There was no blood on the floor at the session on Postmodern Poetry: Fact or Fiction? -- though the next day's panel on "degrees of oppositional rhetoric" included a devastating critique of the promotional literature surrounding "conceptual poetries" from Richard Owens.
It's been so many years since I'd been on a yellow school bus that I was caught off guard by the "body fluid cleanup kit" I saw clamped to the front of the bus over the driver -- Maybe something like this would be useful in performance poetry venues --
My own panel, taking up the subject of how some infrequently read moderns read modernism (William S. Braithwaite, Alfred Kreymborg, etc.) held down an 8:30 AM slot, but had an attentive audience none-the-less. Other standouts for me included a roundtable on poetic innovation and Kaplan Harris's talk on Larry Eigner. I chaired a panel on Modernist Revivals and the Politics of Appropriation with presentations by Leif Sorensen, Todd Carmody and John Connor.
That evening I spent with the Buffalo cousins. While waiting for dinner I spotted a fellow who was really enjoying this summerish weather and had climbed with his glass of wine to a perch atop a building across the street from where I was dining. The cousins (thanks guys!) then took me to Buffalo's African American Cultural Center on Masten Avenue, where the Paul Robeson Theater was mounting a production. I had no idea what was in store for me till we arrived at the theater, when I discovered we were about to see "Cool Blues," a play based on the last days of Charlie Parker by Bill Harris. A few years back I had read a selection of Harris's plays and other writings in the process of a promotion review for Harris at Wayne State University. It was a pleasant surprise to find that the cousins had, without knowing they were doing so, taken me to a play with which I had an unanticipated personal connection.
Next - On to ASA --
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