Does Dana Gioia matter? Obviously more than we know...

An alert Cave Canem alum spotted this in the big man's bio--

"An influential critic as well, Gioia's 1991 book 'Can Poetry
Matter?', which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle
Award, is credited with reinvigorating the role of poetry in
contemporary American culture and giving rise to popular poetry
movements such as poetry slams and cowboy poetry."

Is that true? Did Dana Gioia's lofty 1991 tome miraculously give birth to slams that I participated in four years earlier?

Wow. He's magic.

Look at these faces.

These six people allegedly held a West Virginia black woman captive for an entire week, choking, raping and stabbing her while forcefeeding her feces and peppering her with the N-word. They doused her in scalding water, ripped out her hair and made her drink from a toilet.

Meanwhile, we're in the business of poetry.

...but there's a little wisp of a rumor that somewhere, someday, you may be able to get up close and personal with the bloggers of Harriet. Not only will you be able to gaze upon our actual faces, but there may even be a chance to revel and weep as jewels of poetic wisdom drip from our lips!

OK, who am I kidding? There's only one of us the public's clamoring for, and I'm going to make sure you good people get the access you deserve. So before this rumored appearance, which is rumored to be within a month or so, I am selling armbands that may get you a privileged place in line to buy a ticket to get close enough to share oxygen with Kwame Dawes.

You heard right.

With your valid charge card number, not only can I offer actual access, I can guarantee that our most prolific blogger will write you a paragraph--or a line of his sumptuous poetry--while you wait!

This is a one-time offer, providing the rumored appearance actually becomes a reality, which I assure you it will. This is your all-access pass to the Renaissance man, a chance to be touched by genius, an unparalleled opportunity to someday be able to utter the deception "Kwame Dawes is a friend of mine."

The line starts forming to the right, and as soon as the credit card emblazoning thingie warms up, we can get this party going. If you're gonna be a poet, ya gotta know a poet.

I can introduce you to the best.

Rigoberto's got me thinking about poetry and music, and I've been thinking about my favorite singers, who always seem to be poets at heart.

So 1 a.m. on Sunday morning is the perfect time to unveil my guilty pleasure, the man second only to Smokey Robinson in my heart. This was tonight's lullaby, the song I needed to hear in order to end the day, and the reason I'll wake up with a poem in my pen tomorrow.

Goodnight, all.

>

Like many other folks, I need a cap to my summer--a day or seminal event that bellows this is it, the dog days are officially over. This year, I actually had--if indeed this is possible--two ways to end the season.

The first one was to be a personal pleasure--Martin Espada's 50th birthday bash at the Bowery. Not only was this a chance to reconnect with dozens of my favorite poets and send them off with a hug and kiss into their respective autumns, but it provided a rare opportunity to heap much due praise upon The Espada, who is everyone's poet whether everyone knows it or not.

The very next day I planned to wave adieu to summer again from the sultry confines of the ATL and the Decatur Book Festival. There, over Labor Day weekend, I was set to read with Sherman Alexie, who I haven't laid eyes on since he flattened me during a People's Poetry Gathering sendup of the Taos Poetry World Heavyweight Championship bout. He beat me about as badly as I beat Jimmy Santiago Baca in....hey, wait a minute.

Anyhoo, not only was our own Kwame Dawes gonna be in the house, but I was all set to shake hands with Kinky Friedman and finally meet Natasha Trethewey so I could bask in her considerable aura and maybe absorb a smidgen of her talent. Best of all, I had plotted and planned with several of my Cave Canem brethren to meet up at Gladys Knight's Chicken & Waffles for what we hope will become an annual pilgrimage. If you think Tabasco and syrup have no business touching each other on a plate, well you, my friend, have a lot to learn.

So it's been a fantastic summer, and it was set to end ultra-fantastically. But since I'm typing this from my couch on Saturday evening, you can assume that something went awry.

Suddenly, the air is charged.

My 12-year-old is banging around the apartment, trying on first-day-at-school outfits, cooing at her image when the ensembles work and screaming like a banshee when they don't. She has copied the official 7th-grade school supply list over two or three times, which I guess was somehow preferable to simply printing it out from the computer.

Armed with the list, we headed for Staples, and she trounced the aisles looking for a mirror (so she could see how she looked holding various folders) and gushing over her very first Texas Instruments fancy-pants, bell-and-whistles calculator. I have never seen anyone so excited about the beginning of school.

Poised on the edge of the emotional maelstrom known as middle school (hello pimples, gossip and--omigod--boys), she is dancing toward the chaos with both eyes open, singing even. (If you have not heard the entire score of "High School Musical 2" screeched by a tuneless preteen, you have not lived. And you will no longer want to.)

I can't stop looking at her. Amazing. And I can't help but think back to when I was 12, penning anguished little poems in my wire-bound notebook, thinking there wasn't anyone but me writing, no one but me needing to write. I hadn't read any poems in school (we're talking about the Chicago public school system, where even math was an elective), and certainly didn't know that there were people who made a living writing poetry, and that was an option available to me.

My granddaughter, however, is a different breed.

...and I'm exhausted. But I'm sitting in front of my laptop, bleary-eyed, listening to a muted Lightnin' Hopkins and staring at the 17th line of a poem that I've been working on for four years.

This profession--this writing of measured and meaningful lines--is for crazy people. I can hear the warm, contented snoozing of my husband and granddaughter, and I long to join them in the sleep of the blissfully unaware, but there's this--line. I could forget it for now, sleep on it, but I can't help feeling that I'm on the verge of a breakthrough. And after four years of nada breakthrough, I'm not about to doze off and miss the big moment.

I know that this line will complete the poem--finally--and that the poem has the potential to be a soul-shaker, a disturbance, a ripple in the cosmos. It's like being on the verge of childbirth. It's just that I've been in labor so long everyone's lost interest. Before giving up on me an hour or so ago, the 12-year-old dismissed my delirium with an exasperated roll of her eyes and this oft-repeated phrase: "Oh, that poem. Grandma, it's just a line."

