Kevin Killian: What I Saw at the Orono Conference 2008, part 4

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Were the 70s a time of crossover between visual artists and poets? It is a proposition that we would see tested over and over again in the days that followed. What a shame that Liz Kotz couldn’t make it to the conference, Liz Kotz, the art historian whose recent book on the 60s artists who made the “turn to language” is so daring and convincing—she would have been great to consult on this question. Reading her book you get the feeling that at a certain point, the art world, like Pacman of a later date, opened its fierce jaws and simply gobbled up language as yet another treat. Words to be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art came out from MIT just last year, hardly enough time for its thesis to become common parlance, but I predict in four years’ time, everyone will have this stuff on their tongues. In his report, Barrett similarly bewailed the lack of critical work about the intersection of 70s art and poetry, but I think had Kotz been able to make it, he would have found the analysis he found lacking elsewhere. Reading Sentenced to Light in its light the individual works Fred Wah wrote for assume a sudden clarity, it’s easier to see the outlines of his total achievement. Both books have that serious, deep blue color, streaked with black, that denotes to me an engagement with an occluded or prettied-up reality, an underground stream still burbling, like Joan Greenwood’s speaking voice.

Presently Steve Evans appeared and released Fred from his purgatory of the broken cordless mike, and dragged an old fashioned mike stand in front of his face. The relief in the room was palpable, he could be heard throughout, and the reading finished on one strong point after another. Afterwards it was our turn: me, Dodie, and Eileen, asked to reconvene on the next floor in a dramatically different theater space that reminded me of the mise-en-scene of A Chorus Line—a totally black box theater with bleacher seats all down the length of the room, while a pair of shorter rows filled one side of the stage, so that when one was speaking one didn’t know which way to face, not really. It was tremendously theatrical and would be a great space for putting on a Living Theater production of cruelty like The Brig. Yikes, it seemed like a daunting proposition to get up there and read, but since this was going to be the site of many of the group readings and the after-hours open mike series, somebody had to go first. As it turned out, it was I.

Were people out there in the dark leaning to each other and whispering, he has the biggest cock in California? Doubtlessly, yet I was nervous anyhow, sensing the clicking of the folding chairs I couldn’t see, the heavy thump of the padded doors when someone came in late.. I did sort of the same set of poems I had read in New York in April, on the principle of, they loved them there, they’ll love them again, and because this was the 70s conference, I leaned heavily on my 70s repertoire, ending up with “Is It All Over My Face?” my elegy for the musician Arthur Russell. I asked the crowd, do any of you know Arthur Russell? And when no one replied, I swallowed and just tried a little harder. Afterwards a number of people told me they indeed knew Russell’s music but they were just too shy to yell out. Such diffidence would be a thing of the distant past by Friday or Saturday, but this was still only Thursday. Suffice it to say I tried to slay them—in show business terms only!—but in light of the “Aggression” conference at Small Press Traffic—maybe an unfortunate term.

Tariq Alvi (in a suit made of Band-Aids) and Dodie Bellamy on his 40th birthday

Dodie read (a section from) her essay/memoir on the London-based artist Tariq Alvi, Eileen read, part of her Inferno novel about the life of a young poet in the 1970s and her encounters with problematic colleagues, male and female alike. It’s all up on YouTube—I forgot that this would happen —it slipped my mind that everything I write here you will be able to check up on! I feel like the painters of the 19th century when they realized that photography had usurped their narrative function. Years ago I started writing about these conferences in terms of fashion reports, but today you can see what everybody had on at every day of the event, and judge for yourself—though as the days go by some outfits loom larger and larger as exemplary conferencewear, while others sink comfortably, like Kate and Leo on the Titanic, deeper and deeper into icy fashion hell. While reading I found myself culturally and sexually excited by the complementary presence of a particular cameraman, Jimmy Sharkey his name was—who must have been hired by the conference to provide complete documentation, as he went everywhere with us, and when he couldn’t be at several places at one time, he’d run into a classroom for a particular panel, swivel his camera around to get the general mise-en-scene, then go running out to find another grouping.

Myself (left) with Jimmy Sharkey, conference photographer. Note indistinct, murky, atmospheric theater floor and walls.

We saw him in bits and pieces, but when one was centerstage, as I was this evening, and moving at the lectern with a microphone, one felt oneself being danced around in the most sinuous and agile way, by this man Jimmy from Ireland; he’d sink to one knee to capture one from below; he’d poke that camera right up to your chest; he’d swirl around your body like Nureyev circling the aging Margot Fonteyn in Frederick Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand (1963). Well, one couldn’t help reacting of course, if one has an ounce of “playing to the camera.” Kind of quiet and retiring when you got him on his own turf, on yours Jimmy had no shame and would do anything to get his way with you. As I say you can see it on YouTube, you can’t see him but you can see me making faces at him—making eyes, as my grandma used to say.

Outside of this performance space in the tiny, rhomboid shaped lobby university employees had set up a cash bar and oh, how I wish I still drank! I must say the level of drinking at Orono seemed to me falling considerably short of previous years, but maybe I was just missing out on some memorable bacchanals because I wasn’t at Doris Twitchell Allen Hall falling down on the furniture? The bartenders did get busy that’s for sure. I couldn’t keep up with what they were doing with their forearms, but all I wanted was a humble Diet Coke. In this beseeching posture I met Chris Glomski, a Chicago poet whose book, Transparencies Lifted from Noon, belies its kooky title with some of the best writing I’ve seen in a long time. I had met Chris at New Years, at the MLA convention in Chicago where I had accompanied Dodie who was giving a paper. Organizers had put together a vast reading of the “Poets of the MLA” and somehow I had wangled an invitation in order to justify to myself, my own voluntary visit to the MLA floor.

Chris Glomski at Orono

Fifty poets, two hours, in the ballroom of the grand Chicago Art Institute school. How they get any work done there is beyond me, if it was me studying there I’d just be blinking and gasping all the time at the rococo and the gilt. Glomski has an amiable, sharp-eyed face and he had caught my attention the previous evening when some of us made an informal wager about who looked the most seventies, and my money was on Chris Glomski’s wonderfully thick and expressive mullet. I asked him if I could take his picture, once, twice, trying to get all that hair into one picture was like trying to capture the double rainbow that had heralded our evening. I introduced myself to Tom Orange, thanking him for the work he had done in organizing what promised to be the single grandest event of the conference, the assembly of Washington DC poets of the seventies, several of whom I had never met—people whose names were redolent of legend for me, mythic figures of a vital poetry scene that had to it a bit of the Camelot magic. Well, anyone who has read any of Joan Retallack’s memoir-cum-essay “The Dupont Circle Circle” knows what I’m talking about. Tom Orange looked weary for a moment, then brightened considerably when I declared myself a fan. The Washington DC poets just didn’t seem like conference type people to me, I said. Indeed I expect some of them had never been out of DC before: like Antaeus they drew strength from keeping a foot on their native grounds. “They’re not all here yet,” Orange said. “But I’m hoping for the best.” Orange himself looks almost scarily like the young Philip Horvitz when I first met him, his height, his wave of hair, his open and friendly gestures, his eyes—what am I saying, he could play my dear Philip in the movie version of his life. Do you see it? I wondered if Ben would agree—Ben Friedlander, who knew Philip before I did, who probably knew Tom Orange too? Maybe it was just me, and a middle-aged penchant for seeing old faces in new ones, a way to hold on to ghosts and to extend to their new avatars some of the love the grave fritters away.

