James Wright (image by way of 9 Poetic Fingers)

One does not turn to James Wright for laughter, so it came as something of a surprise to find him writing a tribute to the Italian satirist Giuseppe Gioachino Belli. The tribute appears in Wright’s last collection, the posthumous This Journey (1982), and was fashioned in Belli’s own savored form, the sonnet, making it the second to last of Wright’s half-dozen and the first after many years, indeed the first after “Saint Judas” (1959), the celebrated title poem of Wright’s last book in which traditional form was the rule.^[1]

Half a dozen is not a large number, but Wright made his mark in the sonnet before abandoning the form: his “Saint Judas” is one of 92 poems from the previous century chosen by Daniel Bromwich for American Sonnets (2005), a slender anthology from the Library of America.^[2] Inspired by Belli or not, then, Wright’s return to the sonnet in This Journey, a book composed at the end of his life — he was dying of cancer at the time — must have functioned for the longtime reader of his wrok as a kind of rhyme, both well-prepared for and unexpected, yielding to a need, or at least desire, for formal closure, while offering up the pleasures of surprise.

The rhyme, it should be said, is not a couplet, but an envelope, coming after two decades of free verse, drawing a link between one kind of last book and another. The subject too creates a kind of envelope rhyme, drawing a link between two temporally disjunct figures: Wright wrote his doctoral thesis on Charles Dickens (and so, presumably, had an appreciation for humor, if not the gift or inclination to produce it), while Belli, a contemporary of the novelist, had Dickens’s ear for dialect and a comparable sympathy for the poor. Call it an off-rhyme, as Belli’s sympathy was not displayed with tenderness but outrage. His humor was decidedly populist: Belli brought a low comedy to bear on correspondingly high subjects, most notably the popes (James Joyce was an admirer), expressing himself in the vulgar tongue of his native Trastevere — the language of Rome, Romanesco. Wright had his own love of the vulgar but his method was very nearly the opposite: he brought a high sense of tragedy to ear on the low — it was the darkness in Dickens to which he was drawn; and he expressed himself, even in free verse, in “a conspicuously mannered style” (quoting here from a review of This Journey) “derived neither from speech nor from traditionally fluent writing.”^[3]

Piazza Giuseppe Giacchino Belli in Rome (photo by Dr Martinus)

Given all this, it is not surprising that Wright should discover a tragic comedy in Belli. The one poet disdained, the other pursued, a project of dignification, but the two shared a deep appreciation of indignity’s power, though that power was mobilized in very different ways. Wright reflected on it, Belli conferred it. Wright’s tribute to Belli closes the circle, reflecting on the indignity conferred on Belli himself. This topic of reflection might, in other hands, at other times, produce something other than a tribute, but Wright had good reason to identify with Belli beyond the bare fact that both were poets. As his title indicates, Wright’s sonnet concerns the poet’s embrace by posterity, and Wright was aware, of course, in composing it that this embrace would soon be his own. Contemplating Rome’s monument to Belli, Wright saw that such tributes are a mixed blessing, and so decided to add his own prayer to the mix — his own inscription, as it were, on the monument to poetry that the sonnet itself represents:

Reading a 1979 Inscription
on Belli’s Monument

It is not only the Romans who are gone.
Belli, unhappy a century ago,
Won from the world his fashionable stone.
Where it stands now, he doesn’t even know.
Across the Tiber, near Trastevere,
His top hat teetered on his head with care,
Brushed like a gentleman, he cannot see
The latest Romans who succeed him there.

One of them bravely climbed his pedestal
And sprayed a scarlet ᴍᴇʀᴅᴀ on his shawl.
This afternoon, I pray his hidden grave
Lies nameless somewhere in the hills, while rain
Fusses and frets to rinse away the stain.
Rain might erase when marble cannot save.^[4]

Not quite a prayer for oblivion, the poem extols the hidden and nameless, preferring the valet-like service of the rain (which fusses and frets over the dirtied gentleman) to the magisterial efforts of the stone. The stain here is not sin, but insult, yet that final word “save” does suggest a contrast between the humility of Christ and the majesty of the Church, a contrast with no small significance in Belli’s own poetry. The ironies are clear, so clear one might not take care to notice that this Christ-like rain is tendering its care to Belli, who lies elsewhere, but to the Church — if I might put it that way — erected in his name. A river divides Belli from his posterity, and Wright, standing on this side, has already passed over in his care to the other.

◊

Ray Johnson cover for The Roman Sonnets of Giuseppi Gioachino Belli (Jargon Press, 1960) (image by way of With Hidden Noise)

Wright is not a poet with any presence in the NPF’s publications, and I find only one session in which his work was discussed at any of our conferences, but a few months ago, visiting Jamestown Community College, I found myself in a lunchtime conversation with the brother-in-law of Wright’s widow, and since then I’ve done some modest dipping in and out of Wright’s work. (The brother-in-law, I should say, was the president of the college, which made this the most interesting conversation I’ve ever had with an administrator.) Wright, in turn, led me to Belli, whose link to the NPF is, paradoxically, much stronger: Harold Norse’s lively translations were published by Jonathan Williams with an introduction by William Carlos Williams. That introduction is primarily concerned with language: Belli’s Roman dialect and the American idiom with which Norse created his translations. Williams is charmed by the use of such language by “the sonnet, of all forms, so used to being employed for delicate nuances of sound and sense.” I suspect he would not have had much use for Wright’s poem, though his summary of Belli’s accomplishment captures well the complex relation of high and low that Wright shares with Belli, and that Wright captured in his own way in his tribute:

The times were crude, especially so for the underdogs with whom these sonnets deal, but not so crude that they could not see themselves, in their imaginations, in high office. Belli saw it also and he knew how, politely, to bring them down — and up ! — to their betters by a knowledge of the language.^[5]

A fair summary of Wright’s accomplishment too.