Just a line? They really don't get it, do they? There's absolutely no way to explain that nine words, tweaked mercilessly at least once a week for the past 1460 days, can feel so vital, so damned necessary, and not tomorrow, but right now. It's like childbirth. You struggle and sweat to bring something into being. And once it's there, out in the open air, you should feel relieved--but damned if you don't miss the pain.

Certainly couldn't afford to, but this past week I decided to reread the poetry books I keep rereading. Trying to think of why I keep coming back to these volumes, I realized that I was thinking too much. Let's just say riveting narrative, muscle, muscle, muscle, guts. Let's say porch stories, inherent music. Let's say I'm a creature of habit.

For the record (not in the order I crave them, but in the order I picked them up):

Sherry Fairchok, The Palace of Ashes
June Jordan, Haruko/Love Poems
Stephen Dobyns, Velocities
Rafael Campo, The Other Man was Me: A Voyage to the New World
Tyehimba Jess, Leadbelly
Steve Davenport, Uncontainable Noise
Diane Ackerman, Jaguar of Sweet Laughter
Elizabeth Alexander, Venus Hottentot
Roger Fanning, The Island Itself
Jan Beatty, Boneshaker
Richard Wright, Haiku: This Other World
Lydia Melvin, South of Here
Sharon Olds, Strike Sparks
Roger Bonair-Agard, Tarnish and Masquerade
Remica Bingham, Conversion
Douglas Goetsch, Nobody's Hell
Kwame Dawes, Wisteria
Frank X Walker, Buffalo Dance
Tony Gloeggler, One Wish Left

And what a week it was. I hope this list will pique your curiosity, spark a discussion, at the very least lead you to check out and discover a poet you didn't know before. Questions and conversation welcome. Post your own can't-resist list!

Happy summer perusing.

Seacrest. Out.

....that approximately 13 seconds after Charles Simic was named poet laureate, I went alookin' for him on YouTube. And I discovered that he is the only person with a heartbeat who hasn't been captured by a cell phone camera in bad light and plastered across cyberspace. He is simply NOT THERE.

That was very disappointing. You see, every time a laureate gets his wings, I launch into an intensive study of his writings, background, muttered wisdoms and, yes, his voice. I'm convinced there's a prescribed path to the big office, and I wanna be on it.

You heard right. I've got my eyes on the prize. I want to follow proudly in the footsteps of the 12 white men, 2 white women and one black dove who've been undisputed sultans of the stanza. But every couple of years, when I study up on the current laureate, I find I've got a long, long way to go. All I need to encourage me is the appointment of a a young chipper whose stature seems vaguely attainable. Instead I get this:

I I don't know when this video was filmed, although it looks to be about 10 years ago. What I do know: this is Marc Smith, inventor of the poetry slam, devil or angel, miracle worker or madman, love 'im or hate 'im. This is what he does that made me do what I do.

I'm positively weepy watching this.

Enjoy.

I try not to think about dying much.

Whenever I do, naive as it may be, I dismiss it as something that happens to other people, usually in very spectacular ways. A longago plague sweeps through eastern Europe. A car bomb explodes in a crowded bazaar. A distraught lover climbs over a rail and leaps into the drink. Splashy demises always seem so far away, so detached from the realm.

Then there's what I consider "regular" dying, which pretty much consists of extremely old people who smile in their sleep and just drift away..or obscenely attractive people with broken hearts, dwindling to mere air, surrounded by a loving beside circle of family and friends. This type of dying is usually accompanied by music.

I never think of poets succumbing. I can't wrap my head around notebooks of unfinished stanzas, empty stages, slim volumes with blank pages. The poets I grew up with and around are so utterly necessary, so vital. I'm not sure how I'd process my life without their help. I never thought I'd have to.

But lately poets have been dying, just like ordinary people.

Recently reflecting rather gleefully on the second half of my first century, I felt exactly one twinge of regret. The Motown era is over.

Of course, it's been over for some time. Diana Ross is now officially deranged. Smokey Robinson seems to have gone the Vegas route, and the Miracles are no more. The Four Tops are no longer four, or on top. Stevie Wonder flashes his brilliance about once every couple of years. And the Jackson 5--well, it's now basically the Jackson 1, and his nose is missing.

Plus, I spent last year in the company of some very precocious 7th and 8th graders who not only didn't know what "records" were, but had never heard of Motown. Am I the only one who believes that "My Girl" and "Tears of a Clown" should be a part of every budding teen's curriculum?

Anyways, as far as I'm concerned, the Temptations were Motown. Check out the video...isn't it the coolest, slickest, sexiest thing you've seen in years? Those handsome lads in sharkskin were my introduction to poetry. Their songs were lyrical, their songs told the bestest boy-meet-girl-boy-loses-girl-boy-begs-relentlessly stories, their songs were where I first learned that life could sound pretty damned good.

But the modern-day Temps, full of imposters and also-rans, are simply a hollow whisper of the original. From left to right in the opening moment of the YouTube clip--Melvin Franklin, the bassman, was the most recent to die, of heart failure; Eddie Kendricks succumbed to lung cancer; Otis Williams is the only original Temp still alive; Paul Williams committed suicide and David Ruffin died in a Philly crack house. Damn.

So what kind of a Motown baby am I? Obsessed. I''m madly obsessed with Otis Williams, because he's all that's left, because he represents a time when everything was starkly choreographed and poured into passionate little stanzas. Love, passion, deceit, heartbreak, all of it trapped in a glistening black disc, released by the plop of a needle, and played over and over again. And a little colored girl on the west side of Chicago listened, and felt the song in everything.

I want to grab hold to the moment that began this, the moment when I felt that poetry could tell it all. That's why I'm the gal at the jukebox, wailing every Motown song long and aloud, trying to hold onto something that slipping away.