Tom Orange and Lynne Dreyer

Bill Howe shepherded a long line of open mike poets through their paces, in the dark, black auditorium behind us, but after awhile I felt my knees begin to give way, possibly from having thought about things so much. I remembered being here in 2004 and, as I was leaving, Burt Hatlen pressing his hand on mine and saying, “And now you will return to San Francisco and give us a novel?” He wasn’t talking about my own novels either, just my propensity to expand my fashion reports into three decker length. I knew it was time to return to Steve and Jennifer’s house and try to get my thoughts in order, for this was only the beginning.

Kevin Killian: What I Saw at the Orono Conference 2008, part 3

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

In the lobby of Lord Hall we emerged into a buzzing cluster of familiar poets and friends, and beyond the bar area in the lobby you could see, through a pair of glass panels, the exhibition we had come to celebrate, “Art of the 1970s,” organized by Laurie Hicks of U-Maine’s Art Department. It was an insanely clever idea that depended, of course, on the University Art Museum having enough prints and such from the 1970s to be able to pull it off, and from my one glimpse through the glass it looked like they had done it up beautifully. You could see a Rosenquist, a Miro, what looked like a Warhol, like a Warhol portrait of—was it Mick Jagger? The piece de resistance was supposed to be a reconstruction of Bernadette Mayer’s legendary installation/slide show Memory, from elements preserved at the Archive for New Poetry in San Diego. Yeah, that probably was good, if you had eight hours, but it was drinking time, and I found myself slipping away from the gallery window by my need not to drink but to say hi and to hug a few dozen old friends who do drink. Some I hardly knew, but we were so far away from home that at a party, formalities get abandoned by mutual, unspoken consent, so it was hearty back slaps and tender hugs all around. Clark and Susan Coolidge stood there, Clark tall and presidential, if a mortician had been elected president, and Susan always so chic and unruffled; they were dressed like Robert Redford and Meryl Streep in the safari chic of Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa (1985). I saw Keith Tuma across the room, a familiar face from many long years ago, but I had never met his wife Diane—and I was hitting fashion gold, for she was wearing a tight white cotton shirt with slightly puffed sleeves, a pair of brown gabardine trousers that stopped in mid calf, trousers just the color of her chestnut hair. We have a winner! Then across the gallery I spotted a rangy young man with dark Byronic good looks who reminded me of someone I had known once here in San Francisco, the artist Will Yackulic, the resemblance so striking I nearly called out, “Hey Will,” but another voice interrupted, and I was to chase this phantom all over the hills and fields of Orono in the days to come, this Will lookalike—this mystery boy. With a kiss curl not on his forehead, like Mary Pickford, but curling around the side of his neck behind his ear, wilting a little due to the heat. We were at a stage where few wore their name tags, so passing by this fellow with my eye on his lapel didn’t get me to a place where I could say I knew who he was. Oh well, I could ask Keith Tuma later—if I could make him swear he’d be discreet.

Mystery man who later turned out to be Justin Katko of Providence. You can't see the curl behind his ear in this picture but believe me, it's there.

Happily Eileen had come, Eileen Myles, all in black, in fact she had come up the night before so she was perfectly rested—now that’s clever! But when we heard her game plan we were aghast with worry. She was going to give a reading this evening—and then drive back to Boston or New York—and get on a plane and go to LA to read at the Hammer Museum. And then she was going to turn around and fly back and drive back here to Maine in order to take part on our panel on Saturday. Now, I’ve heard of these Hammer readings as being sort of prestigious, but never could I imagine someone coming to Maine, going to LA, then coming back to Maine just for one event. I swallowed hard, considering once again, as I had for 30 years, Eileen’s amazing courage, in her so closely aligned with insouciance I could barely tell the difference. And wherever I see her, she’s totally present, not tired, not jet lagged, always ready, bouncing on the balls of her feet as though to take on whatever challenges for good or bad come her way. This scene, on the outskirts of the art gallery, had to it something of the rapid-fire changes in reality of that last volume of Proust: everyone is there from all the previous volumes, but changed somehow, and the ones who looked the same were probably actually the children, now grown, of those you had known before the war.

Eileen Myles, before the war

Oh look, there was Linda Russo—last seen trawling the wintry halls of the Art Institute of Chicago, advising us to see the Jasper Johns “Gray” show, the very show that sounded too depressing even to think about. I can hardly keep up with where Linda Russo works any more. I remember her from Buffalo, where she was a student, and now, she tells us, she has gotten a new job at a school in Eastern Washington state—so she’ll be nearby, or nearbyer, to coin a phrase. It was all I could do to keep from warning her about going there, for I had been scared silly by a two part Lifetime Television for Women miniseries, that Dodie had insisted we watch, called The Search for the Green River Killer. Pastoral country, that Washington state, but one haunted by serial killers who rampage with impunity, and I cared about Linda, I did indeed. What prevented me from speaking out? Only a thin little voice in my cerebrum telling me, that was only a TV show, Kevin, be happy for her good news and for God’s sakes, stop borrowing trouble, you’re turning into, oh, what’s her name in that house made of stilts in Russia? I grimaced till it came to me: Baba Yaga. “Oh Linda, that’s marvelous,” I managed to croak out, “Now you won’t be a stranger!”


Stepping outdoors on the grass of the Quad we were taken aback by a huge rainbow that stretched out from far left to far right--you couldn’t see it all properly, and when I stepped back with my camera to take a picture, I had to take it in two two’s. Everyone simply stopped cold still like the end of “The Day Lady Died.” Some said it was a double rainbow. Against the fading of the light it was luminous, and strong. I wonder if it was still there an hour later, when all was dark—do rainbows exist after dark, or iare they some byproduct of sun on top of rain? In any case one thought immediately that the rainbow, single or double, was a magnificent omen, or sigil, for the events to come.

