I just finished Jane Mead’s new book, The Usable Field, and wanted to post a poem from it because I read with interest, chagrin, and both agreeable and argumentative impulses, the comments following Doug Powell’s post on Larissa Szporluk (it’s in the archive now, see “New Bat City.”) One reader made the remark that she found the posted poem “hermetic” and that touched off the blogostorm. I know I’m touching on the issue of accessibility, the discussions of which I haven’t seen yet (should dig in the archive, I know), but I was tickled to hear it described by one post-er as pies circling around in a display case at a diner.

What I thought would be more fun than arguing about accessibility (to use the carnival instead of the combat model) is if people who drift through here put up their readings of/responses to one of Jane’s poem as a way of creating collaborative meaning. Disclaimer: Jane is my friend. I always say: Jane, what are you talking about? And I suspect she thinks: Lucia, must you be so long-winded, you could take half the words in your poems out! But, seeing as we’ve known each other 25 years and are not going to change, we better come to collaboration soon or else we’ll be dead.

Now, a reader could say: “Hey, wait, I just came off waitressing at Denny’s, working graveyard (should have known when I majored in English thirty years ago that it was going to be tough to get a job). I’m too tired to collaborate; just let me just curl up with unfashionably-accessible poet X, at least I’m one of the few people who check poetry books out of the library.” Or the reader might say: “What, just because I’m a waitress you think I haven’t read Adorno?”

Anyway here is the poem. This is one that, for me, passes the memorability test the blog was talking about.

GYPSUM WHEN YOU ARRIVE

For just as there is alabaster
in the marketplace there is
the remembrance of gypsum

in the sun,—when the body
watches. If you listen
you will turn toward a remote

and ancient calling: alien:
you survive: beyond the brownish air
around the globe another

streaked sky waits—as if for
a flickering-of-wings which it cannot
contain. As if for the flinch

in your voice.—Which it can.

Late last year, The Monserrat Reporter published an article whose title begins “Deputy Governor of Montserrat writes book…” We can all imagine the subject matter of hardcovers that would be penned by (or ghostwritten for), say, the governor of Wyoming or Alabama or New Jersey or _________ (fill in your favorite state). In fact, just last night on Charlie Rose the former governor of West Virginia (Bob Wise) was out pumping his new book Raising the Grade: How High School Reform Can Save Our Youth and Our Nation. Let’s just say it didn’t quite sound like Michael Apple.

But back to The Monserrat Reporter, which late last year ran an article whose full title read (in full) “Deputy Governor of Montserrat writes book about Lasana Sekou.” Born in Aruba in 1959 and reared in St. Martin until he was 13, Sekou has since published more than a dozen books of poetry, non-fiction and other imaginative writings including Maroon Lives…for the Grenadian Freedom Fighters, Big Up St. Martin—Essay & Poem, The Salt Reaper—Poems from the flats and most recently Brotherhood of the Spurs.

Fergus opens his chapter on “The Love-Labor Nexus” by writing that “Sekou’s national agenda for St. Martin recur throughout his work like the utterance of a Greek chorus…” I immediately began to ask myself which USAmerica poets, for example, could be said to write with “national agenda”—and if I were asked, what I’d say mine might be? The section on exploitative labor in this chapter is exceptional. Fergus discusses Sekou’s reading of the St. Martin version of slavery in the salt mines of his country, tying this into the slavery that “did not end in 1800” but has “persisted into contemporary life in the form of neoslavery.” (Readers interested in this topic in the USAmerican context might look at Douglas Blackmon’s new book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II).

In the next chapter on “Liberating the Mighty,” Fergus contends that “[s]ituations exist in St. Martin to be set straight. Divided and owned by two European countries, the island is doubly disadvantaged; in Sekou’s eyes St. Martin colonialism is not particularly benevolent [is it ever??]. One of [Sekou’s] aims is a genuine participatory democracy along with decolonization and Caribbeanization of his ‘homeland’.” Fergus brings to the fore Sekou’s political poems such as “The Blockade Next Time” (on the St. Martin protest of January 15, 1990). And in a chapter on “The Sekou Aesthetics,” Fergus tackles Sekou’s more innovative work in ways that display the poet’s always tri-partite (as opposed to “third way”) poetics of love, labor, and liberation in the colonial context of the Caribbean basin, such as the poem from The Salt Reaper, “r’ass remnants”:

bdt
bot
bvi
bwi
…
dwi
fod
fwi
…
dom-tom.& all
like cowbrands
poking ussssssssssssssss. still.

The acronyms identify the remaining colonial territories of the Caribbean region (and the sixteen “s”’s in “us” certainly points to the USAmerican colonial project in the Caribbean (& in Iraq, & in Afghanistan, & in…). As Fergus later writes, “Sekou’s knowledge, for instance, of the paraphernalia of US imperialism such as the Monroe Doctrine, the big stick policy, manifest destiny, dollar diplomacy, and the Caribbean Basin Initiative, among others, is critical for carrying out his liberation agenda.”

Reading Howard A. Fergus’s book reminded me not only of the deep intermingling of love, labor, and liberation in the books of Lasana Sekou that I’ve been reading for much of the past decade; it also reminded me of what feels (often) like a paucity of global political and econmic knowledge and engagement by poets and their poetry here in the United States. Does “American exceptionalism” in much of our poetry worry us? Can we speak about the Monroe Doctrine? The Caribbean Basin Initiative? DR-CAFTA? Should we have to, as poets? And if not, why not?

