Message from the President ~ January 2021

 
“All things are full of gods,” said Thales twenty-five hundred years ago. Whatever he may have meant by that, I thought of his claim recently when I encountered the name of a Roman deity previously unknown to me, or long forgotten: Cardea, goddess of hinges. Yes, hinges. Cardea was a beautiful nymph of the wilderness when Janus spotted her and, as usually happens in such tales, fell immediately in love. In gratitude for surrendering to his will, Janus gave Cardea power over doorways—more specifically, over the dowel-like pivot hinges at the top and bottom of a door that allowed it to swing open and closed. This was a gift and a power only he could bestow, because Janus—the gatekeeper-god with two faces, one looking forward and the other back—presided over the beginning and end of things, over entries and exits, thresholds, and transitions. The first moment in every day belonged to him, as did the first day of every month, and the first month of every year: January. In accepting Janus’ gift, which marked a major change in life for her, Cardea became the defender of boundaries, the guardian of civil and domestic spaces, and the special protector of children within the home. Words like “cardiology” and “cardinal” derive from her, for she was at the heart of things, central to them, fundamental. Wherever something turned on something else—not just doors, but anything axial, such as the earth on its poles, or the heavens around the north star—she was there. Pivotal moments in a person’s or a nation’s life were a concern of hers as well.
 
Perhaps Cardea is with us still, or if not her specifically, then the numinous power she represents—for if ever there was a pivotal moment in American history, the one we are in right now, this very month of January, would qualify. Will Covid-19 be conquered? Will the Black Lives Matter movement make a difference? Can the environment be saved? Are women free and equal, along with all people generally, no matter who they are and how they choose to live? Is America a democratic country? Will the economy survive? With 2020 behind us, the year in which all these issues came to the fore, and 2021 just now underway, we’ll find out soon enough. One thing is certain: forces beyond anyone’s control have been unleashed—from the magnified fury of natural events (fires, hurricanes, pandemics) to the anger erupting in the halls of Congress and on America’s streets. A revolution of some sort is in the air.
 
Amidst all this, the Robinson Jeffers Association managed to fulfill its mission. Looking back at the past year, we see a number of new names added to our membership list (please renew your membership, if you haven’t done so already); guided by editors Jim Baird and Whitney Hoth, we published two issues of Jeffers Studies; Tim Hunt and Mick McAllister overhauled our website; and with the help of Jessica Hunt, we presented two well-attended webinars. As we look forward to the year ahead, we hope to maintain our momentum with two more issues of Jeffers Studies (contributions welcome), additions to our website, and a series of thought-provoking webinars. We also hope to host an October conference in Carmel, held in conjunction with the Tor House Foundation, provided it is safe to meet at that time. A talented team of officers is committed to helping us achieve our goals: president-elect Aaron Yoshinobu, executive director Brett Colasacco, and advisory board members Gere diZerega, Tim Hunt, and Robert Zaller.
 
Our next webinar is set for later this month—Thursday, January 28, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. Pacific time. Tim Hunt will moderate a panel discussion of three poems by Jeffers that directly address political issues: “Shine, Perishing Republic,” “Shine, Republic,” and “Shine, Empire.”  Participants include Shelley Alden Brooks, Whitney Hoth, and Robert Zaller. Additional information about the program will follow in a separate announcement.
 
The three poems selected for the webinar were published in 1925, 1935, and 1941 respectively—all major moments in American and world history. Jeffers regarded the entire period in which he lived as a turning point, or breaking point, for civilization. “I believe that we live about the summit of the wave of this age,” he says in the introduction to At the Birth of an Age (published in Solstice, the book that contains “Shine, Republic”), “and hence can see it more objectively, looking down toward the troughs on both sides.” However frightening it might be to live through a period of tumultuous change, the process—whether seen as rising and falling, opening and closing, or beginning and ending—is natural and, for Jeffers, divine. “All things are full of God,” he says in “De Rerum Virtute,” affirming Thales’ basic principle while giving it a pantheistic spin: “Winter and summer, day and night, war and peace are God.” Jeffers said the same thing in different ways throughout his career, but never more eloquently than in the closing lines of “Point Pinos and Point Lobos”: “For the essence and the end / Of his labor is beauty, for goodness and evil are two things and still variant, but the quality of life as of death and of light / As of darkness is one, one beauty, the rhythm of that Wheel, and who can behold it is happy and will praise it to the people.”