The famous lilac or lavender scarf

We traipsed through a colonnade of brick walls and tree plantings and in the quiet dusk you could see the cone shapes of lilac, you could smell their homey scent. Behind me a young woman asked if she could come with us as she wasn’t sure how to get to the next lecture hall. “Are you giving a paper?” I asked. “No, I’m just here to listen,” she said. She couldn’t know why I found her such a rare specimen. The thing was that Dodie and I were asking each other all the way there if everyone we met would be a speaker, or were there any who were just audience members. “Stick with me,” I told the listening woman. “I’ll deliver you to the right place.” Male arrogance I guess, since nobody knew exactly where to go, and I was just following after lingering traces of Maria Damon. The young woman said she was from the Bay Area (yay!) and was studying the epic in 70s poetry like Mayer, Coolidge, Hejinian. These must have been the names that unlocked the darkness for out of the night a bright square blinked and shone in the distance, Steve Evans holding open the door to the building we sought. “Steve,” I cried out, “here’s a girl came from Berkeley to be in the audience!” but when I looked back over my shoulder I saw nothing, only absence, and a scent of lavender hung for a moment in the air, then dissipated. A phantom poetry student? It was like that old urban legend that used to scare me as a Boy Scout of the vanishing hitchhiker—she who appeared before the young man’s convertible in a party dress at midnight, disheveled and in tears—and the driver drops her off at her home, but she’s left behind her lavender scarf in his passenger seat, so he returns the next day, and—well, you know it as well as I do! Stern Gothic parents let him cross the threshold, point to a portrait on the covered piano—it’s her in that same violet dress, the dress she wore to her prom five years ago, the night she died on her way home. He looks more closely—there’s the chiffon scarf tied round her neck, the same scarf he’s clutching in his suddenly sweaty hands.

Fred Wah, first plenary speaker

To Fred Wah fell the chore of igniting the crowd that filled the auditorium at Mirsky Hall. He looked nervous, standing before us with a clip on microphone that soon, upon his brave launch, failed him utterly, banging out every other word over the last row of the stands, and dropping the remainder into a silence bushier than his beard. “Are people hearing me?” he hazarded, and no one knew what to reply. The truth is, we were hearing large parts of him—some nouns, most adjectives—and that was thrilling enough, but if he hoped for some sustained contact with his audience, he wasn’t getting it. I had heard Wah read before, a number of times, in Canada and in the US both. But only now, due to the faulty dynamics of his presentation, did I totally understand his fish out of water appeal. First time I saw him read was at some grand affair in Vancouver, and while he sat on stage another poet took the podium, a man of Wah’s generation, and began to read. From behind us a third poet, known far and wide for her elegance and for the beauty of the writing, leaned forward and whispered in Dodie’s ear, “He’s got the biggest cock in Canada.” That was an eyeopener, and never since have I been able to see Fred Wah read without this useless factoid cluttering my visual field, for it was impossible to discern which of the two poets on the Vancouver stage was the subject of our elegant friend’s revelation. But I’m plumping for Fred and I say, more power to him. Tonight he read briefly from some 70s poems, 80s poems, and read a lot from a new book called Sentenced to Light, which I ran right out and snapped up from the store. It is a collection of his various collaborations with visual artists . . . (to be continued) . . .

Exit, Pursued by a Barf

Lucas Rivera, in a secret location in the East Bay.

Kevin Killian: What I Saw at the Orono Conference 2008, part 2

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

This year’s conference was going to be different, that much was apparent from the list of events posted on the NPF website. No more plenary addresses, in fact no lectures at all at night. The big events were going to be by poets, not professors. I wondered how this profound change would effect the mood of the conference. In a post-conference post on his website Barrett Watten treated this development with skepticism, and I think convincingly, merely by noting that the disappearance--or diminution--of critical ideas has a curious consequence. It’s fine in the short term but it might result in the conference being remembered in the future as only a pleasant haze of great readings. Can’t make up my mind about this, since speaking for myself I enjoyed the plenary readings of 2008 more than most of the plenary lectures of days gone by, when I found the non-plenary talks more interesting—among them Barrett’s own, Althusserian/Bob Guccionean “Bettie Page” talk; Steve Evans and Ben Friedlander’s twin papers on O’Hara during the 50s conference before either of them had come to Orono to live; Andrew Mossin’s paper on the “Venice Poem” of Robert Duncan; Glenna Breslin’s momentous biographical sketch of Lorine Niedecker’s boy-toy during the “After Louis” period; Tim Gray’s paper on Morris Graves and poetry; Kelly Holt’s on Jaime de Angulo vs. Spicer and Duncan, I’m remembering all these great papers that weren’t held in front of everybody but just in smaller booths and offices and you really had to be there. So what would it be this time? I was in a mood to hear something fantastic, but would I?

Last time I was here in Maine I came by myself, which turned out to be fine really, but this time I had Dodie to read the maps and to monitor how many times, on the 159 mile ride to Orono from Portland, should we stop at any of the magnificent Maine rest areas, each one slightly different and puzzlingly enough, each mirrored on the other side of the divided highway so that when one returned, one could count on there being identical facilities one each side of the road, so closely alike that it took me awhile to realize I had not been there before on the way up, but instead to its near twin and there were things that set them apart, tiny differences like the puzzle at the back of Highlights for Children. “I’m so sleepy,” I moaned. Really I should have pulled over to the side of the road and dozed off, because it was getting to be painful staying awake. And when Dodie nodded off I felt a little stab of panic, the way Kate Winslet must have felt at the end of Titanic when Leo started growing strangely silent in the ice water. She’d only rest her eyes for a minute or so but you know how contagious yawns are and they seemed to be powering the car. Oh my God, this is the longest trip I’ve ever been to in my life. I kept thinking of the gold at the end of the tunnel and how Peter Middleton will be there, like a shining avatar of answers, kindly and gentle and ready to tell us who was the mother of Mary Queen of Scots, and that kept me going for the final fifty mile stretch before Exit 191. “Kelley Road,” I read. “Now that must have some connection to the 1970s.” See, I’m from California where we believe in magic signs. “Maybe Grace Kelly died in the 1970s.” “No, I remembered well that she died right after I moved to San Francisco--in 1980- or so, the same week as Romy Schneider and it as like all the glamorlights of Europe shut down one by one, and God took away from us the slinky royal heads of the town. Terrible month that was!

Romy Schneider, God rest her soul

Luckily Steve and Jennifer were home when the Eclipse pulled into their driveway. It was as if, on the eve of Waterloo, Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington had made time to welcome us to lovely old Belgium (note to self, check to see if Waterloo took place in Belgium). “Wow, what a car,” Steve said mildly; the two of them, exquisite manners and all, couldn’t help but goggle at our rental. I hadn’t really noticed till now how ugly a car it was—tiny, whitish like the underbelly of a fish, with interior upholstery on which brown stripes alternated with wide maroon swatches of some oppositional fabric reminiscent of corduroy. This gave it an educational air of looking extremely seventies, as if Rhoda’s apartment had wheels and we had commandeered it all the way from Minneapolis. The rear window you couldn’t see out of, because a raised, jaunty piece of white metal about four feet wide and eighteen inches deep flared above the trunk. They called it a “spoiler.” Inside, the front seats could be pushed back right into the back seat, eliminating all footroom, a trick I had never seen before and one which made it difficult to take anybody else around with us. I slammed down the trunk and realizes this was exactly the kind of car which would have gotten me laid plenty in high school, but why as it masquerading as a 2008 model?
“That’s some car,” said Steve. I felt like Charlotte’s Web when she called Wilbur “some pig” and the townspeople think it’s a miracle.

