The
Wallace Stevens Society†
John N. Serio
THE SEEDS OF THE WALLACE
STEVENS SOCIETY were planted in the late 1960s when William T. Ford, a
librarian at the University of Chicago by day and a law student by night,
started The Wallace Stevens Newsletter. Four issues of the eight-page
newsletter appeared: Vol. 1.1 (Oct. 1969); Vol. 1.2 (April 1970); Vol. 2.1
(Oct. 1970); and Vol. 2.2 (April 1971). These usually
contained one or two brief essays on Stevens' poetry, book reviews, news about forthcoming events, abstracts of recent
dissertations, a current bibliography, and poems paying tribute to Stevens.
After completing his law degree in 1972, Ford moved to Los Angeles, but without
a university connection, he could not continue the Newsletter.
In 1975, soon after
Holly Stevens sold her father's letters, manuscripts, and library to the
Huntington Library in San Marino, California, Ford received a phone call from
Robert H. Deutsch, an English professor at California State University at
Northridge, asking if he would be interested in reviving The Wallace Stevens
Newsletter now that the Stevens material was located nearby. This led to
the founding of The Wallace Stevens Society and the beginning of The Wallace
Stevens Journal.
The first meeting of the
association was held at the Huntington Library on May 8, 1976, and Deutsch was
selected as chairman of an executive council charged with formulating the rules
and regulations of the society. The formal articles and bylaws of the society,
initially called The Society for the Study of the Poetry of Wallace Stevens,
were adopted on January 25, 1977, most likely in Northridge, Calif. Signatories
included Deutsch as president of the society and chairman of the executive
council; Herbert Turman as secretary-treasurer; and Charles Kaplan, Mary
Klinger, George Drury Smith, Ann Stanford, William Walsh, and Warren Wedin as
executive council members. Most of these individuals were colleagues of
Deutsch's at California State University at Northridge, the original home of
the society and journal.
The express purpose of
the Wallace Stevens Society is to disseminate, for educational purposes and
without profit, knowledge of the poetry and life of Wallace Stevens. The main
vehicle for doing so is The Wallace Stevens Journal. Other means include
sponsoring programs at annual conferences, cooperating with other literary
societies, and keeping members informed about impending events. From the very
beginning, the society was recognized as an educational organization by the
Federal government and granted tax-exempt status. In 1984, soon after the
administrative and editorial offices moved to Potsdam, N.Y., the society was
incorporated in the State of New York as a not-for-profit,
literary organization.
The first issue of The
Wallace Stevens Journal appeared in the spring of 1977, soon after the
official formation of the society. Deutsch served as editor and Ford as
associate editor. They were assisted by a panel of
consultants that included A. Walton Litz, Roy Harvey Pearce, and Joseph N.
Riddel. Originally, the journal was scheduled to appear quarterly;
however, the first volume saw only three numbers: Vol. 1.1 (Spring), Vol. 1.2
(Summer), and Vol. 1.3/4 (Fall/Winter). Thereafter, the journal became
biannual, at first with the spring issue combining numbers 1 & 2 and the
fall issue numbers 3 & 4, but then in 1984, after the society's move to
Potsdam, N.Y., the spring issue simply became number 1 and the fall issue
number 2.
Deutsch served as
chairman of the executive council, president of the society, and editor of the
journal from 1977 until his death in December 1983. During these years,
membership in the society hovered around 200, evenly divided between
individuals and institutions, and issues of the journal averaged forty-eight
pages. In 1984, John N. Serio of Clarkson University, an associate editor since
Ford's departure in 1979, was selected to replace Deutsch as president of the
organization and editor of the journal. Under Serio's leadership, the society
was reorganized: the executive council was replaced by an
advisory board, and the panel of consultants was replaced by an active
editorial board that reviewed articles submitted for publication in the
journal. Over the years, distinguished Stevens scholars have served on the
editorial board, including Litz, Pearce, and Riddel, mentioned above, as well
as Milton J. Bates, Jacqueline V. Brogan, Robert Buttel, Eleanor Cook, Frank
Doggett, Alan Filreis, B. J. Leggett, George S. Lensing, James Longenbach, Glen
MacLeod, Marjorie Perloff, Joan Richardson, Melita Schaum, and Lisa Steinman.
In addition, Serio appointed an art editor to contribute or select cover
images, a poetry editor to review poems relating to Stevens for publication,
and a book review editor.
In 1983, Clarkson
University initiated a program of giving every incoming first-year student a
personal computer, the first college in the country to do so, and Serio used
this new technology to manage the society and to produce the journal. Armed
with the database management capabilities that this new technology offered,
Serio launched an aggressive membership campaign. Within a few years,
membership in the society more than doubled, and currently it stands at nearly
500 members with worldwide representation. This increased interest in the Wallace
Stevens Society, sparked in part by the growing recognition of Stevens as a
major American poet, also led to the enhanced reputation of The Wallace
Stevens Journal. Beginning with the fall 1983 issue, which he guest edited,
Serio used the personal computer to typeset the journal. Given the software at
the time, this was no mean accomplishment, but it led to full control over the
production of the journal by the editor and resulted in greater accuracy and
reduced costs. In 1988, Serio described the process whereby he used the
personal computer to produce the journal with high-end but inexpensive
photocomposition, and the article received the Outstanding Journal Article
Award by the Society for Technical Communication (1989).