James Karman
Emeritus Professor
Department of English
Department of Comparative Religion and Humanities
California State University, Chico
 


News from Jeffers Country
 
RJA welcomes new members BRUCE and DEBBIE GRELLE (Chico, CA), TONY and SONDRA KARMAN (Chicago, IL), ADAM KLINKER (Genoa, NE), TRIFIN ROULE (Silver Spring, MD), and JOSÉ SENTMANAT (Riverside, CA).
 
ENRIQUE MARTINEZ CELAYA, Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts at the University of Southern California, plans to create a series of Jeffers-inspired paintings at Tor House as soon as travel allows. Celaya has written about Jeffers in Collected Writings and Interviews, 2010–2017 (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) and other works: nebraskapress.unl.edu/search/?keyword=Celaya. See also martinezcelaya.com.
 
Poet, cowboy, Jeffers scholar, and Old Norse professor JACKSON CRAWFORD has attracted a large following on YouTube. A selection of his videos, a few of which deal with Jeffers, can be accessed through his website (scroll down to “Miscellaneous”): jacksonwcrawford.com.
 
RJA member ED CROCKER noticed a detail on the cover of the first edition of Thurso’s Landing: a hammer and sickle beneath the gilt illustration of a crouching woman, made to look like the artist’s initials. Although the name of the artist responsible for the cover design is not known for certain, some evidence points to Franz Felix (1892–1967). Thurso’s Landing was published in 1932, when admiration for the Soviet Union was high. 
 
GENEVA GANO published “The Poetry of Ecological Witness: Robinson Jeffers and Camille T. Dungy” in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Vol. 27, Iss. 3 (2020): academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isaa088/5918080.
 
PETR KOPECKY contributed a chapter titled “Czeching American Nature Images in the Work of Robinson Jeffers and John Steinbeck” to Framing the Environmental Humanities, edited by Hannes Bergthaller and Peter Bjerre Mortensen (Brill, 2018): brill.com/view/title/36037.
 
Jeffers is included in a ten-disc set of audio CDs titled The Poets’ Collection: Englischsprachige Lyrik im Originalton und in deutscher Übersetzung [The Poets’ Collection: English-Language Poetry in the Original Language and in German Translation], edited by Christiane Collorio and Michael Krüger (der Höverlag / Random House, 2018): randomhouse.de/Hoerbuch/The-Poets-Collection/Christiane-Collorio/der-Hoerverlag/e496225.rhd.
 
MARIA POPOVA included an article on Jeffers in her popular Brainpicking newsletter. See “Robinson Jeffers on Moral Beauty, the Interconnectedness of the Universe, and the Key to Peace of Mind”: brainpickings.org/2019/06/03/robinson-jeffers-sister-mary-james-power.
 
 
Recently completed PhD dissertations and MA theses:
 
FRÉDÉRIC POUPON, Trois poètes du sauvage: Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder et Kenneth White, thèse de doctorat, Littératures française, francophonees et comparée, Université Bordeaux Montaigne, 2020.
 
KATHARINE BUBEL, Edge Effects: Poetry, Place and Spiritual Practices, University of Victoria, 2018.  Bubel’s PhD dissertation “focusses on the intersection of the environmental and religious imaginations in the work of five West Coast poets: Robinson Jeffers, Theodore Roethke, Robert Hass, Denise Levertov, and Jan Zwicky.” Bubel also wrote the Jeffers entry for The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, edited by Stephen Ross (Routledge, 2016).
 
JOSHUA D. BARTEE, Reality and Nature in Robinson Jeffers, PhD dissertation, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2017. In this study of the words Jeffers uses to communicate his thoughts, Bartee contends that Jeffers’ “poetry is ecological, but it is also cosmological, and with this equation Jeffers created some of the most profoundly wild and spiritual language of the Modernist era.”
 
MARK A. HUTTON, “Only the Earth Remains: Exploring the Machine in Selected Lyric Poetry of Robinson Jeffers,” MA thesis, East Tennessee State University, 2017.
 
CHRISTINA M. BERTRAND, “Place, Space, and the Not-Self: A Study in Ecopoetics,” MA thesis, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2017.
 
