9:00-10:15 R112. The Aphorism: Life Is Short, Art Is Really Short. (Patrick Madden, Mary Cappello, Sara Levine, James Richardson, Steven Stewart) Somewhere between poetry and essay, the aphorism is an ancient literary form that celebrates observation, speculation, subversion, and idiosyncrasy. Panelists discuss the vitality and versatility of this shortest of literary forms, offering theoretical frameworks, translations of contemporary work, reading suggestions from the Renaissance to the present, brief readings of their own “unconnected propositions,” and advice for teaching, writing, and publishing aphorisms today.
10:30-11:45 R135. Revising Modernisms: Innovative Latino Writing in the 21st Century. (J. Michael Martinez, Antonio Viego, John-Michael Rivera, Gabe Gomez, Jennifer Reimer) We will investigate what constitutes innovative U.S. Latino writing through an analysis of the cultural conditions that gave rise to the “innovative.” What role does the Latino play in the understanding of “innovative” writing? How is its aim changed by the U.S. Latinos participation in its aesthetic? We will explore these questions through Lacanian theory, an analysis of Modernism and its heirs (NY School, Langpo, etc.) that includes the U.S. Latino, and the methods employed by publishers of innovative U.S. Latino writing.
Noon-1:15 R139. Diverging Lines: Understanding the Evolution of Contemporary Latino Poetry. (Blas Falconer, Rosa Alcalá, Gina Franco, Peter Ramos, Rodrigo Toscano, Robert Tejada) Although Latino poetry has a strong foundation in American literature, emerging writers are complicating the aesthetics of the canon by drawing on movements (i.e., Language Poetry, New Formalism) and communities (i.e., Gay and Lesbian, African American) outside their own. The panelists will explore the intersection between aesthetics and ethnicity, helping to define the foundation and the evolution of Latino poetry.
1:30-2:45 pm R155. Multiformalism: Postmodern Poetics of Form. (Susan M. Schultz, Hank Lazer, K. Silem Mohammad, Annie Finch) Language poetry meets new formalism at last, and the poems fly! Editors and contributors to a daring new multicultural, multiaesthetic anthology talk about where poetry is headed now.
3:00-4:15 R184. Lyric Selves and Global Imperatives: Toward a Poetics and Ethics of Encounter. (Luisa Igloria, Marjorie Agosin, Christine Casson, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, Andrew Kaufman, Vivian Teter) This panel will discuss the formal and ethical concerns poets must engage with when the individual lyric self confronts the urgency of a global world and its imperatives. How is a poetics of encounter to be practiced and defined as the self ventures from a personal and experiential mode of saying toward a more representative utterance that would seek to translate others’ voices or stories, re-vision historical accounts, or give voice to displaced, marginalized or vanishing peoples, forms, and landscapes?
4:30-5:45pm R195. Inclined to Speak: Arab American Poets Reading. (Philip Metres, Khaled Mattawa, Hayan Charara, Elmaz Abinader, Fady Joudah, Deema Shehabi) In celebration of the publication of Inclined to Speak: Contemporary Arab American Poetry, six Arab American poets—Elmaz Abinader, Hayan Charara, Fady Joudah, Khaled Mattawa, Philip Metres, and Deema Shehabi—read from the anthology and their latest works, engaging in the questions of being Arab and American in a post 9/11 world.
6:30PM-8:30PM
Con Tinta Celebration
Location: COCO Restaurant, 2723 W. Division St, CHICAGO 60622
Cost: Free Buffet / Cash Bar
Website: http://www.cocochicago.com/
Fourth Annual Pachanga for the Chicano/Latino Literary community and its allies. Event will include special recognition of Patti Hartmann, presentation of Achievement Award to Carlos Cortez, and readings/tributes by Carlos Cumpian, Lisa Alvarado, and Ray Gonzalez. For more information, contact Richard Yañez (ryanez4@epcc.edu).
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 13
9:00-10:15 F103. Book Contracts. (Anita Fore) Anita Fore, Director of Legal Services for the Authors Guild, will offer attendees her expert advice on reviewing a book contract and the key points for negotiating with publishers. She will review the important clauses routinely found in traditional as well as academic publishing agreements, such as copyright, royalties, and out of print provisions.
10:30-11:45 F127. Shameless Promotion: Get the Book to the Readers. (Marisha Chamberlain, Margaret Hasse, Todd Boss, Jon Spayde) Your book is out—now you’ve got to promote it. Yes, you. At many small presses, the publicity budget is minute. At big publishers too, authors must take an active role. Two poets, a novelist, and a nonfiction writer with books out in 2008 from Norton, Nodin, Soho, and Random House describe strategies they’ve used to garner readers: book tours, book clubs, personal publicists, and the Web—virtual tours, using a site to build buzz, getting a good Google position, networking with blogs, and more.
12:00-1:15 F149. Louder Than Words: Poetic Renunciation in the Lives & Work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Arthur Rimbaud, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and George Oppen. (Christina Davis, Joy Katz, Donald Revell, Susan Wheeler, Spencer Reece) By reflecting upon four distinct acts of “elected silence” in literary history, this panel considers poetic renunciation as a philosophical, spiritual, and/or aesthetic choice and explores what these decisive silences suggest about the ideal relationship between language/writing and truth/conviction. What can we (in pursuit of poetry) learn from this equal and opposite action of abstaining from it?
