“Letters of the New York School,” panel at the American Literature Association conference, Boston (May 25, 2013)

If you’re interested to see the kind of scholarly work being done on poets of the New York School lately, check out the panel that the “New York School Society” hosted at this year’s American Literature Association Conference in Boston this past weekend.  (The New York School Society organizes a panel for each year’s ALA conference).  The topic was “Letters of the New York School,” and it focused on the importance of correspondence, the epistolary form, and collaboration for this group of poets.

Here are the details:

Letters of the New York School

Organized by the New York School Society
Chair: Benjamin Lee, University of Tennessee
1. “Ashbery’s 1948 Letters to Koch,” Luke Carson, University of Victoria
2. “’French telegra. # # # # # # # # # # # # # #’: Ashbery’s Letters from Paris,” Ellen Levy, Pratt Institute
3. “’So very Nest’: Short Distance, Long Distance, and Matters of Taste in Ashbery and Schuyler’s A Nest of Ninnies,” Jenni Quilter, New York University
4. “Letters as Art Objects: Frank O’Hara and Joe Brainard,” Joshua Schneiderman, CUNY

Also of interest at the ALA  (and also, coincidentally, about letters) was Gillian White’s paper on Bernadette Mayer and Wallace Stevens:

“Pleasing Others in Letters: Bernadette Mayer’s Identification with Epistolary Wallace Stevens,” Gillian White, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor