On Friday, March 18 and Saturday, March 19, there's a huge poetry event taking place in St. Louis. For those who pay excruciating attention to contemporary poetry, this will mean something to you: the event was posted on Silliman's Blog. (I know. I said "!" too.) If that means nothing to you, which is probably the case, I'll do my best to explain just how cool this event is going to be.
"Kayak at the Confluence: A Poetry Tribute to George Hitchcock," examines the life and career of the "lone oarsman," behind Kayak magazine, an extremely influential Bay Area literary mag published during the 1960s. When Hitchcock passed away last year, the New York Times obituary gestured towards his impact and larger-than-life-ness: "Mr. Hitchcock had a strong personality, visual flair and keen eye for writing talent. The long list of poets and writers who found a home in his pages included W. S. Merwin, Anne Sexton, Robert Bly, Margaret Atwood and Hayden Carruth. Criticism, reviews, the occasional prose piece and Mr. Hitchcock’s collages rounded out the content. Kayak enjoyed fights. It set up in opposition to revered publications like The Kenyon Review and The Hudson Review, and nourished a spirited contempt for what it saw as the overly intellectual poetry of writers like Robert Lowell and Richard Wilbur. Creatively frugal, Mr. Hitchcock acquired an offset press from the Pacific Steamship Line that had been used to print menus and learned to run it himself. He printed one issue on paper that the Army had rejected for target-practice use."
The event, organized by Liz Hughes Wiley, a former student of Hitchcock's (who has just moved to St. Louis), kicks off on Friday with a 6pm opening reception at the Gaslight Theater (360 Boyle, in the Central West End. Tickets are $10, $15 at the door). The theater's home company, the St. Louis Actors Studio, will do a reading performance of Promethus Found: A Tragic-Comedy in Two Acts, a play Hitchcock wrote in 1958. (He also wrote poetry.) On Saturday, all 64 issues of Kayak will be on display (including the one printed on military target practice paper), at the St. Louis Ethical Society at 9001 Clayton Road. There'll also be a full day of workshops and readings, starting at 9am, with a finale "keynote tribute reading," featuring Albert Goldbarth, Mark Jarman, Mark Doty, William Harmon, Nancy Willard, Gary Young, Willis Barnstone, Marjorie Simon (Hitchock's long-time partner), as well as local poets like Richard Newman of River Styx. That takes place at 7pm, and tickets are $20 for the reading, $40 for an all-day pass (plus $5 more if you get your tickets at the door). For the short take/big overview, click here for a press release; for the long, complex and hyperlinked version, here is the event website.
