Some fresh links

Ron Silliman did a good review the other day at his blog about new anthologies, among them Tinfish Press's Jack London is Dead: Contemporary Euro-American Poetry of Hawai`i (and some stories).  You can find that here.

Tony Trigilio interviewed Tinfish Editor, and has just posted the podcast on his Radio Free Albion series, here.  We talked about many things, from the St. Louis Cardinals, to dementia writing, to Jack London, and then to memory cards.  Tony is a lovely, lively host who already has a wonderful line-up of podcast people.

I'm just back from five sick days at the Boston AWP. The Tinfish table was located in outer nowhere.  Not the best of our conference stints, but really lovely to see some good friends and meet some more.

Dementia & AWP (no link, save the ampersand)

While I was away in Denver last week, I got an update from my mother's intermediate caregiver, the woman on the outside of her Alzheimer's home who checks up on her, makes sure she has clothes, sends me notes. This social worker has discovered over recent months that my mother can be fierce, will shoo her away when she gets too demanding (wants her to take a walk, for example). The last time I saw mom was in January, when she did little but sit in a chair, slumped over to her right, to stare into the community room in her residential wing.

This latest update:

Susan,

I am due to see your mom tomorrow. The staff at Arden Courts got in touch with me to discuss possibly getting a hospice consultation for your mom. Hospice is not only for when people are actively dying and can offer a lot of additional support and supervision for clients. Your mom is still the same at this time, no real change. They thought it would be nice for her to have the additional support. She eats fair and is not that involved or interested in activities anymore. Her weight is stable though. My thoughts are, she may not qualify at this time, but I wanted to get your thoughts on having them do a consultation. [signature removed]


I reread it for the phrase "Hospice is not only for when people are actively dying." "Actively dying." I know what it means, but I want to parse it. Is her dying then passive? Is that what dementia is, an inactive verb for dying?


There has been such a slowness to her passing. It can hardly be called "passing," almost a permanent way station on the way to not being in her chair, not not seeing what is before her, save a few photos to make her smile (a dog, a cat, a child).


My friend Joe Harrington's personal and political histories run parallel tracks; his mother died the day Pres. Nixon resigned. Co-incidence to mark historical specificity. Given (and taken) a moment to contemplate for a lifetime. My mother exceeds her parallels now. Her passion for politics died, but she did not, yet, not actively in any case.


I ask my students to think about the larger problems their favorite tropes pose to them. Metaphor totalizes, is imperial in its force (we're reading Walcott's Omeros, where that matters), anaphora annoys, repetition treadmills, oxymoron cannot decide. The forces of our tropes to appropriate, to claim, to render same, like malls in the suburbs, their adobe faces bland approximations of others. My mother has no tropes now. Was irony, was sarcasm, was pun ("the lowest form of humor," she would say, adding a line about nuns and habits). Is now cliche, spent shell casing, language lab English. "I'm so glad you called and everything's ok."


I call home and Radhika calls me "grandma." It's mom, I say. "Hi, grandma," she says, laughs.


Family as translation: we give or adopt life, watch to see how children take up our language. We are not literal translation, now homophonic catachresis. There's something in the air, Bill says to my report that Claudia homophonically translates women troubadours. We are not the same; we have travelled.


I say I publish indigenous writers but not as indigenous writers. Family is not blood, even where blood linked me to my mother. Is now past resemblance. Though her voice resembles itself once the telephonic dusk clears.


In her inactive dying I say yes, have the consultation. As member of the Graduate Program Committee, I imagine her applying for a spot in our program. Her application needs the active verb to fly. Her application may be sent back. She may get a better offer elsewhere. She may worry there's not enough diversity in heaven. She may not choose.


____________________


The only guerrilla action at AWP this year occured when I was in the women's room and heard a woman screaming "motherfucker" at the top of her lungs, along with several other multisyllabic sweetnesses. Turns out she was standing on a chair in front of the Cave Canem booth reading a poem about her grandmother. Otherwise, AWP provided its usual official celebrations of the mainstream, with off-campus readings that were a bit more funky, including the Meadowlark Event I linked to Joe Harrington's blog about yesterday.


