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• News and Comments
• Bart Eeckhout and Glen MacLeod

The tenth John N. Serio Award for the Best Article Published in The Wallace Stevens Journal was awarded to Patrick Redding for his contribution entitled “How Stevens Read His Emerson: Marginalia and the Spirit of the Age” (Spring 2020). The award was judged by a committee of three: two Editorial Board Members (Gül Bilge Han and Krzysztof Ziarek) and the Secretary of the Wallace Stevens Society, Florian Gargaillo. It was officially presented at the 2022 MLA Convention in Washington, DC. Please join us in congratulating the author.

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Millicent Borges Accardi’s poem “Let’s Very Often Say,” published in the Spring 2022 issue of this Journal, was selected by the Hopkins Press as one of ten “poignant” poems for the 2022 edition of National Poetry Month, an annual celebration established in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets.

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The 2021 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 Toi Derricotte.

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“Thirteen Ways of Looking at Blackboard,” a parody poem written by the junior music major Kayla Bivin at Northern Illinois University, was selected and published by McSweeney Internet Tendency, a website with a social media presence of about 200,000 followers on Facebook, 275,000 on Twitter, and more than 57,000 on Instagram. From the thirteen possible citations, we have selected two stanzas as examples from the poem: “O professors of University, / Why do you imagine class on Zoom? / Do you not see how Blackboard / Has a course room / Awaiting us?” And the final meditation: “She was working all afternoon. / She was studying / [End Page 266] And she was going to study. / Blackboard lingered open / On her desktop.”

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In the spring of 2022, the artist Michelle Cotugno and the poet Jim Finnegan teamed up to organize an exhibition at the Hartford Public Library entitled “Words in Clay, Words on Paper.” It brought together objects in clay, made by Cotugno and including reprinted words of important poets and writers, with accompanying broadsides from a range of New England letterpress printers selected by Finnegan. The artistic collaboration further involved an artist talk and printer panel as well as a poetry reading. Three of Stevens’s poems were included among the broadsides; one other broadside referenced the poet.

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Julien Strong and Luisa Caycedo-Kimura were the featured poets at the 2022 Rose Garden Reading, which was held, exceptionally, not at Elizabeth Park but at the nearby St. John’s Episcopal Church in West Hartford, Connecticut. This year the reading took place on June 18. The event was sponsored by the Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens. Julien Strong, the author of two poetry collections and two novels, teaches at Central Connecticut State University. Luisa Caycedo-Kimura is a Colombian-born writer, translator, and educator who serves as an editor of Connecticut River Review and a board member of the Connecticut Poetry Society.

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The 57^th Annual Wallace Stevens Poetry Program at the University of Connecticut, postponed from last year, featured D. A. Powell, the author of three books of poetry that are often read as a trilogy on the AIDS epidemic. Mr. Powell has been both a winner and a finalist of the National Book Critics Circle Award for two of his later volumes of poetry and is a Professor at the University of San Francisco. He read from his poetry on March 31, 2022, via Zoom. This annual event is sponsored by The Hartford to honor Stevens as a former company executive. It received additional support from UConn’s Rainbow Center, Humanities Institute, Creative Writing Program, and English Department Speakers’ Fund. Regrettably, [End Page 267] we hear that The Hartford plans to discontinue its support for this annual event in the future. As a result, the program’s future is in doubt.

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For the 3238^th poetry competition organized by the British magazine The Spectactor, poems were invited on the topic of literary feuds. Stevens’s 1936 fisticuffs with Ernest Hemingway at Key West turned out to be among the favorite allusions. A quatrain by one contender, Basil Ransome-Davies, illustrates the kind...