Bread Loaf RIPTON, VT Five poets go behind the scenes at one of the oldest writers’ conferences in the country. Friday: 08.25.06 | Permalink | Comments (5)

This week, five poets dispatch from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. Bread Loaf, which has been meeting annually for 81 years, divides its participants into different categories—scholar, fellow, waiter, staff, and participant. Each day of the blog will feature a poet from a different category.

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Robin Ekiss, Headwaiter

The Problem of Deer on an Island

What does wearing a feather boa and doing the hustle have to do with being a poet?

I was thinking about this last night at the dance. Less than a week ago, I’d arrived on the mountain after being flagged in the Oakland airport and taken aside to have my bag searched. The TSA screener had a perplexed look on his face. He was holding one of my necklaces in his hand, but for all he knew, it could have been a bomb: a battered pocket watch on a gold chain with its face deconstructed into tiny metal hands and rivets, its untethered clock parts jumbled loosely inside. He made me shake it to prove it wasn’t dangerous. I’m embarrassed to admit, I was somewhat sarcastic and unhelpful (genuinely dangerous these days); when he asked what it was, I offered only, “it’s art.” He packed it back into the bag, and confiscated my lip balm instead.

With a six-hour red-eye from California, a three-hour layover in New York, another leg to Burlington, and an hour’s van ride to the Bread Loaf campus, I had a lot of time to think about notions of security, and what it means to poets. In many ways, we’re more comfortable with insecurity, how it makes us question ourselves and the world around us. We depend on it for our work. But we’re still human (for the most part, though some might tell you otherwise), and need a degree of security in our imaginative lives, too, to be productive: to feel validated, supported, inspired.

That’s what Bread Loaf does for me. At Bread Loaf, the line between your “real life” with its attendant responsibilities, securities, and insecurities, and your “creative life”— its meditations and revelations— blurs in the best possible way. (The dilemma reminds me of what Bishop wrote about “the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly unreal.” Which is real, and which un, I’ll leave to you.) Here on the mountain, everything is designed to feed that vital conversation about literature and the experience of writing. Even the dance. Even the feather boas (especially the feather boas) that appeared at just the right time to do the hustle.

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If you really want to know what it’s like at Bread Loaf, ask a waiter. As work-study scholars at the conference, waiters participate in events and workshops like other attendees, as well as wait tables in the dining room up to 10 hours a day, in exchange for a full scholarship. Outside of writing a poem, it’s the most blissful, focused, creative exhaustion I know.

I’ve been on the waitstaff at Bread Loaf for the past four years, and I’ve learned a few important things:
Writers don't like coffee, they need coffee. This is not a cliché.
A good salad bar can counteract the effects of a bad workshop.
As a poet, it’s important to have a marketable skill (like waiting tables, for instance).
A writers’ community is NOT an oxymoron (in other words, You are not alone).

As waiters, we’re an unlikely crew: MFAs and PhDs, mothers and fathers, professional waiters and rank amateurs, 20-year olds and 30-slash-40 somethings, the waiter who’s an ER doctor, the waiter who’s a Jesuit priest. More importantly, the doctor who’s a writer, the priest who’s a poet . . . all of us, our many lives waiting side-by-side with us here on the mountain.

Our diners are patient and forgiving, as is the kitchen staff, whose one hazing ritual is to call the waiter who gets to ring the meal bell the “ding-a-ling.” Oddly enough, everyone wants to be the “ding-a-ling.” In line at the salad bar last night, one waiter told me all this camaraderie was ruining his “carefully constructed martyr complex.”

So this is what happens when you bring together 285 poets and writers, a little theater with screened-in French doors, a cavernous barn with a stone fireplace and bat-worthy rafters, two lean but rangy red foxes loitering at the back of said barn looking for scraps, countless slat-backed Adirondack chairs artfully mismatched on lawns, one clay tennis court, a stone wall level with the tree line, the shadowy outline of a flat-spined mountain, a picnic on the lawn (hopefully not rained out today; fingers crossed . . .), a tour of Robert Frost’s surprisingly diminutive cabin (a box of Whitman’s candies shelved in his kitchen), a perilous hay ride pulled by a tractor, and a phone booth in a field surrounded by fennel and flowers.

