As I work through and with my archive, I want to supplement it online to show some highpoints of what I am finding there. The first in my imagined series, as a kind of originary moment, documents my talk on Louis Zukofsky, or better put the talk I hoped to give on his work, at the San Francisco Art Institute on 8 December 1978, the famous evening with Robert Duncan. This event was a watershed in my poetics; the occasion of the splitting of New American communitas from the social formation of Language Writing that ricocheted widely during the following decades; and the first in the series of literary controversies that have marked my work and career. Most recently, the online journal Dispatches from the Poetry Wars obtained and uploaded the tape of the event—which had been circulating since someone reproduced it without permission from the American Poetry Archive at San Francisco State University. The tape itself became the subject of lore and an object of struggle in its own right—a fusion of material text and mythic correspondence all archivists yearn for. What was missing were the images. [Contd. below]
Zukofsky quotes from “A”
Page 2, the first eight lines of “A”–7, has been lost but is necessary in this sequence.
