Tuesday, June 16, 2009
I had just gotten off the phone with a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, doing background work for an obit of David Bromige, when I got an email telling me that Victoria Rathbun, a fine young poet who hung with the Actualists in the late 1970s, had passed away last month. Actualism was the brainchild of Darrell Gray, an attempt to create a 3rd-generation NY School out of the Iowa City-Bay Area axis, and a number of its practitioners were first-rate poets. Of course the whole idea of the NY School sans New York is an interesting, if problematic, concept to begin with, but Actualism was never able to transcend Darrell’s mercurial (and fatal) alcoholism. If you hunt for Victoria Rathbun (there’s more than one) on Google, what you’ll find for the poet is the Dick Grossinger-Kevin Karrane anthology, Baseball Diamonds, in which she has work alongside Tom Clark, John Sayles, Philip Roth, Fielding Dawson, Roger Angell and A. Bartlett Giamatti; records of two readings at the Grand Piano (one a Punk Rock Reading – a quintessentially Actualist event – with G.P. Skratz & Michael-Sean Lazarchuk, the other with me); a reading & chat with Alan Bernheimer on the radio show In the American Tree (MP3); and mention of her participating in an Actualist Convention video among the archives of the defundt La Mamelle artspace.