◊

Notes

¹ [Back to text] I take the figure six from Above the River: The Complete Poems, ed. Anne Wright (1990). Three appear in Wright’s first book, The Green Wall (1957): “To a Troubled Friend,” “To a Fugitive,” and “My Grandmother’s Ghost.” After these comes “Saint Judas,” and then, after long pause, two last sonnets appear in This Journey: Wright’s tribute to Belli and “May Morning,” the latter an experiment in which a rhymed and metered sonnet is run together as prose (as noted by Kevin Stein in James Wright: The Poetry of a Grown Man, 138-39 and 198 n. 21, crediting Michael Hefernan with the discovery). Conceivably, Wright also thought of “Listening to the Mourners” as a sonnet. Its fourteen irregular, unrhymed lines appear in Shall We Gather at the River (1968).

² [Back to text] I mean the century leading up the anthology itself: xxx.

³ [Back to text] The reviewer is Alan Williamson, writing for The New Republic. See James Wright: The Heart of the Light, ed. Peter Stitt and Frank Graziano, 411.

⁴ [Back to text] Wright, Above the River, 325.

⁵ [Back to text] William Carlos Williams, “Preface,” The Roman Sonnets of Giuseppi Gioachino Belli, n.p.

Published on December 14, 2012. Click on the image for a legible text — or go to the online version (link).

The name rang a bell, but I am not an opera buff, so I guessed a Frank O’Hara reference. Which was close: Gloria Davy sang the libretto that James Schuyler wrote for Paul Bowles, about which my colleague Paul Bauschatz wrote a fine essay, “James Schuyler’s ‘A Picnic Cantata’: The Art of the Ordinary.” It appeared in The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets, edited by Terence Diggory and Stephen Paul Miller, a book brought out by the NPF in 2001 (link).

The picture of Davy in the Times was taken four years after the premier of the Schuyler-Bowles collaboration, which occurred on March 24, 1954. Four singers performed: Davy and Martha Flowers were the sopranos; Mareda Gaither sang mezzo-soprano; Gloria Wynder, contralto. Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, who commissioned the piece, played piano. There was also a percussionist, Al Howard. Columbia then released a recording with this delightful cover:

Cover by way of Discogs (click here for album info and on the image for a larger view).

As the arrows indicate, Davy is sitting beside Schuyler, on his right, in the back row of the car. His libretto, apparently, also appears on the cover, bearing a dedication absent from the text in Collected Poems: “to Mrs. William Esty” —  arts patron Alice Swanson Esty. Her paper are kept at Bates College, and there’s Schuyler material included there [link]. I’ll have to make a day trip.

Paul Bauschatz

Schuyler’s libretto — his poem — is divided in six sections, the action of which is easily summarized: a surprise visit from friends, who propose a Sunday drive and picnic, then the planning of the picnic and the drive itself (section I); arrival and lunch (II); a reading of the Sunday paper, beginning with horoscope (III), followed by advice column (IV) and garden section (V); then the packing up and return home (VI). Given how much of this matter is supplied by a newspaper, it’s appropriate, I suppose, that the New York Times led me back to Schuyler’s poem. Or maybe not appropriate; but ironic, since the Times had no use for this text in ’54, characterizing it as nonsense, adding: “Absurdity can sometimes be delightful, but this … is merely absurd.” A judgment I find hard to fathom: Schuyler’s poem is a hymn, so to speak, to  “The Art of the Ordinary,” to quote the subtitle of Bauschatz’s essay. Yes, there are dizzying moments, especially if one wants to differentiate characters amid the lovely bubbling of voices. But absurd? Nonsensical? As Bauschatz notes, “Schuyler’s typical poetic practice presents an ordinary mind or minds, somewhat befuddled, trying to organize or make coherent sense of ordinary events in ways that also let us, his readers, partake in the organizing process.” The Times, obviously, had no interest in partaking.

Not in the fifties, anyway. A 1992 revival was more fortunate in its reviewers, with Bernard Holland bestowing his approval, after a fashion: “thin to the point of triviality, … this glassy-eyed account of four women on a picnic has a zany and wholly winning ingenuousness.”

Four women, one of them, once upon a time, Gloria Davy. I clipped her picture yesterday, and put the rest of the paper in the bin.

