Rita Dove receives Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

The National Book Foundation, administrator of the annual National Book Awards, just announced that Rita Dove is the recipient of this year's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She is only the fourth poet to be so honored, after Gwendolyn Brooks in 1994, Adrienne Rich in 2006 and John Ashbery in 2011. She'll receive the prize during this year's National Book Awards ceremony in New York on November 15.

 

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Publications

Kiki Petrosino
Kevin Moffett
Kevin Moffett
Micheline Aharonian Marcom
Lisa Russ Spaar
Christopher Tilghman
Bruce Holsinger
Jahan Ramazani
Micheline Aharonian Marcom
Brian Teare
Brian Teare
Brian Teare
Brian Teare
Kiki Petrosino
Kiki Petrosino
Writing Communities
Stephen Parks
The Brick House
Micheline Aharonian Marcom
A Brief History of Yes
Micheline Aharonian Marcom
The Mirror in the Well
Micheline Aharonian Marcom
Draining the Sea
Micheline Aharonian Marcom
The Daydreaming Boy
Micheline Aharonian Marcom
Three Apples Fell From Heaven
Micheline Aharonian Marcom
Victorian Connections
Jerome McGann
Air Heart Sermons
Jerome McGann
Don Juan in Context
Jerome McGann
Publication icon
Jerome McGann
Hothead: A Poem
Stephen Cushman
Roads of the Heart
Christopher Tilghman
Stauffer
Andrew Stauffer
The Textual Condition
Jerome McGann
Byron and Romanticism
Jerome McGann
Petronius’ Satyrica
J. Daniel Kinney
Cellar
Lisa Russ Spaar
Kneeling on Rice
Elizabeth Denton
Selected Poems
Rita Dove
The Craft of Argument
Jon D'Errico
Blue Pajamas
Stephen Cushman
Cussing Lesson
Stephen Cushman
Riffraff
Stephen Cushman
American Smooth
Rita Dove
The Rape of the Lock
Cynthia Wall
Mason's Retreat
Christopher Tilghman
Best New Poets 2010
James (Jeb) Livingood
The Poet's World
Rita Dove
Museum
Rita Dove
Book icon
Lisa Russ Spaar
The Way People Run
Christopher Tilghman
Robert Browning's Poetry
Andrew Stauffer
Blue Venus
Lisa Russ Spaar
Glass Town
Lisa Russ Spaar
Rethinking Tragedy
Rita Felski
Sonata Mulattica
Rita Dove
Fifth Sunday
Rita Dove
Thomas and Beulah
Rita Dove
Mother Love
Rita Dove
Satin Cash
Lisa Russ Spaar
A Transnational Poetics
Jahan Ramazani
Modernism
Michael Levenson
Vanitas, Rough
Lisa Russ Spaar
Grace Notes
Rita Dove
Why Read?
Mark Edmundson
In a Father's Place
Christopher Tilghman
The Right-Hand Shore
Christopher Tilghman
Heart Island
Stephen Cushman
Book icon
Jerome McGann
Byron and Wordsworth
Jerome McGann
The Invention Tree
Jerome McGann
Torn Sky
Debra Nystrom
Bad River Road
Debra Nystrom
A Burnable Book
Bruce Holsinger
The Invention of Fire
Bruce Holsinger
The Red List
Stephen Cushman
Orexia: Poems
Lisa Russ Spaar
This Thing Called the World
Debjani Ganguly
Uses of Literature
Rita Felski
Nine Island
Jane Alison
A Quarter Turn
Debra Nystrom

Events

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