NBCC member Greg Gerke recently sent Critical Mass the following dispatch:
Wallace Stevens Week at Bigother.com was a great success, with record numbers of views and more important, greater exposure for one of our most treasured writers. Some highlights included interviews with two Stevens experts—James Longenbach, who wrote a critical study, The Plain Sense of Things, as well as Eleanor Cook, who wrote The Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens.
Four Stevens poems were looked at in detail. “Anecdote of the Jar” by Sam Rasnake, “The Snow Man” by John Madera, “Metaphor as Degeneration” by Jamie Iredell, and “Motive for Metaphor” by me.
In addition there were essays by John Domini, Christopher Higgs, W.F. Lantry, Douglas Manson and Curtis White (reprinted), as well as words by James Robison and Amber Sparks, who wrote about Stevens’s work as an insurance executive in balance with his life as poet.
Robert Lopez, Ken Sparling, William Walsh, W.F. Lantry, and Tiff Holland contributed poems in tribute to Stevens.
I would like to thank the distinguished group of writers and poets who took time to contribute. Founder and editor of BigOther John Madera plans to do more weeks dedicated to a single author, with possible future candidates being Emily Dickinson and James Joyce.