Kulchur GirlRachel Loden. Vagabond Press, $15 AUS (88p) ISBN 978-1-922181-21-3
Instead
of a Preface
In July 1965, a few days after turning
seventeen, I returned to the city in which I had spent four years of my
childhood to attend the Berkeley Poetry Conference. At the offices of the
University of California Extension (through which the conference had been
organized) at 2223 Fulton Street, I paid the steep registration fee of $45,
which covered two seminars, with money saved from hundreds of hours of
babysitting.
Alternating between a brown journal I’d
carried with me, and a green one purchased in Berkeley for the seminars, I took
notes on whatever pleased me, occasionally leaping from the spoken words in the
room to others of my own invention, with no duty (at the time) to anyone but
myself.
On
the Poetry Foundation website, the biography for American poet Rachel Loden
includes: “As a teenager, she discovered Donald Allen’s influential anthology The New American Poetry (1945–1960), and
from there began to immerse herself in poetry, finding influences in Emily
Dickinson, Franz Kafka, and John Ashbery, and attending seminal events like the
Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965.” The Berkeley Poetry Conference of 1965 was
considered a follow-up to the infamous 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, and
included a number of the same participating American poets, including Robin
Blaser, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley. Given its status in
American poetry generally and Loden’s own development as a poet, it is
interesting to see the publication of Kulchur
Girl (2014), a sketchbook of notes the author made while attending those
Berkeley sessions. As the press description reads:
A girl just seventeen, high school
dropout, travels to the July 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference to encounter some
of the giants of The New American Poetry
1945-1960 and after (Creeley, Olson, Duncan, Blaser, Ginsberg, Dorn,
Sanders, Berrigan, &c.). These notes from her surviving diary show her
longing to be taught, but also fiercely teenage, perversely independent and
contradictory.
Rachel
Loden is the author of a small handful of poetry books and chapbooks, including
The Last Campaign (Slapering Hol
Press, 1998), Hotel Imperium (University
of Georgia Press, 1999), My Domain
(Grove Avenue Press, 2000), Affidavit (Pomegranate
Press, 2001), The Richard Nixon Snow
Globe (Wild Honey Press, 2005) and Dick
of the Dead (Ahsahta Press, 2009). Part of what is interesting about this
small book – the first of a set of ten small books edited by Pam Brown and
published by Sydney, Australian publisher Vagabond Press for 2014 – is in how
Loden has presented her notes here without any context or editorial
interruption, but for those original notes by that seventeen year old self,
absorbing and attempting to articulate some of the ideas being presented during
the conference. The notes run from attempting to capture quotes, book titles
and page numbers, sketching descriptions of events and lectures, to the
occasional charming and sweet note by a seventeen year old poet set loose in
Berkeley: “Run around for absolute joy. In Berkeley. // How does anyone survive
it?” As an addendum to this small volume, I would be interested in hearing some
of Loden’s thoughts on the text and the conference now, after such a distance
of years, what she thinks the experience might have allowed her to explore in
her own writing, and what some of those original notes might have sparked,
possible memories that fell outside of the text of her notebook.
OLSON LECTURE
You know.
Inverted Hippies. Infirm hippies.
Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. Page 12-13.
Someone says there’s supposed to be an
earthquake tomorrow – all of the California coast – into the sea. God is angry
at poets.
GINSBERG JUST BORROWED 2 PIECES OF PAPER
FROM HERE →
Olson Big Fire-Source (Duncan).
Strange & nice to be in Berkeley
this morning.
Fierceness of Pound. Almost catatonic.
Never speaks.
A 1 only so if it produces a 1.
A knowable seizable thing & your
thing – the world.
And then it jives.
Meeting Pound – as meeting an angel –
The world familiar as the smallest thing
I know.
Mythology – possible activeness &
personalness of the earth.
The connectivity (of same).
(November
2014)
Purchase
Kulchur Girl HERE.
Reviewer
bio: Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan
currently lives in Ottawa. The author of nearly thirty trade books of poetry,
fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the
Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for
the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. His most recent titles include notes and dispatches: essays (Insomniac
press, 2014, The Uncertainty Principle:
stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014) and the poetry collection If suppose we
are a fragment (BuschekBooks, 2014). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground
press, Chaudiere Books, The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview),
seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds),
Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com) and the
Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). He spent the
2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of
Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com
