This was my third year attending AWP, and I finally feel like I might understand what I need out of the conference and how to get it. Maybe.

I do feel like traveling to AWP is traveling to another planet. Once I set foot in the hotel lobby my mind zeroes in on all things poetry and I get a bit fuzzy about everything else. I tend to overdose a bit on panels and readings at the conference. I learned more this year about pacing myself, and still, every time I went back to my room to take a timeout, I knew that I was missing another chance encounter at the bookfair or another opportunity to hear someone fabulous read. So be it.

Coincidence: I picked up a little book of poems, Souvenirs of a Shrunken World by Holly Iglesias, which is all about the World’s Fair of 1904. Several of the poems hint at that slightly anxious feeling of not being able to see all of the wonders contained within the gates. Very AWP!

It was wonderful to see old friends and put faces to names from internet connections, and I did get re-energized about poetry and writing, as I had hoped. (I shipped home 17 lbs. of books/journals and brought another 10 lbs. back in my suitcase! Woo hoo!) Now, I’m settling back into my regular teaching pace, reconnecting with my students, and continually glancing at my stack of “to-read” material. Hopefully, I’ll be able to write some “What I’m Reading” posts as the semester cruises onward full-speed.

I have more impressions jotted down in my notebook but am out of time for the day. Perhaps more soon.

For anyone making the trek to AWP this year, here’s a fun essay from Agni by J.S. Tunotre: “AWP Chicago: A Gamer’s Notes.” Here are two excerpts to give you a taste:

In AWP Convention Game regulations, a salutation, an exchange such as the above, between people who already know each other, technically counts for nothing. It must either be truncated—for economical use of time is vital—or else parlayed, turned to advantage. The point of play, if I haven’t made this clear enough yet, is to trade up, to advance the avatar, and the only way this can happen is when someone with a higher-stratum position (more publications, better publications, more ascertainable connections) sees you, and with that certification promotes you along the board. This is hardly arbitrary. For as everyone knows, being seen from a higher position only happens when there is something to be seen, though of course the appearance of being seen has value insofar as you might be seen being seen, and therefore score second-order points (described in game book) whether or not there is genuine substance behind the encounter. The calculus is very tricky, and point scoring is often hotly contested.

and later

I am speaking here for all of us who still cannot walk into a room, a literary arena, without immediately seeing it as a complexly graded hierarchy, a scarcely disguised Hobbesian jungle, tyrannized over not by teeth and claws, but by their verbal equivalents. We all ask the same questions: How do we go about trying to advance our avatar along the board; how do we achieve status lift? Or, less cynically: how can we find our way into situations where our natural merits (our sensibility, our intelligence, our not-sufficiently-regarded achievements to date) can be made known and be validated?

Good stuff!

Today’s mail brought copies of New South (2.1 Fall/Winter 2008), containing my poem “Requiem.” Thanks to Austin Segrest, poetry editor, and all the other fine folks down Atlanta way for the support. The issue is jam-packed with poetry and prose. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, and probably won’t until the flight to Chicago for AWP, but it looks enticing. Beautiful cover as well! Lovely sea turtles.

~~

Sadly, my resolution to keep writing through the semester seems to be suffering. I’m hoping AWP will get me fired up enough to get back on track!

Today in the mail: new issues of Meridian and The Normal School.

The Meridian is issue 22, which contains two of my new poems, “The Museum of My Childhood” and “River Years.” I’ve been a big fan of this journal for quite a while and was first published by them in issue 16. The editors are fantastic and the production is top-notch. Also, I’m awed by the other writers who share the space with my poems. The poets are: Carl Phillips, Donald Revell, Jeff Hardin, Brendan Galvin, John Poch, Bob Hicok, Barbara Hamby, Karen Rigby, and Carl Dennis. I read with Jeff Hardin back in October of 2006 at the Southern Festival of Books, so it was great to see his poem there. The issue also contains several Ginsberg letters and an interview with my fellow Little Rock writer, Kevin Brockmeier. Lovely, lovely.

