Date:         Thu, 6 Jul 2000 22:39:40 -0700
Reply-To:     UB Poetics discussion group
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Sender:       UB Poetics discussion group
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From:         Kevin Killian
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Subject:      What I saw at the Orono Conference 2000, part II
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What I saw at the Orono Conference on Thursday, June 29, 2000

I woke up startlingly early.  Breakfast, 7:00 a.m., seemed so early
but then I figured, oh, if I was in my regular life I certainly would
be up by 6.30, so managed to fool myself for quite a while.  I crept
out of my room to have a cigarette and was confronted in the hallway
by an amazing number of beer bottles, empty half-pints, soda cartons
and crushed plastic cups brimming with old Kool butts. The Capricorn
in me rebelled and I pulled a big trash liner to one side and began
cleaning up, my thoughts roiling, nervous for some reason. In
ordinary life I work for a large janitorial company and in my head I
could imagine the scorn and contempt with which the Orono janitors
would be thinking about the poets and scholars they were cleaning up
after. This was so Felix Unger of me I could hardly believe it
myself, but all of a sudden a finger's tapping my shoulder and a
courtly voice speaks through the gray dawn, "May I be of some
assistance, young man?" Curtly I grunted, turned around and came face
to face with John Wieners, whom I hadn't seen in ten years or so. "I
slept like a top!" he cried out, "Then I came to my senses and wanted
a smoke." He looked great. Okay, not great, but if you'd been through
what he's been through you'd probably look worse.

We sifted through the glass debris like a pair of rag pickers from a
painting by Jean-Francois Millet. Chancing upon a disgusting bottle
of Labatt Blue, Wieners paused. "This beer is Canadian-Fred Wah must
be here," he deduced, growing agitated like Sherlock Holmes at the
Reichenbach Falls. "I must see Fred Wah and his two children and
Pauline!" He speaks a bit more slowly, haltingly, than most
Bostonians I've known, but with exacerbated finality and
righteousness. But also a kind of sweet demureness I've never known
elsewhere.

"I have a present for you," I said, hauling it out of my pocket. Have
any of you seen the new book "The Blind See Only the Blind" (Pressed
Wafer/Granary Books) in which 30 or 40 poets pay tribute to John
Wieners? The volume climaxes with a new poem by Wieners himself, in
which he waxes lyrical about forgotten stars of his youth, including
the one and only Edie Adams, a blond comedienne/soubrette who long
ago starred in the Broadway musicals "Wonderful Town" (1953) and
"Li'l Abner" (1957). The day the "Blind" book came in the mail, Dodie
and I had a chance to meet Edie Adams and we took the book to her
gingerly enough and asked her to sign it "to our friend the great
poet." She claimed to have known, in her Hollywood heyday, both Allen
Ginsberg and Carl Sandberg ("all the burgs," she boasted) so poetry
was no big thing for her. "Was John Wieners ever in San Francisco?"
she cried, a tiny wrinkle crossing her forehead. "Then I met him in
1959 with Ernie!" (Ernie Kovacs, her late husband.) As this was just
possible, I nodded bumptiously, showed her where to sign. I produced
the book now for Wieners. "Look what she wrote, "FOR JOHN WIENERS,
HOW EXCITING FOR ME, I LOVE YOUR WORK, LOVE, EDIE ADAMS, SAN
FRANCISCO 2000."

John held the book from different angles, peering at it above and
below his face-a-main, as though it would bite him. "I thought she
must be deceased!" "No, and Dodie took pictures of her signing it."
"Please let me examine the shots," he begged. I showed him two which
I'd tucked into the book-one shot of Adams grinning into the camera,
her white powdered face bigger than the Cheshire Cat's. The other
showed her querulous profile as she sat lost in thought, trying to
remember the good old Hotel Wentley days I assume. "I'd like one of
these, Kevin, for my own," John said. "But only one. And I can't
decide which shows the sheer insouciance of Miss Adams to best
advantage. May I decide later?"

"We are all so excited you are here among us," I said. It's hard to
talk to someone with Wieners' personality without lapsing into his
particularly affected lingo-at least it's hard for a Capricorn. "Take
all the time you need!" So saying I slung my garbage bag over my
shoulder like Ralph Kramden and went to breakfast and a day of panels.

