Tamar & Other Poems: A Centennial Conversation

This RJA-THF Zoom Webinar is a Roundtable featuring four prominent scholars celebrating the centennial of the April 30, 1924 publication of Robinson Jeffers’ Tamar and Other Poems. This Roundtable was held on April 30, 2024 at 6:00pm Pacific.
Because the 1925 publication of Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems by Boni & Liveright so quickly superseded the privately printed Tamar, we tend to overlook the significance of Tamar and Other Poems itself, even though the sensation it caused initially established Robinson Jeffers as a major poet and even though the important reviews it elicited helped set the agenda for how he would be read and understood. What might we learn about Jeffers as a poet who continues to speak to us in our era by considering Tamar and Other Poems as a collection in its own right rather than as the concluding section of Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems? This conversation looks both backward to 1924 and forward from 2024 to explore-and celebrate-the collection where Jeffers first became Jeffers.
This Roundtable is moderated by Tim Hunt, with the following Participants:
Brett Colasacco, whose research focuses on the intersection of poetry, religious thought, and public life, is a former Executive Director of RJA, the editor of Sightings: Reflections on Religion in Public Life, and is currently writing a biography of the theologian Martin Marty. His University of Chicago doctoral dissertation, “Robinson Jeffers: Poet at the End of the World,” explores the interweaving of myth studies, politics, and poetics in Jeffers’ career.
Robert Faggen is the Barton Evans and H. Andrea Neves Professor of Literature at Claremont-McKenna College. He has published on the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Thomas Merton, and Czeslaw Milosz, who “deepened,” he reports, his interest in Jeffers. His most recent project, Ken Kesey: An American Life, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Geneva Gano, a former President of RJA, is Associate Professor of English at Texas State University. Her 2020 study, The Little Art Colony and US Modernism, Carmel, Provincetown, Taos, contextualizes Jeffers in the social, cultural, and economic dynamics of his era as they are specifically enacted in Carmel so that he participates in, rather than standing outside, our cultural and aesthetic histories.
Susan Shillinglaw, Vice President of the Tor House Foundation and a member of RJA, is the pre-eminent scholar of John Steinbeck. Her numerous books, editions, and collections of essays include On Reading The Grapes of Wrath. From 1987-2005 she directed the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies as San Jose State University and from 2015-2018 she directed the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas.

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Thank you for this. Love Robinson Jeffers.