March 29, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

The Beats go on> Vital poetry of the ’50s discussed by poets, scholars and critics at special conference in Orono

When Ruth Stone read her poem “Cocks and Mares” back in the 1950s, men would walk out of the room. The poem was blatantly sarcastic about the ostentatious sexual power plays of males, and male listeners didn’t like it. So they left.

But no one walked out earlier this week when Stone read the poem at a conference devoted to American poetry in the 1950s. In fact, the audience chuckled and clapped, and Stone was goaded into entertaining the crowd with more of her witty work. Later, she recalled the difficulty of being a female poet during an era in which male poets were undergoing a renaissance.

“I was zilch,” she said. “My poems were so different from theirs. They’d try to beat me down, but I don’t think they did.”

At 81, Stone is now a respected and representative poet from the 1950s, a particularly fecund and revolutionary period in American poetry and the focus of a five-day conference given this week by the National Poetry Foundation at the University of Maine. Stone is one of a dozen major figures in town to discuss that period in literary history. More than 250 others — professors, graduate students, critics — have gathered to meet the poets, deliver scholarly papers and talk about poetry.

The Orono conference is the 10th one held at UM since English professor and Ezra Pound expert Carroll Terrell founded the National Poetry Foundation there in the early 1970s. The organization publishes two scholarly journals — Paideuma (on Pound scholarship) and Sagetrieb (on poets in the imagist and objectivist traditions) — and, according to its current director Burton Hatlen, is a nexus for academic discussion.

“We’ve been a center of networking between critics and poets through the history of the National Poetry Foundation,” said Hatlen, who teaches English at UM, and was recently appointed interim dean of the College of Arts and Humanities there. “The conferences are a way of getting them together to share common interests. It’s the only one exclusively devoted to 20th century poetry, so it’s a service to a scholarly and creative community. In exchange, Orono is famous among poetry people.”

Although everyone is invited to attend the many lively readings offered at the conference, the panel discussions and paper presentations are intensely specialized, with titles such as “Randall Jarrell: The Poet as Dromomaniac,” “`AD VALOREM CAGLI’ — Olson’s Projective Moebius,” and “Disingenuous, Intrigued, Inviting More: The Limits of Precedent Anthologies.” There are others that celebrate the unabashed spirit of the decade’s language and rhythm: “`Faggot Vomit’: Jack Spicer Versus `the Maidens”‘ and “From Bop Kabbalah to Jews With Horns: The Fifties Roots of Radical Jewish Culture.”

If you’re not on the inside with this heady crowd, it takes a doctoral degree just to get through the titles.

And there are no apologies about that. After all, this is an academic affair. Whether their hair is dyed magenta or they walk around barefoot or wear a tweed jacket and jeans, these folks are serious thinkers when it comes to poetry of the 1950s. That era roared with attitudes that were anti-establishment, anti-political, anti-intellectual, self-realizing, self-expressing and quite unopposed to sexual abandon and drugged hallucinations.

World War II was over, and the atomic age had begun. In a whirl of disillusionment, Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 poem “Howl” and Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel “On the Road” became the bibles, and the Beats took their name to signify that they were both “beaten down” and “beatific.”

But if the 78 sessions offered at the conference drive home any point, it’s that there’s more to the 1950s than Ginsberg, Kerouac and coffeehouses.

There’s Barbara Guest, Alicia Ostriker, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Lorine Niedecker, Mina Loy, Theodore Enslin (who lives in Maine now), Marianne Moore, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Duncan, Robert Hayden and countless others whose work also speaks of a postwar time when more than the bombs were exploding.

Many of the poets of the 1950s passed through classes taught by M.L. Rosenthal, who was then professor of English at New York University and poetry editor at The Nation. A professor emeritus now, Rosenthal remains an authority on American poetry and was the opening speaker at the conference.

“Every period is a unique time,” said Rosenthal, who came from New York. “The 1950s had a certain amount of breaking loose from the disciplines. The poets were very energetic, and there was an enormous surge of professional writers.”

Jerome Rothenberg, who was in the poetry hub of New York in the 1950s, writes poetry and edits anthologies on “ethnopoetics,” a term he coined to describe poetry of traditional cultures. He described the era as an “opening up.”

“There was a growing sense of empowerment,” said Rothenberg, who came from California. “It was colored by the experiences and consequences of the war. Suddenly you were doing what you want.”

If the 1950s represent a breaking away from the restrained establishment, then the conference becomes relevant to a new wave of poets and thinkers who must navigate through conservative waters in the 1990s. The parallels are not lost on this huddle of scholars and writers, whose backward glance is as much about memories of wildly active muses as it is about understanding poetry today.

At its best, agreed Rothenberg, that’s what a conference on poetry does.

Community members interested in obtaining $10 passes for admission to all the poetry readings and major presentations through June 23 should call 745-4673.


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