AWP Folks

This AWP blog is slow and possibly cursed. I am now crawling out from a fluish haze, but I don't care if I finish it on the plane to Chicago, I will finish this blog. With John Irving, as my witness, I will finish this blog.

Which brings us to the people of AWP. There are the famous (who knows what this means for authors) writers there, who you seldom see any of if you aren't equally famous or you can't get into their reading. Ha Jin visited his publisher (early works) who were tabled next to us. Robert Olen Butler told us we had beautiful books. (I didn't recognize him, I just saw his nametag.) This is partially my fault. I didn't go to any sessions this AWP- I was far too interested in doing NYC things rather than being talked at things. But there is a weird hierarchy to the whole event. MFA folks, publishers, independent publishers (hurrah us!) university presses, journals, magazines, etc. etc. Everyone's got a place.

We did meet lots of interesting folks there. On one side we had Bound Off, that does short story/flash fiction podcasts out of Iowa City. http://boundoff.com/about.html Kelly and Ann were great neighbors, even though they never finished my socks. They offered knitting lessons and had one of those funky laptops designed to provide computer access to poorer kids in sub-saharan Africa. Good work that they fund because they are interested and the 2 of them tabled the whole thing all by themselves.

We were visited by royalty as well you can see. Ms. Small Press Distribution 2008 ladies and gentlemen, Jill Essbaum, author of Harlot on No Tell Books. http://www.notellbooks.org/ It features a large cock on the cover (her description, not mine, although I'd probably say the same thing). I'm now committed to only having my picture taken with women wearing tiaras.

Mostly AWP is nice because you get to see folks you already know and meet a few others. I see the Wave Books boys here, who I got to meet when they came through Durham on the Poetry Bus Tour, I usually see some MFA folks from UNC-Greensboro, and other poets scattered to the wind.

OK, the flu medicine's taking over again, so I'll finish this later this week.

AWP Swag

We're in the airport getting ready to fly back to Durham. We've been without internet access, so this is our first update. We'll have pictures and our reading online this week, but I'll write a short review while we're waiting to board.

This was our second AWP conference for the Carolina Wren Press. When we went to Atlanta last year, the thing we learned was we needed good swag, that was not only unusual but had an interesting tie-in to our work. Since our featured book this year was Jeanne Lieby's Downriver, we had candy necklaces. They went over great- even people who didn't want them were happy to see them.

The cover of Jeanne's book is so powerful for the same reasons. Everyone has a memory or connection to these necklaces. Hand people a string of sugar and they either react with extreme joy or extreme revulsion. It was fun to walk through the Bookfair and see folks wearing and/or eating them. Children were immediately drawn to the table of course, but even for adults it was a real draw.

Gay men seemed the most joyous to see them, young hipsters were also rather thrilled, and older women usually reacted with a smile and a "of course" response when asked if they wanted a "tasty and fashionable candy necklace."

The necklace is also a really good connection for the book because it's the right feel. The children in the stories have that enthusiasm, that joyousness, but they are also kids who have lived, who haven't been denied sugar by their overprotective parents. The children are loved, but also have toughness to them because they live in a real world where they know their parents can lose jobs and one good Christmas doesn't guarantee a string of them.

Jeanne's a little like that herself. She clearly loves life and relishes its challenges, but you also know that's not just because she's been tiptoing through the tulips to get there. She had numerous devotees at the conference- lots of folks told us how happy they were we were publishing her and lots talked about the excitement they have for The Southern Review now that she's the editor there.

We also collected lots of swag. Magazines and journals and candy and coasters and pens and stickers. At CWP, we know the marketing is important, but as a small, independent, non-profit press, we also have to use our weaknesses as out strengths, so simple but clever is our idea.

AWP 2008

I'll keep a blog of the 2008 AWP Conference starting Wednesday. Carolina Wren Press has a table and we're hosting a party Friday night with readings by Jeanne Leiby and others. I'll post some pictures and video as well, perhaps a podcast or two depending on the time.

I'm excited about all the goodies at AWP. I want to catch some sessions on film and poetry and multimedia work and poetry. I'm less excited about all the big readings- most writers just aren't good readers I find, but I hope I'll get lucky there. I'm also excited about going to New York. I'm going to catch Fiona Shaw in Beckett's Happy Days (I added the Beckett so no one will have to ask if she played Pinky Tuscadero) and I want to go to the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

I also have plans to (a) get offered a modeling contract and immediately move into a hip loft and have a lot of cool friends. That happens in the big city all the time. (b) change the course of history by making the Patriots lose the Super Bowl when I seduce Giselle Bunchen and, on Sunday morning when she is begging me not to leave, forcing her to call Tommy and break-up with him on the spot. Then he'll spend all day Sunday crying while tears gather in his precious little dimple and throwing interceptions.

