What was your favorite thing about AWP? Even if you didn't go? I "went," but attended no panels ... I was staying about an hour north of the conference hotel by train, and I never managed to make it down there before about noon, at which point it was time for lunch, after which I would wander the book fair for a while and reunite with writerly friends and acquaintances and such until I felt lonely and despairing and thirsty for cocktails. AWP, I hardly knew ye.
My favorite event was the No Thousands reading at the Empty Bottle on Saturday night, hosted by Black Ocean, Octopus, Rope-a-Dope, Cannibal, and Forklift, Ohio. The lineup was dude-heavy but I was enraptured by the stylings of dudes including Sam Starkweather (City of Moths), Johannes Goransson (who read translations of Aase Berg, insane poems about guinea pigs and a fox heart, I think, which my friends and I happily misheard as "fuck's heart"), and Kevin Holden ("I eat strawberries like I drive a big car").
Possibly for the first time, I didn't come home with a cold. (Unless it's gestating.) Guess the panels are where germs get spread (and bored/underwhelmed).
Also: Go read Gary Sullivan's post/poem "WC Fields + WCW" -- excerpt:
A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money. Forgive me.Love.
A woman drove me to drink and I didn't even have the decency to thank her. Forgive me.
Ah, the patter of little feet around the house. There's nothing like having a midget for a butler. Forgive me.
4 comments:
Can I say what my favorite things about missing the AWP were?
Number ten: Not getting the cold/flu now incubating in 100's of bodies as we speak.
Number nine: Self-pity. It makes its own gravy!
Number eight: Telling those departing for AWP, "No, no, turn out the lights on your way out. NO use wasting electricity on me!"
At the reading the concluded AWP, Heather McHugh was brilliant. One of those gifted few who speak everyday words in verse.
I loved the panel I went to about the reading series Rec Room (in Chicago). There were five readers -- two read essays, two read poems, and then this amazing woman (whose name I don't remember...) did this audience participation performance piece that was indescribably brilliant. I would even go so far as to call it cute and sublime.
I did go to panels, and I do have a cold, so yr theory may have some merit, E.
High point for me: a panel with the unpromising title "Quantum Narratology: Toward a Transactional Interpretation," in an even less promising 9 AM Saturday slot. It was organized by FC2 and featured Lance Olsen, R. M. (Ralph) Berry, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Vanessa Place. The two dudes read fairly straightforward but unusually rich and engaging critical papers: Olsen's called into question the concept of character, Berry's did the same for the preference for concrete language over abstraction. Both were persuasive and funny, Berry's -- operating deep in Dave Hickey territory -- in particular.
Yuknavitch then proceeded to commit the most virtuosic reading I have ever seen at AWP or anywhere else. She delivered a poker-faced, jargon-free text with a button-pushing, I'm-just-a-girl-so-I-don't-really-GET-theory shrug-&-wink pose, which at precisely the right moment enlisted the voices of the three other panelists in counterpoint to her own (cf. the VU's "The Murder Mystery"), thereby jacking the audience's attention back and forth in a really compelling way, with tasty non-sequiturs ("Sometimes when I'm at these conference things I kind of want to shoot something with a gun") amplifiying and erasing one another at the edges of attention. All I really want from art, I realize for the nth time, is the feeling that I'm missing something.
Vanessa Place finished up with a pun-driven riff on the pantoum form and the two thieves crucified with Jesus. I might have found the text difficult-to-follow and irritating had its reading not been accompanied by a cadre of assistants operating electric toasters and distributing toast and doughnuts to the panelists and audience, which rendered Place's text impossible-to-follow and awesome.
The lesson here is: if AWP sticks you with a Saturday 9 AM slot, be prepared to bring yr A game.
My other AWP high point was Stuart Dybek scrapping with Sasha Hemon over who loves Bruno Schultz more, and then name-checking Derrida. ("Derrida calls this hauntology, only he pronounces it in French and turns it into a pun, which I'm not going to do.") Panels: sometimes surprisingly worth it.
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