This year's AWP in Denver saw me chained mostly to my table under the klieg lights of the Convention Center in a vast hall adjacent to this year's Auto Show whose food spreads were better, whose price of admission was higher, and whose clientele test drove cars with enormous engines around a tiny block to a lot across from the Hyatt. My neighbors and housemates (at my cousins' Sue and Rick) were Bill and Lisa Howe, whose Slack Buddha press is an amazing DIY production. They publish wonderful writers between lovingly silk-screened covers. Sales were far better than they had been in last year's panic economy. I was also on a panel about publishing indigenous and Latin American poetry. Most of my panel mates were associated with Salt Press's Earthworks Series, and ended up at the table on the other side of me. Brandy Nalani McDougall signed books for a while on Saturday morning.

I took photos of everyone who bought a Tinfish book, and some who merely touched them. I love these photos for the way people held themselves and their books: one large young man held his proudly, like a little kid clutching a new toy; others held books at a distance; some frowned and pretended to read, while others held several purchases in a fan-shaped array. Here are just a few of the photos. You can see all of them at my public facebook link here.

Here are Brandy McDougall (r) and Ching-In Chen (l); Deborah Miranda (l) and Tim Denevi (r); Joe Harrington (l, in Cards cap) and Leonard Schwartz (r, in trench coat); Janna Plant (l) and unknown young man whose photo I love (r).











Tinfish Press is going through some changes at the moment, so I'm not certain how many publications we'll be getting out in the next year, beyond the forthcoming Dandelion Clock by Daniel Tiffany and Tinfish 20, which will be our last issue of the annual journal. Our art director, Gaye Chan, is leaving us after 13 years of doing brilliant work and mentoring young designers. She will be greatly missed; this collaboration has been one of the highlights of my career. I intend to keep the press going, if perhaps at a slower pace, and am also feeling some burn out (mostly over the budget and staffing situation at my institution) So perhaps I won't be in DC next year. But we'll see.

AWP Guerrillas, Part Two

Not one half hour after I posted yesterday's entry on AWP's capricious selection (non-selection, rather) of panels, I got an automated announcement from them that another panel I'm on had been accepted. Organized by Janet McAdams, the panel is called "Editing Indigenous, Editing the Americas"; its purpose is "to enlighten our audience about the complications and rewards of publishing and delivering Indigenous writing and translation to larger reading communities." Surely this is a good thing.

Less than an hour after that my phone rang. When the caller ID read "George Mason University," I gulped. AWP headquarters. Sure enough, the caller was Christian Teresi, Director of Conferences, AWP. He said he was calling to answer any questions I might have. We talked for a while. I told him that the AWP has gotten a lot more diverse and interesting since I first attended (Albany, late 1990s). But many of my colleagues who have proposed panels on (among many other subjects) Hawai`i and Pacific (Indigenous) work have been turned back. To see more amazing rejections, look to Phil Metres's blog; he's been collecting evidence. I've also heard stories on facebook from Tim Yu (who proposed John Yau and Mei-mei Berssebrugge on a panel that was rejected) and Stephen Hong Sohn, who had a similarly stellar panel turned down.

Lest one think that paragraph two indicates on-going ethnic bias on the part of AWP, the first paragraph argues against that bias. Neither is evidence enough for any conclusion. But that's one of the problems: there is no evidence, because panels are rejected without any feedback or context. The process might, in fact, be rigorous, but it seems capricious. Capriciousness is the writer's friend (so much room for interpretation!), but it's the institution's enemy (so many angry writers!). I've lived in English departments long enough to know that capriciousness can provide cover for unstated agendas. Simple words like "craft," like "theory," take on fierce, yet unspoken, allegorical meanings and are used to exclude others (and Others).