“Does Charlotte’s Web take place nearby?” I asked. We saw no spiders though black flies were tearing around making crazy circles in the sky. It was about 3 pm and we gathered together to discuss the shape of the days to come. “Where’s Peter Middleton?” I asked, and it turned out he couldn’t make it for he had some painful medical condition which hopefully is only temporary, but we raised a glass to him in the general direction of Southampton.

Here's to you, Peter Middleton

Jennifer had made the sort of lunch you could unveil at any time and it would always look and taste good, and it could be stretched to fit unexpected guests, or put away till tomorrow if no one was hungry. Doug Rothschild was staying there too, a chance for me to catch up on old times, since he had been their guest the last time I had stayed here, during the conference for the 1940s. In the interim, of course, I had found out more about Doug from having read the manuscript, then the published version, of Jennifer Moxley’s autobiography The Middle Room (Subpress, 2007), in which Rothschild figures heavily. It is the sort of thing that would make an ordinary man immortal, like Gore Vidal’s cameo in Fellini Roma, but nothing about Rothschild is ordinary. I had told Dodie about his amazing wardrobe of super-dapper, shiny suits of unusual hue, that often look wet, like Angelina Jolie rising out of that underground pool in Grendel’s cave, so we were both wondering what he’d be wearing—I had almost said “modeling.” We had not long to wait, but in the meantime we ate chicken, salad, and basically gossiped about all the other arrivals, old and new.

Underneath our banter lingered a jot of melancholy, for during the past few months Burt Hatlen died, he the man who had run the Orono conference for so many years. Now gone also, Sylvester Pollet, the poet and publisher we always looked forward to seeing. They gave the place its heart, or so it seemed to me. What would a conference be like without them? I couldn’t understand about death, though it seemed every time I returned to Orono it faced me down. Four years back Hatlen, alive and busy, was himself organizing a memorial for Carroll Terrell, the founder of the conference, whom I just barely remember the way one might barely remember one’s great-grandfather, and while he was at it Hatlen made a double tribute to Hugh Kenner too, the author of The Pound Era. And now in the four years since then, not only had Hatlen left us, but so had many of the godlike figures we saw at the conference walking among us, reading their poetry, presenting papers, lending genuine stardust to the proceedings—Jackson Mac Low, Margaret Avison, Robert Creeley among them.

I told them about the strange, almost a Carrie-like feeling of—well, you know how Amy Irving is paying her respects to Carrie’s grave at the end of the movie—just to say, I’m sorry I taunted you in the shower, Carrie? And just when you think all will end tranquilly, Pino Domaggio’s music takes a sudden stab and Carrie’s hand pushes right out of the grave and grabs Sue’s ankle! Now I’ve gone off track but basically about two months ago I went down to get the mail and on our apartment steps was a big envelope too big to squeeze into the mailbox, plus it was sturdily reinforced with extra cardboard and red stickers commanding the post office, “Do Not Bend—Fragile.” My eyes widened, maybe this was going to be the rare Kylie Minogue 12 inch I had ordered from eBay! Mounting the stairs, with inferior mail tucked under my arm, I inspected the prize package more closely. Looked like it was from Stephen King in Bangor, Maine but that had got to be a prank address written in by one of my jokier friends. Then I tore the top off and a smaller package was inside, scrawled with blue marker, “For Burt/For Stephen King,” and what do you know, it was a photo of me, Dodie, and Stephen King glaring out from between us, signed in ballpoint by the man himself. I swallowed hard. Of course I recognized the photo—taken during the “writers of the 60s” conference by an obliging Loss Pequeno Glazier—but where had it been all these years? The way I finally put it together is that I had prevailed on Burt Hatlen at some point, Burt Hatlen who had been the favorite teacher of Stephen King when he was a callow undergraduate at U-Maine, I must have begged him to use his friendship with King to get him to sign this photo and he must have agreed—and then what happened? I couldn’t work it out.


Maybe Hatlen’s death had prompted King to go to the corner of that big gloomy mansion where he writes, the corner where he stacks the piles of fan mail and autograph requests, and finally he picked up the one Burt had forwarded from me? For Burt had died in January, this photo came to my door in April, and in that time Stephen King had probably written three books and a miniseries or whatever. The photo is pretty goofy and Dodie, who had dyed her hair flame colored red, using every ounce of henna available on the West Coast, looks like Drew Barrymore in Firestarter had taken vengeance on her head. And King looks trapped, no other word for it.

The point was really how Burt Hatlen’s kindness had erupted one more time in the months since his death, and the larger point was how many giants had gone into the earth. But what are you going to do? It wasn’t as though there no legends here in 2008: I saw grown men and women grow stupefied, as though by the Medusa’s head or by Romy Schneider, at first sight of Bernadette Mayer. But that was to come. First off was the opening cocktail thing.

Kevin Killian: What I Saw at the Orono Conference 2008, part 1

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Strange to be publishing this diary of happenings three months ago on a blog, the format designed for the instantaneous transmission of news and existential I-am-here-nowness, but I’m slow and had some fact checking to do. Thanks Dodie for making this happen now, and for being there with me way back when in the stone ages of June 10, 2008.

All academic conferences must owe a structuralist debt to the one that kicks off David Lodge’s 1984 satire Small World, in which the attendees bemoan having to travel thousands of miles to endure, for the better part of a week, the squalid company of their own kind. In Small World, the scholars must sleep in one horrid dormitory, eat their dire meals en famille in another place, while the lectures and sessions are given in yet another, further place, so that all day long everyone is late for everything and the pathways between grim buildings are “made dangerous and unpleasant by the snow.” The meals of tomato soup, roast beef and two veg, and a jam tart and custard turn stomachs and tempers and “from every item of which all trace of flavour had been conscientiously removed by prolonged cooking at high temperatures.” Even the sherry tries to “protest too much” its Spanish origin with labels that feature not only lurid toreadors but a flamenco scene as well. Even worse, as the attendees arrive the dim realization hits that only 57 signed up for the conference, and not a star of their profession among them. Everyone’s forced to wear shiny white badges that make you squint to find out which nobody you’re addressing. There’s the sulky American speaker used to addressing 8,000 people at the MLA, there’s the dour retired folklorist who just likes to go to these things to keep her hand in—a former student of Jessie Weston, who sizes up the local campanile for its phallic content. And there are the inevitable guests who can’t stand each other and are appalled to find themselves in close quarters with mortal enemies—for five days in a row in the middle of nowhere. Of course nothing like this happened at Orono in June, 2008, and I was there and can swear to it on a stack of Golden Boughs.