If I get offered a modelling contract or manage to break up Tom and Giselle Bunchen you'll hear about it here first and can adjust your Super Bowl betting accordingly.

Tanya

Serving With Schrodinger's Cat

I've been both not working on the other poem that came out of Love and War and stuck on what I have been working on. Sitting down and writing has to be the last step for me; I have to figure out a lot of things in my head before I can even get a version on paper and then i have to work and rework it on paper as well. I've become determined i am going to take a sabbatical and just go write somewhere and try to have a regimented writing program- sit down at the same time every day and write. Mostly i am interested in seeing whether this will work for me. So much of what I write gets processed in my head for so long, I am curious whether the "same time everyday" approach that so many people advocate will make me a better writer, worse writer, or just annoy me.

Anyway, Schrodinger's cat- this poem started life about a soldier who had to give DNA to see whether a body found on a military academy was his relative. I then wanted to have a poem from the dead soldier and a poem from the dead soldier's slave. Now I have completely cut out the lost relative and am focusing on the sniper pair and the multiplicity and uncertainty at the heart of the cat exercise. Below is the only part I have that i like right now-

Serving With Schrodinger's Cat

Johnson understood
what Parham meant
when he talked
about Schrodinger's cat.

It was the third day
of sniper duty.
Until they were retrieved
three days from now,
Parham would talk and talk.

Stick a cat in a box with an unstable WMD.
You can't see in the box.
Until you lift the top to check
that fucker is both alive and dead.

No one existed until they appeared in the scope.
When he gave Parham the order to shoot
he saw a target living and dying at once.

I have another verse I am working on about MRE's and how they contain all possible extras until opened. I'm not sure if it's stupid, if it belabors the point, or whether it works nicely. Back in the head until I decide.

what the dancer thinks while dancing

so this is the poem i wrote in response to working with choreo. like i said below, i wanted to explore the way dancers used language when discussing dance. i had the title from the start, although i had "a dancer" for awhile. "the" came in later, a choice i liked because of the glide of the "th" and the generality.

i also had the opening line and the next to the last line (penultimate line) straight away also. they never changed never moved. from there i made a list of lines i liked. i wanted things that were sensual, intimate, indeterminate, contradictory, unsettling. i wanted a list poem (this was mostly because of the time restriction, but i ended up liking this form a lot), i wanted a lot of vowels.

i wrote down a lot of phrases one night when i was trying to go to sleep. i would write something down, turn out the light, think of something else, turn on the light, write it down, turn off the light, almost be asleep, think of something else. i worked with the list, pairing some things, moving the order, trying to figure out what organizing principles could hold it all together. i added more to the list and i kept reorganzing.

i read part of it to a dancer at rehersal. she liked the presence of the sense appeal and suggested adding something with "breath." it was a good suggestion and i eventually came up with the "breath and its opposite" line, a line i ended up liking.

i took it to poetry group- went over well with a couple of good suggestions. i liked "solidarity" and the "abridgement/expansion" pair, but the lines were too general at that time, particularly coming after "the moan of the whale" line. I tried moving them, ending with "sky of a tree" and "moan of a whale" lines as the next to last pairing, but that threw off the movement of the poem- there was no middle peak anymore. i moved them back and rewrote the abridgement and solidarity lines as they appear now.

i feel like it captures some things that struck me about dance. it moves me that they go on stage and reveal such intimacy. i think there is no way i could be a dancer for that alone (trust me, there's a long list of reasons why i couldn't be a dancer) i love their joy at it and the trust and comraderie it fosters between them, how generous it makes them in performance, and the way they negotiate the whole process.

oddly, they haven't heard it or seen it yet (i did read it for one of them on request) as they were changing when i read it (that was its purpose) so i don't know what they think about it or if it feels accurate to them or if it comes off as pretentious or naive or what. i liked it though, for its purpose and on its own.

