REPORT FROM ORONO 2

Well I stand delightfully corrected in my comments about the
probability no-one was reading, thanks to Fergal, Anny, John Latta
(whose last name I use only because I like it so much), and Ralph for
delightful emails. Self-hatred is definitely a problem: I don't know
if being Irish or poetry exacerbates it more.

Today I realized that I am very close to Bar Harbor and as I've always
wanted to go there it would be a crime not to go. But as I got up
late, having woken up early but not having yet had the sort of tough
productive dreams that make sleep worth sleeping, I had to go back to
sleep again to do it and hence deemed it too late to set off for Bar
Harbor. But I made a start by getting good directions and hope to go
tomorrow. Weather Report: it's cold and rather gloomy here. FYI:
Other places I've always wanted to go are South Dakota, Italy
(especially Milan to see Bernardino Luini's paintings) and Trabzon in
Eastern Turkey.

Breakfast was very good again today. I didn't feel I got quite the
right breakfast yesterday so I got it today: 2-egg omelet with green
pepper, onion, and tomato, with home fries, coffee, grapefruit juice,
and a blueberry muffin. That was all less than $6. I went to the same
place for breakfast as yesterday of course and it was just as heavenly
although there were no old men. There were several generations of
women who seemed as happy and fluent on one side of the counter as the
other. Again I was extremely satisfied and well fed. Then I went to
get as much cheap gas as I could stuff into my car.

The first session I went to yesterday was on the Objectivists, chaired
by Lyn Hejinian, with papers by Thomas Nelson, Steve Shoemaker, and
David Briggs. The focus was on forms of Objectivist silences. I
missed most of Thomas Nelson's (University of Texas at Austin)
presentation "Rhetorics of Silence: Objectivists and the 1940s,"
though I was interested by his comment that rhetoric and poetics have
been traditionally at odds—which I think is no longer the case in fact
quite the opposite: listening to readings here I feel that poetry is
all rhetoric. Walking in, even late, on a meditation on Objectivist
silence was very pleasant. I have thought about Reznikoff's silence:
something which is perhaps the principal mark of his work. For me his
use of found materials, especially in Holocaust, demonstrates an
exquisite tact. Likewise his eschewal of metaphor. Sometimes it
seems that the only element of poetry which Reznikoff employed in
Holocaust is the introduction of silence via the line-break. The
question of white space on the page, which I often read as silence,
also came up today. Anyway, I am generally disappointed that there is
no Reznikoff paper being presented. I somehow assumed, maybe because
I love him, that Reznikoff would be a central focus of a conference on
poetry of the 1940s. I regret that I didn't shake off the felt cloak
of my inertia and write a paper myself. Other poets I would have
liked to present on include May Swenson and Patrick Kavanagh. Believe
it or not, the National Poetry Foundation MUG has the name "Patrick
Kavanagh" listed alongside all the American Modernists. I was as
proud as punch and asked Burton Hatlen if Kavanagh had ever been to
Orono but he hadn't. By the way, and via something Michael Basinski
who speaks exclusively in riddles said last night: the official
greeting of this conference is now: "Ezra Pound." You don't say
"hello" when you meet someone, or "Lá brea" (not a place in
California) or "What about you," you just say "Ezra Pound." So
although I haven't yet met any poetry types today I will soon commence
my day's business and go quietly about campus saying "Ezra Pound."

Okay, back to Objectivist silences. Steve Shoemaker (Harvard)
presented a paper titled "The Poetics of Silence: George Oppen and
World War II" and David Briggs (University of Alberta) presented a
paper titled "Location, Occupation, and Locomotion in Lorine
Niedecker's 'New Goose' Manuscript." I've never been sure how to
pronounce Lorine Niedecker's name so it was cheering to notice that
David Briggs varied his pronunciation of "Knee-dicker"/ "Nigh-dicker"
at least once. I also noticed that although I knew very few people in
the audience, they all looked very familiar to me. The classrooms and
lecture halls here are strange in that they look like they are tiled
floor to ceiling with white tile so there is a slightly abattoirish
feel to things. I couldn't help also noticing that David Briggs was
very sharply dressed.

After the presentations Lyn Hejinian summed up briefly. I noticed
that she speaks with her feet planted very firmly on the ground,
although she moves her body easily and gestures with her hands. The
effect is one of assurance and grace. I thought maybe she did yoga.
Lyn invited questions from the audience, having expressed confidence
that there were people in the audience more intelligent than she
(her?). Sure enough a very intelligent question came right away from
Kasey Mohammad who within a few words posited the liklihood of
synecdochic relation (don't ask me now between what and what) and fair
play to Steve Shoemaker, he took the question and ran with it in a
dazzling display of intellectual and athletic skill. I must say some
of the questions from the audience at this conference are out-and-out
dismaying due to their length and density. A gorgeous exception was a
terrific question last night which laced the words "George," "Bush,"
"television, "American Century," and WW2" into one terse sentence. Ela
Kotkowska then asked a devilishly intelligent question which included
its own answer in two parts, both of which involved music and one of
which invoked silence as resonance. Her blog "Incertain Plume" is
unique.

