LIT UP IN LOUISVILLE 2010

My trip to the Conference Formerly Known as the 20th Century Conference began and ended with poetry. I met poet Mary Jo Bang on the way to her opening reading, and saw that she was an active participant throughout the days of the conference, especially the poetry panels. And the closing party traditionally hosted by Alan Golding and Lisa Shapiro featured a group reading.

You can join that group reading, still in progress, by clicking here!





The first critical keynote was offered by poet/critic Michael Davidson, who spoke from his work in progress on George Oppen. This, too, found its conference-enclosing echo in the panel I chaired during the last concurrent sessions, including an intriguing paper on Heidegger and Oppen.

In between came the usual wealth of intellectual sustenance and collegiality that has kept me coming back to the University of Louisville off and on across two decades of Februarys. One highlight was the panel presented by Lynn Keller, Linda Kinnahan and Dee Morris, with papers ranging from Paul Muldoon's "Horse Latitudes" through Bergvall's poetry to a meditation on New Media poetics.

. . . and I won't soon forget the noisy minutes when an entire classroom full of us rearranged the furniture so that Chris Cheek could conduct his shadow through the projected space of an entire Louisville wall. By the way, that's Bill Howe projecting on the opposite wall of the same room for a talk on card poems and gaming poetics.

My own paper was one of three devoted to African American literature on a panel Saturday. I spoke on Melvin Tolson's modernisms as traced through his revision process across three decades.

Then it was on to a final keynote by Rita Felsi, who adopts the peripatetic mode of address, giving a talk that sounded suspiciously like a critique of suspicion.

Followed by a sampling of Kentucky's Mexican cuisine and the annual stumbling efforts to find Alan and Lisa's house.

As always, I met many wonderful new people, some of whom are pictured here among the many friends I've made at this conference over the years. Hope to see y'all there next year.

CHRIS CHEEK - DON'T LOOK BACK

FOUND SCULPTURE

My father took this photo this morning in Northern Virginia.

[photo by Aldon D. Nielsen]

Ken Irby Collected

I believe I first knew of Kenneth Irby by way of his early 70's book, To Max Douglass. The book, which had caught my attention in part because of its mention of David Bromige in the opening, also served as my introduction to the late Max Douglass, whose collected poems were published not too much later by Chris Weinert's small press, with an assist from Andrea Wyatt. When I spoke at the University of Maine's conference on poetry of the 1970s, I made that book and those three poets the center of my paper, looking at the shift from the "New American Poetries" into the yet newer.

I got my first, and so far only chance to hear Irby read a bit later, when he read in Baltimore. Barry Alpert offered me a lift over from D.C. Barry's interview magazine, Vort, had done a special issue on Irby. I'd read that with real interest, and the special issue of Credences also dedicated to explorations of Irby's works. That's where Robert Kelly taught me the word "deictic."

In the following years I made a point of following Irby's books as they appeared. I read Riding the Dog while riding the bus. Seemed appropriate. What I didn't see much more of, though, was strong critical response to Irby's poetry. He remains one of those poets who really should be better known.

And maybe this will help. A while back I got an email from Billy Joe Harris alerting me to the fact that there would soon be a Collected Irby. I expected a good sized volume, what with it being a collected, but when the book arrived, with its gorgeous cover, I was taken aback by just how rich an offering this book proved to be. Despite my previous readings, I'd not known just what a sizeable iceberg had been signaled by those few books I'd gotten my hands on over the years. My experience is in some way summed up by the lines of one of the poems:

"to be claimed in the end by the fate of some old poem

dying its life

the unprotected sop of experience for size

hot

shit!

hotter, for having been off on its own for 30, 40 years

come home"

You can order the book here. Sorry to say there's no Kindle edition; but the thing earns its heft.

Luis Leal

One of the more frustrating conference moments of my career came at a gathering to examine American Literature of the 1950s as I heard the repeated claim that Chicano literature began to "happen" in the 1960's. (This by way of partial explanation of the total lack of papers on the subject at the conference.) Now, I'll cop to being an old guy, but it shouldn't have been all that hard for people who consider themselves scholars of American letters to notice that Tino Villanueva's landmark anthology Chicanos dated to the fifties. (I'd read the 70's era reprint.)