Am I crazy? Is it just me?

I am sitting in the living room of one Mr. Garland Thompson Jr., who at the moment s a very, very busy man. He is a one-man whirling dervish, a battery-operated bulldozer, a little-bleary eyed at the moment. He is pretty much single-handedly organizing the 10th anniversary version of the West Coast Poetry Slam Championships, and just watching him is making my head pound.

It's a massive undertaking. Ten teams, a few errant slammers with unbridled egos, posters, ID badges, brochures, newspaper coverage, food vendors, a DJ, travel arrangements, finding campsites for the teams, staging, lanyards, competition rules. And as it gets closer to to the big day (today, in fact), Garland gets a little snippy. His eyes glaze over a little. OK, a lot.

I'm in awe. I've always enjoyed the fruits of the festival organizer's labor. I get my all-access pass, nibble on cheese in the green room, get on the stage when someone says "Get on the stage." So, staying with Garland for these couple of days, I"m learning a lot. He's a madman. He has to be.

First, the details, just in case you're in Cali and want to have a huge amount of fun: The show's today and tomorrow from noon to 6 at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur. Yes, that's BIG SUR, the lush and luscious jewel of th California coastline. It's such a cool event that it's worth logging off right now, getting a last minute flight and winging your way there--here--just so you can hang out and party with the po' people and say you did.

That's it from the sun. Garland's going on about badges right now. Should be a kickass show.

I know that many of us submit our work to contests. I know for a fact that at least two Harrieteers, Ange and myself, have sent manuscripts to the annual National Poetry Series competition, and were lucky enough to have books published as a result. (Harrieteers...I like that. It's like Mouseketeers, but without the ears or simmering psychoses...)

Sending your poems off to be judged is a little like dressing your daughter up in her finest clothes, making sure her skin is sparkling and her hair is perfect, kissing her goodbye, and putting her on a first-class flight to a college that hasn't even accepted her yet.

The key is to keep it all in perspective. I enter fewer and fewer competitions (just no time), and when I do it's for the perverse thrill of having my passion, my lifeblood, fondled by an stranger (OK, maybe there's a simmering psychosis after all, and maybe it's not so simmering). For me, the contests are still fun. Most of them anyway.

We've got a couple of categories to deal with, of course. Some contests are looking for a damned good poem, and the author of that ditty gets cash money and publication in a mag or literary journal. Other contests, usually sponsored by publishers, ask for a completed manuscript. If yours is chosen as pick o' the crop, the book gets published and maybe you get little spending money besides. Then there are the immensely popular are-you-worth-it contests--although I'm sure organizers are cringing at the word "contest"--sponsored by the NEA and various regional grant-giving entities. They have money and they want to give it to you--but only if you can prove to them that you're a worthwhile investment.

Finished with 3rd MFA residency. Incredibly tired. Just back from lobster bake thingie where no lobsters were visibly baked. Ten days in creative nirvana. Maine cooperated, kinda (rain). Shunned TV and most internet, have no idea at all what's going on in the world. Got some incredibly luscious news, but can't tell ya yet. My Spenserian stanzas worked! Fell in love with May Swenson and fell in love again with June Jordan. Thrilled to learn the connection between Sanchez and Bogan. Third-semester critical essay looms. Studying quite intensively with the inimitable Annie Finch. Woman never met a dactyl she didn't like. I will be worked mercilessly. It will be exquisite. Let's get that party started. Stonecoast feels like my home now. I'm tired. Really tired. Wanted to say hi to you guys. Tired. Six-hour drive looms. Tired.

Tired.

Whew.

Last week, I was on the faculty of one of the most challenging, groundbreaking creative retreats in the country, surrounded by students whose work was so good it made me shudder.

This week, I'm up at midnight in a sweltering dorm room, staring at a scanned version of Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" and wondering if I can spit out a joint mimicking his style before exhaustion pulls me under. This is--I can't believe it either--HOMEWORK.

Welcome to the world of the poet/teacher/student known as me, doggedly pursuing a graduate degree in being creative. With very little turnaround time, I have morphed from respected teacher to the marginal superhero known as MFA Girl. I don't wear a mask, because my eyes are bloodshot anyway. My cape is the scratchy little towel I wear to scoot across the hall to the bathroom. I can't fly. I can barely even walk. Right now, MFA stands for Must Fall Asleep.

How, oh how, did I get here?

Please. Please. No more. I can’t take another earthy diva bellowing an ode to her ample hips. No mores slithery temptresses urging loverboys to traverse the landscape of their bodies. Let’s do away with rotund wordsmiths defiantly extolling the joys of foodstuffs and fatback. Can we finally bid adieu to every minority—little people, black Republicans, Dick Cheney’s hunting buddies—whimpering about his or her miserable lot in life? And why are poets so angry? Black people mad about being marginalized, poor people mad about having to stand in long lines for handouts, minorities mad about being racially profiled, Asians mad about being stereotyped, women mad about disparities in pay, teenagers pissed off about curfews, Republicans mad about their rapidly waning power, Democrats mad at themselves for failing to take advantage of the Republicans’ rapidly waning power. And everybody’s writing a poem and looking for a stage and a hot mic.

So much…enthusiasm.

You may have noticed that my voice has been strangely silent, that I haven't been whispering anything at all into Harriet's ear. That's because for the last week, I've been teaching at Cave Canem, the intense and inimitable retreat for African-American writers. The only choice we have here is to immerse ourselves in what is offered, to revel in community, to nurture the haven.

Fifty-four writers have lived. wept and laughed together since last Sunday. It is an experience that cannot be measured, something so huge in our lives that we stutter and stammer in our attempts to describe it. Then we stop attempting to describe it. There's no need.

None of us are fools. We know that the African-American creative voice is not where it most needs to be--in classrooms where no faces mirror ours; on stages that have never known us; in the journals that shape the next days of the canon.

We have much to say. Here's your chance to listen.

