Editor’s Introduction

This issue of the Review presents a selection of papers from two conferences dedicated to Williams. The first section includes work featured in the second biennial William Carlos Williams Society Conference held at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe- University, Frankfurt on 7–9 June 2007. The conference title was “Dividing and Waning: Openness and Incompleteness in the Poetic Life of William Carlos Williams,” and in addition to the work presented here and listed below it included a guest presentation by the poet August Kleinzahler entitled “The Woodthrush in the Burning Cineplex.” Both August and Peter Halter acted as respondents to the papers and contributed hugely to the effectiveness of the conference’s round-table format which allowed for a concentrated focus on ten papers over two days by young and established scholars alike from around the world. The other papers presented at the conference, some of which have subsequently been published elsewhere, include Irene Hsiao’s, “Bad Keats: A Biography of Lyric,” which, following its publication in The Cambridge Quarterly (2008) 37.2, subsequently won the Williams Society’s Louis Martz Prize for best work published outside the Review in that year. Michael Rozendal’s essay “A Politicized Openness? Paterson’s Embrace of the Little Journal” appeared in issue 27.2 (2007) of the Review. Other papers given at the conference, but which for reasons of space do not appear here, include the following: Simone Knewitz (Bonn University), “‘a disinclination to be five petals or a rose’: Williams’s ‘Flowers in August’ Sequence and Modernist Floral Poetics”; David Huntsperger (University of Washington), “The Spectacle of the Poor: Williams’s An Early Martyr and the Isolation of the Proletariat”; Irene Praitis (California State University), “The Eye of the Beholder: Voyeurism and Surveillance in Williams’s Speaker/Reader Matrix.”

The second section of the Review includes a selection of presentations from the commemoration of Williams’s 125th birthday held on 20–21 September 2008 in his hometown of Rutherford. The event was organised by Della Rowland, chair of the William Carlos Williams Poetry Symposium. Kerry Driscoll has kindly provided a summary of the events at what was a wonderful gathering.

I would like to thank Theodore Graham for her invaluable assistance editing the current volume. I also wish to dedicate this issue to the memory of Burt Hatlen, Professor of English at the University of Maine and Director of the National Poetry Foundation, who sadly passed away on 21 January 2008. He is greatly missed.