The next panel I went to was 'African American Poetry," chaired by
Michael Bibby (who interviewed me once with great gusto for a job at
Shippensburgh University and from whom I never heard again), with
papers from Aldon Nielsen (Penn State) and James Smethurst "University
of Massachusetts at Amherst). Aldon's paper, "Russell Atkins and the
Road Not Taken," introduced me to Atkins, possibly the first
African-American concrete poet. I have always considered Langston
Hughes a candidate for this title although Hughes wouldn't have
claimed it himself. Aldon supplied a handout, however, which included
several poems by Atkins which were very clearly centered in the
Concrete tradition, much more so than Hughes. One thing that keeps
coming up at the conference is the problem of terminology, and it's a
problem that has dogged me since the beginning of the year, especially
in a new course in Visual Poetry I was teaching at Rhode Island School
of Design. It's been pointed out several times at talks I've attended
that we come to the 40s with our early 21st century terminology in
hand. For example, someone suggested after James Smethurst's friendly
and careful talk, "Kitchenette Correlatives: African American
Neo-Modernism, The Popular Front, and the Black Avant Garde in the
1940s," that Langston Hughes was not actually a Modernist poet, not
for the usual blind-spot or dangerous narrowing-of-the arteries
reasons, but because he was in fact Postmodern. It's sort of an
intoxicating thesis but James was very reluctant to allow this
skip-over, reasonably pointing out Hughes' interest and expertise in
many aspects of High Modernism. During these talks I noticed again
what a very strange phenomenon laughter is, especially when it just
issues forth from one's one throat and lungs jolting and braying into
a large and sparse lecture hall. I also noticed a wooden table in the
right wall aisle of the banked lecture hall. This table had 2 large
blue wheelchair stickers on top, and "Disability Services" stamped in
2" letters along the side (maybe both sides), and a white-scrawled "Do
Not Remove" added for good measure. I imagined my possible feelings
if, wheelchair-bound, I were to ever see these piece of furniture
being carried toward me: I suppose there would be mixed emotions
involving the publicizing of my own physical condition, resentment of
the mobile table and grim satisfaction that it was confined to the
white-tiled windowless lecture hall. I also reflected briefly on
concocting an imaginary companion for myself to alleviate occasional
loneliness at this large conference where everyone must greet each
other with the murmured epithet "Ezra Pound." My imaginary friend
would be called "Eliot Stevens," he would be a very young and very
white male, he might also have a slightly more rustic cousin called
"Eliot Williams," whom I could also escort and consort around.

The two Eliots not having arrived (having been last sighted heading
down a wrong exit near Augusta), I went to dinner with my suite-mate
Brett Millier. I brought her to my old haunt, of course, as I was
eager to try the pizza (my old haunt is open 7am to midnight and maybe
even later). I parked in my usual parking spot and pointed out a few
local details on the short walk. Dinner was great of course. I had a
9" Greek pizza (it was a little strange) and water and lemon meringue
pie with vanilla ice-cream and coffee. That was about $10. Brett has
baked ziti, which she'd been pining for since her college days, and a
Greek salad, and a beer. Her bill was for $11, I think. We had a
great talk. Brett has written books on women poets and alcoholism,
Elizabeth Bishop, and is currently working on a book about Jean
Garrigue. She told me a lot about Jean Garrigue: born in Indiana,
changed her name in order to set out on her self-chosen path: to be a
New York poet. She determined not to waste time doing anything else:
not working at another job, not marrying, not having children. She
decided what a poem was for her and proceeded to write them until her
death at 59 from lymphoma. I was relieved to hear that she was
unrepentant about her decision and wrote some of her best poems in her
last years. Hooray for Jean Garrigue! And hooray for Elizabeth
Bishop too, someone who published only 97 poems I think, each one
wrought and hewn and delicate and strong. Hooray for Elizabeth Bishop
whose christening gift from the bad fairy was that self-disgust
bestowed so frequently upon women, but whose good fairies gave gifts
too. I couldn't help thinking Elizabeth Bishop could have built
bridges, designed space shuttles, run governments, given possibility.
The talk with Brett was long, thorough, personal, professional, and
very enjoyable.

Then it was time for J.Hillis Miller's plenary talk, "The Individual
(Poet) and the Community: Stevens's and Williams's Poetry of the
1940s." If I had been designing that title I definitely would have
avoided that "s" back-up. It was great to get to hear J. Hillis
Miller because when I was writing my dissertation on metaphor, Miller
and Paul de Man were the companions of my mind and I derived great
delight from sharing thought cocktails with them, or at least sipping,
slurping or plain knocking back what they had to offer. I wrote to J.
Hillis Miller once to share with him my enthusiasm for an article he
wrote about the figure of example but he did not reply (I watched the
mail for quite a while). So I was pretty happy to see that he
approached his talk humorously, describing Wallace Stevens with a
string of epithets that included "tall" and "portly," and the comment:
"like a jar in Tennessee in fact." He also wittily described a
reading in which Stevens got more and more carried away by his own
poetry, his voice getting quieter and quieter in the process, and
people at the back of the room leaving, then more and more leaving as
Stevens got quieter still and only those at the front could hear, and
maybe not even those because of the sirens and uproar outside, to
which Stevens was oblivious. Another funny thing Miller said was that
his talk was much longer: 20 pages, but he had to cut it down to
four—but they were *golden.* Some of what Miller said about Stevens,
his interest in the indigene or what was indigeneous, and his interest
in brotherhood (arched by and at the expense of the mother) reminded
me strongly of classic elements of nationalism but J. Hillis Miller
did not proceed in this direction.

