Hartford Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens

composite image: house, stevens, office
Welcome to the Hartford Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens web site. From 1916 until his death in 1955 Wallace Stevens lived with his wife and daughter in Hartford, where he wrote poetry and worked at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. Visitors will find selected poetry, a walking tour, event notices, an online discussion group and contemporary artwork inspired by Stevens, and other things of interest to Stevens fans.

11th Annual Wallace Stevens Memorial Poetry Reading
Richard Demming
Saturday, June 21, 2008 - 1 pm
Pond House, Elizabeth Park
Rose Festival Weekend
Asylum & Prospect, Hartford

Connecticut poets read at the Rose Festival in Hartford's Elizabeth Park, which was Stevens' neighborhood park. The reading takes place rain or shine. Admission is free.

45th Annual Wallace Stevens Program
Alice Fulton,
Tuesday April 22th, 2008, 8 pm
Greater Hartford Classical Magnet School, 85 Woodland Street, Hartford
Wednesday, Apirl 23, 8 pm
Konover Auditorium at UConn, Storrs

"Alice Fulton is not a safe poet; she's a daring, ambitious, and risk-taking one." So begins the Harvard Review's description of Fulton's most recent book, Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems. Fulton's previous book, Felt, was chosen by the Los Angeles Times as one of the Best Books of 2001 and as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. It also won the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress.Fulton's earlier books of poetry include Sensual Math, Powers of Congress, Palladium, and Dance Script with Electric Ballerina, and she has also authored a collection of prose, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry. Her work has also been adapted for musical and theatrical productions. Anthony Cornicello's...turns and turns into the night, a setting of four poems from Sensual Math, premiered at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2001, while William Bolcom's setting of Fulton's "How to Swing Those Obbligatos Around" was first performed by Marilyn Horne at Carnegie Hall's Centennial Celebration. Ms. Fulton has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Reviewers have delighted in her "broad range of interests" and her "continual and evolving sense of how to use the most seemingly insignificant details to illuminate the nuances of difficult moral ideas."

Sponsored with The Hartford Financial Services Group Inc.,
& The Hartford Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens

For more details and updates contact: vppelizzon@sbcglobal.net
See a list of poets who have read their work in the Wallace Stevens Program.

12th Annual Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash
James Longenbach
"An Examination of Wallace Stevens in a Time of War"
Saturday, October 6, 2007 6:30-10:00
Hartford Public Library
500 Main Street, Hartford CT 06103.

Ticket: $35 per person; send check payable to:
Hartford Public Library, 500 Main Street, Hartford CT 06103.
Or call to reserve tickets at the door: 860-695-6300.
Reception begins at 6:30. Wine, music, hors d'oeuvres. Birthday cake & champagne to follow the program.

Supported by The Connecticut Center for the Book at the Hartford Public Library
and the Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens.

Author and Playwright Beverly Coyle Explores Wallace Stevens’ Letters
Hartford Public Library’s Hartford History Center
Thursday, October 18, from 6:30 – 8:00 p.m.
See press release

Join Beverly Coyle for an evening exploration of the relationship between Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Wallace Stevens and writer and editor of the Cuban literary magazine “Origenes” José Rodríguez-Feo. Letters between the two men spanning the years 1944-54 provide an intimate look into the lives and thoughts of the older, more practical Stevens, writing from Hartford, and the much younger and dramatic Rodríguez-Feo, residing in Cuba. Presenter Beverly Coyle, author, playwright and member of Yale University’s Divinity School faculty, is co-editor of the book, Secretaries of the Moon, the Letters of Wallace Stevens and José Rodríguez-Feo.

Wallace Stevens Walk
The Walk will consist of 13 stone markers installed along the two miles Stevens walked from home to office. Each marker will have one stanza from "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." We have raised over $40K toward our goal of $80K. Five stones have now been installed: at the Classical Magnet School, Asylum Hill Congregational Church, Asylum and Woodland, and Westerley Terrace (2). We need your help to complete the project. We are deeply appreciative to the donors who are making this project happen! If you would like to make a contribution, please contact James Finnegan.

Wallace Stevens Scholarship
This $1000 prize is awarded yearly to a Hartford high school student(s) who exhibits exemplary ability as a poet.

Congratutlations to Carmen Blatt for winning the 2007 Wallace Stevens Scholarship!

Recordings
Stevens reads "Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself."
(Harvard U Press recording 10/8/54; 1.9 Mb AIFF; duration 1:33)
Stevens reads "The Idea of Order at Key West," "The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain," "Vacancy in the Park" and "To an Old Philosopher in Rome." (Harper Audio)

101 Early Wallace Stevens Poems on Free Audio -- Anecdote of the Jar, The Emperor of Ice Cream, Peter Quince at the Clavier, Sunday Morning, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, and many others in the public domain, recorded for LibriVox by Alan Drake. Download as podcast.

Voices and Visions
"A video instructional series on American poetry for college and high school classrooms and adult learners; 13 one-hour video programs and coordinated books. . . Stevens's flamboyant verbal technique and philosophical vision of American life are beautifully illustrated by archival footage." Now free online.

Wallace Stevens on camera? There are no known moving images of Wallace Stevens.

Online discussion since 1997
You are invited to join this decade-long discussion of Stevens' life and poetry. You may subscribe or visit the list, which is hosted by Wesleyan University. Subscribers and guests may search the list archive for topics of interest.

Enemies
As our name implies, there were more than a few people who knew Stevens and couldn't stand him. Readers of Peter Brazeau's oral biography, "Parts of a World, Wallace Stevens Remembered," will be interested in the memo Ivan Daugherty, an attorney who worked for Stevens, wrote to the file as record of his difficulties with his boss. This typescript chronicles incidents that occured on January 3, 1947, in the office, the Canoe Club and in the car, in which Stevens and Daugherty strongly disagree. Ivan Daugherty's memo.