…

like cowbrands
poking ussssssssssssssss. still.

Moodymann (Kenny Dixon Jr), on the other hand, insists on the essential blackness of the music that interests him—soul, jazz, house, and techno. And while he djs around the world, his focus is on his hometown of Detroit. This isn’t unrelated to my previous post about the need for marginalized communities to preserve a sense of identity, though perhaps a better response is what Gayatri Spivak refers to as “strategic essentialism”—which I’m guessing is closer to Moodymann’s view, whatever his “public” statements (from someone who doesn’t give interviews). Moodymann’s music combines deep house with soul and jazz elements, clips of children singing and talking, and excerpts from blaxploitation films. His set on Saturday night at Water Beach Taxi—an artificial beach along the East River waterfront with a stunning, albeit fenced, view of the midtown-Manhattan skyline—combined his own songs with soul and disco tracks. Given three hours in which to work, as opposed to DJ /rupture’s forty-five minutes, Moodymann’s set built more slowly and moved less abruptly (except when he had trouble with skipping needles). Moodymann’s brilliance is in creating dance music that’s one tick below a club’s typical beats per minute, and that isn’t afraid to take historical-conceptual detours. The result is a sound that’s sexy and romantic, that outlines a recent history of African American musical culture in which celebrating life is a form of resistance, and that isn’t afraid to make reference to racism in the United States. Moodymann’s Black Mahogani is an excellent point to begin.

Among other things, Mr. Logan restated his belief that if O'Hara were alive today, "he might have written a blog."

Bloggers took note, and they quickly offered up their take on the life and work of Mr. Logan.

To wit:

"It troubles me," says Short Schrift" to see a critic taking so much of O'Hara's self-built mythology at face value . . . "

"Typical of Logan, the overall tone is snide, and, I would also say, a bit homophobic," offers Philip Gentry.

John Latta sneers, "Logan generally proceeds with the archest of manoeuvres, attempt’d pummeling by one-liners."

"A NY Times kicking on Gay Pride day to boot! A real 'time-sensitive' editor there, I say!" writes Stephen Vincent

"Not again, BIlly," moans Greg Rappleye.

"Stupidity after stupidity," seethes Jack Kimball.

"On the positive side, Logan is always bold, loud and exciting to read," sighs Levi Asher.

"Recently I happened to read the letter in which Montaigne relates the death of his friend de la Boétie: afterwards I couldn't fall asleep for crying, but to my shame this crying returned the following evenings with no apparent cause: you can imagine that I did not give in to it easily, I had books in front of me - but alas, these books: one sends me back to the other, basic knowledge is everywhere lacking, soon I will be sitting back behind the first vestiges, and what will I do there without memory?"

In the centuries when most marriages were contracted out of economic and social considerations, friendship was written about with the kind of emotional extravagance that we, in our own time, have reserved for an ideal of romantic attachment. Montaigne, for instance, writing in the sixteenth century of his long dead, still mourned-for friend, Étienne de La Boétie, tells us that they were "one soul in two bodies." There was nothing his friend did, Montaigne says, not an act performed or a word spoken, for which "I could not immediately find the motive." Between the two young men communion had achieved perfection. This shared soul "pulled together in such unison," each half regarding the other with "such ardent affection" that "in this noble relationship, services and benefits, on which other friendships feed," were not taken into account. So great was the emotional benefit derived from the attachment that favors could neither be granted nor received. Privilege, for each of the friends, resided in being allowed to love, rather than in being loved.

This is language that Montaigne does not apply to his feeling for his wife or his children, his colleagues or his patrons—all relationships that he considers inferior to a friendship that develops not out of sensual need or worldly obligation, but out of the joy one experiences when the spirit is fed; for only then is one closer to God than to the beasts. The essence of true friendship for Montaigne is that in its presence "the soul grows refined."

Sounds like Montaigne and Rilke could've been pals.

It's not all that easy to avoid the sensual need, though; also in this issue of the magazine you'll find Fanny Howe's remembrance of Edward Dahlberg. Their own correspondence, she says, changed the course of her thinking life - but:

Dahlberg left a burn mark on whomever he met; he branded his students and friends and then abandoned them as his mother had for a time abandoned him... My friendship with Dahlberg ended bitterly. He chased me around his apartment on Rivington Street with his pants down, having locked the door from the inside, and I had to leap out a window to get away from him. My last letter from him was a racist diatribe against my marriage and the wasting of my "sweet, honeyed flesh."

What I received from him, before this event, was invaluable: the sense of the writer's life as a religious vocation. You had to protect yourself from Philistines, and read what he would call "ethical" writing. That is, writing that is so conscious of potential falsehoods, contradictions, and exaggerations in its grammar, it avoids becoming just one more symptom of the sick State."

That sense of the writer's life is one gift of literary friendship. But as Gornick observes,

In both friendship and love, the expectation that one's expressive best self will flower in the presence of the beloved other is key. Upon that flowering all is posited. The relationship fails, in friendship just as in love, when that best self ceases to feel itself served.

