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An American Avant Garde: Second Wave, An Exhibit John M. Bennett and Geoffrey D. Smith, Curators. 80 pp; 2002; Pa; Rare Books & Manuscripts Library, The Ohio State University Libraries 1858 Neil Av Mall, Columbus, OH 43210. $15.
An American Avant Garde: First Wave:
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It began with an afternoon open mike poetry reading on Friday, 26 September 2002, in
one of the rooms in the main library at Ohio State. I was pretty out of it--a 30-hour trip
on a Greyhound bus can do that to you, and it was little more than an hour behind me. I
recognized the first reader, though--Mike Basinski. He was grunting and howling--with a
big smile. According to Dave Baratrier, who posted an impression of the proceedings to
an Internet poetry discussion group (and kindly put me up the two days I was in town),
Mike's poem involved "all kinds of packing materials." I remember things being thrown
into the audience, I think, but it's now hazy. I should have taken notes, but didn't. I do
know that ten or fifteen poets besides Mike eventually read something. Most hesitated to
do so until it looked necessary, no one else seeming to want to. I hesitated near-
maximally, myself. I had come thinking I would read something but got spooked by how
far out the material being presented was. The poem I'd chosen for the occasion was text-
only. It was purposely agrammatical at a few points, and used a number of portmanteau
Joyceanisms but did not seem very unconventional. The ones who read seemed awfully
good, too--and polished. So I quickly got the worse case of stage fright I've ever had. I
even started feeling ill. That saved me, though, for it made me angry enough at myself to
decide I had to read to prove I could. So I pushed myself up and did okay.
Among the other readers were mIEKAL aND, Peter Ganick, Lewis LaCook, Andrew
Topel, Tom Taylor, Michael Peters, William Austin, Dave Baratrier, and Igor Satanovsky
(who used a bullhorn for what he read, which included a hilarious harangue against "ski's"
or "sky's" we could do without--like Stravinski, Kandinsky and . . . Basinski).
After the reading came an hour or two of visiting, and snacking on the excellent food
provided, though I now forget what it was. Then, John M. Bennett, main organizer of the event, led us out of the building and across a few lawns to the Grand Lounge of the OSU
Faculty Club. There we heard Marvin Sackner's keynote address, which turned out to be
a presentation using Powerpoint (a computer program for presenting computer images as
though they were slides). He was very entertaining about his collecting activities, showing
some of the works in his archive as he discussed them. Then he presented a survey mostly
of work he owns by presenters. It took him worrisomely long to get to something by Me,
but he made up for that at last by showing three pieces of mine! Among them was a visual
haiku about a boy on a "s.wing." This, he noted, was from 1966, which indicated how
long I'd been doing visual poetry. After his speech, when we happened to be leaving at
the same time, I thanked him for saying how long I'd been doing visual poetry, meaning I
was pleased to be thought someone there in "the early days." He took me to be jokingly
annoyed with him letting out how ancient I was, so I've decided now that that was how I
intended it.
So ended the events of day one of the two-day symposium put on by the Ohio State
University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library as part of its An American Avant Garde: Second Wave, An Exhibit, which was at the library from 20 June through 3 September. I'll
be writing more about the symposium in my next few SPR columns, for I believe it, and
the exhibit it was part of, were Of Signal Importance To American Culture. The
catalogue that was published for the exhibit was a wow, too, and I expect to spend at least
one full column on it. It, and the catalogue for the exhibit that preceded it last year, are
well worth the money asked for them.
Note: to see pix of participants in the symposium, and some neato photographic
impressions of the exhibit by Thomas Taylor, go to
http://www.lib.ohio-state.edu/rarweb/avant!
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