P78 Anthology, gouache and watercolor, by JD
This anthology surfaced recently, rising from decades ago, to provoke an eerie moment of recognition. The title, P78 Anthology, jogs my stale memory. Once self-evident to those who had been involved in the huge international poetry festival in Amsterdam that stretched across a full week in September 1978, it now reads cryptically. P78 has not become a shorthand term like Woodstock or Altamont. Only an insider would recognize that this title identifies a large-scale literary event. The list of participants is a crazy who was who of established and emerging poets from America, Mexico, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, Japan, and a handful of others. The anthology is a mix of poetic texts transcribed in original languages, accounts of events, drawings, and candid photos of the participants caught unawares during the week. I appear as a background figure on page 10, which is what I was, young, barely emerged and emerging, one of the most junior among the still not very senior crowd. Except for the two headliners, I doubt almost anyone was much over forty.
The week was an extravaganza, billed as such, and in the anthology pages the accounts read like passages from a Beat on-the-road journal describing druggy late nights and dragged out performances, rapping screeds and readings full of cussing at audiences and speaking as fast as humanly possible except for those who spoke very slowly with much emphasis. Some put microphones up and down their pants or banged on bottles and glasses and then walked into the night along the canals to enjoy the freedom promised by Amsterdam. Punk, Beat, and the New York School tones prevailed, softened a little in the American contingent by the Bolinas poets and their Buddhist references, and among the Europeans by a lingering attachment to a casual modernism in unstructured verse. A handful of sincere activist poets attempted their assault on existing institutions of power, using the stage as a platform to call attention to injustice and systematic forms of oppression which those days was not identity poetry but linked to deeper struggles and broader communities. Only a few lapsed into lyric, offering a personal moment of revelation or epiphany, and even that was largely entwined with sex and dissipation of some kind to keep it on the right side of sentiment. None of the women spoke of longing, only the occasional male poet named the lost, absent, or unobtainable object of desire. The women were out there, performing with whips, beads, sharp-edged tongues and dares to the audience and fellow-poets to step up shut up put up and put out.
The exhilaration that weaves through the pages is tangible even now, at a distance rapidly approaching half a century. How can that be that long? I feel the distance in the marked absences, the deaths, the losses. So many of those who were there are gone.
And how many of these, remaining or archived, have preserved an account of that event among their papers? Archived…. The word itself suggests a past tense relation to the living, as if the only access to the vital heat generated in that week were a mere trace on a photographic plate, an trail left by electrons streaking with maximum momentum between the vibrating entities who were the poets on the scene. Archived.
So I reach back into my files to find my own account, which I know is there, among the many unpublished papers, and pull it out. The writing is terrible, but some of the observations are still vivid. The manuscript begins:
“What was had by all can only be described as a good time. Serious intentions (far) aside the purely social aspect did provide for considerable exchange (of ideas) (sic) and from the first promoter to the last poster that’s got to be what this was all supposed to be about. Have to admit, of course, that watching from the bench was a lot more exciting than watching from the stands, even if I didn’t get to play so much (that’s okay folks, I’m just the junior junior, glad to be on the team, not complaining) I got to see it ALL.”
The snide tone and elliptical parenthetical remarks permeate my ten-page essay, which is filled with unkind character sketches of the poets as they jostle for attention from the press, public, and each other. I was writing as a complete brat. The piece was never published. Never submitted for publication. In fact, likely has never been seen or read except by me. Probably best to keep it that way. But its observations cross-cut the tone of the anthology, with its combination of works read and notes produced during the event, some even tapped out unedited on a typewriter organizer Harry Hoogstraten kept supplied with paper.
The week long festival took place in multiple now legendary venues—De Kosmos, Melkveg, and Paradiso. Among the stars in attendance were Anne Waldman riding a wave of stellar success from her recent hit publication Motorcycle Woman, Tom Raworth, Franco Beltrametti, Bill Berkson, Joanne Kyger, Mimmi Graffi, Patti Smith, Jessica Hagedorn, Lorenzo Thomas, Simon Vinkenoog The headliner, William Burroughs, arrived with partner Brion Gysin, legendary figures descending from celestial heights. They were stars. I was just a young writer making a bid for inclusion and very interested in participating in the dynamics of these events..
