Remembering Anselm Hollo, 1934-2013

IN THE RAGING BALANCE

i.m. Jack Clarke

Energy, the man said, equals
Eternal Delight. Does our return to it
mean shedding all that was our art?
Task of the Living: to ask questions
of The Dead. You did it well, you
Weird and Funny Dude! I thank you
and wish you a good Eternal Night
in Tunisia or wherever you’ve taken
The Show. “The winds on the moon
blow so cold, so cold” could be a refrain
but isn’t nor will this last line rhyme
with anything but tears then again why
should it be the last line and come to
think of it it couldn’t possibly be

Anselm Hollo

Anselm Hollo: The Raven at the End of the World

The Raven at the End of the World:

Anselm Hollo’s Dangerous Language

A Review of Corvus by Patrick Pritchett

N.B.: an earlier version of this review appeared in The Boulder Daily Camera and LA View.

For over thirty years, Anselm Hollo has been brilliantly weaving together the pioneering sensibilities of a high-modernist European with a postmodern American vernacular to produce a poetry of extraordinary grace, wit, and power.  In his latest work, Corvus, he surpasses himself — it’s more beautiful and assured than anything he’s yet written.  These new poems ripple with an elegant clarity while offering a delightfully subversive edge. Hollo’s poetry performs the seemingly impossible, delivering the ancient satisfactions of sheer pleasure within a radical form that challenges the reader to think differently about what “literature” might be.  A master at leaping effortlessly between the high note and the low, between sonorous, elegiac rhythms and the slyly comic mordant aside, he can swerve from these lines, in “West is Left on the Map”:

                        a puff of dust where the lampshade bloom’d

                        Marlene forever young

                        like Marx or Helen’s ankles

                        at the gates of dusk

to the deadpan observation of:

                        many thoughts return marked insufficient

                        postage

For sheer dexterity, he has few equals. There’s a protean suppleness at work throughout this book, which by turns is bracingly skeptical, ruefully laconic, and flat out wondrously enheartening.

In Hollo’s poems, the sublime and ridiculous are more than just strange bedfellows, but markers for the circulating energies of an endless play of perpetually reconstituted meanings. The deeper we read Corvus the more we come to see that these polar nodes are tropes for generating a mysteriously liberating force, and that if we are quick enough to glimpse it, we might be endowed with a saving sense of beautiful absurdity. 

            hand me my spear      my little secret book

            desperately singing in harm’s way

            yes yes that does describe your arbitrary foci

            dream of big live teddy bear that “wants” “you”

Like another great original, the French Surrealist Robert Desnos, Hollo sees his poems forming “one continuous poem.”  Viewed in this light, it might be tempting to cast Hollo’s corpus as an epic, say, along the lines of Pound’s Cantos or Olson’s Maximus Poems.  Nothing could be more misleading. Hollo eschews the grandiose and the macroscopic in favor of the intimate and the local. For the special genius of his work is the way it articulates a kind of anti-epic, a discrete series of poems — linked by the tonal and thematic concerns of a wry, deft sensibility — that focus on the marvels and inanities of the quotidian, on friends, the literary world, the procedures of art and science (to name but a few of the amazingly diverse range of topics he addresses), and the exasperating and often hilarious ironies attendant on all of these.  The possibility for “epic” contained in the notion of  “one continuous poem” is realized, if one may call it that, in the puncturing of the ambitions and pretensions of the epic. Instead, we are given the most rewarding and humane alternative — a conversation.

Much of the tone in Corvus is retrospective.  It is a book of looking back, taking stock, summing up.  In many ways, it is book of elegies, and among those recalled are the poet’s sister, Irina, whom he memorializes in the austere and haunting “1991,” as well as the cosmopolitan poet Piero Heliczer, and American poets Joe Cardarelli and Ted Berrigan.  The exuberant Berrigan figures prominently in Corvus.  The section entitled “Lines From Ted: An Ars Poetica” is a transcription, Hollo writes in his fascinating Notes (an appended sub-book that is as rich in detail as the main text), of talks given by Berrigan at Naropa in 1982.  The result is a remarkable posthumous “collaboration” that outlines what might be called “the way of the poem.”

