Robinson Jeffers and the Sacredness of Place Conference

FAIN: GA-263632-18

Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation (Carmel, CA 93923-9109)
Alan Henry Stacy (Project Director: April 2018 to April 2022)

The trustees of the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation request a $23,122 Chairman’s Grant to help fund a unique conference to take place in October 2018, focusing on the legacy of the work of the poet Robinson Jeffers and his impact on today’s writers and artists in many disciplines. Robinson Jeffers’ poems, dramas, and long prose poems are enjoying a resurgence among scholars in humanities departments, using Jeffers’ “inhumanism” as foils against current trends in human exploitations of the planet and fellow beings. Jeffers’ early environmental philosophy is also being leveraged in classes on ecocritisism and ecopoetics at California State University at Long Beach and other schools. This demonstrates that Jeffers’ influence in many disciplines is still spreading and gaining momentum once again. A portion of the grant is used to provide honorarium and travel expenses to a cadre of writers, poets, artists, and humanities scholars who will be invited to provide keynote and supporting talks on Jeffers’ influence on their work. Administrative, operational, and other conference expenses will also be supported by the grant.
For this special 2018 conference, we are proposing an intertwined dual-track theme: “Robinson Jeffers and the Sacredness of Place.” The first track is the recognition of the importance that place-land and sea-play in Jeffers’ poetry and his tight bonding t the spiritual nature of, as Professor Emeritus James Karman describes it, “the terroir, the spirit and inner life of the region-as revealed in its topography, its flora, fauna, and people.” The second track is to reveal how Jeffers poems and philosophy of inhumanism inspire writers and artists today in their own works that reflect their Spirit of Place.
We are preparing a prospective list of 6 writers, artists, and humanities scholars that we would like to invite to the Fall Festival in October. The exact number, of course, depends on the NEH grant amount and the availability of the invited writers to travel and attend.