21st Ezra Pound International Conference Rapallo, Italy July 4-7, 2005 The 21st Ezra Pound International Conference will be held in Rapallo, Italy, Pound's home during most of his Italian years. Sessions will take place at the Villa Tigullio on the waterfront, near the Giardino Ezra Pound, a small memorial pond and garden which Rapallo dedicated to Pound. Lodging will be in various Rapallo hotels, with meals there or in other places at the discretion of participants, who will have the opportunity to relax in the seafront Caffé Rapallo, under the balcony of Ezra and Dorothy Pound's apartment in Via Marsala, once the headquarters of the "Ezuversity." The registration and opening session will be held in the Salone Consigliare of the Town Hall, where Pound arranged concerts of music, and where the fiddle score which is now Canto 75 was first performed by Olga Rudge. There will be visits to Sant' Ambrogio, where Pound lived with Olga, which forms the background of some of his most haunting lines. Excursions to nearby Pound places such as Portofino, Portovenere, and Zoagli will be arranged. Among the highlights of this conference will be the possibility of seeing, on the night of July 3 in the Gulf of Tigullio, "the long boats set the lights in the water" as celebrated in Canto 47. Proposals are invited for papers on or related to the topic: "Ezra Pound, Language and Persona" Language and Persona (or Mask) are at the center of Ezra Pound's work, from his first commercial volume, Personae (1909) to his last Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII (1968). The Anglo-Saxon Seafarer, the Chinese Exile, Propertius, and Confucius, are only a few of his major masks. ("Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth," as Oscar Wilde famously put it.) Pound also gave voice to many goddesses and women, ancient and modern, introducing aspects of language and gender. Other masks are his parodies of style, from the vernacular to the Biblical, and his tireless exploration of languages, Western and Eastern. His heroes could be called "men made out of words." Committee: Massimo Bacigalupo, University of Genova, Italy Walter Baumann, University of Ulster, Ireland David Moody, University of York, England William Pratt, Miami University of Ohio Papers should be timed for 30 minutes delivery and 15 minutes discussion. Proposals should be no more than a page in length, and should be sent by Oct. 1, 2004, via regular mail, air mail (outside the USA) or email, to the Conference Secretary: William Pratt Department of English Miami University Oxford OH 45056 USA Email address: [log in to unmask] Anyone interested, with or without a proposal, should write to the Conference Secretary.