Again and again, she writes, poets

have acted out of the impassioned belief that poetry, through the extravagance of feeling that it generates, bestows on friendship the strength to defeat the ever-present drive toward self-division. If, ultimately, their friendships go under, as do those of the rest of us, that insistent effort of theirs to light up the hunger for connection keeps us concentrated on the glorious stubbornness of the need.

Your comments are welcome, dear friends.

Amidst the engaging recent posts by Peter O’Leary on the "Poetry of the 1970s" conference in Maine and Alan Gilbert on poetry and identity/identifying practices—as well as steering away from the seemingly looming question of whether or not I ever was a member of the Communist party!—I wanted to continue to post &/or discuss poems that I’ve used or plan to use in my factory and workplace workshops, poems that push the political and the innovative in myriad ways yet always include a race/class overlay or overdetermination (rather than fronting one at the expense of the other) as well as poems that scale back and forth between the local and the global. So, having already written about U Sam Oeur’s “Work at the Douglas Corporation, Urethane Department…” and Emelihter Kihleng’s “Micronesian Diaspora(s),” let me add a poem that I think it would be most productive to read alongside any 1970s configuration of poetry that has been inscribed to include Late Capitalism and Language as well as poets such as Tom Raworth and Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer (to cite just a few mentioned by O’Leary), Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “It Dread Inna Inglan”:

dem frame-up George Lindo
up in Bradford Toun
but di Bradford Blacks
dem a rally roun

Maggi Tatcha on di go
wid a racist show
but a she haffi go
kaw,
rite now,
African
Asian
West Indian
an Black British
stan firm inna Inglan
inna disya time yah
far noh mattah wat dey say,
come wat may,
we are here to stay
inna Inglan
inna disya time yah...

George Lindo
him is a working man
George Lindo
him is a family man
George Lindo
Him nevah do no wrang
George Lindo
di innocent one
George Lindo
him no carry no daggah
George Lindo
him is nat no rabbah
George Lindo
dem haffi let him go
George Lindo
dem betta free him now!

—from Mi Revalueshanary Fren: Selected Poems

An article by Darcus Howe in the New Statesmen reflects on that period. Howe informs us that Lindo was a bin spreader at Tyersall Combing works in the UK’s textile sector in 1978. Lindo, Howe writes, was framed for a robbery and given a prison sentence. Activist social movements worked not only to free Lindo but to sue the police (and win!). Howe’s article also brings the political, cultural, and economic issues of the late 1970s Lindo case square into the 21st century.

How, and to whom, might the Linton Kwesi Johnson poem (and the George Lindo case) speak differently and perhaps more powerfully than a poem by, say, Raworth or Mayer or W. S. Merwin, for that matter? Which potential communities of readers might each of these poets attract? Repel? Intrigue? Disperse? Why does this matter? What is to be done?

For those interested in reading more widely about the poem and LKJ, Peter Hitchcock’s “It Dread Inna Inglan’: Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dread, and Dub Identity” (Postmodern Culture, 1993) is currently available free online. Reading LKJ’s poem alongside David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism, a book I’ve mentioned before (and a book/writer I find crucial to my thinking about poetics, and particularly in framing a way of thinking about the period of the 1970s to the present), flushes out the Harvey volume (and particularly the sections on “Maggi Tatcha”) in interesting and productive ways. And, of course, for those of you who like to take your poetry oral/aural as well as textual (and count me in your group), here’s a version of “It Dread Inna Inglan” on Youtube. Enjoy!

There are of course very good reasons why marginalized communities, of which poetry is one, orient themselves around identity as opposed to non-identity. It’s a question of survival. At the same time, poetry is generally a privileged occupation, and a better awareness of this might make poetry worlds more self-reflective on their own power structures. An acknowledgment of complicity can be almost as liberating as one of resistance. In the art world, this practice is called institutional critique. Nevertheless, poetry does create flashes of alternative culture and communities—“temporary autonomous zones,” Hakim Bey calls them. That was my experience of Amiri and Amina Baraka’s Kimako’s Blues People gatherings I mentioned in an earlier post. The Naropa Institute Summer Writing Program, from which I’ll be blogging in another week, has less identitarian group-think and quest for institutional approval than some other poetry communities with which I’ve been involved. I’d also list the numerous political protest marches—against a couple different wars, against racism, against police brutality, for housing rights, for the preservation of public spaces, etc.—that I’ve participated in with poets and people not all that engaged in poetry.

Up on literary agent Nathan Bransford’s blog there’s a discussion raging over what the optimum rate of production is for contemporary writers. One book a year? Two? A book a decade? One good book a generation?

Bransford’s debate centers on fiction, but it’s quite applicable to poetry as well. The terms, though, seem quite different.

On the other hand, you’ve got free-agent poets—some younger and unknown, others mid-career and well regarded--shopping multiple manuscripts around to contests and small publishers, often for years, plugging away at an oeuvre in relative obscurity. The poems pile up, the rejection letters too, until the lucky day comes and then he or she has multiple books coming out in a relatively short amount of time (I’m thinking of a few poets whose work I admire—Eleni Sikelianos, who had four books come out in as many years, and Graham Foust who had his first two books appear the same season).

This creates feast or famine schedules, with some poets putting out books at a rate that would put the prolific William Carlos Williams to shame, and others disappearing for years (Laura Jensen? David Berman?) On top of all of this, if you add the pressure to publish in academia (which I only know of through hearsay), and a marketplace that is lukewarm at best to new products, then the picture becomes quite complicated.