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When we aren’t enjoying an embarrassment of writerly riches, listening to readings or lectures, attending craft classes or panels, drinking, not sleeping, donning the proverbial apron, or trying to fight off BLARS (Bread Loaf Acute Respiratory Syndrome, the result of too much drinking and too little sleep), we’re in workshop.

In mine, Mark Doty tells us that the deer on Fire Island aren’t afraid of cars or people, that they got there by swimming from the mainland. The problem of deer on an island seems especially relevant to the experience of poets at a writing conference. I didn't know deer could swim, and can’t stop thinking about it.

The deer follow me around the dining room at lunch. I’m pouring coffee and thinking about deer in the ocean, deer emerging from the tide at the shoreline, dripping with salt, how hard it must be to keep their noses above the waterline, whether a hoof functions at all like a paddle. Someone asks for a glass of ice or a hard-boiled egg, a high-chair or to-go cup, some soy milk for her tea. Peripherally, the deer stand at intervals around the dining room when I make my circuit: letting the chef know the headcount, conferring with Charlie, my co-headwaiter, about when we should take down the salad bar. Dessert sparks an ontological debate: If “raspberry tiramisu” isn’t made with espresso, ladyfingers, or chocolate, is it really tiramisu? Outside, the rain is falling in sheets, but in here the dining room is warm and whitely noisy.

About security and those deer: they stand by until the last diner has left the room, until the tables have been cleared for the next meal, the aprons strung on their hooks in the hall, before asserting themselves. More than anyone, they understand the work at hand and the work to come.

This week, five poets dispatch from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. Bread Loaf, which has been meeting annually for 81 years, divides its participants into different categories—scholar, fellow, waiter, staff, and participant. Each day of the blog will feature a poet from a different category.

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Sasha West, head of the social staff

Robin humbly fails to mention in yesterday’s entry the function of the hustle and the feather boas. The social & administrative staff had challenged the wait staff to a dance off—and the waiters, with only an hour to spare, organized a group dance. The independent board of judges is still out on the verdict (to be announced in the Crumb—our daily newsletter), but when we social staffers turned the barn lights back on, the floor was littered with multicolored feathers, which we had to sweep up. Let me just say, it didn’t make me think of Emily Dickinson.

This seems a mundane way to start after Robin’s lyrical entry yesterday, which mentions many of my favorite parts of the conference & this place—but maybe that’s the point. I’ve often thought Bread Loaf seems like one of those hypothetical scenarios you invent with a friend on a long car ride: What would happen if you brought 250+ writers together on a mountain, fed them, gave them clean towels, put them in rustic dorms, and took away their cell phones? Like most car games, the scenario would probably get more detailed: obviously someone would need to arrange the trademark Adirondack chairs in meadows and under trees; mist rising from the same meadows at intervals would be nice; and returning participants would tell you one of two things: this is a good year to see a moose, and the food has definitely improved since last summer. What if all these writers came eager with the work they had most prized for a year, and what if readings ran all day? What if the senior writers distilled their best new ideas into hour long talks & craft classes—and everyone else’s distilled curiosities and writerly struggles infused talk over cups of coffee and between those infamous green Adirondack chairs? What if you filled the whole day with the written word & meals & conversations on an impossibly green & beautiful campus? What would emerge?

The answer is, you would get a community of people who spend 10 days with each other entirely awake in language (a reference to what someone told me Ellen Bryant Voigt said we must always be—whether writing, reading, or speaking). To be honest, I’m sort of amazed this all works as a system. History teaches us about the fragility and danger of a utopia—but then, here we are. You can’t institute happiness or curiosity or growth. But you can create ideal situations for transcendence to occur at the individual level. I think part of why this all feels so powerful is that the conference is a distillation of so many things: choices fall away. Dinner is either the meat or the veggie option. When you ask people what they are, you usually mean poetry, fiction, or nonfiction first—and what they do in the rest of their lives later. In other words, we arrive and are stripped bare of many things about the way we move through our lives—except for our abiding love of language/writing. Hmmm. That sounds a bit overarching or even religious—which is not quite what I mean—but the thing is, you live here fully as a writer inside your life. There are days in which one has to retreat—constant awareness is exhausting!—but the experience as a whole works. In sitting down to write today, I can’t help but compare it to the thrill of that perfect last line.

