It’s true pirate radio, internet-style, with some of my literary friends and friends-of-friends generously donating their words and time for your listening pleasure. The readings and discussions range widely, from a short story recorded professionally in the studio of some guy named Ira who evidently has an interest in American lives, to a self-produced audio essay recorded on location in Africa, to what sounds like a writer who’s broken into your kitchen late at night to drink your bourbon and pet your dog, and when you discover him there he tells you a crazy-funny tale about the Russian mob stealing a river.

It promises to be “asynchronous as hell” in case you won’t be present for the AWP festivities themselves, though if you couldn’t make it because you’re trapped under three feet of snow, the internet may still not be much help. Analog shovels beat digital ones every time.

Instead, I’m going to post a few Machinima poems (not of my own creation) over the coming days. I was thinking of contextualizing these, even perhaps writing about Machinima to explain what it is to the uninitiated, but that would be tedious and incomplete and beside the point. You can Google it to your heart’s content. For now, here’s a wonderful, earnest mash-up of Halo, Gary Jules, and Langston Hughes.

Suicide’s Note

For one thing, it was unapologetic, without that defensiveness poets who work in form are prone too (But I also write free verse!  But I am really not a formalist!  I substitute!  Hide the rhymes!)   For another, everyone was professional and relaxed and super-prepared (not, er, always the case at these things…), kept to their time, came at it from another angle, listened and responded to their fellow panelists. 

Charles Fort spoke about Robert Hayden and how he had not been considered “black enough” in his time—something that in retrospect seems a bit bizarre for the author of the great sonnet “Frederick Douglas.”   In America, use of form has long been an oddly politicized choice.  (Women are sometimes criticized in the same way for using it—that false dichotomy of free verse = democracy and empowerment and progress whereas formal verse = oppression and elitism and kowtowing to dead white males.)    

Tara Betts gave a fascinating discussion of forms invented by African-Americans (as the Bop, see below), and of how we can all use forms invented in other cultural contexts—that they are all open to everyone, and gain energy from cultural cross-fertilization. 

Erika Dawson, who has something like rock star status in the formal world, and who has the presence to go with it (this is a tall woman who has written an ode to high-heeled shoes…), spoke about her relationship to the tradition, tossing off some seriously dead white male influences like Anthony Hecht and James Merrill,and  reminding us of just how raunchy the Metaphysical poets could be.  A decade ago she was told at a recitation contest that “form was dead” but now she has served as judge at that same contest.  She exuded confidence and vindication, taking on the canon in her own terms. 

Allison Joseph discussed among other things how she came to form, her fascination with invented and repeating forms (and forms invented by “women with three names”), and how sonnets, say, helped her handle toxic subjects like grief, how she could say things in form she couldn’t say in her free-verse, how it actually gave you permission to say such things.   Here’s her blog about rondeaus and other forms of repetition, The Rondeau Roundup.

OK, I wasn’t taking notes—this is all from memory—so this is rather a vague sketch—forgive me if I didn’t get it all straight.  But at the same time, rather impressive that so much of it did lodge in the memory!

I was most fascinated, I think, with the discussion of “The Bop.”  Invented at Cave Canem by Aafa Michael Weaver, it partakes of the proportions and perhaps the argument of the sonnet, in stanzas of 6/8/6 lines, which all end with a refrain.  I am particularly fascinated with forms that are extensions of the sonnet tradition, and it seems to me this could be added to the Meredithian sonnet, the caudeated sonnet, the curtal sonnet.  I hope to try my hand at it someday. 

But what was exhilarating was, I think, that what came out of this was that the tradition and form were not about exclusion or elitism or who owns or is allowed to do what.  It was about inclusion and access and taking all things human as belonging to everybody, about the ongoing conversation, dialogue really, of the dead and the living, about owing the canon not an obligation of respect and deference, to put it in a museum, but an obligation to pass it forward, to add to it, enrich it, keep it alive, take it into the future.

I am late to the post-AWP wrap-up party, I suppose, but nonetheless, I have a few thoughts about my four-and-a-half days in Denver. One thing, I talked to several people, some friends, some just people, who call themselves Denver residents. They all noted that Denver was a dull place to live. I would remark that I live in Iowa City, Iowa, and that things can get pretty dull there, if you know what I mean, and they would say, well, sure, it’s Iowa. But Denver is a big old frontier town next to the mountains, gateway to the West, and yet somehow it’s like a giant newfangled strip mall. How did that happen?

My thinking is that all of the people who made these general kinds of remarks were, in fact, transient residents; most were in school, at various writing programs, or were teaching at various writing programs. And since all of them were writers of some stripe, they were also the kind of residents given to spending some serious time considering. Just considering. In other words, they of course have worked out a position, have articulated a poetics, if you will, of everything, including how Denver as it is today might square with vatic Denver, the Denver that used to be (or probably never was).

But wait, there’s more. I also spent a fair bit of time walking the four blocks between my hotel and the convention center where the AWP book fair was housed. Back and forth, mostly lovely, crisp weather, especially in the morning, when I always underdressed and fairly froze as little mountain wind jags bounced around downtown. I felt like I was experiencing a Rocky Mountain High at those times, when the wind shot through me, and I pulled my pathetically thin windbreaker tighter around me, and I would even stop at times at a corner and consider walking back the one block, now two, now three to put on a warmer jacket, which I had brought, of course, had brought three jackets, because I like to be prepared for all possible weather events wherever I go, and sometimes I would occupy that corner for even five minutes, barely registering the crowds around me shuffling through the crosswalk as the light turned green, then stopping as the light turned red, at this point my bones had begun to hurt, it was that wind, and it would take some cab driver laying on his horn at an old woman who crossed at the wrong time for me to snap out of my contemplation and just walk into the convention center, bracing myself for the other weather inside this enormous building.

Once inside, I saw a lot of very serious people. I felt extremely unserious. I wasn’t on a panel; I wasn’t delivering a reading. I was at the conference thanks to the largesse of The Iowa Review, where I am the poetry editor, and also to support Canarium Books, which I co-edit with the three loveliest people I know. But walking into the airplane hangar-like room that housed the hundreds of presses, organizations, magazines, self-published writers, etc. I felt very small. Mostly because the room was just so big (if I was given to a more lyric kind of writing, I would remark that the experience of seeing the book fair room for the first time was sublime, in the way Wordsworth describes the mountain’s immensity, etc., i.e., one feels at a remove from the din, even if one has to soon proceed forward and attach one’s self (in)to it (yes, it is something like the shadow world in The Matrix, at least in a low-level reading/fantasy kind of way).

Moving forward into the business of this conference, the serious people surface, often stern behind a table or booth, often wearing the death-mask they have had fitted for just such occasions, the occasion of what, exactly? The occasion of pedaling wares, perhaps, or (re)connecting with serious people (Matrix again), or deflecting the stares of less serious people. What is very interesting to me is that I saw and sometimes met serious people all over the place, whether a major literary organization with culture cache, or a tiny press that essentially serves as a vanity press to anyone willing to subvent the publication of their book. The former serious people mostly made sense to me. I used to work for The Poetry Foundation (I forget now if I am supposed to initial cap the “The”) and it is a very serious organization, as is The Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, the NEA, and so forth. But I also, as I mentioned above, invest myself in a small, tiny press and I used to always think that small, tiny presses were, by nature, supposed to be at least sort of unserious. But they often are not.

The reasons are probably legion, but one thing that I noticed this year was that gap between the so-called Haves and Have-nots (the Establishment and the DIY Establishment) has increased (most think the gap is shrinking, because of things like the Internet and Print on Demand and because of things like hybridization and the grotesque and how academia has begun to swallow such things up and so the marginals have arrived, but that’s not true).  I felt a serious disconnect, talking to serious and unserious people, between how the serious feel they are perceived by others and how the unserious desire to be perceived by others. Or rather, that’s the distinction.

The serious people are always, in a context like AWP, “being thought about.” E.g., everyone has an opinion on how The Poetry Foundation should spend its money, or if So and So really should have been awarded a Guggenheim (for that is a lot of money for “a poet whose poems makes me want to punch a donkey immediately after reading.” Actual quote overheard on book fair floor.) But the unserious people spend a lot of time miming the actions of serious people (holding readings in contemporary art museums; sending extensive press releases out whenever they pass wind; publishing their own selected correspondence; sending letters to me when I used to work for The Poetry Foundation, wondering whether I’d be interested in featuring them on poetryfoundation.org, and then after not being featured on poetryfoundation.org, talking some serious trash on poetryfoundation.org for being an evil organization hell-bent on destroying literacy in this country (generally speaking, of course)).

