When I told my poet friend John Harn that I had been invited to write about the Eugene poetry scene for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, he chuckled and said, “Good luck with that,” alluding to the minefield I was stepping into. If there’s a sure way to alienate my fellow local poets, it would be to write such an essay. Who am I anyway to speak as a representative? Frankly, I said to John, when it comes to my taste in poetry, I still feel like an outsider in this town, just as I did when I first moved here from Buffalo in the summer of 2005. But then most of the local poets I know are all too aware of my critique of Eugene’s poetry scene by now, that it’s dominated by a neo-Romantic, Workshop aesthetic, or what Michael Leong calls “a poetics based on the phenomenalization of voice” (Contested Records: The Turn to Documentation in Contemporary North American Poetry). Of course, this doesn’t mean they agree with my assessment, rejecting, as many do, the notion of camps, of poetic affiliation with a specific school of poetry. In any case, I said to John, whatever I end up writing will not surprise anyone who knows me. Plus, if I write the piece as my own particular experience, seen through the lens of a Buffalo Poetics Program graduate, who can take issue with that?
Rather than beginning with my own journey, however, I will start by saying that the poetry community in Eugene is lively and has been lively since I moved here, with multiple reading series and venues, most notably Tsunami Books, thanks to owner Scott Landfield, a former “Hoedad,” the latter described affectionately by Robert Leo Hielman as “a bunch of hippie tree planters” with college degrees. Yet it is not so much Landfield’s connection to the late Ken Kesey and Merry Prankster Ken Babbs that has set the tone in terms of the kind of poetry you’ll find in Eugene, but rather the University of Oregon’s MFA Creative Writing program, thanks to a number of former graduates who have made Eugene their home after graduating with their degrees, including Cecelia Hagen, Maxine Scates, Ingrid Wendt, John Witte, Deb Casey, Rodger Moody, Frank Rossini, John Harn, Joan Dobbie, Amedee Smith, and others. (I should add here that Tsunami also sponsors well-attended spoken word readings, a series I rarely attend and so can’t speak to beyond this acknowledgement, as well as book launches and concerts featuring bluegrass, folk, classical, and occasionally jazz—it’s truly a cultural center). Along with Tsunami Books, Eugene is blessed with a number of independent books stores, including Black Sun, which has a generous selection of poetry as well as, in my opinion, the best philosophy/theory section in town, J. Michaels Books, located downtown and a favorite of many locals, and Smith Family Books, which used to have two locations, one downtown that is still open, and one near the University’s campus that reminded me of the Strand Book Store in Manhattan.
The nexus between Eugene’s history as a hippie town and the aforementioned graduates of the UO’s Creative Writing Program is evident in the first two books published by the recently launched Tsunami Press, Ken Babbs’ Cronies, A Burlesque: Adventures with Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead, followed by Bookstore Clerks & Significant Others, an anthology which includes former employees Michael McGriff and Matthew Dickman and a selection of some of the UO grads mentioned above, as well as former Creative Writing professors Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar.
Also included in the anthology is the late Erik Muller, former professor at Southwestern Community College in Coos Bay and at Lane Community College in Eugene, whose presence and substantial influence is sadly missed. Erik was one of Eugene’s most devoted supporters of poetry, giving and attending readings on a regular basis, and publishing Oregon writers through Fireweed journal, which he founded and edited, and his press Traprock Books. In Durable Goods: An Appreciation of Oregon Poets (2017), published locally by Ce Rosenow’s Mountains and Rivers Press, Erik celebrated the work of six of the state’s prominent poets, writing critical essays on Richard Dankleff, Barbara Drake, Kenneth O. Hanson, Paulann Petersen, Clemens Starck and Lex Runciman.