1:30-2:45 F165. After Magical Realism: New Adventures in U. S. Latino Literature. (Elena Minor, Fred Arroyo, John-Michael Rivera, Gina Franco, Aaron Michael Morales, Paul Martinez Pompa) Magical realism opened a natural door to the rich, imaginistic narrative traditions of Latino cultures and offered Latino writers a license to fly with language in its infinite possibilities. This panel examines the legacy of magical realism through the prism of new and innovative Latino writing and how Latino writers are crossing and erasing literary borders to bend, stretch and reshape the forms, structures, content, and tenor of Latino literature to create meaning in fresh, singular ways.
3:00-4:15 F177. New Poetry from Chile, Cuba, and Mexico: A Reading. (Daniel Borzutzky, Roberto Tejada, Jen Hofer, Kristin Dykstra, Brian Whitener, Laura Solozano) This event brings together experienced translators of contemporary and innovative Spanish-language poetry from Latin American. Each participant will read work in translation; moreover, they will provide a social, political, and literary context for the original works, as well as the translations.
4:30-5:45 F199. The Country They Come From: Polish-American Writers Read about the Midwest and Poland. (John Guzlowski, Anthony Bukoski, Linda Foster, John Minczeski, Leslie Pietrzyk) Polish-American writers have been writing in and about the Midwest for a 150 years. They have written novels, travel narratives, poems, songs and memoirs that commemorate the Midwest while memorializing the country these writers or their ancestors came from. Five recent Polish-American writers will demonstrate that this tradition is very much alive and vital.
6:00PM-7:30PM PALABRA PURA: Special Edition
Location: JAZZ SHOWCASE, 47 W. Polk St., Chicago 60605
Cost: Free/Cash Bar
Websites: http://www.jazzshowcase.com, http://guildcomplex.org
Following up on the multi-voiced reading hosted by ACENTOS in NYC last year during AWP, the Guild Complex, Letras Latinas, and Poetry Magazine will be hosting a “One Poem Festival” featuring an ample roster of Latino and Latina poets from Chicago and out of town, including: Lisa Alvarado, Carlos Cumpian, Silvia Curbelo, Gina Franco, Gabe Gomez, Irasema Gonzalez, Maurice Kilwein Guevara, Gabriela Jauregui, Olivia Maciel, Carl Marcum, Valerie Martínez, Orlando Ricardo Menes, Achy Obejas, Daniel A. Olivas, Johanny Vasquez Paz, Paul Martinez Pompa, Linda Rodríguez, Jacob Saenz, Jorge Sánchez,Juan Manuel Sanchez Rich Villar. For more information, contact Ellen Wadey (ellenw@guildcomplex.org)
SATURDAY FEBRUARY 14
9:00-10:15 S109. Qualifying for University Employment in Creative Writing. (Paul Munden, Steve May, Patricia Ann McNair, Kathy Flann, Helena Blakemore) A panel of experienced program leaders and teachers of Creative Writing debate the ideological, ethical and pragmatic aspects of the questions: if you’re hiring, what do you ask for in university Creative Writing faculty; and if you’re applying for posts, what qualifications should you have, what should you know, and what should you be able to do?
10:30-11:45 S126. Speaking Of and To Others: Beyond the Western Apostrophe in Intertribal Poetry. (Molly McGlennen, Simon Ortiz, Kimberly Blaeser, Diane Glancy, Sherwin Bitsui) Do shared commitments of Native American writers to cultural, liguistic, political, and physical survival inform a unique creative process? This panel considers the possibility of an Indigenous Poetics and the embodied consequences of poetry in Native communities. Within what contextual “frame” do Native American poets craft, publish, or perform their work? Is an Indegenous Poetics, discrete from or parallel to the Western tradition, implied in the creative work itself? Panelists incorporate readings to showcase important creative/critical confluences.
12:00-1:15 S144. Bad Poems by Great Poets: Where They Went Awry, What We Can Learn. (Roy Jacobstein, Laura Kasischke, Margaret Rabb, Greg Rappleye, Robert Thomas) Whether our favorite poets are O’Hara or Dickinson, Stevens or Plath, Berryman, Ashbery or Wright, they wrote some poems that are almost parodies of their great poems. We inquire out of an interest in craft, not schadenfreude: how did they write poems so flat, sentimental, boring? Do the bad poems teach us how to read the good? Rather than comparing apples to oranges, we will use these poets as their own control, contrasting to see what makes one of a pair of poems, and only one of them, great.
1:30-2:45 S161. The Writer in the Community: Taking Creative Writing from the Campus to the People. (Taylor Fleming-Henning, Katie Stutzman, Sharlene Gliman, Jason Whitney, Stephanie Pyle, Ashley Kunsa) Social activist, humanitarian, public intellectual: this is the new role of the writer. MFA students in Julia Spicher Kasdorf’s class at Penn State lead creative writing groups for new English speakers, high-schoolers, teens at a shelter, and residents of a public nursing home. This panel discusses the challenges of teaching creative writing outside of academia, describes the logistics of setting up similar programs, and offers practical lesson plans for each population.
