ORONO 3

Well today I am crime-free because I went to Bar Harbor. It was a
rainy day but what the hell. Things I think I saw while driving
include a 9ft tall black Madonna and Child, effigies of lions with
mauve ribbons round their necks, waves of lupins, and a lawn covered
with silhouettes of black dogs.

Things I have noticed today: women generally pay more attention to
dress; men generally pay more attention to presenting papers on
panels. Two-thirds of the participants here are male. And the panels
reflect that fact. I've actually done an analysis of this but don't
have time to present it right now as I am between lobster dinner and
cash bar. The lobster was very fat and shelly. It was also my first
lobster, not an enviable position for either the lobster or my
table-mates but fun for me, in a way.

Yesterday started for me with a panel on Langston Hughes, chaired by
Aldon Nielsen, with papers from Michale Bibby ("'A fugitive from his
origins': Langston Hughes's FIELDS OF WONDER and the Racial Uncanny,"
and George Hartley's "Or Does It Explode?: Jazz Politics and Langston
Hughes's Discordant Montage." Michael was introducing a Hughes book,
first published in 1947, which doesn't get a lot of coverage. FIELDS
OF WONDER is unusual for Hughes as it consciously eschews mention of
race, and as Michael pointed out I think, the word "black" occurs only
once. For some reason, when reading these short lyrics, I thought of
early Patrick Kavanagh poems. [And by the way, I was thrilled tonight
to hear Robert Creeley say that Charles Olson, on return from a
conference somewhere, said Kavanagh and Ungaretti (forgive spelling if
wrong) were the only/best two readers/poets there. Suddenly Charles
Olson is okay by me.] Michael Bibby's argument about FIELDS OF WONDER
was that although it is often referred to as Hughes's non-racial book,
it can be seen as structured around racial themes. It struck me that
paper presentations are very odd forms of discourse, being
conversations with critics not present rather than engagements with
the actual audience on the chairs, but I suppose all forms of
discourse are by definition or by custom odd. George Hartley blew
apart the form a little by framing it with music and voice recordings:
basically he made a recording which left gaps for his paper: it didn't
always synchronize perfectly but the blasts of be-bop and warm voice
of Hughes was much appreciated by me and I'm sure others. Another
thing I noticed was that, since I started telling people here that my
name rhymes with "parade" nearly every panel I've been at features a
poem called "Parade" or at least mentions the word. The world does
revolve around me after all. I knew it.

On a side-note, the National Poetry Foundation, which hosts the Orono
conference, has published one interesting book, maybe the only one,
about Pound and African-American poetry – "Ezra Pound and African
American Life," I think.

Marjorie Perloff was the plenary speaker last night. She spoke very
lucidly and feelingly on Beckett's experience during WW2 in France.
Her paper, "'In Love with Hiding': Beckett and the Phenomenology of
War," was framed to some extent by the question of war poetry, its
validity, its perspectives, both in terms of poetry written about WW2
and
the war in Iraq. Perloff at one point quoted someone, I can't
remember whom, but the quotation was roughly: "When we want to do
fantasy, we do Brecht; when we want to do reality, we do Beckett."
Perloff delineated Beckett's contributions to the Resistance, and his
subsequent flight from Paris and years in St. Lo. She made an
argument for this the excruciating waiting out of this time as the
experiential underpinning for Waiting for Godot. Rather than being
explicit or direct about his experience, Beckett, influenced by
existentialism, universalized the experience. I wonder if perhaps
being Irish had given Beckett a helpful distance in this work: at a
time when, as Perloff pointed out, the undeclared, unacknowledged and
sometimes invisible collaborations of the French during the war could
not be spoken about publicly. If I'm writing a little stodgily at the
moment, forgive me, I don't have time to be casual as the guy keeps
shouting out 30 mins to closing time, 20 mins to closing time, and
it's not a bar it's a computer lab. Anyway here's a quote from
Perloff: "For me, Beckett is the great war writer though he never
mentions the word 'war'." [Thinking back on it, I wonder if Langston
Hughes had any existentialist influences: his omission of the word
'black' may be in some way parallel. Maybe the Cold War was America's
existentialism.]

Perloff was very fresh and charming and drank lots of water saying "I
shouldn't have had Chinese food tonight." I asked a question about
Reznikoff's approach to writing about war, particularly in Holocaust,
and whether that was a more useful model for poets in America today,
in relation to Iraq. I mentioned that I grew up in a country where
guerrilla warfare was constant less than 100 miles from where I lived.
 I always feel a lot of shame about this, as if I have no right to
mention it. After my question, I realized that actually guerrilla
warfare was constant about 65 miles from where I lived, and my cousins
were involved in it. My understanding of distance has changed so much
this is almost incomprehensible.

I missed the beginning of Joan Retallack's talk, which followed: "Wars
We Have Seen: The Politics and Poethics of Gertrude Stein in the
Forties." The only real offering I can give ("Ten minutes to
closing") about Retallack's Stein paper is a quotation from Stein, and
I hope it's accurate: "Men are afraid for themselves" (as opposed to
women who are afraid for others): that's the real difference between
men and women." Everything seems a bit unreal right now: I find it
hard to believe Stein actually said this. But I did observe that men
and women have very different styles of coming in late to a lecture
hall. An old man carries his lateness, only a little deferentially,
into a front seat: he has forgiven himself already and is used to
being forgiven. A woman hangs around the doorway for a while and may
not enter at all. I see all this from my seat in the top back row.
Well it's getting too tense here to write so the last instalment will
come tomorrow when I get home.

Mairead