Group formation in action. Responses from Cynthia Sailers, Stephanie Young and Chris Chen, the organizers of the SPT Aggression Conference, to the conference. Incredibly interesting. More on this.

And more on women of the 70s.

I think Marc Lecard gave me this copy of Susan Howe’s Hinge Picture (from Maureen Owen’s Telephone Books) because of its obvious and important connection with my work – which by then had fortunately changed a lot from the example below. This is around 1979, maybe 80. At the time, I resisted it mightily, as children will, because of its obvious connection with my work. The lovely cover is by Susan.

I am am I


Set fire to the house
Overturn the table
I am crouched on the axis
of sunset
seated at the edge
of my chair
are wombs another extreme
of lair
have I been cooked into the fabric
of my father





















Making the Park is an early Kelsey Street Press book (1976). I helped to typeset it in Patricia Dienstfry’s basement on Kelsey Street, feeling exactly like Anais Nin, whose diaries about setting type and living the literary life, we had all already read by that time. This poem is by Karen Brodine, one of the six of us (Rena Rosenwasser, Kit Duane, Marina La Palma, Karen, Patricia and I) who started the press. Karen sadly died of breast cancer in 1987.

TO THE WOMAN WHO SWALLOWS HER IDENTITY

This coat full of holes you give me
I know already how to wear hand-me-downs.
You turn so I can’t see your eyes
how they flatten into dimes
and swallow reflections.
Pouring money from a jar, you say,
take a bus.

I don’t want coins. You try
to fail.
I hate these generous handfuls of small
change, the pennies
that slip through my clenched hands
and are never
enough.

Now you tell me to go about the business
of my position and the hard cloth
of your coat is an curt as your chin.





















Loree Anderson and I formed Sternum Press in 1976 and published Escape From Veils. The linoleum print on the cover is by Robert Weinsko. This is the first part of a longish poem of mine called “Loon Woman.” It is shamelessly 70s.

Loon Woman

The Christians left you Pioneer
to your maps and cannibal dreams
Wildcat left you
but Coyote turned into a woman
and smiled, offered
to roast your painful head in the stones
But once inside
you could not fight your way out
and were cooked and
thrown into the river where shamans come to bathe
Part of the dream of Loon Woman
who never slept
whose dreams fell to her from the sky
into the fire and escaped
grew old but did not die.

Re Vision and 70s Outakes from Re Vision

"Re Vision: Outlaws, Lone Wolves and Made Poets: Bay Area Poetics from the 70s to the Present is available here. It is the talk I gave at the SPT Aggression conference. Below are some of the outtakes. There is a bit of overlap with the essay.

Triumph of Flora, 1980, The Pilot Hill Collection of Art by John Fitz Gibbon


“Begin with Tharmas Parent Power” Blake, Four Zoas. For me that is the teacher and artist John Fitz Gibbon who taught Art History at Sacramento State in the early 70s. He made me a poet. So my story starts with love and with John’s idea of paradise, the garden of love or good government. He thinks (and acts) allegorically, putting on art events at his place in Pilot Hill in which everyone is naked and there are themes like the Judgment of Paris, the Peaceable Kingdom or, as above and from later, the Triumph of Flora. So I begin, allegorical and naked, to see my life as a history painting, and me in it and I begin to write my first poems. Also at Sac State I hear Allen Ginsberg during Gay Liberation Week. I hear Diane Di Prima and Alta who is the publisher of Shameless Hussy Press. When Diane Di Prima reads it is from Loba and I am struck by the image of this female lone wolf.

Loba,Part 1, Capra Press, 1973

“…she grinned/ baring her wolf’s teeth.” Diane Di Prima, Loba. Women’s Liberation is going full out and instead of thinking that I will grow up to be a wife and a high school English teacher, I begin to imagine a different destiny for myself, as a poet. I read Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder to find out how to do that. Loba is in the back of my mind. I take a Bob Dylan class. He and the Beats are my first living poets. I read Philip Whalen’s On Bear’s Head with the same transfixed passion I later read Jack Spicer. For the first time since I was a kid, I begin to write poems. Influenced by my Dylan class, I think of them as ‘talking blues.’ I think of the writers I like as outlaws and of being an outlaw as my duty. The first two poems of mine that are published, in 1973, appear in a stapled zine called Nevermind. Among the contributors are Alta and Laura Chester. My poems are titled “On Being Fired From the Job of Housekeeper for Immoral Acts” and “An Examination of the Anima in the Work of Bob Dylan.”