3:00-4:15 S175. Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature. (Daniel Olivas, Manuel Muñoz, Kathleen Alcalá, Michael Jaime-Becerra, Estella GonzÁlez) Latinos in Lotusland (Bilingual Press, 2008) is a landmark anthology spanning sixty years of Los Angeles fiction that includes the work of thirty-four Latino writers. We’re introduced to a myriad of lives that defy stereotypes and shatter any preconceptions of what it means to be Latino in the City of Angels. These actors perform on a stage set with palm trees, freeways, mountains, and sand in communities from East L.A. to Malibu, Hollywood to the San Fernando Valley, Venice Beach to El Sereno.
4:30-5:45 S202. Breach: Emerging U.S. Latino and Latina Poetry. (J. Michael Martinez, Gabe Gomez, Carmen Gimenez-Smith, Rosa Alcalá, Roberto Tejada) In an extension of AWP New York’s Avant Garde Latino/a Poetry Panel, this group of emerging poets is a sampling of some of the most ambitious and innovative Latino and Latina voices in the US. Rather than focus on the theories and varying aesthetic practices that directly affect Latino literature, these writers will present a new and progressive body of poetry that attempts to redefine contemporary Latino and Latina literary traditions.
6:30 “Love on the Line” Poems About Love
Location: Sullivan Galleries, 33 S. State St., 7th floor
Cost: Free admission
Website: http://poetrycenter.org
Poets Cynthia Atkins, Frank Bidart, Kurt Brown, A. Van Jordan, Paul Muldoon, Elise Paschen, and Robert Polito read selections from their work. Co-sponsored by The Poetry Center of Chicago, The Writing Program, and The Department of Exhibitions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The only AWP I’ve been to is the one held in Atlanta in the 90s–it helped that I lived in Atlanta (definitely couldn’t have afforded to fly anywhere then, when I was a half-time secretary at George State), and I got a pass because Jeffrey McDaniel (a former Harriet blogger) put me on the roster for a Spoken Word event. The converence wasn’t nearly on the scale it was today. And I didn’t really know anybody except for the Atlanta locals I saw pretty often anyway. I remember feeling uneasy in the audience of a panel discussion on Humor when I suddenly realized it wasn’t going to be funny. (And none of the poetry discussed rhymed either, which, for a humor panel, seemed a little on the obtuse side–but that’s just my hobby horse.)
I meant to go to Atlanta last year–since I could combine that with visiting family, and I had a new book out. But I couldn’t make it happen.
This year, I also fully intended to go. But I didn’t. Is the truth perhaps that I have mixed feelings about going to a Poets’ Convention? (OK, there are fiction writers too I imagine–why does it strike me as such a Poetry event? Maybe fiction writers don’t need conventions in the same way, since they have agents.) Is the truth perhaps that some part of me resists? Sure, I would have seen lots of friends, got lots of books, made new friends, met people I admired, maybe been inspired. Reginald talks about feeling isolated in Pensacola–I also feel isolated in a different way in Athens, Greece. So maybe the whole thing would have been a wonderful boost and confirmation. But I also feel a bit queasy about the whole idea. And I think the truth is a lot of us do. Some of us have to go–especially if we teach. But most of us deep down have mixed feelings, don’t we? Isn’t it OK to fess up to this?
Here are some of my reasons for not going. What are yours?:
*Er, I live in Greece
*Flying makes me panic
*I had nowhere to stay
*Crowds make me panic
*How Public–like a Frog!
*Too much talk about poetry drowns out my Muse
*Drowning muses make me panic
*I too dislike it
*Meeting lots of successful poets makes me envious
*Envy makes me panic
*At my back I always hear the Great Dead Poets laugh and sneer…
*Maybe I am cultivating status as an Outsider, though obviously by being on this blog I am somehow really an Insider? Hmmm. (Must think about this one.)
*I had nothing to wear
*I’d rather glide out and look up in perfect silence at the stars
*MY PANEL WAS CANCELLED!!

As always, I didn’t attend a single panel, except the two I was supposed to: I read with my new colleagues at the Rutgers—Newark faculty reading; and I chatted about the crisis and transitions in book reviewing with my fellow board members at the National Book Critics Circle. It’s not out of disrespect that I don’t attend other panels—I simply don’t have the time. I spend most of the conference hours manning the various tables, my publishers’ and my organization’s, Con Tinta’s. I talk until my throat hurts, and then I talk some more, usually at the hotel bar once the bookfair shuts down for the day.
I meet old friends, like fellow Harriet blogger Major Jackson, and I bump into new folks, like fellow Harriet blogger Stephen Burt. (Missed you, Reginald. Heard you were around.) And though I caught up briefly (five minutes is all anybody usually gets) with a slew of old friends and allies, I especially love to meet up with Latina/o students and young professionals who always have questions and who simply want to make a personal connection at this networking-fest. (Sigue la lucha, mi gente.) I had to sneak more than a few into the bookfair because, like many others, they got left out of the party after the conference sold out without a warning.