Deutsch established the
format of The Wallace Stevens Journal that has endured for over
thirty-five years. Each issue features a distinctive cover, usually an original
artwork exemplifying a passage in a Stevens poem,
often by well-established artists such as Kathryn Jacobi, Jerry Uelsmann, and
Carl Chiarenza. Charles Schulz of Peanuts fame contributed a cartoon about Stevens to the spring 1991 issue. Following
the main section of scholarly articles are shorter sections of poems, reviews,
and news and comments in the fall issue or a current bibliography in the spring
issue. Material and essays in the journal range from previously unpublished
primary sources, such as letters or manuscripts, to important historical
documents, biographical essays, critical and theoretical articles, influence
and comparative studies, and primary and secondary bibliographies. Prominent
scholars, including Charles Altieri, Milton J. Bates, Michel Benamou,
Jacqueline V. Brogan, Eleanor Cook, Margaret Dickie, Albert Gelpi, A. Walton
Litz, Samuel French Morse, Alicia Ostriker, Roy Harvey Pearce, Marjorie
Perloff, Joseph N. Riddel, and Helen Vendler, have published in its pages.
Acclaimed poets, such as Marvin Bell, Robert Creeley, Jorie Graham, X. J.
Kennedy, William Meredith, Robert Mezey, Robert Pinsky, William Jay Smith,
William Stafford, and John Updike, have contributed poems. Hailed by A. Walton
Litz as "the best of the single-author journals," The Wallace Stevens Journal has become
the major periodical outlet for new Stevens scholarship, and issues now average well over 120 pages. In 1990, the Journal was honored by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals when Serio received the Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial Achievement.
In 1991, the Wallace
Stevens Society initiated a poetry series by publishing and distributing free
to members of the society the work of contemporary poets, especially those who
have had difficulty finding a publisher for their second book. Between 1991 and
2003, the Wallace Stevens Society Press published Eve's Primer by
Dorothy Emerson (1991); A Morning Pose, by Robert Noreault, with
drawings by Hugh M. Neil (1994); and Inhabited World: New & Selected
Poems 1970–1995 by John Allman (1995). The series ended with a
critical work, The Poetry of Delmore
Schwartz, by Robert H. Deutsch (2003).
Another way in which the
society fulfills its mission of sharing new knowledge about the poetry of
Wallace Stevens is by sponsoring programs at national and regional conferences,
such as the Modern Language Association convention, meetings of its regional
affiliates, and the American Literature Association convention. In particular,
annual programs at the MLA have showcased the work of the society. As early as
December 1977, the society sponsored a two-part program on thematic elements in
the shorter poems that attracted an enormous audience with its list of top Stevens scholars including Benamou, Buttel, Doggett, Litz,
Morse, and Vendler. In December 1978, in anticipation of the approaching
Stevens centennial in 1979, the society arranged an MLA program of contemporary
poets honoring Stevens that included Michael Benedikt, Alfred Corn, Robert
Fitzgerald, Barbara Guest, Richard Howard, William Meredith, Muriel Rukeyser,
and William Jay Smith. Holly Stevens, the poet's daughter and editor of his letters,
as well as Peter Brazeau, a scholar working at the time on an oral biography of
Stevens, also participated.
These convention
programs have played an important role in Stevens studies, for they have initiated new directions in Stevens criticism. In addition, the society has extended its international reach by
helping to mount and publicize international conferences on Stevens, such as
the one at the University of Connecticut in 2004, another at Oxford University
in 2005, and a third at NYU/ Gallatin School in 2010. Plans for additional
international conferences, including one in Paris, are underway.
These programs have
become launching pads for special issues of The
Wallace Stevens Journal. For example, many of the participants in the
centennial program as well as John Ciardi, Robert Creeley, Karl Shapiro, Robert
Fitzgerald, W. S. Merwin, Richard Wilbur, Richard Ellmann, and Robert Penn
Warren contributed to the 1979 Commemorative Issue. Other program topics have
led to the following special issues:
Stevens and Postmodern Criticism (Fall 1983)
Stevens and Women (Fall 1988)
Stevens and Politics (Fall 1989)
Stevens and the Structures of Sound (Fall 1991)
Poets Reading Stevens (Spring 1993)
Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop (Fall 1995)
Approaching the Millennium: Stevens and Apocalyptic Language (Fall 1999)
Stevens in Late 20th-Century Culture (Fall 2000)
Wallace Stevens, Adrienne
Rich, and James Merrill (Spring 2001)
International Perspectives on Wallace Stevens (Fall 2001)
Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound (Fall 2002)
The Poetics of Place in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (Spring 2003)
Celebrating Wallace Stevens: The Poet of Poets in Connecticut (Fall 2004 &
Spring 2005)
Wallace Stevens and British Literature (Spring 2006)
Stevens’ Erotic Poetics (Fall 2006)
Wallace Stevens and France (Fall 2008)
Wallace Stevens and the “Less Legible Meanings of Sounds” (Spring 2009)
Wallace Stevens and Henry James (Spring 2010)
Stevens, Freud, and Psychoanalytic Theory (Fall 2010)
In a number of instances, these programs have
led to book publication as well, such as Stevens
and the Feminine, edited by Melita Schaum (U of Alabama P, 1993); Teaching Wallace Stevens: Practical Essays,
edited by Serio and B. J. Leggett (U of Tennessee P, 1994); Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic, edited by Eeckhout
and Edward Ragg (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2008): and Wallace Stevens, New York, and Modernism, edited by Lisa Goldfarb
and Eeckhout (Routledge, 2012).