In a review of my book "Teahouse of the Almighty" in the Summer/Fall 2007 issue of Gulf Coast, in the best review I've ever received of anything I've ever written, in a strikingly glowing review, in one of those reviews that makes me wanna kiss the reviewer's toes, in one of those reviews that makes me wanna--as the Godfather of Soul James Brown might say--jump back and kiss m'self, I was called...

wait for it...

here it comes....

"a speech pathologist's wet dream."

You may now talk among yourselves.

Everybody's sayin' it: "PhDs are the new MFAs."

Say it ain't so. I'm out of money.

Anybody out there got a PhD in creative writing? Why? Is it sexier? Do you get more dates? Does it make you smarter? Whaaat?

I have a friend named Rachel Kann. Her new book, "10 for Everything" is fresh off the press; I got my copy in the mail today. Turn the book over and marvel at one of the most sizzling author photos I've ever encountered--all gams and attitude, adorned with pigtails and an unflitered cig. The girl ain't playin'.

Rachel Kann is a poet. She says so herself in that little self-indulgency called "About the Author" that so often pops up on a book's last inside page, where no one actually manages to look. But there it is, black and white, loud and clear: Rachel Kann is a poet.

"10 for Everything" however, is not a poetry book. It's a sexy, quirky,revelatory work of fiction which quickly becomes an addiction. The underlying spark for that addiction is that fact that...well, Rachel Kann is a poet. The inventive yet lyrical irreverence that make her such a whiz at stanzas infuses her fiction with twists of language that quickly become addictive.

And I just finished "She's Gone," an amazing debut novel by by our own Mr. Kwame Dawes. In this textured tale of lust and politics, his sizzling prose sports a signature that will be instantly familiar to anyone who knows and appreciates his poetic voice.

In fact, my favorite poet of all time has also penned twenty--count 'em, twenty--novels. And while he tries his best to squelch his poetic tendencies in the pages of his mysteries, he fails miserably. I'd recognize that poetry anywhere.

I'm thrilled to read Kann, Dawes and my all-time favorite poet, to savor those fictional passages long and aloud. Which got me to thinking...who are some other poets who are also successful fiction writers, or fiction folks who also write poetry? And are poets naturally drawn to fiction with a heavy poetic element?

What fun! I want to be sexy, cool and accessible too! So here's my very own pro-consumerist thingie! Thanks, Kenny!

(You may notice that I don't touch as many things as Alexandra does, and I wouldn't know a Bvulgari if it fell on me.)

First, my Motorola
Then my KMart
Then my Dell
Then my Krups
Then my Sonicare
Then my Ivory
Then my Crest
Then my Lady Speed Stick
Then my Suave
Then my Nair
Then my Loreal
Then my JCPenney
Then my Motorola
Then my KMart
Then my Sony
Then my Skagen
Then my Sears
Then my Proctor-Silex
Then my Magic Chef
Then my Kashi
Then my Hood

Kwame, I swear your life is just cooler than other people's. There you are, crisscrossing the landscape, being rescued and inspired by benevolent strangers, ruminating on the ultimate rightness of the world.

My experience on America's byways has been exactly the opposite.

I've traveled cross country a couple of times n my life--Boston to L..A., Chicago to San Francisco. I'll admit these sojourns involved a certain level of naivety on my part.

The first time at least, I fully expected that America would be the America of glittering rivers, sweeping sands and awe-inducing forests. I wanted to shake hands with every John and Judy Q. Public on Main Street USA. I planned to do all the touristy stuff--the stuff most of us make fun of but wish we'd seen--the Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, Tombstone, Cooperstown, the Golden Gate Bridge, the World's Largest Skillet. (NOTE: If you've got a hankering to see said skillet--and who doesn't--it will be frying up a mess o' poultry--not 10,000 pieces at a time, but almost--at the 2007 World Chicken Festival, September in London, KY. Sadly, I'll be somewhere--anywhere--else.)

In short, I intended to wallow in the heartland, for once to be fully American (I know, I know, just stay with me here). The heartland, however, had other ideas.

So the other night I did one of those trademark New York things that everyone else in the world imagines they want to do. It was an unsettling mingling of glamor and grit--women in gowns with actual trains, men who'd paid their stylists for grunge, ivory business cards, heply tossed expletives, white-jacketed waiters, d**k in a box, asparagus and prosciutto, pounding music, crystal chandeliers, the YouTube guys, a barricaded avenue, lots of cameras and--last but not least--approximately two minutes of David Bowie, looking less like an cutting-edge rock pioneer than your foppish high school English teacher. (If you wanna see what a rock star should look like nowadays, check out the icy dismissive chic of our very own Nick Twemlow.)

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Webby Awards, a strange, loosely structured event that can't decide if its gleefully thumbing its nose at the Internet or fervently praying at its altar. I was there because the Poetry Foundation and the website you are now enjoying won an award. It's the coolest of the cool when it comes to what the Web has to offer. That's right---you are now wiling away the hours on an award-winning site.

Consider yourself blessed. Then, just for the hell of it, drop a few Mentos in a bottle of Coke, shake vigorously, and watch the fun. As I headed for the subway after the hoopla (no matter how I wished for a limo, it never materialized), merely a million cameras were trained on that jubilant chemical eruption, performed under the stars on a barricaded Wall St.

If I learned anything at all from my night on the red carpet side of the velvet rope, it's that even edgy achievers never ever grow up.

I have partied with Emily Warn. I can die now.

I've had a poem stolen.

Imagine my surprise when a friend mailed me a copy of one of my poems with somebody else's name on it. The scoundrel, a student at a middlin' Midwestern college, was in his creative writing classes passing off the work as his own in workshopping sessions. After receiving accolades for the piece (but of course), he adamantly refused to submit it to the college literary mag. The professor, who thought this odd, showed the piece in question to some colleagues, one who'd seen me read the same poem at a venue in Chicago. Then, of course, the question was whether the piece was actually the student's or mine.

