ENGLISH

Jefferson Holdridge

• Northern Irish Poetry Project
  Awarded $35,000 for the period 8/1/07–12/31/08
  Source: National Endowment for the Arts

Wake Forest University Press will publish a volume of Northern Irish poetry.

• WFU Series of Irish Poetry, Volume 2
  Awarded $8,000 for the period 1/1/06 to 12/31/07
  Source: National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)

Wake Forest University Press publishes representative anthologies meant to introduce a number of contemporary Irish poets whose work has not appeared widely in North America. The inaugural volume featured Harry Clifton, Dennis O'Driscoll, David Wheatley, Sinéad Morrissey, and Caitríona O'Reilly. From the burgeoning economic realities of the “Celtic Tiger” to the burden of religious and political realignment, from urban scenes to historical landscapes, these poets sensitively record the effects of writing in a dramatically shifting society. However, they do not write solely from historical or social contexts but also out of psychological compulsions or mythic modes. Whatever the subject, their writing shows an awareness of the formal traditions and tensions of Irish poetry.

Connor O’Callaghan

• Visit by Poet Adam Zagajewski to Wake Forest University
  Awarded $1,200 for the period 1/31/007 to 2/14/07
  Source: North Carolina Humanities Council

  Hosted by the WFU Dillon Johnston Writers Reading Series, Zagajewski is one of the most well-known and highly regarded contemporary European poets, His work was described in the New York Times as ”luminous and searching… imbued with a deep engagement with history, art, and life,” and critic Dennis O’Driscoll called him “a world-class writer, a Nobel laureate-in-waiting.” His collections in English include Mysticism for Beginners (1997) and Without End: New and Selected Poems (2002). His poem, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” was carried on the back cover of the New Yorker in response to the 9/11 attacks.

  Zagajewski’s work is both dazzlingly current and historically aware: he writes about exile, dissidence, and political friction with insights gleaned from negotiating the constraints of the Polish Communist regime for much of his adult life. His work is also fragile, tender, and open to wonder. He writes, “I will never be someone who writes only about birdsong – though I admire birdsong highly, but not enough to withdraw from the historical world, for the historical world is fascinating.”

• Poetry Reading by Devin Johnston at Wake Forest University
  Awarded $960 for the period 08/18/06 to 09/26/06
  Source: North Carolina Humanities Council

  Winston-Salem native Devin Johnston has published two books of poetry, Aversions (Omnidawn, 2004) and Telepathy (Paper Bark, 2001), as well as a book of criticism, Precipitations: Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice (Wesleyan UP, 2002). He currently teaches at St. Louis University. Funds supported a free public reading from his work, hosted by the Dillon Johnston Writer Reading Series at Wake Forest.

• Dillon Johnston Writer’s Reading Series
  Awarded $1,200 for the period 1/01/06 to 12/31/06
  Source: North Carolina Humanities Council

  Funds will support a visit and free public reading at Wake Forest by the poet Harryette Mullen as part of the Dillon Johnston Writers Reading Series. Born in Alabama, Mullen grew up in Texas, the daughter of teachers, and the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Baptist ministers in the still-segregated South. While completing a BA in English at the University of Texas at Austin, she began writing, participating in the burgeoning black arts movement in the 1970s. She received a PhD from the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California at Santa Cruz and teaches African-American literature and creative writing at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her works include five poetry collections; most recently, Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California Press, 2002). She has also published a critical study, Gender, Subjectivity, and Slave Narratives (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Of her latest collection, Oyster Boy Review noted: Sleeping with the Dictionary contains more than enough light, heat and sheer pleasure to bring Harryette Mullen the attention she so richly deserves”; and according to African American Review, “Sleeping with the Dictionary is an important book. Timely in its concerns, brilliantly idiosyncratic yet stylishly ground-breaking, this is a triumphant performance by Harryette Mullen.”

Eric Wilson
The Occult Current: A Romantic Poetics of Electricity
Awarded a residential fellowship for the period 2003-2004
Source: National Humanities Center

Associate Professor of English Eric G. Wilson is among 42 scholars to win a National Humanities Center Residential Fellowship for 2003-2004. The award provides financial support and a stimulating environment for the best new work in the humanities at the center in Research Triangle Park. Dr. Wilson will work on his new book, .The Occult Current: A Romantic Poetics of Electricity. It argues that Coleridge and other British and American Romantic writers who responded to him—including Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Walt Whitman—combined alchemical speculation and the science of electromagnetism to inspire an ecological vision and a corresponding naturalist poetics. The study examines the neglected alchemical and scientific subtexts of these writers’ literary works, leading to a wider theory relating human consciousness and natural processes, words and things, and magic and science.