And I have no problem with the latter—the desire for unseriousness to mature into seriousness. From unperceived to perceived. This is like the transition toward the sublime, the overwhelming flattening of the senses and reason, say, before the fact of the mountain. If that’s your thing.

Anyhow, I am going to post once more on AWP, and then let it go. The next post will feature assorted video and audio clips made in and around the conference.

Several weeks earlier in DC, I also participated on a panel on “Documentary Poetics” (organized by Francesco Levato) at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival—to my thinking, one of the most consistently engaging gatherings of poets and activists I’ve been to in recent years. Philip Metres, Martha Collins and I discussed wide-ranging tendencies in doc-po for a packed and enthusiastic room at the inimitable Busboys & Poets (which has, in case you haven’t been there, both one of the better bookstores in the mid-Atlantic and one of the greatest wait staffs in North America—there wasn’t a session I attended in the back room where one of the waitresses or waiters didn’t grab the microphone during the Q&A and level the audience with insights from outside the often too narrow poetry Beltway).

During my reading at yesterday’s symposium, I began by talking about documentary poetics as not so much a movement as a modality within poetry whose range I see along a continuum from the first person auto-ethnographic mode of inscription to a more objective third person documentarian tendency (with practitioners located at points all across that continuum).

Documentary poetics, it should be said, has no founder, no contested inception, no signature spokespersons claiming its cultural capital; its practice is not limited to the pre-modern, modernist, or post-modern moments (it is as comfortable in musty historical archives or conversations with actual live individuals as it is with Google). Documentary poetry tends to pack a lefter-than-liberal, social-Democratic to Marxist political history (grounded largely in WPA-era poems ranging from Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead to Langston Hughes’ “Johannesburg mines” and photo-documentary texts such as Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices). As Martin Earl mentions in “Documentary Poetry and Language Surge,”documentary poetry has a deep international tendency (I’d additionally add to Earl’s list works by writers such as Ernesto Cardenal, Alfred Temba Qabula, Nancy Morejón, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and others). And documentary poetics, though present in poetry, is currently more widely and, in my view, fully leveraged in visual culture (film, photography) than the language arts (which has a lot to learn from its praxis in other fields).

Finally–and I claim this only for my own documentary practice and not to the tendency as a whole–I believe that documentary poetics needs to participate not only in the social field of contemporary Poetry but—as has been its historical trajectory—in the larger social movements of the day. It needs to find its feet outside of AWP and art galleries and instead locate itself (or organize its potential location) on factory floors, in union halls, at political rallies, in collaboration with institutions and organizations working to shift the Draconian policies under which conservative school boards, Tea Partiers, and neoliberal politicians of the world (unite!?!) seek to police the rest of us.

It’s the middle of Poetry Month, so I think we’re obligated to send some love to the poets and their books. This was always one of my favorite posts when I did Harriet back in the day: it’s not exactly like getting singled out from the general audience on The Price is Right, but hey, people of the profession with few monetary rewards are grateful nonetheless. I’ll be doing a few of them before my time expires.

But I do want to rant a bit here and say that we shouldn’t subscribe to the notion of the freebie for everthing or that poverty is part of our game. That only leads to a type of abuse. Case in point: when newspapers were cutting costs, one newspaper in particular, which for years had been paying a notable poet to write a weekly column on poetry, determined that “poets would do this for free!” So the column was cancelled and now poets introduce their own poems. Is there no dignity in poetry?

It’s rare for me nowadays to do a reading or presentation gratis. It’s not that I think my creative work is worth any money, but I sure as hell know my time is. When organizers approach me with the opening phrase “We’re on a limited budget” or “We really don’t have much funding” I grow wary. These are not the most persuasive arguments. What I’m really hearing is that I’m worth as little as they can afford. If they had more money they’d probably not be asking me. I think it’s more endearing when organizers are upfront and say, “We can’t offer an honorarium but we will make sure you have a warm audience” or “We can’t pay you but we will sell your books!” It’s called an exchange: and it doesn’t have to be monetary.

Since my time is more limited than ever, I pick and choose carefully. When I turn an offer down I do so graciously and I follow-up by recommending other readers. And sometimes, if the organization or institution is doing great work for the community, I say I’ll do it for no pay. It’s not charity; it’s acknowledgment.

The only time I get annoyed is when I turn an offer down and then the organizer fires back with a guilt trip that appeals to my ethnic sensibilities: “But we have a large Latino community that’s hungry for writers of color.” All the more reason to pay me–or bite me. Would this tactic ever be used on white writers? It would sound rather funny and awkward. Also, it affirms the suspicion that we writers of color are asked to read because we’re writers of color, not because we’re good poets or performers

I mean, it’s bad enough that this misrepresentation is finding itself into poems. Where did I hear that? Oh, yes, there was a white boy poet who wrote and read a poem at AWP that made reference to people benefitting from their “caramel-colored skin” and “short skirts.” But we’re supposed to think it was funny and ironic and tongue-in-cheek. Har har fucking har har. Asshole.

Anyway, this afternoon I’m off to attend a ceremony honoring high school students in Newark who participated and placed in our annual High School Writing Contest. It’s a wonderful festivity with proud parents in the front row and giddy teenage writers at the podium, most of them reading in public for the first time. It’s a nice reminder that writing thrives in communities that don’t stroke egos and sanction stupidity like the aforementioned incident. Who knows what seeds will be planted at this event? Who knows what artists will blossom from these first steps?

It’d been six years since my last visit to AWP. This is not a confession. I had a strange time back then, adrift, inadequate feeling. You know, not feeling that I’d done enough, that I wasn’t pulling my own weight as a poet in the world. This is another way of saying that at that point in my career, I was so dependent upon the approval of others in order to judge my own worth as a poet, and that was disheartening, almost demoralizing. And certainly, we do this, think about our publishing careers in relation to others’ publishing careers.

First, I want to say that I am so pleased to have met the BOA Editions editors, Thom Ward and Peter Conners, who have been so kind and respectful via our telephone and e-correspondences. In person, they are more so. So thank you again to Thom and Peter, and actually, especially to Matthew Shenoda, for bringing me into the BOA Editions world. Peter tells me some folks were coming to the table at the book fair, asking about Diwata. I am so pleased to hear there is interest.

Second, I flew into Denver last Friday evening, and was up early Saturday morning and attending a 9 am panel, hosted by an incredibly energetic Sarah Browning of Split This Rock. I have copious notes, but rather that rehash what’s in my notebook, I want to just give some of my impressions. I do not know why the stereotype must insist upon perpetuating itself, that poetry is not enough in the world (of course, I spoke on a panel Saturday afternoon precisely about poetry in the world, in which “world” means outside of academic institutions). Poetry has always been in the world. I am really not so interested in engaging in discussions about poetry belonging to the academic institution, which is only one of many places where it exists, and even thrives.

This is an ongoing theme in my life and career, or it’s the issue which matters most to me, and so my ear is constantly tuned into discussions about it — transgression of border, in my own poetic and even activist practices, and given the poets and poetries to whom/which I am drawn.

That said, some highlights:

• John Murillo, reading “Ode to the Cross Fader,” from Up Jump the Boogie, his first book, newly released by Cypher Books, also reminded us of something we take for granted — doing our best work, remembering our responsibility as poets to witness and advocate.
• Melissa Tuckey, asking us to think about how our activism can serve our poetry, reminding us that we write political poetry because we are paying attention.
• Dan Vera, citing the “astounding tonguefuckery of the the Bush administration,” believes the role of the poet is to address the authority, respond to it empowered by language, to exist separate from it.  Poets decode language in order to name the unnamable.

Later on that afternoon, at a panel and reading for the anthology, Fire and Ink: An Anthology of Social Action Writing, a young woman of color in the audience articulates that her being neither MFA student nor professor has made AWP attendees turn their noses up at her. She tells us she works in real grassroots work, and asks how the academy can support her in this work, for she’s had and currently has no such support, but rather, discouragement.

