The National Poetry Foundation (NPF) is a book publisher founded in 1971 by Carroll F. Terrell who built its reputation with Burton Hatlen

Burton Hatlen

Burton Norval Hatlen was an American literary scholar and professor at the University of Maine. Hatlen worked closely with Carroll F...

 at the University of Maine

University of Maine

The University of Maine is a public research university located in Orono, Maine, United States. The university was established in 1865 as a land grant college and is referred to as the flagship university of the University of Maine System...

 in Orono

Orono, Maine

Orono is a town in Penobscot County, Maine, United States. It was first settled in 1774 and named in honor of Chief Joseph Orono of the Penobscot Nation. It is home to The University of Maine. The population was 10,362 at the 2010 census.- Geography :...

. Today it publishes poetry by individual authors as well as both journals and scholarship devoted to Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

 and poets in the Imagist and "Objectivist

Objectivist poets

The Objectivist poets were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernists who emerged in the 1930s. They were mainly American and were influenced by, amongst others, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams...

" traditions. It has also positioned itself as a center and host for international conferences on modern poetry.

Overview

The National Poetry Foundation began in 1972 as a publisher of scholarly work on Ezra Pound and the Pound tradition with the first issue of Paideuma: A Journal Devoted to Ezra Pound Scholarship, which continued under the senior editorship of Hugh Kenner

Hugh Kenner

William Hugh Kenner , was a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor.Kenner was born in Peterborough, Ontario on January 7, 1923; his father taught classics...

 and Eva Hesse

Eva Hesse

Eva Hesse , was a German-born American sculptor, known for her pioneering work in materials such as latex, fiberglass, and plastics. -Early life:Hesse was born into a family of observant Jews in Hamburg, Germany...

. In 2002, Paideuma broadened its focus, changing its subtitle to "Studies in American and British Modernism."

Since 1978, when NPF published its first collection of poetry, the works of such poets as Carl Rakosi

Carl Rakosi

Carl Rakosi was the last surviving member of the original group of poets who were given the rubric Objectivist. He was still publishing and performing his poetry well into his 90s.-Early life:...

, Thomas Parkinson, and Kenneth Fearing

Kenneth Fearing

Kenneth Fearing was an American poet, novelist, and founding editor of the Partisan Review. Literary critic Macha Rosenthal called him "the chief poet of the American Depression."-Early life:...

 have appeared. As well, NPF has published the influential anthology of Language poets

Language poets

The Language poets are an avant garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s...

, In the American Tree, edited by Ron Silliman

Ron Silliman

Ron Silliman is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, The Alphabet...

. The National Poetry Foundation also publishes the Man/Woman and Poet Series. Begun in 1979, it has devoted critical and bibliographical attention to British and American poets.

In 1982, NPF initiated the scholarly journal Sagetrieb: A Journal Devoted to Poets in the Imagist/Objectivist Tradition. In 2002, Sagetrieb changed its subtitle to "Poetry and Poetics after Modernism."

Finally, NPF has regularly hosted international conferences on modern poetry, including three conferences devoted to Ezra Pound (1975, 1980, and 1985) and conferences on William Carlos Williams (1983), H.D. (1986), Marianne Moore (1987), T.S. Eliot (1988), Pound and Yeats

Yeats

W. B. Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright.Yeats may also refer to:* Yeats ,* Yeats , an impact crater on Mercury* Yeats , an Irish thoroughbred racehorse-See also:...

 (1990), American Poets of the 1930s (1993), and in 1996 American Poets of the 1950s.

Speakers at these conferences have included some of the better known scholars working in the field of modern poetry. Hugh Kenner

Hugh Kenner

William Hugh Kenner , was a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor.Kenner was born in Peterborough, Ontario on January 7, 1923; his father taught classics...

 was a featured speaker at all the NPF conferences from 1975 through 1993, for example. Featured speakers in 1996 included Marjorie Perloff

Marjorie Perloff

Marjorie Perloff is an Austrian-born U.S. poetry critic.Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna. Faced with Nazi terror, her family emigrated in 1938 when she was six-and-a-half, going first to Zürich and then to the United States, settling in Riverdale, New York...

, M.L. Rosenthal, Albert Gelpi, Robert Von Hallberg, Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Rachel Blau DuPlessis an American poet and essayist, is known as a feminist critic and scholar with a special interest in modernist and contemporary poetry.-Life and work:...

