BOOK NEWS: Centennial edition of Robinson Jeffers poems in wide format

Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems, Centennial Edition

By Robinson Jeffers
Foreword by Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts, Afterword by Tim Hunt 

Tor House Press, 2025

https://www.torhouse.org/tor-house-press/p/the-echo-vase-7drbh

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), a contemporary of Pound and Eliot, was in the 1920s and 1930s viewed as one of the most significant American poets. His explorations of narrative poetry and his long verse line contributed to several of the major New Critics dismissing his work when the classroom canon was initially formulated in the 1940s and 1950s, but his rejection of Imperialism, critique of modern mass society, and advocacy for environmental matters are leading to renewed interest in his work. A new edition of Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems (1925), the collection that initially made his reputation, attempts to re-present his work in a manner that invites additional reappraisal of his craft and artistry.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

The pages of this centennial edition of Roan Stallion are landscape rather than portrait so that none of the long verse lines are doubled back because of the right margin. Also, the edition uses the corrected punctuation from The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (Stanford UP) and thus removes the additional layer of punctuation the typesetters added when the book was first published. These adjustments provide a clearer record of the momentum, modulations, and inflections of the poetry. 

“The publication of the Roan Stallion/Tamar volume a century ago was a major event in American letters. It not only announced the arrival of a major poet, and a poet from the west far from, the eastern establishment; it also proclaimed and enacted a poetics antithetical to the modernist poetics of Pound and Williams. A different sense of poetic form, but also, more essentially, a different sense of the sources and ends of poetry. The wide format of William Everson’s hand press volume of Granite and Cypress some years ago was a revelation because it released Jeffers’s free verse line to run with full sweep and force without line-breaks. This centennial edition of Jeffers’s breakthrough volume gives us the poems at last in their full form.” —Albert Gelpi

“One can't fully understand the force and originality of Robinson Jeffers’s poetry until one sees his lines laid out exactly as they were written without the line breaks made necessary by commercial formats. I remember the startling clarity I experienced when I saw William Everson's Granite and Cypress. The new Tor House Press edition of Roan Stallion, Tamar & Other Poems makes it possible to see (as well as hear) the strange, tragic music that made Jeffers famous. I can't think of a better way to celebrate the centennial of Roan Stallion than to allow us to see the texts, clear and unbent, for the first time.” —Dana Gioia 

“After The Waste Land and the early Cantos of Pound, or perhaps Marianne Moore’s Poems, Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems was the second or third shock of modernist aesthetics to transform American poetry. This edition is the perfect way to recover that shock and its energy for a new generation of readers.” —Robert Hass

 

As a resource for instructors, Jeffers's first four trade collections are now available as PDFs from the Robinson Jeffers Association at https://robinsonjeffersassociation.org/his-writing/poetry/ 

Deadlines approaching for two JML Calls for Papers

 DEADLINE: 25 September 2020

Underrepresented Women's Voices in Modern Literature (conference session)

 

Call for Papers

JML session for NeMLA annual convention, March 11-14, 2021

Philadelphia, PA (hybrid format)

http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention.html

The Northeastern Modern Language Association convention session, led by the editorial board of the Journal of Modern Literature, will focus on reading under-represented women's voices in light of the Me-Too Movement.  For the last several years, the Me-Too Movement has worked to give voice to women and all sexually disenfranchised persons a platform to speak their trauma.  While this movement of revolution and healing has been a great development of the twenty-first century, women have been using writing as both a means of working through their own traumas and giving a space of catharsis to those who have no such opportunity.  The session will explore the political, social, economic and cultural positions of women creating and women featured in Modernist literature, with particular attention to the ways in which the disenfranchised voice uses writing to gain political and social power.  Presentations will focus the positions and reactions of women characters and authors faced with a lack of sexual autonomy.  There will be special attention paid, in this session, to under-represented groups of women, including but not limited to, women of color, women of non-binary orientation, and immigrant women.

Proposals--abstracts for a 15-minute conference presentation--should be sent to JML advisory editor Gina MacKenzie at gmackenzie@holyfamily.edu by 25 September 2020.

 DEADLINE: 15 October 2020

1922 and After: A Centenary of Modernism and World Literature (JML special cluster)

Drawing upon anthropological, psychological, and philosophical knowledge as well as personal experiences, the high modernists wrote their now-famous classics, including The Waste Land, Ulysses, Jacob's Room, among many others, in the expanded context of a post-War generation facing the larger world via the influences upon them and the influences they and their works would create. These interrelationships among European, British, and American modernism (so-called international modernism), and the emergence of World Literature, provide the framework for the issue. 

How does 1922 speak to us today, after a century of ever-increasing globalization, regarding "literature in a globalized world," the understanding of the "comparative," Global South studies, the emergence and variation of World Literature? What does it achieve proleptically in a kind of analytic arc that takes the entire century into its consciousness and resets its existence within certain mores and modes of contemporary thinking and discourses? How does 1922 speak into our times and discourses rather than speak back? How do we re-consider history, tradition, notion of the contemporary, and literature today, a hundred years hence? 1922 has its own world-forming potentials –- the potencies to "world" radical ways of thinking and understanding within the disciplinary and epistemic complexities of 2022. Articles tracing this complex literary dialogue and genealogy via close attention to important but possibly neglected texts, expanding, re-aligning, or critiquing them, defines the broad outlines of the issue.  

Submissions should conform to MLA 8th edition style for documentation and manuscript formatting, and should include a 100-150 word abstract and 3-5 keywords. Submissions must be under 9,000 words for the entire submission package, including the abstract, notes, and works cited. No simultaneous submissions or previously published material. 

Submit manuscripts as a Word or RTF attachment to special coordinator Ranjan Ghosh at weransum@yahoo.co.in by 15 October 2020.

Call for Papers for "1922 and After: A Centenary of Modernism and World Literature"

Drawing upon anthropological, psychological, and philosophical knowledge as well as personal experiences, the high modernists wrote their now-famous classics, including The Waste Land, Ulysses, Jacob's Room, among many others, in the expanded context of a post-War generation facing the larger world via the influences upon them and the influences they and their works would create. These interrelationships among European, British, and American modernism (so-called international modernism), and the emergence of World Literature, provide the framework for the issue. 

How does 1922 speak to us today, after a century of ever-increasing globalization, regarding "literature in a globalized world," the understanding of the "comparative," Global South studies, the emergence and variation of World Literature? What does it achieve proleptically in a kind of analytic arc that takes the entire century into its consciousness and resets its existence within certain mores and modes of contemporary thinking and discourses? How does 1922 speak into our times and discourses rather than speak back? How do we re-consider history, tradition, notion of the contemporary, and literature today, a hundred years hence? 1922 has its own world-forming potentials –- the potencies to "world" radical ways of thinking and understanding within the disciplinary and epistemic complexities of 2022. Articles tracing this complex literary dialogue and genealogy via close attention to important but possibly neglected texts, expanding, re-aligning, or critiquing them, defines the broad outlines of the issue.  

Submissions should conform to MLA 8th edition style for documentation and manuscript formatting, and should include a 100-150 word abstract and 3-5 keywords. Submissions must be under 9,000 words for the entire submission package, including the abstract, notes, and works cited. No simultaneous submissions or previously published material. 

Deadline: October 15, 2020. 

Submit manuscripts as a Word or RTF attachment to special coordinator Ranjan Ghosh at weransum@yahoo.co.in.