The letter carrier – well, the UPS person, I guess – brought a package from Cambridge University Press the other day, & after I scratched my head a moment (what in world did I order?), I opened it, only to find groovy pristine author's copies of the brand spanking new Cambridge Companion to American Poetry Since 1945, edited by Jennifer Ashton. My own essay bears the unwieldy title of "From the Late Modernism of the 'Objectivists' to the Proto-postmodernism of 'Projective Verse.'" (No, not my title, I'm afraid.) The book's chock full of nutty goodness:

1. Periodizing American poetry since 1945 Jennifer Ashton

2. From the late modernism of the objectivists to the proto-postmodernism of 'Projective Verse' Mark Scroggins

3. Confessional poetry Deborah Nelson

4. Surrealism as a living modernism: what the New York poets learned from two generations of New York painting Charles Altieri

5. The San Francisco renaissance Michael Davidson

6. Three generations of Beat poetics Ronna C. Johnson

7. The poetics of chant and inner/outer space: the Black Arts movement Margo Natalie Crawford

8. Feminist poetries Lisa Sewell

9. Ecopoetries in America Nick Selby

10. Language writing Steve McCaffery

11. Post-1945 American poetry and its institutions Hank Lazer

12. The contemporary 'mainstream' lyric Christina Pugh

13. Poems in and out of school: Allen Grossman and Susan Howe Oren Izenberg

14. Rap, hip-hop, spoken word Michael W. Clune

15. Poetry of the twenty-first century: the first decade Jennifer Ashton

So as you can see, it's packed full of great contributors, among whom I feel kind of slight. And it's also more or less affordable – if you don't want a copy for yourself, see if you can't persuade your institutional library to buy one!

scroggins world tour dates, spring 2013

The Grateful Dead had Deadheads; Jimmy Buffet has Parrot-heads. Thank Ba'al I don't have any hardcore fan-followers, because heaven knows what sort of "heads" they'd be saddled with as a name. Anyway, I poke my head out from the great sift of papers (real and virtual) to announce upcoming appearances:

•Tuesday, 19 February, Richard Greene of the University of Toronto, award-bedecked poet and biographer of Edith Sitwell, editor of a selection of Graham Greene's letters, will be at Our Fair University; we'll be having a free-form "conversation on literary biography." (7.00 PM, CU 321, for locals.) It'll be great fun.

•The very next day (phew!) I'm sitting on a panel with some of my esteemed departmental colleagues, trying to impart some wisdom (?) to undergraduates about how to go about applying to grad school. Flyer here.

•Friday, 22 February, at the annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, I'll be on one of two whiz-bang panels on "The New Gnostics: Vectors in Postmodern Poetry." I'll be talking about Robert Duncan – paper title "'I am not an occultist': Esotericism, Literary History, and Autobiography in The H.D. Book."

•Then, after a few weeks to catch my breath, I'm off to Orlando to the annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. This is I gather a rather big deal for those involved in science fiction & fantasy studies. It's my first time around, so I'm kinda scared and unsure of myself – what if I mistake a book by Ursula K. LeGuin for something by Joanna Russ? What if I miss an obvious reference to a Celtic fertility ceremony? What if I forget my snazzy steampunk-modified-goggles-&-top-hat combination? The paper I'll be delivering is called "Recalculating the Apocalypse: Michael Moorcock's The Final Programme and Adaptation."

Hope to see some of you at one or more of these things.