Poetry of the 1980s - NPF at U of Maine IV

It didn't take Star Black any time at all to see what Keth Tuma and I have in common.

Thanks to Star and to Patrick Pritchett for the photos with me in them on this page.  I saw that Douglas Rothschild was quite adept at the arm's length self-shot, which I'll have to get him to teach me one day.

First up was a panel with Susan Gilmore, who had sat next to me at the banquet the night before and is doing good work on Gwendolyn Brooks, Alan Golding and Jonathan Skinner.  Following that was a session on small presses and magazines, in the course of which the preternaturally happy Danny Snelson supplied a URL from which we could, for a few days, download the full run of Jimmy and Lucy's House of K. Grant Jenkins and I immediately started downloading the mag while the panel was in process.  I remember first seeing a copy at David Bromige's house on my first visit to California.  Good to see the full run.  It was good, too, to hear Don Wellman talk about his work on Coherence, and Laura Moriarty's paper on Vanishing Cab revealed to me how many of my DC poet friends had gotten a ride in that cab.

After an afternoon panel titled "After the Black Arts" that made a great companion to our plenary on African American poets the previous day, there was a plenary that ran the gamut from Nathaniel Mackey, through Beverly Dahlen, Anne Waldman and Robert Gluck, to Erica Hunt.  The final keynote readers that night were Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, who was known by her little dog all through the evening, and Nathaniel Mackey.  I'd received an invitation to introduce Mackey as I was preparing to leave California for the conference, which gave me the perfect excuse to ask Mackey to autograph my mint condition copy of his second chapbook, Septet for the End of Time.  The next morning, there were so many of us on the flight from Bangor to Philadelphia that we had a veritable final reception at the airport coffee shop.