|
|
|
26 May 2005: Recovery from the long trip in the morning of this day followed by another inept ride to Boston for the American Literature Association Conference at the Westin Copley Place. I got to Boston with only one minor screw-up, but had a horrible time once into the city: too many cars and streets, and it was drizzly. I'm still not sure how I finally made it to the hotel. I do know I did at least two illegal things to do so. The hotel, by the way, is just one minor part of some huge complex of retail places like Neiman-Marcus. Getting to the building it's in was only step three or four of five or six steps toward getting to it. I did find it, but had been so rattled when parking the car (in the parking garage connected to the complex that I'd only gotten in by luck, darting into it when I saw it just to park the damned car, not knowing it was where it was most appropriate to park--making an illegal turn to do so, among who knows what other illegal maneuvers I made)--I had been so rattled, as I was saying, that I forgot to observe where in the garage I was parked. It took me some forty minues after locating the hotel to go back to the garage to find the car, so I'd be able to quickly get to it when I was ready to come home.
My presentation was pretty bad. A projector was available but it didn't plug into my computer, so I had to run the show off my laptop screen, and there were over a dozen people in attendance--a big crowd compared to the last one of these Cummings things I did. I'm not sure how much the audience was able to see. And because of the technical problems, I started late, so had to rush through sixty or seventy percent of it. For those who missed my entries about my presentation, or don't remember them, it was about the influence of E.E. Cummings on contemporary otherstream poets.
I was first to present. William Jason Raynovich, a young composer, then gave a talk called, "On Setting the Poetry of Cummings to music," that I found very interesting, full of concerns similar to mine about syllabreaks, and the like. One interesting tidbit came up in the question and answer period: that Cummings himself, when reading his poetry, did not observe his own line-breaks. My opinion: that as a performer, he probably didn't reflect too much on what he had to do, and--well-- read as a amateur. That is, he read right through the subtleties of what he'd done as a poet. So, in one instance, Cummings's "dominic had," one line is "icecoalwood truck a," which is followed by "wistful little." This Cummings is recorded reading as, "icecoalwood truck," pause, "a wistful little," thus reducing the poetic value of the passage by more than a tick, in my view--and Raynovich's. But not others'.
The final presenter was Gudrun M. Grabher, from Austria, who talked about Cummings's concept of time--in what seemed to me flawless English. Interesting if a little more subjective than I most prefer--and about a gushier side of Cummings than I most prefer. But she referred to a bunch of Cummings's poems about time and distributed a hand-out with 19 of them quoted. I love such little collections from admired poets about one theme. Someone afterwards mentioned that Cummings had described "time is the autobiography of space." Goofy but there's something about it . . .
Several people discussed my presentation a little with me afterwards, and Mike Webster, editor of the Cummings journal, Spring, wants a piece based on it for that, so I guess the presentation was not a complete failure. I would have liked to have hung around and chatted with the Cummings people, but felt I had to rush to get out while it was still somewhat light. (Our seesion had gone from 5:30 to around 7.) I also didn't want to pay more than I had to for parking, which ended costing $24. So I left at around 7:30. I had my usual trouble getting home, but at least didn't need help from my brother-in-law: three guys working in a Dunkin' Doughnuts place a few miles from my sister's gave me good directions that I was able successfully to follow.
|
|
|
|