There is reason to be suspicious of the capricious. After all, D.W. Fenza, an energetic enthusiastic partisan of AWP, has laid down a stark agenda in essay after essay. I'm sure he does not speak for all members of AWP, but he is the Director (currently on sabbatical). So, when he takes on "critics," calling them out seven times in one paragraph of "Advice for Graduating MFA Students in Writing: The Words & the Bees" (2006), and remarking that they "sustain a parasitic lifestyle" and engage in the "systematic humiliation of literature" with "gruesome interrogations" and live in a world he calls "academentia (forever)," well then.

Close-reading Fenza's essay may be exhilarating fun, but it's too easy. He's clearly on a romp, and it would be easy to respond with a romp of one's own. As Patrick Playter Hartigan advises in yesterday's comment stream (where Fenza also makes an appearance), go for the goal, not the stance (even when you're faced with such a one). So true, though one of the problems with AWP is that it represents institutions rather than writers, branded ways of thinking about literature and writing rather than new or synthetic ones, ways that bring together craft and culture, content and form, and yes, theory and practice.

In his essay, "Who Keeps Killing Poetry?" published in The Writer's Chronicle in 2006, Fenza cites D.G. Myers's The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing since the 1880s. This important book explores the origins of creative writing as a discipline that grew out of composition, emphasized creation over reception. While dense, the book is useful in teaching the pedagogy of creative writing, something I've been drawn into in recent years in my work with Ph.D. students. What it shows most starkly is how the workshop method developed as a tool for teaching creative writing. The workshop method emphasizes craft, community, and other good things, but often at the expense of content, experiment, or immersion in unfamiliar--in all senses of the word--literatures. The danger of workshop classes is that they are often content-free. They also tend to be conservative. If you have a group of students whose experience of literature is limited and based on notions of realism and linguistic transparency, it's hard to encourage experiment and risk-taking of a new kind if they are mostly talking to one another. "But that isn't realistic!" "No one talks that way!" Mark Wallace has written on this pressure to "make it real."

AWP is like a giant old-fashioned workshop, seems to me. What it needs are some good Bernadette Mayer exercises to remind it that its role is as much creative as it is institutional. Joseph Harrington remarks in yesterday's comment stream that institutions are meant to be gate-keepers. Perhaps this is true, and perhaps entering the institution ourselves is a danger we should think more about. And yet what I and others love about AWP is that it IS too big, it is diverse (in some ways, at least), and it offers a place where we can see each other, swap books and tales, and show off our wares as small publishers and poets and writers.

So what to do, aside from guerrilla tactics? I thought it amusing that the Director of Conferences offered to advertise an off-site event for me, as if that is what I wanted. Co-opted before I began!! I still think guerrilla tactics would be good fun, even good for AWP itself. But what are those positive goals that Patrick is advising us to shoot for, now that the AWP is clearly listening, or at least hearing? Here are some AWP experiments, after Mayer.

--Tear out pages from previous year's programs and write all over them. You might choose to erase words to create new proposals (see Ronald Johnson, Janet Holmes), or you might add new words.

--Cut up old programs and splice pages together randomly. Anything new pop up?

--Write down lists of talks you'd like to hear, then ignore the list and open yourself up to surprises! Make decisions more transparent. The AWP website has a long list of "Event Types," but everything I've seen that was rejected fit one of those types. Christian mentioned that some people will volunteer panelists who don't know they're being proposed, but that's not the case either, in my experience.

--Write lists of goals for the organization. Make decisions not based on who's on the board, but on goals of the organization itself. Christian told me that the Board decides, and the board is always changing. Well, there's one way not to be transparent! If the AWP sets goals for (let us say) including some panels on literature and theory (don't tell Mr. Fenza), or literature and journalism, or literature and cultural studies (as Joseph Lease suggested to me backchannel) and gets board members who know these things, then we might get somewhere.

--Write lists of writers outside MFA programs that you like to read. Invite them to AWP. De-emphasize programs, and re-emphasize writers and teachers of writers. This would be difficult as the AWP has as in its name the term "writing programs." But many of us teach creative writing, even if we are not faculty of MFA tendering institutions. Or, if we are, we don't teach in that track. Some of my colleagues do not teach creative writing, but have had great influence on students who write. I'm thinking now of someone like Craig Howes, who has been on dozens of fiction committees over the years.