The Orono Conference this year was a good two weeks earlier than it had been in earlier years, and now that I think on it, it may be that the organizers might have changed the dates to accommodate people who were going to be studying at, or teaching at, or meditating at the Summer Writing Program at Naropa this year, since the latter begins on the day that this conference will end. As a matter of fact I wound up seeing Kasey Mohammad in Orono, on the last day of a very thrilling and exciting five or six days, and in a thin voice he told me he was off for a week’s teaching at Naropa. His voice hinted of a spot of terror, so I told him not to be scared, you’ll have a great time, though they work your ass off there. “That’s what I’ve heard,” he said, sepulchrally. Anyhow on our way to Maine Jet Blue cancelled our flight for reasons of weather, and then I got on the phone and the operator promised that if we could get to Oakland in half an hour he would put us on a flight to New York there. I wasn’t even packed but I threw together a few things. Okay, what did I absolutely need? Clothes, I could buy clothes. Soap and shampoo ditto. I guess all I needed really was the talk I had written for my panel, and also some of my poetry to read at the open mike thing, and even that I figured I might be able to find in Maine. Oh, and my ID. “Okay,” I growled, making a executive decision, “Sign us up.” I looked on line to see our new plane. “Okay,” I agreed, “tie me to the length of that.”

We got to the parking lot of Oakland Airport with 9 minutes to spare, and then when we were on the plane up in the air, Dodie and I realized that we were coming back to the Bay Area on Sunday, but to San Francisco, and our poor little Subaru would be all alone in the parking lot of Oakland, and that we’d be taking a cab I guess—or BART, all the way back to Oakland from SFO. In addition, BART wouldn’t even be open at the time that we were due to return, after midnight on the Sunday, but nothing is more trying than listening to the travel woes of others, and anyhow for once we agreed to stop borrowing trouble and just to enjoy the minimal courtesies of Jet Blue—the little color screen you pay for, the tiny bags of cashew nuts, the hot wet paper towels they occasionally bring by in afterthoughts. Best of all, we had a choice of two slightly different feature films to watch—The Other Boleyn Girl, with Natalie Portman and Scarlet Johansson, and 10,000 BC, in which a cast of unknowns acts out the world’s oldest story, how primitive man learned to kill dinosaurs, ride camels, listen to the vatic prophesies of “Old Mother” and to pursue an abducted girlfriend through the vast snowy tracks of Afghanistan, with a cute ten year old stowaway boy who just wanted to come because he wanted to help the elders of his tribe.

Along the way monotheism gets discovered, and primitive snowshoes and tattooing. Ever since it came out I had been dying to see this movie, so I was happy and for a few hours, while Dodie lost herself in The Other Boleyn Girl, I nearly forgot my anxieties about Orono. Afterwards she asked if there were really two Boleyn girls in the Tudor court, and if Anne Boleyn had really been accused of sleeping with her own brother, and if incest and witchcraft were what got her beheaded. “When we get to Orono, let’s ask Peter Middleton,” I suggested. “He’s from England and is bound to know the answer to all your questions.” In our bathroom at home we had had the issue of W, with Scarlet and Natalie on the cover, for over seven months. Do issues of W last forever? They must, they’re too heavy to recycle, and even to lift from the floor, much less to read.

Neither of us had been able to figure out if Natalie and Scarlet despised each other, or whether they were, as the article insisted, more than sisters. We were still debating whether or not dinosaurs could fly and run up trees like kittens, and the allied historical questions of Tudor court life, when the plane landed in New York and we had a few hours to sit there waiting for another plane to Portland. “Maybe we should call Stephen,” Dodie fretted, alluding to the young writer Stephen Boyer who was kindly watching our three cats. Or was he? That was our fear! Maybe he was out with his age peers lost in a Bret Easton Ellis world of sin, sex and sensation, while our cats, Ted, Sylvia and Quincy, padded through an empty apartment like Harry Belafonte and Inger Stevens roaming deserted post-bomb Manhattan in The World, The Flesh and The Devil. “Oh don’t bother the boy. He’ll be asleep,” I said, provoking a debate about whether SF is three hours before or behind New York. Soon enough we were on the plane to Portland and then, in the light of the new day, we were on the ground looking for the car rental place and it was Wednesday, and the show as about to begin. We had a few hours to drive up to Bangor, and then Orono, and Steve (Steve Evans) had said it would be a straight shot, not an expression I‘m used to for some reason. I should just segue right into Wednesday since we hadn’t slept since the night before, but this seems like a good time to pause and check my notes. In any case if there are any historical experts out there who know anything about a) the Boleyn sisters, or b) the relative dates of when aliens came from outer space to bring earth people monotheism, versus flying, dragonfly-like dinosaurs prowled the jungles of Central Asia, please reach out, a fifteen dollar wager rides on this one. We did call Stephen Boyer but, because he didn’t pick up the cell phone, we were undecided whether this meant it was too early, or too late, to call the West Coast, what do you think?

Trauma Footnote

For another fascinating account of childhood trauma, check out Thomas Kendall's photo-essay on Dennis Cooper's blog, "POW! Right in the Kisser," in which Thomas revisits each place in which he was beat up as a child.

p.s. I have some exciting news. Starting next Tuesday, Kevin will be publishing in installments his long-awaiting diary of our trip to a poetry conference in Maine, "What I Saw at the Orono Conference 2008." We went in June, but he's been writing it up ever since. Right here, on Belladodie! With pictures!

Trauma

I can't quit thinking about the Nonsite Collective event, Bhanu Kapil on "Poetics of Disablement," which took place last Saturday afternoon (September 20). It was a follow-through on the collective's July 23rd Allegories of Disablement event, featuring a talk by Thom Donovan, which I wasn't able to attend.

Bhanu Kapil and Amber Di Pietra

Bhanu is a brilliant novelist and thinker, but the discussion was actually co-led by poet and editor Amber Di Pietra. Amber's participation was not advertised, though it was implied in Bhanu's description of the event:

I've been reading Elizabeth Grosz on sensation and futurity: "There is an involuted and oblique relation between the energies of sexual selection...the attraction to and possible attainment of sexual (though not necessarily copulative) partners—human and otherwise—and the forces and energies of artistic production and consumption" (from *Chaos, Territory, Art*). That the intensity felt in a body is part of what allows it to extend into a territory or cross between domains—acts of pleasure, acts of sexual selection, as analogous to the process of making transgressive works of art. Not sure. Am thinking about immigrant bodies, refugee bodies, bodies made hybrid by divergence on a continuum from prosaic (the South-Asian grad student) to traumatic. Have been thinking about numbness, about hyper-vigilance, about what happens to the flow of "energies of sexual selection" in a body that's at the limit of possible sensations. This as depending too on class status. On how desirability is worked out in the port of arrival. My question, then, for writers/artists working through a poetics of disablement—towards hybrid works, in particular—is there any language we can think through together, about the experience of hybridity/fusion in the body—and how might this affect our transgressive relationships to the space of the book, the territory of document, our ability to attain the kind of couplings/intensifications/resonant physical gestures that further the limit of what a book is? I feel as if there is another kind of book I am only beginning to imagine. What about you? I didn't meet you yet. Other aims: I'd like to ask Amber Di Pietra to say more about the hybrid body as "compacted."

