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Information about Susan Howe Events and Seminar

The Pearl Andelson Sherry Memorial Poetry Reading and Lecture honor the life and work of former University of Chicago student, Pearl Andelson Sherry.

Pearl Andelson Sherry was born on the west side of Chicago in 1899. Despite objections from her father, she attended the University for one year, probably in 1916-1917. During that time, Pearl Sherry met a group of writers and poets involved in the Poetry Club, including Ivor Winters, Janet Lewis, and John Toigo; she remained friends with the members of the Poetry Club for the rest of her life. This literary circle nurtured Pearl Sherry’s own aspirations as a writer, and she began her writing career working at Poetry magazine with Harriet Monroe. Her first book of poetry, "Fringe," was published in 1923, and her poetry, fiction and reviews appeared in many periodicals, including Dial, Poetry, New Republic, Chelsea, and the Southern Review. Pearl Sherry continued to write and publish poetry until shortly before she died in 1996.

Established in 1997 through a gift from the Sherry Family, The Pearl Andelson Sherry Memorial Fund annually brings a major contemporary poet to the University of Chicago to work with students and to present the Pearl Andelson Sherry Memorial Poetry Reading and Lecture.

EVENTS:
(details at http://poetics.uchicago.edu/events.html)

November 7, 5:30 pm--
Reading/Lecture by Susan Howe: "Choir answers to Choir: Notes on Jonathan Edwards and Wallace Stevens"
November 8, 5:30 pm--
Public Conversation between Susan Howe and Marjorie Perloff: “Constraint, Concrete, Citation: Susan Howe’s Poetic Technique”
November 15, 7pm --
Performance by David Grubbs and Susan Howe: "Souls of the Labadie Tract"

SEMINAR:

During her residency, Susan Howe will be teaching an intensive non-credit seminar open to faculty and 10 selected students from 10am-12noon on the following days: Monday 11/5, Monday 11/12, Wednesday 11/14.

If you are a student interested in participating in the seminar, please email a statement of interest (one-page max) including a list of courses that you have taken or other activities (poet/editor, etc) that you think are relevant to the seminar to jnklein@uchicago.edu by October 15.

“After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.”-Wallace Stevens, “Adagia”

In 2007, I have almost abandoned my faith in what Stanley Cavell has called our North American literature of finding as founding, and Gertrude Stein refers to in “What is English Literature” as “our American way.” Nevertheless, the last poems Wallace Stevens gathered together for publication under the general title “The Rock” continue to astonish, comfort, and inspire me. They wouldn't have such incarnational power if they didnt have deep roots in a redemptive New England tradition stretching from Edwards through Emerson. Where do I find myself now?

Background Reading: Jonathan Edwards' “Personal Narrative,” “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” Emerson's “The Divinity School Address,” “The Poet,” and “Experience,” Emily Dickinson's “Master Letters,” Gertrude Stein's, “Henry James,” “What is English Literature,” Perry Miller's “From Edwards to Emerson” in Errand Into the Wilderness, Stanley Cavell's “Words” in The Senses of Walden,” Susan Howe's “Submarginalia” in The Birth-mark.

1st Seminar. “Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none.” Emerson, “Experience”

What does Stevens mean by the following aphorisms: “Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.” “Poetry is the Scholar's art.” What is a criticism done by poets? How do we incorporate reading into writing?

2nd Seminar. “Night, sleep, death, and the stars.”-Walt Whitman, “A Clear Midnight.”

I'll start the second seminar with close readings of first three poems in The Rock. “An Old Man Asleep,” “The Irish Cliffs of Moher,” “The Plain Sense of Things.” I might bring in W.C. Williams late poems in Paterson V, for resemblance and differences.

3rd Seminar. “The truth is that the most conspicuous element from the point of view of human interest in the handling of claims is the claim man himself. - Wallace Stevens, “Surety and Fidelity Claims.”

The third seminar centers on “To An Old Philosopher in Rome,” but will also include thinking about “Vacancy in the Park,” “The Poem that took the Place of a Mountain,” “Prologues to What is Possible,” “The Rock,” “The Green Plant,” “Madame La Fleurie, Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.”

* * *

Primary Texts.

We should all be referring (if possible to the American Library edition of Stevens Collected Poetry and Prose.

Cavell, Stanley: The Senses of Walden, U of Chicago Press (expanded edition).

Dickinson, Emily: The Master Letters, ed. Ralph Franklin. Amherst College Press, 1986.

Edwards, Jonathan: A Jonathan Edwards Reader, Yale University Press eds. John Smith, Harry Stout. (“Personal Narrative,” “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” “A Divine and Supernatural Light.”

Emerson, Ralph Waldo: “The Divinity School Address,” “The American Scholar,” “The Poet,” “Experience.”

Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson ( New Directions).

Miller, Perry. Errand Into The Wilderness (Harvard University Press).

Stevens, Wallace: Collected Poetry and Prose. (American Library edition). ed. Joan Richardson.

Stein, Gertrude: “Henry James”
-------------------- “ Poetry and Grammar” Both are in Stein:Writings 1932-1946, ((American Library edition). ed. Catherine Stimpson and Harriet Chessman

Williams, William Carlos: Paterson V.