Contraband1

The 1970s were strange times in Portland, Maine. I
remember walking along Fore Street on a warm,
humid October afternoon in 1975, when the
vegetation had gone bare and the sun was visibly
lower every day and the harbor was already cold,
thinking sardonically of the phrase: "Paris of the
'70s." Some guy had written a letter to The Portland
Times (one of the many alternative newspapers that
came went in a flash during those years) comparing
the surge of artistic and literary activity in Portland
to the same forces in Paris during the 1920s.
"Portland is the Paris of the '70s," he had written, or
something like that, and the phrase became a running
joke with us whenever we wanted to call attention to
cases of sentimental self-aggrandizement. All of us,
however -- artists, writers, musicians, theater people,
students -- knew what he was talking about.
Walking through the hazy October sunlight, I played
with the phrase while I was thinking how to write an
article for The Portland Times about Bruce Holsapple.
My cousin owned the building at 85 Park Street
where Holsapple lived and Contraband Press was
headquartered. On the top floor were four tiny
rooms. Each one housed a poet or an artist of some
kind, or merely some roughly college-age person who
dressed in hippie-like rags, drank and took drugs,
worked at some extremely grungy job like cutting
sails for sailboats, and had, or adopted for social
purposes, an artistic disposition -- which in those
days meant an alienated, perhaps cynical manner of
speaking and a nominally aesthetic personal
philosophy. For better or worse, people had or were
at least interested in philosophy back then. Especially
their own.
Holsapple lived up there in one of the rooms for
nearly ten years and was different from most of the
others because of his intensity and seriousness about
art. He wrote and published poems because he
thought poetry was important, both personally and
culturally. For a spell during the mid-1970s he
peddled his poems by tacking neatly typed and
calligraphied copies of them to an easel, and sitting in
front of the Portland Public Library, which then
resided almost opposite the end of Park Street on
Congress Street.
You could go there most sunny days and talk about
poetry or culture with Bruce, if you were serious
about it. Weird people hung around him -- drunks,
derelicts, art students, ex-convicts, other poets. An
old man named Raymond Jones came by with his
cane from time to time to talk and tell stories about
being a script editor for Alfred Hitchcock and living
in the same building with Ernest Hemingway. I was
astonished once to find out that a paperback science
fiction novel, The Cybernetic Brains, which I had bought
as a teenager was written by Ray.
He once told me in confidence that Bruce's main
problem was money -- you can't produce any
effective writing if you're always worrying

about where your next meal will come from. Bruce
was the caretaker of 85 Park Street, and so he paid a
reduced rent, but he had no income apart from a
dollar a week or so selling poems. He bought
groceries for a mysterious old man I never saw,
and apparently the old man gave him food from time
to time. Bruce also became an amateur naturalist and
learned to eat city vegetation, lamb's quarter, and so
on. Once he gathered and boiled a huge pot of
periwinkles. Excavating the meat from a single shell
was such trouble that he quickly turned to gathering
mussels instead.
Since Bruce's room served as the editorial and
production office of Contraband magazine, it was a
center of activity that attracted people. I don't know
exactly what Jim Bishop was doing at this time.
Occasionally he would turn up at 85 Park Street for
an evening or a few days, and there would be a flurry
of extra energy for talking about poetry. If Jim
happened to be at one of the regular Sunday morning
editorial meetings in Bruce's room, the discussion
would become exceptionally heated. Peter Kilgore --
who was, with Bruce, the core of Contraband --
would sit with his face sort of prune-colored, looking
down at the floor and waiting patiently for a chance
to make a statement. Bishop responded with great
emotion to everything Bruce said, and it wasn't until
years later in Burlington, Vermont, that I realized
how personally he took all talk of poetry. It was
almost the same thing as talking about his mother or
his wife. He would become expansively delighted or
exhaustively upset, so active and real was it in his
imagination.
Holsapple would often be on his feet, slightly bent at
the shoulders, his blond hair like a cloud around his
large and pleasant face, talking distractedly and
almost angrily to us, or more precisely, to the last
person who had commented on either the poems or
the subject at hand. The subject was always the
nature of poetry and art, what constitutes poetry and
art, how it does so, and which poetry or art is more
or less successful. True to the times, the general
editorial disposition was very open -- anything could
be acceptable for the pages of Contraband, although a
highly subjective judgment of quality was always
involved in editorial decisions. Once we decided to
reject a group of Kenneth Rexroth's translations.
Actually, I argued that including Rexroth would be
good for Contraband 's reputation and therefore for
its opportunities for funding, but Bruce and Peter
were very stubborn about their sense of quality.
They felt these poems were not up to snuff. I never
had a poem appear in Contraband, either.
When you look back at the old issues of Contraband,
you can get a feel for how ragged and frayed our
picture of the world was. When I say "our," I don't
necessarily mean the editors of Contraband, but most
people under about 30 years old in the late 1960s to
late 1970s. Some of the poetry in those magazines

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