THURSDAY FEBRUARY 12
8:00a.m. R100. Conference Registration. Attendees who have registered in advance may pick up their registration materials at AWP’s pre-registration desk on the lower level of the Hilton Chicago. On-site registration badges are available for purchase at the 8th Street side of the lobby level.
As far as I can tell (apologies if I missed somebody), I am the ONLY current Harriet blogger not to have been at AWP in NY. What did I miss? Was there a secret meeting of Harrieteers? What did go on at all those parties? What was the most fabulous reading I missed?
So here’s a post for everyone who WASN’T there. What are your excuses? Your reasons?

Well, I survived my ninth AWP conference. I’ll say what every New Yorker (including me) said about the conference being held in our city this year: it wasn’t fair. We didn’t get to feel as if we were leaving our duties and obligations behind since we simply skipped over from our respective Big Apple dwellings. But to even out the score, I heard many out-of-towners share this sentiment: that they didn’t feel they came to New York; they came to AWP.
I have just returned from my second time attending the AWP conference, which (like last year) was wonderfully exhilarating and utterly overwhelming. Here in Pensacola I lead a life rather thoroughly isolated from any literary community or scene, and so the opportunity to see and talk to so many fellow writers was and is particularly exciting to me. I am pretty poor and the trip has practically bankrupted me, but it was worth it.
I am, as I have written, done with discussing Charles Bernstein’s piece, my critique of which was only a part of a post that engaged considerably larger topics, which were simply ignored by most commenters. But the discussion around my post has brought up some issues I do think worth pursuing, both about the tenor of discourse in the online poetry world and about the question of insiders and outsiders in the poetry world(s).
More follows below the fold.
This post is in two parts. The first is a simple announcement of my participation in the upcoming AWP Conference in New York City.
I am chairing a panel on Saturday, February 2 at from noon to one fifteen on Gay Male Poetry Post Identity Politics, featuring “emerging”? poets Christopher Hennessy (whose wonderful blog Outside the Lines focuses on the relationship of identity and creativity), Brad Richard, Aaron Smith (whose entertaining blog focuses on anything but poetry), and Brian Teare. Here is the description of the panel from the conference schedule, written by moi:
What does it mean to be a gay male poet today, after gay liberation, the somewhat domesticated gay rights movement, the revived radicalism of Queer Nation, the AIDS epidemic and ACT UP, and intellectual interrogations of “queerness”? and identity itself? Contemporary gay male poets can take their gayness for granted on several levels. They also can explore, question, and even explode that identity. On this panel, four emerging gay male poets discuss what the words gay male poetry mean to them.
I hope that all interested parties will try to make it. Let’s make this panel a party!
The second part of this post is about my impression of the role that some phantasmatic nightmare image of AWP plays in the imaginations of many participants in the various online poetry worlds. To read more, look below the fold.

I’m trying to get my blog momentum back, but it’s not going to be easy: I’m currently in residence at Vermont College of Fine Arts up in snowy Montpelier. Yesterday it was ten degrees below zero, this morning it felt warmer: three below. And while I was up here I finished editing my forthcoming book of stories, Men without Bliss, and reading nominated books for the National Book Critics Circle (finalists for the award will be announced next week in San Francisco!), and of course, my teaching duties: poetry workshop, poetry lecture, poetry chit-chat.
When I taught creative writing at Lynchburg College in Virginia, I discovered, like many creative writing teachers, that violence pervaded the lives of many undergraduates students. After receiving several poems about assaults, suicide, and abuse, I conducted an unscientific survey. I asked students to anonymously list violence they, their families, or friends had experienced. All but fifteen of my 50 students were victims or had a close friend who had experienced one of the following: abuse, murder, suicide, assault, or rape.
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.
Anselm Berrigan
Abigail Deutsch
Tonya Foster
Melissa Friedling
John S. O'Connor
Barbara Jane Reyes
Amber Tamblyn
Edwin Torres
Cathy Halley
Michael Marcinkowski
Travis Nichols
Fred Sasaki
Don Share
Señor Smith to you. (1)
Vladimir, Ron, and Gregori (4)
dubious poetry: the palin comparison (3)
To Vaya in the Viva of Time (2)
Indie Publishing: Two Questions, Many More... (5)
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