[Wgcp-whc] Reminder: Beinecke Fellows Lectures

[Nancy Kuhl]

All --

the following event may be of interest--please join us...

Nancy



>Dear Colleagues,
>
>Please join us for a double lecture given by Visiting Fellows Sarah 
>Barnsley, who will speak about the poet Mary Barnard, and Eric White, who 
>will speak about the early prose of William Carlos Williams.   Each 
>lecture will run 30 minutes with 10-15 minutes of questions.  A reception 
>will follow on the mezzanine.
>
>THURSDAY, JANUARY 3rd
>3:00-4:30pm
>in room 39 downstairs in the Beinecke Library
>
>
>
>1st lecture
>3:00-3:45PM
>“Will the Real Mary Barnard please stand up?”:
>Mary Barnard Among the Moderns
>
>
>[]
>
>
>
>
>When Mary Barnard arrived in New York by steamship in the Spring of 1936 
>she was, she said, “an awkward young woman with sawdust in her hair” ­ the 
>shy daughter of a northwestern lumber-merchant, encouraged East by her 
>mentor Ezra Pound, to whom she felt apprenticed.  And this would be the 
>standard account of Barnard, if we were to believe the brief sketches of 
>her in the biographies of the modernist poets she knew, where she tends to 
>appear among the footnotes.  This lecture seeks to re-position Barnard’s 
>place in American modernism, drawing on materials newly-acquired by the 
>Beinecke following Barnard’s death in 2001.   Whilst I’ve argued elsewhere 
>that Barnard was a ‘Late Imagist’ poet, my Beinecke fellowship has 
>revealed a fascinating portrait of a figure who wasn’t so much a ‘late’ 
>writer,  languishing at the tail-end of modernism, but one energetically 
>engaged with the production and extension of high modernism during her 
>years in New York City and Buffalo between 1936 and 1960.  Focussing on 
>some selected snapshots unearthed from the archives of Barnard’s 
>encounters with James Laughlin, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and William 
>Carlos Williams, this lecture will outline some of “the Real Mary Barnard” 
>(the quotation comes from one of her friends) and her “real” literary
>legacy.
>
>H.D. Visiting Fellow in American Literature
>Sarah Barnsley is the Course Director for English Degree and Diploma 
>Programmes (by distance-learning) at the University of London, where she 
>also teaches American Literature (at Goldsmiths College).  She received 
>her MA and PhD from the University of London, and a BA from the University 
>of East Anglia.  She is currently completing a book manuscript, The Poetry 
>of Mary Barnard, drawing extensively on unpublished materials only 
>recently made available.  She will be using her H.D. Fellowship to 
>initiate research for a more exhaustive work, Mary Barnard:  A Critical 
>Biography, which will appraise and contextualise the entire scope of 
>Barnards work (poetry, prose, translation, short fiction, essays, and 
>travel writing) in order to prompt re-assessment of her place in the 
>American literary canon and her influence on those in her circle 
>(including William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Marianne 
>Moore).  Sarah has written articles on Mary Barnards metrics, her use of 
>region, and her relationship to H.D. and Imagism.  She has also published 
>poems in a range of UK poetry journals and was shortlisted for an Eric 
>Gregory Award for Poetry in 2004 by the Royal Society of Authors.
>
>
>
>2nd lecture
>3:45-4:30PM
>Building an American Avant-Garde:
>The Early Prose of William Carlos Williams
>
>William Carlos Williams is best known as a poet, but many critics consider 
>his major prose works (including his 1925 book In the American Grain) to 
>be an important part of the American modernist canon. Yet his early 
>writings remain largely inaccessible, and their importance to the broader 
>evolution of American modernism is all too often neglected. My work at the 
>Beinecke is an attempt to correct this situation by producing a critical 
>edition of Williams’s uncollected, unpublished, and previously unknown 
>early prose, ca. 1913-23. In this talk, I will explore Williams’s early 
>career and his attempts to foster an “indigenous” avant-garde community in 
>the pages of little magazines. While tracing the development of Williams’s 
>prose, I will discuss the challenges that editing this material presents. 
>Ezra Pound famously claimed that the “opacity” of Williams’s early work 
>was one of its defining features. Yet Pound also recognised (sometimes 
>only intuitively) that a scrupulous method lay behind the apparent 
>eccentricity of Williams’s more experimental writing. The “typographical 
>environments” of little magazines afforded Williams an unusual degree of 
>freedom for such experiments: he crosscut poetry, prose, and sometimes, 
>even the work of other writers to re-write the rules of engagement between 
>the avant-garde, its audiences, and its own members. By restoring the 
>visual resources that Williams drew on in his early prose writing, I hope 
>to overcome some of the difficulties that this work presents, and also 
>present a vivid picture of the avant-garde publishing scene in the 1910s 
>to early 1920s.
>
>Gallup Visiting Fellow in American Literature
>Eric White's research focuses on American modernist journals, and the 
>central figures in his research are William Carlos Williams and Ezra 
>Pound. He completed his PhD in American Literature at Clare College, 
>University of Cambridge in 2005 and currently teaches English and American 
>Literature at the University of Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin University. He 
>has published an article on Williams's journal Contact, and recently 
>contributed a chapter on Kora in Hell to The Legacy of William Carlos 
>Williams: Points of Contact (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007). At present, 
>Eric is working on an edition of Williams's early prose and completing a 
>monograph based on his doctoral thesis, provisionally titled Locating the 
>Avant-Garde: Place, Poetics, and Print Culture in Modernist Journals.
>
>
>Priscilla Holmes
>Coordinator, Fellowship and Educational Programs
>Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
>Yale University
>P.O. Box 208240
>New Haven, CT 06520-8240
>Phone (203)432-2956    Fax (203)432-4047
>beinecke.fellowships at yale.edu

Nancy Kuhl
Associate Curator, Yale Collection of American Literature
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Yale University
121 Wall Street, P.O. Box 208240
New Haven, CT 06520-8240
Phone: 203.432.2966

African American Studies at Beinecke Library: http://beineckejwj.wordpress.com/
Poetry at Beinecke Library: http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com/
Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities: http://brblroom26.wordpress.com/
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