Nevermind, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1973, edited by Melinda Barry & Ingrid Swanberg, cover by Barbara McGee .
I transfer from Sac State to Cal, study with Tom Parkinson, first meet Robert Duncan in Parkinson’s class, study Blake with Donald Ault, have a class with Svetlana Alpers to which Patty Hearst doesn’t show up after she is kidnapped by the SLA. Behind me in the big auditorium of the giant survey class, one of her friends says to the other, “Patty kidapped?”

At the time, I am writing by looking at art and spend a huge amount of time at the Berkeley Art Museum. I admire Joan Brown. I see the poster of her Wolf in Studio painting everywhere. I go to her office hours at Cal but find I have nothing to say. You can’t simply say, “I think we share the same lover or I wanted to meet you because I want my writing to be in some way like your art” so I don’t say it but that’s what I want. I am in a Rhetoric class taught by Leonard Nathan and am invited to be part of a reading group with Leonard Nathan and Josephine Miles – possibly at the house of Lawrence and Justine Fixell. This is quite an august group but the experience scares the hell out of me and I only go once. Miles is an influential teacher and the first woman to be tenured by the English department at Cal (much later I learn she was a friend of Jack Spicer). She was very disabled by arthritis, and had to me, a kind of Linda Hunt in Dune feel about her, but I don’t study with her or connect with her work. I also don’t find that Donald Ault thinks much of contemporary poetry so I don’t join his Blake club. Hot on the trail of my new identity, I need to be with people who believe in contemporary writing and its power to change oneself and everything else. I am already with Jerry Estrin at this point and we are sort of lone wolves together. But Ault’s sense of Blake has enabled my own work and I call my individual major “The Practice of Poetry” from Blake’s statement in his engraving the of Laocoon.

“Practice is Poetry

















If you leave off you are lost” William Blake

Women of the 70s

HAIR-RAISING was one of the first books published by Kelsey Street Press. In the spirit of the anti-hierarchical times no editor is indicated. The contributors are Laura Beausoleil, Misha Berson, Karen Brodine, Cathy Colman, Patricia Dienstfrey, Sukey Durham, Judy Grahn, Joanna Griffin, Marina LaPalma, Cynthia MacDonald, Susan Maconald, Frances Mayes, Alicia Ostriker, Rena Rosenwasser, Susan Sherman, Margaret Allen Sloan, Roswell Spafford, Denise Taylor, Margaret Teague, Ulrike Birkoff, Rachel Rosenthal, Sylvia Simpson, Hazel Slawson, Barbara Smith and Nancy Buchanan. I can still remember Karen's excitement about the book which begins with a series of Samson and Delilah vignettes and ends with endpapers with into which actual hair was embedded. (Kelsey Street, 1978)




Gesualdo is one of my favorite books by Lyn Hejinian. Completely revelatory when I first read it, probably not long after it was published in 1978. This and HAIR-RAISING as well as books by Barrett Watten and many others show the tendency -- in a good way that has continued into the present -- of writers to be publishers and to publish themselves.







I think this picture of Anne Waldman and Bernadette Mayer changed my life -- maybe several times. It is in The Angel Hair Anthology.







I remember meeting Summer Brenner when she first blew into town from New Mexico at some party. I was still an undergraduate at Cal. Five minutes or so older than me, I perceived her as one of the "made poets" of the 70s. This is her photo from From The Heart to the Center. (The Figures, 1977)






I seem to remember running into Gloria Frym in an elevator at a group reading at SF MOMA in the 70s in full cowgirl dress. I was probably similarly decked out and we might have had a duel or something. But here she is in her early 80s mode, which might be described as cotton waif, on the back of her 1982 Figures book Back to Fourth.