From the December 11, 2012, edition of the New York Times (link)

Belatedly posting this odd sighting of Ezra Pound, which appeared in the letters column of “Science Times,” the Tuesday section of the New York Times. It responded to an article (link) that reported that antibiotics were proving ineffective in treating urinary tract infections in men, with harmful side effects when the treatment was prolonged. The letter writer, Ronald Macaulay (Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Pitzer College, Claremont, CA), noted that methenamine is readily available as an alternative. His letter concludes: “Ezra Pound gave thanks for the benefits of methenamine in ‘The Pisan Cantos,’ in the days before antibiotics were common.” Not your expected authority, although I suspect no other literary figure has ever mentioned the drug (the OED, for instance, gives the same reference in its definition, the only non-scientist so cited).

Pound’s thanks for the drug comes in the first of the Pisan cantos, in a passage that is often cited, though not for this particular line:

and Mr Edwards superb green and brown
in ward No 4 a jacent benignity,
of the Baluba mask: “doan you tell no one
I made you that table”
methenamine eases the urine
and the greatest is charity
to be found among those who have not observed
regulations (74/454)^[*]

As Richard Sieburth notes in his annotated edition of The Pisan Cantos, “Mr Edwards” is Henry Hudson Edwards, an African American serviceman and fellow prisoner. On account of his race, Edwards is figured here as a Baluba mask, an African artifact of the sort Pound learned about from Leo Frobenius. The table, made from crate, is immediately linked to the “methenamine”: two instruments of kindness that Pound upholds with his allusion to Corinthians. “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” Greatest, perhaps, because it came to Pound from outside, faith and hope having been his inner resources. Charity, perhaps, for the rhyme with “benignity,” which, in light of the drug, can be seen as an easing of the poem’s own malignancy, an easing of the infection of anger (the gift table having served as a writing surface).

I find it meaningful that Pound credits the drug itself with charity, not the medic who dispensed it: my thought is that he wanted to avoid associating his guards with kindness, Perhaps, too, he wanted to hint at an Axis benignity. Only nine lines before, a German pharmaceutical factory is mentioned: “and the Farben works still intact.” This is the infamous I. G. Farben, broken up after the war for its role in various war crimes; and since its name means “colors,” there may be a tie-in too, poetically speaking, with the charity of Edwards, especially since Edwards is then described in terms borrowed from the German “works” of Frobenius.

The Wikipedia entry for the underlying chemical describes methenamine as a “white crystalline compound” having “a cage-like structure,” noting further: “It sublimes in a vacuum at 280 °C.” A description that serves quite nicely for the poem too.

◊

Note

^* [Back to text] Unfortunately, the indentations in the poem are lost in this blog format. Clicking on the linked reference will take you to a reproduction of the page.

Here I offer for public review my most keenly-sensed take-away from the Poetry & Poetics of the 1980s Conference.

Because I have long been a reader of poetry written in this decade, and though my current scholarly interests expire by the end of the 1970s (I’ve attended both the Poetry of the 1960s and 1970s conference), I went to Orono to revel in poetry and community under summer skies. I didn’t intend to produce a social (or cloud) document – thus, sadly, I have few pictures – but to be present and observe, absorb, and perform. Contributing to a panel and having been invited by Laura Hinton (in early June) to contribute the “Poetry and Performance” event she was organizing, my lead-time to the conference was very intense and productive and, at the other end, for three full conference days I nourished my curiosities and enthusiasms. And here I shamelessly indulge these. Who would want it any other way is free to look for it elsewhere.

I arrived on Wednesday eve from Boston with Cathy Wagner as my excellent driving companion and navigator. Amidst our roving conversation we visited upon Irigaray, Denise Riley, conceptual poetry, the institution of academia (she must have recently been thinking about or writing her contribution to the Poetic Labor Project), and creative practice, among other things. I think I gave her a run down of the “geographies of relation” concept I would focus on in our panel (“Feminism in the ‘80s”). We got lost in Auburn, Maine following GPS directions to Food City and happily stumbled upon Axis Natural Foods (I prefer a food village) where I was able to stock up on sustaining wheat-free vittles (having recently discovered my love for Liz Lovely vegan/gluten free cookies). Like others traveling north, we drove under a cloud-smudged rainbow.

Thursday morning I attended the “Gender and Genre” panel where two poets on my 80s conference reading list (see photo below) – Bernadette Mayer and Rosmarie Waldrop—were featured. Being the first panel of the conference, and given my longstanding interest in what arises and is subverted at the intersection of gender and genre, I was eager to hear what would unfold. Ellen McGrath Smith’s presentation of a history of the framing/taming of the prose poem to reclaim a critical view of its vitality as a space of “writing the feminine” (so to speak), included the panel’s most memorable line: “when we start to talk about uncles, maybe it’s time to drop the lineage metaphor altogether.” I found it interesting that this group of papers (including David Need’s comparison of Bernadette’s Midwinter Day and Fanny Howe’s The Lives of a Spirit as sites of DeCerteauian resistance with particular attention to formal strategies and the quotidian and Ben Gillespie’s analysis, couched in a history of visual aesthetics in poetry, of resistance to the authority of the page as a visual space in Waldrop’s prose poems) dealt with gender and genre as separate categories, rather than as a cross-section of thinking, one as a lens for the other, for instance. Given the way panels get named on such occasions, it’s not fair to hold any of these scholars to account, but this interesting juxtaposition did at the time prompt me to wonder (aloud, as it turns out) if there was reason to revisit this sort of decidedly gendered genre critique (so thoroughly addressed in the work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis and other scholars), if there was more to say.