It's a good question, though, for writers, readers, and publishers: how much is enough?

One of the most provocative pieces of prose I’ve ever read appeared in Carbuncle #3, in 1991. It was a scathing review of a reading by Robert Creeley. Certainly the tone is critical and perhaps even, at times, mean. But the last line of it has stayed with me.

It doesn’t have to be about Creeley. It describes a feeling that so many of us might have had at a poetry reading, at one time or another. Good to remind ourselves that no poet should rest on his or her laurels, and that young poets need for older poets either to inspire them or to encourage them, but they rarely need to be bored (despite recent claims that poetry doesn’t need to make any bid for the attention of the reader).

Creeley Crawlies: Robert Creeley at the California College of Arts & Crafts, 7 November 1990, written by Vincent Farnsworth, Scott Stampfli, Julianne Leigh, and Owen Hill

Robert Creeley is one of our best poets, but he sure is into some boring shit now.

The night started insufferably enough with Michael McClure READING an introduction asserting either (hard to tell) Creeley’s Greatness or McClure’s Greatness or the Greatness of mythologizing your own past while you’re still young enough to live off it.

So then Creeley came on. It didn’t seem that bad at first, because of that 10-15 minute lag time where you wonder Is It Me before you realize This Guy Is Being Really Dull. It became apparent Creeley didn’t even need the audience, since he was chuckling over his own cleverness and he never looked up to see his lengthy nostalgic meanderings between poems were whiffling right by the restless art students in the packed lecture hall. Maybe if he’d followed thru in that direction—of a fading star riding the revival circuit—and read some of his Greatest Hits, like “If You” or “The Finger,” we would have cared more about those old days McClure dripped about when he and his friends were excited and exciting in their (once) refreshing use of bebop rhythms. Instead people escaped the room right in front of Creeley as he went Hee Hee That Was Kindof Fun I Think I’ll Read It Again and then read stuff smelling suspiciously like it had been touched by his richer and more powerful new friends, the Language Poets. Stuff sounding like this:

       To in to up
       to over to inside
       to outside to above
       to which to you.

or part of a rural remembrance:

      cats rats
      swallows follow
      sun sunk
      dog log

Blah! The language people rarely live up to even the low altitude of their own ideas, and lots of the more boring stuff of this evening seemed hogtied by some concept like, Words mean so much they don’t mean anything anymore.

The most real part of the evening occurred with a cameo appearance by some Art Drunk who, after arriving very late and swaying in the doorway for a couple minutes before finding a seat, finally couldn’t take it anymore and yelled “You’re a fucking wimp!” Creeley thought he said “Talking wind,” and said Well that’s what poetry is, talking wind. “You’re a fucking wimp!” the drunk repeated before moderator man went over to have a talk with him. Drunk Critic lasted maybe 15 more minutes, till Creeley started on a long explanation of an upcoming poem about Wordsworth’s sister (?), when Drunkman shambled out the exit with a loud “FUCK WORDSWORTH!,” cueing (appreciative?) laughter in the crowd. Give me a triple shot of that stuff.

Of course it’s easy to be negative, and to be glib about it. The night had its moments and its poems, and Creeley actually seemed a little sad more often than arrogant. Aging and the past seem to preoccupy him as he sat there uncomfortably, smoothing down his hair. But it’s hard to be gentle when poetry is smothered in front of you at what might have been for some their first exposure to a Poet Great. It made you want to stand up yelling POETRY IS NOT BORING or WHERE IS THE PASSION or to run out the door into the street yelling I WANT TO LIVE.

—from Carbuncle, issue 3, 1991

There’s one poet I did mention whom I’d like to bring a little more attention to here: Coral Bracho.

Intentionally or not, Bracho introduced a version of écriture feminine into the Octavio Paz lineage of Mexican poetry. Her earlier work, with its dashes and fragments, at moments reminds me of Danielle Collobert’s poetry. Bracho’s later writing is more restrained, more focused on objects than subjects (more Paz-ian in a way), but no less haunting or haunted. Time, always shadowed by mortality, displaces a previous grasping at immediacy. Language that was once fractured is now limned by silence. From the book-length poem That Space, that Garden:

Of the scores of books I read or looked at for my Voice roundup, Bracho was one of my favorite personal discoveries, i.e., a poet whose work I didn’t know, and which deeply impressed me.

To be honest, this was my first extensive encounter with Mayer’s work. I’d known of it, had read some of it, but it was interesting to acquire so much of the work first hand: some of the sonnets, some of the journals/diaries, several long sequences, a very wry, dry sense of humor pervading.

Coolidge came to the podium next, already a good 45 minutes behind schedule (I could see Steve Evans sweating the situation as the afternoon panels would have to be pushed back in order to accommodate the return bus trip): Tom Orange, who has expertise in Coolidge’s poetry, introduced him; Coolidge is a tall guy. He loomed over the lectern reading in a surprisingly staid voice – surprising to me, I guess. I’d never heard him read before and expected a more staccato delivery, I suppose. Another solid hour of poetry. I’m a fan of Coolidge’s work – I’d been looking forward to this one. I’ll be honest, though: my attention was waning. The acoustics in this gallery were lousy: the amplification somehow swallowed the brightness of speech while ricocheting the bass sounds. And lunchtime was looming.

