Burton Hatlen - Career - National Poetry Foundation

National Poetry Foundation

He began working with Carroll Terrell shortly after his arrival at the University of Maine. Terrell is best known as a noted Ezra Pound scholar and the founder of the National Poetry Foundation. Together, Terrell and Hatlen, in conjunction with the University of Maine English department, built the Foundation into an internationally known and respected academic center based at UM. Under Terrell and Hatlen, the Foundation focused on the works of Ezra Pound, as well as modern and contemporary forms of poetry.

One of the academic missions of the National Poetry Foundation was the publication of two journals, the Paideuma and the Sagetrieb. The Paideuma focuses on Ezra Pound studies, as well as American and British modernism. The second journal, Sagetrieb, which was founded by Hatlen in 1982, focuses on the study of contemporary and Objectivist poets such as George Oppen, William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky.

The Foundation became known for its summer poetry conferences which gathered poets and scholars at the University of Maine. The conference also allowed students and professional, published poets to meet informally and get to know one another, which closely followed Hatlen's own informal teaching style.

Hatlen became director of the National Poetry Foundation in 1991.