The regular panel sessions: always or so it seemed, so many good ones
all at the same time so that one was forced to make these agonizing
decisions and usually they each turned out wrong.  For example, the
first choice was among a panel called "Echoes of the 1930s," then one
on John Ashbery, a separate panel on NY School poets, a Baraka And
Others panel, and one called "A sense of place."  I don't know, I
just figured, A sense of place sounds dull, though maybe I'm wrong.
So that was out.  "Echoes of the 1930s?"  That was a good possibility
because the abstracts of the papers sounded so intriguing and
sometimes one feels, oh why go to a panel on someone like Ashbery,
why not go and find out something about someone more obscure, how
else will I ever learn anything?  So this "Echoes" panel had papers
on Ramon Guthrie, Carl Rakosi, and Thomas McGrath, poets who were
still active in the 1960s tho productive as early as the 1930s, and I
know a little bit about Rakosi  and McGrath but nothing about Ramon
Guthrie & I still don't.  I wound up taking the better part of
valor,
by attending a panel I knew would have at least one good paper,
because I had heard Lytle Shaw give a paper before and knew he'd
deliver value for money, so to speak.  This panel, chaired by the
dapper, French-cut, exhausted Steven Evans, was on "In and Around New
York," and Lytle's paper outlined the possible connections in life
and in poetry between Frank O'Hara and Ezra Pound, a subject on which
I had never thought it possible to write even a sentence let alone 20
minutes worth of paper.  Turns out that O'Hara had written a poem on
"The Pisan Cantos" and later, in a different frame of mind, a mind
turned 100% towards Personalism, made Pound one of his subjects in
"Biotherm"!  From these two angles Lytle developed a theory that
clarified the different attitudes towards audience that O'Hara and
Pound each worked from.  Funny that Pound wound up outliving O'Hara,
who must have thought Pound such an old man when he began to write.
At Orono these kinds of thoughts came to one often.  I looked at the
classroom we were sitting in, and remembered back to 4 years ago.
This was the very classroom in which the top of my head came off
after a particularly brilliant brace of O'Hara papers given by Steve
(Evans) himself and by Ben Friedlander during the 50s conference.
And now, as though it had been some sort of audition, both Evans and
Friedlander have been hired by U Maine Orono!  This must, I decided,
spell good luck for Lytle Shaw!

After the first panel, all spilled out into the lobby of "Corbett"
Hall and drank coffee and talked about which panels and papers had
been the best.  All papers, or so it seemed, given by anyone named
"Jonathan" had been noteworthy.  (I didn't hear any Jonathans, alas,
during my entire stay.)  Dee Morris introduced me to Richard Quinn
who, or so everyone said, had just given a great paper on Albert
Ayler, John Coltrane and Amiri Baraka on the "Baraka and Others"
panel.  I wondered how the "Sense of Place" people had done, and then
the program book told me there were two upcoming readings at 10 and
at 11 by Ted Enslin, Nathaniel Tarn and Toby Olson, people one would
never ordinarily get to hear in San Francisco, and this made me
reflect that "Sense of Place" studies were never stronger than in
Maine.

In the afternoon, after lunch, I didn't have as much choice about
what to see, because I had committed to chairing a panel, and so had
Dodie.  We both missed the "Baraka and Others II" panel, the panel on
Brooks, Rukeyser and Rexroth, and the panel on Dickey, Eckman and
Snyder.  Again a few Jonathans took the field.  The first Louis
Zukofsky panel was in this slot too, and apparently this was one of
the very best of the week.  Dodie told me hers went very well, with
Linda Russo taking off on Barrett Watten's Hettie Jones take, and
Matthew Pifer giving a research-based paper on Detroit's twin streams
of counterculture and revolutionary mimeo work in the 1960s (like
John Sinclair).  Alas, our dear Nick Lawrence did not appear due to
illness, a virulent South African fever felling him, ironic since his
paper was to have been called "Mimeo Fever."  (He eventually did
arrive at the conference, a bit frail, and some were heard to make
ebola jokes.)  The panel I chaired was great, even if I say so
myself, for I had leapt at a chance to be the chair for a panel
featuring 3 of my favorite poets, Tony Lopez, Marjorie Welish, and
Kasey Mohammad on "The New York School."  Welish speaks so precisely
and learnedly and wittily in every sentence--some unexpected verb or
adjective pins down her thought like Nabokov his butterflies.  Kasey
whom I now regard as one of our California homeboys did us proud by
giving a very very close reading to a particular Ashbery poem I can't
remember which one now (but it's the one that ends a stanza with the
word "The"), and Tony Lopez brilliantly read Ted Berrigan's sequence
"In the Early Morning Rain" as a way of explaining how the Sonnets
were constructed, managing to inject some controversy by soundly
rebutting some other recent article about Berrigan by Libbie Rifkin,
an admirable scholar indeed.  

