I could have been excoriated, but I wasn’t. Although I was teased ever so gently over the weekend for my “poor Chicago” crack, Stacy Szymaszek & I were repeatedly told that our audience of 75 was the largest ever for the Chicago Poetry Project at the Harold Washington Library. I can’t speak for Stacy, but overall I was treated like the toast of the town.

 

“So what do you think of Chicago poets, now?” I was asked sometime around midnight on Saturday. A fair question, tho impossible, on the basis of a weekend visit, to answer. I came away with nothing but positive impressions, tho, and wasn’t particularly surprised when one Milwaukee poet who’d come down for the occasion emailed me on Monday to say that “It was the best poetry gathering I think I’ve ever been to, with everyone seeming so open to each other.”

 

That openness – the absence of any BS factor or visible ego games – was indeed palpable, and something I noted when I did respond to that question. But I wonder, at least in part, if that is a feature specific to Chicago, or rather an index of distance from any “major scene.” Chicago may be a destination city like New York or San Francisco, but I suspect that the motives that bring people to it must be different, so that the “we’re-all-in-this-together” camaraderie approaches the feel one gets in Philadelphia or Tucson.

 

Considering that I was in town for only a little over 36 hours (which included two nights’ sleep), I managed to see & do a fair amount – not only the reading & a party at the loft of Mary Margaret Sloan & Larry Casalino, but a trip to Seminary Co-op Bookstore where I spent a bundle, a tour of the Art Institute in the very able hands of John Tipton & time to hang post-reading at a tavern called Kasey’s. I met many people who had only been names in print or email to me before – Tipton for one, Suzie Timmons, Peter O’Leary, Jesse Seldess, Lisa Samuels, Steve Timm, Ray Bianchi, & of course Stacy Szymaszek – and was to reconnect with others, such as Anne Kingsbury & Karl Gartung from the legendary Woodland Pattern, Bill Fuller & Bob Harrison. In addition to the stack of books that are being shipped by Seminary – I for some reason hadn’t expected it literally to be in a church basement, complete with someone playing an unseen organ upstairs – I came home with several world music CDs that I’ve been listening to all day, books by Fuller & Timmons, and copies of new issues of Antennae, Chicago Review & Conundrum. As I tooled around town, I was reminded how the flatness of the landscape functioned as a provocation for great architecture. The Harold Washington Library, designed by Thomas Beeby, is itself a building worth a visit. In addition to all the skyscrapers, I also zipped past (more or less literally) Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House & an emerging Frank Gehry band shell that is just starting to take shape (or misshape, as the case may be). The building where Mary Margaret & Larry have their loft was once a Montgomery Ward’s location & is topped with a giant statue of Artemis that is visible for miles.

 

This visit also reminded me of two events that taught me a good deal about the disorientation of expectations. The first occurred in 1964, when I traveled across the country in search literally for adventure & thus set foot into the Art Institute – it may have been only the second or third museum I’d ever been inside, museums not being something my family ever did. When I first came upon George Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, a painting I knew only from books & the “art postcards” I would buy near the University of California campus as a boy to decorate my room, it was much larger than I had ever imagined. I instantly burst into tears, something I’ve subsequently done with only two other paintings.* This isn’t necessarily an endorsement of Seurat, but the painting’s size completely floored me. I think I’d imagined pointillism to aspire to smallness in more ways than it actually does. I suddenly realized that I had to rethink whatever was in my head about the history of painting – I had to actually see the paintings.

 

The second such event was how I first met Mary Margaret Sloan, which was through her husband Larry. Larry joined the West Coast editorial collective of the Socialist Review back when I was its editor in the late 1980s and the collective had decided to hold one of its editorial meetings at his house. I hadn’t known Larry beforehand, but his credentials (M.D., Ph.D., experience with the United Farm Workers) were impeccable, so I was pleased to have someone with both theoretical & practical knowledge about the health industry on the collective. The meeting gathered in Larry’s livingroom on the north side of Bernal Heights in San Francisco & at some point in the conversation, my eyes just wandered over the coffee table that was in the center of the room where I saw a copy of Diane Ward’s Relation. Now the SR collective was not especially given to culture – I could count on Michael & Pam Rosenthal to generally know any reference I made to avant-garde history & for Carole Hatch & Steve McMahon to be supportive in principle, but there were also people on the collective like Jim Shoch – a good friend from our days working in DSA – who liked to brag about how much he hated culture. I couldn’t remember bringing the book – in fact, once I thought about it, I was sure I hadn’t. It had been awhile since I’d read the book & I wasn’t carrying it around with me in my book bag. Why the hell was it there? I think the whole last half of the meeting just floated past me, I was so absorbed in trying to figure this out. The obvious answer – that the book belonged there – struck me as so improbable that I couldn’t imagine it. Which meant that I had to figure out the narrative by which its presence, staring up at me, made sense. After the meeting concluded, I asked Larry if that was his book & he said, “Oh that belongs to Margy.” A little prodding & I quickly discovered by Mary Margaret Sloan & I knew many people in common, but somehow had not yet met.

 

One could make a cautionary tale out of this, but that’s not my interest here. What I want to note is how expectation frames perception. Even though I’ve been to Chicago maybe eight times in the last forty years, I don’t really know it. The result is that I’m immersed into a state of constant newness – even when I’m seeing old friends, like Larry & Mary Margaret, the context is entirely different. I come home charged up, entirely thrilled by the experience, by the newness of it. The rolling hills of the Delaware Valley no longer seem so much like failed mountains** in contrast with the table-top landscape of Chicago.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* A Pollock in the National Gallery & Delacroix’s Lady Liberty in the Louvre. 

 

** Mount Misery at Valley Forge is no larger than Albany Hill in the Bay Area, a pimple on the landscape when compared just to the Berkeley Hills let alone to Mount Tamalpais or Mount Diablo