When the reading was done, there were sandwiches in bags for all of us and a perfect, bright Maine summer afternoon beckoning outside. With many others, I retired for the porch to the museum, sipping ginger ale and eating lunch. I snapped this photo of Tom Raworth and Doug Lang in the bright sunlight. Their lunch consisted, initially, of cigarettes.

The drive back to Orono after lunch was smooth, lubricated as it was by a stop at the Dairy Queen in Waterville on the way out of town. Have the summertime praises of Dairy Queen been sung enough by the poets of America? The first set of afternoon panels provided many temptations: Kit Robinson on Ted Greenwald and Keith Tuma on Raworth; Andrew Epstein and Scott Pound on Silliman; Ed Foster, Eric Hoffman, and Burt Kimmelman on Bronk; a Hannah Weiner panel. I opted for the New Order concert: “Periodizing the 1970s: The Adolescence of the Spectacle and the End of the Post-War Boom in Debord, Ashbery, and Others” featuring Joshua Clover on synthesizer, Christopher Nealon on vocals, and Bob Perelman on analog programming.

The panel started with Clover’s talk on “The Sunday of the Seventies, The Saint of the Negative.” It was about Guy Debord, a Rolf Dieter Brinkmann poem, the Situationist International, and about the advanced use of PowerPoint. Comparing Clover’s use of this medium with Watten’s from the previous day, I would say where Watten was playing a Casio keyboard, Clover was playing a Grand Piano. (Did I just say that?!) The computer is a splendid instrument in his hands. His presentation was easily the most beautiful I saw. Truly: beauty in an academic presentation! It didn’t even matter what it was about: there was a film soughing gently in the background, text superimposed, Clover lankily underlit by the podium he worked at. His talk included the phrase “habitual dithyrambs to debauchery.” I have no idea what any of it meant but was mesmerized.

He was followed by Chris Nealon, who gave an immediately, transparently intelligent reading of Ashbery’s poetry, focusing on many of its aspects, but especially – at least my notes tell me – on “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” He framed this portrait in a reading of the New York of the 1970s – investment bankers and corporate traders, “the spectacularization of capital” the Twin Towers represented. He referred to poetry as a kind of anti-violence, being political simply by not being war. He explained that a poet is a minor figure for living in a system of divided labor in which he can never be whole. And then he read through Ashbery’s poem as the exemplary speaking subject for the 1970s. It was all kind of mind-blowing.

Followed by Bob Perelman’s talk on “Democracy & Bathos.” Tracking bathos back through Pope to Longinus, Perelman claimed it to be at the center of new poetry, calling it “the very soul of Flarf.” (Or was that me, in my notes?) He keyed his sense of bathos to two of Ashbery’s poems, “Calypso” and “Fugue on a Theme,” insisting it is the precision of the wrongness in these poems that is most striking. He then shifted focus to Flarf, reading two poems of Ben Friedlander’s as examples. He seemed to dig Flarf, as far as I could tell. I left this panel with the theoretical lobe of my brain emitting low-grade radiation.

And went immediately to a Bernadette Mayer panel, featuring Lee Ann Brown, Kimberly Lyons, Jennifer Moxley, and Jonathan Skinner. What I liked about this panel was the way it represented the work of its subject. Brown provided an alphabet of Mayer’s work, keying in on Getrude Stein’s influence on Mayer, among whose slogans is “Read the Steins!” (Gertrude, Wittgenstein, and Einstein.) Brown also quoted this from Mayer, “Sometimes I want to have sex with everyone in my zipcode.” Lyons focused on Mayer’s Studying Hunger from 1975, speaking of it in terms of the burgeoning ecology movement in the 1970s, but also in terms of its use of Native American mythologies and texts. Moxley focused on Mayer’s memory constructs, thinking through Mayer’s use of the form of the journal, wondering why this form is considered “conceptual,” at least in avant-garde practice. She also distinguished Mayer’s practices from those of the so-called Confessional poets, particularly what she called their “histrionic high artifice” presented “as unedited raw truth”; Mayer’s textual practice, by contrast, was an Augustinian exploration of memory as the same thing as the mind. Skinner finished with another reading of Studying Hunger, which he thought through in terms of its resonances with Thoreau’s Walden. There was an interesting discussion that followed, and I found myself wanting to get better acquainted with Mayer’s work.

But not before attending the “Queering of the 1970s” panel, featuring Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, and Eileen Myles. Unfortunately, this plenary coincided with a brief dinner hour window. There was no way to attend this panel and have dinner at the same time, unless you would be satisfied with sandwiches from the student commissary. I opted for hunger, at least temporarily, listening with rapt attention as Killian described John Wieners’ transvestite passions in vivid detail: in the 1970s, drag entered culture in a large way, said Killian. Wieners rode the wave. Bellamy read from a more memoiristic piece about how she came into being a queer writer in San Francisco in the 1970s, associating with a group of feminist writers before connecting with the experimental community with which she’s usually associated. It was a interesting piece about shifting transitions and the use/value of different communities at different times in one’s life. The plenary finished with Eileen Myles, whose performance matched that of her reading on the opening night of the conference: when she started speaking you could feel oxygen entering the room. She read from a paper but extemporized avidly, describing the development of writing and performance in queer/experimental communities in New York in the 1970s, at one point making a bold comparison between the digital reality of today’s poetry and the analog reality of the 1970s. (Am I remembering that correctly?)