I kept turning this question over and over again in my brain, until I finally came to this: is it even reasonable to ask the academy/academic institutions for support for real grassroots community work? I don’t think it is reasonable to ask for this. In response to this young woman’s question, Martín Espada told her this would be like expecting the boss to support the strike of the workers. This doesn’t happen because it’s not in the boss’s interest. In other words, Espada says, don’t ask for support from the academy. Find your support in your community. Toi Derricotte agreed, don’t ask for the academy’s support, because once you become reliant upon the academy’s resources, supposing you do indeed gain access to their resources, then what of your politics will you have to compromise in order to continue having access to their resources. In other words, you’d be beholden to their standards.

So these are just a few things I am thinking about this morning, as I fight off my migraine. More AWP stuff to come.

Been enjoying A.E. Stallings’ entries on literary friendships (sorry we didn’t run into each other at AWP, Alicia!) and I was reminded of the good old days at Harriet–sparring with Ange Mlinko, learning from Stephen Burt, getting puzzled by Christian Bök. And towards the end of our tenure back in January of 2008, the always-provocative Reginald Shepherd came on board. Sadly, he will not be joining us again because he passed away on September 10, 2008. His final Harriet blog post is dated August 26, 2008–an entry in which he is honestly and openly discussing his illness and complications. A tribute to his memory and accomplishments took place last week in Denver.

I only met Reginald a few times and only briefly, but I was a huge admirer of his first book Some Are Drowning, which Carolyn Forché had selected as the winner of the AWP Series in Poetry (since then renamed the Donald Hall Poetry Prize). She had recommended the book to me when we first met at a poetry workshop in Mexico around 1996. I was about 26 years-old then, and eager to locate my gay sensibilities in poems.

The next year I attended my first AWP in DC, where I got to meet Laura Jensen during a rare public appearance. She moved around the hotel lobby in a floor-length skirt that made it seem as if she was floating. That year was also the year of the sullen tribute to Jane Kenyon–Donald Hall’s late wife–who had succumbed to leukemia a few years before. And at the beginning of this tribute, one of the speakers announced to the audience that Allen Ginsberg had just died. I will never forget the communal gasp.

These thoughts are swirling through my mind as I start to think ahead to AWP 2011, in DC again next year. Everything does move in circles. I will be proposing a tribute to the late poet Ai, who passed away less than a month ago.

I suppose this is one of the reasons I do appreciate AWP–it gives us the space to meet, greet, and grieve. Who else will remember us as poets and writers if not other poets and writers? As I walked around the book fair, I kept being startled at the reality of our aging bodies, our mortalities. Of course, I’m projecting since I walked around using a cane–an elegant accessory, mind you–but a necessary one. (What I thought was arthritis of the knees or sciatica has since grown to a more complicated diagnosis, so it appears I will be cane-bound longer than I expected. Hear that, Lihn? The cane stays.)

Blame it on the jetlag for this rather lugubrious post, but it’s actually a celebration of community, an acknowledgment that despite the losses there are always gains. In this case, all those young writers in attendance–some opportunists, others dreamers–who reminded me of myself twelve years ago when I first set foot on the conference of conferences.

Those are my highlights now–meeting young writers from other parts of the country. And keeping sacred the memory of those who are no longer with us, though their words live on.

Someone spoke of your death, Heraclitus, and it moved me to tears, and I remembered how often we put the sun to sleep as we were talking.  You, my friend from Halicarnassus, lie somewhere, long long ago gone to dust; but your nightingales are living, and Hades who snatches everything will never lay his hand upon them.

Or, here is the Loeb translation by A. W. Mair:

One told me, Heracleitus, of thy death and brought me to tears, and I remembered how often we two in talking put the sun to rest. Thou, methinks, Halicarnasian friend, art ashes long and long ago; but thy nightingales live still, whereon Hades, snatcher of all things, shall not lay his hand.

(See the Greek here.)

It is the image of the two friends talking till the sun goes down that brings this to life.  And then the sad reassurance to the dead, and comfort to the living, that his verses (charmingly called “nightingales,” that ancient symbol of poet and song) shall live on.  Callimachus was a poet and scholar of consummate learning and polish (he was librarian at the famous library of Alexandria).  He flourished in the first half of the third century BC.  (Sorry, I don’t go in for the politically correct BCE…)  

The Heraclitus in question is a fellow-poet from, well, Halicarnassus (in modern Turkey).  He is NOT the philosopher who said everything flows.  That Heraclitus lived some 200 years earlier.  I point this out because of the dangers of the internet—there are footnotes all over the place (even some “legitimate” academic sites…) for the Cory poem that explain that Heraclitus was the presocratic philosopher of that name, even though, then, the poem makes no sense.  I mean, surely it could not have come as much of a shock to Callimachus that that Heraclitus was dead.  Really.

But I digress. This poem is more famous in the English-speaking world from the Victorian translation of William Johnson Cory.  Like Callimachus, he was a scholar as well as a poet, and served as headmaster of Eton.  His version goes:

It is a faithful, accurate and instantly memorable translation—and the bold liberties Cory takes are all meaningful and telling.  An indication of its classic status is surely the presence of many excellent parodies.  (Some are here.)

Evelyn Waugh also did a parody, and no doubt there are others.

Cory expands the efficient six lines of elegiac couplets in Greek to eight lines—and, importantly, two stanzas—of hexameter and heptameter couplets in English.  The six-beat line tends to break in two in English, leaving a rest in the middle, so that the seven-beat lines don’t feel longer, they just feel completely filled out.  The two lines that are completely filled out are the points of greatest emotional pressure:  lines 2 and 8.  

In the English, the first line is all Anglosaxon monosyllables besides the mellifluous, resounding and foreign “Heraclitus”—the name is lingered on.  The repetition seems to speak of denial.  And indeed, coming to “dead” at the end of the line is shocking—perhaps, we think for a moment, this is a false rumor—after all, we are addressing this “dead” person. 

Cory has changed the one someone who brings the news in the Greek, to a sinister “they.”  Hewing closely to the Greek, Cory calls the sun “him,” but in Greek, there is no choice but to give the sun a gender.  In English, doing so personifies him.  He becomes a companion to their long conversations, even though he goes to bed first. 

The big shift in the English, though, is between stanzas.  In the first stanza, Heraclitus seems still alive—if  in the past tense, these shared memories have a freshness and urgency to them.  He speaks to Heraclitus directly as “you.”  By the second stanza, Heraclitus has become a dead poet, whose poems survive him.  He is suddenly an archaic “thou,” (there is no such register shift in the Greek), and the repetition of “long, long” (though an accurate rendering of the original) is less about denial than about acceptance.   

In Greek, the nightingales (the poems, of course) of Heraclitus still live, but in the English they are “awake”—it comes to the same thing, but whereas the Greek is a plain and simple, elegant statement, the English is a metaphor—awake and thus singing though the night—the eternal night of death.  (And it foregrounds the contrast of the sleepy sun in the first stanza with the wakeful nightingales.) 

I often hear that the cardinal sin of translation is adding something, but I think this is often misconstrued.  Translation isn’t a word for word operation.  A phrase may sometimes explain something that is actually contained or latent in one word of the original.  “Thy pleasant voices” is not in the Greek, but in a way it is contained in the etymology of nightingale, which in Greek is cognate with the Greek verb for singing.  The “handful” of grey ashes is not exactly in the Greek either, but one wonders if Cory wasn’t influenced here by the end of the Greek poem:  grasping Death shall not lay a “hand” on his friend’s poems.

The synonym of “Carian” for Halicarnassian is metrically useful—it gives Cory more space to work with in the line.  But is there not also some vague hint to the ear here of “carrion”?  (Or I am going to far there?  Maybe.)  Death becomes the ultimate archaizer, or rather maker of timelessness, as indicated by the grand and old-fashioned “taketh,” and the slightly inverted syntax of the close, hammered home by alliteration, repetition and meter.  The poem begins in denial and ends in defiance. 

The Greek here of Callimachus has an elegance and restraint that we associate with the classical.  The translation gets that feeling across; but it is also more highly colored (the alliteration and internal and end rhyme for instance, the repetition of “bitter” in line 2, which is Cory’s own interpolation) than the original, more emphatic, more emotional.  More, well, Victorian.  But what it loses in that anonymous elegance of the Greek Anthology it makes up for in other ways.  It becomes (arguably) a great English poem in its own right.  The Greek is like pure, transparent spring water.  The English is like a vintage claret.