Alan Trachenberg, historian at the University of Maine, then gave a
talk: "The Noir Decade: Historical Perspectives on the 1940s." One of
the interesting things that came out of this for me was Trachenberg's
suggestion, in the question-and-answer period, that film noir was
*the* essential contribution of Hollywood. The western had had its
day, also the musical, but film noir: a direct product of leftist
thinking in Hollywood before the end of the 1940s, continues to be
popular, and film noir movies continue to be made. Then there was
also that great question about George Bush's appropriation of WW2 and
how in America today "It's just like WW2." Alan Trachtenberg
responded well, pointing out that even WW2 was not just like WW2; he
quoted a phrase from a poem by a Greek poet who died during the war:
"the ageless ambiguity of everything," and spoke for a while about
ambiguity. Marjorie Perloff chipped in to fire off a huzzah to the GI
Bill as a result of which so many American poets gained entrance to
elite and so elite universities. Alan Trachtenberg was the opposite
to a bully, I thought, very gentle, careful and fair as a speaker and
responder: with a sad resistant optimism.

After this I went back to my pod (I think I'm getting this usage from
the pod system of accommodation in Marshall County Correctional
Facility in Holly Springs, MS, where I once taught) to make some
calls, and then back to the Group Poetry Reading ) Susan Schultz,
Karen Alkalay-Gut, Bob Archambeau (I would have liked to see him to
show him a postcard I had made of a poem found in the Contributors'
Notes of SAMIZDAT), John Beer, Suzanne Ferguson, Aaron Kunin, Ross
Leckie, Kenneth Sherwood, Jonathan Skinner, Ellen Smith: though this
line-up must have changed because I definitely saw and heard Okhee
Jeong read. My strategy here was to proceed to the group reading but
to be attentive to the cash bar on the way. I hoped to run into
someone I could talk to but if I didn't I could pop in and out of the
group reading until I did. As it happened the first person I ran into
was K. Silem Mohammad who very graciously offered to buy me a drink as
he sold me his latest book (from Mike Magee's Combo Press) without a
brotherly discount at Wordsworth Books last week. I quickly got
talking to Chi-Gyu Kim and Youngmin Kim – one of my students Sun-kyum
Hong had translated a great poem by Korean poet Yi Sang, which I had
read the previous night. Chi-Gyu Kim translated the title for me:
"OGAM-DO": a crow's eye view. It also turns out that Chi-Gyu Kim
knows a lot more people in Ireland than I do. Steve Shoemaker and I
talked for a long time about family, human frailty, and parental love:
subjects which had also come up over dinner with Brett Millier. I had
a good conversation too with Will Goodman about bibliographer and its
real joys. I thoroughly enjoyed conversations at the cash bar (seems
tautological, though not as tautological as "bye-bye") but was also
looking forward to reading one and a half poems at the Open Reading
scheduled for 11.30pm. However, the group reading was still in full
swing at 11.30pm with 5 readers to go. I heard Aaron Kunin and Susan
Schultz, both of whose readings were lucid and enjoyable. Susan was
in great form. I was getting a little sulky however.

The Open Reading eventually started at about 1am. First up was a guy
who had already sat through the entire Group Reading as far as I know.
 He said he would read 10 haiku and 4 short poems, but then offered to
read the haiku twice. He didn't do this (I loudly discouraged him),
but he did read quite a few additional poems, one of which involved a
farmer's market with a lot of tables and a description for each table
and what was encountered there. Then Bill Howe gave me the nod and I
tore up to read. Then a guy who, after some debate about whether to
turn the lights out, read with his jacket pulled over his head. Then
Michael Basinski, who had been doing a pretty good sustained imitation
of a sensible man, read something completely insane. I can only
describe it as a square of text which turned into a concrete bunker
full of secret passageways, codes, tunnels, gorgons, and electronic
alarm systems when read. The text covered about half a page, or a
complete square according to the dimensions of his medium-sized pencil
but it took a terrifyingly long time to read. We all (approx. 10
people) clustered around to look at it later, as if he were Marvin the
Magician. Then Bill, Michael Basinski, and one other guy whose name I
don't know did a Cris Cheek/Bill Howe performance piece which was
short, shocking, and absolute dynamite as far as shaking free any dust
from the day is concerned. We catapulted out of there like ….
(whatever the collective name for a group of heavy planes is) or
dynamic turtles, and trundled home happily to bed, at least I did.
But not before reading some more of my Dave Sefaris book which despite
the highest recommendation of Borders clerks who stayed awake all
night reading it disappoints.

Now I'm going out into the early afternoon where I know news of the
death of Cark Rakosi will intensify the elegiac texture of this
conference.

Mairead (soberly expectant that some of you have reached the finishing line)