I was recalling that moment this morning as I read news of the passing of Luis Leal, one of the real luminaries of literary study in America and of the community life of Santa Barbara. Professor Leal began publishing his own literary scholarship in the 1950s (specializing in Mexican and Chicano fiction) and as of last count had some 45 books to his credit. Now he was, admittedly, 102 years old, but even so, I often found his level of production as daunting a prospect as it was inspiring.

This photo is one I took of him not too long ago at the Santa Barbara Book Fair, which presents an annual literary prize in his honor. Leal was really enjoying visiting with the many school children who were at the fair that day, and he particularly delighted in showing his still current driver's license to a friend I introduced to him that afternoon.

Luis Leal was a true role model, even to writers like me who had little use for the concept of the role model. He was a great friend to literature, a real scholar/writer, and he was a great friend to his community.

Here's the link to Amazon's page for the recently released Luis Leal Reader.

MLA OFF-SITE READING 2009 - THE VIDEO

Click on the part number to navigate to the videos.

Part 1 - Julia Bloch, Matthew Landis and Rodrigo Toscano

Part 2 - Carlos Soto Roman, Kim Gek Lin Short and Jacob Russell

Part 3 - Angel Hogan, Ish Klein and Gregroy Laynor

Part 4 - Nava EtShalom, Ryan Eckes, Sueyeun Juliette Lee and LRSN

Part 5 - Norma Cole, Rod Smith and Frank Sherlock

Part 6 - C.A. Conrad and A.L. Nielsen

Part 7 - Bob Perelman and Suzanne Heyd

Part 8 - Emily Abendroth, Laura Moriarty and Evie Shockley

Part 9 - Pattie McCarthy, Ron Silliman and Thomas Devaney

Part 10 - Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Tyrone Williams and Jenn McCreary

Part 11 - Carla Harryman, Kate Lilley and Steve Dolph

Part 12 - Chris McCreary, Jennifer Scappettone and Lisa Howe

Part 13 - William Howe, Charles Cantalupo and Julie Phillips Brown

Part 14 - Norman Finkelstein, Mel Nichols and Aaron Kunin

Part 15 - Jamie Townsend, Michael Hennessey and Chris Carrier

Part 16 - Eric Selland and Barrett Watten

Part 17 - James Shea, Sandra Lim, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan and Danny Snelson

Part 18 - Michelle Taransky, Herman Beavers, Adrian Khactu and Julia Bloch

MLA OFF-SITE READING 2009 - Philadelphia

Point your browser here for a recording of the event.

"Coming in from the Cold" -- Celebrating 20 Years of the MLA Off-Site Reading

Seeing that the Modern Language Association was scheduled to meet in D.C. in December of 1989, Rod Smith seized the opportunity to organize a literary event featuring visiting writers. Hosted by Bick's Books in Adams Morgan, the evening showcased readings of poetry by Charles Bernstein, Bob Perelman and me, followed by a critical paper read by Marjorie Perloff. Thus began a new tradition, growing into an annual reading held away from the MLA hotel and typically presenting more than fifty local and visiting poets. You can hear a recording of that 1989 reading at the Penn Sound site, here. And you can hear this reading by visiting this URL.

This year the MLA recognized that twenty years of marathon poetics with an on-site mini-version reuniting all the poets from that first event, along with poets who have organized some of the readings and poets who have appeared in them. Readers for this occasion included Elizabeth Willis, Tyrone Williams, Rodrigo Toscano, Rod Smith, Evie Shockley, Jennifer Scappetone, Bob Perelman, Laura Moriarty, Patrick Durgin and Charles Bernstein.

MLA 2009 - PHILADELPHIA

When I got to my hotel room at 8:00 AM and looked in the mirror, I got a lesson in why they call those flights "red eyes." I also learned, as part of my continuing education in Starbucks anthropology, that a "red-eye" is a cup of black coffee with a shot of espresso.

I guess the good people at the Philadelphia Mariott feared that after two previous MLAs in recent years we might have grown tired of the venue; things had been moved around quite a bit since our last visit. The bar, most particularly, had been moved and enlarged. I suppose they've been reading their newspapers and figured we had a lot to drink about.

The conference itself was great this year. While I had to miss all too many sessions (including some of my own Poetry Division's panels) due to varied pieces of business that obliged me, the talks I did get to hear were uniformly non-uniform.

I started out at the panel on Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture (where I learned just how universal Catholicism may be), and I closed out the conference listening to presentations on Langston Hughes. In between, still more poetry -- In posts to come I'll be sharing photos from the readings in Philadelphia.