Calamity Jane Takes Aim

Return from NeMLA

Thank you to the people who wished me well at NEMLA this weekend. The talk went well. I had the pleasure of listening to thoughtful papers on topics closely related to my own. I, quite fortunately, met some wonderful people publishing in my area of study. Barbara Fischer, the panel chair, has just recently had her book Museum Meditations published from Rutledge in January. Barbara will also have an essay included in a forthcoming, hopefully, volume of essays on gender and ekphrasis. Stephen Paul Miller also presented on the painterly poet David Shapiro. Miller’s work can be seen in a variety of places, but his book, Skinny Eighth Avenue, in particular, is something I’ve been enjoying. Judy Halden-Sullivan, who presented the paper “Wor(l)ds and Pictures: the Hermeneutics of Innovative Intermedial Poetry” looked at the poetry of Susan Howe, Leslie Scalapino, and Thomas Fink, concentrating on the concept of “nearness” as a means of reading their experimental imagetext poetry. Elizabeth Spies’ incisive essay “Advertising Stigmatas: Advertising’s Utterances within the Poetry of Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg” made thoughtful connections between the pop culture magazine and billboard advertisements popular in the 1950s and each poet’s interwoven sense of self and vision within his/her individual art. Overall, I found myself invigorated and challenged by my co-presenters. It is they who made the conference worthwhile. Thank you to each of them for their presentations, as well as their questions about and suggestions for my own work.