While I was off on a 60-hour trip to New York City for the LZ / 100 . . .

 

·        My office at home was flooded by the remnants of Ivan as it passed through Pennsylvania (tho apparently not nearly as badly as John Taggart’s house)

·        I saw Harvey Shapiro &Hugh Seidman read for the first time ever

·        I realized just how much Louis Zukofsky’s “A”-21 was faux Shakespeare

·        As a result, I realized that the 24-book scheme of “A” was derived from Joyce’s Ulysses

·        Burton Hatlen & I found ourselves in the same hotel, the austere Riverside Towers, & had breakfast together twice, once at Zabar’s & once up at the Pinnacle Deli just off the Columbia campus (advantage Zabar’s)

·        The New York City subway was shut down due to flooding, compliments of Ivan

·        I saw the best minds of my generation arrive drenched at the conference – Don Wellman & Charles Alexander appeared to have swum

·        One of  the most highly anticipated talks of the conference – Peter Whalen’s “Literary Paternity and the Psychological Residue of Abortion: Lorine Niedecker and Louis Zukofsky” – failed to materialize

·        So the audience discussed it anyway

·        Robert Kelly described how the Zukofskys wrapped each and every book & magazine in their apartment on Willow Street in Brooklyn in the 1958 equivalent of plastic baggies & how their ashtrays would be emptied after every cigarette, so that they could chain-smoke all day and still have spotless ashtrays

·        Much was made of the pronunciation of “A” – ā or ă (with lots of regional variants for the latter) – there was a lot of sentiment for the latter, given that the title is a quotation of the poem’s first word (hence the quotation marks)

·        The Guardian, the progressive British daily paper, ran a very positive review of Lee Harwood’s Collected Poems

·        I received copies of the following works:

o       Born 2 by Allison Cobb

o       A Reading Spicer & 18 Sonnets by Beverly Dahlen

o       TV Eye by Todd Baron

o       Slowly but Dearly by Norman Fischer

o       Chantry by Elizabeth Treadwell

o       While Sleeping by Bill Lavender

o       Architecture Against Death / Architecture Contre la Mort, a two-volume (plus CD) double issue of the journal Interfaces devoted to the work of Arakawa & Madeline Gins

o       The Labor of Division in Society by Joshua Schuster

·        I returned home to discover that Krishna & Colin had taken care of the flood entirely by themselves (Big Thanks!)

·        A stack of books had arrived in the Saturday post & were awaiting me:

o       Instrumentality by Ravi Shankar

o       Up and Up by Ted Greenwald

o       Shut Up and Shut Down by Mark Nowak

o       The California Poem by Eleni Sikelianos

o       plus the latest Rain Taxi, aptly named this month