S200. Reading Stevens for Writers: The Mind at the End of the Palm
Saturday, March 1, 2014
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm
“We think by feeling,” writes Roethke, but Wallace Stevens proposes more complex methods of inquiry. Our panel of poet-critics reads the poems, essays, and letters of this “philosophical” poet through contemporary workshop practices as well as both romantic and post-structural language theories to interrogate how this heady Modernist speculates, meditates, and reflects. We hope our examination will reveal how Stevens helps us sharpen and sustain our own ability to think in lyric poems.
Participants
Moderator:
David Baker is a poet, critic, and editor whose recent books include Show Me Your Environment: Essays on Poetry, Poets, and Poems, and Never-Ending Birds, winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. He is poetry editor of Kenyon Review and teaches at Denison University.
Linda Gregerson is the author of five books of poetry, including Fire in the Conservatory, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, Waterborne, Magnetic North, and The Selvage. She has also published two books of criticism and a co-edited volume of essays. She teaches at the University of Michigan.
Stanley Plumly's most recent collection of poems is Orphan Hours. He is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Carl Phillips
