OCTOBER 17 2024

Archive Entry 2: John Ashbery's LCLC Reading (Feb. 27, 1986)

Our second video upload to the LCLC Archive (the first being the Frank Bidart reading of 2001), John Ashbery’s 1986 reading begins after my colleague Tom Byers gave his introduction. Fortunately, I have located the typescript Tom prepared.

The author of the 1989 critical book What I Cannot Say: Self, Word, and World in Whitman, Stevens, and Merwin, Byers was instrumental in securing Ashbery’s participation in the conference. The introduction Tom provides is now a fascinating time capsule from an earlier epoch, before the millennial break. Reading this piece evokes for me great nostalgic longing for communal intelligibility. Consider, for example, the almost instinctive parlor game around which Byers’ constructs this introduction. He names 3 critics as arbiters--Charles Altieri, Harold Bloom, and Marjorie Perloff before going on to name Ashbery and to place him within a pantheon of what shall one call it—popular, canonical poets? Byers links Ammons with Bloom; Adrianne Rich with Altieri, but his third critic Marjorie Perloff we leaves without a clear matching poet to champion. A creature of logic, I naturally connect Ashbery with Perloff. Pondering these three pairs of names, I doubt that such a game could be played today. Perhaps that is a good thing. I leave it for my reader to decide.

What I find certain is that this introduction and the reading capture a moment in time when Ashbery was perhaps at the peak of his fame. Now a quick search on the internet suggests a significant falling off in interest among poetry readers active online. Given these circumstances, I am inclined to predict that we cannot be far away from the rehabilitation of Ashbery.

Certainly, as I review the very large stack of submissions for our upcoming LCLC52, I can’t help but see Ashbery’s influence almost everywhere. In another piece Byers discusses the so-called expansive line characteristic of late twentieth century American poetry. Ashbery was one its originators and one of its best practitioners. Again and again I encounter now in the work of young poets that expansive, metrically adroit line: it may be new-fangled in its shapes on the page, featuring lots of gaps and flows studded with stars and strange special characters, and its pop cultural references no longer feature the likes of spinach eating sailors (as in our reel from the reading), but--no mistake about it—much of this work remains animated by the spirit of John Ashbery even as he remains in partial eclipse.

SEPTEMBER 16 2024

Archive Entry 1: Frank Bidart at Mayan Café (2001)

The honorarium wasn’t much, and worse, we wanted him to teach a master class in the morning.  Frank Bidart is not a morning person.  The titles alone of his three long poems—The First, Second, and Third Hour of the Night—tell you that. But it is difficult for Bidart to say no.

Even that night, after his reading at the Louisville Conference, when the spotlight lends a poet some power, here he was sitting at a table with his hosts.  It happened in a season before the current hiring freeze and budget cuts, but even then the University was far from generous.  Hearing that I could only put his meal and mine on the conference tab, Bidart pulled out his credit card and insisted on paying for the entire table.  I begged him to submit it with his expenses when he got back to Wellesley and he said he would but I knew better.

We talked about reggae.  He had just read a long poem with a title swiped from the great dance hall master Desmond Dekker.

 Music Like Dirt · Desmond Dekker Anthology: Israelites 1963-1999

Once a teenage rude boy, I had cued up in my head as I sat in the hall and listened to him read “Music Like Dirt”  and I was still mulling over the two rhythms—Bidart’s and Dekker’s—while we enjoyed our Yucatan fare.

The thing about Bidart is that once you hear him read, you possess a key to making sense of his idiosyncratic versification. As in “To the Dead”:

 What I hope (when I hope) is that we'll

see each other again,--

. . . and again reach the VEIN

in which we loved each other . .

It existed. It existed.

There is a NIGHT within the NIGHT,--

The caps denote a certain voicing that you hear again in your head when you are alone reading the poem.  As do the dashes and the ellipses…

There is a NIGHT within the NIGHT,--

. . . for, there at times at night, still we

inhabit the secret place together . . .

Is this wisdom, or self-pity?--

The love I've known is the love of

two people staring

not at each other, but in the same direction.

I told Bidart this and he seemed pleased and honored to know that I had reserved a voice track for him. We talked about another Cambridge fixture—Allen Grossman, also obsessed with using words to mark out platonic architecture, what Grossman calls the Great Room in the Great House. Like Bidart, more than once I have heard dueling Grossman imitations, a true parlor game among east coast poets of a certain age.

Then I told Bidart that his work reminded me of David Ferry’s and in truth I thought the two very similar. Ferry was his chair at Wellesley. This two men knew each other intimately.