In any of its incarnations, though, it embodies beautifully our feelings towards our departed poet friends.  Our fond memories of our conversations, when we sent the sun to bed.  And our hope that their poems will live on, singing through the night.  Many poet friends and acquaintances have left us these past few years, translated out of time, and when I think of them, this poem pulses through my mind.

Tim may be best known as the editor of Artforum, but he was a serious poet for a decade before that. As someone who’s tried to bridge the poetry and visual art worlds, I was happy to see a number of prominent artists in attendance. I guess it helps to have the editor of Artforum on the bill as the opening act. Except that Kevin asked to go first, and read “Zoo Story” from his new City Lights collection of stories, Impossible Princess. He chose the less raunchy “Zoo Story” because, as he told me afterward, members of his family were in attendance. The night before, Kevin had helped organize a reading/performance at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church celebrating the release of the Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater, 1945–1985, which he co-edited. Perhaps in keeping with that spirit, he had Dodie and Tim come up to “perform” a poem based on the Joan Crawford film Autumn Leaves—“of course you’ve all seen it,” Kevin implored the audience in his charmingly inimitable way.

Tim then read four pieces that were just right for the context and occasion. The first was a brief cat poem that connected with Kevin’s feline soft porn “Zoo Story.” He then read a recent, abstract poem that used a staccato prosody and indeterminate pronouns to defer subjectivity within a phenomenological world that’s gone hazy around the edges. After expressing wariness about the category “poet-critic,” he read a poetic prose piece addressing an idea of authorship that might fit somewhere between the death of the author and the return of the real. His final piece was written in the late ’90s when he was a poetry MFA student at Bard. It seemed to be a kind of found collage poem consisting of lines and phrases from studio crits with visual artists. Did you ever notice how at a poetry reading the friends of the poet laugh the loudest at her or his funny lines (this is particularly endemic at Flarf readings)? This time the artists in the crowd—and those of us who’ve participated in these kinds of crits—were the ones who most appreciated the joke. But it was a serious piece, too, in that it cast a light on how art gets talked about, conceptualized, and utilized—for better and for worse.

Just like at AWP right now.

If it’s not too audacious of me to say so, I think Dodie is among the most significant underrecognized and underappreciated writers working today. Since “underrecognized and underappreciated writers” means they’re not all that well known, I’m sure there are plenty I don’t, well, know; but for now I’m sticking with Dodie until she achieves greater acclaim. She read most of a story entitled “When the Sick Rule the World.” It began with a questionnaire filled out at a naturopath’s office in order to help determine what environmental and dietary factors are making a person ill. As the story unfolds, the main character—Dodie (but we can never be too sure these days, can we?)—goes to visit an apartment building constructed for, and filled with, those suffering from environmental sensitivities—or, as she calls them, “the sick” (herself included). Eventually the story takes on a zombie-film screenplay quality as the sick wrest control of the world from the healthy—“the well.” Yet beneath the humor and absurdity of the whole piece is a sympathetic equation of sickness with a loss of home and an existential uncertainty—recurring themes in Dodie’s work.

There wasn’t too much hobnobbing afterward: the artists went back to their studios (maybe), Kevin’s family returned to Long Island, and the writers headed over to Patsis in the Meatpacking District, a small corner of Manhattan that used to be filled with trannies and prostitutes and great clubs like Mother, but is now overrun by people that Dodie said looked exactly like they could be from San Francisco.

So maybe I will see some of you at AWP this week. It’s a quick in and out for me. I teach in San Francisco on Friday morning, and then I’m off to Denver. On Saturday afternoon, I speak on a panel entitled, “Poets in the World: Building Diverse Communities through Independent Poetry Centers, Blogs, and Radio,” organized by Camille Norton. Other panelists are Oscar Bermeo, Jan Beatty, Tim Kahl, and Susan Kelly-DeWitt.

So “Poets in the World,” which is where we are supposed to be. In the Bay Area, I have always had a local, grassroots literary community, comprised of, well, local writers, and the work of these local writers has consistently been connected to this place, its history and political movements. There was no line drawn between activist work and literary work. In fact, the literary work has been activist work. I’ve previously blogged here about this community. I’ve also previously blogged here about Al Robles, Tony Robles, Jeff Tagami, and Catalina Cariaga. Growing into becoming a writer, I was surrounded by folks like this, folks for whom poetry has always been a way to tell stories about our families, our neighborhoods, our struggles, our political and geographical movements, about the people of this place. Poetry has always built and affirmed community, and propelled emerging writers onward.

I was one of those emerging writers once. I kept binders full of inchoate poems, acts of mimicry after reading Gloria Anzaldúa, Carlos Bulosan, Jessica Hagedorn, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ntozake Shange. I read them, and I wanted to tell our stories just like they did. I joined Maganda magazine in 1990, attacked slushpiles of Filipino American authored work with gusto, published so many emerging young writers, organized and hosted spoken word events and poetry readings, and in our community spaces, performed spoken word with so much heart.

Also in the early 1990′s, local author and educator Jaime Jacinto took me under his wing, started pointing me in such helpful directions, and asking me hard questions about my poetry and how I planned to grow it. He brought me into some great Bay Area literary spaces. He blurbed my first book. Nearly 20 years and a MFA degree later, up until the penultimate versions of my Diwata manuscript, I continued seeking his advice and direction. “Think harder about your music,” he’d say, “Go find Nate Mackey,” which I did. And it made all the difference.

I don’t remember now when this line between Poetry and The World was drawn, between those who get published by The Man versus those who spit Truth and Fiyah, and (referencing Craig’s recent post) between those who MFA versus those who don’t. I don’t know who started it. I hate getting stuck in the middle of it. I just know this division is counterproductive.

AWP every year. Better pay. Health insurance (currently). Full access to a research library (Ange mentions this as one of the true perks of academia, and she’s right). Summers off (to say nothing of sabbaticals). Travel and research grants. What have I gained? No endless letters of recommendation. No faculty meetings. No committee work. No classes to prepare and papers to grade. I’ve been lucky enough (I should say very lucky) to not have five-day-a-week jobs during my time in New York, which means I’ve had relatively (relatively—this is New York City, after all; plus, I have a seven-year-old daughter) uninterrupted long weekends during which to write year after year (but remember, no summers off), so I’m always writing something. I’m grateful for that consistently consistent time.

The danger for those of us outside of the academy, or even people locked in crappy teaching jobs, is feeling marginalized as well as resentful toward those with access to the university’s many resources—despite the current economic crisis. (You want to see budget cuts? Trying working for nonprofits during the past decade.) The danger for those inside the academy, as Linh writes, is that “the system as it’s set up demands a careerist mentality from both purveyors and suckers.” I’m frequently stunned by the social and cultural myopia of the poetry worlds (of course there’s not just one), and for some reason I’m still surprised when I see Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the bio note of the latest poetry book prize winner (I got an announcement for one in my inbox yesterday). The system is rigged, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. (It’s even worse in the art world, which an artist friend of mine recently described as “feudal”—poetry is post-feudal, though with a version of the court system intact.) But the system is rigged at every level of U.S. society. There’s absolutely no better example of this than George W. Bush becoming president.

Which is why I appreciated Craig Santos Perez’s post with its question: “Why is there such a dearth of reviews of poetry books by writers of color?” (his emphasis). There are exceptions (I’ve reviewed many books by non-white poets), and he usefully lists journals to consult. Barack Obama is somewhat of an exception to the structurally rigged U.S. system. Rigoberto González also splits the middle in his post—entitled “Oh, Schmacademy!”—when he sympathizes with frustrations concerning the proliferation of writing programs, while being “excited about these ‘too many’s. That means that groups that have been historically excluded (like Chicanos / Latinos and Native Americans) now have better chances of finding venues and homes and audiences for their work. How easy we forget that ‘too many’ tends to represent the dominant white population.”

It’s like the “death of the author” cited in Kenneth Goldsmith’s post. While I understand Foucault’s argument (and am partial to much of his thinking), and Kenny, as always, is challenging writers to examine what it means to exist in the contemporary moment, I can’t help but echo others who’ve asked why the author was killed off in the 1960s at the moment when women and disenfranchised groups were finding a more public voice?