                        You have to make your work at your own pace

                        It is made of words

                                                                        One word after another

                        Some people do it in phrases

                        Others are beautiful writers of sentences

                        & some are beautiful writers

                                    of one word at a time

                                    +  +  +  +

                        But what I think happens when a poem works is

                        That it rises into the air of its own powers

                        And in doing so it has formed a circle

                        And it becomes something like the sun or a star

                        Or a planet

                                    Or whatever

I like the idea of it being up in the air

            To have no idea is a good idea

            If it helps you to make a poem

                        I have to go now

                        I have to go and think about this for a thousand years

And a thousand years would only be a start.  “Lines From Ted” magnificently performs not just what poetry can bring us — its enigmatic news from beyond, its invigorating power of play — but what poetry is.  As warm and fresh as a talk with a dear, old friend, it also shrewdly meditates on the materialist character of the poem, a thing made out of that most recalcitrant and unyielding of substances, words, that nevertheless transcends its origin to achieve a wild, emotive life all its own.

            Hollo is undoubtedly one of our most erudite poets, but while Corvus bristles with a wealth of allusions, it  never feels top-heavy, nor is the music ever impeded by the learning.  Indeed, one of this poet’s greatest accomplishments is the way he weds acute intelligence to the rhythmic demands of song.  His praxis is deceptively simple, as he notes in “The Word Thing”: 

                        method is effortless:

                        translation of autonomous objects

                        from adept to zygote

                        in rhapsodic rises & falls

Particularly striking is the sonnet sequence “Not a Form at All But a State of Mind” (the title comes from William Carlos Williams), which offers a sharp rebuttal to criticism that experimental work can’t also be formally rigorous. Hollo’s startling verbal agility and quicksilver emotional registers transform the sonnet from a threadbare object of nostalgia and poetic propriety into a dazzling display of intellection and pathos.

            underground trees       slow darkness

            and fear has lien upon the heart of me

            magpie steals silver spoon     it is gone forever

            like the eyeglasses of the less fortunate

            in a terrifying gray light from the future

            the carnival continues                a place where a sad horde

            of such as love and whom love tortures

            point to the moon and break it

Using an Oulipian word algorithm, Hollo repeats — or better still, replays — certain key phrases at differing junctures throughout the twelve sonnet sequence so that the overall effect of reading them straight through is like hearing an extended sonata, with motifs like “landing a B-52 in a desk drawer,” or “I have woven my heart into this net of branches” reappearing with an unexpected sharpness and power.

But the chief pleasure of Corvus is its deeply human music.  From the recondite “The Word Thing,” to the playful farce of “Why There Is A Cat Curfew In Our House,” to his earthy translations from the Greek Anthology, or the intimate, lyrical benediction of “And,” a poem that, among others things, praises the work of his wife, the artist Jane Dalrymple-Hollo, he strikes an expansive and ennobling panoply of notes. 

friends die before their time

& that is a matter of grief

but she dreams she is swimming

in her studio

her paintings on its walls

make his head swim

into spaces as free of words

as die Musik    when it pulls away

into angelic telepathy

shuts up the ape ever scheming

heavy with greed & war

lights him up

so light he becomes

invisible to himself

in a vortex of notes

audible only to the soul

Whatever we ask of poetry — and what more could we ask of it than this? — is to be found here: that it lift us like this, requiring nothing more (which is everything) but that we sit still, and listen. 

