Oleksandr Gon is a Fulbright Visiting Scholar this year at Penn State. He is a professor of translation and interpretation, the Institute of International Relations, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine. He received his degrees of Candidate of Sciences (Philology) in 1995 and Doctor of Sciences (Philology) in 2018 from the Institute of Literature, Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences. His two dissertations have been published as monographs in Ukrainian: Svinbern u poetychnomu konteksti kintsia stolittia (Swinburne’s Poetry in the Context of Fin de Siècle (1996) and Paradyhmatyka lirychnoho y epichnoho v “Kantos” Ezry Paunda (Paradigmatics of the Lyric and Epic in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (2017).

This talk will focus on the comparative analysis of two consequential texts in American and Ukrainian poetic modernisms, The Cantos (1917–1968) and Popil imperii (The Ashes of Empires, 1943–1947). This project seeks to develop a coherent and practical comparative approach to Pound and Klen identifying the specifics of national poetic modernisms as reflected in the relationships between the interiority of the lyrical self and the epic tradition. The core argument of the presentation is associated with the concept of a poetic ‘ver(s)ification of history’ to examine diverse creative practices in modernist long poems. Both texts foreground subject rhymes and intertextuality to highlight cultural continuity across geographical and temporal divides. Contextualized both synchronically and diachronically, these unapologetically elitist works display a significant structural affinity in artistic concepts, poetic idiom, and self-referentiality as well as a sharp divergence in Klen’s post-Romantic millennial and teleological as opposed to Pound’s cyclic and mythologic poetics and ideology.

Oleksandr Gon’s email: omg5217@psu.edu