That afternoon, I attended “Post-Generic Writing in the 1980s” with Stephen Fredman, Peter Middleton and Kaplan Harris, whose provocations were excellently placed for Marjorie Perloff, Respondent, in this well-attended panel (to provide a little illustrative seating chart, I sat between Laura Moriarty and Miriam Nichols whilst Pen Creeley and Susan Howe sat in front of me). Marjorie selected her choice spots to prod and produce smoke if not sparks; she began, I believe, with the panel title: “is there a post-generic? of is it just a different genre?” (Given my own confessed prod to the previous panel, I have to marvel at the efficacy of this simple, some would say obvious, strategy). Middleton’s paper came closest to articulating the 1980s as a cultural-political time frame for poetry—and I note this because it seemed underplayed, at least in the variety of panels I attended—looking at correspondences between then-contemporary discourses (medicine/AIDS, finance/US economy) and Lyn Hejinian’s The Cell. The panel as a whole—with Kaplan offering as an entre into his look at San Francisco as a literary-geographical site a passage from Kathy Acker’s early novella The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec (1978) that prominently features (or deploys) “Ron Silliman” and Fredman’s paced treatment of attenuations of “poet’s prose” in Hejinian, Acker, and Cha—was well-rounded and it was interesting to see scholars one after the other at work in such different critical modes.

A little aside here on note-taking in panels. I’m terribly impressed with absorptive audients, those few, usually the more accomplished, who put on a serene face and drink ideas in. Personally, I take a lot of notes, mostly illegible, to swat ideas down onto my brain, if only fleetingly.

Susan Howe & Charles Bernstein, both of whom I’d studied with at Buffalo and neither of whom I’d seen perform for an audience a whole lot outside of the classroom, gave the keynote readings that evening, so this was a real treat. The Poetry Reading Keynote is often approached by reading through works chronologically, offering a bit of a personal overview. In addition to doing so, Susan illustrated a set of cultural changes in the 1980s—in poetry publishing, community formation, and the relationship of individuals and institutions. She began her reading by elaborating on the significance of Maureen Owens’s mimeo’d Telephone magazine and Telephone Books. Owens published from the late 60s into the early 80s, putting out two titles of Howe’s (Hinge Picture, 1974, and Secret History of the Dividing Line, 1978). Susan continued to thread throughout the rest of her reading comments about entering academia after joining the faculty of UB in the late 1980s (her first and only academic appointment) and the pressure this exerted on her work. Charles’ reading was perhaps generically illustrative of this point, with a wide range of poetry and criticism and translations, some off-rhyming. I always feel that Susan’s readings are haunted throughout by her own voice; both chose to read works touching on personal losses, Susan reading from That This, and Charles performing his beautiful and sad rendition of “Der Erlkonig.”

Who, afterwards, didn’t float along with others up to the bar, didn’t touch elbows with a few fellow people, wasn’t like me. We were celebrating life and community just by being there, and I perhaps at the time even took this for granted, for I remember only silly things, like how Jonathan Skinner joined me in conveying for Charles how his shirt appeared to change from a flat peach to the pale orange gingham pattern it was (I can’t remember Jonathan’s experience of the pattern/hue) during his reading. The elevator on this second floor continued to spill out people and drinks continued to be paid for and poured, yet I left the festive scene to head back to my suite to put last-minute touches on my presentation for the next morning’s panel, “Feminism in the 1980s.” I might keep right on going with this paragraph despite the shift to a new topic since this next and that last seem to have been separated by only a few winks. It was early—9 a.m.—when a convincingly alert-appearing and good-sized audience assembled. Arielle Greenberg, panel organizer, provided a provocative run down of what remains visible and what we need to continue to try to see about the 1980s in “W(h)ither Feminist Poetics in the 80s? Some Speculative History.”

Cathy Wagner’s “Identificatory Stances and Identificatory Trances: Denise Riley and the Legacy of Her Lyric Argument” made a great case for a historical reading of Riley’s subversion of lyric that, for Cathy, called into question the professed intentions of Conceptual Poetry regarding the disappearance of authorial intentionality these days. I rounded out the panel with a performative reading from several stacks of index cards (I’d meant it to look somewhat like a Tarot reading, and one audience member described it, I later heard, as “ludic,” so that was nice)—a series of questions, observations, and propositions viewing 1980s long poems by women (I primarily referenced Mayer, Waldrop, and Howe but was also thinking, sometimes aloud, about Notley, Berssenbrugge, Scalapino, and Dahlen,) not as discursive disruptions (a la ecriture feminine, Kristeva’s chora, post-structuralist subjectivities, etc.) but as investigations of actual space as a site of female inhabitance, with the text as a “geo-graphy”—a writing of actual spatial relations which are gendered and inform cultural constructions and performances of gender. The discussion following treaded along the mobius strip of woman/writer and raised the issue of the 80s being an era of multiple feminisms.

