Programme of Events

Please note: we hope to include a talk from Colin Simms in the schedule and will confirm details soon

“With sleights learned from others”: Basil Bunting and Friends

St. John’s College, Durham

July 4-5, 2012

DAY ONE: Wednesday, July 4

11.00 - 11.30

Arrival and Registration: Foyer – St. John’s College

11.30 - 11.45            

Welcome Address (Leech Hall): Stephen Regan (Professor of English, Durham University)

11.45 - 1.15  

Session 1, Plenary Lecture: (Leech Hall) Harriet Tarlo (Sheffield Hallam); “Consider/ the alliance: Basil Bunting, Lorine Niedecker, Richard Caddel and the growth of British modernist environmental poetics.”

1.15 - 2.15    

Light Lunch, Haughton Dining Room, St. John’s College

2.15 - 3.45 Panels

            Session 2-A: Bunting and Translation (Tristram Room)

Chair: Annabel Haynes

1.     Charlotte Estrade (Université du Maine), “Echoes of Catullus and Horace in Basil Bunting and Ezra Pound”

2.     Dirceu Villa, (Universidade de São Paulo “Basil Bunting in Brazil”

3.     Michael Zand (Roehampton University), “‘Something Old, Something New…”: Basil Bunting, Omar Pound and the Re-orientation of Poetic Translation”

Session 2-B: Sources and Shared Settings (Linton Room)

Chair: John Clegg

1.     Alex Pestell (Sussex University), “‘A very clouded sentence’: Basil Bunting and William Carlos Williams"

2.     Nicoletta Asciuto (Durham University), “A Japan of the mind: Basil Bunting's modernist adaptation of Chomei's Hojoki”

3.     Philip Sidney (Cambridge University), “Cupboard-glacier, crevasse-telephone: Towards a Cold Modernism in W.H. Auden and W.S. Graham"

3.45 - 4.00     Break

4.00 - 5.15    

Session 3, Plenary Lecture: (Leech Hall) Don Share (Poetry Magazine, Chicago), Annual Basil Bunting Lecture: “Bunting’s Persia” – with an introductory reading from Samira El-Janbey. Chair: Jason Harding

5.15 - 6.00       

Wine and nibbles, Haughton Dining Room, St. John’s College

6.00 - 7.30       

Poetry Reading (Williams Library, St. Chad’s College):

Tom Pickard; Tony Lopez; Amy Evans;

Dinner – Please join us at El Coto or feel free to make your own arrangements.

DAY TWO: Thursday, July 5

9.30-11.00     Panels

Session 4-A: Perspectives (Tristram Room)

Chair: Matthew Griffiths

1.     Alex Niven (St. John’s College, Oxford), “One generation | I saddened myself with idealistic philosophies”: Bunting’s crux in the thirties.

2.     Alex Howard (Sussex University), “‘Who needs enemies when you’ve got Ezra?’:  Pound, the Square $ Series, and the strange case of the Far-Right vortex surrounding Basil Bunting’s Poems: 1950.”

3.     James Brookes, "Geoffrey Hill, Toby Martinez De Las Rivas and the poetics of place."

Session 4-B: Texts, Contexts and Inter-texts (Linton Room)

Chair: Jack Baker

1.     Richard Parker (Gaziantep University), “Bunting, Zukofsky and Briggflatts”

2.     Louise Chamberlain (Nottingham University), “‘Then is Now’: Basil Bunting and Tom Pickard”

3.     Samuel Rogers (Bangor University), “The long, modernist poem in Britain: contextualising written identity in Briggflatts”

11.00-11.30     Refreshments

11.30-13.00     

Poetry Reading (Leech Hall):

Harriet Tarlo; Rory Waterman; Michael Zand; Dez Mendoza; Julian Stannard

13.00 - 14.15   Light Lunch, Haughton Dining Room, St. John’s College

14.15 - 15.30   

Film (Leech Hall): Tom Pickard, “Birmingham is What I Think With”

15.30 - 15.45   Break

15.45 - 17.15   

Session 5, Plenary Panel: Connections and Legacies (Leech Hall)

Chair: Tony Lopez

1.     Bradford Haas (Washington Adventist University), “‘O Goodly Bull, release your rapture’: The Ecliptic as a wellspring for Briggflatts”

2.     Annabel Haynes (Durham University), “Useful Work: Bunting and William Morris”

4.     Julian Stannard (University of Winchester), “Chomei at Toyama: Redaction and Prefiguration”

Closing remarks

End of Conference

Friday, July 6: Briggflatts Excursion

09.20  Meet coach on Old Elvet street, to depart at 9:30

11.10  Arrive at Briggflatts, light refreshments

11.30 - 12.15 Guided tour of Briggflatts Meeting House

12.15 - 13.15 Basil Bunting poetry reading (John Rice, John Clegg, Matthew Griffiths)

13.15 - 15.00 Picnic lunch (with free time to explore or have a ruminative drink)

15.15  Coach returns to Durham

16.50  Arrive in Durham