For me, the bookstore is the place to be, to gossip, to see, to schmooze, to meet, and to feel part of a larger community. I can actually do without the featured readers, but I understand that for many this is the forum to hear voices that might not otherwise make it to their neck of the woods. I will have to say though that I was very disappointed that the Latino headliners were weakly represented. For an AWP in a city like New York, that is shameful. (Oh, yeah, and two years ago in Austin that negligence was a crime also.) It reminded me of the joke: What does AWP stand for? All White People. Well, for those of us that have been going to AWP over the years, we immediately recognize this statement as false. You see people of color everywhere: they’re working the bookfair tables, buying books, attending panels, and cleaning the hotel rooms! But we’re only sporadically present on that glossy poster AWP sends to us every year. When a Latino face makes it on there I get the phone tree started. All that just to say, I still love AWP, great job, but it can get better, esteemed board members.
Anyway, on my last month on Harriet, I decided to celebrate the AWP bookfair: I will be featuring books and organizations and cool projects I stumbled across during my exhibition hall strolls. Yes, it was a zoo, as expected. We had three floors and a zig-zagging of escalators, and a screechy god-voice that harassed exhibitors to hurry up and pack on the last hour (she was deservedly hissed at and booed), and it was freezing on one floor, and it was lit like an airport terminal in one floor, and lit like a cocktail lounge in another, but the energy was non-stop, sales were happening, folks were browsing, and overall I think people were happy to be collecting their free pens.
So, as I make my table and hotel reservations for Chicago, as I turn down requests to serve on panels (none for me next year, people, I’m doing the bookfair exclusively!), as I rally with the Con Tinta Advisory Circle to celebrate yet another successful Con Tinta party and start thinking about the next, as I sift through two bags of rubble—catalogues, brochures, book order forms, business cards, press releases and other publicity materials—I will be thinking back fondly on this last week by showcasing poets and poetry projects that grabbed my attention at AWP New York City.
Until the Wednesday Shout Out, y’all.

A commenter on my previous post called my arguments “Orwellian.” I take that as a compliment, since strictly speaking the adjective “Orwellian” means “of, pertaining to, or resembling George Orwell.” (I am well aware that’s not how this person meant it, so no one need write to say so.) I have the greatest respect for George Orwell as a writer who pointed out and diagnosed the abuse and misuse of language, which was one of the topics of my post, though hardly the only one. Orwell was also adept at puncturing posture and pretension, especially pretensions to virtue.
Too many people in the online poetry world take any principled disagreement or reasoned argument as a mode of personal attack. In turn, they know how to argue or to disagree only by means of personal attack. It’s also remarkable that when this is pointed out, as I have done here and on my own blog, many people, lacking all manners, respond in exactly the same manner I have decried, as if by blind reflex or reflexive blindness.
I would again like to make the point that the boundaries of the “inside” and the “outside” of the poetry world, or rather the multiple contemporary American poetry worlds, are very porous and unpredictable, and are constantly being redrawn. For example, whatever some people may think of AWP and the AWP conference as instances or symbols of “official verse culture” or some such shibboleth, almost everyone I met and/or spent time with at both conferences I’ve attended could be considered some variety of a “post-avant” writer. (Kent Johnson made a similar point in his comment on my previous post.)
At this point, I will reiterate some of the things I wrote in the comments section of my previous point, in the hope that what doesn’t seem to have been heard the first time might be heard this time.
Many of those who were once on the outside are now quite thoroughly insiders, and many people now cultivate a sense of outsiderhood who have never been anywhere but in the middle of the in crowd. Paul Hoover asks in a very interesting post on his blog regarding the question of whether the post-avant, “postmodern American poetry” as represented in part by his estimable Norton anthology (the book’s publisher tells volumes about the shifting sands of “mainstream” and “alternative” literatures, as does Norton’s forthcoming publication of the anthology American Hybrid, edited by David St. John and Cole Swensen, two poets on supposedly opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum), is the new mainstream, “Would it matter if Christian Bök and Kasey Mohammad had tenure-track positions?” Unless I am misreading their bios, both have not just tenure-track but tenured academic positions, as do many Language poets (Charles Bernstein and Bob Perelman, for example, are both at the University of Pennsylvania, near the pinnacle of the academic hierarchy) and their very diverse aesthetic progeny. And yes, that does matter. But many people willfully refuse to recognize that the landscape has changed, and that a lot of things that used to be weeds are now treasured flowers.
Many very comfortably ensconced people, older and younger, enjoy complaining about how marginalized and excluded they are. But as the marvelous poet Michael Anania once said to me, if you continue to nurse a sense of grievance and victimization after you’ve become successful, then you just become an asshole.
At the risk of sounding like Rodney King asking “Can’t we all just get along?”, I would like to point out that the enemy, if an enemy is required (as it seems to be), is not other poets, however different their aesthetic and social dispositions, and not even an organization like AWP (which is indeed a legal corporation), but a culture and an economy of scarcity—of money, of resources, of attention, of recognition professional and personal—that pits people in the society as a whole and in any given social endeavor against one another in a zero sum competition for crumbs of a shrinking economic and social pie precisely in order to prevent them from cooperating in changing the reward/withholding/punishment system some profit from, some rail against (some of these are actually suffering and some just don’t want to admit that they’re profiting), and most are actively harmed by.