When the panel ended, many of us fled for dinner, hoping to rush something in before Tom Raworth’s reading in 45 minutes. I’ve seen Tom read several times – he’s one of the most surprising and revelatory poetry readers there is, rushing through his poems at hyperventilated velocity. Given that most of the keynote poets were going long, I figured I’d make it to most of this reading. But the rapidity of Tom’s delivery confounded my desires: I caught only the last few minutes and the rapturous applause afterward.

Photo by Scott Pound

The final keynote of the night was Rae Armantrout. I’d never seen her read before, but admire the poetry quite a lot. This was one of my favorite readings: something about the size of her poems and the acidity of her delivery made them both memorable and digestible. By the time her reading started, I was on my twelfth hour of poetry – but her delivery and presence soothed and compelled. The applause that filled the auditorium when she finished were well-deserved.

But the evening wasn’t over. Pods of poets and scholars were already floating around the cash bar outside the Black Box Theater, awaiting the late night’s final event: the last of the open readings. It was nearly midnight but I couldn’t resist. After days of thinking seriously about poetry, there is an exhilarating freedom to the open reading. One person after another, for five minutes, working the afflatus of language, sucking air into it and then squeezing hard to blow it out. Earnest engagement, outright humor, bizarre experiment. It’s the good stuff, reader. And to experience it, you’ll need to plan your trip to Maine in 2012.

By Day 5, Sunday morning, most participants are fried to a crisp. Nevertheless, there were two sets of panels Sunday morning to conclude things. The early morning panel I attended turned out to be one of my favorites: Bruce Holsapple spoke about Philip Whalen’s poems with obvious passion and intelligence, making me eager to dip back into the library copy of his Collected Poems I have in my study; Stephen Motika, of Poets House delivered a talk on Leland Hickman, who is probably best known for editing the journal Temblor in the 1980s, but whose stranger, even alarming poetry (at least in Stephen’s account of it) is soon to be republished; and Mark Silverberg spoke of Kenneth Patchen’s late, last poem-paintings, with many slides and images of them. What I liked about this panel is that it involved three people talking with dedication and passion about three somewhat overlooked subjects: in all three cases, these were the only talks on these subjects given at the conference.

The conference ended for me with a roundtable discussion, led by Joel Bettridge, of Ronald Johnson, with special reference to Ronald Johnson: Life and Works. Have you bought your copy yet, reader? If not, now there is a direct link to the book on the NPF pages.

Blowing out of town at noon to rush down to Boston to catch afternoon planes back to London, to Chicago, and to Portland, Oregon, we kept running into people from the conference: at the sandwich shop in Orono that Jennifer Moxley had directed all of us to visit to grab some lunch, at the rest stop near Portland where Patrick Pritchett was leading a crew toward the Burger King, and even at the airports – Logan, O’Hare. Poetry – it’s everywhere, especially after dispersing from its momentary epicenter in the middle of Maine to the rest of the continent and beyond.

Since I began attending this conference in 1996, the internet has replaced correspondence as the means of communicating “what happened” as an event such as this one. I think, overall, this is fortunate (though I miss the privacy of exchanging letters or phonecalls about such things). But in the case of the National Poetry Foundation conference, this is especially fortunate: Steve Evans has compiled an ever-changing page of responses to the conference, including links to many Flickr pages with lots of photos of the events, as well as blog recapitulations and other musings. This also includes a direct link to the conference ThoughtMesh website where you can read abstracts and participant essays as they are posted.

Eventually, and presumably, Steve’s page of responses will include a link to Kevin Killian’s “Orono Fashion Report, 2008” or something like that. The Electronic Poetry Center has a link to his “What I Saw at the 2000 Orono Conference”. These were all initially posted to the Buffalo Poetics List. One of the pleasures of going to Orono, for me, is getting to bump into Kevin over the course of five days, to hear what he’s up to, and to hear what he thinks about what’s been going on. His accounts of these conferences are as good as it gets. (Mine pale in comparison.) When I first attended in 1996, all the meals were taken in this outmoded cafeteria. It was a daunting time to be surrounded by all these poets but not to know anyone. Kevin, having introduced himself to me, proceeded sweetly to join me for most of the meals that week, introducing me to everyone he knew, which was pretty much everyone at the conference. So, in the spirit of gratitude for that gesture, I’d like to dedicate these unfashionable Orono reports to Kevin, with love and admiration.

See you in 2012.

That’s my conjugation.

Early in the process of developing my transnational social movement “poetry dialogues,” when I was asked by the education directors at NUMSA (National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa) to lead a series of two-day, eight-hour per day poetry workshops at Ford plants in Port Elizabeth and Pretoria, I formulated a schedule that included a “first person singular” poetry day and a “first person plural” day. In the former, autoworkers would read poems like U Sam Oeur’s “Work at the Douglas Corporation, Urethane Department, Minneapolis, Minnesota” and view digital videos of workers from my previous workshops; they would then write individual, often documentary/reportage poems (think Tillie Olsen’s “I want you women up north to know”) about their experiences.

