1963 in Poetry - Events

Events

• January 26 – Raghunath Vishnu Pandit, an Indian poet who wrote in both Konkani and Marathi languages, publishes five books of poems this day
• The Belfast Group, a discussion group of poets in Northern Ireland, is started by Philip Hobsbaum when he moves to Belfast this year. Before the meetings finally end in 1972, attendees at its meetings will include Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, James Simmons, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Stewart Parker, Bernard MacLaverty and the critics Edna Longley and Michael Allen.
• July–August — The Vancouver Poetry Conference is held over a three week period, involving about 60 people who attended discussions, workshops, lectures, and readings designed by Warren Tallman and Robert Creeley as a summer course at the University of British Columbia. According to Creeley:

"It brought together for the first time a decisive company of then disregarded poets such as Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Margaret Avison, Philip Whalen... together with as yet unrecognised younger poets of that time, Michael Palmer, Clark Coolidge and many more."

• The Soviet government appeared to begin removing freedoms previously granted to writers and artists in a process that began in November 1962 and continued this year. Yet the government proved uncertain and the writers persistent. In March 1963 the gavel fell on the great debate", or so it appeared, wrote Harrison E. Salisbury, Moscow correspondent for The New York Times. Khrushchev announced that Soviet writers were the servants of the Communist Party and must reflect its orders. Among the authors he specifically targeted were the poets Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky. Yevtushenko, on a tour of European cities earlier in the year, recited before large audiences, including a capacity audience at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, and then returned home. "Literary Stalinists took over almost all the key publishing positions", Salisbury wrote. Yet the artists and writers who were criticized either refused to recant or did so in innocuous language. Alexander Tvardovsky, editor of the magazine Novy Mir, published three brutally frank stories by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for instance. By midsummer, the effects of the announced crackdown appeared nil, with authors publishing essentially as before. After the Union of Soviet Writers rebuked Voznesensky, he replied "with what is regarded as a classic nonconfessional confession", according to Voznesensky's 2010 obituary in the Times: "It has been said that I must not forget the strict and severe words of Nikita Sergeyevich . I will never forget them. He said 'work'. This word is my program." He continued, "What my attitude is to Communism — what I am myself — this work will show."