 
Books containing chapters about or extended references to Jeffers:  
 
Robyn Creswell, City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut (Princeton University Press, 2019): press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691182186/city-of-beginnings.
 
Gouven Le Brech, Échappées océanes: sur les pas de Jean Grenier, Albert Camus, Fernando Pessoa, Llewelyn Powys, Nescio, Kenneth Rexroth, Robinson Jeffers et Jack Kerouac (Éditions du Petit pavé, 2018): petitpave.fr/petit-pave-echappees-oceanes-710.html.
 
David Mason, “To Humanize the Inhumanist” in Voices, Places: Essays (Paul Dry Books, 2018): pauldrybooks.com/products/voices-places?_pos=5&_sid=c11e54177&_ss=r.
 
Peter O’Leary, “Robinson Jeffers: The Man from Whom God Hid Everything” in Thick and Dazzling Darkness: Religious Poetry in a Secular Age (Columbia University Press, 2018): columbia.edu/book/thick-and-dazzling-darkness/9780231173308.
 
Joy A. Palmer-Cooper and David E. Cooper, editors, Key Thinkers on the Environment (Routledge, 2018): routledge.com/Key-Thinkers-on-the-Environment/Cooper-Cooper/p/book/9781138684737.
 
Peter Betjemann, “The Ecology of Desire: Coastal Poetics, Passion, and Environmental Consciousness” in Coastal Heritage and Cultural Resilience, edited by Lisa L. Price and Nemer E. Narchi (Springer, 2018): springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-99025-5.
 
Claudia Keelan, “A Hinge-History: Robinson Jeffers and Brenda Hillman,” Ecstatic Émigré: An Ethics of Practice (University of Michigan Press, 2018): press.umich.edu/9867982/ecstatic_emigre.
 
Leslie Williamson, Interior Portraits: At Home with Cultural Pioneers and Creative Mavericks: A California Design Pilgrimage (Rizzoli International, 2018): rizzoliusa.com/book/9780847861569.
 
 
Journal articles:
 
Julian Murphet, “Astonied: The Mineral Poetics of Robinson Jeffers, Hugh MacDiarmid, Francis Ponge and Muriel Rukeyser,” Textual Practice, Vol. 34, Iss. 9 (2020): tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0950236X.2020.1808298.
 
Pradip Mondal, “‘These Grand and Fatal Movements Toward Death’: Apocalyptic Visions in Robinson Jeffers’s Poetry,” Literary Criterion, Vol. 53, Iss. 1-2 (2018): printspublications.com/journal/the-literary-criterion.
 
Jarosław Zawadzki, “Robinson Jeffers’s Inhumanism vs. Tao’s Unconcern,” Studia Litteraria Universitatis lagellonicae Cracoviensis, Vol. 13, Iss. 4 (2018): ejournals.eu/Studia-Litteraria/2018/Volume-13-Issue-4.
 

Message from the President ~ September 2020

 

“September again.” These two words, from the opening section of Hungerfield, do not refer to the changing of the seasons, or to the turning wheel of time. They refer, rather, to the way life stopped for Jeffers when Una died, September 1, 1950. A year after his “awful loss,” grief was unassuaged. Even the beauty of Carmel was dimmed. “The gray grass, the gray sea” and the “ink-black trees” around Tor House reflected the “gray ashes” of his distress. By literally (or poetically) wrestling with Death in Hungerfield, however, Jeffers achieved a measure of peace. At the end of the poem, his gray despair has lifted, and he finds Una in the resplendence of the natural world. “You are earth and air,” he says; “you are in the beauty of the ocean / And the great streaming triumphs of sundown.” With eyes open once again, he could see Una “alive and well” everywhere, even in “the tender young grass rejoicing / When soft rain falls all night, and little rosy-fleeced clouds float on the dawn.” “I shall be with you presently,” Jeffers says in the last sentence of the poem—soon, that is, and always.
 