Those engaged in the virtual turf wars with which the online poetry world is rife might do well to recognize that their battles and mock-battles in tempestuous teapots are the direct result, indeed can accurately be described as symptoms, of the economy of scarcity. The energy expended in those gladiatorial contests might be more productively used elsewhere and to other ends, ends that might obviate the need for such catfights. (Forgive my mixed metaphors.)

There seems to be a lot of resentment and anger toward AWP and its conference among those (many or most of whom seem never to have attended the AWP conference) who see themselves as excluded from an overly monolithic and reified idea of what AWP is and what it does, people who seem to believe that all published writers enjoy lives of pampered luxury. I understand the sense of those who feel themselves to be on the outside that the “inside” is some kind of “cabal,” as Ron Silliman has characterized the mainstream poetry world (though his definition of “cabal” includes people who don’t support or even know one another and have no contact with one another, which is rather the opposite of a cabal), or even a conspiracy, as the folks at the late-and-very-much-unlamented Foetry.com saw everything in the poetry world. I have felt that sense myself, that there was some secret key which I didn’t possess which would give me access to the poetry world and make me a real boy at last.
But it’s hard to understand the cultivation of such feelings among those who are clearly not the beleaguered outsiders they present and/or imagine themselves to be. Charles Bernstein has a recent post on his web log parodying AWP as the “Amalgamated Writing Programs,” a malign and monolithic corporation. He also presents it as seeking to crush all poetry that clashes with its ideology, all poets who refuse “to write the Amalgamated Way,” quoting the imaginary Darien Credenza (a caricature of D.W. Fenza, AWP’s executive director) as saying that “some views are more equal than others,” a heavy-handed allusion to George Orwell’s Animal Farm and its critique of Stalinism. Besides the implication that AWP is equivalent or even comparable to Stalinism, I was especially disturbed by the piece’s central conceit, that the so-called Amalgamated Writing Programs were holding (at their “annual congress,” a clear allusion to Communist Party congresses) a “Morally Repugnant Poets-and-Theorists Exhibit,” particularly since at another point in the piece this imaginary exhibit is referred to as “the Degenerate Books exhibit.”
The last people to hold Degenerate Art (Entarte Kunst) exhibits were the Nazis. Such a conflation of the utterly incommensurate—the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and the Nazi Party—is irresponsible and, yes, morally repugnant. If we put all the insinuations together, that would make AWP a bunch of hypercapitalist Communazis. The latter was a popular term of opprobrium among Nineteen Fifties McCarthyite types. But then, “the centerpiece of the exhibit [will] be a graphic display naming names of poets who engage in Un-Amalgamated activities,” so I guess that AWP are McCarthyite red-hunters as well. It all gets so confused and confusing…
Such pseudo-political posturing is rife in the online poetry world. But to compare AWP, which whatever its shortcoming and blind spots has no power over anyone (though the piece quotes Credenza with threatening that poets who don’t toe the Amalgamated party line that “poets should be like bees [working in swarms]…are going to get stung”), with Nazism is inexcusably irresponsible, demonizing AWP and trivializing the murder of millions of actual people. Such comparisons, like the word “fascism” (which Bernstein doesn’t explicitly use in this post), are thrown around much too casually these days.
But Bernstein’s piece does reflect many people’s view of AWP as a malignly powerful corporate entity out to keep them from achieving their dreams. Such a sense of exclusion and oppression is rather odd in the case of someone like Bernstein, who has been a chaired professor at SUNY Buffalo and is now a chaired professor at the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania. Such positions are hardly markers of marginalization. These would seem, rather, to be indications of the acceptance of avant-garde poetry and criticism in academia.
Having now published five books of poetry, two poetry anthologies, and a book of literary essays (yay me!), and still not found that magic key, I now realize that the poetry club or clique or coterie or cabal is at the least much more diffuse, diverse, and fractured than I had imagined when I was only aspiring to be a poet. Of course there is no lack of nepotism and back-scratching in the poetry world, and I don’t like it any more than anyone who’s not a beneficiary does. I hate dishonesty and hypocrisy, by which I’ve been victimized too many times. But I’ve also realized that their prevalence doesn’t distinguish the poetry world from the world at large. The poetry world offers more opportunity for effort and merit to be rewarded on their own terms than most parts of the so-called real world that I’ve seen. If it didn’t, I wouldn’t have the publications I rolled off above, as I’ve never had anyone’s sponsorship or been anyone’s protégé.
I grew up in poverty, about as far from anything like a literary world as one can imagine, and partly because of this, literature and the world it presented, and the possibility of a world where people cared about literature, appealed to me as a place utterly different from my own. As I’ve experienced the literary world and academia in general, I’ve come to see that too much of it operates by the same unfair rules as does the rest of the world, except sometimes in even more vicious and petty ways.