Durable Goods and, at the Airlie Press book launch for Picture X and Karen’s Skein of Light (2014), Erik Muller and, to his left, Karen McPherson (at Maude Kerns Art Gallery)
Other local presses include Laura LeHew’s Uttered Chaos, Rodger Moody’s Silverfish Review Press, and, as already mentioned, Mountains and Rivers Press, which published, during its roughly twenty-year run, not only local poets like Erik, Portland poet Laura Winter, and former Oregon Poet Laureate Paulann Peterson, but also—a pleasant surprise for me—Cid Corman. Along with these presses, Eugene has sustained numerous reading series since I have been here, including the Windfall Reading Series, hosted by the Eugene Public Library but run by the Lane Literary Guild (recently renamed as the Emerald Guild), as well as the River Road Reading Series, curated by Joan Dobbie and Erica Goss who, like Tsunami, have an anthology in the works, Jenny Root and Carter McKenzie’s Springfield Reading Series (Springfield being Eugene’s neighboring city), LeHew’s Poetry for the People Reading Series, originally housed at Tsunami Books and formerly hosted by the late Charles Thielman under a different name, my own A New Poetry Reading Series, and more recently John Harn’s Studio 7 Poetry Series, which I currently host. More than any of the series above, Mike Copperman’s Oregon Writers’ Collective bridged the gap between the University and the local poetry scene, inviting writers from UO, where Copperman worked as an adjunct, as well as local talent, like Sam Roxas-Chua, one of the key figures who emerged out of Toni and Michael Hanner’s Red Sofa Poets group, also supported by the Lane Literary Guild, and finally there is the Burning Down the Barnes reading series, named as such because of its location at Barnes & Nobles.
While only three of the series above are still operating today, this was more or less the scene I stepped into when we moved to Eugene in 2005, having just completed my dissertation and still very much in the fold of the Buffalo Poetics Program (BPP). After attending a number of readings, I felt like I had stepped back in time. This was not only due to the kind of poetry I was hearing but also the town of Eugene itself, the spirit of which reminded my wife Tammy and I of our undergraduate years in Durango, Colorado in the late 70s/early 80s. Not only were people still smoking weed—a scent hard to miss in this town, even before marijuana was legalized in 2015—and listening to the Grateful Dead, Eugenians had that laid back hippie vibe that seemed largely to have disappeared from the rest of the United States, particularly the eastern part of the country, from our experience, at least. And then there were the poets, most of whom seemed to be writing the kind of poetry I had read in my early twenties but no longer followed, so-called Mainstream or Workshop poetry. William Stafford, for example, is revered in this town (and state), a poet whose mention would have solicited dismissive chuckles in Buffalo, much in the same way the passing mention of Gertrude Stein at a Tsunami reading devoted to UO’s MFA students did some years back (dismayed, I squeaked a barely audible “I like her”), or how a visiting professor was scolded for assigning Lyn Hejinian’s My Life in one of their classes. No wonder so few of the Language poets’ books grace the stacks at UO’s Knight Library (named after Nike founder Phil Knight, whose influence on the University is substantial) last I checked. Perhaps this was the reason Charles Bernstein wondered why we had chosen to move to Oregon when I told him of our plans.
If I was initially taken aback by what appeared to be the city’s conservative poetic sensibilities—in contrast but not in opposition to the city’s leftist bent—there was a positive side to this assessment insofar as it presented me with an opportunity to contribute something different to Eugene, namely, to start my own reading gig. A New Poetry Series (2008-2014) would tap into my “allies” at Portland’s Spare Room Reading Series, which was run collectively at the time by David Abel, Maryrose Larkin and others, a refuge made known to me by my fellow BPP grads Alicia Cohen, Tom Fisher, and Joel Bettridge who also lived in Portland. It was David Abel, who I had spoken with earlier about starting up a series, who alerted me to the call for work and/or proposals by the Downtown Initiative for the Visual Arts (DIVA), an art gallery located in downtown Eugene. With DIVA’s go ahead and their institutional support, which included occasional spotlights by the invaluable Eugene Weekly, the series started off with a bang: a reading by Robert Grenier. Fresh off of transcribing our talk with RG, conducted when I still lived in Buffalo and later published by my colleague and fellow interviewer Jonathan Skinner as Farming the Words: A Talk with Robert Grenier, Bob was an obvious choice, after all I was living on the West Coast now and Bob was just a short eight hours away in Bolinas—compared to residing in Buffalo, that did seem close by at the time. Needless to say (or not), the reading was a great success, even though the initial reaction to the slide show of his drawing poems was a mildly amusing disbelief. Is this guy crazy, or what? But by the end of the evening, Grenier—who I am certain none of the audience members had heard of before—had won them over, accepting his challenge, the struggle involved in deciphering the words in his poems, exhibited by even Bob himself.