It was an intense event. Some people were thrilled by it, others had mixed feelings, still others were disturbed. I don’t think anybody walked away unmoved. One person told me that afterwards she had to abandon plans for the evening and stay home, that she was in no shape to go out because of what she'd heard—and felt. The afternoon has haunted me this past week. I’ve been journaling about it, over and over, trying to get a handle on my reactions.

Jumping off from an excerpt from Elizabeth Grosz's Chaos, Territory, Art (which Bhanu had made downloadable on the Nonsite site ahead of time) Bhanu talked about attraction and species survival—and alluded, without going into details, how the trauma of otherness can thwart one from feeling one’s attractive capability, can thwart one from enjoying pleasure until an experience is nearly over. It numbs one’s ability to take in and feel passion. As always she evoked a wonderfully uncomfortable edge between intelligence and emotional and physical vulnerability.

Amber's surprise presentation was also captivating and smart, and can be found here. Amber talked frankly about her difference from her family, the painful physical realities of childhood arthritis, and the social stigmatization she’s experienced. She said you feel like an other to yourself—taking in cultural images and then the shock of looking in the mirror and seeing you aren’t that image. Others talked about various ways they too were shocked when looking in the mirror—age, race, etc.

I felt there was not enough acknowledgement of the gulf between our experiences and Amber’s, the gulf between ableness and disablity, between private trauma and public trauma. An acknowledgement of otherness is not necessarily a bad thing—it’s a matter of respect. On a more mundane level, being with Kevin for 20+ years, at a certain point I stopped trying to understand him—he’s unfathomable—and I realized that understanding and trust weren’t inherently connected. We should acknowledge otherness—rather than trying to colonize it through compassion or understanding—or finding parallels in our own trauma. But how can we do this?

Perhaps the event was trying to do too much: acknowledging the deeply personal nature of the topic, witnessing Amber’s trauma—but also discussing Elizabeth Grosz, who naturally adopts an academic and speculative tone. There were all these people plugging into personal traumas and then there was the group’s continual return to an intellectual mode. Although abstraction has its place, and I love Elizabeth Grosz, it felt alien amid all the personal disclosure. I don't think the event was set up to handle an overload of emotion, but the nature of the topic and the generous vulnerability of Bhanu and Amber invited gut level reactions.

When I inserted theory into The Letters of Mina Harker I tended to collage in theoretical language—including passages from Elizabeth Grosz—in an awkward and jarring manner—so that the coopted language was a violation as much as an opening. Intellectualizing disturbs me these days—intellectualizing as a way to contain all the messiness, an impulse to distance and erase ordinary life.

But then, does one need to be frank about everything, does one need to put a spotlight on every messy little thing? Aren’t there positive values in coding, filtering, mediating? I’ve never written directly about my own childhood trauma—at this point I wouldn’t know how to make it interesting—there’s no distance, nothing redeeming, no relief. But that trauma has influenced my writing about monsters and all sorts of freakishness. Lots of women relate to the monster. Not surprisingly, the discussion turned to the question of whether writing about trauma reactivates the original trauma or recuperates it.

There’s so much trauma among writers. What happy child spends so hours with her nose stuck in a book? I do believe we store emotions in the body. I asked my chiropractor if she felt a person could release childhood trauma. Karen said no—the memories will always be there—but one can get to know that trauma so one can better manage its impact on your current life. Later in the week, I asked another body worker about trauma. Erene said emotion is always in the present—so if you dip into a childhood trauma, you experience it not as past/distant but in the present. That's how it felt at the Nonsite event—that for some of us the past was infecting the present. As Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Presenting Anselm Berrigan

D.S. Marriott and Anselm Berrigan at SPT September 19, 2008

Last Friday Small Press Traffic had a reading with D.S. (David) Marriott and Anselm Berrigan, and Kevin wrote out a little introduction for Anselm. (David Buuck wrote about David Marriott, who teaches at UC Santa Cruz.) Before the reading we had dinner with Anselm, his wife the poet Karen Weiser, their little daughter Sylvie, and other poets at a restaurant nearby CCA.

Sylvie and Karen

I asked Kevin for a copy of his introduction to the event so I could "publish" it right here on the blog. He says it loses something written down, but what the hell.

Kevin Killian: Anselm Berrigan at Small Press Traffic, Friday, September 19, 2008

Dodie and I have a story about meeting Anselm Berrigan back in the day which we are saving for our memoirs, Eyewitness, which you won’t hear from me tonight—Oh, whatever, it takes place in a smoky, crowded loft party in the Mission in the early 90s, and then the music stops and a golden light from above illuminates the young version of Anselm Berrigan, newly arrived to SF from Buffalo with Alicia Wing, the two of them like Caravaggio angels in this messy, bohemian space—but I can attest as probably many of you can that his residency here in San Francisco saw the poetry forces of the city shift and realign, forces that never since then have really abated. There are many reasons for what we experienced as a genuine resurgence in poetry, and perhaps Anselm was riding the wave of a particularly vital and coincidental coalition, but in any case, though he never really loved it here, he made an enormous difference that I’m going to try to explain as I welcome him back to Small Press Traffic. It wasn’t that he himself changed the poetic weather, just that I see him in symbolic terms as heralding the winds of change.

It took me a while to separate what Anselm Berrigan’s work was doing as opposed to what his charisma was making happen, and in fact we used to occupy ourselves with games such as, who’s better at poetry, Anselm or Edmund (his brother)? Well, that’s just human nature and I’m sure the Howe sisters aren’t crazy about our games either. But in part this blur was due to Anselm’s own poetic work, which seems at first sight to be all over the place. There was a bit of the New York school notational lyric, and when I read Chris Martin’s poetry of today it reminds me of Anselm’s practice in the early 1990s. I remember going to a reading at Canessa Park and hearing him read “Ghost Town,” tremendously thrilled by this serial piece—there was an attention to seriality which I thought harked back to a West Coast tradition of, frankly, not being able to finish what one starts. I told everyone for years that “Ghost Town” was the best poem written in San Francisco in the 1990s, till I realized just how much this sort of all or nothingness made me sound like Ron Silliman. Like something always has to be the best. And maybe it does, so maybe Ron is right, but maybe it doesn't. Anyhow when I read Ryan Murphy’s poetry today I think of Anselm’s writing of this second period.

