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Queer Kinship among the Stars: H.D., Silvia Dobson, and Astrology
Sep 18, 2024
In the introduction to her 500-page unpublished manuscript, A Mirror for a Star, A Star for a Mirror, held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the writer, teacher, astrologer, farmer, and herbalist Silvia Dobson recounts her first correspondence with H.D. in 1933—a “rapturous” fan letter sent to a poet whom she did not know was “a man or a woman? Alive or dead?”
Editing Willa Cather’s Letters for Digital Publication: A Dialogue
Sep 12, 2024
Melissa Homestead and Emily Rau have spent the past decade collaborating with Andrew Jewell and a team at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to create the Complete Letters of Willa Cather . With 2,800 letters published at the time of this writing, the Complete Letters is an ongoing digital scholarly edition of all known letters written by American author Willa Cather. The edition features full transcriptions of the letters,...
Woman with a Movie Camera: Marie Menken’s Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945)
Aug 8, 2024
As I watched Marie Menken’s short film, Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945)—screened as part of an exhibit at the Noguchi Museum earlier this year—I found myself thinking about Gertrude Stein. Specifically, I recalled the letter Stein wrote to Samuel Steward in 1940, thanking him for a gift he had sent her and Alice B. Toklas: a countertop stand mixer...
Queer “Orientations” as Counterblast Manifesto
May 16, 2024
When Alice Oswald delivered her final lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2023, she (once again) made new the modernist manifesto. Counterblast! (a manifesto for poetry) launches the futurists on a rocket ship back to Homer via stanzas containing questions about how we come to sense each other in a vortex, since “after all humans are dark inland pools full of anguish and panic-stricken love.” As an...