Alternate possible worlds of poetry scholarship

A quick postcard from Brooklyn and the annual Modernist Studies Association conference: hello! Having a great time! Wish you were here!

The MSA was My Conference during the years in which I wrote my two wholly scholarly books. As a green assistant professor, I participated in a seminar on modernist women poets and made friends with whom I still keep in touch. I stopped attending for a while because I was working on a later period–21st century verse in Poetry’s Possible Worlds–and because I started publishing poetry collections that I needed to find audiences for, and perhaps ironically, most people here don’t read a lot of contemporary verse. Some writers have energy and money for ALL the conferences, it seems; I pick and choose, and this one just didn’t fit my obsessions, for a while. I’m back in modernist territory in the criticism I’m writing, though, so I organized a roundtable called “Avenues of Creative Scholarship.” The people I invited did an amazing job (see Suzanne Churchill’s slides about scholarship and design here, for example). Retrospectively, though, I feel a little queasy about my own presentation. Intellectually I live in a weird place, I guess, neither fish nor fowl, and I have NO idea how scholars are receiving my recent work.

Funnily enough, The Hopkins Review just made my creative-critical essay “Ghost Tours” available for free download for a few days. I’ve blogged about it before, but then it was only available in print or through paywalled Project Muse, so I thought I’d let you know about this quick window of opportunity. If you like Auden, Ouija boards, weird footnotes, and disenchantment about academia and the confederate-nostalgia-tourism industry, this is for you. Happy Halloween.

A few deeply interesting presentations, some that were dull, but lots of lovely meals with poet- and scholar-friends: a good trip overall, although, as one friend from West Virginia put it, every dish or glass of wine is basically a hardback book, price-wise. What a way of doing the math! Speaking of math, I also took my son the impecunious grad student out for a couple of meals; we saw the Spike Lee and Judy Chicago installations at the Brooklyn Museum and walked the Brooklyn Bridge together, a first for both of us.

Back to the real world soon, with all kinds of mixed feelings–

Your Friend the Creative-Critical Chimera