My problem was a congenital cornea disease that apparently skips a generation.  Eight years after being fitted with the contacts, my eyes began to reject the lenses.  I was told that there was little else that could be done except to have cornea transplants.  By then I was enough of a poet to realize that sight, perspective, light, and shadow were being shaped into motifs for my work because of these treacherous eyes of mine.  I now see through a stranger’s corneas and they have been faithful to me for thirteen years.  I no longer wear contact lenses.  I wear spectacles.  But a crave light.  I get very annoyed when I am assigned a basement classroom for my classes and I demand being put where there are large windows.  I like hotel rooms with huge windows.  I pick my offices for their windows.  I am very happy where there is bright light.  When i am asked what I need to be in place for readings, I say, “lots of light, a bottle of water, a podium or music stand, and lots of light”.

The problem with large hotels is that they have long dimly lit corridors.  When these hotels are used for conferences, the corridors and lobbies are the meeting place, the town square, the place where you look for the stars and try to catch the eye of someone who may help your career, or you try to greet people who know you and who you may not have seen in a while.  And at these conferences, they come at you rapidly, in waves of faces, bouncing, moving, bobbing and weaving through the shadow and slight light.  All of this is exciting if you can see.  For me, it is a nightmare.  I look directly at people, I sense that they are smiling, but I don’t know who i am looking at.  Sometimes the distance is far enough for them to get offended enough to drift further away from me when they are passing.  Occasionally, they will come up to me and shout, “What you don’t know me again?” or worse, “Oh, you are too good to talk to your old friends now.”  And it is all in fun, but I can’t explain that the truth is I did not quite see them.  The problem is that I do see them, but what i am seeing is a shadow, not enough for certainty.  Sometimes it is like what happens when I am driving at night, and the street sign hurtles pass, and I can’t catch in time to do something about it.  Then it is too late. I have to turn around and get back to the spot and make my way in.

The problem also arises when I am reading.  At readings, I look into an audience and I am able to make out the faces of the folks who are sitting in the first few rows.  beyond that, I won’t be able to tell.  Not really.  And what folks don’t realize is just how much communication goes on with eyes, with lips, and with the turn of a head the subtle movement of a hand.  It is lost on me.  I never see any of it.  So it can be quite embarrassing, really, when I have looked straight into someone’s face, and have not registered who he is.  Usually that person has done the math, gone through the roller desk in the brain, come up with my name while they are checking me out at a distant.  I have no such luxury.  Usually, the second I recognize a face (“hey, I know this person!”) I am supposed to be able to say, “Hey, Joe!”  Well, I am just now trying to work out who this face belongs to, where do I know it from, and what name is normally affixed to the name.  Its that street sign, zipping away from me, all over again.

The thing  is, I am not blind.  I can see.  And under most other circumstances, I function fine.  But in this helter-skelter world of making connections at these conferences, trying not to offend, “networking”, schmoozing and all of that, my handicap makes me scared of those hotel corridors.  So I would like to make a disclaimer right here and right now while I can for anyone who tries to make eye contact with me at AWP in one of the dark corridors.  If I don’t seem to remember your name, or if I look blankly at you when most people who know you would start to show some familiarity, and if I struggle to remember your name, and if I walk past you without saying hello even though I seem to have been staring at you all along, it is not arrogance or the lack of social graces.  I just can’t see so good.  So do be patient.

ps. Confession:  Sometimes being handicapped like this has its uses.  At least I don’t have to keep coming up with small talk to fill up awkward pauses.

>> Thursday, April 8 <<

9:00 a.m.‐10:15 a.m.
The Online MFA: An Innovative Alternative to the Resident and Low‐Resident MFA. (Lex Williford, Daniel Chacón, Sasha Pimentel Chacón, José de Piérola). Granite Room Hyatt Regency Denver, 3rd Floor

Noon.‐1:15 p.m
Sacred Art: Writing to Change the World. (Norma Cantú, Sandra Cisneros, Ruth Behar, Carolina Monsiváis,  Michelle Otero, Liz Gonzalez) Capitol Ballroom Hyatt Regency Denver, 4th Floor

1:30 p.m.‐2:45 p.m.
Wesleyan University Press Poetry Reading. (Stephanie Elliott, Roberto Tejada, Adrian Blevins, Musharraf Ali Farooqi, Tan Lin, Kazim Ali) Rooms 102, 104 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

Writing Biographies: Making Someone Else’s Story Your Own. (Diana Raab, Honor Moore, Joy Castro, Phillip Lopate, Robert Root, Kim Stafford) Rooms 103, 105 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

(WITS Alliance) Journey to Identity: Teaching Creative Writing to Immigrant Students. (Long Chu, Jose Luis Benavides, Margot Fortunato Galt, Ellen Hagen, Merna Ann Hecht, Sehba Sarwar) Room 111 Colorado Convention Center, St. Level

Outposts and Exiles—A Reading by Award‐Winning Latina Writers. (Chantel Acevedo, Jennine Capo Crucet, Patricia Engel, Lisa Wixon) Room 203 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

Birth and the Politics of Motherhood in Poetry. (Melisa “Misha” Cahnmann‐Taylor, Alicia Ostriker, Beth Ann Fennelly, Paula McLain, Diana Garcia) Room 205 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

Poetry, Race, Ethnicity: A Conversation. (Lynne Thompson, Martha Collins, Susan Deer Cloud, Rigoberto González, Fady Joudah, Frank X Walker) Capitol Ballroom Hyatt Regency Denver, 4th Floor

3:00 p.m.‐4:15 p.m.

Sudden Fiction Latino: Short‐Short Stories from the United States and Latin America. (Daniel A. Olivas, Lisa Alvarez, Stephen D. Gutierrez, Pedro Ponce, Alicita Rodríguez, Edmundo Paz Soldán) Room 108 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

New Directions in Texas Fiction. (David McGlynn, Scott Blackwood, Ben Fountain, Mary Helen Specht, Oscar Casares)
Room 109 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

The Daemon and the Craftsman: Teaching Writers to be Wild. (Fred Arroyo, Pablo Medina, Xochiqueztal Candelaria, Rob Davidson, Jennifer Perrine) Room 303 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

4:30 p.m.‐5:45 p.m.

La Otra Latina: A Creative Nonfiction Reading by Latina Writers. (Lorraine López, Joy Castro, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Carla Trujillo, Teresa Dovalpage) Room 205 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

Writing in More than one Language: Significance, Opportunities, Challenges, and Audiences. (Katerina Stoykova‐Klemer, Ewa Chrusciel, Jennifer Dick, Pablo Medina, Simon Ortiz, Luisa Villani)
Room 207 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

5:30 p.m.-7:30 p.m.
5th Annual Con Tinta Celebration
Free Buffet / Cash Bar
Achievement Award Recipients: Abelardo “Lalo” Delgado & Dr. Alicia Gaspar de Alba

Laguna’s Mexican Bar & Grill
1543 Champa St., Denver, CO 80202 / 303-623-5321

>> Friday, April 9 <<

9:00 a.m.‐10:15 a.m.

Hybrid Aesthetics and Its Discontents. (Mark Wallace, Arielle Greenberg, Craig Santos Perez, Michael Theune, Megan Volpert) Room 201 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

Writing the Mind’s Wild Geography. (Hannah Fries, Maurice Manning, Ann Pancake, Lia Purpura, Alberto Rios, Pattiann Rogers) Room 207 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

10:30 a.m.‐11:45 a.m.

Justice, Community, and The Republic of Poetry. (David Mura, Martín Espada, Tara Betts) Rooms 301, 302 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

Noon.‐1:15 p.m

Living Words: Folklore and Creative Writing Programs. (Margaret Yocom, Darcy Holtgrave, J. Michael Martinez, Eric Pankey, Wayne Ude) Room 111 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

A Reading from Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery. (Sarah Cortez, Mario Acevedo, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Manuel Ramos, Sergio Troncoso) Room 207 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

1:30 p.m.‐2:45 p.m.

