As I browsed through the tapes available from the Berkeley Language Center, one of the things that caught my attention about the Berkeley Poetry Conference of 1965 was the length of the solo readings. There was none of those “excuse me” 25-minute so-called featured readings that one sees so frequently now on college campuses and on the East Coast. While the opening night reading appears not to have been recorded, from the remaining available materials we can see that of eight solo readings, six took at least 80 minutes. Charles Olson’s, of course, is notorious for its length – they literally had to shut the building down to get him to stop. But Olson’s tape at 205 minutes is not inconceivably longer than Allen Ginsberg’s two-hour reading, nor Ed Dorn’s, which was only ten minutes shorter. Robert Duncan at 95 minutes, Gary Snyder at 90, Robert Creeley at 80 were more modest. Only Jack Spicer (at 50 minutes) and John Wieners (at 45) came in at under one hour.

 

There were five group readings as well. The first, with an obvious San Francisco focus, included Robin Blaser, George Stanley and Richard Duerden. A second reading was entitled “Young Poets” & included Victor Coleman, Robert Hogg, David Franks, Jim Boyack , Robin Eichele & Stephen Rodefer. These kids were the essence of modesty – only Franks read over 20 minutes.

 

A third reading featured John Sinclair, Lenore Kandel, Ed Sanders & Ted Berrigan. Berrigan’s presence is really the only visible sign of the New York School on the conference program*. A fourth program featured another three San Francisco poets: Ron Loewinsohn, Joanne Kyger & Lew Welch. And finally the conference closed with a second reading of “young” poets, this time mostly from Berkeley: Gene Fowler, Doug Palmer, Drummond Hadley, Jim Wehlage, Eileen Adams, :Lowell Levant, Gale (sic) Dusenbery, Sam Thomas & Jim Thurber. While again these readers kept their performances to around 15 minutes, the number of them pushed the event to two hours, forty minutes.

 

Until I looked at this site, I hadn’t realized just how thoroughly present & accounted for Canadian poets were at this early stage – obviously the first Vancouver conference in 1963 had already had an impact. Nor had I expected to find the Detroit scene – Sinclair and Eichele –represented at all. But, as I noted yesterday, I was ignorant as a stick at the time. As it turned out, Sinclair – who now practices his music & poetry routine in the Big Easy – would be one of the first significant editors to connect with my poetry, printing a few pieces of mine in his journal Work in ’68.

 

 

 

 

* Sanders is included in the Shapiro-Padgett An Anthology of New York Poets, but in this context seems obviously to function as a younger Beat poet. Interestingly, two conference attendees, Lewis Warsh & Anne Waldman, would discover one another while in Berkeley, leading to all sorts of great benefits for the NY School’s second generation & beyond.