I had arrived in Amsterdam in the summer of 1978 with the intention of printing an artist’s book. Two studios existed for which access was simply a per diem fee. One was equipped with traditional printmaking, including etching presses. The other was an unusual facility on the Herengracht, in the Centrum, called the Druckhuis, a house filled with tilted floors and everything askew from plumb, but crammed with type and presses. I was in heaven.
My trip to Amsterdam came as part of a trajectory launched after the New York Book Fair in late Fall, 1977. There I shared a table with then-also-young publisher-poet Lyn Hejinian and made the acquaintance of many persons in New York who were part of the extended poetry networks in the Bay Area. We sat in that cold tent, Lyn and I, feet in thick mud, drinking hot tea, exchanging books, ideas, and contact information with the many people who came by the table in a steady stream, their faces half-concealed by condensed breath in front of their faces in the damp air. Exciting times, filled with enthusiasm for the intellectual undertaking that would become known as Language Poetry. My work ran parallel or tangential to that movement, but intersected, socially and aesthetically, through the formalized attention to material and discussions of non-lyric approaches to literature.
My work was visual as well as linguistic. I was a typographic poet, but also a visual artist. The project I had come to Amsterdam to print, Experience of the Medium, was a conceptual, procedural work combining etchings and text in a theoretical study of marks, processes, and system-dependent meaning value. I was quite full of myself. But no more so than the rest of those many participants in the P78 event. I hadn’t been invited, was not a star, had little name recognition, but I was connected to many of those who were on the program. So I simply went to the office where the organizers of the festival were doing the planning, introduced myself, and said, put me on the program somewhere. They did, probably figuring that slotting me into the line-up at the Melkweg or Kosmos was the easiest way to get me out of the office.
I wrote and printed two books in Amsterdam, and it was the second one from which I read, Netherlands: How (So) Far: Dutch Interior, a work based on observations of Dutch culture and language. The group reading took place in a bar, smoke-filled in those days, and noisy with conversation. But I read. I was there, part of this international event. One Bay Area poet who was part of our common networks offered encouraging, if patronizing, praise, “Did you know you had that voice? Did you?” In the poetry parlance of the day, finding one’s voice was considered a crucial issue. More than one male poet had let me know where I had failed in that regard. All ages ago.
But now, in spring 2024, this publication surfaced in a remote location as I am working at Beyond Baroque, the longest existing literary institution in Los Angeles. I help cull overstock and inventory in the bookstore where I volunteer to help maintain the shelves. I also work with their archive which I helped to organize. There are more than two hundred boxes of records, ephemera, institutional documents, and a vast number of chapbooks and serials that have accumulated in more than half a century since the founding of Beyond Baroque in the 1960s. Going through these publications and calendar announcements is a process of constant recognition and personal loss, as with the P78 anthology. I knew so many of these people whose readings are documented, some better than others, some only briefly or in passing at the event. But quite a few were fixtures in my world across decades, and the photographs mark that poignant nostalgic distance from the present.
In P78 the bodies of the poets are slim and lithe, the men have long sideburns and longer hair, wear bell-bottom trousers, occasional earrings or beads. The women have dangling earrings and ethnically influenced clothes that take advantage of a decade of liberation from constraining undergarments. The easiness of intimacy wove through the Amsterdam week, casual encounters without expectation or promise but lots of charged excitement at meeting another high-octane entity. The recollection comes through vividly in my generally over-cultivated prose:
“But Raworth, man, he’s so tight, like a watch spring, all wound up, thin stuff, those laced shoes, black and shiny with the off-white ribbed socks under them, clean, maintained. The bit about his heart heard later: had to have it stopped and restarted cause it goes so fast. That explains the intensity, the about to burst tightness even in his voice, words spit out under pressure.”