The Chicana Social Novel, the Border and the Americas: A Political Literary Forum. (Rigoberto González, Stella Pope Duarte, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Reyna Grande, Emma Pérez) Rooms 102, 104 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

Latin American Poets in the USA. (Lila Zemborain, Mariela Dreyfus, Eduardo Chirinos, Víctor Rodríguez‐Núñez, Carmen Valle, Eduardo Espina) Room 201 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

Ecopoetics on Colorado’s Front Range: Intersections and Ecotones. (Soham Patel, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Serena Chopra, Juan Morales, Mia Nussbaum) Room 203 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

Jean Valentine, Poet. (Celia Bland, Kazim Ali, C.D. Wright, Catherine Barnett, Miguel Murphy) Rooms 301, 302 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

Reinventing the Wheel: The Tradition of Innovation in Poetry. (Blas Falconer, Patricia Clark, Nancy Eimers, Elline Lipkin, Angela Sorby, Michael Theune) Rooms 403, 404 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

3:00 p.m.‐4:15 p.m.

University of Nevada Press Reading. (Gary Short, Phyllis Barber, Lawrence Coates, Susan Lang, Richard Yañez) Room 106 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

Editing Indigenous, Editing the Americas. (Janet McAdams, Diane Glancy, Katherine Hedeen, Gordon Henry, Víctor Rodríguez‐Núñez, Susan M. Schultz) Agate Room Hyatt Regency Denver, 3rd Floor

4:30 p.m.‐5:45 p.m.

A Reading by Michael Nava & Achy Obejas, Sponsored by the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University Mineral Hall Hyatt Regency Denver, 3rd Floor

6:30p.m.-9:00p.m.

“One Poem Festival”
Hosted by Momotombo Press and PALABRA
Dikeou Collection
1615 California St., Suite 515, Denver, CO 80202
www.dikeoucollection.org / (303) 623-3001

>> Saturday, April 10 <<

9:00 a.m.‐10:15 a.m.

Don’t You Hear This Hammer Ring? Socially Engaged Poetry in the Age of Obama. (Sarah Browning, Regie Cabico, Melissa Tuckey, Naomi Ayala, John Murillo) Rooms 103, 105 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

Ghost Road Press Five Year Anniversary Reading. (Mathew Davis, Jessy Randall, Juliana Aragon Fatula, Jeff Kass, Eric Elkins) Room 106 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

10:30 a.m.‐11:45 a.m.

Body as Landscape. Place as Blood. (Barrie Jean Borich, Achy Obejas, Ann Pancake, Brian Teare, Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, Ira Sukrungruang) Rooms 102, 104 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

Re‐writing America: Complicating the Poetics of Identity. (Neelanjana Banerjee, Hayan Charara, Samantha Thornhill, Ching‐In Chen, Tim Hernandez, Summi Kaipa) Room 201 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

Translations of Contemporary Poetry from Latin America. (Kristin Dykstra, Urayoán Noel, Juan Manuel Sánchez, Mónica de la Torre, Daniel Borzutzky) Room 203 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

Noon.‐1:15 p.m

Border Crossings: Women Writing the West Across Genres. (E.J. Levy, Sawnie Morris, Summer Wood, Valerie Martinez) Room 108 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

Bilingual Writers and Their Aesthetic Choices. (Lucia Cherciu, Urayoán Noel, Brenda Cárdenas, Hedy Habra, Emilie Pons, Claude Convers) Rooms 210, 212 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

1:30 p.m.‐2:45 p.m.

Writing Beyond Race. (Veronica Gonzalez, Lara Stapleton, Gina Apsotol, Carl Hancock Rux) Rooms 102, 104 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

Both Sides of the Mouth: Teaching Bilingual Workshops. (Cheryl Klein, Daniel Chacón, Tim Hernandez, Naomi Hirahara) Room 107 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

3:00 p.m.‐4:15 p.m.

And Gladly Would (S)he Teach: Are Visiting Writers Valuable? (Randall Albers, Dorothy Allison, Cristina Garcia, Steve May, Patricia McNair) Room 107 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

Re‐Mapping Aztlán: Celebrating las Historias and the Landscape of Chicano Literature. (Michelle Otero, Stella Pope Duarte, Alex Espinoza, Manuel Ramos, Richard Yañez) Room 111 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

Write the Relationship. (Sawnie Morris, Paul Guest, Valerie Martinez, Eliot Khalil Wilson, Amy Pence) Room 304 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

Poets in the World: Building Diverse Communities through Independent Poetry Centers, Blogs, and Radio. (Norton Camille, Barbara Jane Reyes, Oscar Bermeo, Jan Beatty, Tim Kahl, Susan Kelly‐DeWitt) Granite Room Hyatt Regency Denver, 3rd Floor

4:30 p.m.‐5:45 p.m.

Reading from the Anthology, Primera Pagina: Poetry From the Latino Heartland, by the Latino Writers Collective. (Natalie Castro Olmsted, Linda Rodriguez, Gloria Vando, José Faus, Xánath Caraza, Gabriela N. Lemmons) Rooms 102, 104 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

Poetry and New Media: A Users Guide. (Katharine Coles, Wyn Cooper, Kate Gale, Alberto Ríos, Monica Youn)  Rooms 103, 105 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

Fire and Ink: A Social Action Writing Anthology Reading. (Diana Garcia, Martín Espada, Toi Derricotte, Frances Payne Adler, Ray Gonzalez, Debra Busman) Rooms 301, 302 Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

I’m spending this weekend at home, grading papers to free up my upcoming week. Does it need to be said that I’m attending AWP? I believe this is my 10th time–and though I have my gripes about the conference (overloaded schedules, claustrophobic book fair) I also celebrate its pleasures, like meeting up with friends and former students. As anyone knows, the conference is poetry-heavy. Perhaps because fiction writers usually have little to lose by not attending, but poets have plenty to gain.

Some may balk at the networking that happens at every corner and others may bitch about how there are too many writing programs and books of poetry being published, blah blah blah. But I’m excited about these “too many”s. That means that groups that have been historically excluded (like Chicanos/ Latinos and Native Americans) now have better chances of finding venues and homes and audiences for their work. How easy we forget that “too many” tends to represent the dominant white population.

AWP-Denver is getting it right this time by shaping a conference that better reflects the land and its people. The buzz on social networking sites is that there will be more Latinos and Native Americans attending this year, so I had to show up though I’ve been threatening to take a breather. (Next year in DC–if it isn’t an African American conference, it’s not a conference. AWP organizers take note.)

For the longest time I resisted entering the teaching profession. In fact, after I completed my MFA I did anything but jump right back into the university academy as an instructor. I worked as a literacy specialist for an after school program, I worked as a translator at a hospital, I even returned to my old life as a dancer and assisted my former dance director at his studio. But as my credentials grew it was hard to stay away–the academy pulled me in, tempting me with crazy things like health insurance and a regular paycheck. Who knew those things were useful?

But the perk that I wasn’t expecting, and which I have since learned to appreciate and hold on to as the main reason to stay in the academy and support AWP, was engaging with graduate students. I absolutely love my students. And believe me, I’m a hard-ass teacher: I’m too honest for my own good in the writing workshop and I demand more than the young writers can give.

I don’t make any other promises than helping young people grow as artists and readers. It’s for the love of the poem that we get together every week. If the academy is facilitating that than we owe some gratitude not the shade that usually gets thrown on it, usually by people who feel somewhat superior because they fancy themselves outsiders. Please. (Insert eye roll here.)

Who knew I’d be part of a maligned population just because I want to be among my kind–people who want to write and talk about what they read? And, as a bloke who comes from a family of migrant farm workers, the clean job with the nice paycheck isn’t bad either. So do me a favor: if you’re an AWP or “academic poet” hater, don’t come near me. I wield a cane now and I’m not afraid to use it. And I will be damned if I allow my students to be insulted for investing time, money and energy into their graduate education.

(In the spirit of love, a shout out to my poetry crew at Rutgers-Newark: Diego, Saeed, Jenna, Moriah, Valerie, Armin, Rimas, Sara, Paula, Zahra, Jean, Susan, Chris, and Nora; and at VCFA, Jacquetta.)

P.S. I’ll be back in a few days to gab about race. Oh, yes, Rigoberto’s a Chicano hornet and he’s building his nest on Harriet

Actually, I think it was a very good group we were in all round—I certainly found the conversations stimulating and conducted with good-will and respect.  But maybe being the two women—and the two mother-poets—had something to do with our continuing our conversations off the blog.  And maybe being from opposite sides of the poetry “spectrum” added too—we could compare notes on our respective “scenes.”

