Kevin Power, author of Where You're At: Poetics & Visual Art, Tuesday, October 25th

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Kevin Power's resume is impressive. He is Chair of American Literature at the Universidad de Alicante, he has been visiting professor throughout the Americas: Instituto Superior de Artes, Havana; University of Buffalo; University of San Diego; Universidad de Tucman, Argentina; universidad de Medellin, Colombia. He has been curator of many exhibitions the past 33 years, such as Julian Schnabel in Madrid, Puerto Rico: Los 90 at the Instituo de American in Granada, While Cuba Waits, in Los Angeles and la Bienal de Valencia. He has written catalogs on David Salle, Markus Lupertz, Carmen Laffon, Alex Katz, Georg Baselitz, Manuel Ocampo, Anselm Kiefer, Georg Immendorf and Emily Cheng, among others.

Kevin Power's book of interviews, Where You're At: Poetics & Visual Art, contains eight insightful interviews conducted in the mid-seventies by Power, then a graduate student from the Sorbonne in Paris, writing his dissertation on the conjunction between contemporary American poetics and art. Power traveled to Buffalo to interview Robert Creeley who was teaching there. Then he visited Jerome Rothenberg, living on an Indian reservation in upstate New York to talk about "Ethnopoetics." Back in Buffalo, Robert Bly gave a reading: Power remembers him floating across the stage in a white cloak. This was the era of the VietNam War and Bly was very vocal in his resistance with works like The Teeth Mother Naked at Last . They had a discussion about subjective poetry and myth. Then Power came to the West Coast to interview Robert Duncan, George & Mary Oppen, David Meltzer, Michael McClure, and Robert Duncan. This group of brilliant conversations records each of these writers' thoughts about poetics and how they relate to visual art. Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, West Coast Expressionism and Assemblage, are all discussed in fascinating exchanges. Along the way there's a lot of personal anecdote and revelation. Creeley talks about putting a drunk De Kooning to bed, then checking out his studio; McClure mentions his encounter with still-inebriated De Kooning 3000 miles away when the artist makes clay animals with his daughter. The Oppens admit they don't approve of Ben Shahn because he began to imitate himself. They tell startling stories about the expatriate Jewish community in Mexico City. Berkson discusses the New York School in relation to painters like Guston, Katz and Rivers, while Meltzer brings Berman, Herms and Conner to the discussion. I had wanted to publish this collection 35 years ago, but was refused permission by one estate: that obstacle has now been surmounted and it was worth the wait. In fact, the book has improved with age -- the conversations with Creeley and Duncan particularly are often cited as important in-depth discussions of their poetics and philosophy, but until now were only available in obscure little magazines such as Niagara, Line and Spanner.