News and Comments

The eighth John N. Serio Award for the Best Article Published in The Wallace Stevens Journal was awarded to Sarah Kennedy for her contribution entitled “‘We reason of these things with later reason’: Plain Sense and the Poetics of Relief in Eliot and Stevens” (Spring 2018). The award was judged by a committee of three Editorial Board Members (Charles Altieri, Lisa Goldfarb, and Juliette Utard). It was officially presented at the 2020 MLA Convention in Seattle. Please join us in congratulating the author.

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The Wallace Stevens Room, a “mini-museum” devoted to the poet’s life and work, was opened in Brunswick, Maine, in early 2020. An initiative of the Stevens biographer Alison Johnson, the room contains various pieces of the poet’s furniture, some objets d’art from China, Japanese woodcuts, and several post-impressionist paintings that Stevens obtained from Paris, including the portrait of Anatole Vital to which he alludes at the end of “The Latest Freed Man.” The museum hosts live music and readings of Stevens’s work on Saturdays and Sundays. For more information on how to visit, please consult the museum’s website at www.wallacestevensroom.org.

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At the 2020 MLA Convention in Seattle, the Wallace Stevens Society teamed up with the Kelly Writers House to organize a roundtable in which four contemporary poets discussed Stevens’s poetics, recollected when they first encountered his work, and considered his significance and legacy. The poets were Kate Colby, Mónica de la Torre, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, and Tyrone Williams. Al Filreis organized the roundtable and served as chair. A video recording can be enjoyed on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FA0_Imf7n88.

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The 2019 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 Rita Dove.

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Due to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, all annual events that serve to honor the memory of Wallace Stevens in the Hartford area (the Annual Wallace Stevens Poetry Program mounted every spring at the University of Connecticut, the Rose Garden Reading held in early summer at Elizabeth Park, and the Annual Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash organized during the fall at the Hartford Public Library) have been canceled.

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In the course of the past year, the community of Stevens readers mourned the demise of several respected scholars: Chris Beyers, Harold Bloom, and Barbara Milberg Fisher. In the following sections, we would like to take a moment to honor the memory of each of them.

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Chris Beyers, Professor of English at Assumption College, died suddenly on October 7, 2019. On that occasion, John N. Serio recollected his collaboration with Chris in a letter to Paul Shields of Assumption College:

Although I did not know Chris personally, we met several times at conferences and I worked with him when I was editor of The Wallace Stevens Journal, in which he published several articles. More recently, we worked together on the corrected edition of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.

At conferences, he was always energetic and enthusiastic, stimulating his audience with novel interpretations of Stevens’s work. His scholarly articles, equally original, offered new inroads into Stevens’s challenging poetry and added significantly to our understanding of Stevens’s poetic achievement.

Chris and I worked amicably and efficiently on our corrected edition. Over the years, he had amassed an invaluable trove of information from his extensive, first-hand research on the original layout, spelling, and wording of the poems. He had also gathered important information about the poems not only from Stevens’s letters but also from letters to Stevens from his various editors and publishers. His research helped resolve many issues. All told, we discovered over 100 errors in the original publication of The Collected Poems and made another 100 changes in layout, titles, spelling, and punctuation. We truly worked as a team, and it was both enjoyable and rewarding.

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One week after Chris Beyers’s demise, on October 14, 2019, perhaps the most famous...