REPORT FROM ORONO

Susan Schultz and I were lamenting last night that we couldn't be in
Cork right now for Trevor's  Festival (Trevor would you consider an
official re-naming?) but it's pretty good here too – my first time. 
Last Orono, someone posted a very full account to the Poetics list.  I
was grateful for that so I will post here about this year's Conference
(not a "Festival," you notice …), or at least passing impressions. 
There will be a quiz on Sunday.

The first thing I noticed when I arrived at the University of Maine
after driving up from Providence was how eerily like my alma mater
Purdue University the campus seemed.  It also looks very like the
University of Mississippi where I spent a year.  I think the
University of Maine and the University of Mississippi may even have
used some of the same building plans: except some buildings here are
north/south and in the University of Mississippi they're east/west. 
So it was with many mixed feelings of overpowering loneliness,
nostalgia, curiosity, and wonder that I strolled around eating my dark
chocolate covered Dove Bar.  I know I haven't been here before because
all yesterday I was congratulating myself on the states I was driving
myself through for the very first time (actually only New Hampshire
and Maine) but I may as well have been here before, I feel as though
I've been on campus visits here, I feel as if I may have taken a job
here, though I'm sort of glad my actual job is at Rhode Island School
of Design where there is no campus at all.  Mind you, I noticed that
gas prices are substantially cheaper here and the prices on the
breakfast menu took me back many years.  More about that later.

Maine is a little difficult to navigate as all the exit numbers have
been changed and some of the highway numbers too.  So the Mapquest
directions were useless.  The feeling of benign lostness continued
when I arrived on campus as I had no documentation relating to the
location of the conference.  Luckily, I ran into some very helpful
people, the first of whom whose name (very tricky grammar there) I
didn't request and the second of whom, Pat Burns, may well be a
relative of mine.

Turns out I'm staying in a sort of a pod.  A dorm pod.  I never stayed
in a dorm in my life, except for a few nights at the University of
Kentucky once.  This is much more svelte.  But still there's something
about the design that absolutely prohibits the customer from caring
about one morsel of the fabric of the building or considering it home.
 More and more colleges look to me like money milking machines.  I am
writing this report quickly and so do not have time to iron out my
prejudices and baseless notions.  Like my quiet acceptance that all
poets are idiots and shouldn't bother pretending otherwise.  Of all
the language specialists we are the most idiotic.  I don't have time
to develop this idea right now.  And chances are no-one is reading
anyway.  But there is good juicy real coverage coming up in the next
paragraph.

But first I'd like to say that I felt guilty leaving my (t)rusty 1993
teal-colored Ford Escort, in the parking lot under the boiling sun.  I
wanted to take it into the pod with me but dorm regulations forbade
it.  You can't smoke within 20 ft of a building let alone bring a car
in.

Robert Creeley kicked off the conference, after a brief introduction
by Burton Hatlen.  The conference as a whole, titled "Poetries of the
1940s American and International," is dedicated to the memories of
Carroll F. Terrell and Hugh Kenner, and Burt also mentioned the recent
deaths of Cid Corman and Ric Caddell in his introduction.

There are about 200 people at the conference.  I don't know if they're
all poets.  Probably.  As this is a total poetry boot-camp with four
consecutive events scheduled after Robert Creeley at 7pm, bringing us
up to 12.45am.  I don't even think they're all in their forties, which
I thought was a criterion for registration until I saw the conference
title written out in full: "Poetries of the 1940s," not just "Poetries
of the Forties" (I felt I met the latter criterion very well but the
former, well, I am in still in transition from writing poetry to
writing poetries). Anyway I saw a lot of people who were not in their
forties though some of them looked as if they were, including Robert
Creeley.  I did the math and he's 78 so he could at least be up for a
job as the alternative Stanley Kunitz.

Robert Creeley's talk was informal and very engaging.  Basically he
took his own books (work by himself and others) from the 40s off his
shelves and spoke about them.  It was great to hear him talk about the
1946 Collected Poems of Hart Crane.  He said that although taught not
to write in books, he had written all over that book.  He also read
from The Golden Goose. And told us about his early days in Harvard,
being asked to stay out of Cambridge, working at the Boston Globe,
going to Burma during the war, marriage, and more.  I didn't like the
way he more often referred to women as "wives" than by name, and that
so few of his shining moments of the 1940s related to women poets but
that's just my perspective as a woman poet wanting to hear about my
kind, and I have my own sets of blinkers.  He told us about
corresponding with Ezra Pound who signed his letters "Anonymous" or
"E."  He said he asked Pound why he was anti-semitic and after a few
drummed-up answers, Pound said it was because he didn't believe in
monotheism.  Creeley was 23 at the time of this correspondence.  It
occurs to me that one of the secrets of Robert Creeley's eternal
youthfulness is the fact that so many canonical figures of American
poetry older than he saw him as young.  For example, Whitman.  Another
one of Creeley's secrets, of course, is that portrait in the attic. He
mentioned Gide, Camus, Lawrence, Dostoevsky, as some of the writers
influencing poets of the 1940s.  I realized I too am a poet of the
1940s as well as of the 40s.  Thank God I am on my way to writing
poetries.  Also Conrad Aiken, Paul Blackburn, and many more.

Creeley's talk and reading of other people's poems and his own was
followed by a tribute to Louis Zukofsky with contributions by Bob
Perelman, Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, Robert Creeley, Mark
Scroggins, and one other participant whose name I'm sorry to say I
don't know.  I did notice during this tribute that the audience was
strikingly white: almost a blue-whiteness as they used to say in the
old Daz ads in Ireland.

I had to take a break then to select a poem or two to read at the Open
Reading to be hosted by Bill Howe later in the evening, i.e.,
midnight.  I did get a chance to enjoy a couple of glasses of red wine
and talk to a lot of people, including Susan Schultz, with whom I
promised to spend every living moment of the conference though I
haven't seen her since.  It really was terrific to talk to people and,
for a shy person, the wine was helpful.  I had a great time reading
one and a half poems.  Mike Magee read a bunch.  A poet from Maine who
lives in a one-room shack in the woods and works in Borders also read.
 Earlier I heard Kevin Killian's tributes to his muse Kylie Minogue,
Peter Middleton's clipped accents (seems he's starting a British
poetry listserv, hmmm), Mark Scroggins, Greg Biglieri, who said one of
the best things I heard yesterday: "Tautology is the science of saying
bye-bye."  I also very much admired the absolute pristine paleness of
his lilac shirt (although I saw a gorgeous powdery orange shirt on a
guy in the library this morning—that shirt had the edge), and Jayne
Marek: I missed the beginning of this group reading.  But I heard
enough to know that poetry has gone to hell.  It used to be soulful. 
Now it's a joke.  I wonder how it would survive in a comedy club
though.  How would I survive?  Thank God I don't have to do that.  The
poetry world is relatively soft.  Which is lucky for the softies who
inhabit it.

Finally this morning I went for breakfast in Orono.  At first I was
afraid to enter the joint as a few rough-looking characters were
emerging.  When I did go in, I was glad, as it was a real
old-fashioned pre-chrome diner, if you can imagine such a thing.  The
prices on the menu were surreal. I quickly got lost in reverie and
romantic fantasies involving screenplays and living in Orono, Maine,
when I came to enough to notice that the place itself was a romantic
fantasy.  A group of 5 retired men down by the door were standing
around listening to one of their company reading a funny story.  How
lucky they are to have such a group, such a place to come to, such a
cheap breakfast, such a tradition.  It seemed like old man heaven to
me.  I want to come here and live immediately, or at least have
breakfast here for the next three days, and possibly dinner too.

Mairead