For anyone interested in the back story, here’s an aside for you. I had wanted to challenge my own prohibitive sense of how an “academic” conference paper “must” proceed; I decided not to write a paper, and this felt risky, though I was encouraged by Arielle in our conversations leading up to the conference to use the occasion of our panel as an exploratory forum. In devising my performance (sometimes I would call it a “talk” but given the venerable history of that word in the poetic configurations that emerged in the 1980s, I must acknowledge my folly), I proposed for myself a “reading list” of long poems by women,

taking these as a context for my thinking and performing. I came to think of my presentation as more of a provocation than an argument. Knowledge, and how one brings this to bear on the spaces she inhabits, is not gender neutral. We are all Susan Howe in some archive; her radical rearrangements and the female presences that emerge were important for me in thinking through what other women poets accomplish in terms of place and writing.

Since my own inquiries are into space and time, I looked forward to the “Temporality” panel up next, and I was not disappointed. Stephanie Anderson (“The Submerged Date in Coolidge and Eigner, 1982-84”), Charmaine Cadeau (“Time after Time: Creeley in the 80s”) and Lytle Shaw (“The Eigner Sanction: Keeping Time From the American Century”) are all people I look forward to hearing more from; I was hooked on their every word and unfortunately had to cut out of Lytle’s paper early to attend a run-through of the evening’s “Poetry and Performance” event and I felt as I though I was leaving in the middle of a fantastic story (the rockets and jets and bombs! the maps in the sky! the neighborhood as project! seeking a home! ideological constraints!) and I hoped some one would tell me how it ended (Lytle has since graciously shared his paper with me. Thanks, Lytle!)

I met up with Aldon Nielsen, Evie Shockley, Cathy Wagner, and Laura Hinton—there’s a photo of me on Aldon’s website bursting with laughter—I don’t remember what about. But we had great fun figuring out how to perform each other’s pieces and, we all agreed, assembled an intriguing program. More on this in a bit.

After lunch, in “A Sisterhood of Exploration: The Feminist Project of HOW(ever),” Linda Kinnahan began by passing out issues of the slim “magazine” (talk about gender and genre!) for attendees to peruse. This is living history: the feel of the urgency of assembly, of putting these various texts and visual text side by side in a collage of inquiry in fragments unpressured and gestating—this is what feminism in the 80s, to me, who wasn’t (quite) there, is about. Through an exploratory and collaborative mode of inquiry, HOW(ever) tapped into a broad range of critical and creative works and their cross section. The three papers on this panel offered very different and useful points of access into this important project. Getting to know Kathleen Fraser and HOW(ever) was part and parcel of my introduction to LangPo as a larger avant-garde formation and very important in getting me to Buffalo’s Poetics Program; she/it helped structure a lot of my thinking about feminism and innovation and the small press, and I’m glad to see there is still much more to be explored.

Our next stop in the conference proceedings is the cocktail hour preceding the banquet. Picture the variety of people pouring into a somewhat narrow, large-windowed space, lining up for the bar and forming mobile evolving chat-clusters; picture it from above, how it might look like generative cellular activity as participants continue to show up and cluster and circulate and recluster. And flash to the organized pattern of banquet tables with a few cells swaying about in search of a free chair.

Poor lobsters of Maine! How we photographed and feasted upon thee in your last red moments. Here, Cathy Wagner loving cradles her lobster:

Amidst all this we gave the customary but no less heartfelt round of applause for conference organizers Steve Evans and Carla Billitteri (and partners Jennifer Moxley and Ben Friedlander). Steve at some point cued up a video of Alice Notley reading from Mysteries of Small Houses—a nice touch. Here, Steve and Carla announcing the winner to the Thatcher-Reagan Photo Caption Contest:

After the banquet I had the pleasure of walking a stretch to the evening’s keynotes with Meta DuEwa Jones who remembered me from years ago when she’d been interviewed for a position at Buffalo and I was a grad student and we talked about C.S. Giscombe and mapping. I’d seen her give a paper the previous month in San Francisco on a fantastic panel on African-American poetics with Evie Shockley called “Innovative Nostalgia,” where her claim that “what’s nameless can be landscaped or mapped geographically” had encouraged me to consider mapmaking as a cultural practice and poetics as a way of disrupting hegemonic mapping.

Keynote Speaker Marjorie Perloff was vibrant as ever as she zoned in on Charles Bernstein’s Contents Dream and Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, looking in particular at the work they accomplish in terms of theory and criticism at the level of language. It was great to hear close readings of passages in both of these seminal works. I had, sadly, to miss most of Kevin Killian’s piece to do tech set-up for the “Poetry and Performance” event, but I took strength from hearing him voice a few paragraphs, from seeing the characteristic flick of his head to shake back his bangs (and from watching the whole talk on youtube right after the conference. Just do it).

The “Poetry and Performance” event offered a fantastic array of works. Aldon Nielsen has posted on this on his blog (which includes a copy of the program for the event and he has since updated his blog with many photos laying down a social history of the whole conference) as has Laura Hinton.