He claimed it was his, for a little while anyway. He changed his mind when I contacted him directly and threatened to break his spindly little legs.

Actually, the poem had been heard by someone else BEFORE he claimed to have written it. I said he was a thief, not a genius.

Almost every day at Calabash, I'd grab my laptop and head down to a lounge chair at the edge of the sea (sorry) to commune with Harriet. Then, fortunately and unfortunately, I would happen upon the copious, deftly crafted musings of Kwame Dawes. Each day he wrote with such unbridled exhilaration. He wrote about the festival with the love of a father.

By the time I'd finished reading his posts, I didn't feel there was anything to add. It was all there--the celebration, the community, the camaraderie, the rain. And I'm afraid my planned entries were going to be a little (OK, a lot) less insightful:

I saw a really big crocodile!

I totally like saltfish!

My granddaughter Mikaila beat a really smart man (initials Terrance Hayes) at Scrabble!

I thought it was B.J. Honeycutt and it was!

I've never had an audience like this!

I drank (mineral water) at a bar built right in the middle of the sea!

I've heard Michael Ondaatje giggle!

I'm in Jamaica!

OK, so I'm not as tender and exhaustive as our prolific Mr. D. Maybe it's just enough to say...

...my life has been changed.

Kenneth said:

...innovative or experimental writing lives only in the academy.

The slam is arguably the most innovative, controversial and exhilarating poetry movement in decades. It is not only established as a force to be reckoned with, but has given the genre a cocky edge that wooed those who had long ago relegated poetry to dusty bookshelves. The slam is responsible for spoken word's unflinching link to hip-hop, with all its energy and promise. The slam is one of the reasons poetry is where poetry is.

Granted, we can't do without the academy. But we can't afford to marginalize those without access to the academy, or those who never craved or required access.

I began my life in poetry as a slammer, was a slammer for almost 10 years, and the academy tried its best to blow me off the map. My work was maligned and trivialized in every arena except the one I was in. Even now, more than a decade after the last time I actually participated in a slam, it's the persistent qualifier tacked to my name.

I could have proved you right, but I didn't. The academy tried for years to call me something other than a poet--the words "actress" and "imposter" come immediately to mind. I could have listened. I could have believed.

You say innovative writing can't breathe outside the academy. I'm breathing. I'm singing. Damn, I'm screaming.

You didn't attack me personally, didn't talk about my mama or anything; never said you did. But you questioned my legitimacy by saying that the work I've done--as well as the work of countless slammers, collaborators and artists--is somehow diminished because we didn't hang out with the (alleged) cool kids. I've spent most of my creative life in a movement that changed the face of poetry but, according to you, I don't exist--because the academy says I don't.

Not in the equation? Gotta disagree with you there.

P

Hi, my name is Patricia. I’m approximately 5’6” tall, a black woman with reddish-brown hair (paid in full), a thick waist and world hips. I love wearing sun hues—deep golds, copper, bronzes—and, probably because of those aforementioned world hips, I prefer flowing garments. Since I would rather eat glass then drive in Manhattan, I can usually be found on Metro North, Hudson Line, or on the subway—usually the 4 or 6 lines, which whiz me to the poetry I care most about.

I just looked into a mirror and saw me. I just asked my granddaughter if she could see me, and—after widening and rolling her eyes—she said that she could.

I had to make sure. You see, Kenneth Goldsmith is going around telling people I don’t exist.

When you do as many readings as I do, in venues from crumbling speakeasies to Japanese stadiums; when you stand in front of countless classrooms trying to inspire the younguns while they pop bubblegum, update their lip gloss and text message the person sitting next to them; when you sweat over the stanzas in your next book, hoping someone across the country picks it up and hears your voice...

you kinda want something in return.

Sure, it's gratifying when a kid comes up to you with a poem that's been folded and refolded, and you know he's poured his whole young life into that writing. You suspect that something you said changed his life, but then the class is over and he's gone and you're gone and you never really know. Unless, that is...

the poem is about you.

Sweeeeett....

My mother is more than 70 years old. She is not sickly or forgetful or frail, but she is strange.

Annie Pearl Smith was part of the great early 1950s migration of blacks from the south to the cluttered and chaotic west and northside neighborhoods of Chicago. She searched for a factory and found it—a place where she could create drone with her fingers, plopping product onto conveyor belts in neat, insanely measured rows, a place where relentless machinery hissed and pounded inches from her hands.

From Alabama, she brought with her a Southern sense of order. Children were to be raised a certain way, no sparing of the rod. Bring them up in the Baptist church of the holy-rollers, bombarded by solid walls of organ, rollicking choirs and preachers speaking in tongues. Children were always to respect white people—yessir, yes ma’am—because white people made the decisions that inevitably trickled down to where we were.

Nothing strange about that, you say.

But how about this?

At a conference last month, I conducted a writing workshop for foster kids. That’s not quite as simple as it sounds.

Some had witnessed the murder of their parents. Others had been emotionally or physically abused for most of their young lives, or had been forced to watch their mothers or fathers succumb the ravages of drugs. One young girl had been abandoned matter-of-factly by her overwhelmed mother: “She just drove me to this place in town I’d never been too before, and she pulled the car over and she said ‘Get out.’”

I tried to get them to write about something else, I really did. I didn’t feel equipped to help them confront their traumas—many were already working with people trained to do just that. So I came in with the shockingly naïve idea of treating them like any other kids.

But that’s not who they were.

...if we were paid by the word. The following is one sentence in Michael Wolff’s story in the April issue of Vanity Fair:

"Sitting in Judge Reggie Walton's court for a front-page trial, it was oddly underattended, as if the world has moved on from the Bush administration - trying to keep track of who spoke to whom (and wondering how the jury was keeping track of this), of who had his call returned when (returning calls was the leitmotif of the trial: when Robert Grenier, the cool C.I.A. operative, fails to promptly return Scooter's call, he's summarily pulled out of a meeting - Oh, dear, he recalls thinking), of the persistent telephone tag, of the game of telephone (the message morphs, degrades, gets forgotten), and of who might actually be more truthful than not (given that many of the witnesses are either P.R. people or C.I.A. agents, truth seems especially transient), I was stuck trying to figure out if anybody really knew what they were doing."