Robert Grenier, “AFTER / NOON / SUN / SHINE” (http://jacketmagazine.com/35/iv-grenier-ivb-bernstein.shtml)
That reading was followed up by Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand, both living in Portland, and would later include readings by the Spare Room poets mentioned above, as well as Rodney Koeneke, Lindsay Hill, Sam Lohman, James Yeary, Standard Schaefer, Alison Cobb, Jen Coleman, fellow Buffalonian Linda Russo (traveling down from Pullman, WA), Endi Bogue Hartigan and others. But it wasn’t just the Spare Room community that I tapped into, it was their reading series itself and the poets touring the Pacific Northwest on their way down to the Bay Area and beyond. However, due to A New’s increasingly smaller audiences, I quickly learned what most curators of reading series understand all too well, that nobody is going to show up to hear poets they aren’t familiar with—especially when hosted by a poet they themselves don’t know—unless you pair them with those they do know, namely local or regional poets, and so, despite my disappointment in the seeming lack of curiosity on the part of my now fellow Eugenians, I began scheduling the poets I was primarily interested in at the time with the locals, thanks to the assistance of Ce Rosenow, who happened to be my office mate at Lane Community College at the time. If ultimately A New Poetry Series failed at making any converts in Eugene—an effect difficult to measure—for me, it was well worth the effort. In fact, I eventually began to look upon the reading series in a selfish way, as scheduling the kind of poetry readings I myself wanted to attend. As such, along with the Portlanders mentioned above, I had the great privilege of hosting an impressive list of poets, including Kit Robinson, Laynie Browne, K. Silem Mohammad, Kate Greenstreet, Portland poets Emily Kendal Frey, Zachary Schomburg, Dan Raphael and John Beer, former Buffalo colleagues Kyle Schlesinger, Kristen Gallagher and Chris Alexander, as well as Charles Alexander, Drew Gardner and Katie Degentesh, Joshua Edwards, Lynn Xu, Anthony Robinson, Chris Nealon, Barbara Henning and others.
It was through this process of mixing local poets with outsiders—by which I mean not only those residing outside of Eugene and its surrounds but those whose aesthetic affiliation was fundamentally different if not antagonistic to their own—I came to know and befriend many of Eugene’s poets. This process of familiarizing myself with the local community was hastened by the acceptance of my manuscript Picture X by Airlie Press, a publishing collective founded by Donna Henderson, Matridarshana (Jess) Lamb, Carter McKenzie, and Anita Sullivan, and which included at the time Cecelia Hagen and Chris Anderson.
(Picture X dealt with what is no doubt the greatest influence on Eugene’s poets: the physical environment of the Pacific Northwest—in other words NATURE—something I found impossible to ignore yet difficult to write after Buffalo’s post-industrial landscape). Given the style of the work Airlie had published at that point, I was surprised (and delighted) by their acceptance of my work. I was also more than pleased to discover that my partner in crime, the other poet Airlie chose to invite into their fold that year, was Karen McPherson, a French professor at UO who specialized in translating Québécois poets and who, as such, had taught Nicole Brossard, a poet much discussed in Buffalo when I was there. Part of having one’s manuscript published by Airlie Press, which is still thriving sixteen years after its inception, means agreeing to work as an editor/publisher for three years, which includes attending monthly meetings. Since members of the press at the time lived in various places, mostly Eugene, Salem and Portland, that meant commuting together for our monthly meetings and it also meant airing our differences (and similarities) when it came to our aesthetics, conversations I think all of us miss, now that our tenures have passed. As for our editorial decisions, we waited until the meetings themselves, when all the members were present, to make our cases, whether this had to do with selecting new members and their manuscripts or with editing our peers’ manuscripts that Airlie was publishing that year. As a collective, decision-making was based on consensus, which meant that we all had to agree in the end with the press’s choices, a not-so-easy task at times. We thus emphasized the importance of suspending our own individual tastes and, instead, evaluated, as much as possible, manuscripts and specific poems on their own terms and what we thought the poet was trying to achieve. Ultimately, it was this practice that was transformative for me when it came to the Eugene community (and beyond), even if, in the end, I still gravitate toward the poetic lineage that brought me to Buffalo, work that follows from the Modernist and Postmodernist tradition of innovation (Pound’s “make it new”) and the turn to language, a poetics that may indeed be passé by now as well.