Part of Laura’s impetus for organizing this event was to represent within the frame of the conference poets pushing at the boundaries of the “poetry reading.” Success. First up was Cathy Wagner, singing and performing poems in several voices; Evie Shockley and Laura Hinton’s pieces similarly bumped out the vocal space of the poetry reading proper. Evie’s reading/singing commenced with her remixed phrase “Those who cannot forget history are destined to remix it” and her poems continue to mix it up, presenting linguistic and sonic clashes that provoke new thought forms (beautifully resonant of Harryette Mullen, I thought; these two I had just seen read at the ALA conference the previous month). Laura’s “Paris in the Springtime” included dance moves (my dance debut). Laura and I donned masks for one piece in which the audio cued us in a series of difficult moves (because fast or moving quickly on vertical/horizontal axes) and looking out at the audience through a mask while performing in this sort of disembodied way was really interesting. Next came my first soundscape piece, a multivocal reading of a page from my recent chapbook American Heritage Syntax, with Aldon, Evie, and, volunteering from the audience, Robin Tremblay-McGaw, together with my own voice presenting a fantastically layered assemblage of sounds (sometimes remixed) from these short poems. A delight for me, personally, to hear this particular articulation of sound forms in time, and the audience thought it was a hoot too. It was a great audience! From then the program went techno, with video, audio, recorded and spoken voice on the part of Laura, Aldon, and myself. Aldon’s recordings of this event will be available at PennSound in the near future, I’m told. This event was of course a favorite of mine since it was, for me, several firsts: my first theatrical performance as a part of Laura’s lovely work; my first multivocal sound collage; my first soundscape-audio/poemtext piece, “Geothermal/Jarditha” (based on recent travels in Iceland); and the debut of “South Fork Palouse River,” an interactive map-poem. This concluded the program, though I soon after read the text of this piece aloud for the audience, since Douglas Rothschild had at this point arrived, having decided to move the Open Mic reading into this space. It began with some marvelous found poems by a man whose name I didn’t catch.

Lo but though this event began late and ended later, the evening was only starting. Cathy, Alan Golding, and I headed over to the dorms and on into what has gone down in the cyber archive as the “Gray Dorm Reading” corralled and documented by Richard Owens (of Damn the Caesars) and up on YouTube (with performances by Brian Ang, Allen Golding, David Lau, Joe Luna, Michael Peters, Christopher Rizzo, Samuel Soloman, Cathy Wagner, and yours truly). We walked into a roomful of about a dozen young men and one woman, who was visibly relieved to see Cathy and myself. After some chatter and rousing and the procurement of a bottle of whiskey (the beer was running low), the readings began, including Alan Golding offering a rendition of the ballad Lord Donald (sadly cut off after 47 seconds, since Richard was having battery drainage issues). Joe Luna must have been the star of the evening since his video’s gotten five times as many views as anyone else’s. A handful of guys performed. I want to call these short events (generally 5-7 minute) “performances” and not merely “readings” (all readings are performances), since the total effect on this participant was to register them a gender performances, though they were perhaps not conscious ones, or perhaps only “self-conscious” in the sense one might be aware of articulating bodily gestures such that they (and the self they correspond to) correspond to a certain construction of “poet” (where male bodies historically serve as default models). It soon struck me that it was quite late (maybe 2:30 a.m.?) and I was getting ready to leave when Rich granted me the floor. Entering into this male space, an interesting proposition, provoked a sense of embodiment, of needing to project my awareness of that into that space, so I performed, carefully positioning a nearby chair into the performance space and then straddling it backwards, as the moment seemingly required. I had with me for poems only the same single copied page from American Heritage Syntax that we’d used in the Poetry and Performance event, and these I read, slowly, because they have a lot of space around them, but, dangling these little poems out there

I was also enjoying the contrast in pace and verbal density from the previous performances. Certainly it is a way of giving the poems “force” without all the muscularity. I suppose I was playing/working with how that space was being constructed, as any conceptual poet would (though I’m not a conceptual poet). After I left, Cathy recited and sang from memory some medieval lyrics. Sorry I missed that.

Saturday I rose bright and early for a full day of interesting panels. Each included three thought-provoking presentations, and here I offer a selective account with a few highlights: from “Transmission, Tradition, and Change,” Jonathan Skinner’s commentary on Michael McClure’s ecopoetics with a disturbing video of him (McClure) roaring at a caged lion (“grahhr”), here pictured along with Benjamin Friedlander and Stuffed Tiger.

I’m still stretching my brain into his (Skinner’s?) proposition to think of the poem as an animal (contrary to Williams’ valorization of the machine); from “Interrogating Agency, Authorship, and Reproduction,” Sara DiMaggio’s theorizing around the pregnant subject in Anne Waldman’s First Baby Poems, proposing a question compelling enough to repeat here with some emphasis: what does poetics have to learn from the pregnant body?; from “Poetry and the Visual Arts,” Robert Dewhurst (a Buffalo Poetics grad student I look forward to hearing/reading more from) with an analysis of locality/vocality in vernacular speech in Eileen Myles’ debut Fresh Young Voice from the Plains (no doubt whittled out of the more broadly-titled paper “Rimbaud in New York: Expressionist Lyric in the 80s”); from the plenary panel with a long title (“Discrepant Engagements: Long Form and Hybrid Genres in the Writing of Nathanial Mackey, Erica Hunt, Beverly Dahlen, Anne Waldman and Robert Gluck,” with Robin Tremblay-McGaw, Kathy Lou Schultz, Kaplan Harris, Erica Kaufman read by Cathy Wagner, and Rob Halpern read by Kevin Killian), which came late in the day and it’s a shame there was neither time nor energy left for discussion, for these were several great papers that I would have liked to dwell on/in with some specificity. Robin has recently written about this panel (& the conference more generally) on her blog.

