Burton Hatlen - Career

Career

Hatlen arrived at the University of Maine in Orono, Maine, in 1967. He quickly became an active and, by all accounts, highly devoted faculty member in the school's Department of English. Hatlen often juggled heavy teaching and research schedules. He eventually became chair of the department, where he oversaw academic grant applications, nationwide promotions and academic tenures, and a host of other responsibilities. Hatlen delivered more than 100 academic papers from 1977 to 2007 alone, at conferences ranging from Finland, Canada, the United States, London and Paris. One of these academic papers was titled Stephen King and the American Dream; a synopsis of how, Hatlen's student, Stephen King captured the "American Zeitgeist". He also served as Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities for one year.

Hatlen never published a collection of his own scholarly writings. However, his poetics and other writings often appeared in literary scholarly journals. And his editorial work at the National Poetry Foundation had a profound impact on a scholarly community interested in the objectivist tradition and contemporary North American writers as diverse as H.D., Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Ted Enslin, and Margaret Avison. His edited collection of essays George Oppen: Man and Poet was a work of which he was especially proud. He also contributed editorials and letters on local and international politics to local Maine newspapers occasionally.

Hatlen received the UM Presidential Research and Creative Achievement Award for his work in 1996. In 1999, Hatlen volunteered to cut his salary so the Department of English could hire two new professors, instead of only one. He continued to work part-time, even when he became ill, though he carried a full-time work load. He spent the later part of his academic career focusing on scholarship on a wide range of modernist poets and fiction writers (chiefly Kay Boyle and Stephen King), as well as continuing to write his own elegiac poetry.

Hatlen was known as a campus activist. He marched against both the Vietnam War in the 1960s, as well as the War in Iraq, as recently as 2007, in Bangor, Maine. He was one of the founders and a lifelong member of the campuses Marxist-Socialist committee, which oversees a lecture series and an interdisciplinary minor.