A word about Creeley, whose death didn't exactly haunt the Vancouver conference but which made for a palpable absence nevertheless. His influence on me has been indirect but vast: all the roads of the New American poetry that I discovered in the past demi-decade lead to and through him. I saw him twice: once at a reading in San Francisco in 2000, where he seemed quite frail, sitting down to put across his magnificent late poem "Histoire de Florida"; and at the Zukofsky conference last October, where he actually seemed much more vigorous. Thought about shaking his hand after his moving reminiscences of Zukofsky (Creeley was famously approachable and generous to young poets) but decided not to; I regret that now.