"Beat Poets, not beat poets"

Robert Hass went to University of California Berkeley campus to observe police action to end the Occupy Movement there, and was beaten with billy clubs.  This is a must-read:

Robert Hass, "Poet-Bashing Police," New York Times (November 19, 2011).

October 17th - Philip Levine

Philip Levine will give an Inaugural Reading as U.S. Poet Laureate, Monday, October 17th, at 7p.m. in Coolidge Auditorium, Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C.

Links
Library of Congress News Page (www.loc.gov).

October 6th - W.S. Merwin

W.S. Merwin will read on Poetry Day, October 6th, at 6 p.m. at Harold Washington Library, 400 South State Street, Chicago.

Links
Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org).

Poetry in Action

Javier Sicilia, Mexican poet, stopped writing after his son and six of his friends were tortured and assassinated by a drug cartel.  In May, he made a public declaration, "Estamos Hasta la Madre!" asking for people to resist so that the violence could be stopped.



In June, he organized a tour for peace (June 4-11), ranging from Cuernavaca to Ciudad Juarez.  This resulted in a national dialogue for peace (June 23, 2011).




Links

Frédéric Saliba, "Les Indignés du Mexique," Le Monde Magazine (June 25, 2011), pp.26-31.
Jo Tuckman, "Mexican peace caravan led by poet Javier Sicilia nears its final stop," Guardian (June 9, 2011).
Olivia Stransky, "Letter from Poet Javier Sicilia to Mexican Government and Cartels," Sampsonain Way (May 17, 2011).
Randal C. Archibold, "Violence Suffocated a Father's Poetry, but Not His Voice," New York Times (May 13, 2011).
Harriet Staff, "Poet Javier Sicilia leads 150,000 in march against Mexican drug violence," Poetry Foundation/Harriet Blog (May 9, 2011).
Jason Beaubien, "After Son's Death, Poet Fights Mexican Drug Violence," NPR (May 6, 2011).
Gilles Biassette, "Marche contre la violence au Mexique," La Croix (May 5, 2011).
Julian Miglierini, "Mexico poet Javier Scilia leads anger at drug violence," BBC Mobile (April 22, 2011).
Ioan Grillo, "Should Mexico Call for A Cease-Fire with Drug Cartels," Time (April 7, 2011).
"Javier Sicilia's Open Letter to Mexico's Politicians and Criminals," Narco News Bulletin (April 4, 2011).


Interview with Javier Sicilia, by Ricardo Venegas, in Agulha, Revista de Cultura (October 2003).

To follow these actions via Twitter:  @mxhastalamadre  and on Facebook:  Todos somas Juan Francisco Sicilia.

Philip Levine as Poet Laureate

Philip Levine has become the new Poet Laureat of the United States for 2011-12, as announced by the Library of Congress librarian James H. Billington.  Congratulations to the poet, a perfect choice.

Links:
Being Named as Poet Laureate
Jon Michaud, "Philip Levine, Laureate," New Yorker (August 11, 2011).
Edward Byrne, "Philip Levine New U.S. Poet Laureate," One Poet's Notes (August 10, 2011).
Dwight Garner, "Making Rare Appearance: People and Their Appetites," New York Times (August 9, 2011).
Charles McGrath, "Voice of the Workingman to Be Poet Laureate," New York Times (August 9, 2011).

About Philip Levine
Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec, "Out of the Acids of Rage: Philip Levine's Poems about Detroit," Belgrade Bells 2 (2010), pp.167-186.  Link to pdf format of Belgrade Bells 2.
Bio-bibliography of Levine, with poems, from the Academy of American Poets (www.poets.org).

Also, this, discovered thanks to Neil Astley:

Carcanet Press now has a blog

For friends and fans of Carcanet Press, the good news is that they now have a blog called "New Poetries".  Keeping up with what they are up to will now be easier and more fun.
http://newpoetries.blogspot.com

The Power of the Word Conference, June 2011

Heythrop College will host "The Power of the Word: Poetry, Theology and Life" on June 17-18, 2011 at the Institute of English Studies at University College London. Keynote speakers include Gianni Vattimo, Michael Paul Gallagher, Helen Wilcox, and Jay Parini.

Description (www.heythrop.ac.uk).

Program (www.heythrop.ac.uk).

Legacies of Modernism at Paris-Diderot University

From June 9 to June 11, 2011 Paris-Diderot University will be hosting the conference "Legacies of Modernism: The State of British Poetry Today" organized by David Nowell-Smith and Abigail Lang. This conference has a blog, featuring a map to the conference location, the abstracts of papers to be given, and a program of the conference.

Links

Legacies of Modernism (blogspot.com).

CFP "Legacies of Modernism" (Institut des Amériques).

Will the Wales 2011 Book of the Year be poetry?

The Long List for the 2011 Wales Book of the Year includes the work of three poets:

Pascale Petit, What the Water Gave Me: Poems After Frida Kahlo (Seren Books, 2010).

Patrick McGuinness, Jilted City (Carcanet, 2010).

Alan Wall, Doctor Placebo (Shearsman, 2010).

Links

Literature Wales, "The Long List" (www.literaturewales.org).

Literature Wales, "Eligible Books" (www.literaturewales.org).

Patrick McGuinness page at Carcanet (www.carcanet.co.uk).

Pascale Petit, three poems from What the Water Gave Me (www.fridakahlo.it).

Alan Wall, extracts from Doctor Placebo (www.shearsman.com).