Each poem in Corvus is never less than itself, integral and complete. There are no poses here, no sleights-of-hand, except for the verbal kind that continually surprises, or else those the poet delights in exposing with a wink, a nudge, and an exquisitely formed bon mot.   Over the entire book is stamped the Chinese ideogram for sincerity, which Ezra Pound translates as “the sun’s lance coming to rest on the precise spot verbally.”  Sinceritas, Hollo amply shows, is not a quality to be associated with some sort of simple-minded naiveté, but rather is the product of the fully engaged moral imagination of the poet as he casts an alternately ironic and tender eye on the folly and clumsiness of mortal doings.  For beneath all the bright, bristling wit, the marvelous, impish wordplay, the impeccable sense of rhythm, the sharp pitch and stress of diction, another note can be sometimes heard: the sound of twilight drawing its raven wing over the edge of the sky.

think about each word and why it is where it is

moon splashes borrowed light on the wall

across the street of distant galaxies

slowly turning their tails to point to the first letter

           

Which is also always the beginning again of language.  The unceasingness of poetry, as Keats notes, will continue beyond us.  That seems straightforward enough. But Hollo sees the underside as well, the way in which language is twisted by the professional class of liars, the politicians and those others who use it as a tool for power over others, rather than as an instrument of liberation. Hence the sublime directness of  the modest poem, “Proposal,” as barbed as anything in Swift or Juvenal:

                        For war memorial

to end all war memorials:

plain granite slab

                        David Jones style lettering

text by Ted Berrigan:

                                    THE WAR GOES ON

                                    AND WAR IS SHIT

Hollo enjoins us to “always treat language like a dangerous toy.”  In his poems, as perhaps nowhere else, what delights can endanger — and what endangers can delight.  And beyond the much needed political critiques, beauty itself, Hollo recognizes, may be the most potent form of subversion available to us, since it is generated by and occupies an interior space outside the reach of the State, the Church, and all other enslaving institutions. All of which is only to say — caution: these poems may produce thoughts not sanctioned by the Authorities!

In his introductory note, Hollo tells us that corvus is Latin for raven, which is what his own surname signifies in Finnish.  This is appropriate, since one of the mythic roles played by the raven was that of psychopomp, or guide of souls to the Underworld, a function which poets, as purveyors of news from afar, have been playing for the species since Orpheus made his descent to Hades.  The title seems triply appropriate, then — or is that quadruply? — for the way in which Hollo pays homage to his dead, not by stiffly memorializing them, but by continuing the conversation. This bit of association also brings to mind Hollo’s own translation of the great Finnish poet Paavo Haavikko:

                        And I asked him,

                        The bird

                        Who is identical with myself,

                        I asked him for the road, and he said:

                        It is best to leave early.

Anselm Hollo has always been leaving early, “ahead of all departure,” as Rilke puts it, checking out the bends in the meandering psychic road ahead of us and relaying back the information with subtle precision and enormous panache.  In a time when so many poets tread timidly about the poem, afraid of disturbing its marmoreal slumber, or else exhaust their energies in endless debates about theory, the unflaggingly abundant inventiveness of his poetry seems all the rarer, all the greater a gift for those of us fortunate enough to be alive to read it. 

The Arcadia Project

The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral

This extraordinary, pioneering anthology, conceived and beautifully edited by Joshua Corey and G.C. Waldrep, is now out. Full of groundbreaking work, it re-frames what used to be called "nature poetry" to meet the radical challenges posed by collapsing ecosystems on the one hand, and the immersive environments of cyberspace on the other.

This is the first collection of its kind to openly address the mutual interpenetration of nature and technology. As such, it subverts or even demolishes many of the pieties attending the idea of nature as a pristine category, immaculate but for our species. As my old professor Tim Morton puts it, we need to think of ecology in a more vibrant and expansive way, without the crippling halo that enwreathes "nature," which has never been and cannot be, natural.

As Corey puts it so eloquently in his introduction, "this volume is hardly intended as a call to conscience ... [it] is a call to imagination -- not the imagination of dire failures, but to the interruptions of poetry ... these interruptions are also connections, recalling readers to life as it is lived ... attuned to the intimations of the mortality of everything."