Former lovers, future lovers, friends loved and spurned some cast off in the turbulence of competition for attention. We were all eager, hungry, wanting our share. The essay is filled with discussions of fame, the various bids and quests for recognition, driven by anxiety. The beautiful female poet, staging an entrance for the cameras, annoyed there was “no interview” after she had come six thousand miles. The men all bucking against each other, hitting heads and striking hard in a contest, issuing ultimatums to each other, “Don’t let your attention wander cause ain’t no way you deserve to be saved if you do.”
A constant subtext of politics was palpable among the Europeans, struggling with the idea that experimentation escaped commercialism and that resistance, real resistance, was possible. The elegant Chicano poet, unwilling to waste a word, an instant, on anything not directly connected to the struggle that was his life-long commitment. A handful of New York poets, stylishly affluent, and a transient Californian in a Hawaiian shirt, child in tow, had their own distinctive style. All were cast perfectly in roles of their own devising. Some were more dramatic than others, such as Franco, who out-charmed everyone, including himself. And Tom, the most genuine person present, insisting that the role of the poet was to “fight back”. Or Lewis, who would have walked on water if I had been capable of making it happen. Patti Smith, spitting and stamping, smart and full of razor edges. Jessica Hagedorn, whipping the audience into a frenzy.
And there was Burroughs, a genuine legend, the real thing, who indulged in a playful fantasy game of planning a space voyage for whoever had a hundred grand for a seat onboard.
“[…] the old man something like a cadaver shot full of preserving fluid, no life in the skin, the face hard blue, ice cold the eyes. It’s the drug, got to be, cuts you off, way off, his fantasies still operating in the same tracks. […] the ineluctable fact of him as a phenomenon, historical evidence. […] see it, watch it, the straight suit, brief case, could be the board executive, is the board executive, born to it, raised in it, making a whole rebellious act out of redefining relation to it. What’s it now? Past tense?”
The account ended with the final reading of the week, Burroughs on stage in “ghastly green light” having survived the endless bids for his attention. His hotel room trashcan no doubt overflowing with copies of publications forced on him. Everyone worn out from a week of poetry partying and spinning tales and picking arguments just to feel like it all mattered. The story of the future space ship spun its own spell to the very end of my pages:
“[…] and some of you (us) will get to go on the ship and that’s pretty important, not saying who or what the criteria will be, but it was discussed, that voyage out, the real colony to be launched, full of elite and able units for the vehicle. Will I be one, is in our minds, all wanting to get to go. Or have we, as Tom said, left already?”
I show up in the publication, my name on a program remains as evidence that I was there, among the many others, along with an excerpt from the text I read:
Dutch: Domestic Interior
Like (maybe) something social
Will justify (the lack):
That’s the Protestantism–streak,
So to speak.
Now, as the archival work proceeds week after week in the present, going through those calendars of events at Beyond Baroque and my own files of unpublished work at home, I am cognizant of nothing so much as loss. So many of these people are now gone, though they live on in the archive, ghosts waiting for recognition, remembrance.
But is not only the absence of deceased friends, colleagues, rivals, not just the individual deaths that leave a specific gap in the fabric of a psyche. A deeper loss registers, the shifted ground, changed frames, distance from the circumstances that shaped lives and careers, relations and networks, in other times. The very condition in which those events occurred has vanished. For all of our savvy, self-conscious swagger, self-promotion and ambition, we were on a much smaller stage than we realized. What mattered most mattered less than we could have calculated. The inventory and the archive are eloquent testimony to that diminishment over time, even as they remain the testimonial to what occurred. The sense of loss generated by revisiting my archival past is not just for what is gone but instead, for what will never come again.
Poignant lines hang in the finishing passages of the anthology’s texts. Harris Schiff, returning to New York after the event, echoed the sentiments of many: “I hadn’t felt so good, so together, since I can’t remember when.” And others, cognizant they were no longer in the spotlight on the stage, remarked sadly as they headed to airports and terminals to return home: “We are not stars anymore.” But of course, they were.
In this week as I was writing, our dear friend and esteemed colleague Marjorie Perloff left us. A loss too profound to process. We will miss her in proportion to the enormous affection and admiration in which she was held.
Superb piece of work, Johanna. You should write your memoirs--perhaps about your double life in the artworlds and in academia. Jerry