Department of English

Thursday, October 5th

1. MFA Reading Series
   • Where: New Dominion Bookshop 404 E Main St, Charlottesville, VA 22902, United States
   • Start time: 07:00pm
   • End time: 08:00pm

Friday, October 6th

1. Hannah Loeb Dissertation Presentation
   • Where: Bryan Hall Faculty Lounge
   • Start time: 12:00pm
   • End time: 01:00pm

   • “And then his mother wouldn’t recognize him”: The Modern Elegiac Meters of Allen Ginsberg & Elizabeth BishopABSTRACT Rather than determining whether the ghost of poetic meter deserves exorcism or invites seance, Qualified Ghost: Meter & Affect in Contemporary American Prosody develops a rich metrical vocabulary with which to articulate how, in the long wake of the so-called “free verse revolution,” iambic pentameter haunts both the line and the syntactic unit, indexing poets’ unfolding thoughts and deepening their affective performances.  Through readings of two 1960s poems of mourning, this chapter explores what a scansion-forward approach to ostensibly non-metrical poetry can reveal about its emotional stakes. Allen Ginsberg was vocal about his principled aversion to the iamb, but, in “Kaddish,” his elegy for his mother, he gains affective traction by incorporating discrete units of iambic pentameter into longer lines that intermix culturally meaningful rhythmic codes. Engaging the ghost meter metaphor, I apply Annie Finch’s term “embedded pentameter” to these uncanny moments of recognition, compulsive revenance, and palpable presence-in-absence. In “Crusoe in England,” Elizabeth Bishop’s oblique elegy for her long-time partner who committed suicide, the formal structure that loosely contains units of iambic pentameter is not the line but the verse paragraph. Using Antony Easthope’s term “freed verse,” (as in, vers libéré rather than vers libre), I trace Bishop’s tendency to mix lines of approximate iambic pentameter with lines of other lengths, creating an effect of approaching and retreating that is essential to her tidal depiction of loss. Like Ginsberg, Bishop designs and masterfully enacts a prosody of flickering resonances and ghostly returns. This presentation will explore these two poets’ preoccupations with the problem of recognition as it relates both to poetic form and to grief. With close attention to the ways that forms can carry or suppress the baggage of the irrepressible past, the dissertation as a whole contributes to a wider conversation about what kind of cultural formation poetry is and to what extent meter—even in its absence—continues to shape understandings of what poetry can do.

2. Manon Garcia (Freie Universität Berlin), “The Joy of Consent”
   • Where: Bryan Hall Faculty Lounge
   • Start time: 05:00pm
   • End time: 06:00pm

Thursday, October 12th

1. Cecily Parks Poetry Reading
   • Where: UVA Bookstore Mezzanine
   • Start time: 05:00pm
   • End time: 06:00pm
2. MFA Reading Series
   • Where: New Dominion Bookshop 404 E Main St, Charlottesville, VA 22902, United States
   • Start time: 07:00pm
   • End time: 08:00pm

Friday, October 13th

1. Dennis Tyler (Fordham Department of English): "The Problem of the Color Line in the Age of COVID-19."
   • Where: Bryan Hall Faculty Lounge
   • Start time: 12:15pm
   • End time: 01:15pm
2. Kalyan Nadiminti (Department of English, Northwestern). “Phantom Limb, Occupied Nation: Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Contemporary Postcolonial Novel”
   • Where: Bryan Hall Faculty Lounge
   • Start time: 03:00pm
   • End time: 04:00pm

Thursday, October 19th

1. MFA Reading Series
   • Where: New Dominion Bookshop 404 E Main St, Charlottesville, VA 22902, United States
   • Start time: 07:00pm
   • End time: 08:00pm