When Aerial/Edge Books published Zero Star Hotel—you see, I’m skipping things, wanting to stick closely to my own response to his work, or the deepening of my understanding of the work, anyhow, again I was bowled over and part of that was realizing what one might call the strain of reportage, journalism, in his outlook on things, and this smear of lyric and this keen attention to the absolute detail of objects called to mind the things we live about Jack Kerouac, this heartwrenching conflagration of detail upon detail, thing upon thing, an imagism animated by a devotional, nearly religious force. In Kerouac, and I think in Zero Star Hotel too, it’s not just the one mode or the other—the rush of feeling nor the descriptive particular—that makes it so great, but rather the constant tension and give and take between the modes. Like Kerouac, Berrigan’s best work is stiffened by high Emersonian pragmatism, an optimism that nights of occasional doubt have let pass. He was not one of those who looked back, back, back for inspiration, for answers, though during this time he did a lovely job, with his mother and brother, assembling and editing the poems of Ted Berrigan, in a way that re-posited Ted’s work for a new century. (And for me personally.) At the helm of the Poetry Project, we admired from afar the way he took up the charge of steering that ship of state between the twin shoals of Nostalgia and Charybidis. It could have been such a disaster! So let me recap. It is the mixed methods—very much those of an installation artist, perhaps,—the mixed methods of an investigation of lyric practice, a commitment to a certain, twisted narrative line, an increasingly sophisticated political acuity, all these things criss-crossing and permutating and percolating, that might confuse a newcomer to his work. In recent years his commitment to the one phrase, “Have a good one,” might have driven an ordinary man crazy, and yet in composition by unit, in the small, a return to the smallest and yet largest of details, the poem’s title, he has found a new axle on which to turn the Sunday morning Cadillac his poetry has become. Whenever I want to bring the poet to the podium, I can’t help but turn to the lyrics of the Australian-born pop star Kylie Minogue, who has one hundred different songs urging a shy boy onto the dancefloor. “How do you describe a feeling?” she asks. “I’ve only ever dreamt of this.” Come up, Anselm dear, and get a groove on.

p.s. Kevin just published his 2000th Amazon review, "Red Melanie," an account of his fascination with Melanie Griffith and Kim Basinger, posing as a review of Griffith's 1988 sci-fi classic Cherry 2000. For his 2001st review, he will turn to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Art Spaces

Scott Watson and Attila Richard Lukacs at his studio

In Vancouver Scott Watson took us to the studio of the painter Attila Richard Lukacs, who was still a student at Emily Carr when he and a half dozen of his colleagues were plucked from obscurity and given a show at the Vancouver Art Gallery under the name, "The New Romantics" back in the early 80s. Implicitly this was a riposte to the prevailing mania for the kind of photo-conceptualism typified by Jeff Wall. Lukacs' career has waxed and waned in the past 25 years, but Kevin and I were thrilled and delighted to see so much of his new work way up close, and he was very kind. Enormous canvases lined the walls of the big studio right off Hastings in Vancouver's East Side, paintings about the current war in Iraq and, also, Canada's own involvement in Afghanistan. These surreal, utterly limpid pictures are like something executed by the WPA workers of Mars or Venus.

Scott's mother, Toronto-based Ardis Breeze, surveys Lukacs' baptism picture. Ardis was staying at Scott's house with us, and to Kevin's delight she revealed she met Jack Spicer at Ellen Tallman's home in 1965.

This is but a detail of a much larger canvas

As a bonus we got to meet Michael Morris, an artist of the previous generation famed for his interactions with the Fluxus group as well as (with the Image Bank, a collective he founded with Vincent Trasov) his own practice as a "mail artist" and his work with General Idea. He was one of the founders of the Western Front. In Lukacs' studio, Morris had a lot of stories to tell and should write his memoirs! He described a New York event in the 70s in which he and many other artists were brought in to cook at an "art restaurant" called Food, and Ray Johnson showed up on the arm of Emmanuelle Riva, the legendary French actress who starred in the Resnais-Duras Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). "I felt like I had died and gone to heaven," Morris said. Further back, he was a young student when he went to the first run showing (in Vancouver) of Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, and in the seat in front of him was the American poet Robert Creeley—"that's how we met." Here's Michael Morris is trusty old black and white:



Scott led us to the newly refurbished Or Gallery to the opening of a show by the artist "Laiwan," a small retrospective of her work in photography, video and installation art over many years. How do you say your name? Kevin asked her, and she said, "It rhymes with Taiwan," which made it easier to remember. Here she is in front of a fascinating image-text piece. Years ago each bus line in Vancouver had its own transfers, each one marked with its own alphabetical character (the "E line" and so forth), so Laiwan went on all of them and tried to collect as many transfers as she could, then set to making words and sentences out of the letters she'd hoarded. Interesting to see the restricted numbers of words you could make out of a restricted number of letters (for there were never 26 bus lines, instead a much smaller number.) As it happens, mystic commands devolved.

Laiwan at the Or Gallery

Not an art space per se, but Kevin introduced me to the Casa Gelato on Venables Street, well worth a trip for it has hundreds of flavors of gelato, every normal one you could imagine, dozens of tropical fruit flavors (and liquor like "whisky sour") and many extraordinary flavors.They offer for example balsamic vinegar! We had gone out to dinner with Larry Rinder and Colter Jacobsen shortly before our flight to Vancouver, and they had been bragging about going there, so I was curious. The walls are decorated with corny travel paintings (in an "Around the World" theme) of the Tower of Pisa, the Eiffel Tower, old Japan, everywhere people are eating gelato. Boys and girls cruise behind the horseshoe-shaped plexiglas cabinets, ready to give you a tiny taste of any particular frozen treat you want before you have to make up your mind. I must have tried five or six good ones—OK, maybe 14!—before settling on ginger while Kevin got "Nutella." Mmm, look at those cones!



Back in the USA we went with Stephen Boyer to a dinner in honor of painter and musician Christine Shields, who had painted our picture on our 20th wedding anniversary. Shields has a solo exhibition at the innovative Triple Base gallery on 24th Street, which runs through the end of the month. The spectacular setting for the dinner was off-site at the so-called "Pencil House" on Vermont Street deep in the Mission, an ordinary house (really two houses) which the owner has been redecorating for many years , and eventually every corner of it will be an installation all by itself.