Poetry & Religion: Figures of the Sacred, April 1-2, 2011

Institut Catholique de Paris, 21 rue d’Assas, 75006 Paris

Poetry & Religion: Figures of the Sacred

Friday, April 1, 2011

Amphi Paul Ricoeur (B18)

8:15 WELCOME Coffee

8:30

Greetings from the Dean of the Faculté des Lettres, Olivier Soutet, the Assistant Dean Pauline Piettre, and the head of the English Department, Ineke Bockting.

9:00

Philip Crispin (University of Hull)

“Mysteries of Faith: The Consubstantiality of Poetry and Drama in Medieval Theatre,”

9:30

Şebnem Kaya (Hacettepe University, Turkey)

"Natural Theology in the Works of Middle English Mystics and Mevlana Jalalu'ddin Rumi"

10:00

Cassandra Gorman (University of Cambridge)

"Adam and the atom: Thomas Traherne's natural-theological approach to the origins of 'ALL THINGS'"

10:30

Jean-Christophe Van Thienen (Université Lille III)

"Virtuous wordplay in George Herbert's Anglican Manifesto"

PAUSE

11:15-12:15 KEYNOTE ADDRESS introduced by J. Kilgore-Caradec

Alice Goodman, “Wreaths of Fame and Interest”

LUNCH

2:00

Gary Kuchar (University of Victoria, Canada)

"Sounding the Temple: George Herbert and the Art of Hearkening"

2:30

Guillaume Coatalen (Université de Cergy-Pontoise)

“Sucking ‘the sincere milk of the word’ (1Peter 2:2) in Herbert's The Temple (1633)’’

3:00

Sola Ogunbayo (Redeemer's University, Nigeria)

"Genesis as Muse in William Blake's ‘Milton’"

3:30

Catherine Fleming (University of Virginia)

“The 18^th Century Germanic History of Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’”

PAUSE

4:30

Stephen Tardif (Harvard University)

"Personality as Sacrament in G.M. Hopkins' Poetry"

5:00

Paola Partenza (D'Annunzio University, Italy)

"’It is man's privilege to doubt’, Alfred Tennyson and the poetry of doubt"

5:30

John Fawell (Boston University)

"Hardy, the Churchiest Atheist"

6:00

Mélody Enjoubault (Paris IV-Sorbonne)

"'Tune me, O Lord, into one harmony': Christina Rosetti and the Poetics of Eternity.”

6:30-7:15 FILM: “Mankind” (A Medieval Play), presented by Philip Crispin.

7:45 CONFERENCE DINNER

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Amphi Paul Ricoeur (B18)

8:30 WELCOME Coffee

9:00

Christopher Stokes (National University of Ireland, Maynooth)

"Prayer, Rite and Affect in Keats’s 'Ode to Psyche' and 'The Eve of St. Agnes'"

9:30

Jane Avner (Université Paris XIII)

“Annunciations”

10:00

Anne Mounic (Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle)

"Deux chants du singulier: Gerard Manley Hopkins et Robert Graves"

10:30

Murielle Cayouette (Université Laval, Canada)

"Spirituality and Disaffiliation in T.S. Eliot's "Gerontion" and Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning"

PAUSE

11:15 KEYNOTE ADDRESS introduced by C. Parc

Monique Lojkine-Morelec, “When Birds in Glory Come”

LUNCH

2:00

Ben Keatinge (South East European University, Macedonia)

"'Holy God makes no reply': Prayer, Mysticism and Subjectivity in three Irish modernist poets"

2:30

Monica Manolachi (University of Bucharest)

"Faith, Doubt and Blasphemy in Contemporary Caribbean British Poetry"

3:00

Cathy Parc (Institut Catholique de Paris)

“Tongue(s) of Fire: Echoes of the Sacred in Elizabeth Jennings’s Poetry”

PAUSE

4:00

Ineke Bockting (Institut Catholique de Paris)

“A Southern Sanctity: James Dickey’s The Heaven of Animals and Approaching Prayer”

4:30

Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec (Université de Caen / Institut Catholique de Paris)

“’In terms of grace and carnal loss’: Oraclau/Oracles by Geoffrey Hill”

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

ALICE GOODMAN is a poet and Anglican Priest, currently Chaplain to students at Trinity College, Cambridge. She wrote the libretto in rhyming couplets for the opera Nixon in China (music by John Adams, directed by Peter Sellars, first performed at the Houston Grand Opera in 1987) and the libretto for The Death of Klinghoffer (1991).

MONIQUE LOJKINE-MORELEC is professor emeritus, Université Paris Sorbonne (P-IV). As well as teaching modernist poetry, she has taught courses on romantic poets, Shakespeare, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and translation. Her book, T.S. Eliot, Essai sur la génèse d’une écriture (Klincksieck, 1985), was the first publication in French to give detailed attention to the manuscripts of Eliot’s earliest unpublished poems. She has also translated The Waste Land into French.

THIS CONFERENCE IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF ANITA HIGGIE

Anita Higgie (1956-2010) was the head of the English Department at Institut Catholique de Paris for a decade, single-handedly running a complex program of study for more than four hundred students. She was a dedicated teacher and medievalist. Without her initial enthusiasm for this conference, it would not be taking place. She would have liked to present a paper on anonymous medieval poets and began reading, but illness prevented her from continuing the work. Those who knew her will always remember the loveliness of her smile, the intensity of her gaze, and her commitment to excellence. One of her favorite pithy pedagogical phrases was: “Lit, Life, & Thought.”

Links:

www.icp.fr (2011).

calenda.revues.org (2011).