--Write short descriptions of different kinds of diversity, ethnic, theoretical, stylistic. Encourage diversity ON panels, as well as in the program itself. Encourage panels that include poets and parasites, the morally upright and the "morally repugnant" (sorry, I go back to Fenza's rhetoric--it's seductive, isn't it?) On that last blast, see Reginald Shepherd, Charles Bernstein, Christian Bok, et al.

--Write a short play about AWP, then perform it on the street outside your house. Have events outside the buildings. Street theater, poet's theater, slam poetry in the streets. This is a way to reach out to the communities in which we're camping out for a few days. Get out of the hotels!

--Write poems in the form of AWP panel descriptions. Then turn the descriptions into poems. Make those panels happen.

--Collaborate with strangers who goad you. Add their goals to your list and vice versa. As Mayer puts it: "11. Get someone to write for you, pretending they are you."


I'm glad that Christian Teresi called. While he couldn't clear up matters that are opaque (like how panels are selected), he sounded open to suggestions. Let's start making them. We needn't attack. Just do.

A call for guerrilla poetry action at AWP Denver, 2010

[Jade Sunouchi behind the Tinfish table, AWP 2009, Chicago, Illinois]

I've attended several AWP conferences in recent years, mostly to push Tinfish product by sitting and standing behind a small table in a cavernous room--in Austin, the next room down had Toyota trucks in it--underneath terrifying buzzing lights, bathed in a cacophony of unintelligible sound. Along the way I've been on a few panels--there was the "what to do about genre" panel organized by Joyelle McSweeney where some of us argued for teaching writing without enforcing genre boundaries; there was a panel on translations from Asia with Tinfish writers and translators Craig Perez, Don Mee Choi, and Steve Bradbury; most recently, there was a fractious and well attended panel on Annie Finch's and my collection, Multiformalisms: A Postmodern Poetics of Form (Textos, 2009). I still get emails from people who witnessed that afternoon's conflict between those who think that breaking established form is akin to violence (we got questions about domestic and non-domestic violence, oddly enough) and those who prefer their metaphors more gently cooked (or mixed).

But I've also been included in proposals for exciting panels that never happened because they were turned down. By whom one does not know: the AWP website notes the "Selection Process" that "Conference Committee members submit rankings to AWP Director of Conferences for tabulation. Each proposal is given an aggregate score based upon these rankings. Proposals are sorted by aggregate score and the top-ranked proposals in each event type are marked for acceptance." The apparent mathematical rigor of the process (mirrored by the model proposal under the "Craft of Poetry" event type on "Mirror Neurons, Mathematics, Metaphor, and Mind: Where Science and Poetic Craft Meet"?) is not matched by any sense of what these rankings are based on. I tend to agree with Charles Bernstein, who wrote on my facebook page that, "the AWP says it is a service organization with no agenda. That's why those with different agendas that conflict with their no agenda have no place on their panels." But let's look more closely at the proposed panels and at the AWP's mission.

This year's rejections included panels proposed by Philip Metres and Joseph Harrington. You may know Metres from his fine book on poetry about war, or for his own poetry, or for his translations from Russian, or for his blog. Joseph Harrington wrote a well-received book on poetry and the public sphere, published by Wesleyan, and is circulating a marvelous book of documentary poetry on his mother's death and Richard Nixon's resignation, events that occured on the same day in 1974. No slouches, these guys. Metres's proposal was for a panel entitled "Off the Page and Into the Streets: Poetic Interventions in the Public Sphere." Panelists would have been Kaia Sand, Laura Elrick, Jennifer Karmin, Philip Metres and myself. Here's Phil's description (ordained by the extremely careful wording on the AWP site for how to propose a panel):

"Poets . . . share their experiments in guerrilla poetry, bringing poetry off the page and into the streets. They provide a guide for creating your own spatial poetic interventions, whether signage, walks, installations, or street theater--and what it means for poetry and social change." Under the "how it would contribute" rubric, he writes: "The panel would be pitched to inviting a discussion about how to integrate poetry into our lives as citizens, as workers, as consumers, as recreators."

