violence and the emptying of space in both poem and print. These and other contributors to Wild Orchids remind us that such experimental responses to Melville’s work compose their own tradition, offer eccentric forms of knowledge, and remain relatively unstudied. In a forthcoming essay, Andrew DuBois analyzes the ways in which writers such as Olson, Metcalf, Howe, and Lentricchia often replay Melville’s preoccupations with imitation and originality. The “wild orchids” approach to literature, inspecting its attachments, also may have resonance for professional societies that gather academics and aficionados around the figure of the author and continually negotiate stances of critical detachment and enthusiasm. The Melville Society’s major event this year will be “Melville and Rome: Empire—Democracy—Belief—Art,” the eighth international conference, organized by John Bryant, Giorgio Mariani, and Gordon Poole, in collaboration with the Department of Foreign Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at the University of Rome (Sapienza). The conference will take place June 22-26, 2011, at two venues in the heart of Rome: the first day will take place at the renowned Center for American Studies and the remainder of the conference will be...

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