I was able to meet Ange in New York late in our Harriet tenure for a coffee, and then later we roomed together at AWP.  (We were both on a panel organized by Craig Arnold…  more on this later.)  Then, when Ange moved to Beirut this year, I was excited to have a mother-poet-literary-friend in the neighborhood, so to speak.

In January, Ange was actually able to visit me here in Greece, and we (plus my four-month old baby girl) spent four days on a Greek island in the dead of winter. 

Trust me, a Greek island in the dead of winter is no Mama Mia experience—it can be cold and rainy and windy, ferry service is erratic if not interrupted, tavernas are closed, save maybe one for the locals.  We had to go to the pharmacy at one point for contact lens solution, and discovered the pharmacist performing minor dental surgery on a local Albanian worker.  (To go to a real doctor or dentist entails getting a boat to the next, larger island.) 

But we had a great time hanging out, building fires in the fireplace, cooking and eating, taking long walks, drinking an organic box wine called “Pausilypos” (a word straight out of Euripides, I think), which means “sorrow-cease” or “woe-stopper,” pushing the baby the 7 or eight kilometers to other side of the island.  (For which feat, apparently, we acquired some notoriety among the locals.)  Conversations were about anything from the difficulty of writing while caring for small children to po-biz gossip.  At one point we exchanged long passages of a book of free-verse we had both memorized:  Go, dog.  Go!

Literary friendships–real, live, in-person friendship (as opposed to Facebook “friend”-ship), where you store up the laughter and silence of real meetings, in sound-of-voice conversations–are nourishing and replenishing.  It can be easy to forget this in an era of energy- and time-draining social “networking.”

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.

I’ve always had trouble “concentrating” on it myself. In fact it’s often seemed to me that I don’t know how to “work” on writing, as the word “workshop” implies. So what can I offer a young writer I just met? All I could really offer was something of what I’ve read and how it pertains to the endeavor (not the “vocation”) of writing.
— (point of departure – 2)
A few weeks ago I read a book, a perfect-bound yellow pamphlet, put out by the magazine n+1 as their inaugural “n+1 research pamphlet” which offered a transcript, kind of like this one, which occurred a year or two ago at PS1 contemporary art museum in queens, which focused on the avant-garde.
I’m in no way proposing that this little yellow book is a must. (I suppose a book you “must” read is more like a little red book, or maybe Mein Kampf, and perhaps every artist should read that mad artist’s work, though i confess i never felt like picking it up myself.) But I found disagreeing with the yellow pamphlet productive: it caused me to think—in connection to thinking as I have been recently about sustainable agriculture and sustainable small presses—about the sustainable, if you will, avant-garde.
I was most irked by two premises that one of the panelists asserted: 1 – that the avant-garde is/was all about form, and could only offer new forms, 2 – and that the avant-garde is/was invested in linear progress (a kind of progress that resembles business models in this country, growth and more growth) and that it (the avant-garde) is/was a kind of breaker that went ahead of the mainstream, and which the mainstream followed, picking and choosing the most successful of its experiments.
Of course, I have an elaborate and longwinded way of approaching to discredit both assertions.
But I can’t go into them here, because this is not a panel on the avant-garde. Yet, some of the books/authors I’m attracted to talking about at this panel effectively do a better job than I could, and perhaps discussing them will suggest to you ways in which that n+1 guy was totally wrong. —(some thoughts with some books i like to read) Laura Riding’s Collected Poems (kept in print by Persea) contains an enigmatic poem called “Poet is a Lying Word” and just reading the title, one gets the shivers. What could she mean?
In her preface to the original 1938 edition, Riding takes responsibility for her poems, and tries to negatively define the “reasons of poetry”. She attacks the idea of the muse, and more widely the “compulsion” to write poems attributed by poets to “forces outside themselves”.
She says that for the reader, “to go to poetry is the most ambitious act of the mind,” and Riding is looking for a way for the poet and the reader to be “equal companions in poetry”.
When Hakim Bey, in Communique #6 from T.A.Z. (Temporary Autonomous Zone, published by Autonomedia), urges artists to enact “Poetic Terrorism”, he speaks of “gratuitous generosity” rather than violence. “Art tells gorgeous lies that come true.”
It’s not precisely the same meaning as Riding’s healthy suspicion of poetic language, but Hakim Bey is also looking for a “secret theater in which both artist & audience have completely disappeared—only to reappear on another plane where life & art have become the same thing, the pure giving of gifts.” In other words—equal companions in poetry.
This idea of the gift has intrigued me, because many of the writers I’ve come to think of as my teachers, have written about the gift, the perfect gift, in relation to creative endeavor.
Daniil Kharms, for instance, in “A Treatise More or Less After Emerson” sees the perfect gift as having a negative use value, something that throws off the chains of worldly interdependence, demanding no other object to give it meaning, (the gift of an ink pot demands a lid for the ink-pot, and also a desk, a desk demands a chair, etc.). The perfect gift also won’t make you cry if it disappears, as it causes no feelings of attachment and therefore it’s own negation would cause no regret.
“…a stick for instance, to the end of which has been attached a wooden sphere and to the other end a wooden cube. Such a stick can be held in the hand, or if one puts it down it doesn’t matter at all where. Such a stick is no use for anything else.”
But this perfect gift isn’t just a bauble. There’s something more mysterious about it. In fact, it is a tool for approaching immortality.
Struck with the conundrums of the perfect gift (its uselessness in the physical world vs. its spiritual implications; the dis-attached way we might dispose of it vs. the importance of giving it, etc. etc.), I find the same conundrums I see in evaluating writing, my own first of all.
Am I being generous when I offer a poem? When I write it? Can I be unattached to it? Am I (selfishly) acquiring by writing?
“Negating correctly the objects around ourselves,” says Kharms, “we lose our taste for acquisition”. Can I negate these objects, the poems, that I’ve placed around me? Back to Riding’s preface: “To live in, by, for the reasons of, poems is to habituate oneself to the good existence. When we are so continuously habituated that there is no temporal interruption between one poetic incident (poem) and another, then we have not merely poems — we have poetry; w have not merely immediacies—we have finality. Literally.”
I love Riding’s chilling and emphatic “Literally”. In her own Poetic Terrorism, Riding—like Hakim Bey—finds a heavenly plain, another existence, (just as Kharms seeks immortality in the exchange of perfect gifts)… where poet and reader are one in poetry… She embarks on the (utopian of course!) project of giving “poems written for all the reasons of poetry—poems which are also a record of how, by gradual integration of the reasons of poetry, existence in poetry becomes more real than existence in time—more real because more good, more good because more true.”
In Henri Michaux’s TENT POSTS (recently made available in English by Green Integer)—a book which is possibly meant to instruct me, the young writer, or himself, the artist starting over again and again?—as in Hakim Bey’s “communiques” we also read about a kind of poetic battle: “You must prepare for bodiless combat, to be able at least to hold your own: abstract combat that contrary to other kinds is learned by daydreaming.”
Of the three works collected in STROKE BY STROKE recently translated by Richard Sieburth & published by Archipelago—one is called “Grasp” (a sketchbook of drawings, a poem, a meditation, an essay with illustrations?) Here, Michaux inveighs punningly against the grasp, against the desire to grasp: his own desire to grasp an animal by drawing it, against the desire of the author to “grab” his reader, to be a “gripping” read, and the desire to understand…
From this juncture, we could go to Robert Walser, we could go to Bruno Schultz, differently but definitely to Maurice Blanchot; we could find this resistance to in all that keeps to the margins, and resists, struggles against progress, against use-value, against a world-order predicated on economic growth, etc. … Walser’s hedgehog that says, in effect, “don’t look at me” and “leave me behind”.
Maurice Blanchot writes in the essay “From Dread to Language”:

If the book is not useful for anything, it appears as a disruptive phenomenon in the totality of human relations, which are based on the equivalence of the currencies exchanged, on the principle that corresponding to every production of energy there should be a potential energy in a produced object, an energy capable of being thrown back again … into the uninterrupted circuit of forces….” Here is the book as interruption, an art that is value-less, a writing that does not “attain something”. Precisely the pursuit or recognition of that “disruptive phenomenon” (as content!) is shared by the writers I admire, though they couldn’t be more different with regard to form.