What? What editor let that fly by?

This may come as a surprise to those who’ve called her flash in the pan, imposer, imposter, Johnny-come-lately, distraction, travesty, novelty, temporary nuisance, joke, jokester, blatant, blasphemous, irrelevant, irreverent, harmful, hostile, theatrical, arrogant, nefarious, evil, needy, dramatic, unpredictable, irascible, irritating, elitist, mind-numbing, passionless, dumb, boring, boorish, whiny, brash, impetuous and destructive. Like the harlot bedding the reverend, she’s been incessantly discussed. She has taken your derisive jabs, your dismissive insults, and turned them into strength.

Ladies and gentlemen, the poetry slam is now 21 years old.

National Poetry Month is a teetotaler who lives it up for exactly 30 days every year, then pours herself into the backseat of a taxi and winds through rain-slicked streets headed home, warbling "How Dry I Am" and wearing someone else's clothes. Whew. What a party.

Did everyone notice how absolutely nothing changed? There's still poetry hurtling at us from every direction, that glorious canvas clears itself every day, and not a single one of us would trade in what we do for anything else.

I feel about National Poetry Month pretty much the same way I feel about African-American History Month. Thanks for the honor, but we're so much bigger than that.

While working sporadically on a longer post, this question came up. Suddenly it hit me---Hey, I'm a blogger! Figured I might as well toss this quandary into your formidable laps.

Let's say that I've been doing a theoretical poetry residency in a rather tony high school in a rather tony theoretical suburb just past, theoretically, Manhattan. The 11th-graders are theoretically typical--tethered to their cell phones, swathed in spandex, sporting tattoos, gleefully potty-mouthed, indulging in quick, furtive blowjobs in the back stairwells. You know, the usual.

I'm teaching persona poems, which I love to teach because kids nowadays have no boundaries. No one's told them yet that their imaginations will grow numb then wither into further numbness. They still got dreams, dammit.

So after I explain the concept of stepping into other shoes and writing from other perspectives, after I assure them that they can take on the persona of absolutely anything, one of the cagey little imps comes up with a poem in the voice of a penis.

How about you?

Yes, yes, I’m reading Auden again. So sue me. Now I’m tossing and turning in my sleep because W.H., in his infinite wisdom, once set down the standards (as he saw them) for recognition as a “major” poet. Since, I certainly aspire to be “major” (the alternative would be—uh, what?), I thought I’d see how I measure up, just how far I have to go before students of the genre are poring over my musings for “clues” or whispering my name in hushed, shivery reverence. Maybe then I can ease up on the shameless marketing of me, myself, and I, crossing the country hawking my books with the unleashed fervor of a Jehovah’s Witness.

So let’s see how major you are. Let's see how major I am. (By the way, if your name is actually Major Jackson, you can stop reading right here.)

According to Auden, here’s what it takes:

The Virginia Tech convocation was draining, so sad. Cliches were everywhere, the hurt so deep that speakers clicked into rote language. The words hardly mattered.

Until...

Nikki Giovanni punched her poetic fist through the dreary proceedings, daring the mourners to imagine themselves normal again. In brash and rousing womanspeak that was part poem, part sermon and part backhand slap, she did what even President Bush couldn't.

She hinted at something called tomorrow.

Sometimes I think it would be easier to give up.

The point of the pen touches the paper, and because we call ourselves poets, what flows out should be part of the world’s story. On days like this, our shoulders buckle under the weight of it all—no stanza has the fists we need, no syllable quiets the wail.

I remember a regularly scheduled open reading in Cambridge, Massachusetts on the evening of the Oklahoma City bombing 11 years ago. There was a television mounted on the wall above the bar, and as patrons filed in, absolutely no one lifted their eyes to the insistent images that had bombarded them all day. They were numb to the horrifying shot of the building with its gaping wound, suddenly deaf to dramatic bellow of news anchors.

That's not the kind of word they needed.

.
…I’ve found your poster boy.

This week I began a middle school residency, slinging a poem or two toward the impressionable young’uns, hoping to make a dent. Along with poets Roger Bonair-Agard and Fish Vargas, we bounced between 7th grade (delightful) and 8th grade (mega-surly) classrooms. At the end of the day, I headed for my car with Roger, a stellar wordsmith and, shall we say, manly man. He’s pumped, ripped, cut, tattooed, and he’s got a sweeeet Trinidadian accent to top things off. I have to keep reminding myself that he can write.

Fish is manfully manly also. You need to know this.

Rockin’ that off-kilter swagger typical of the nearly four-footer, a young man fell into step beside us. Wearing 7th grade like loud cologne, he beamed at Roger and said, “You inspired me a lot today.”

How cute. It had been a demanding day, and this lil’ darling was about to make it all worthwhile. Or so I thought.

That won’t mean anything to most of you. One sweet windswept world of a woman has suddenly gone missing, and the earth stupidly soldiers on, insisting on its spin, already moving us to a time and place beyond her.

Right now it’s hard to believe that anything exists beyond her.

Phebus was a reverent Haitian lyric, a deft conjurer of language and light, a Cave Canem sister, an insistent glow. She penned poems the same way most of us do…in a kind of unleashed fever, praying the page can capture what has loomed so large and for so long in our hearts and heads.

It seems no one really cares to know why we don't know each other. Go figure. I say we set up a lunch or dinner, shoot the shinola, get this thing figured out. Kenneth? Rachel (I imagine you hugely pregnant)? Kwame, you coming this way anytime soon? Jeff?

I see us as a United Nations of poetry. All hope lies with us. We must not fail.

