Wallace Stevens the forever stamp

In 2012, The United States Post Office is honoring ten poets with their very own postage stamps! Yes, the visages of Elizabeth Bishop, Joseph Brodsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, E. E. Cummings, Robert Hayden, Denise Levertov, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams are to grace all your Cablevision bills. And they’re priced at “forever,” too!
See Beyond the Perf.

Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash, Sat. Nov. 5

Robert Pinsky will speak at the Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash. Former Poet Laureate of the United States, Robert Pinsky has recently published a Selected Poems (FSG, 2011).

Save the date: Saturday, November 5, 2011. This festive and informative event is sponsored by Connecticut Center for the Book, and is held at Hartford Public Library.

2011 Rose Garden Poetry Reading

2011 Rose Garden Poetry Reading
Susan Howe and Elizabeth Willis
Saturday, June 18, 1 o’clock
The Pond House, Elizabeth Park (Hartford CT)
Part of the ‘Rose Festival Weekend’ celebrations.

Elizabeth Willis is the Shapiro-Silverberg Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Wesleyan Univesity. She is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Address and Meteoric Flowers, both from Wesleyan University Press. She is a scholar of the poetry of Lorine Niedecker.

Susan Howe received the 2011 Bollingen Prize in Poetry. She is the author of many books of poetry and criticism including her new volume That This and her well-known study My Emily Dickinson which received the American Book Award in 1986. She is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and before her retirement, she held the Samuel P. Capen Chair of Poetry and the Humanities at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she has been a long time resident of Guilford, Connecticut.

Free event.

Sponsored by The Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens
http://www.stevenspoetry.org

Friends of Elizabeth Park and Rose Festival Weekend
http://www.elizabethpark.org/

For more info contact:
Jim
JforJames@aol.com
860-508-2810

The Wallace Stevens Program

A poetry reading featuring…
August Kleinzahler

April 19, Konover Auditorium of the Dodd Center
University of Connecticut, 8 pm

April 20, Classical Magnet School
85 Woodland Street, Hartford, 11 am

Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash, Nov. 6

SAVE THE DATE…
Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash
November 6, 6:30p.m.
Hartford Public Library
Featured Speaker: Joan Richardson

Made possible with the generous support of
Connecticut Center for the Book

For more info, email: JforJames@aol.com

Rose Garden Reading, Sat. June 19, 1pm

Rose Garden Poetry Reading
Saturday June 19, one o’clock

Featuring:

Benjamin Grossberg and Margot Schilpp

(Their bios below.)

Location: Pond House at Elizabeth Park in Hartford CT
Part of the Rose Festival Weekend…

Free Event.

The Rose Garden Reading is sponsored by The Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens (www.stevenspoetry.org) and this annual reading series is dedicated to the memory of Hugh Ogden who had organized the program for many years.

Benjamin S. Grossberg teaches poetry and creative writing at the University of Hartford. His books are Sweet Core Orchard, winner of the 2008 Tampa Review Prize (University of Tampa, 2009), and Underwater Lengths in a Single Breath, winter of the 2005 Snyder Prize (Ashland Poetry Press, 2007). A chapbook, The Auctioneer Bangs his Gavel, was published by Kent State in 2006. His poems have appeared in Paris Review, Southwest Review, and The Pushcart Book of Poetry: The Best Poems from Thirty years of the Pushcart Prize. New poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New England Review, North American Review, and The Missouri Review, among other journals.

Margot Schilpp’s books of poems are The World’s Last Night (2001), Laws of My Nature (2005), and Civil Twilight (forthcoming in 2012), all published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her poems have been published widely in literary journals, including American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Green Mountains Review, Hotel Amerika, and New England Review.