One the second day, the “first person plural” day, I devised a series of exercises for workers to collectively compose collaborative “choral” poems from their experiences, poems that they would then perform as a chorus of workers. If interested, you can find printed examples of both types of poems online in the UAW 879’s October-November 2006 newsletter. [Note: they are not meant to be center-justified, but oh well…]

Yesterday, somewhere between the boyhood home of Sinclair Lewis and the city of Fargo, I facilitated another one of my trade union poetry workshops for Education MN (who represent 70,000 public educators from across the state).

Since the people in my group were from regions all across Minnesota (and were also at various stages of contract negotiations, membership development, organizing drives, dispute resolutions, etc.), the issues we wanted our choral poem to address were varied: intra-union conflict and communication, new member involvement, Fair Share, etc.). Workshop participants wrote poetry stanzas on all these issues and, after some discussions, we decided on the chorus line “What are the pieces of the mosaic?” [Note: I’d shown participants the 2,000+ photo Zimbabwe banner that I included in my last post as part of my introduction.]

The poem itself, “the noun,” was quite beautiful, especially as chorally performed by the participants. It somehow managed (similar to the Zimbabwe protest mosaic) to capture the complete range of poetic forms—one person wrote a limerick; several wrote imagistic poems heavy with water, soil, and rock symbolism; one wrote a short-lined poem that focused on opposites; another person told a deeply personal story of appreciation for solidarity; one directly addressed Fair Share. These pieces (each became a stanza for the choral poem) reflected the incredible diversity of poetic forms and styles that regularly get set against each other in the poetry debates that rage here and elsewhere in the lit/crit & poetry worlds. Yet in western Minnesota yesterday, at a lakeside conference center with union educators and organizers, they somehow coalesced into one under the larger rubric of collectively composed social movement choral poem.

The focus on poetry as verb, as the process of articulating (simultaneously) the first person singular and the first person plural, the individual and the collective, the private and the public, somehow managed for a little while again to transcend one type of debate as it coalesced to build a voice for another—a voice in common and in collective for the betterment of self through the betterment of all.

I know that’s not the function of poetry as noun.

(Maybe that's why I like the verb.)

Friday the 13th of the Poetry of the 1970s began much the same as the previous day: up early – the birds of Maine with their dawn chorus – searching for breakfast and then striding through the lovely piney woods. Even without the sleep I needed, I was feeling oddly refreshed.

And the morning started strong. I opted for the panel with the provocative title, “The Avant-Garde, Language, and Opposition,” with two papers by two thinkers whose work I admire both from the Pacific Northwest: Jeanne Heaving from Seattle, and Miriam Nichols from Vancouver. Check out these paper titles: “Marking the Avant Garde” and “Writing Opposition: Determinate Negation and the Imago Mundi.” Nice.

Heuving’s claim – that what she was labeling “introjectionist projectivist” poetry, which stresses irrationality over critique (the mainstay, in her reading, of Language poetry), has been sold short as a representative &/or standard bearer of the avant garde in American poetry – was impressively complemented by Miriam Nichols’ grand taxonomic juxtapositions, in which she argued for the reassertion of a poetry of cosmicity whose reflexivity is presently out of phase with itself, owing to the rise of current “oppositional” poetries, whose strategies of negation tend toward an “antinomian Puritanism” of language. At one point, she posed the cosmicity of the New American poetry, exemplified by Olson, against the negation of Language poetry, exemplified by Ron Silliman. What both of these talks gestured toward, in my mind, was that resonant, Tolkienesque, hopelessly retrograde word mythopoeia, coined in the 19th century – when Shelley was alive – but put to work in the 20th, when Pound was around. (Heuving used Shelley and Pound to stand for figures of the projectivist impulse.)

Things shifted decidedly back toward Language in the morning plenary: Barrett Watten’s talk, “Late Capitalism & Language Writing.” I find this talk hard to summarize without retelling it like the Dream of Irma’s Injection in The Interpretation of Dreams. Here’s some of what happened, some of what Watten said: the power of PowerPoint, the slideshow authority of technology; the seventies were the shortest decade; what it meant to write in the 70s was to negotiate the totalizing imperative of the 60s; we were destabilizing available forms of expression and inventing new ones; the advent of Neoliberalism happened during a period of global economic crisis; Watten described what happened in the Bay Area during the formation of Language poetry by appropriating what happens in some of Roberto Bolaño’s novels; psychic injuries at the hands of the 70s; prospective v. retrospective readings of Language poetry; aggravation at ongoing retrospective readings, ones that insist on Language as a “period style”; reading of his poem “Tibet,” with text on PowerPoint, interspersed with images of tanks & tankas (Tibetan Buddhist scroll paintings); get it? tank/tanka?!; anti-heroic agency of Language & its poetic of uneven development… It goes on, several pages of notes in my little notebook.

A photo of me & my notebook by Scott Pound.

When he ended, Watten professed his discomfort at the habit of “Oedipalizing” the story of Language poetry. Yet, I couldn’t help but think of the central story to Frazer’s Golden Bough, that of the rex Nemorensis, namely the priest of the grove sacred to Diana at Nemi who obtained his role by slaying the previous guardian of the grove and who held that role only so long as he could ward off the attacks of his covetous successors. The first four questions fielded from the audience were from Christopher Nealon, Joshua Clover, Aaron Kunin, and Franklin Bruno. Were they smelling blood? Can you tell that I dig me my Freud?

