The 1960 Symposium

Both video & audio of all two hours & 20 minutes

With Al Filreis, Bob Perelman, Ron Silliman,
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Chris Funkhouser, Erica Kaufman,
Judith Goldman, Kristen Gallagher, Danny Snelson,
Michael S. Hennessey, Charles Bernstein & Mel Nichols

Since these two points come up in the Q&A, it’s worth noting that Henry Rago, the editor of Poetry, died on May 26, 1969. I was thinking that his 14-year tenure with the journal began in 1952. It began in 1955. And the exact statement by Creeley is “There is nothing quite so abrupt and even pleasant as rape — ask any woman.” It appears in his essay on Franz Kline in the Winter 1954 Black Mountain Review & was reprinted in A Quick Graph but is cut from the essay in the 1989 UC Press edition of Collected Essays. Thanks to Al Filreis & Rachel Blau DuPlessis for running down the details, and to Clayton Eshleman for originally noting the discrepancy.

At the Poetry Center 1957, L-R: Ida Hodes, Jack Spicer, Ruth Witt-Diamant, Robert Duncan

In 1974, John Taggart asked me for an essay for an issue of Maps dedicated to the work of Robert Duncan. I chose to do a close reading of the first poems of Duncan’s now-classic Opening of the Field where I suggested that Duncan set them out as an argument from which to mount the large, unnamed Life Work that began with these poems. Later today, I will be participating in Penn’s Poetry in 1960 symposium, and will allude to this piece, tho not read from it.