In 2010, after more than
twenty-five years of celebrated leadership, Serio stepped down as president of
the Wallace Stevens Society and editor of the journal; he remains a highly
valued and active Honorary Editor. His many accomplishments during his tenure—which
are in addition to regularly publishing the journal and organizing scholarly
panels sponsored by the society—include several significant editorial
projects that have done a great deal to advance knowledge of the life and
poetry of Stevens: a text-searchable CD-ROM of the first twenty-five years of The
Wallace Stevens Journal; a free, online concordance to Stevens’ poetry
(with Greg Foster); Wallace Stevens: An
Annotated Secondary Bibliography (U of Pittsburg P 1994); Teaching Wallace Stevens (mentioned
above); Poetry for Young People: Wallace
Stevens (Sterling Pub., 2004); The
Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens (Cambridge UP, 2007); and Wallace Stevens: Selected Poems (Knopf,
2009). Serio’s final act demonstrating his
unflagging commitment to the journal was to arrange for its transition to the
portfolio of The Johns Hopkins University Press, where it proudly joined such
top-notch publications as Callaloo, Diacritics, Modern Fiction Studies, New
Literary History, and Shakespeare
Quarterly, to name but a few.
With the Spring 2011
issue, the journal welcomed its third editor: Bart Eeckhout of the University of
Antwerp, author of the critically celebrated Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading
and Writing (U Missouri P, 2002), editor of the journal’s silver jubilee
issue devoted to International Perspectives on Stevens, and co-editor (with
Edward Ragg) of the special issue on Stevens and British Literature as well as two
volumes of essays, Wallace Stevens across
the Atlantic and Wallace Stevens, New
York, and Modernism (all mentioned above). Under Eeckhout’s direction, the journal has expanded its editorial board to include,
besides distinguished scholars such as J. Hillis Miller, Krzysztof Ziarek, and Bonnie Costello, specialists hailing
from France, England, Ireland, Poland, and
Belgium. The journal now includes two associate editors and new editors for
book reviews, art, and poetry. All the individuals serving in these capacities are well
known to readers of the journal as excellent and
productive Stevens scholars or as talented poets and
artists.
Under Eeckhout’s
direction, the journal still largely follows its original format. Each of its
biannual issues, which are now generally around 120 to 160 pages, features a
distinctive cover, usually an original artwork exemplifying a passage in a Stevens poem. A main section of scholarly articles is followed by shorter sections of poems, reviews, and News
and Comments in the fall issue or Current Bibliography in the spring issue.
Eeckhout plans to augment the book reviews, which are
for many Stevens scholars, as both authors and
readers, the most meaningful coverage of new work on Stevens. The journal will
also include two new occasional features, inaugurated in the Spring 2011 issue:
an Editor’s Column, intended to address informally topics of interest to
Stevensians; and a Visitors Gallery, designed to present different kinds of
creative work alongside scholarly contributions. Scholarly submissions are
subject to a double-blind peer review; contributions to the new Visitors
Gallery will undergo a form of peer-review process tailored to the occasion.
Although one does not have to be a member of the society to publish in the journal, a robust
and active membership is essential to ensuring the continued success of the society’s
mission.
The society has increasingly utilized the Web to engage a broad, international
population interested in Stevens scholarship. The
Society’s website, <www.wallacestevens.com>, includes a link to subscribe
to the journal (which includes membership in the society), links to Stevens
resources and media, as well as news on forthcoming programs, conferences, and
special events involving Wallace Stevens. Most notable among the website’s
resources are the free online concordance to Stevens’ poetry (which receives
steady use and interest) and an online list of the all the articles published
in the journal. The recent redesign of the website and introduction of a
Wallace Stevens Society Facebook page (please “like” us) have also improved the
Society’s media image and its ability both to incorporate multimedia materials
and to reach out to a younger generation. The society also regularly
communicates via an extensive e-mail list of individuals interested in Stevens—about
1,000 people—to generate interest in the society, the journal, and the
events it sponsors.
†A version of this essay
appeared in Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1999
Ed. Matthew Bruccoli. Detroit: Gale Group, 1999. 369-71.
Updated
8/29/2011