, Charles Altieri

Charles Altieri

Prof. Charles Altieri is presently the Rachel Stageberg Anderson Chair in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Prof...

, Jerome Rothenberg

Jerome Rothenberg

Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known American poet, translator and anthologist who is noted for his work in ethnopoetics and poetry performance.-Early life and work:...

, Armand Schwerner

Armand Schwerner

Armand Schwerner was an avant-garde Jewish-American poet. His most famous work, Tablets, is a series of poems which claim to be reconstructions of ancient Sumero-Akkadian inscriptions, complete with lacunae and "untranslatable" words....

, Theodore Enslin

Theodore Enslin

Theodore Vernon Enslin was an American poet associated with Cid Corman's Origin and press. He is widely regarded as one of the most musical of American avant-garde poets. Enslin was born in Chester, Pennsylvania. His father was a biblical scholar and his mother a Latin scholar...

, Ed Dorn

Ed Dorn

Edward Merton Dorn was an American poet and teacher often associated with the Black Mountain poets. His most famous work is Gunslinger.-Overview:...

, Alicia Ostriker

Alicia Ostriker

Alicia Suskin Ostriker is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry.Alicia is married to the noted astronomer Jeremiah Ostriker who taught at Princeton University...

, and others.

NPF's The Man/Woman and Poet Series

Featured writers in this series include:

• Helen Adam
  Helen Adam
  Helen Adam was a Scottish poet, collagist and photographer who was an active participant in The San Francisco Renaissance, a literary movement contemporaneous to the Beat Generation that occurred in San Francisco during the 1950s and 1960s...
  
  
• Basil Bunting
  Basil Bunting
  Basil Cheesman Bunting was a significant British modernist poet whose reputation was established with the publication of Briggflatts in 1966. He had a lifelong interest in music that led him to emphasise the sonic qualities of poetry, particularly the importance of reading poetry aloud...
  
  
• T. S. Eliot
  T. S. Eliot
  Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
  
  
• H. D.
• David Jones
  David Jones (poet)
  David Jones CH was both a painter and one of the first generation British modernist poets. As a painter he worked chiefly in watercolor, painting portraits and animal, landscape, legendary and religious subjects. He was also a wood-engraver and designer of inscriptions. As a writer he was...
  
  
• Patrick Kavanagh
  Patrick Kavanagh
  Patrick Kavanagh was an Irish poet and novelist. Regarded as one of the foremost poets of the 20th century, his best known works include the novel Tarry Flynn and the poems Raglan Road and The Great Hunger...
  
  
• Mina Loy
  Mina Loy
  Mina Loy born Mina Gertrude Löwry was an artist, poet, playwright, novelist, Futurist, actress, Christian Scientist, designer of lamps, and bohemian. She was one of the last of the first generation modernists to achieve posthumous recognition. Her poetry was admired by T. S...
  
  
• Hugh MacDiarmid
  Hugh MacDiarmid
  Hugh MacDiarmid is the pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve , a significant Scottish poet of the 20th century. He was instrumental in creating a Scottish version of modernism and was a leading light in the Scottish Renaissance of the 20th century...
  
  
• Marianne Moore
  Marianne Moore
  Marianne Moore was an American Modernist poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.- Life :Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. She was the daughter of mechanical engineer and inventor...
  
  
• Lorine Niedecker
  Lorine Niedecker
  Lorine Faith Niedecker was a Wisconsin poet and the only woman associated with the Objectivist poets...
  
  
• George Oppen
  George Oppen
  George Oppen was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism, and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee...
  
  
• Carl Rakosi
  Carl Rakosi
  Carl Rakosi was the last surviving member of the original group of poets who were given the rubric Objectivist. He was still publishing and performing his poetry well into his 90s.-Early life:...
  
  
• Charles Reznikoff
  Charles Reznikoff
  Charles Reznikoff was the poet for whom the term Objectivist was first coined. When asked by Harriet Munroe to provide an introduction to what became known as the Objectivist issue of Poetry, Louis Zukofsky provided his essay Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of...
  
  
• May Sarton
  May Sarton
  May Sarton is the pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton , an American poet, novelist, and memoirist.-Biography:...
  
  
• William Carlos Williams
  William Carlos Williams
  William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
  
  
• Louis Zukofsky
  Louis Zukofsky
  Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was one of the founders and the primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and thus an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.-Life:...