Many aspects of academia are petty, cruel, and vicious. The MLA convention, for example, which I have attended as a job-seeker for more than ten years (and no doubt that situation colors my perspective), is for me a toxic experience, full of people whose only interest is in scoring points against one another, in looking down on those who don’t come from or haven’t been placed in the right institutions, and in playing out their social dysfunction in the guise of intellectual debate, the point of which always seems to be “I’m smarter and thus better than you are” or just “Pay attention to me.” The criterion of “collegiality” in academia (at least in English departments) seems mostly to be used to weed out anyone who isn’t “one of us,” often on ethnic or racial grounds, or just because someone hasn’t completely filed him or herself down to fit into his or her assigned box. Or maybe he or she is just someone that the powers-that-be in a given English department don’t want to have over for cocktails. But the MLA is hardly the Nazi party either.
But I was struck when attending the AWP conference for the first time last year by how closely it resembled my early vision of a literary world. The warmth, the friendliness, the welcoming environment were almost overwhelming. I found it to be a very diverse place where I could meet with poets, have discussions about poetry, creativity, etc., without any sense of people trying to advance their careers. I’m very sensitive to the jockeying for position that’s so common at “professional” gatherings, and I found none of it.
So two cheers for AWP.

Last night Brigit Pegeen Kelly came up to awe the audience with her work. The fan club is rather sizeable so I won’t flash my membership card too loudly, but I will say what a treat it is to listen to this rather reclusive poet, who makes rare appearances. This was also my first time meeting her. When I took a job a few years ago at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she’s on faculty, folks assumed (as did I) that I would become chummy with her. Alas, she was on leave, and when she finally did return to teach I had already moved on to greener pastures back to New York City. She’s a brilliant poet, and a nice lady.
The poetry chit-chat going around here is AWP. I know it’s a bit early but not really: it’s right around the corner. The buzz is that it sold out: 7,200 people registered. And unlike past AWP conferences, there will be no on-site registration this year. If you didn’t register beforehand you are SOL. The next challenge will be to fit all attendees into the keynote speaker’s auditorium, which seats only 4,000. Well, it was bound to happen, the growth spurt, and especially for the NYC conference. I’ll be posting more about all matters AWP before and after the conference. During last year’s jamboree in Atlanta, this acronym was one of the top ten search engine phrases plugged into Technorati. Wow.
Anyway, another project I just completed was editing the new and selected volume of poetry for Chicano poet Alurista:

The volume celebrates a twenty-plus year relationship between this important poet and his publisher, Bilingual Press. Alurista is a hero of Chicano letters, and a key figure in the formation of Chicano identity. He is alternately referred to as “the poet laureate of Aztlán” or the “poeta-maestro,” both fitting titles given the significance of his artistic and political contributions to el Movimiento Chicano of the late 60s and early 70s. Besides his consistent creative output, in 1967, while a student at San Diego State University, he co-founded MEChA, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán. He helped draft El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán of 1969, giving it its title and preamble on that fateful March in Denver, Colorado at the First National Chicano Liberation Youth Conference hosted by Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales. In 1977 he founded and edited Maize, an early journal (and later small press) dedicated to Chicano and Third World literature and criticism that also sponsored the first Floricanto festivities.
He has also been excluded, like many writers of color, from the white canons, and therefore remains obscure and unrecognized by readers outside the Chicano cultural landscape. Alurista is nationalistic, political, and an outspoken critic of the Republican Party. It has been an honor working on this project, and I’m extremely excited to see this manuscript become a book to be released in 2009.
Hmm, I’m using the word “political” again. I think I’m home. So wáchale, haters: Chicano in da house!

I think many of these students turn to poetry as a way of understanding and integrating violent experiences into their newly developing sense of selves. Yet undergraduate poems about violence, often poorly written or too narrowly autobiographical, present a dilemma for the creative writing teacher: how can one respond to them both as a writing instructor and fellow human moved by another’s suffering without blurring the roles between student and teacher, or writing workshop and therapy group?
To find an answer back then, I read the literature written by doctors helping soldiers suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD). While not all students who are victims of violence suffer from PTSD, some do. Those with PTSD live a half-life, marked by a profound sense of emptiness and a continual reliving of the traumatic experience.
According to Jonathan Shay in Achilles in Vietnam, a book about Vietnam veterans suffering from PTSD, “Severe trauma explodes the cohesion of consciousness.” He discovered that narrative is what “pieces back together the fragmentation of consciousness.” To effectively shape a narrative, Shay argues, narrators require “trustworthy listeners.” A trustworthy listener is someone who can: 1) hear the horrifying accounts of violence without denying them or blaming the victim, 2) experience some of the terror, grief, and rage of the victim, 3) listen with emotion and respect for the storyteller, and 4) refrain from judgment.
Shay’s attributes of a trustworthy listener parallel some guidelines used in many workshops to respond and to critique poems. I used to instruct my students to identify a poet’s intention and then assess whether the poem successfully achieves it. They should not judge the subject matter, or ask questions about actual events. I’ve found that no matter how often I repeat these guidelines, students first respond emotionally and sympathetically to their peers’ poems, especially those about violence, and then critique a poem’s stylistic achievement rather than judging its subject matter. In short, they function as trustworthy listeners, freeing me to comment on craft.