Does it sound like the literary Big Rock Candy Mountain yet?

My experience here has changed over the three years I’ve attended. My first year, as a waiter, I was struck by how communities rename things. Consider: the jacktray, cambro, bouncer, wine key, mixer, & leaker. At home, they would have been (in order): tray, thing to get coffee out of, pitcher, wine opener, juice, & plastic box. I got home and wanted to rename everything in my house. I was struck by the structure of the readings—how writers get up and announce their names and did right in to their pieces. Something about not having the experience of the actual reading mediated by bios (which one can always get elsewhere) makes the whole thing seem like one extended conversation—between all of us, regardless of age (and here I mean both chronological age & what I think of as the age in writing). These last two years, as social staff, I felt the experience move more deeply into me. Again, some of the detritus of finding rooms & navigating a schedule became easier. I was happy to see familiar faces, and happier still when strange ones became familiar by the end. I knew how much I loved watching readings through the screen door while sitting under the stars. I already knew I’d find a whole small town of people in love with the world.

This year, I came hungry for questions. I’m starting to think of my work in terms of a manuscript, and I’m looking for how people pursue revision and create larger structures. One of my first conversations here was with a fiction writer—Kevin MacIlvoy, whose work I deeply admire. He was talking about the way putting a collection of stories together stretches the limits of intuition. When I was asking him his process for collections, he said he went to the book and kept asking “What do you wish to be? How patient can I be with what you wish to be? & Where are my original intentions for you getting in the way?” Carl Phillips, my workshop leader, suggests the following four (paraphrased) questions, poem by poem (warning, these are for revision, not composition. In other words, use at home sparingly!): What is the intention of the poem? How do the formal choices serve this intention? What work does each word do? & What is the relevance to the reader? There are more guttural ways of phrasing the last. Yesterday, he helped me think through a longer poem in sections that grew out of a desire to recapture Pound’s form in The Cantos, but to introduce a larger sense of a human presence—and correct some of Pound’s flagrant myopias. It’s grown into a big, baggy mess of something that I deeply care about, but I can’t see my way through to a revision. He suggested I start my asking each section who the speaker was. A simple thing, but somehow, exactly the right place to start. In my other life, I’m nearing the end of a PhD program in Houston. I thought I was done with workshop (emotionally), but this experience has reminded me that the workshop only extinguishes its use if it just offers answers to individual poems. In its best possible form, these conversations with other writers help us to a set of tools for inquiry into our own processes, a set of questions we can use again and again, and they sustain our lasting engagement with the craft of it all.

Today, our crew will set up a book signing on the Larch lawn in front of the bookstore. I’m glad the sun has broken. Event though it’s possible to get copies of lectures & readings, I’m sure I’ll be up at the little theater for a good part of the day. I’ve realized I have the same thrill listening to the living voice that other people get from watching live sports; the taped version doesn’t quite do it. So I’ll steal up to the sound booth or behind the theater and listen in the dark. Around me, other writers listening as hard as I am. To steal from Stevens, there’s a thrill in the being there together which is enough.

This week, five poets dispatch from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. Bread Loaf, which has been meeting annually for 81 years, divides its participants into different categories—scholar, fellow, waiter, staff, and participant. Each day of the blog will feature a poet from a different category.

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Jason Schneiderman, poetry fellow

Grrr—I just lost all my notes for this blog entry—I know—blog entries aren’t supposed to have notes, it’s all stream of consciousness, a celebration of process, everyone communicating in some kind of speedy, up to the minute, guess what I thought JUST NOW kind of thing. Anyway, the computer won’t let me open the file “blog” that’s on my jump drive—so goodbye organization, hello meet-the-deadline.

Besides the editors at PoetryFoundation.org just told me that they want more gossip. I would be the worst gossip columnist in the world—I get everyone’s name wrong, and I always tell stories wrong. But actually that’s how gossip columns work. But I’m afraid I’m a little low on juicy details. As I sat down to write this, I found out that we’re going to close on our house, so I’m a little distracted. I also keep singing the theme song to Snakes on a Plane in my head, which is also, not surprisingly, distracting. But seriously, it’s the best pop song since “Toxic.”

