In Conversation Elizabeth Gregory on Marianne Moore

Virtual In Conversation with Elizabeth Gregory, author of Apparition of Splendor: Marianne Moore Performing Democracy through Celebrity, 1952-1970
While the later work of the great Modernist poet Marianne Moore was hugely popular during her final two decades in the 1950s and 60s, since her death critics have condemned it as trivial and left it largely unexamined. This book challenges that assessment: with fresh readings of many of the late poems and of the iconic, cross-dressing public persona Moore developed to deliver them, Apparition of Splendor demonstrates that Moore used her late-life celebrity to activate egalitarian principles that had long animated her poetry, in daring and innovative ways. Dressed as George Washington in cape and tricorn and writing about accessible topics, she reached a wide cross-section of Americans, engaging them in consideration of what democracy means in their daily lives, around issues of gender, sexuality, racial integration, class, age, immigration, and species-ism. Always avant-garde, Moore’s work resonates with that of her younger contemporaries, including poets like John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Langston Hughes and Elizabeth Bishop, and artists like Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, and Ray Johnson.

Elizabeth Gregory will be in conversation with Emily Setina.

About the Speakers
Elizabeth Gregory divides her life as a researcher between literary studies (particularly Moore studies) and explorations of the intersections of fertility and women’s work. She directs the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program and the Institute for Research on Women, Gender & Sexuality at the University of Houston, where she is a Professor of English. Her books apart from this one include Ready: Why Women Are Embracing the New Later Motherhood (2007/2012), Quotation and Modern American Poetry: “’Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads’” (1996), and two edited collections—The Critical Response to Marianne Moore (2003) and, with Stacy Carson Hubbard, Twenty-First Century Marianne Moore: Essays from a Critical Renaissance (2017). She is a collaborator on the Marianne Moore Digital Archive and is currently completing work on studies entitled “Who Needs Kids?: Fertility, Workforce and the Future” and School/Work Synchrony: Building a Culture and Economy of Care. She and her husband have two excellent daughters.

Emily Setina, Associate Professor, English Department of UNLV, teaches and writes about modernism, poetry, and 20th and 21st-century American literature Writers’ archives and writing’s relation to visual media and visual practices, especially photography and painting, are at the center of her research. With Susannah Hollister, she edited Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition, which was awarded the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions Seal. Her current book project, The Woman in the Darkroom, tells a literary and cultural history of modernism and photography through the works and archives of three women writers: Virginia Woolf, Stein, and Marianne Moore.
Apparition of Splendor
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