At the "Pencil House"

The room where the dinner was held has a zillion pictures in it, including a trio of original Margaret Keane pictures! Can you see the large square picture on the top center, done against a pattern of red brick? That's Jason Mecier's portrait of horrormeister Stephen King. Mecier is notorious for his celebrity portraits constructed in pointillist fashion out of, well, basically, debris. It used to be food—he did a folding screen of the three Charlie's Angels made entirely of beans and colored pasta, and Pamela Anderson out of candy. Now he often works directly with the celebrities themselves. Every year Phyllis Diller will send him a sack of her trash, and he will respond by doing a new picture of her just using the trash. Anyhow you can't see in the Stephen King picture but one eye is actually a toilet paper holder mounted on the wall, with a roll of toilet paper fluttering down.

Several artists, including Christine, are now working on a bathroom that will look like an undersea aquarium. Here's Stephen in situ, with a glass of pink wine:



The great feature is the spiral staircase connecting three floors, the masterpiece of Jason Mecier, entirely constructed of pencils and similar stationery items (protractors, erasers) so that when you're mounting the stairs you think you're back in some mad nightmare of the first day of school.



When we were first taken to the Pencil House (Kenward Elmslie's nephew Bill Weir lives a few doors down) we were flabbergasted and, of course, our first idea was to write about it for NEST magazine, the shortlived magazine of interiors that used to focus on unusual domestic spaces. Well, of course NEST had featured it already!


After the dinner, we were led to a basement room where Christine entertained us with stories and songs, accompanied by a guitarist and percussionist. Here's a pic—the room was lit by candlelight, so the long exposure gives a ghostly aura:



And closer to home here's a quick shot of Christine Wertheim's sublime installation at the Right Window space at Valencia and 22nd here in San Francisco. Citizens and visitors, you still have a few weeks to go down and take a look—all is visible from the street—it is utterly gorgeous and convincing and I'm not saying that just because I curated it!

Plastic Exploding Inevitable by the Institute of Figuring

Art Film Barf

Kasey Mohammad of Ashland, Oregon.

A Barf and a Peck

Aaron Peck of Vancouver, B.C.

This picture reminds me of that one genre of Facebook profile pix, where the frame cuts off right below the eyes, where the profile-ee's face is shrouded in mystery, and the eyes stare out huge, like the paintings of Margaret Keane. Note Colter Jacobsen's double drawing behind him—two more eyes, peering knowingly over his shoulder.

Aaron's novel The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis will be out soon from Pedlar Press.

Bark Manifesto

Courtesy of David Buuck, of Oakland, CA:

Kitten Barf

From Emily Wilson of Berkeley, CA.

More Barf Manifesto Sightings

Del Ray Cross reading BM on his way to work in San Francisco. I snagged this great pic from Del Ray's Facebook page.

BM on Scott Watson's coffee table in Vancouver. Sharing space with a recent issue of Mirage with an image by Kota Ezawa on the cover.

Send me yours!

Conference Carousel

Finally—here's some more odds and ends about the Vancouver Positions Colloquium (August 19 – 24). I got to as much of the conference as I could, though Kevin went to more sessions than I, and we both had to miss almost the whole of one day because of some research Kevin was doing at nearby Simon Fraser University, which has a great collection of Jack Spicer’s manuscripts and other papers. Here are a few scattered highlights of the people I met (or re-met) during the week we were there.

Brian Kim Stefans gave a reading in which the words of his poem seemed to explode every which way in a digital animation, and he stepped into the beam himself, his image quivering and gyrating and exploding.



Darren Wershler-Henry’s reading was amusing and frightening, he isolated days’ worth of his Facebook friends’ updates and the inane things we say and substituted the names of great poets throughout history for his friends’ names, so that a typical line would be something like “Plutarch is so over Gossip Girl.”



Judy Radul showed part of an upcoming video project she is working on to present at UBC, in which three characters play the parts of the “Question,” the “Answer” and the—hmm, I’m blanking out, some third thing—Judgement?—and the camera shows them racing through Vancouver and speaking in triplets, each perfectly in character and yet with something weird, uncanny, about their interactions.


Kevin took the black and white pix. They're lovely but inadvertent. Kevin still uses a film camera, and his friend Kota Ezawa gave him some rolls of film he no longer had a need for. Kevin didn't realize until the film was developed that at least one roll is black and white. We love the arty Beat-era aura that it gives to our fellow poets.


It was a pleasure to reconnect with Clint Burnham after many years. I love this photo because the background looks so fake, like a painted backdrop of a county fair. In actuality he's standing on the same sidewalk as Judy.



Here is Maxwell Heller, whom I hadn’t met, as he appeared opposite Rodrigo Toscano in an episode of Rodrigo’s “Collapsible Poetics Theater.”



Jules Boykoff gave an elaborate presentation with a slide carousel projecting images in each of two walls, a long poem which involved, among many other components, counterposing the names of conference participants, and brief quotes from our works, with the names of our celebrity "doubles." I was in the poem "opposite" my doppelganger—Dodi Al Fayed, Princess Diana's boyfriend who died in the tunnel with her; Kevin got to "star" opposite Kevin Federline, the former husband of Britney; Mark Wallace, I remember, was paired with the singer Marc Anthony (J.Lo's husband)—so there was a lot of husbands going on. I felt a bit sorry for Kaia (Sand) and Sianne (Ngai) neither of whom had a polar opposite celebrity!



On the final night I saw artist Stan Douglas across the room and Kevin ran over to get his autograph.



Rod Smith and Robert Mittenthal looking Beater than the Beats. Rod is really taking his Robert Creeley lessons to heart. They look fantastic.



While Juliana Spahr read, a fantastic Kafka-esque parable she had written with David Buuck, I tried from a distance to capture something of that distinctive Spahr stance, and the glittering bugle beads of her blouse. It was so dark I set my camera on some "low light" setting, which looked good on the viewfinder but turned out to be one big blur that just worse and worse. First photo, Juliana in soft Post-Impressionist dreamy light like Renoir:



Last photo, by which time, Juliana seems to be exploding in psychedelic light, like she was providing her own light show at the Fillmore East circa 1968:



We were staying at Scott Watson’s house, and when it developed that Louis Cabri and Nicole Markotic were staying nearby, we tried carpooling with some success. Don’t think I have any photos of Nicole unfortunately, but here’s Louis with Roy Miki—Miki being one of the many Vancouver-based poets and artists who were not on the program per se, but who made up the audience.



Wayde Compton read briefly, with Rita Wong, then came back again on another day to see more of what was going on.



It was great to see many old friends of the old Kootenay School. Dan Farrell was there with his little girl. We saw Catriona Strang for the first time in many years, and Colin Smith as well, and with Lisa there too, and Jeff Derksen and Colin Browne and Erin O’Brien and Peter Culley and Dorothy Lusk and so many more it was just like the first time we went there so many years ago. Here’s Catriona:



It seems like we were always wandering off and meeting up and going places, just as well since some of those readings were l-e-n-g-t-h-y, here am I and Colin Smith meeting up in a sinister alley near Broadway and Main: