I’m half-ignoring Spider Man 2 on the miniature LCDs of the in-flight movie screens, wending my way back to Paoli. Alfred Molina, a wonderful actor, makes for a superb villain here – Doc Ock – but frankly I prefer him as Diego Rivera in Frida or as himself – an hysterical turn – in Coffee & Cigarettes. A week on the road in the service of poetry swirls in my head, scattering disparate observations that haven’t cohered into anything like a thesis. Some of these include the following:

 

·        A relatively modest audience in an out-of-the-way place like Lawrence, Kansas, can be every bit as satisfying as the largest turnout in the most major of literary centers. I can’t imagine any poet who wouldn’t (at least figuratively) kill for the audience I had for my talk in Lawrence. The attentiveness, knowledge, deep questions were fabulous. One person, Don Lee, drove all the way from Arkansas – an act that completely humbles me.*

·        I don’t think that, as a young writer, I had understood or counted on the constancy & steadfastness of an audience over the years. It is far better to have one reader over the years if that reader happens to be a David Bromige, Steve Vincent, Susan Gevirtz, Aaron Shurin, David Melnick, Kathleen Fraser, Kenneth Irby, Norma Cole, Tinker Greene or or or than it is to have a hundred hit-&-miss readers, who dig casually into the work then depart.

·        What a lot of graybeards we are!

·        Heads up, younger poets: you’re about to be ye olde poets of the next decade or thereabouts.

·        Somebody needs to fund the digitizing and web enablement of the vast archive at the San Francisco State (just as somebody needs to endow & ensure the future of the Electronic Poetry Center in Buffalo, not to mention at least a dozen other literary institutions). Will the Poetry Foundation, so-called, ever step up to do something useful?

·        The most frustrating experience of my trip was learning that, when reading at the Unitarian Center in SF, I was competing with a reading that included Lyn Hejinian, Kit Robinson & Alan Bernheimer in the East Bay. The reading at the Unitarian Center had been planned for over a year (& been listed on the SF State Poetry Center web site almost that long), but – as happens here in Philly too – people seem to think it’s too hard to do a little advance checking…. That just flummoxes me.

·        At least it didn’t seem to have much impact on turnout, which was good for both events I did that day.

·        Using the police car as a stage (with a sort of padded lean-to attached proscenium to protect the vehicle itself) was a nice touch at the FSM rally.

·        When I first saw Kit Robinson at the FSM rally, he was talking with Howard Dean!

·        I think we are going to regret for years (decades!) the fact that Dean’s campaign was not prepared to take on the onslaught of Dick Gephardt & the Fox News Channel in & after Iowa. He would be kicking W’s butt by about a ten-point margin right now. He’s an entire generation ahead of Kerry.

·        The other first-rate speaker at the FSM rally was Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, a one-time high school teacher who got her start in politics as one of the leaders of the FSM. She would make a great governor for the state of California.

·        Traveling makes it very hard to pay attention to “current events” – I caught only fragments of the VP debate & second presidential one and have yet to watch a full inning of the baseball playoffs. People who know me will understand just how improbable the latter is.

·        Doesn’t mean that I can’t root for the Red Sox this year, tho . . . .

·        People have been belly-aching about the impact of chains & Amazon on the status of independent bookstores for so long that I don’t think we get it yet just how quickly & deeply the consolidation of independent retail outlets is going to be over the next 24 or so months.

·        This is going to require a serious rethinking on the part of poetry book publishers as to what distribution actually is & means. Right now, far too many of them think of distribution as somebody else’s job –it’s not!

·        I keep imagining that the traffic in the Bay Area couldn’t get any worse – and then it does.

·        I’m nowhere near done thinking about Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book. In fact, I think I’ve just sort of pointed out a lot of what will someday – like when the book is in print – seem obvious.

·        The U.S. post-avant canon is Robert’s reading list – more or less completely – more than that of any other single poet over the past fifty years.

·        At the same time, Robert did not get the degree to which the New Sentence, if I may indulge in caps, figures precisely the role of the Other, the non-rational, the dark side (which is not without its many colors). The blank space between punctuation & the next capital is the X-file of language & we have just begun to scratch at its surface.

·        For a young poet today, replicating those scratches is not necessarily a step in the right direction. Time to look inside!

·        Honoraria, especially in the academy, have been more or less stagnant now for at least 40 years, meaning that the actual payment for readings is – in constant currency – only a fraction of what it once was.

·        I’m always amazed by how academic departments fail to exploit the riches of poetry & poets in their own immediate regions (e.g., when major poets are let in, they are often – as was the case for both Ken Irby & Rae Armantrout – strung out as “adjuncts” for two or more decades.) 

·        One becomes very aware of the degree to which many English departments have as a first priority a desire not to be threatened by their creative writing teachers.

·        They get just what they deserve!

 

* & reminds me of how I experienced that same emotion when Louis Cabri led a carful of friends from Ottawa for a reading I did in Buffalo many moons ago.