Joseph Harrington proposed a panel to include himself, Eleni Sikelianos, Craig Santos Perez, Brenda Coultas, and me, on "Experimental Docupoetry." "There is growing interest in poetry based on testimony, reportage, and research," he writes. "Through these forms, experimental docupoets investigate not just their subjects, but also the relations between evidence and memory, truth-claims and genre. This panel will explore this growing body of work and the insights that poets and other nonfiction writers might gain from it." He might have added that the "growing interest" in the subject started growing decades ago, at least since Charles Reznikoff wrote Testimony and Muriel Rukeyser her magnificent oeuvre. Fortuitous perhaps that on the first page of Chapter One of Al Filreis's Counter-revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960, I read, between parentheses: "(In the late 1940s and 1950s, dubbing a poet 'journalistic' could even, at times, be coded red-baiting.)" (3) This may offer a hint to the AWP volunteer reviewers' non-selection of this panel, even if "red-baiting" is a bit passe these days. But not according to the mission statement of the organization itself, as transcribed in David Fenza, Executive Director's "About AWP: The Growth of Creative Writing Programs":

"More than any other literary organization, AWP has helped North America to develop a literature as diverse as the continent's peoples. This, of course, is also a boast for the democratic virtues of higher education in North America and the many public universities that comprise AWP. AWP's members have provided literary education to students and aspiring writers from all backgrounds, economic classes, races, and ethnic origins."

What follows this paragraph is another that begins with the phrase "the largest system of literary patronage the world has ever seen," which is perhaps telling. But the paragraph I just quoted seems to invite just the kinds of proposals put forward by Metres and Harrington. Follow Fenza's essay further and there's seems more reason yet to include panels on cutting edge poetics. Did you know that AWP saved literature? So it seems. "AWP rescued literature from the exhumations of philologists to elevate literature's status as a living art, an art that compels each new generation to add its own interpretation, readings, stories, and poems." The italics are Fenza's, as is his ongoing invocation of the terrible past, when literature died in the classroom, and the magnificent present, when AWP members share a living art with their students. Included among these classrooms by Fenza are those in "hospitals, prisons, elementary schools, high schools, and community centers as well as in colleges and universities."

But the portion of Fenza's essay that seem to mandate panels like Metres and Harrington's are these: "Many students, especially today's students, feel that the world is not of their making, and not theirs to form or to reform; but writing classes often demonstrate the efficacy of the human will--that human experience can be shaped and directed for the good--aesthetically, socially, and politically."

So what gives? Is this just bullshit? Are there simply too many stunning panels to accommodate them all? Has the AWP's vaunted patronage system mandated a fleet of panels associated with particular programs, specific directors, advertising needs? Is the AWP more interested in programs than in people? Is the experimental crowd still unwelcome? Where do questions of ethnicity and gender fit in here? Was the content of these proposals too radical for the volunteer judges? There's no way to know. The answer, as in so many standardized (and standardizing) tests, is probably "all of the above." I do not want to presume, though I do. I've been to enough AWPs by now to know that not all the panels are scintillating enactments of a living, re-forming art. Reading the works of the authors I've mentioned in this post (the links are deliberate and mandatory!) gives me faith that a living, activist, historically informed art can already be found within and without the classroom. Not so easy to find in the cosmopolitan hotels where AWP sets up shop, however.

So let me call for guerrilla action at this coming AWP convention in Denver in April, 2010. Nothing too specific, since this is a blog available on the internet to anyone who cares to find it. But let's think of some ways to protest the stodginess of the organization, spill some metaphorical blood on its metaphorical white pages or its literal 600 page program! Let's take AWP to the streets, organize some off-site panels and workshops and signage! After all, Donald Fenza tells us "that the study of literature should include the play of creation as well as the work of conservation"! Who knows, we might just rescue literature from the exhumations of AWP.