On the way to the evening keynote I was accompanied by an animate beclouded sky.

A final round of keynote readings brought Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (who had been the respondent earlier in the day in the Visual Arts panel, at which Laura Hinton had given a grand overview of her artist book collaboration with Richard Tuttle, Hiddenness—a nice primer for Mei-mei’s reading) and Nate Mackey to the stage, along with introducers, respectively, Jennifer Moxley and Aldon Nielsen. The glow and spaciousness of Mei-mei’s words; Nate’s epistolary series, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, “fugitive texts” Robin Tremblay-McGaw had elaborated on earlier in the day (it’s nice when things come together like that to trace out common pulses and deepen engagement)—it was a fantastic reading.

The evening wound up and back down with the open bar and open readings. Again, not being the social documenter and not trying to make myself a part of history, I flitted about taking advantage of these last moments to see what people were up to and what they were all about until the bartenders packed up the bar, whence we—a small crowd then-familiar and now only partly remembered (I won’t list names because there were far more people, maybe a dozen, than those whose names I can remember) packed it on over to the dorm and situated ourselves in the first floor lounge to imbibe in talk and further libations and it was so late that more than one person decided to stay up to catch an early flight or a ride. I, being the driver, bade everyone good night, which made me a little sad, to catch some sleep.

I had hoped to have some free time en route back to Boston for a quick detour, and it was disappointing not to, but I’m glad to present to you here the marvelous sculpture of Isabelle Pellisier, which I would like to have experienced face to face. Drove back with Cathy Wagner and Adra Raine, an Orono alum who I heard read an interesting memoir-paper about reading in the 1980s. Another thing to be sorry to have missed. More companionship to be glad to have experienced.

Thus concludes My 2012 Orono.

Note: Three photos— the conference sign, the Wagner-Bywater-Russo “Feminism” panel, and the shot of Steve Evans and Carla Billitterri from behind Susan Howe and Peter Middleton—were sourced from uncopyrighted public documents. The remaining photos were taken by me.

*

Linda Russo is the author of Mirth (Chax Press) and American Heritage Syntax (Publisher Unknown) and several other chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in ecopoetics, Horse Less Review, Interim, New American Writing, Shearsman, Summer Stock, Tinfish and elsewhere. Her essay “Precious, Rare, and Mundane” is the preface to Joanne Kyger’s About Now: Collected Poems (National Poetry Foundation). You can visit her on Facebook.

PDFs of paper abstracts and biographical notes are available for download here:

80s-Abstracts-F2

80s-Bionotes-F1

Thursday, June 28, 8PM in Minsky Recital Hall
Plenary Poetry Readings by Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein

Friday, June 29, 8PM in Minsky Recital Hall
Plenary Lectures by Marjorie Perloff and Kevin Killian

Saturday, June 30, 8PM in Minsky Recital Hall
Plenary Poetry Readings by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Nathaniel Mackey

Free & open to the general public. 

If you have a disability that may require accommodation for a conference-related event, please contact Ann Smith in the office of Disability Support Service, 121 East Annex, 581-2319 (Voice) or 581-2311 (TDD).

If you have a disability that may require accommodation for a conference-related event, please contact Ann Smith in the office of Disability Support Service, 121 East Annex, 581-2319 (Voice) or 581-2311 (TDD).

If you’d like to get a headstart on your book buying, check out the SPD pages linked to below.

Post a comment or drop us a line at NPF.Paideuma@umit.maine.edu and we’ll set you up with a promo code good for 30% off your purchases through July 1!

Keynotes: Charles Bernstein, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Susan Howe, Kevin Killian, Nathaniel Mackey, and Marjorie Perloff