P

Glad to meet you, Kenneth. My name is Patricia. I only have four books published, and I’m nowhere near a university position. But I’m a poet, damn it, and have been one for two decades. So why haven’t we met, been published together, shared a mic, or partied into the wee hours with a group of like-minded souls?

Almost 20 years ago, I stepped onto a stage in Chicago and read a poem. Some people said that I “performed” the poem. What followed that moment was a glorious whirlwind decade of poetry slamming, stark spotlights and hundreds of other stages. Over short tumblers of whiskey and beer-splotched legal pads, a whole generation of poetic “rebels” got together to bellow our distaste for and celebrate our disconnect from the canon. We helped forge a false division, claiming that our way was the only way. We didn’t need to study poetry. We were poetry. Those lush grants funding the creative dreams of academia’s darlings? Haaruumph. Blood money.

I am 51 years old, have been a poet for 20 or so of those years, and up until about a month ago I had never read a single poem by W.H. Auden.

There. I said it.

The consensus of friends and concerned loved ones (who didn’t want to comment on Harriet, for fear of shaming me) is that I should never have admitted publicly that I was not familiar with the work of my poor deceased new boyfriend W.H. It’s as if owning up to my ignorance made me less of a poet, a less worldly and wordy wordsmith, someone to be whispered about and pitied. “He’s major!” hissed one colleague during a frantic and somewhat clandestine phone conversation (I think she suspected my horrifying levels of ignorance had led someone to bug my phone). “You’re on the Poetry Foundation site, for Chrissakes--even if you don’t know Auden, you should say you do!”

And just where would that get me?

Check out today's entry on Poetry Daily and tell me what you think. I'm torn.

I have fallen absolutely, irrevocably, unflinchingly in love with W.H. Auden.

I’m ashamed to say that I created a few new expletives when his 897-page collected works popped up on my MFA reading list. I planned to quickly scan the monstrous volume for cool stuff (mentions of lust, free coupons, whatever) and pen a heartfelt, though somewhat cursory, analysis, using words like “sweeping,” “intricate,” “concise” and maybe even “hullabaloo.”

But W.H. is a snaky seducer. I’m reading every page aloud:

Motionless, deep in his mind, lies the past the poet’s forgotten,
Till some small experience wake it to life and a poem’s begotten,
Words its presumptive primordial, Feeling its field of induction,
Meaning its pattern of growth determined during construction.

Now I’m gazing at his craggy, hangdog countenance on the book cover, thinking yea, I would’ve married him in a heartbeat, and we’d be miserable, a tortured couplet for sure, but damn, he writes like a guy who sold his soul to the devil for a pen.

Why didn’t anybody tell me about this before?

Sorry folks, I've been out of commission for a few days...at a poetry workshop thingie on Block Island with spotty phone and net access. But I did the "island thing" with gleeful abandon, including the requisite chilly early morning walk along the deserted shoreline accompanied by a manic Golden Retriever, And yes, I began a poem about the 'twilight of my life." How could I not?

For reasons I won't go into here, I also started thinking a lot about folks standing up to read their poems to groups of other folks. I wonder why it's so difficult sometimes. Can a poet reading an interminable boooorring singsongy ode to himself actually hear that interminable booooring singsongy ode to himself and recognize it for what it is? Can mass yawning among his listeners be interpreted as a clue? Can another poet, whimpering into her hands while the second row strains to hear, finally learn to lift her head and speak as if she actually believes in what she is saying?

I'm here to help.

What I wanted: To teach my sweet, suburban high school freshies to write love poetry. I gave them the tools, hoping they would visit the innocent days of romance, find ways to chronicle their fresh, fumbling attempts at love. I thought I might gather their ode and maybe send them in to Art Linkletter or--in case Art was dead or something--Garrison Keillor. Ah, youth.

What they wrote: Stilted and stiff stanzas, basically limericks without wheels. Bulges. Entanglements. Much wetness. You could almost hear Barry White growling in the backdrop.

What a teacher told me: "You know about the girls giving blowjobs in the stairwells?"

What?

There’s nothing as pitiful as a sick poet.

I’ve been tussling with a rather raucous flu bug lately. And I’ve never been one of those stiff-upper-lip sickies, sucking it up and persevering, conquering the malady by refusing to give it power. Pshaw. I like to surrender to my germs and wallow among them. I’m a feverish, whiny drippy snorter, hopelessly addicted to the self-centered drama that is run-of-the-mill illness. It’s probably part of my inane belief that all arteeest suffer for a reason, that in the psychedelic throes of a 103-degree temperature I will listlessly drag my pen across a sheet of paper and happen upon the one line the world has been waiting for. Operating on just one nasal passage, I’ll talk endlessly about my constricted chest, aching joints, itchy eyes and spot rashes. Each ailment makes me more insufferable, more tortured and therefore more legitimate as a writer. Who needs a shotglass or a junk-filled hypodermic when you’ve got loose stools?

It began with my father.

Grizzled and slight, flasher of a marquee gold tooth, Otis Douglas Smith was Arkansas grit suddenly sporting city clothes. Part of the Great Migration of blacks from the South to northern cities in the early 1950s, he found himself not in the urban Mecca he’d imagined, but in a roach-riddled tenement apartment on Chicago’s West Side. There he attempted to craft a life along side the bag boys, day laborers, housekeepers and cooks who dreamed the city’s wide, unreachable dream.

Many of those urban refugees struggled to fit, but my father never really adopted the no-nonsense-now rhythm of the city. There was too much of the storyteller in him, too much unleashed southern song still waiting for the open air. From the earliest days I can recall, my place was on his lap, touching a hand to his stubbled cheek and listening to his growled narrative, mysterious whispers and wide-open laughter.

Because of him, I grew to think of the world in terms of the stories it could tell.