"Like any simulation, pastoral contains with it a kernel of critical negativity that, when properly activated, promises to put us in touch with the reality, or realities, of our contested world. To write postmodern pastoral is to write from consciousness of this ultimate yet elusive reality, to be a digital native with dirt between one's toes."

My own humble contribution consists of three poems, written at a time when I was studying with Morton at Colorado, in a course called "Green Romanticism." Here is the first of them.

The Dream Of Open Space

Sun. Stone.
The long heave of bare sky.
Branches.
Drop down.

For the cult of the hunter is based on a Darwinian model of belonging to nature: outfits & trophies. The bourgeois economy.

Rock over rock.
Tree crack lung.
Whole air, whole range.
Of luminous distance shrugged.

Between the vibrant life of the other and insatiable appetite.
To do the fatal thing with honor.

The fever of wood alive to the touch.
Where breath is the glory of a farness
come closest.
Sweep of fissure.
Ache of ark
to abide in only its falling.

& swept clear down to water.

Hank Lazer's "N 18 (Complete)"

Hank Lazer’s N 18(Complete) is an impossible book of poems. Written in serpentine longhand, they spiral across the page in calligrammes that challenge legibility. The difficulties and rewards in reading them is central to the question of their form, making that form the very subject of the poems and how the re-spell the possibilities contained in reading, for making meaning as we go, re-making it as we go over. At the same time, their playful inventiveness is inviting, creating an intimacy impossible to obtain otherwise. Over and beyond that, however, these poems continue the explorations begun in the exquisite The New Spirit.

In his essay “Thinking / Singing and The Metaphysics of Sound,” Lazer describes the processes behind the composition of The New Spirit as an attending to not only how we hear music, but how “thinking in musicality” might take place within the poem. N 18 translates this idea into another register – the proprioceptive circuit that is writing by hand, the establishing of hand-to-mind circuit that obeys its own laws of form and formation. In this sense, Lazer is following Duncan, when he writes to Charles Olson that the hand is also a form of hearing, an organ of perception and knowing no less than the ear.

“I have observed in myself a curious double note in hearing. There is a previous ‘hearing’ out of which the lines (or from which – as in sketching an object) are composed, written on the page. Then the central ‘hearing’ is in the hand. The act of writing seems to hold back, rein (Plato’s image of the horseman) – listen (?). But the important thing is that ‘hearing’ only comes as the eys relay the words seen from the designing hand – ”

[N.B. This letter by Duncan is from the Olson archive at U Conn, in Storrs, dated March 1954].

N 18 in some ways is an exploration of this tantalizing description of a reciprocal cognitive feedback loop. More than that, though, it explores the poet’s response to his slow and careful reading of Heidegger and Levinas over a period of several years, a time in which he also found his way more deeply and surely into what he calls “shapewriting.”

“The word G-d is an overwhelming semantic event
that addresses the subversion worked by illeity.
The glory of the Infinite shuts itself up in a word and becomes a being.”

Held lightly

“But it already undoes its dwelling
and unsays itself without vanishing into nothingness” <151>

This is a wholly inadequate approximation of one of the simpler poem’s as it actually appears. Imagine the Levinas quotes as the twin curves of a parenthesis running sideways along the lengths of the page’s margins. It’s that “held lightly,” floating on the horizontal axi between the quotes, that arrests the attention – breaking up the quote, questioning it, but also amplifying it.

Occasionally there are poems that are more or less straightforward, like this one, with its echoes of John Taggart:

turned
back again
turned back toward
away say
then turned around
turned
back being
a way to be
turned
toward

It’s impossible to reproduce the layout and typography of N 18’s pages. Suffice it to say they inscribe multiple figures – the labyrinth, the spiral, the wave, and others so complex and delightful that there are no terms for them, really. Each page is a portal of discovery and wonder. With Levinas and Heidegger as springboards, shapewriting enacts Lazer’s delicate, nuanced articulation of a post-metaphysical theology and the rich potentialities it carries for an innovative poetics that is polyvocal and decentered, but equally welcoming and affirmative.

