what I saw at the ALA

or rather, what I saw in San Francisco over the past weekend. It's kind of axiomatic for me that the broader the scope of a conference, the harder it is to find things of specific interest. The very best conferences I've been to have included two LZ events in 2004 (Columbia & Chicago), separate Ronald Johnson & Bottom: on Shakespeare events at Buffalo, a Sir Walter Scott do in Eugene, Oregon, & of course the sequence of massive poetry-fests mounted at the University of Maine. I find the University of Louisville's "Lit. & Culture Since 1900" conference pretty consistently stimulating, & I get a hankering to attend the Modernist Studies Association every year, tho I've never quite gotten around to it.

The American Literature Association casts its net of presentations a bit too broadly for my taste, I must admit. I love Twain, & I love Cooper, but do I really want to see the Twain-Cooper contretemps restaged between representatives of the Fenimore Cooper Circle and the Mark Twain Society? Try as I might, I can't muster the slightest bit of enthusiasm for talks about John Steinbeck or any American realist author. And like the MLA, the ALA is strikingly poetry-poor.

So I was seesawing back & forth until the very last minute as to whether I'd even show up to give a paper on this panel on biographies of 20th century American poets. I had reasonably priced airline tickets (which I knew I could exchange if need be), but I waited till the last minute to book a hotel. Alas, the conference hotel – the brutalist, brutally dated Embarcadero Hyatt Regency – was booked solid; the back-up hotel, 1 1/2 miles away, was far out of my price range. So I took a chance and booked a room in the "charming" Aida Plaza Hotel, pretty much in the heart of the Tenderloin district. Not bad – at least I was never lacking for company in my strolls to & from the hotel, since the neighborhood is plentifully supplied with panhandlers, crackheads, drug dealers & assorted street personages. If I needed entertainment, there were two strip clubs on the block (tho if I wanted "company," the Hotel charges a $30 "visitor's fee" to allow someone into your room). Somehow, between an iPod with David Harvey's collected lectures on Das Kapital and a briefcase full of books, I managed to entertain myself alone in my 14' x 14' room (taupe plaster walls, vintage 50s-era furniture, television with 3 working channels, linens & towels that didn't bear too close inspection); after all, this was San Francisco, right?

Frankly, I wasn't expecting much of this conference, or of the trip in general. The semester had left me bone-weary. I wanted to fly in, give my paper, & get the hell out. But the weekend turned out better than alright. First, there were bookstores: I'd been to City Lights some years ago, & found myself for some reason unimpressed. Perhaps I was reacting apotropaically to the whole beatification of the Beats, the "shrine" aspect of the place. This time around, I spent some serious time with the poetry section, which is flatly excellent. On Friday, I hiked to The Richmond to visit Green Apple Books. Now my usual out-of-town 2nd-hand book haunt is The Strand in Manhattan, & my MO in the poetry section there is to pile up everything I see that I want, add to it things that I might want, & buy that. In Green Apple I found myself having to reject all of the "might wants" outright, & then performing a kind of 2/1 triage on things I really wanted. & even then ending up spending a good deal more than I'd expected. It made for a back-breaking carry-on bag on the flight back, mind you, but I've got enough poetry to keep me busy for some time. (Which doesn't mean you shouldn't send me your book.)

Lodging... book shopping... what else is there to conference-going? Oh, right: Food. A couple of splendid Italian meals, a mediocre Indian lunch buffet – but the grand find: trudging around the fringes of the Union Square district, I finally rediscovered the Indonesian place I'd visited back in I think 1991, where I had a fantastic rendang the color & consistency of 2-year-old motor oil. It was just as delightful and piquant this time around.

Yes, the Conference: well, the highlight for me was a reading by my old friend Cecil (CS) Giscombe, beautifully delivered & ecstatically received. Cecil, whom I've known for almost a quarter century now (!!), has made the big time – a job at UC Berkeley, prizes, widespread recognition, etc. And he's still as warm & delightful as ever. I saw more old friends & acquaintances than I'd expected – Aldon Nielson, Katharine Wright, William J. Harris, Lyn Hejinian, Richard Flynn, Laura Barrett, Joan Retallack, Juliana Spahr, Alec Marsh (himself at work on a Pound bio). Marjorie Perloff whisked in for a panel on Gertrude Stein, where she delivered a rousing defense & analysis of Stein's language, took a few potshots at what she saw were misguided readings of Stein, and called for a new "renaissance," on the order of the whole Modernist revolution, in contemporary poetry. I was struck by her evocation of Wordsworth's Preface to the 1802 Lyrical Ballads, with its attack on the "inane & gaudy phraseology" of contemporaneous poetry, & her call for a similar revitalization of poetry. Who's to do it, tho – or who's doing it?