This is the fellow installment of the Live from Bread Loaf poetry blog. Of course, every time I say that I’m a fellow, I hear Tracy Morgan shouting “I’m Brian Fellows”—but the one time I said that out loud no one knew the sketch, and it’s not funny if you have to explain. As a fellow, I get to give a reading (20 minutes) and I don’t get workshopped, but I do assist in the workshop. My faculty member is Toi Derricotte, and I have the sort of perfect place—I don’t say anything until the end of the discussion and then I can weigh in briefly. I’ve never quite been in this position—it’s a place of honor (no small competition for this fellow thing), but also a place of calm. Toi manages the class, sets the tone, gives us reading assignments, directs the conversation, does all the heavy lifting. I do the writing assignments (solidarity with fellow poets). After the last writing assignment read around (and Toi goes straight for the big stuff—it was a pretty intense read around) Toi said, “We deserve something for that.” And I said, “Chocolate.” And she said, “Do you have any?” And I did, so I went back to my room and brought my candy stash out (Cadbury Royal Dark and Nestles White Chocolate Flips). So basically, I’m the guy in the workshop who gives you candy. Good place to be, I’m sure you’ll agree.

So the rhythm of my days: breakfast, lecture, workshop or off day, lunch, craft class, reading, cocktails, dinner, reading, reading, party. It’s a really nice rhythm, but I’m leaving out all chatting and running-into. It’s a small campus, and chock full of my favorite writers, so there’s sort of constant contact with writers whose work I adore. Poetry editors, do you really want me to name drop here? I mean, it’s poetry gossip when someone gets a book prize (particularly if they know/sleep with/have slept with the judge), but does anyone care that Catherine Barnett helped me work out my ideas about the prose poem, or that Richard Siken and I discussed the manuscripts for our (gestational) second books? Catherine’s here leaning over my shoulder (see—small campus), and she’s reminding me that actually, it was the intellectual highlight of the conference. (It’s the absence of the line break that makes the prose poem, just as the break is the absence that makes the line in a lineated poem—it’s all about the tension between absence, presence, and expectation.)

The craft classes are super fun, and always unexpected. Thomas Heise had one on the sentence as the structuring unit of the (post)modern poem—and I still think that if we’re all part of the consciousness giving rise to John Ashbery’s poems, that I should get a piece of his Pulitzer, but that’s only because I’m reifying my subjectivity (you get the idea)—but the class was hot. I never realized that Gertrude Stein coheres at the level of inflection and intonation. I’m about to go over to a craft class (I left e-mail out of the rhythm of my day) where Michael Collier’s going to talk about Hart Crane. I’m kind of excited.

Wearing angel wings and a halo to the dance was in fact a good idea—I was worried I’d look kind of stupid, and I probably did look kind of stupid, but it was a fun kind of stupid. I mean, I’m not exactly a club kid—although Charlie Clark did remind me that as an undergrad I used to wear pixie wings (angel wings have feathers, pixie wings are nylon stretched over a metal frame) to Ozone, back when that was the hot place to go in D.C., but then Larisa (not a poet, so last name withheld, you don’t know her, OK?) burned a hole in them with her cigarette, and I don’t even think they were my wings—but the point is, I’m cuter here than when I’m not here. Sure, I’ve had less sleep, but so has everyone else. And why was the music at the dance so bad? La Bamba? Seriously? What-ev-ah.

Of course, the highlight of the dance was not my angel wings but rather the crushing victory of the waiters in the waiter/staff dance off. The staff had a leg up (groan) during the individual competition—at least one staff member had a serious dance background that was fabulously on display—but then the waiters pulled out their feather boas and did the hustle on mass (the waiters had arranged with the DJ for “The Hustle” to come on, so the staff never saw it coming), and the victory fell to the waiters. Then one of the waiters was picked up and sort of turned around (it was more or less body surfing sans mosh pit) but I couldn’t tell if it was a victory celebration or part of the dance—it seems more like the former. If it was the latter, it was kind of Dada and lost on me. Mark Doty is the lone voice of dissent—he maintains that the staff won, and that the collective action of the waiters shouldn’t overshadow the individual talents of the staff—but Paul Lisicky agrees with me that the hustle was a victory ensuring tour de force. (Can I stop name dropping now? Please?)