Eric Hoffman's "The American Eye"

Robert Murphy's Dos Madres Press has been bringing out some amazing books over the past few years, among them several titles by Michael Heller and Norman Finkelstein, Don Wellman's A North Atlantic Wall, and Peter O'Leary's stunning A Mystical Theology of the Limbic Fissure. One of their most recent is Eric Hoffman's The American Eye.

Hoffman, whose forthcoming biography of George Oppen promises to be a major event (and something many doubted could even be done), has situated these angular poems along the rough grain of American transcendentalism and pragmatism. They play beautifully with the language of Emerson and William James, torquing their pithy aphorisms into something provocative and strange. The second half of the book draws from Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club. (When I mentioned this to Menand, his response was “interesting”).

But these poems are sharp-eyed and agile and teeming with surprise. In “The Vast Practical Engine,” Hoffman’s language takes on uncanny overtones of George Oppen and William Bronk, delineating a continuity between these latter-day poets of epistemology, their 19th century predecessors, and his own concerns for the poem’s powers of reticulated consciousness, fueled by the precision of the imagination.

the world is certain
yet we cannot know
for certain its certainty
is all there is
to be known

things happen
and Truth is a thing

The Cool of the Archive: On Gustaf Sobin

Reading in an archive is exhausting business. Like viewing paintings at a museum, saturation fatigue, as my friend Nancy Kuhl calls it, can set in quickly. It’s not just the difficulty of deciphering an author’s longhand script, in some cases, but the immersion in their life, their day-to-day concerns, along with the unavoidable sense of feeling like an eavesdropper. Beyond that, there is the larger experience of cognitive confusion that occurs when poring over reams of completely unedited material: so many envelopes stuffed with letters with no signposts for what to read first, or what might prove illuminating and what is merely a dead-end.

I don’t consider myself an archive scholar. Mostly, I just read poems in books that someone has edited, then try to think of some things to say about them. My previous trips to read poet’s papers – to Durham, Northumbria, where Bunting’s papers are kept, and to Storrs, CT, to read Duncan’s letters to Olson – were stimulating, but they never opened up new avenues for the kind of analytical writing I do. At best, they offered the possibility of an alternate life where I would reinvent myself as the editor of obscure poets’ correspondence. Which could be enormously useful to say, about seven people, but probably even more thankless than what I’m doing now.

On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, thanks to the gracious hospitality of Richard Deming and Nancy Kuhl, who put me up for the night, I spent a total of about seven hours at Yale’s Beinecke Library, an elegant cube of a building, reading through three out of ten overall boxes of Gustaf Sobin’s correspondence (the entire archive of his papers comes to 48 boxes). I had no firm notion of what I was looking for other than the possibility of locating some connections between Sobin and some other poets I’m writing about, chiefly Michael Palmer and John Taggart.

I was disappointed with respect to the latter, who only wrote to Sobin once (about rights for some translations of Rene Char), but the Palmer letters were quite marvelous, though I have no idea what, if anything, to do with what I gleaned. There was a real sense of connection, through the work and the care and demands of the work, that linked these two (though Sobin’s letters to Palmer are not included). It was a privilege to read them and out respect for Palmer I won’t quote from them here except to note one poignant remark made after his 41st birthday: “Some things at least I can appreciate more. I won’t list them, lest they disappear.” (That single word, “list,” in Palmer’s spidery hand, gave me some long minutes of puzzling out).

There are also some gems from one of Sobin's literary executors, Andrew Joron, who writes, in 1999: "isn't the system of language itself finally to be understood as an Ur-terrestrial toponym?"