Before yesterday, I used to think it was less important for the instructor to exhaustively critique a poem about violence than it was to simply let it be presented with minimal suggestions (and to contact the college counseling service if it was especially troubling). In doing so, students and teachers alike could view these poems as milestones, steps in a process that will mend an intelligence fractured by violence. Now this seems heretical, a blurring of the lines between therapist and instructor. I thought then it taught students about one of poetry’s roles—that of naming the unnamable. To listen to these poems as trustworthy listeners, I thought, was to help the sufferer name what has been up to that point unnamable. Naming, a quintessentially communal act, can reunite the sufferer with his or her social network and enlarge it to contain his or her suffering.
After yesterday’s violence, I think creative writing teachers should turn to experts in PTSD and psychology to figure out what to do when students turn in writing that contains horrific acts of violence.

We’d just spent four days in nerd nirvana, surrounded by other mutterers in darkness, pondering sonnet sequences, witnessing the triumphant birth of Annie Finch’s radical formalism and vaguely stalking Rita Dove. Although it’s officially called a conference, AWP is more an overwrought paradise, full of all our long-dreamed-of indulgences, a place for writers to strut, preen and bellow even the tiniest of victories (“Cow Chip Quarterly just agreed to publish my triple sestina! And it’s only going to cost me 20 bucks this time!”)
Once the show begins to wind down (11:13 on Saturday night always feels particularly sad), you see signs of folks struggling against the inevitable—standing in the Hilton lobby, stunned into inaction, wondering whether to join the guys for a weepy cocktail, unreel their woes in one last open mic, or trudge to the room to—dammit!—pack. We’re trying not to think about the moment many of us stumbled into today at airports all across the country. As we deplaned, grinning like Mary Tyler Moore on the streets of Minneapolis, we were greeted by underfed spouses, grubby children, crushing deadlines, dead-end jobs, filthy kitchens, unpaid bills, long commutes and dust bunnies under the sofa. Our “cute little writing thing, while tolerated (barely), is no longer understood as being more important than—oh, the fact since you’ve been off at your little “party,” the family has existed on mayonnaise, tap water and an ancient stump of pepperoni they found wedged behind the crisper.
Real life intrudes, and how. It takes particular fortitude to hold on to at least a smidgen of the unbridled glee we felt in the warm midst of our chronically misunderstood brethren. Remember the insistent ideas, the sudden creative revelations, the urge to write, write, write, the rebirth of our ambition? How to make that giddy high last in the face of so many mundane obstacles, at least until next year when we gather again in (gulp) New York?
It’s like when you come home from a fantastic party, the best party of the whole damn year. You’re swathed in our stilettos and sequins or tuxes and spats, hair spritzed, nails burnished. At home, finally, in front of the mirror, you begin to peel away the pomp. Bow ties are pulled loose, makeup is scrubbed away, and there it is, the real you, weary but relieved under telling fluorescents. It’s always heartening to see that you’re still there, as simple and unadorned as a single word.
So write that word. Then write another. And another. It’s what you do. Once the literary journals are devoured and the jimmy-hats have served their sultry purpose, all that’s left to link you to this glittering week are those words. It’s the one quiet thing that belongs to you, the current that pulses consistently beneath both the hoopla and grim reality. Sure, after a bitchin’ bash like AWP–when a writer is the best thing you can be–it’s normal to feel a little deflated when mere mortality taps you on the shoulder again. But that’s when you have to think it, way out loud: Time to write something. Cause that’s who I am.

Deborah and I hadn’t grown up together, but we grew up in the same neighborhood at the same time. Yep, we are west side of Chicago girls, and if you talk to us long enough, you’ll hear those streets in the sassy bend of our voices. In fact, our shared history was so strong that one of the first things we did yesterday—after hugging and screeching delightedly and screeching louder and then screeching some more—was to playfully slap our hands together in one of the first clapping games we remembered. More serious writers slowed to stare as we sang:
Oh Mary Mac, Mac Mac
All dressed in black, black, black
With silver buttons, buttons, buttons
All down her back, back, back.
She asked her mother, mother, mother
For fifteen cents, cents, cents
To see the elephant, elephant, elephant
Jump the fence, fence, fence.
He jumped so high, high, high
He touched the sky, sky, sky
And he didn’t come back, back, back
Till the fourth of July, ly, ly.
When we were eight years old, growing tall tangled in bitter root, we could whip our fingers numb with those clapping games, the hand jive. Smack, pat, clap, clap, snap, telling rhythmic tall tales of little girls and flying elephants—and blue-black superheroes who only flew on Fridays, cause that’s when the eagle flew. Some other girls were better at rapidfiring the rhymes, but I could make my hands a blur without ever losing it. I sewed those buttons down Mary Mac’s blackside. That dime and nickel also glittered in my fist.
