At 07:31 PM 4/21/2003 -0600, you wrote:
>Ken,
>
>I'm glad you mentioned C.D. Wright and Forrest Gander and their Lost Roads
>press in connection with Stanford. There was an interview with C.D. Wright
>recently, an issue ago?, in Poets & Writers Magazine over here, with a lot
>of information on the press. Wright and Gander champion a lot of 'back
>roads' poets from Arkansas, and her work, in particular, is very much of
>this vein though skewered through San Francisco and the LANGUAGE poets.

I believe I saw the Wright interview in P&W last spring and that was where
I came across Stanford.  Wendy Carlisle, who is from Texarkana, told me
that Stanford is something of a legend in Western Arkansas and East
Texas.  What the hell: I suspect that anyone who reads Stanford turns him
into someone legendary.

Wright herself is a curious character.  In 1996 I was at a workshop at Lyon
College in Batesville, Arkansas, and CD was one of the instructors.  She
was not mine; I "drew" Stephen Dunn, who I'd been told beforehand was a
bit...difficult...but in fact was one of the sweetest and helpful men I've
ever met.  In any case, I tended to be one of the early risers and had
breakfast with CD a couple of times.  She was funny and abrasive at the
same time, and seemed to see the larger world into which she made herself
fit as an extension of small-town Arkansan culture.  I never had the nerve
to ask her "What's a nice radical like you doing in a place like Brown
University?" but I DID get her take on Academe, and I learned a new verb:
to Wal-Mart.  She used this to describe the overuse of Adjuncts on college
and university faculties--no benefits, just few enough hours not to qualify
for them, an undercutting of the full-time faculty's position by using
desperate part-timers.  That became really relevant when I started using
Adjunct positions to help support myself after I lost my last full-time job
in 12/2001.

CD's also the only person who read a fragment I brought with me to Arkansas
and said "This is a poem."  Everyone else who read it said it needed
resolution, cleaning up, etc.  CD thought otherwise--or at least told me to
go read William Bronck, David Antin, and Eliot Weinberger, because I seemed
to be trying to break the form in which I'd (to her mind) caught myself and
she was giving me keys to different doors.  I didn't understand her
reaction until I read sections of Battlefield...even though she never
mentioned Stanford.  Let's say I identified to the extent that I made the
mistake of rewriting that fragment to sound too much like
Stanford.  Eventually it may sound like a Me I can stand....

My question for the day is whether Battlefield is as long as The Faerie
Queene:-).

One funny sidelight--unless they've corrected themselves, the Grolier
Poetry Bookstore in Cambridge, on their online catalogue, lists Battlefield
as African-American literature.  I recall how The Righteous Brothers fooled
DJs on traditionally black radio stations into thinking "You've Lost That
Lovin' Feelin'" was recorded by a couple of black men.

Ken