Both titles were published by Airlie Press in the Fall of 2016
After five years with Airlie Press—during which we welcomed into the fold two of my favorite Eugene poets—Tim Whitsel and Kelly Terwilliger—Karen McPherson and I continued our work together by curating the Windfall Reading Series for two years, combining Karen’s knowledge of the local scene, including the University, with the Portland poets I knew from the Spare Room series, one of the highlights being the reading by Kaia Sand and C. S. Giscombe, who happened to be related to Karen through her cousin, Cecil’s ex-wife.
This formula proved to be quite successful with audiences and it is something I am currently trying to extend with my curation of the Studio 7 Poetry Series launched by John Harn. Finding ways to mix the innovative with more mainstream (lyrical) styles of writing ends up enhancing both. (Of course, what gets lost here by using these categorizations is the wide variety of voices that fall under such taxonomies. This is as true of mainstream or “conventional” poetry as it is of the so-called Language poets.)
"The Eugene Studio 7 Poetry Reading was such a delight! We got there early and at first I thought we had directions wrong pulling up near a grange building across from some sleepy cows in the countryside. Then we found Tim Shaner, and Studio 7 gallery tucked in with paintings up and down the walls, and suddenly (clockwork?) poets and poetry listeners all appeared... a good and super engaged crowd on a Sunday afternoon! It was such a pleasure to meet Carter McKenzie and Willa Schneberg and hear them read and celebrate books together! Many thanks to Tim for curating this and the gallery for hosting us. Loved the format—a lively round robin of two 10 minute reading sets each, preceded by 1 poem each by the previous readers in the series (Janice Rubin and John Harn) so the round necklaces forward. Also felt special seeing friends I had not seen in a while, being there with my husband and our son and his friends, and chatting with kind people after the reading who had listened closely. Thanks to all who came out!”
Endi Bogue Hartigan’s Facebook post on her Studio 7 Poetry reading (September 14, 2023)
Whether it’s Eugene’s influence or the perspective old age tends to bring, as Anthony Robinson—a poetic ally when it comes to our more or less shared tastes (unfortunately, he lives an hour away in Oakridge)—put his own aesthetic mellowing in a recent exchange, in the end what has proven most important to me is community, the key feature of what I call “Support Staff Poetics.” This also happens to be one of the key aspects of the Language “moment” that was emphasized and practiced in Buffalo, that poetry is not confined to the poem itself but to the infrastructure of magazines, presses, and the talk and reading series that help promote them. Whether poetry is written in isolation or in the “midst of the action,” as William Carlos Williams described his own practice of writing in the interstices of his workaday life, above all it is a social medium and that means learning to live and embrace differences.
A final thank you to recent Eugene transplant Lori Anderson Moseman for introducing me to rob mclennan, whose treasure of a blog I was well aware of prior to our meeting. Lori, your presence has already enriched our community, whether or not it knows it (yet). And my apologies to anyone I’ve left out of or mischaracterized in this report.
Tim Shaner is
the author of Radio Ethiopia: Testimony of a Development Brat (forthcoming
Spuyten Duyvil, 2024), Noch Ein at the Stein: A Poetic Essay on Beer,
Conversation, and Hippycrits (Spuyten Duvil, 2022), I Hate Fiction: A
Novel (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018) and the poetry collection Picture X
(Airlie Press, 2014). His work has appeared in Broken Lens Journal, Exquisite
Pandemic, Juxtapositions, Plumwood Mountain: A Journal of Ecopoetry and
Ecopoetics, Colorado Review, Jacket, Kiosk, The Rialto, Ambit and elsewhere.
He teaches writing at Lane Community College.
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