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.

POETRY OF THE 1980s - Maine III

Friday's sessions started for me with a panel on Feminism in the 1980s organized by Arielle Greenberg that featured Catherine Wagner and Linda Russo, with whom I would be performing in the poetry event that night.  When I saw Linda's stack of index cards I got a bit sad, thinking of the many times I'd been here with Lorenzo Thomas, who always spoke from such a deck of cards.  Time passed, and I attended a panel on temporality.

The afternoon plenary was a panel I organized, "Of Time and Bodies: New Black Aesthetics/New Black Critique," featuring presentations by Mecca Jamillah Sullivan, Meta Jones and Evie Shockley.

I only eat lobster when visiting the University of Maine.

Marjoie Perloff at the keyboard

The night closed with our Poetry in Performance session, organized by Laura  Hinton, who  managed to manage poets and technology.  See the previous post for photos from this event.

National Poetry Foundation at U of Maine - Poetry of the 1980s

This year's gathering in Orono began with a reception and the screening of selections from a film in progress by Konrad Steiner that has as its soundtrack the voice of Leslie Scalapino reading from Way.  It was deeply moving to hear Leslie's voice again, so very much alive.

The first morning began for me with a panel on the works of Clark Coolidge. Tom Orange, and thus his saxophone as well, was unable to make the trip in the end, but Brooks Lampe and Kristen Tapson Widenhofer delivered careful considerations of The Crystal Text and Solution Passage, both of which I had, as it happens, reviewed in the 80s.

 One of the best attended sessions was a panel on "Post-Generic Writing in the 1980s."  The term "post-generic" strikes me as an empty signifier, but the papers themselves, by Stephen Fredman, Kaplan Harris and Peter Middleton gave me a lot to wrestle with in my post-conference thinking.  I don't believe I'd seen Peter Middleton, a wonderful poet and critic, since the last Orono conference, so he and his work were a more than usually welcome sight.

The first plenary session, on the Poetry Project at Saint Marks, was surprisingly sparsely attended.  Maybe people thought they already knew this story?  To this day, I've never been to the Poetry Project, so it has remained something of a legend to me.  It was good to hear about it from participant observers.

The first evening's keynotes were poetry readings by Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein, who established a pattern among the conference readers of dipping back into their 80s work before moving with us to new poems.  I followed their example in our Poetry Performance event and read only from poems I'd published in the 80s.

 Poet friend Laura Hinton contacted me in advance of the National Poetry Foundation conference at the University of Maine to invite me to join the company she was assembling for a late night poetry performance. I was glad to be part of this dear company, which in the end included Linda Russo, Evie shockley and Catherine Wagner.  If you click on the program below you should be able to read it full size.


We only had time to talk our way through the performance in advance back at the hotel, but things went well that night and we had an appreciative audience, who also appreciated the free drinks we provided.  I may do that at all my readings in the future.  I certainly wish I could have these poets with me at every reading in the future.  Watch this space for news of a posting from the evening's recordings.