I was startled then to see Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop walking through
the hallway, for their lack of interest at conferences has long been
a truism of poetry, like the reclusivity of Jess or the hair of Jorie
Graham.  But there they were, she, with the piquant looks of a
younger Luise Rainer, and the voice of Glinda the Good Witch, and he,
with that freaky Charles Manson hair and beard that might scare a
child, except he has the open, sweet, appealing face of one of the
Teletubbies.  "Why are you here?" I called to them in disbelief.
Turned out they had shown up out of personal loyalty to Steve Evans
and to Jennifer Moxley.

The plenary sessions that evening were just as intriguing.  One was
by Frank Davey on "Regressive Poetics of the 1960s."  Briefly he
described the ways in which Canadian poetry was turned on its head in
the 1960s in ways which had not entirely positive effects for its
state today.  Davey was part of a large Canadian contingent we were
very happy to greet, as the conference this year had changed its
emphasis slightly to include the formerly rebuffed or excluded
Canadians, I wonder why?  Anyway Frank Davey wins our Fashion Award
hands down with his beautiful Haspel suit, in a lightweight cotton so
highly pressed it seemed metallic, bought (or so we later learned) on
the eve of a trip to India in April 1982.  Barrett Watten followed
Davey with a slide and video presentation about the Berkeley Free
Speech riots of the mid-60s and their aftermath.  This was a talk
with a lot of carefully wrought argument that was wonderful to look
at and listen to, but in the end it all wound up being
extraordinarily personal, as though the breakdown of the revolution
had resulted in one salutary effect, Watten's own graduation from UC
Berkeley in 1968 and the birth of the Language Poetry movement
(foretold when, asked for his opinions about some Berkeley protest
march at which he was present, Allen Ginsberg thought for a minute
and then began emitting a Sanskrit mantra, resulting in a perplexity
and turning inside out of language that Watten, et al, were to take
to even greater heights).  This is the event that Matt Richardson has
reported on to us on the List, in which "Baraka attended this reading
and finally lashed out at Watten for being a "hyper-rational
pseudo-radical" and for "pimping"radical politics for his own
academic benefit."  Coming in late, but carrying a whole sheaf of
notes, Baraka called out from the audience to Davey and Watten, "I
don't know your names, so I'll call you First Person and Second
Person."  He accused them of character assassination and of trashing
the 60s so that their academic careers would prosper.  The debate
grew so heated that a conference organizer (Ben Friedlander) took the
unprecedented step of scheduling an ad hoc panel in the middle of the
cafeteria on another day to stage a formal debate between Watten and
Baraka.  But more of this later.

The adrenalin high, the bar opened its doors, and happily there were
Liz Willis and Kristin Prevallet who, shopping at the local IGA in
Orono, came upon a display of Tab, the 1960s Coca-Cola-made soft
drink to which I became addicted quite early, and which was withdrawn
from sale in California about 3 years ago.  And Liz and Kristin
brought me a case of it, the best gift I ever had, and so I spent the
remaining days of the conference quite drunk on Tab which, I
understand, took its name from a NASA prototype and stands
acronymically for "Totally Artificial Beverage" the way "TANG" used
to mean "Totally Artificial Nutrient Group," thus completing the 60s
motif (for me) through a regressive synaesthesia.  And then the open
reading started up and I read and Dodie read and we felt
well-attended and safe, far from home, and that was Thursday, pretty
much.

More later.

Kevin Killian