So, I’m sorry poetry editors for my lack of gossip—but I’m married, I’m boring, and I miss you Michael Broder, but when I get back, we’re gonna have a house!

And a shout out to my Mom and Dad, who like to Google to my name.

This week, five poets dispatch from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. Bread Loaf, which has been meeting annually for 81 years, divides its participants into different categories—scholar, fellow, waiter, staff, and participant. Each day of the blog will feature a poet from a different category.

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Mary Gomez Parham, participant

To make my blog clearer to its readers, I’ll start by revealing a few things about myself that affect the aspects of the conference I’ve chosen to write about and the way I see them. I’m a 50-something-year-old woman and a first-timer at Bread Loaf. I live in Houston and am the daughter of Central American immigrants. For some 25 years, I was a professor of Latin American literature. I’ve been married for 35 years to the same man and am the mother of four children, the youngest of whom is 15. So here I am at that hallowed literary institution, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference—a bicultural woman of a certain age from Texas with a head and a hard drive full of poems.

I’ll never forget my arrival at Bread Loaf. As my van pulled up to the front door of the Bread Loaf Inn, what I saw was a place as green and lush as a Belizean jungle, though 30 degrees cooler. I was struck by how well the founders of Bread Loaf had chosen their site 81 years ago. As I walked up the front steps of the Inn, I turned and looked out over an immense pasture, as bucolic as any in the British Isles or in any of Garcilaso’s poems of Spain’s Golden Age. Yes, the founders had purposely and successfully chosen a chunk of real estate that would drive the likes of Dick Cheney to try his hand at a villanelle. From the front steps I walked across an old-fashioned wrap-around porch and then through a homey lobby. Had Eudora Welty or May Sarton sat in that very room? As I walked up the stairs to my room, I wondered if I had perhaps touched the newel post that Robert Frost had rested an elbow on to chat with Louis Untermeyer. Then, opening the door to my room, it occurred to me that it could be the very room that Anne Sexton or Toni Morrison had stayed in years ago.

I’m not sure that people raised in New England can appreciate the impact a place like this, so full of literary history and tradition, has on a person raised in the southwest, where a building is old if it was built in the ‘60s and poets’ birthplaces and homes and haunts are few and far between. Since the American poetic tradition has its roots in the northeast, sometimes we writers in the south and west feel a tad like the blind man trying to identify the elephant by feeling only its leg. I mean, I’d read about Frost’s birches, but I’d never seen a birch tree until I got to Vermont. And when he speaks of his “yellow wood,” a Texan thinks of knotty pine. So coming up here to the cradle of American poetry is an essential and enlightening experience for us poets out in the hinterlands.

As for the writers, the lecturers, the guests--all those who come up here to teach us, whether in a classroom or via a lecture--, they’re the best, to put it succinctly. But they’re not just the best and the most talented and the most famous of American writers today: they seem to have been chosen because they are fine teachers, too. They’re the kind of teachers who’ll put an arm around a student’s shoulder and say, “Come on, let’s discuss that line that’s bothering you so much” or, to a student wounded in a workshop, “Here’s a Kleenex. Now let me tell you what happened to me once in a workshop with Donald Justice.” They’re writer-teachers like Percival Everett, Helena Maria Viramontes, William Kittredge, and Linda Bierds, to name a few. Just imagine what it’s like to have one of your poems discussed by a brilliant poet like Toi Derricotte (my workshop leader) who also happens to be a gifted and caring teacher and who in her classes addresses all aspects of writing, not just craft. Yesterday, for instance, she gave us this invaluable advice: “Be gentle with yourself. It’s hard to be a writer.” That’s what we have up here on the Mountain, as the veteran Bread Loafers say—teachers like Toi.

I have to mention the agents and publishing wizards, too. There are a lot of them, and like the teachers, they really care about us students and our progress and go out of their way to help us. My meeting yesterday with literary consultant Amy Holman was one of the most useful experiences I’ve had here. She patiently laid out for me a personalized strategy for getting more poems published in good magazines and journals and stayed beyond our allotted meeting time to discuss writers’ colonies and residencies and such.

