“Dividing and waning”: Openness and Incompleteness in the Poetic life of William Carlos Williams

Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany
7 June – 9 June 2007

Richard Gray suggests that on reading Williams’s 1927 poem “Young Sycamore” the reader is left with “feelings of openness and incompleteness utterly appropriate in a world governed by change.” The forthcoming conference, sponsored by the William Carlos Williams Society, and hosted by the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, aims to explore how qualities of “openness and incompleteness” in Williams’s work and thought help breakdown the image of a poet concerned exclusively with his American locale. The conference thus invites papers on a broad range of topics which may include, for example, the openness inherent in Williams’s conception of knowledge, the importance to him of foreign traditions of art and writing, his impact on poetry outside America.

The main conference will take place on Friday and Saturday, with a reception and guest speaker to open procedings on Thursday evening. The guest speaker for this year’s conference will be August Kleinzahler, who will present a paper and talk about the importance of Williams to his own poetry.

Please send a proposal of 200 words outlining both the aims of your paper and how it fits in with the general rubric of the conference. A short CV would also be appreciated. Proposals should be sent to Ian Copestake at the following address no later than April 1st 2007: copestake@rz.uni-frankfurt.de