21 March 2005

Bibliophile heaven

It was wonderfully fitting that my last Saturday in Charlottesville was spent at events sponsored by the Virginia Quarterly Review for the Festival of the Book:

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10am
“Walt Whitman, An American, One of the Roughs, a Kosmos”: Whitman’s Self-Invention
Presentations by David Kirby (The Ha-Ha), William Logan (Reputations of the Tongue, Desperate Measures), and Heather Morton (Walt Whitman Archive)

12 noon
Did the Modernists Get Rejection Slips?
Explore a journal’s historical, humorous correspondence with former editor of POETRY magazine, Joseph Parisi (Dear Editor: A History of POETRY in Letters).

2pm
“Do I Contradict Myself?” Who Is the Real Whitman?
Presentations by Robert Creeley (If I Were Writing This), Stephen Cushman (Cussing Lesson), and Ed Folsom (Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song).

8pm
Robert Creeley Reads His Poetry
Join poet Robert Creeley (If I Were Writing This, Life & Death) for a poetry reading.
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I was also able to spend some time at their Whitman exhibit and the other new exhibit, American Journeys: Columbus to Kerouac (which knocked my socks off!).

I took copious notes, so I hope to post more later.

Meanwhile, Ron at Beatrice has four dispatches from author Pearl Abraham, who also spoke.

2 comments:

Molly said...

I'm jealous about the Whitman--"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" is one of my favorites! What did they pinpoint as Whitman's contradictions?

kwpershey said...

What did you think of Robert Creeley? I met him and heard him read just a few days after 9/11/01, which really cast an unusual pall on the whole event (to make an understatement). His plane was canceled so he drove to Ohio, and he was really quite shaken. It as moving to hear his poetry, though the poetry ended up being quite secondary to the collective fear and loss.