My own panel was something of a repeat, with a slightly different cast, of the similar panel I was on at the 2008 MLA (also in San Francisco). I found myself afterwards having supper with a group of biographers and Kenneth Rexroth fans – more Rexrothians than I knew existed. Don't get me wrong – I'd been reading Rexroth lately, and finding him a very intelligent and sometimes moving poet, but it's unnerving to be dropped into the midst of a bunch of folks for whom one particular guy is DA BOMB, pure & simple. (Yes, I know – it's the same way with LZ events.) Weirdest moment of the evening was when his biographer related some hair-raising tale of Rexroth's amorous goings-on – something to do with inviting both his wife and his mistress to the same apartment in Paris, with a couple of local pick-ups involved as well – and the women present simply sighed & smiled, and someone said, "I guess he just loved women." And everyone present nodded knowingly & sympathetically.

The weekend's very best moments happened outside of the Hyatt Regency: A lovely afternoon on the Embarcadero with Cecil and Roxi Power Hamilton, a friend who was tremendously important to me back in the ambiguous days of my graduate studies, but whom I haven't seen in 19 years (& have only been in touch with recently thru the magic of Facebook). That same evening I was taken for a brief tour of North Beach & an excellent Italian dinner by poet Susan Gevirtz and her partner Steve Dickison, director of SFSU's Poetry Center. I don't know why they wanted to know little ole me, but I had a great time; good talk, good food, good company. (Hey, isn't it time for the PC to do an LZ event?)

It seemed unseasonably chilly in SF for late May; most of the time I was wearing my big leather coat & feeling quite comfortable. When my plane touched down in Fort Lauderdale Sunday night, however, I knew I was back in the steam. I'd worked up quite a lather, overdressed & hauling all those books in the 85 degree, 90% humidity twilight, by the time I got to my car in the parking garage. Only to realize, as I turned over the ignition, that my air conditioning isn't working. Welcome back to Florida.
***
R.I.P.: Peter Orlovsky and Leslie Scalapino. that they were at the beach: aeolotropic series (North Point, 1985) was probably the first Language-related book I ever bought, at Books Strings & Things in Blacksburg, VA, after having been seduced by a large chunk of the book printed in of all places the American Poetry Review. The start of a very long journey for me; it will take me some time to process this passing.

the upright man

I'm off to the American Literature Association conference in San Francisco next week. I don't think this is a conference I've ever been to, at least as a participant (I seem to vaguely recall dropping by one of their meetings in Baltimore a million years ago, for what reason I can't imagine). Am I remembering rightly, or is this the association set up in explicit opposition to the MLA's rampant theory-binge of the 1980s (still ongoing, happily)? At any rate, I'm on a tightly organized panel about biographical approaches to 20th-century poets, along with biographers of Kenneth Rexroth & Denise Levertov. It should be fun; not an awful lot of alt-poetry types there, but I'm sure I'll run down a fair number of people I know (feel free to drop a line – let's do lunch, or coffee). And after all, it's San Francisco, for heaven's sake. How can one not have a good time?

My biggest regret is that our panel seems to be scheduled opposite a panel of homages to the late Burt Hatlen, which I'd dearly love to attend, if only to show my gratitude to the big man.
***
Another symptom of middle-aged drain-circling: back pain, not debilitating, not even really chronic, but occasional & irritating. I suspect it has something to do with sitting reading & writing 8 or 10 hours a day in ergonomically disastrous chairs. But I've always been fascinated by the phenomenon of the "stand-up" desk, used – as manufacturers will tell you endlessly, by Thomas Jefferson, Goethe, Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, all the way down to those contemporary luminaries Philip Roth & Donald Rumsfeld. You can google all the purported health benefits (posture, energy levels, etc); the one that struck me – aside from the overwhelming reports of decreased back stress – was a base metabolic benefit of 60 extra calories burned per hour – just by standing. Which doesn't sound like much, but that's 240 calories every 4 hours – extrapolate it out.

