Poetry foundation kicks off five-day event

ORONO – Maine’s pre-eminent connection to national and international literature opens its 12th summer conference in Orono today, where as many as 250 scholars and poets from Maine and abroad will speak on “Poetries of the 1940s, American and International.”

The University of Maine’s National Poetry Foundation has engineered “a gathering of the poetry clan, and all the sub-clans,” according to NPF director and UM English professor Burton Hatlen. This summer’s five-day extravaganza will run through Sunday, June 27, and include readings by internationally recognized poets, lectures and panel discussions by hundreds of scholars from the United States, Italy, Poland, Germany, Turkey, Canada and Korea, among others, on poetry written during the 1940s.

Among the participating scholars will be Marjorie Perloff, speaking at Friday’s plenary session, and J. Hillis Miller, at Thursday’s plenary session, both of whose literary criticism is among the most influential in recent decades. Other notable participants include literary critics Alan Filreis and Albert Gelpi, and panel topics will cover a wide range of midcentury poets such as Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and Gwendolyn Brooks, and topics as diverse as “The Northern California Poetry Scene in the 1940s,” “Poetry and the Bomb,” and “American Poets and World War II.”

Poetry readings will punctuate the scholarly discussions, and prominent among the readers will be Robert Creeley, who opens the conference Wednesday evening, and multimedia performance artist Jackson Mac Low, who will read Thursday morning. Among other poets will be World War II veteran Harvey Shapiro and Lyn Hejinian from the University of California, Berkeley.

The event will end Sunday with a finale of readings by poets from Maine’s clans, including Ted Enslin beginning at 10 a.m., followed by Mainers such as Hatlen, Jim Bishop, Bruce Holsapple, Tony Brinkley, Ben Friedlander, Sylvester Pollet and Kathleen Ellis.

The National Poetry Foundation, founded in 1972 by UM professor Carroll F. Terrell, holds a well-respected international reputation as a center for the study and promotion of literature. In addition to its list of scholarly and creative books, the NPF’s previous conferences have included discussions of poetry of the 1930s, the 1950s and the 1960s, and are attended by hundreds of scholars and writers each summer.

Conference events are free for Maine residents, and will be held in UM’s Neville Hall, Doris Twitchell Allen Community Center, and the Class of 1944 Hall. Information is available at www.ume.maine.edu/~npf/ or by calling the NPF at 581-3813.