Panelists & Other Participants: Barry Ahearn, Stephanie Anderson, Brian Ang, Robert Archambeau, Tyler Babbie, John Beer, Erica Bernheim, Tara Betts, Jeremiah Rush Bowen, Russell Brickey, Tony Brinkley, Patricia Fahamisha Brown, Tim W. Brown, Franklin Bruno, Dennis Buscher-Ulbrich, Charmaine Cadeau, Brian Carpenter, Alan Casline, Chris Chapman, Cris Cheek, Tomasz Cieslak-Sokolowski, Alan Clinton, Michael Clune, Sarah Cohen, Todd Colby, Carrie Conners, Rebecca Steffy Couch, Peter Culley, Richard Deming, Robert Dewhurst, Sara DiMaggio, Joseph Donahue, Joel Duncan, Sara Dunton, Dale Enggass, Natalia Fedorova, Annie Finch, Norman Finkelstein, Seth Forrest, Ed Foster, Alison Fraser, Stephen Fredman, Wendy Galgan, Ben Gillespie, Susan Gilmore, Alan Golding, Jeremy Green, Arielle Greenberg, Matthew Hall, Rob Halpern, Kaplan Harris, Kurt Heintz, David Herd, Laura Hinton, Donna Hollenberg, Bruce Holsapple, Paul Jaussen, Grant Jenkins, Megan Swithart Jewell, Meta DuEwa Jones, Patricia Spears Jones, Megan Kaminski, Erica Kaufman, Burt Kimmelman, Linda A. Kinnahan, Tom Konyves, Kimberly Lamm, Brooks Lampe, Abigail Lang, David Lau, Gary Lenhart, Nicholas LoLordo, Joe Luna, Kimberly Lyons, Jane Malcolm, Alec Marsh, Paul McComas, Ellen McGrath Smith, Mark Melnicove, Mark Mendoza, Edric Mesmer, Sharon Mesmer, Andy Meyer, Nate Mickelson, Peter Middleton, J. Peter Moore, Claudia Moreno Pisano, Laura Moriarty, Andrew Mulvania, Eileen Myles, Elinor Nauen, Svetlana Nedeljkov, David Need, Miriam Nichols, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Peter O’Leary, Tom Orange, Richard Owens, Seth Perlow, Michael Peters, Patrick Pritchett, Adra Raine, Sean Reynolds, Joseph Richey, Christopher Rizzo, John Roche, Ryan Roderick, Douglas Rothschild, Jennifer Russo, Linda Russo, Matt Sandler, Trevor Sawler, Kathy Lou Schultz, Lytle Shaw, Evie Shockley, Jonathan Skinner, Margaret Anne Smith, Laura Trantham Smith, Daniel Snelson, Rick Snyder, Samuel Solomon, John Steen, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Kristen Tapson-Widenhoefer, Sharon Thesen, Robin Tremblay-McGaw, Demetres Tryphonopoulos, Keith Tuma, Ann Vickery, Anna Vitale, Catherine Wagner, Kenneth Warren, Donald Wellman, and Christopher Winkler.

Keynote readings by Charles Bernstein, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Susan Howe, and Nathaniel Mackey.

Keynote talks by Kevin Killian and Marjorie Perloff.

Panel Presentations by Barry Ahearn, Stephanie Anderson, Brian Ang, Robert Archambeau, Tyler Babbie, John Beer, Erica Bernheim, Tara Betts, Jeremiah Rush Bowen, Russell Brickey, Tony Brinkley, Patricia Fahamisha Brown, Tim Brown, Franklin Bruno, Dennis Buscher-Ulbrich, Charmaine Cadeau, Brian Carpenter, Alan Casline, Chris Chapman, Cris Cheek, Tomasz Cieslak-Sokolowski, Alan Clinton, Michael Clune, Sarah Cohen, Todd Colby, Carrie Conners, Rebecca Steffy Couch, Peter Culley, Richard Deming, Robert Dewhurst, Sara DiMaggio, Joseph Donahue, Joel Duncan, Sara Dunton, Dale Enggass, Natalia Fedorova, Annie Finch, Norman Finkelstein, Seth Forrest, Ed Foster, Alison Fraser, Stephen Fredman, Wendy Galgan, Ben Gillespie, Susan Gilmore, Alan Golding, Jeremy Green, Arielle Greenberg, Matthew Hall, Rob Halpern, Kaplan Harris, Kurt Heintz, David Herd, Michael Hessel-Mial, Laura Hinton, Donna Hollenberg, Bruce Holsapple, Paul Jaussen, Grant Jenkins, Meta DuEwa Jones, Patricia Spears Jones, Megan Kaminski, Erica Kaufman, Burt Kimmelman, Linda A. Kinnahan, Tom Konyves, Kimberly Lamm, Brooks Lampe, Abigail Lang, David Lau, Gary Lenhart, Nicholas LoLordo, Joe Luna, Kimberly Lyons, Jane Malcolm, Alec Marsh, Paul McComas, Ellen McGrath Smith, Mark Melnicove, Mark Mendoza, Edric Mesmer, Sharon Mesmer, Andy Meyer, Nate Mickelson, Peter Middleton, J. Peter Moore, Claudia Moreno Pisano, Laura Moriarty, Andrew Mulvania, Eileen Myles, Elinor Nauen, Svetlana Nedeljkov, David Need, Miriam Nichols, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Peter O’Leary, Tom Orange, Richard Owens, Seth Perlow, Michael Peters, Deborah Pintonelli, Patrick Pritchett, Adra Raine, Sean Reynolds, Joseph Richey, Christopher Rizzo, John Roche, Ryan Roderick, Jennifer Russo, Linda Russo, Matt Sandler, Trevor Sawler, Kathy Lou Schultz, Lytle Shaw, Evie Shockley, Jonathan Skinner, Margaret Anne Smith, Trantham Laura Smith, Daniel Snelson, Rick Snyder, Samuel Solomon, John Steen, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Megan Swithart Jewell, Kristen Tapson-Widenhoefer, Robin Tremblay-McGaw, Demetres Tryponopoulos, Keith Tuma, Ann Vickery, Anna Vitale, Cathy Wagner, Kenneth Warren, Donald Wellman, and Christopher Winkler.