National Poetry Foundation (U.S.)

By embracing the experimental and extreme, the National Poetry Foundation (NPF) at the University of Maine has nurtured the development of poets whose innovative use of language has shaped modern poetry for more than three decades. Through its international conferences on modern poetry, its publications and journals, and its program of campus readings by nationally and internationally renowned poets, NPF continues to be one of the world's leading centers for contemporary poets and scholars of poetry. NPF was founded in 1971 by Carroll Franklin Terrell as a center dedicated to the study of the poetry of Ezra Pound. That year, the first issue of Paideuma: A Journal Devoted to Ezra Pound Scholarship was published by the foundation. It published James Wilhelm's seminal Dante and Pound in 1974, followed by book-length monographs on Pound scholarship. NPF has since examined the works of the Objectivist poets of the 1930s; the Black Mountain School poets and the San Francisco Renaissance poets of the 1950s and 1960s; the Language poets of the 1970s and 1980s; and the current generation of avant-garde poets. Milestones include the 1986 publication of its best-seller, the influential anthology of Language poets, In the American Tree, edited by Ron Silliman, and the initiation of the scholarly journal, Sagetrieb: A Journal Devoted to Poets in the Imagist/Objectivist Tradition.