For more info:
JforJames@aol.com
Jim F
860-508-2810

Charles Simic readings, April 6 & 7

CHARLES SIMIC
WALLACE STEVENS POETRY PROGRAM
Tuesday April 6, 2 pm, Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts
Wednesday April 7, 8 pm, Konover Auditorium of the Dodd Center, UConn

Sponsored by The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc.,
& The Hartford Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens

Simic, who was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954, is the author of more than 60 books in the U.S. and abroad, twenty titles of his own poetry among them, including That Little Something (2008); My Noiseless Entourage (2005); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; The Voice at 3:00 AM: Selected Late and New Poems (2003); Night Picnic (2001); The Book of Gods and Devils (2000); and Jackstraws (1999), which was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. His other books of poetry include Walking the Black Cat (1996), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; A Wedding in Hell (1994); Hotel Insomnia (1992); The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems (1990), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Selected Poems: 1963-1983 (1990); and Unending Blues (1986). Simic has also published numerous translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry, and is the author of several books of essays, including Orphan Factory. He has edited several anthologies, including an edition of The Best American Poetry in 1992.

Pictures from The Bash

Jim Finnegan, Marjorie Perloff and John Serio

Marjorie Perloff delivered the 2009 Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash lecture at Hartford Public Library. The title of her talk was “Beyond Adagia: Eccentric Design in Wallace Stevens’ Poetry .” John Serio was last year’s speaker and he recently edited a new Selected Poems of Wallace Stevens.

Dan Schnaidt, Karim Ahmed and David Epstein

Dan, Karim and David are board members of the Friends & Enemies.

Marjorie Perloff, Lonnie Black and John Crockett

Marjorie Perloff with Lonnie Black, also a board member, and John Crockett, a longtime member of The Friends & Enemies and someone who can actually tell stories of meeting Wallace Stevens on a number of occasions.

Jim Finnegan & Kat Lyons toast a sucessful event.

Kat Lyons runs Connecticut Center for the Book, the organization that sponsored the Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash.

Wallace Stevens bust by Frederic Blatt, c. 2002

In memory of her husband William T. Ford, Dee Ford of Anchorage Alaska donated this lovely bronze bust to the Wallace Stevens Room at Hartford Public Library.

Bash photos courtesy of Mary Crean

Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash – Nov. 7

14th Annual
‘Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash’

Saturday, November 7 2009, 6:30 P.M.

Hartford Public Library
500 Main Street, Hartford, CT

Program begins at 6:30 P.M.

Featured Speaker—

MARJORIE PERLOFF

Revisiting the Adagia:
The Role of Aphorism
in Wallace Stevens’ Poetry

“Poetry is a pheasant disappearing in the brush.”
—Wallace Stevens, Adagia

Birthday Cake & Champagne after the Program!

Tickets are $45 per person; send check payable to:
Connecticut Center for the Book
500 Main Street
Hartford CT 06103.

Or to reserve your tickets at the door,
email Kat Lyons: klyons@hplct.org
or call 860-695-6320.

Sponsored by
Connecticut Center for the Book
at the Hartford Public Library
with help from
The Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens.

For more information, contact
James Finnegan, 860-508-2810
jforjames@aol.com

Wallace Stevens Walk Dedication

Wallace Stevens Walk Dedication

June 11, 2009, 5 p.m.
The Hartford, 690 Asylum Avenue, Hartford, CT

Please join us for the dedication of the Wallace Stevens Walk.

On Thursday, June 11, at 5pm, employees of The Hartford Financial Services Group, members of Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens, as well as the general public will convene for a dedication of The Wallace Stevens Walk, a 2.4 mile self-guided walking tour that traces the path the poet took each day to and from his Hartford home.

Beginning at The Hartford, where Stevens served as vice president beginning in 1934, and ending at his former home at 118 Westerly Terrace, the Walk traverses the Asylum Avenue section of Hartford’s Asylum Hill and West End neighborhoods.

The course of The Wallace Stevens Walk is marked by 13 Connecticut granite stones, each uniquely carved and engraved with a stanza from “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” a poem among Stevens’ most well known and frequently studied works.

For more info, email JforJames@aol.com