I wasn't about to pay the outrageous prices the whole desk-thingies are fetching online these days, nor did I want to shell out $70 or more for a plain old tabletop lectern. (I did consider stealing one from a classroom in Our Fair University, but when I reflected how difficult it's been to get one to teach at lately...) So I cleaned the cobwebs off my hunter-gatherer-manly-arts-of-tinkering-with-power-tools skills, and you can see the results above: yes, my very own homemade (from nothing more than scraps of lumber hanging about the house & environs) tabletop lectern, complete with broad working surface & that little "lip" do-jobber at the bottom to keep your pen from rolling off. Once the spar varnish dries – I was gonna jump right in to using it, but reflected that if I wanted to paint up there, it'd be impossible to get the splatters off untreated wood – I expect to be well on the road to a slimmer, better-postured, dashing poet-scholar me. I'll keep you posted.

post-conference; Nathaniel Mackey: Splay Anthem

[The panelists: L–R, Eric Murphy Selinger, Yr Humble Blogger, Peter O'Leary, Joel Bettridge]

Returned yesterday from the Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture since 1900, anxious a little to be back in south Florida's warmth, more than a little weary after 2 1/2 days of nonstop socializing, polite listening, & – well, partying: in short, conferencing. The Ronald Johnson panel organized by old friend & co-conspirator Eric Selinger went off well: Joel Bettridge presented an overview of the forthcoming Bettridge/Selinger-edited Ronald Johnson: Life and Works; Peter O'Leary read a goodly and riveting portion of his memoir of being mentored by Ron in the art of poetry; Eric gave a lovely account of his quarter-long experiment of guiding a class of students thru the implications of a two-line Johnson poem, something between collaborative "thick description" and Holmesian sleuthing; & I tossed out some piffle about anagrams. (Ask me why "love" is like a "vole" sometime.)

The picture above captures the panel in full glory: Peter in characteristic towering handsomeness; Joel doing a imitation of Lou Reed imitating Brad Pitt; Eric with an intimidating growth of Absalomian curls; me – er, I suppose every 4-piece ensemble needs the homely drummer to make the front men look better. Anyway, it was fun.

There was much more on offer: formal presentations by a range of smart & diverting people – Kristen Prevallet, Tom Orange, Robert Zamsky, Norman ("not that NF") Finkelstein, among many others – and a keynote address by Aldon Nielsen which featured video of Nathaniel Mackey accepting his National Book Award & Jacques Derrida visiting Nelson Mandela's cell & photos of Derrida dueting with Ornette Coleman. Deconstruction, whether adumbrated by M. Derrida or the fantastic African American poet Russell Atkins, may never be the same.

[The Poets: L-R, Nathaniel Mackey, Joseph Donohue, Tyrone Williams]

The main attraction poetry-wise was a reading by Nathaniel Mackey Friday afternoon: as usual, a riveting event, tho marred by the facts that a) Nate's presentational style is a very definitely low-key affair – ie, he does not project, nor does he try to, and b) for some reason, the auditorium did not have a microphone that could reliably pick up his voice, which would have been okay but that c) the damned heating system in the room kept cutting on and drowning out the low subtle bits for the folks in the back rows. But as usually for Mackey, an excellent reading.

Reprised in part at a Saturday night party at Alan Golding & Lisa Shapiro's, where Nate read another section from Bass Cathedral, among a cloud of other poets (too many to name). A great party, followed by a night of carousing in good company (which of course followed two other nights of the same). (Needless to say, I slept on the plane home, when I wasn't reading Paul Auster's – possibly sleep-inducing – The Brooklyn Follies.)

A definite recharging of the batteries, both intellectually & socially. I haven't been to a conference in some time where there was such a concentration of alt-poetry scholarship & talent. But Nate Mackey – that reminds me:
***
Splay Anthem, Nathaniel Mackey (New Directions, 2006)

[6/100]

I've been following the nomadic wanderings of Nathaniel Mackey's sequences "Mu" and Song of the Andoumboulou for a couple of decades now, thru his first three volumes of poetry – Eroding Witness, School of Udhra, & Whatsaid Serif – watching as they've circled around one another, coiled, braided, & finally, in this magnificent latest volume, virtually merged. I'll admit I've put off reading Splay Anthem for some months, for wholly selfish reasons: Mackey's simply so good, the dense and tasty music of his verse so entrancing, his play with pun & anagram so fertile, that whenever I spend time with one of his books I find myself irresistibly drawn to slavish (& mawkishly inferior) imitation. Like School of Udhra & Whatsaid Serif, much of the early part of Splay Anthem follows its speaker(s) thru a dreamlike, surreal, cross-cultural pilgrimage, always surprising, always lively. It's grand & lovely & consistently unexpected – rather like being astonished by what Don Cherry & Ed Blackwell will come up with next on the Mu albums that are one of "Mu"'s referents. The real surprise in Splay Anthem, however, is the horrid spiritual & geopolitical stasis of the final section, "Nub" – "the imperial, flailing republic of Nub the United States has become," Mackey writes – one of the most impressive & horrifying visions of George Bush's American one could imagine.