I was led to these reflections in the wake of our recent webinar, when Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts, Susan Shillinglaw, and I, led by Tim Hunt, discussed “The Purse-Seine.” In preparing for that discussion, I looked for net imagery in Jeffers’ poems and discovered that nets, webs, and traps pervade Jeffers’ work and provide a key to his world view. A very early reference can be found in “To Helen About Her Hair” from Flagons and Apples, where love-struck Jeffers, addressing Una as his archetypal “Helen,” describes the “splendor” of her “long, lovely, liquid, glorious” hair, and implores her to “comb it carefully, / For my soul is caught there, / Wound in the web of it.” And so it was, through all the halcyon and turbulent times to come—which might explain why Jeffers left Una’s hairbrush on her dresser after she died, as a lasting symbol of their bond.
 
Perhaps we can explore the nature of Robinson and Una’s creative partnership in a future webinar. Our first webinar appears to have been a success. Nearly a hundred people registered for the event, presented in partnership with the Tor House Foundation. A recording of the discussion can be accessed here. We are currently planning our second webinar, which will take place next month. Information about it will be provided soon.
 
The next issue of Jeffers Studies is nearing completion and should be ready for distribution before the end of the year. In an effort to expand the journal’s reach and to open it to as many voices as possible, we are hoping to commission at least two special issues, conceived and organized by guest editors. An invitation to participate in this program can be found here. Meanwhile, we welcome submissions for our regular issues. If you have an article ready for consideration, please send it to editor@robinsonjeffersassociation.org.
 
Tim Hunt has completed the initial phase of our website overhaul. Our existing website is still active, but we will soon be switching over to a new host. Once we do, we will introduce improvements to the user interface, along with some preliminary changes to the menu. We will then be ready to add content and upgrade the website’s appearance. If you would like to help with this endeavor, even if only to offer suggestions, please contact webeditor@robinsonjeffersassociation.org.
 
Our treasurer, Charlie Rodewald, is stepping down from his position later this fall. As a dependable officer of RJA, his presence (and dry wit) will be missed, but he leaves with our deepest gratitude for his years of cheerful, dedicated service.
 
The majority of Charlie’s responsibilities will be assumed by Brett Colasacco—our new, I am very pleased to announce, Executive Director. I will capitalize the title for now simply to emphasize the importance of the position, which has been vacant for nearly two years. Brett has been a member of the advisory board since 2018, so he brings a wealth of experience and enthusiasm to his new role. An example of Brett’s behind-the-scenes work is before you right now, for he prepared the electronic format of this message and handled distribution.
 
In normal years, a “Call for Papers” would be issued in September for our annual February conference. Because of ongoing uncertainty resulting from the coronavirus pandemic, however, this is not a normal year and the conference has been canceled. We still hope to partner with the Tor House Foundation for the 2021 Fall Festival.
 
After wrestling with Death in Hungerfield through a dark September years ago, Jeffers continued to think about his adversary for the rest of his life, not just with Una in mind, but himself as well—as such classic poems as “The Deer Lay Down Their Bones” and “Vulture” attest. Beyond Una and himself, he also reflected on death for others close to him, and in widening circles of concern—through poems like “The Shears,” “Passenger Pigeons,” “An Extinct Vertebrate,” “End of the World,” and “Epic Stars”—for all beings, and ultimately for everything that exists. In “De Rerum Virtute,” which begins with a Hamlet-like contemplation of a human skull, Jeffers turns attention, as he always does, toward the “the immense beauty of the world” and to “the transhuman intrinsic glory” of the cosmos as a whole, where light and dark, life and death, being and non-being, are seamlessly woven together. Whatever the universe is, Jeffers says in a late untitled poem, “It flows out of mystery into mystery: there is no beginning— / How could there be?—and no end—how could there be?” All we have is here and now.
 
James Karman
Emeritus Professor
Department of English
Department of Comparative Religion and Humanities
California State University, Chico

News ~ September 2020

News from Jeffers Country
 

Welcome new members BEN BOYCHUK (Running Springs, CA), BRUCE GRANT (Scottsdale, AZ), JESSICA HUNT (Baltimore, MD), FRANK TAKACS (Carmel, CA), ARLEEN TARANTINO (Carmel, CA), and ALICE YAMANISHI (Monterey, CA).
 
An important new book project is currently underway—The Point Alma Venus Manuscripts: Preliminary Versions of “The Women at Point Sur,” edited by Tim Hunt and Rob Kafka. Stanford University Press has a projected publication date of June 2021. In addition to transcriptions of four substantial fragments that predate The Women at Point Sur, the volume will contain an introduction, chronology, and critical afterword—all of which will shed new light on Jeffers’ maturation as a poet at a key moment in his career.
 
