Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash, Oct 4, Hartford Public Library

Saturday October 4, 2008, 6:30 P.M.
Hartford Public Library, 500 Main Street

Reception begins at 6:30 P.M.
Featured Speaker—
JOHN N. SERIO

Poetry Is Feeling, Then, and Sound
“An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought."
—Wallace Stevens

Serio will address a neglected aspect in Wallace Stevens’ work—“the personal” or “the emotional” in his poetry. Most readers focus on Stevens’ complex philosophical ideas and find his poetry abstract, cold, and impersonal. His talk will concentrate on the feeling embedded in Stevens’ poetry.

John N. Serio is a Professor of Humanities at Clarkson University, where he has taught since 1974. A specialist in modern American poetry and Wallace Stevens in particular, he has edited The Wallace Stevens Journal for over twenty-five years. Among his publications are Wallace Stevens: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography; Teaching Wallace Stevens: Practical Essays; The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens.. He has edited two collections of Poetry for Young People, Wallace Stevens and The Seasons.

Serio created a searchable CD of the first twenty-five years of The Wallace Stevens Journal, including the rarely seen Wallace Stevens Newsletter. With Greg Foster, he created a free Online Concordance to Wallace Stevens poetry at www.wallacestevens.com.

He has been the recipient of several NEH grants as well as two Fulbright awards, one to Greece and one to Belgium. He has received recognition for his scholarly articles and his journal editing. In Spring 2005, he taught in the ‘Semester at Sea’ program, a university on a ship that circumnavigates the globe, and will do so again in Spring 2009.
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After Program: serving Birthday Cake and Champagne!

Ticket: $40 per person; send check payable to:
Hartford Public Library, 500 Main Street, Hartford CT 06103.
Or call to reserve your tickets at the door: 860-695-6360.

Sponsored by Connecticut Center for the Book at the Hartford Public Library
with help from The Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens.

For more information, contact
James Finnegan, 860-508-2810
jforjames@aol.com