what the dancer thinks while dancing

the way motion the way curve

the way infinite slips into intricate slips into intimate

how under rolls to over

how ghostly leads abroad

the anticipation of forearm for fingertip

the underside of the Bridge of Sighs

how giving stiffens to stop

the way pretending leaks into actual

why no one is ever apart why everyone feels alone

the way war is always present always at war with peace

how a hip can taste like cinammon a shoulder lemon balm

why the middle can be static why what is static is not stopped

the sky of a tree the hairs of the soil

the response of toes to a hand on a stomach

the moan of the whale in an ocean pulled flat

the way a lover expands through abridgement

how solidarity marries a form to the want

the way light appears as particle light appears as wave

the way palm sits on palm and fingers rest between

the way breath contains its opposite

the way the bridge reveals motion and the river comes to still

the way a kiss can lead to a kiss can lead to a kiss

and nothing ever appears causal at all

Serving With Schrodinger's Cat: Poem #2

The other poem that i got out of working with Choreo came from Love and War not from the process of working with them. That poem is still in process and currently is titled Serving With Schrodinger's Cat.

My interest in Robert Jenkins's story was, at first, about his refusal to serve, defection as a commentary on war. I thought that is what the poem would be about and it was called for a little while Those Who Don't. I was still interested in this idea and interested in the personal aspects of war. How absurd it does or doesn't feel to participate, how one distances or embraces that absurdity.

Then I heard a brief bit on NPR about a body they found at a military academy and how they attempted to identify it, thought it had clearly been there for a century at least. I thought about a soldier who was trying to leave his past only to have it follow him, to be DNA tested to see if it was his relative. I wanted to make it a 3 part poem- the soldier now, the soldier lost, and a slave who left the soldier lost. I wrote the 1st part, took it to poetry group and it didn't work. Too narrative, I didn't know what the poem was about, it was too confusing.

I worked on it again and by the end, the soldier was a spotter listening to his sniper talking about Schrodinger's cat exercise. Took it back to group- the DNA section was too much. I wanted it to keep the past/present shrinkage feel but it was distracting. The power of the poem was in the sniper pair now and their discussion of simultaneity and how they each understood it in relation to war. So now I am working on a version that focuses on that.

Which doesn't sound like a dance poem,but is. It was seeing Jenkins's story translated into movement that made me consider how his story was about loneliness and love, how much of the military demands a doubleness, a knowing and not knowing, a seeing but not acknowledging and what happens (as it did for Jenkins) when that doubleness gets called out or what happens when it is allowed to continue (this poem).

I'll post copies of both of these soon.

Tanya

Melting Gnomes; Performance, Movement, and Language

I was interested that I also got actual poems from working with Choreo. I thought going in Love and War would probably be unable to stand on its own as a poem and that has been true. I'm fine with that and don't feel capable of producing a piece that could be written collaboratively with a group of dancers and exist free from that movement. Right now,that's asking too much of me and the text.

But I have produced 2 poems that came directly from working with Choreo. One, what the dancer thinks while dancing, came from our latest performance at Duke. We needed poems for transition times in-between the dances, so the poets wrote pieces that came out of their working with Choreo. I had been planning on writing this piece anyway, so it was nice to have the deadline and assignment.

I was fascinated by the way the dancers talked about their pieces; dance seems to lack notation to preserve performances (this also makes me fascinated about the intersections of dance and film- i'll get to that later) or even give it a way to be tracked. So instead, there is a lot of use of language to keep phrases in memory and to indicate them. (in fact, it's sort of fascinating that a string of dance movements is called a phrase.)

The dancers kept referring to "clumpy puppies" "melting gnomes" "throwing hoboes" and other linguistic markers of place and movement. I was taken by how effective it was; i wasn't dancing but i would know where they were going to start on the stage, what came next.

However, it never helped me know where to start in the text. So say at rehersal, we would work on the transition between the 3rd and 4th sections. We might start at "melting gnomes." The dancers would know where they should be, I would know generally where we were in the whole movement, but I couldn't note the corresponding place to start in the text. Eventually I started noting on my text where certain movements occured , but usually by the dancer instead of the phrase title ("sarah across blanche" for instance).

This led me to wonder how this whole piece would work differently if Love and War was a spoken word or performance piece. I'm very influenced by the spoken word and performance poets; some of my poems have both performance and written versions, some poems started life on the page and transitioned into spoken word, (although never the other way around), and even in poems that only live on the page, I'm usually very aware of sound and rhythm above any other organizational methods. When I perform these pieces from memory, movement is one way I "remember" where I am in the piece and can trigger memory for the next section. If I ever get lost in a piece or feel my mind start to wander, I can usually look at what my hands are doing (although sometimes its walking or a different gesture) and get focused again.

All of that is a very long intro for a poem i won't post until tomorrow, but the intersections of language and movement were the direct inspiration for the poem.