Also, the 8mm “home movie” film taken by the then Bobbie Creeley (now Bobbie Louise Hawkins) was another incredible find by McTavish, as that added color to the period with shots of the faculty and that Vancouver of 50 years ago, as one attendee put it “without all the condos.” Clark Coolidge and Michael Palmer were USAmerican students and I think it was Coolidge who said that the proceedings had a “hot house atmosphere.” Palmer added that The New American Poetry was a response to the New Critics and that it represented a “profound split in the culture.” A split which still exists. I think it is safe to say that the New Critics are representative of the colonialist/settler/dominator impulse whereas the New American Poetry was more conscious of the environment, of cultural diversity and social justice. With Duncan and Ginsberg, two openly Gay poets on the faculty, you can see how this group was a little “left of center” so to speak. That said, those in attendance remarked that the event was quite male in nature. (There was little ethnic diversity, with the exception of Chinese-Canadian Wah, as was the case in the New American Poetry anthology.) Levertov was only there for a week of the three week conference, as was the only other woman faculty member, Margaret Avison. Marlatt says that Levertov “held her own” with the boys. (When I told him that, Levertov’s friend Sam Hamill remarked: “she did that for over 20 years.”) Levertov’s poem Hypocrite Women was excerpted in the film and paired with audio from her 1963 reading: Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak of our own doubts, while dubiously we mother man in his doubt! And if at Mill Valley perched in the trees the sweet rain drifting through western air a white sweating bull of a poet told us our cunts are ugly—why didn’t we admit we have thought so too? (And what shame? They are not for the eye!) …
Posted on: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 17:30:20 +0000
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