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The Poetry and Cinema Conference, held in �鶹ӰԺ, Colorado June 24th through 26th, was a first-of-its-kind event, as much about the differences as about the similarities of those two mediums. Tom Gunning of the University of Chicago, whose Mellon Grant provided the funding for the conference, stated in his opening remarks: “We want to articulate the abyss or the gap between these two forms.” The week-end was a collaboration between Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and the University of Colorado’s Film Studies and Creative Writing Departments, as well as that institution’s Brakhage Center. Daniel Boord, who heads the Brakhage Center, initially put Gunning in touch with the Kerouac School two years ago, and the various fusions were forged from there. Although working in different mediums, there has always been an aesthetic fit between Stan Brakhage, a leading figure in the avant-garde film movement, and Allen Ginsberg, who founded the Kerouac School along with fellow poet Anne Waldman. Waldman still heads Naropa’s Summer Writing Program. Gunning’s presentation included a screening of El Atlantis, one of the few films of New York poet Frank Kuenstler, which depicts the Third Avenue El cutting through the city. As Gunning pointed out: “The footage was shot before the El was closed in May of 1955, but the film’s date is given as 1973…. Cinema, according to some theorists, exists in the present tense…. Yet one could also claim the opposite: every film has already happened; it is by nature historical, a record of the past…. Cinematic time is inherently a two way street, past and present simultaneously.”

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