The most amusing exchange, from 1956, occurs between Sobin, still a student at Brown, and Ezra Pound, still incarcerated at St. Elizabeth’s. Sobin writes to the older poet as a “very deep admirer” and asks if he can visit and, if possible, bring him some him of his poems. Pound’s typewritten reply, on a postcard, is terse:

“you will have to give proof of preparation,/& a list of what you object to//before I can spend time on you/let alone kindergarten lesson// Yrs. E.P.//also some personal reference would be helpful//why should ANY man take time away from informative reading?”

Sobin’s cheeky response is priceless. He begins by stating that he has no list of objections. Instead, he submits a list of things he loves. These include “my fiancé, swimming at Paraggi, Canto 90, and Campari bitter and ripe olives.” There’s no indication if the trip to D.C. was ever taken. I suspect somehow that it was not. But if it was?

In the 1980s, Sobin, already in dialogue with his publisher James Laughlin at New Directions, offered to help Laughlin with preparations for a film about Pound, much of which was to be shot on location in Provence. The exchange between the two is animated, with Sobin supplying a special map that links Pound’s sacred sites to the Michelin map for Provence. He also prepared, after combing through The Cantos, an extensive list and breakdown of the poem’s many allusions to troubadour culture. It runs to several pages, single-spaced. I’ve requested a PDF of this with a view toward augmenting my argument, made in a recent talk given at Orono, about Sobin’s discrete silence regarding Pound’s influence on his work.

There’s no mention of the film’s final fate. At several points, Laughlin complains about the work schedule set by the director, Lawrence Pitkethly, both on the set and in post-production. I suspect these aren’t really in earnest. Either that, or Laughlin simply had no idea about the kind of hours that go into production, which can easily run to 15 per day. In 1982, a screening of some 13 hours of unedited footage takes place at Yale in the hopes of securing the film’s purchase by the archives. But I have yet to verify if the film is at the Beinecke, or if still exists in some form, or if it was even completed or shown anywhere. (Pitkethly also directed several episodes of the PBS/Vendler series, “Voices and Visions,” including the one on Pound).

N.B. A quick Google search indicates that a 90 minute film, "Ezra Pound: American Odyssey," did in fact appear in 1988. The NY Times called it a "standard biographical documentary." Presumably it is more or less the same as the Pound episode in "Voices & Visions." So much for the mystery -- and my research skills.

The Laughlin correspondence is extensive and full of mutual warmth and regard. Sobin’s file contains the New Yorker profile of Laughlin, entitled simply “Jaz.” Their friendship survived New Directions’ draconian decision to drop Sobin from their list (apparently his books weren’t making the grade: sales of 1000 over two years). That was a tough letter to read and must have been even tougher to write, much less receive. Yet even as Laughlin’s health failed him (he'd suffered a stroke) and his eyes started to go, he remained the ever supportive friend and erstwhile editor. The last letter from him is dated January 28, 1997. He died later that year, in November; Sobin included a print out of the NY Times online obituary. The feeling of loss, of the end of a conversation, is palpable.

As Sobin wrote to Laughlin, on May 24, 1993: “Palliative, that’s the word. Isn’t that what poetry – and irises – are all about?”

The most vivid correspondence that I came across – and this is one of those things that can surprise you in archive research – was Eliot Weinberger’s. The force of Weinberger’s personality is electric in his letters – there are seven fat folders full of them – which begin in the 70s and go through the 90s. He comes across as a consummate bon vivant, witty and sharp, with a gift for piercing pronouncement and razor-sharp satirical gibes at the expense of the inflated. And he made me want to read the mysterious Karin Lessing.

Many of Sobin’s responses are collected in this file, often given over to detailed instructions for the proofs of his complicated poems that would appear in Weinberger’s journal, Montemora. As Sobin writes, “the proper placement of a word can be as significant, as crucial, as the word itself.” It’s clear that not only Weinberger’s great care as an editor, but his investment in a certain kind of poetics, was of great importance for Sobin, a real source of nourishment. Montemora supported, he writes, “the breath of the letter, the spark that instructs the shadows.”