A few weeks ago, I subscribed to a new journal, The Normal School, and today I received the inaugural issue. If you haven’t checked this out yet, please do. This is a glossy, full-sized creation with plenty of whimsy, imagination and great reads. I was delighted to find a fabulous piece by Scott Diel, a fellow U of Arkansas MFA-holder. You also need to read Steve Almond’s “Jenna Bush: Off the Grid (The Unofficial Book Tour Diary)” and Dinty W. Moore’s “Forty-Four Reasons Why You Absolutely, Positively Should Never Write that Book.” ~~I haven’t finished reading the whole issue, so I’m sure I’ll find more to recommend!

Yay for good mail days!

A spirited debate with a colleague sent me to my overstuffed bookshelves in search of the publications from my college years. Yes, it’s been 15 years and I still have the lit mags from my undergrad days. Within these journals are sterling samples of the kind of poetry I was writing then. (My colleague and I were discussing one of our current student’s work.) It was a strange trip to flip through and see the names and writing of people I haven’t spoken to in so long. As soon as I saw their names, faces and voices and memories flooded in. In some cases I didn’t even have to re-read the poems to remember the gist of them.

Then, I found my own poems. Two of them were centered and most of them contained lines that made me shake my head and sigh. However, every now and then, I would read a line that resonated with what I’m writing today. There was some evidence then of the writer I’ve become. That fascinates me…especially b/c I stopped writing all together for about 3-4 years before I went back to grad school. Somehow, some kernel of that beginning voice survived, and that makes me very happy.

The semester is well under way, and we are in the thick of it…complete with a snow day yesterday that has thrown off my Comp II schedule already. I’m still intent on finding the writing time, and I feel pretty good about what I’ve accomplished. I have drafts of two new poems, which is already two more than I wrote during the fall semester entirely, and I started some new lines yesterday that may turn into something (or not?).

I’ve been thinking about what I want my poems to do lately, as I’ve been rereading Glacial Elegies, my new manuscript, and preparing it to go out to possible publishers. As a consequence, I’ve also been comparing it to some of my favorite recent books of poetry. There are all of these questions swimming around in that fragile part of my brain that makes up “poetry.” Here are some:

What is my voice? (a question I thought I’d figured out in Blood Almanac)
Is my voice boring? (yikes!) Is my voice evolving or is it becoming imitative?
Where do lyricism and narrative intersect for me? Should I be going for more of one and less of the other?
Is my language fresh/new/not boring? If I go too far towards the language, do I lose the meaning?
Since I almost always write short poems, should I be writing longer ones?
Should I be taking more risks?

For now, I’m trying to live with the questions and to write through them; after all, there really isn’t any other way.

Thanks to the Hayden’s Ferry Review blog for posting a link to this fabulous essay by Virginia Woolf on the act of reading. Woolf poses the question “what is the pleasure I get, or the good I create” from reading? Her essay discusses the reader in relation to the writer (both author and critic) and contains more quotes for my collection. Among them:

“One should be an accomplice with the writer in his act, whether good or bad, of creation. For each of these books, however it may differ in kind and quality, is an attempt to make something.”

“And the writers who have most to give us often do most violence to our prejudices, particularly if they are our own contemporaries.”

And about criticism:
“It is after one has made up one’s own opinion that the opinions of others are most illuminating.”

And finally:
That readers “are fulfilling our share of the creative task – we are stimulating, encouraging, rejecting, making our approval and disapproval felt; and are thus acting as a check and a spur upon the writer.”

As always, Woolf’s style and syntax remain her own, her sentences singing in just that voice that can only be hers.

If you haven’t already found this blog yourself, please check it out. Starting Today: poems for the first 100 days is created by Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker, two awesome poets themselves. These are poems that are being written for and during President Obama’s first 100 days in office.

The test is at hand for one of my resolutions: to create and stick to a writing schedule during the semester while I teach. Today, I succeeded. I actually added “Write” to my “to do” list for the day, and I made myself sit in the chair until something crawled onto the page. At first it was an ugly mess. I had a bunch of phrases scattered in my journal, but nothing was coming together. It was painful, yet I stayed in the chair. Then, SHAZAM, it coalesced before my eyes. Who knows what will come of it, but there are ten lines that weren’t there before.

When I opened the curtains in my office today, one of the many little notecards I have taped up around my desk gave up on its tape and fluttered down. After struggling with a new poem yesterday, I needed this reminder from Keats:

“I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

Sometimes I need reminding that the poem should be allowed to make what leaps are in it to be made and that I might beat the beauty from it if I lean too hard towards reason.