Bidart couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Evidently, it was settled doctrine to stress that here there where only stark differences.      

I was pleased that he found my claim odd. I didn’t back off and Bidart quieted the table so that I could make my point because this, he wanted hear.

I said it wasn’t in the music, but in the willingness to risk everything on a single image in a poem. 

Here is Ferry:

A bird cried out among the first things of the morning.

I dreamed about murders all night long.

It was the bird’s cry that startled up the stone.

The stone changed color among the shadows as the sun came up.

“A Morning Song” (full text of poem)

Here is Bidart:

Dip a finger into the River of Time,--

It comes back

                           STAINED.

(from “For Mary Ann Youngren”)

Bidart looked at me as if I had just pointed out a fundamental truth that had been there in front of his face and never before had he seen it.  

NOTES

1) Consider Bidart on form vs. free verse:

“I think all of us on the panel, when we first heard about the panel on form, rued the prospect of one more rehearsal of the arguments about free verse versus formal verse. That's a barren distinction. The modernists did not understand their project as constituting a rebellion against formal verse or form itself. It was a far more complicated and fundamental issue. They had the consciousness of making a revolution, and the fact that our nation is founded in revolution, founded in transgression, seems to me a fundamental, recurrent theme in America's use of form.

I think you can argue that another major innovation happened with confessional poetry, both through Allen Ginsberg in Kaddish and Robert Lowell in Life Studies, and this had to do with taking seriously and incorporating into the very texture of poetry the psychoanalytic model of the search for meaning.”

Q & A American Poetry: Frank Bidart

2) Bidart’s “Music Like Dirt” was later published as a chapbook by Sarabande, the Louisville-based press run by Sarah Gorham and Jeff Skinner.  The book was later short-listed for the Pulitzer and is the only chapbook to have earned that distinction.

AUGUST 26 2024

A Recap of Last Year's Conference

JUNE 25 2024

Planning is now well underway for LCLC52, an event that would not be happening without the University of Louisville’s decision to hire Emily Ravenscraft as LCLC Conference Coordinator.  With Emily now integrated into the workflow, I am proceeding with my podcast series and recording interviews that will comprise season 3.

This season I continue to explore how to reshape the LCLC (both as an online entity and as an in-person conference) to heighten its appeal while staying true to its impulse to serve a community committed to furthering thought through art and culture.  Stay tuned for more about our lineup. I expect to start dropping episodes in August when the thoughts of certain odd birds turn to finalizing submissions for our beloved conference.

And as for me, I am back to finishing my Biberman Circle book.  Today I came across this heart-stopping note from my great-granduncle, Herbert Biberman, to his adopted daughter Joan (who he calls Jone and spells phonetically in the note). 

He is in our nation’s capital staying at the Shoreham on Connecticut at Calvert.  He is awaiting sentencing, found guilty for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC), specifically for not answering the question: are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?  He writes:

Dear Jone –

Well, your daddy is still at liberty--the judge has been so busy--he has not yet been able to get to me--and it may be four or five days more before he acts.

In one way I am disappointed because the longer I wait to go and the longer it will be before I come out--but in a year a week doesn't make so much difference, does it?

The good thing about it is that I will probably see Mommy on Sunday -- and we can talk about our Jone and Danny together.

I sent you a gift from Washington and I think you will like it.

Now let me tell you what it is and remind you that it will probably take a week for it to reach you -- but that's not very long.

It is a doll--a kind of story-book doll--but a little larger.  She is dressed in Israeli colors and has a little Israeli flag.  Israeli means the nation of Israel which is the country just founded by the Jews as their own nation - for those Jews who do not have good countries of their own or good friends in other countries.

At any rate she is a very beautiful Israeli girl in a beautiful silk costume, and she winks her eyes like a sleeping doll -- and she will arrive to say “Your Daddy has thought of his Jone -- and is crazy about her.”

Daddy Herbert

 As director of the LCLC, I know that for over 50 years this conference has served as a premiere space for creators to come together. It is a space where we seek to understand and enjoy such stories as the ones that come from this one document in the Biberman archive. That Israeli doll with her winking eyes demands scrutiny. So does the Shoreham Hotel and the courtroom where Herbert will be given the surprising sentence of six months.  The ethos of the LCLC holds us accountable, exhorting us to, in the words of Rabbi Tarfon, remember that just because you will never complete your life's work does not excuse you from attempting to do so. 

I understand that I must work on it and I invite you to join us for LCLC52 and share with us your life’s work as well.

DECEMBER 29 2023