Contraband 3

and Kilgore's rephrased Portland gathered the 1960s and '70s into the Maine version of those decades' personality.
The last issue of Contraband was published in 1985, after longer and longer periods of waiting for funding. Peter Kilgore went to Gary Lawless about that time with The Bar Harbor Suite, a continuation of Maine's intersection with the prosody of the 1960s, and Blackberry Press published it in 1987. Where Kilgore's last Contraband book, Drinking Wine Out of the Wind, is filled with terse Portland images, The Bar Harbor Suite peers into the journey of the early explorers on the whole Maine coast.
The heave out of the 1960s and mid-1970s was over by the mid-1980s. Portland was transformed into a touristy, money-ridden piece of the eastern seaboard, and a more conservative attitude to art and poetry emerged slowly, for better and worse. I won't characterize it here, beyond saying that in the 1990s we heard frequently of a "new formalism" in big-time poetry circles. The 1980s seemed to swamp the energy of the little magazines, and capsize them. Holsapple moved to Burlington, Seattle and Buffalo, and then spent four years in Odessa, Texas, as a professor. He now (2011) lives in New Mexico as a public school speech therapist. In Buffalo his persistence came under the direct influence of Robert Creeley, Charles Bernstein and Jack Clarke, all major accomplices or offshoots, in one way or another, of the poetic axis defined here with the names Kerouac, Ginsberg and Olson.

Peter Kilgore moved with reservations to Washington state. He kept writing his poems, and his last manuscript, "Descending Down to My Roots, I Sing," filled with sea imagery, found its way into Puckerbrush Review in 1999. But in the winter of 1992, long after his participation in
Contraband, his teaching in the Portland public schools, and his work as a founder of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance -- a writing cooperative in a time of many failed experiments in cooperation -- he died. It was a bigger loss for Maine literature than is generally realized, I think.

the sharpest pictures and ideas of what happened between 1975 and 2005. We'll see the transition that was made from the teeming and naive, but powerful, sensibilities of the counterculture, to the world of the 1980s, where every kid had his or her own car, hitchhiking was almost unheard of, and boredom became a parent of gratuitous violence in art, music and
reality. And to the 2000s, where poetry, when not industrialized, is increasingly marginal. Where people have gone out of sight in eastern Maine, or in universities, or elsewhere.
This is a long distance from sitting on the steps of 85 Park Street on a humid, moonlit summer night in 1975 with Holsapple, Bishop, Scott Penney, the painters Matt Blackwell and Scott Murray, and three or four other people who may or may not have persisted in their creative pursuits. "That June Moon," Bruce said, mocking the naive, conventional view that poetry rhymes.
You could see it there, huge and pale yellow, surrounded by humidity and thin clouds, climbing up over the fire escape where Bruce sat Sunday mornings to meditate on Portland Harbor. The smells of salt water, oily pavement and wild roses soaked the air. It felt like the first night you were in love as a teenager, hanging around outside the girl's house wondering whether to knock boldly on the door or tap furtively on her window. You wanted her, that was all you knew.
"The Moon in June," someone repeated. We all laughed. Someone else said something snide about Robert Frost. It would not do to be sentimental.

© Dana Wilde 2007; Puckerbrush Review 1996

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The Mind Errant
Forays in Reading

More observations on Contraband poetry:
The Bar Harbor Suite
A Long, Strange Trip
Vanishing Act