Weinberger’s support obviously was instrumental for Sobin. What it gave him was hsi first real moment of recognition. Which, finally, may be all the reward a writer can really hope for. As he put it in a letter of April 28, 1977: “I’ve been living here, Eliot, on a slab of wind, for over ten years, writing, writing, writing. That the words finally carry. That you hear them, is great recompense.”

Report from Orono 2012-The Poetry of the 80s

There were many great moments at the just-concluded 2012 Orono Conference on The Poetry of the 80s. I’m being kind of partial here, of course, but I think the panel I organized on Michael Palmer, “Estranging the Logos,” with brilliant papers by Richard Deming, Peter O’Leary and Norman Finkelstein kind of rocked the house. I’m normally pretty unflappable (Editor’s note: actually not true, but it sounds good as a lead-in) so I stayed cool as I saw the room gradually filling up. At least 50 people, I’d say. Even Marjorie Perloff’s presence didn’t ruffle me since I’d rather counted on her coming.

But reader, when I looked up as I started my introduction and seated there, several rows up, right at eye level, I saw Nate Mackey, Charles Bernstein, and Susan Howe, gazing down at me with a cool, implacable Olympian calm, I confess, my heart quailed. I mean here I was, claiming with a straight face that the 80s were Palmer’s decade. I was too rattled to improvise in front of the poetry gods, so I just stuck to script and plowed on. No one remembers the introductions to these things anyway and the panel was so exciting it really just didn’t matter. By the time we got to the Q&A I was myself again.

I’m not going to set out in detail even a summary of all the talks I heard. That would require a Herculean effort. I’ll just mention some of the quirkier highlights and pleasures.

The glamorous Star Black orchestrating a madcap photo op with about 20 or so of us, including Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe, in the University’s student union after lunch.

Aldon Nielsen and I cheering when we watched the cable news feed of the SCOTUS ruling. Throughout the conference Aldon wore two hats. But not at the same time.

Chatting with the charming Donna Hollenberg about some of the juicier bits in her forthcoming biography of Denise Levertov.

Laura Moriarty fondly recalling Michael Palmer’s early mentorship.

Pen Creeley, period.

David Need lying supine on a bench outside Corbett Hall reciting from Patchen’s Journal of Albion Moonlight.

My Freudian slip in the Gustaf Sobin talk where I called Wordsworth’s “Ruined Cottage” “The Ruined College.”

Alan Golding’s Colbertism, in his Armand Schwerner talk: “hoaxiness.”

Charles Bernstein reading his heart-rending translation of Goethe's "Der Erlkonig."

Susan Howe holding up a copy of Lee Hickman’s magazine Temblor, at her plenary reading.

Marjorie Perloff declaring, as a respondent to a panel, that San Francisco as a literary scene was “over.” And Kevin Killian saying, “I could talk your ear off about that.”

Kevin Killian in general, but especially his deeply moving plenary talk about AIDS.

A major critic stating flatly that In The American Tree is just unreadable anymore.

Talking theology and Duncan with Peter O’Leary.

Talking Sobin with Joe Donahue.

Talking trash with Bob Archambeau and Grant Jenkins.

Keith Tuma’s sly sense of wit.

Talking Ed Dorn, Baraka, and Naropa with old Boulder friend Joe Richey on the drive back down to Portland.

Nate Mackey brandishing his cane as he strolled by Norman Finkelstein, Joe Donahue and myself and threatening to whack us with his “ugly stick.” Which conjured up the cover of his From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, with its image of a flute terminating in a hammer head, and which, of course, I took to be a classic instance of gnostic contagion.

That was my Orono conference, in part. And I missed a lot, especially at the after-hours poetry readings.

Huge thanks to Steve Evans, Carla Billiteri, Ben Friedlander and Jennifer Moxley, for making it all happen. Bring on the 90s!