The trip started with a grueling 24-hour bus ride from Port Charlotte, Florida, where I live, to Washington, D.C., where I met my sister, there with husband and 21-year-old daughter on holiday, the daughter visiting a genuine congressional intern like what'sername, this one working for Senator Olympia Snow (whom I wouldn't've bothered to mention except, wow, what a great name!). While staying in the Washington suburb of Arlington, I came across a bookstore with a window containing nothing but poetry books! One of them, an anthology called Poetry for the Millennium, I later thought worth writing a brief review of for the Amazon Online Bookstore, which will post reviews by (1) the author of a book; (2) the book's publisher; or (3) someone just happening by; as well as excerpts of reviews from the mass media--which I think a great idea! Here's what I said (misspelling "Ashbery" with a "u," which Amazon was nice enough to later fix for me):

Speaking of Karl Young, it looks like I'll be plugging his website frequently from now on, for it's always getting excellent new material. The latest includes a collection of top-grade Australian visual poetry at thalia.htm, and the beginnings of what looks to be a major d.a.levy site at dalevy.htm which already has reproductions of three of levy's paintings available nowhere else that prove him to have been a remarkably talented abstract-expressionist among all else he was--for tragically too short a time.

The conference, to get back to that, was called "The First Boston Alternative Poetry Conference." It took place 17-19 July--at, I like to boast, Hahvahd . . . (Square). It was run (and apparently entirely financed) by poet Aaron Kiely, assisted by fellow poet Sean Cole. On the night of Friday, the 17th, Kiely introduced the conference as an attempt to showcase poetry in opposition to the kind of "best poetry of the year" material the mainstream is concerned with. Aside from Will Alexander's, which was quite interestingly jumpöcut/surrealistic, the works read Friday night to launch the conference did not strike me as very "alternative." Nor was much else I heard until Sunday morning, when the panel I was on was given. Some fine work was read, though, including Kiely's and Cole's, Lisa Jarnot's, Fanny Howe's, Rosemarie Waldrop's and Caroline Knox's.

Of the four panels given, I most enjoyed and learned from the one on biography/criticism. It included Kristin Prevallet, who is dealing with Helen Adam; Jarnot, whose subject is Robert Duncan; and Lyman Gilmore, who discussed his already-published book on Joel Oppenheimer--and also read one of Oppenheimer's poems, one of the highlights of the conference, and intriguingly similar to certain poems of levy's at the Light & Dust site that draw movingly on the Jewish background of its author. David Kirschenbaum, who is energetically investigating the life and works of levy (though, for me, with insufficient emphasis on levy's bookworks and other visual poetry), was on this panel, too.

Needless to say, I thought the panel I was on was the best! It, also needless to say, was the least well-attended of the panels, but it drew thirty to forty people. The other panels didn't draw too much more, but some of the readings drew a full house of seventy or so. Mike Basinski, organizer and moderator of our panel, started it with an over-view of the many ways poetry of today is genuinely spreading into the New, then performed a cutting-edge chant/wail/song/incantation-off-a-visual-poetry- score with his talented daughter 12-year-old Natalie, and talked about the kind of "amuleting" (my characterization) he was most interested in achieving as a poet. Scott Pound showed and discussed some of his visio-conceptual poetry, including an appealing two-parter in which (if I remember it correctly) a small "i" is labeled "question" and the same "i", with its dot exploding, is labeled "answer"--or vice versa, as Scott said . . .

Sorry. Either I'm becoming ridiculously long-winded or I have a lot to report (albeit not that much to say). In either case, this will have to be continued.