“This song is for my foe, / the clean-shaven, gray-suited, gray patron / of Hartford, the emperor of whiteness / blue as a body made of snow.” Those four lines of dedication close “Snow for Wallace Stevens” (2009) by the African American poet Terrance Hayes—an ambivalent ode, blending wintry detachment and “love without / forgiveness,” “lost faith” and faith regained. Hayes is far from the only poet of color, from the United States or elsewhere, to write a poem after or against Stevens. To list only a few poems that mention Stevens by name: Hayes’s “Snow for Wallace Stevens” joins Michael Ondaatje’s cartoonish juxtaposition “King Kong meets Wallace Stevens” (1973), Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s prosecutorial “I Defy You” (1989) (“I defy you Wallace Stevens / to prove ‘the exquisite truth’”), and most recently Kwame Dawes’s “Deathwatch” (2024), which casts “Mr. Stevens” as a circumspectly businesslike grim reaper: “he says, with a ticking / dry tongue, ‘Well, it is all in order now, / you can have a good death.’” The lion’s share of critical attention to Stevens’s influence (not to mention nearly all the articles and special issues) has been devoted to white poets, from Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery to Jorie Graham and Jay Hopler. There’s plenty to be said about the many circuits of influence connecting Stevens to poets of color—about Stevens’s influence on generations of poets (in scales ranging from the inflected phrase to the entire career), and about the reciprocal influence of poets of color on how we should read and remember Stevens today.

Anticipating a special issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal, the Wallace Stevens Society invites proposals for 15-minute presentations that address the mutual influence between Stevens and poets of color of any region or period. Welcome topics include:

• Examples of poets of color responding to Stevens—allusions to particular poems, riffs on Stevens’s style, homages and parodies, portraits of and addresses to Stevens himself, in poetry or prose
• Comparisons between different poets, generations, or traditions influenced by Stevens
• Hybridizations of Stevens’s influence with other aesthetics and inheritances
• Reconsiderations of Stevens in light of writing by or readings into poets of color
• Conjectures on what Stevens’s poems and poetics could lend to theories of poetry and race

Send questions or abstracts of roughly 250 words (accompanied by a brief biographical note) to Christopher Spaide at Christopher [dot] Spaide [at] usm [dot] edu by Saturday, March 15, 2025.