Congratulations to Geneva Gano, former president of RJA, who has just published The Little Art Colony and US Modernism: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). The book is described by the publisher as “the first to historicise and theorise the significance of the early twentieth-century little art colony as a uniquely modern social formation within a global network of modernist activity and production. Alongside a historical overview of the emergence of three critical sites of modernist activity—the little art colonies of Carmel, Provincetown and Taos—the book offers new critical readings of major authors associated with those places: Robinson Jeffers, Eugene O’Neill and D. H. Lawrence.” Click here to see the full publisher’s flyer, which includes a discount code for those interested in purchasing the book (or asking their library to do so).
 
Geneva also has an essay scheduled for publication in the autumn issue of ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment): “The Poetry of Ecological Witness: Robinson Jeffers and Camille T. Dungy.” Check ISLE’s website for an electronic version.
 
Michael Broomfield has added an important addendum to His Place for Story: Robinson Jeffers: A Descriptive Bibliography. On the Oak Knoll website, click “Author’s Addendum (PDF)” just below the description of the book and order number: oakknoll.com/pages/books/119716/michael-broomfield/his-place-for-story-robinson-jeffers-a-descriptive-bibliography.
 
The 2020 Robinson Jeffers Prize for Poetry, sponsored by the Tor House Foundation, was won by Jerl Surratt of Hudson, New York, for his poem “Twilight Time.” Judge Marie Howe also awarded Honorable Mentions to Joanne M. Clarkson, Lesléa Newman, Ellen Romano, and Jess Skyleson. The winning poems can be found at torhouse.org/prize.
 
Jeffers, H. D., and Eugene O’Neill are included in a discussion of Aeschylean drama in modern literature in an essay titled “Reception Theory, New Humanism, and T. S. Eliot” by Matthew Hiscock, published in Classical Receptions Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, July 2020, pp. 323–39: doi.org/10.1093/crj/clz033.
 
California’s Wild Coast, an updated edition of California’s Wild Edge (2015), a book of “poetry, prints, and history” by woodcut artist Tom Killion with poet Gary Snyder, has just been published by Heyday Books in Berkeley.
 
The September issue of Harper’s magazine contains a major article by University of Kentucky professor Erik Reece titled “Bright Power, Dark Peace: Robinson Jeffers and the Hope of Human Extinction.” The article can be accessed here:
harpers.org/archive/2020/09/bright-power-dark-peace-robinson-jeffers-tor-house.
 
The San Francisco Chronicle published a feature article on Jeffers by California journalist Scott Anderson in its Sunday, September 13, edition. The article is available on the Chronicle website: datebook.sfchronicle.com/books/tech-trends-and-a-captivating-destination-help-california-rediscover-its-greatest-nature-writer.
 
Because of the pandemic quarantine that was imposed in March, the Philadelphia Orchestra canceled the concert that was to include the premiere of Jessica Hunt’s Climb. A new concert, which puts Jessica in company with Mozart and Brahms (instead of Beethoven) is now scheduled for October 15: philorch.org/performances/our-season/events-and-tickets/fall-2020-season/axmozart-piano-concerto-no-14. When not teaching as a professor at the Peabody Institute, Jessica serves as RJA’s social media coordinator.
 
“A Big Sur Sojourn: Scouting the Rugged Sea-Meets-Landscape that Fired the Imagination of So Many Writers,” a story by Elliott Almond with photographs by Karl Mondon, was published in the Bay Area Mercury News, May 17, 2020: pressreader.com/usa/the-mercury-news/20200517/284288187216697.
 
A previously unrecorded review of Be Angry at the Sun surfaced recently. Written by A. M. Klein in 1942 and originally published in the Canadian Jewish Chronicle, the review is titled “Robinson Jeffers—Proto-Fascist?” Acknowledging Jeffers’ genius as a poet, Klein nevertheless wonders why he wrote about Hitler the way he did in “The Bowl of Blood” and other poems. The review is included in Klein’s Literary Essays and Reviews, edited by Usher Caplan and M. W. Steinberg (University of Toronto, 1987). It can also be found in the journal itself, available at Google News. See page 4 of the February 6, 1942 issue: news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2Q0AJrNhS-QC.