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 for more than a decade now we have been
hearing about 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 (2007) 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 Bar Harbor Suite
A Long, Strange Trip

The Mind Errant
Forays in Reading