“Learn cautiously,” Michaux warns me. “A whole life time isn’t enough to unlearn what you allowed, naively and submissively, to be put into your head—simpleton! —without fathoming the consequences.”
(a side note—In a gray notebook found posthumously, the poet Alexander Vvedensky also moves toward a practice of “non-understanding” as Vvedensky attempts un-learn preconceptions about time, and offers poetic proof for the insufficiency of the language we presently use to describe time.
—The avant-garde seems to me always involved in radical reconstructions of time, or attacks against it.) Also in Tent Posts: “If you follow a road, be careful; you’ll have trouble coming back to wide openness.”
Riding shares this anxiety of learning with Michaux, because to read a poem for all the reasons, one must unlearn the reasons that you thought you had for coming to poetry, all those things they taught you. In fact, you kind of have to forget all about poetry (as i understand it) to read it, or to write it.
Rarely are blurbs instructive, but Ashbery says something about the way Michaux is a “conscience” that registers “minute-to-minute living”. Is that like living in poetry every minute? If so, it’s not the most comforting of apartments. And neither is Riding’s “habituation” in poetry.
These writers unsettle the writer-desire and then, somehow, in-spite of everything that writing can’t possibly do, these books intensify that desire. Sounds like a blurb, doesn’t it. Yeah, it’s probably not that simple.
Michaux talks to himself as I eavesdrop: “However weighed down, washed-up, bullied you may be, ask yourself regularly,—and irregularly—’What can I risk today?’”
Matvei Yankelevich is the editor of the Eastern European Poets Series at Ugly Duckling Presse, and co-edits 6×6, a poetry periodical.

1. Michael Wiegers, Editor, Copper Canyon Press
So Many Books by Gabriel Zaid
ABC of Reading by Ezra Pound
Classics Revisited by Kenneth Rexroth
Adagia by Wallace Stevens
Letter to an Am Imaginary Friend by Thomas McGrath
Note from a Bottle Found on a Beach in Caramel by Evan S. Connell
Compass Flower by Evan S. Connell
Poetics of Work by Juan Ramon Jimenez
Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford
Dance Writings by Edwin Denby
Pictures of Nothing by Kurt Varnedoe
2. Jeffrey Shotts, Poetry Editor
The less well-known work of (World War II poems) by William Stafford
Collected Poems by Lynda Hull
Letters to a Stranger by Thomas James
Dark Horse Anthology by Kevin Prufer
Collected Poems by Lorine Niedecker
3. Matthew Zapruder, Editor, Wave Books
MZ by Yannos Ritsos
Exile and Return by Yannos Ritsos
Drowning with Others by James Dickey
For Love by Robert Creeley
4. Joshua Beckman, Editor, Wave Books
Emily Dickinson’s notebooks
5. Matvei Yankelvich, Editor, Ugly Duckling Presse
T.A.Z by Hakim Bey
Tent Post by Henri Michaux
Stroke by Stroke by Henri Michaux
The Great American Novel by William Carlos Williams
Collected Poems by Laura Riding

First up: Jeffrey Shotts, marketing director at Graywolf Press. To figure out his recs, he recalled what got him started reading poetry. He turned to the familiar. Born and raised in Central Kansas, he found that William Stafford’s work spoke to him in an authentic, clear, contemporary voice. He wasn’t, however, recommending that we read Stafford’s widely anthologized poems such as “Traveling through the Dark.” Rather, he suggested that we let the familiar lead us to the unfamiliar. In Stafford’s case, to the darker, deeply political poems that he wrote as a result of being a conscientious objector during World War II. Shotts also recommended Lorine Niedecker—another regional, strangely familiar regional voice.
Any doctor’s in the house? Matthew Zapruder, editor of Wave Books, definitely could have used some Xanax during panel prep time. Filled with anxiety about his recommendations—that they would reveal he’s not all that well read, that the recommended books from his shelf would publicly out his esoteric lifestyle (Hey, Matt, we already know about that. Remember the Poetry Bus tour?), he, too, turned to first encounters. As a grad student at U. Mass., someone handed him Robert Creeley’s For Love, and some James Dickey.
But what he really wanted to talk about was his general anxiety about walking into the book exhibition and being intimidated by zillions of books. How do you decide what to read? Resist the urge to categorize, he said, which is what he doesn’t like about Silliman’s blog, how everything is always sorted into categories until “every poet becomes an exemplar of a category.” As an editor, he tries to resist that. And oh yeah, Yannos Ritsos’ book Exile and Return changed his life.
Did anyone else think Joshua Beckman’s Ginsberg-ish mop of hair is looking a bit more trim than the Poetry Bus tour days? Ginsberg would have definitely high-fived Beckman’s non-recommendations, the ploy he’d invented to deal with how ridiculous he thought the panel title was, and how more ridiculous it would be when only 10 people showed up, and now, Oh My God, there were hundreds of people staring at him scribbling down everything he said.
Beckman, who is also editor at Wave Books, forged ahead. Unlike Zapruder, he likes to think in categories. For example, he likes literary canons, and then he doesn’t like them because they’re finite. He started thinking that a canon of categories might be helpful. Every poet, he recommended, should read regional poets. Every poet should read contemporary and not contemporary poets. Every poet should have books of varying size on their shelf, so that he or she doesn’t start thinking in 81/2 X 11 format. Poets should read books they think they know, such as Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. “We all know what the dude looks like, but having a relationship with the book that is that shallow is detrimental to writing. I mean, what does it mean when we say, ’That’s so Kafka-esque.’”
He finished with—every poet also needs to have ambitious books on their shelves. Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems has been on Beckman’s shelf for years. “It’s so daunting, incredible, and strange, he said—gesturing to give a size of its massive bulk—that I kept thinking this is beyond me; I wasn’t sure I wanted to read it, but I kept it there to give me a sense of what could be. “
Beckman’s mention of ambitious books fired up the panelists. Jeffrey Shot recommended Blake’s wonderful, but most political and bloody difficult poems like “Daughters of Albion” and “Jerusalem.” Zapruder cautioned against the latter confessing that the ONLY time he took acid he read Jerusalem and it gave him a really horrible feeling. But having such negative reactions is a good thing, he said, kind of like “throwing spitballs at girls because you like them.” States of not knowing are to be encouraged.
The final panelist to speak, Matvei Yankelvich, from Ugly Duckling Press, definitely knew so much about what avant-garde writers would make of the panel that he wrote it all down instead of speaking extemporaneously. He talked so fast that we couldn’t get it all down, but he said he would give us his remarks later in the day to post on Harriet. We really want to read them because they’re a refutation of a little yellow pamphlet that n+1 included in their last issue. More to come….

As my gleeful (“Ah! So many people! So much money!”) cabbie deposited me outside the Holiday Inn in Atlanta at what felt like 2000 o’clock last night, I decided that the AWP could definitely use a dose of nasty glamour. We need overwrought drama, blatant bedhopping, more hissy fits, one or two mysteries of paternity, an oily spokesman, several unbalanced pop tarts and a discreet little complex in the islands where we can go to “rest” when our “work” gets to be too “much.” We need to carry teeny dogs in teeny designer bags and give them names like—well, Teeny. Dammit, we need to wear cuter clothes.
Imagine, if you will, the red carpet on the very first day of the glitzy extravaganza known as AWP:
“Omigod! Omigod! Getting out of that ecologically correct stretch limo . . . isn’t that—omigod, it’s . . .
“Mark Doty! Mark, Mark, is it true that you’ve signed a pesky sestina to star in your latest book? Rumor has it that you had to get rid of that temperamental villanelle . . . and may I say you look particularly elegant tonight . . . what are you wearing? Is that—[insert shuddering inhale here]—Gap?”
Yep, we’ve toiled in the backdrop long enough. It’s our time to shine. I’m going to try and forget that the tender Delta baggage handlers snapped a wheel on my suitcase, that my cabbie smelled vaguely unwashed and that the throng waiting for me (well, waiting for something, anyway) outside the Holiday Inn looked less like paparazzi than underpaid, flight-battered English profs on the prowl for bad karaoke and brain-numbing margaritas.
A revolution begins with one. I have looked forward to this all year, and I—for one—plan to work it.
I fully intend to enter my 10:30 a.m. Thursday reading dripping in sequins and leading a young yet-to-be-named male model on a leash.
No photos, please.