News and Comments Sara S. Hodson The Wallace Stevens Society has received a generous anonymous gift allowing it to establish a Best Article Award for the next ten years. As the donor wishes, this award will be titled the John N. Serio Award for the Best Article Published in The Wallace Stevens Journal. The award will be judged by a rotating group of three colleagues: two members of the Editorial Board and one Society Officer. We will be delighted to present our first award, for the best article printed in the course of 2011, at our business meeting during the 2013 MLA Convention in Boston. Please join us in thanking our anonymous donor for the generosity and vision to make this award possible. In April 2012, the U.S. Postal Service issued a series of commemorative stamps dedicated to twentieth-century poets. The twenty-stamp pane marks the largest group of authors honored together in the history of the Postal Service. It presents ten American poets, each included twice per pane: Elizabeth Bishop, Joseph Brodsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, E. E. Cummings, Robert Hayden, Denise Levertov, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. Each stamp bears the face of the poet; in Stevens’ case, this is a shot from the well-known series by Sylvia Salmi. The back of the pane features lines of poetry from each of the honored writers. The stamps have been issued as Forever® stamps, which means they are always equal in value to the current First-Class Mail one-ounce rate. Our Art Editor, Alexis Serio, has prepared a cover for the next issue of the Journal based on the series of stamps; pending copyright permission, we hope to have it grace our publication next time. On June 11, 2012, the Academy Award-winning actor and comedian Bill Murray selected two poems by Wallace Stevens, “The Planet on the Table” and “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts,” for his reading at Bubby’s Brooklyn as part of Poets House’s 17th Annual Poetry Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge. “Poets House,” its website tells us, “is a national poetry library and literary center that invites poets and the public to step into the living tradition of poetry.” The reading may be enjoyed on YouTube. [End Page 287] Jay Parini will be the featured speaker at the 17th Annual Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash, to be held on November 3, 2012, at the Hartford Public Library. A novelist, poet, essayist, anthologist, and biographer, Mr. Parini is the D. E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing at Middlebury College in Vermont. Birthday cake and champagne will follow the presentation. The annual celebration is sponsored by the Connecticut Center for the Book at the Hartford Public Library, with help from the Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens (www.stevenspoetry.org). In a series of recitals in early February 2012, Dr. Kathleen Miller and Dr. Kirk Severtson of The Crane School of Music at the State University of New York, Potsdam, presented the rarely performed song cycle for soprano and piano Harmonium Op. 50, by Vincent Persichetti. The performances took place at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio; the Baldwin Wallace Conservatory in Berea, Ohio; and the State University of New York, Fredonia. The song cycle premiered in New York City in 1952, when Stevens forewent the opportunity to attend the performance. Two letters he wrote to the composer are included in Letters of Wallace Stevens. At the 2012 MLA Convention in Seattle, the Honorary Editor of The Wallace Stevens Journal, John N. Serio, was awarded the prestigious Distinguished Editor Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. This well-deserved honor, which follows twenty-two years upon John’s receipt of the Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial Achievement in 1990, once again underscores the scholarly editorial community’s high regard for the Journal. We are proud to join in the congratulations. A sampling of rare books on the market over the past year includes two lots offered on October 6, 2011, by Pacific Book Auction Galleries. The first is the November 1914 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse containing “Phases I–IV,” Stevens’ first...
Read full abstract
Mar 6, 2024
Patricia Galliford + 2
Open Access