More than 10 years ago, I did the first of many residencies with 6th graders in a Miami school, a dismal jumble of iron and concrete with the flowery name Lillie C. Evans Elementary. Although I was initially excited about introducing the kids to poetry, my trip to the school was disheartening. While my driver—one of the most committed teachers I have ever met—bemoaned Liberty City’s stunning unemployment rate, we passed street after street of shuttered storefronts, heavily-gated package goods stores, ramshackle churches and an astonishing number of shops selling all manner of bundled synthetic hair for braiding and weaving. The entire neighborhood looked like an armed camp that had already been vanquished by the enemy—rusted padlocks swung from a hundred doors, bedsheets were taped to windows, busted gates banged against brick walls. I couldn’t help but wonder about the children.

Just stumbled in from the first day of a residency with 9th and 10th graders. I am beyond exhausted. I had to dig beneath a veritable mountain of Uggs, belly rings, retro jerseys, Sidekicks and Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirts to reach the kids, but they were there. I'd forgotten how good this feels. More later.

And here's a literary journaI I like a lot: Redivider, out of Emerson College in Boston.

And my husband's still in London, and will be for another week, so I'm a little weepy.

And one of the students challenged me to write a persona poem in the voice of the Vietnam War.

I love this life.

I’m not sure, but I think the creative multitudes who applied for MFA programs now hold yea or nay letters in their hot little hands. Alas, THE decision must be made.

I’ve already received omigod calls from friends who never thought they’d get in but now they’re in omigod and suddenly they’re either too good or not good enough and maybe they should have gone to Europe instead and how are they going to pay for it and omigod which one which one, and some want to teach and some want to publish and some just want a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet to tell them their sonnets don’t particularly stink, and omigod! In voices quavering with conjured panic, they seek emergency counsel. You see, I’m currently in an MFA program, and my advanced age makes me wise.

Unfortunately, I can only steer them in circles. I don’t actually say It sucks to be you, but when it comes to sage snippets, an answer to their MFA quandaries, I got nuthin’.

...I could just spit.

Inspiration. Ummm. Inspiration. For two days, I’ve been thinking about inspiration and planning on doing something about it. I invited the topic to a dance in my head, where it did its insistent little pirouette but basically went nowhere. All this time I’ve been revving up to write something inspirational about inspiration, but I just wasn’t—well, inspired.

So I log on to Harriet and discovered that the maddeningly insightful Mr. Dawes (I could just spit!) has not only tackled the broad subject of creative inspiration, he has penned the definitive treatise on inspiration. People are weeping as they read. The Pulitzer committee just held an emergency session to institute a new category for the awards—insanely lyrical Ghanaian men with the initials K.D. who write about inspiration.

[Insert testosterone-infused dramatic narrator-type voice here:]

Whatever will Patricia do?

A little more than a week ago, I was inching along MD-295 in a freakish snowshower, peering through a patch cleared by my struggling windshield wipers. It had taken me hours longer than I anticipated to get to D.C. from my home in New York—but, hey, anything for our art, right? I had little more than an hour to get to a reading in the basement of a restaurant in one of the Capitol’s trendiest ‘hoods, and I was edging toward frantic. I hate breathless arrivals. The short but frequent snow dumps stunned the traffic—by the time I got where I was going, the sidewalks were slick with ice, the wind felt like it was biting holes in my skin and every single parking space in D.C. was already stuffed with an apartment-sized SUV on bitch-ass rims.

All AWP attendees should be granted some sort of transitional grace period before re-entering the real world. Oh, yeah. We definitely need it.

Today, thousands of us hobbled off airplanes, dragging carry-ons bulging with obscure litmags, new tomes by first-time authors, glossy MFA brochures, a billion business cards, 12 Gettysburg Review sippy cups and an assortment of neon condoms emblazoned with logos and attention-grabbing lines that probably made perfect sense at one time or another. Wrap your head around it—read the Dos Passos Review!

How’s this for poetic inspiration? At about 3 a.m., when I should have been snoozing contentedly, dreaming stanzas, I was in the back seat of a cab hurtling toward Gladys Knight’s Chicken & Waffles because—

1) I’m in Atlanta, where they fry everything but chairs.
2) I’ve always been fascinated by the pairings—hot, sweet, crunchy, doughy, syrup, Tabasco.
3) I’m at AWP, which seems to have brought out some giddy, reckless muse/scoundrel (I call her Caldonia), who doesn’t surface until I’m away from home and surrounded by 20-year-olds who think a good ol’ hefty helping of potential heart attack at 3 a.m. is “fun.”
4) I think there’s a book somewhere that lists chicken & waffles are a black person’s rite of passage. If you can handle ‘em, you can keep your membership card.

Now it is 10:20 a.m., and I am reminded approximately every 23 seconds of my early morning feast. It was best tiny death I’ve ever consumed. I must write about what is happening to my body.

Or my body will win.

Yesterday, in the chaotic wonderland that is the AWP bookfair, I happened upon a woman I hadn’t seen in at least two decades. Before she even saw me, I watched as she haggled gently but persistently with someone at the Red Hen table—like so many of us, she was trying to sell herself, trying to convince powerful strangers that her words were worth something.

Maybe it’s how much we’ve been bombarded recently by the particularly icky, and frustratingly addictive, aspects of celebrity. Maybe because I’m mesmerized as Anna Nicole grabs a buzzing blade and opts for bald, Britney Spears weeps openly in a courtroom after deciding to bury herself in the Bahamas and James Brown—could it be?—finally calls it quits with that skanky golddigger Cameron Diaz and—after spilling his woes to a gushing Oprah—is adopted immediately by Brangelina. Maybe it’s because the sprawling Associated Writing Programs conference (sometimes referred to as “too many panels, too little time”) just happens to come on the tail end of the Oscars this year. And maybe it’s because I’m tired of Hollywood grabbing the headlines and having all the juicy fun while we poets twirl dutifully in dimmer orbits, sipping chai, submitting to Kingsley Tufts, and sharpening our pencils.