AWP & Virginia

I'm in a motel room in Vienna, Virginia armed with Whole Foods snacks, having spent the day at Arden Courts, Fairfax, with my mother. As I'm not big on small talk and she does not talk much at all, it was a visit mainly of sitting side by side, sometimes watching an odd film called _Mesmerized_, a kind of Australian western with Jodie Foster in it. The film must have restarted itself, because it went on hour after hour. Foster brandished scissors, read from a medical text to her broad accented husband, walked the beach with another man; I walked out of the room when the husband was having teeth pulled in 19th century fashion, no pain killers.

_Dementia Blog_ will have no sequel, because Alzheimer's has none. There are many new residents, and several I miss because, as the staff says, they "have passed" or been moved (in the case of the woman with the remarkably devoted husband whom I saw every previous time I visited). But the behaviors and the conversations sound remarkably the same. One newer resident plucks invisible stuff off the carpet; he handed some of it to my mother, who opened her hand and accepted it. Another speaks in a kind of stutter; she says the same word several times in a row and then moves to the next (repetition within sentences like the repetitions of the disease itself). So she says, "no no no" followed by "yes yes yes" and refused to eat, though she kept chopping at the gravied turkey. Her son waited behind the wall because he didn't want to interrupt her lunch. Another woman chants nursery rhymes, sings about how hard it is to get up in the morning, and burst forth with a song in what I'm pretty sure was Yiddish.

I spoke with members of the staff, including the new marketing person who went to a high school reunion and met an old friend from Alexandria (blonde Irish) who lives in Mililani works in the fire department and sends his daughter to Kamehameha (the pronunciations were left to me). We talked about Hawai'i's racial politics and Obama. She had visited Hawai'i and wondered if there were any black people there (the staff at Arden Courts, including her, is almost all African American or African immigrant), Lots of Obama stickers in northern VA and one I saw that referred to Operation Quagmire. Another new member of the staff said she had not attended school as a child in Somalia because of the civil war, but that a wonderful teacher in Alexandria had helped her when she was plunked down in an intermediate school classroom.

AWP was for me mostly the book fair, the Tinfish table and much wandering. Saw some good friends and met a new Cards fan; soon we'll have quite an AWP interest group. Jade Sunouchi and Meg Withers held the fort often, and we were sandwiched between Craig Perez and Jennifer Reimer on the one side, and Bill and Lise Howe on the other. A staggering number of presses engaged in an inventory of glut, which met the economy of recession with some discomfort.

I "moderated" the _Multiformalisms_ panel, which was (un)planned as a discussion and quickly became contentious. There was much talk of form as violence, or any new use of form as a form of violence, which may not have done justice either to form or to violence. We spoke alternately of form as activity and as content. I contradicted myself terribly on the question of hybridity, or perhaps offered a strange hybrid answer to the question of the multiple uses of form. Dick Allen of the grand anthology asked a question in which he commented that when he sends poems in different forms to journals, he's never certain which poems will be accepted, whether the sonnets or the free verse. Hank Lazer and Kasey Mohammad were not keen on this, nor was I, though I found myself talking about documentary poetry instead and opining that journals that publish various forms are fine, while people who write them are not. Or something. Will have to think more on that, and probably drop the judgmental tone that I heard emanating from my moderating voice.

I also attended two evenings of readings at Links Hall, which were a mixed bag centered around a lot of presses. The Tinfish reading featured Meg and Craig. I had heard Craig before in person, but not Meg, and I very much liked the way she read her sad/funny drag queen prose poems. When I taught them this past summer, many students didn't seem to hear all the voices in the prose blocks, so I asked them to perform them outloud, on the roof and in the small roof room we workshopped in. What they found in the poems was what Meg also offered at Links Hall. Voices. Paul Naylor says the poems remind him of Berryman. I don't quite "get" the connection, but I like it. While Meg's are not sonnets, they offer distinct voices. Life, friends, is boring, they might say, as they drank a rum and coke.

And now Virginia, which seems so different now, though I think it's as much this subject as it is that object. The view is different after almost 19 years away, and staying in a motel also changes the frame considerably. I'll see my mother again tomorrow, then leave on a very early flight out of BWI on Wednesday.