Many interesting panels beckoned in the afternoon: Bernadette Mayer, Fluxus, Olson & Dorn, Coolidge, Post-Coyote poetry, performance. And the famed lobster banquet. Reader, will you blame me for skipping these events to go to the ocean? Will you hold it against me that I strode upon the ancient granitic schist that begins the land of These States? For I did skip out on the afternoon events to drive to Acadia National Park with four compatriots: Chris G., Ross H., Tom F. & his lovely daughter. And we did see the ocean surging. And would you believe me to hear that gods do float in the azure air of Maine, bright gods and American? And would you believe me that little tubs of melted butter are waiting for you to dip lobster meats into, and that it is succulent and buttery to eat of these massive insects? And would you blame me at all?

Though we missed the plenary poetry readings by Ann Lauterbach and Nicole Brossard, we made it back in time to attend the “Special group reading by Washington, DC poets.” This was held in the aforementioned Black Box Theater. (Or did I mention it? Its name is incredibly descriptive; this is where all the open poetry readings happened.) Outside was the always hopping Cash Bar. When I arrived, I ran into Tom Raworth. He was wearing sunglasses (it was 10.30 at night) and a t-shirt on which was printed a bullseye with over which a hand was giving the finger. He told me the t-shirt was unique & it was meant for the DC Sniper. Could I love Tom Raworth more?

In spite of the hour, this was another good, rousing reading. It featured Tina Darragh, Lynne Dryer, Doug Lang, P. Inman, Joan Retallack, Phyllis Rosenzweig, and Diane Ward. Each poet’s reading centered around works originally published in Dog City, an evidently legendary DC poetry journal. Tom Orange introduced the reading by conveying a convincing sense of how he’d been welcomed into the DC poetry community when he lived there; the poets impressed with a sense of friendship and good humor. They also all read for a very brief amount of time – a nice touch! But even though the reading stretched toward midnight, I noticed that most of the poets invited to the conference – Raworth, Coolidge, Andrews, the Grand Piano poets – were there, holding strong.

Stronger than I. For once again, bushed, I laid my weary head to sleep before the open readings began. (And in spite of friends urging me to stay…)

Attentive crowd, photo by Scott Pound.

Travis Nichols’ post on the current conjecture over who will or should be the next Poet Laureate of Britain contained a wonderfully sad story involving John McCain, Robert Pinksy, Charles Simic and an unfortunately bright-but-not-bright-enough man who wanted to illustrate McCain’s ignorance but instead illustrated his own (sidenote: I don’t see what this man’s being from Tennessee had to do with anything—the author of the original article could just have easily said that the man was from the US). The punchline was this: we live in a country where even somebody who seems to care about poetry enough to ask a trivia question about it (let’s call him “man from US”) doesn’t know who the Poet Laureate is. As for McCain, I think that a correct answer on his part—or even an answer on his part—would only have hurt him amongst his supporters; so, in essence, he gave the correct answer as far as likely McCain voters might be concerned.

During the Reagan presidency, Congress officially added the term “Poet Laureate” to the appointee’s title. Our country was in love with monarchies again (thank you, Princess Diana) and perhaps the “laureatization” of the position made us feel like our official poet would be regarded as regal and stentorian, rather than seeming merely the sort of civil servant who would take a job as “consultant.”

Title VI of Senate Bill S.1264 passed in 1985 under the sponsorship of Dan Quayle. Maybe it’s time to think about repealing that title and restoring the less grandiose title to the office in question.

Elected officials blow with the winds of their constituancies. And none has blown any worse than former governor James McGreevey. Back in 2002, McGreevey called for Amiri Baraka to be removed from his symbolic office as New Jersey’s poet laureate, leading the New Jersey State Senate to enact a law eliminating his position.

The Baraka saga was a travesty. Maybe that would have been a good time for poets to begin considering whether they should accept honorific decorations of ruling bodies—unless the title being handed out has a Shakespearean irony to it. Maybe something like “State Fool?"

Or it may be that poets are aligned with the left because they tend to share the concerns of the poor, or at least the not-rich, having only moderate incomes and job stability, maybe no job stability (as in the blogged-upon case of Etheridge Knight). This would imply that poets share leftist sentiments out of compassion. And that poets are, by nature, compassionate.

I get irked, though, when poetry blindly takes up the cause of liberalism without in some way nodding to the assertions of the other side, the other side being the non-left rest of the world. And when poets are assumed to have common natures (for example: compassionate). There is an assumption that we share the same—is it political? no, more widespreadly social—views. This assumption makes poetry more monolithic than it is, and undermines the (naïve?) hope that some poets harbor about the value of poetry in the social commons. That poetry may sway hearts, however corny a thing that is to say. This is not possible because the right is excluded from poetry altogether.

I wish I knew more about the history of poets on the right. James Dickey, a poet whose canonized work I like quite a bit, I’ve heard tell was a political conservative (this is how blogs spread rumor). It would serve poetry well if the right had a voice in it, so that there would be a challenge for the left to rise to. A counter-song.

Maybe this is why there is not much good poetry written about war (OK: Homer) compared to the bulk of good poetry written about love. Poets tend to lapse into propaganda and polemic when they try too hard to “make something happen,” as Auden warned us. Yet it is a good dream, for poetry to serve the civic good in some direct way,
while realizing that through argument with others we make rhetoric (isn’t that how the old chestnut goes?) That poetry is argument with the self.

I hope poets with more of the historical sweep on this subject than I have will comment.