I was a first daughter. Asked to create our own histories, we taught our hands to sing, and they grew callused with necessary music. Those songs we slapped were the first step in learning where our souls were, the place where our histories could actually begin. Swathed in Chi-blues, we were born knowing about the singing out. But it was eight years before I knew about the singing in—how we need to pull lyrics and backbeats and plump single notes into ourselves and hold them there.
Once you learn the location of the soul, you must immediately begin to feed it.
My whole body yearned for sound. Because I spent so much time inside, alone with my books and rampant imagination, I assumed folks were singing about what I wasn’t seeing. I heard whole stories in guitar riffs, sax solos, finger pops. I held onto lyrics for dear life. I already knew that words and their music had the muscle to save me.
And it was all music. One morning in my 4th-grade classroom, Mrs. Stein wrote the word “anemone” on the blackboard, and asked if anyone knew how to pronounce it. I rolled it around in my mouth until it came out right—and while she went on to explain that anemones were perennial herbs, I freaked on that one word’s rolling rhythm. I must have repeated it a thousand times that day, kept it low and special where my breath could catch it. Anemone. Anemone. Now it’s an exclamation curled in me that sometimes sings itself.
And it was all music. Whipping my hands into hurting, clapping to punctuate the rhyme word, popping non-existent hips to seal the deal. Warping what we knew, making it ours.
Oh Mary Mac, Mac, Mac
Why she so black, black, black,
Spend all that time, time, time
Flat on her back, back, back?
Having no idea what we were talking about. Thinking Mary had fallen, maybe while she was playing, and couldn’t get up. Wondering why my mother hauled off and backhanded me, no questions asked, the first time she heard me deep in that rhyme.
And it was all music. The countin’-by-tens of jumprope, flamin’ doubledutch rhymes. The street-corner doo-wop, the running jivetalk that gushed out whenever someone opened the door of the barbershop. Myself reading out loud. Daddy’s snoring, chicken frying in yesterday’s grease, James Brown’s huuh! All of it an overload of sweet for my two ears. Sound was all over me, feeding the soul I had found.
Not everyone understood.
“Patricia!”
Three downbeats in a line of song.
“Patricia! Tricia Ann! Chile, if you don’t—”
I didn’t hear her. I was singing in my closed-door soprano, head thrown back, eyes squeezed shut. Mangled notes were bouncing off the walls. The Temptations were begging, and I was feeling begged for:
I miss you more with each passing day…
Every night on my knees I pray
Oh, please
return your love to me, girl,
forgive me for the wrong I’ve done…
Bang! I jumped as a jagged chip of paint flew from the bathroom door and nicked my calf. Jesus Christ, the woman was going to kick the door down.
“Girl, get that thing outta your ear!”
I was sitting on the floor with my back resting against the tub, washed in florescence, the door closed and locked. A transistor radio in my lap, the antenna pulled all the way up, the knobby little earphone nestled in one ear. I removed it, but didn’t touch the clunky transistor’s little silver volume dial. The Temptations squealed on, tinny and remorseful through the wire.
“Why? Can I go outside now?”
“Nah, it’s gon’ be dark soon.” It was 3 p.m., the streetlights not even thinkin’ about waking up. But I knew my mother’s version of darkness, of lateness. “What you doing in there, anyhow? Open this door.”
She knew I was listening to the radio. But what she couldn’t seem to understand was that it required aloneness, that any intrusion of the real world pierced the magic. I needed Ruby Andrews and father James and Fontella Bass to preach their gospel unassailed. I needed to feel that anxiousness in my little hips. I needed to place myself smack in the middle of heartbreak and deception and love rediscovered. I needed to cry like I was grown. And I didn’t need a witness.
“OK, OK, I’m coming out. I’m coming out.” As I emerged, she shook her head slowly and made a sucking noise with her tongue and teeth, as if I’d been caught in the commission of a sin. Sin behind a closed and locked bathroom door hadn’t even occurred to me yet.
I remember my mother buying and playing just four records: Tyrone Davis’ “Baby, Can I Change My Mind,” O.C. Williams “Little Green Apples,” “Rainy Night in Georgia” and something by someone named Freddy Fender. Every once in awhile, a piece of lyric hit her at a time when she needed to be hit, and she wore the song out until it fixed what ailed. It was like a dose of Dr. John’s. She insisted that everything else was just noise, especially that sugary dribble I was obsessed with. I couldn’t even begin to explain to her how every spoken word had music hiding in it, how every piece of music I heard shaped me and gave me a ledge to dream on.
The more records I heard, the more I listened to the radio, the more singing words I pulled from the dictionary and held in my mouth, the more stories I read aloud, the larger the world loomed. And I grew increasingly hungry for all of it, especially the parts that dwelled beyond the boundaries set by my circumstance. I set out to learn everything I could about what I felt was being kept from me. There was another place, another mindset, and I longed to be a tourist there.
All that longing, all that being perched on the edge of discovering everything, came back in a rush yesterday as two little girls in their 50s found that they had been traveling the same path and clapped their hands together to celebrate. Now we are both writers. The magic words that mesmerized us as kids had grown large enough to guide our lives, to finally bring us together in this amazing place where just about everyone–except maybe a few crusty litmag editors–knows our joy, and shares it.