News and Comments

Abstract

News and Comments Bart Eeckhout and Glen MacLeod The eleventh John N. Serio Award for the Best Article Published in The Wallace Stevens Journal was awarded to Juliette Utard for her contribution entitled “Epistolary Stevens” (Spring 2021). The award was judged by a committee of three Editorial Board Members (Tony Sharpe, Rachel Malkin, and Patrick Redding). It was officially presented at the 2023 MLA Convention in San Francisco. Please join us in congratulating the author. ________ The centenary of Harmonium, commemorated in this special issue, is stimulating various public occasions in the course of 2023 as well. The President of the Wallace Stevens Society, Lisa Goldfarb, reports, for instance, that she will be organizing a three-part Roundtable at the 92nd Street Y in New York City in October and November of this year. 92NY is itself celebrating 150 years of service to cultural life in the city. ________ In its February 13, 2023, issue, The New Yorker published a poem by Mark Strand entitled “Wallace Stevens Comes Back to Read His Poems at the 92nd Street Y.” This poem was presented as having been bought by the magazine in 1994 and typeset for publication in early 1995 but somehow lost. The poem is supposed to have disappeared from the radar for more than a quarter century so that it failed to appear even in Strand’s Collected Poems. ________ The 2022 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 Marilyn Nelson. [End Page 267] ________ In May 2023, Helen Vendler, the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor Emerita at Harvard University and one of the most influential Stevens experts from the past half-century, was awarded a Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This is the Academy’s highest honor for excellence in the arts. We devoted a special issue of the Journal to Vendler’s achievements as a Stevens scholar and her long-term impact on the understanding of Stevens’s poetry in the fall of 2014. ________ Aaron Caycedo-Kimura and Frederick-Douglass Knowles II were the featured poets at the 2023 Rose Garden Reading, which returned to Elizabeth Park in Hartford, Connecticut, after last year’s move to a nearby church. Originally planned on June 17 with Cristina J. Baptista as a speaker instead of Mr. Caycedo-Kimura, the reading had to be postponed due to weather conditions and was rescheduled to September 9. The event was sponsored by the Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens with the cooperation of the Elizabeth Park Conservancy. Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is the author of two collections of poetry whose honors include a MacDowell Fellowship, a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry, and a nomination for the Pushcart Prize. Frederick-Douglass Knowles II, the author of BlackRoseCity, is a Professor of English at Three Rivers Community College in Norwich, Connecticut, and the inaugural Poet Laureate of Hartford. This year the 2023 Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize and Scholarship winner, Asia Hamilton, was also invited to read a poem. (During proofreading we were informed that this second attempt at organizing a reading had to be canceled as well owing to weather conditions.) ________ Good news: the Annual Wallace Stevens Poetry Program at the University of Connecticut will be back on March 27, 2024, with its 58th installment. The guest poet will be the MacArthur “Genius” and National Book Award winner Terrance Hayes, whose poem “Snow for Wallace Stevens” has drawn a lot of attention from scholars in recent years. Updates will be posted on the Wallace Stevens Poetry Program website at https://wallacestevens.uconn.edu. [End Page 268] ________ The 28th Annual Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash will be held on Saturday, November 4, 2023, at the Hartford Public Library. This year’s speaker will be Anna Maria Hong, the author of three recent books: Age of Glass, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition; the novella H & G, winner of the A Room...