Another thing I’ve been impressed with is how smoothly this huge, complex, living organism that is Bread Loaf functions. Having experienced in the flesh the snafus that even small college departments can create, I’m amazed at how these people—Michael Collier, Jennifer Grotz, Noreen Cargill and all the others—can run so efficiently this 12-day meeting of some 280 students, faculty, guests and staff (all “creative types” known for having minds of their own and a propensity for speaking them both eagerly and eloquently). Do you want an extra pillow, a stamp, a copy of your latest magnum opus, a high-chair for your baby? You get it—and fast, too.

In a writers’ workshop, one’s classmates are much more important than they would be in a lecture class in, say, anthropology. Through peer critique they help a writer to identify ways to improve his or her writing. Like the faculty and staff, the students here are among the finest I’ve known. They are, however, also quite varied. In my workshop group of 12 students, there’s an African-American poet with an MFA and a book published; a young man working on a Ph.D. in Slavic literature; a poet who has been a journalist for 30 years; a 20-year-old who hasn’t chosen her major yet; and a stay-at-home mom who writes stunning poems about her mother’s last days. My classmates vary in their personal and writerly experiences, their styles and themes, and yet each one of them is well-read, perceptive, and able to make incisive comments on any poem we workshop and to write an exquisite line themselves. They are ideal workshop classmates, classmates who, as anyone who’s attended writing workshops knows, are not easy to find.

The diversity evident among the students at Bread Loaf relates not only to ethnicity, gender, or geographic origin but also to life experience. I sometimes go into the dining room early and randomly choose a person to sit next to at a table, just to see what happens, and every time I meet someone with a different life history. There’s the woman who’s an Episcopalian priest, lived for 20 years in Uruguay and works now in prisons in the U.S.; the elementary school teacher from Brooklyn who loves Mexican soap operas and is retraining herself to become a teacher of the deaf; the guy trying to get out of a dead-end job so he can write more; the woman of Columbian heritage who’s started her own publishing house in West Virginia; and the retired man from Miami who takes his sailboat out every day. I’ve also met a corporate lawyer who’s a prize-winning fiction writer and a writer from Sri Lanka who dispatches news to her home newspaper from her base in Maine. And I could go on.

The one element of diversity that has most surprised me, though, is that of age of the participants. There are lots of 20-somethings, of course, but I haven’t seen so much gray hair since the last time I was late getting my hair dyed. Many students here are older, that is, over 40 or 50, and some are even over 60. I see them bustling around the place, not in the least self-conscious about or limited by their age. They’re very much involved in life and in their writing and are smart, healthy, confident and happy. I know they must have their arthritic knees and memory lapses like I do, but they are here nonetheless, reading voraciously, writing beautifully on all the experiences of life that an older person has had, and speaking knowledgeably and excitedly on everything from mooring a boat in the Caribbean to the joys of grandparenthood to the resurgence of formal poetry. I’m not sure why I was surprised to find so many older writers here. This year’s winner of the prestigious Bakeless Poetry Prize, David Tucker, is 58, for heaven’s sake! And we baby boomers do constitute a very large demographic group (Each day for the next twenty years, 13,000 Americans will turn sixty!), we have a lot to say and two or three more decades in which to say it. We have important things to say both to each other and to the young, who’ve been born into an era possibly more terrifying than the ‘50s and the Vietnam era.

There’s one more sub-group of participants at the Bread Loaf Conference from whom I’ve learned a lot about writing, specifically about balancing writing with family and work responsibilities. There are times at home when I put my writing aside because I feel that I need to take my daughter to Walgreen’s to buy mascara (she’s got to have it TONIGHT, she says) or that I should get up and mop the kitchen floor, and I’ve felt my share of guilt at leaving home and family for nearly two weeks to come to Bread Loaf. But I’ve noticed how other women here handle this and that’s helped me. Yesterday evening, for instance, there were three women standing in line to use the phone in my dorm and as I passed them, one joked that it was “hubbie hour.” One woman here has three small children at home and another is sending her last child off to college in a week. And then there’s the woman I overheard on the phone the other night talking to one of her kids. She said, “Gee, Honey, I wish I were there to help you with it.” She seemed sincerely distressed that she wasn’t there to help—but she didn’t offer to go home! Women (and men, of course) who have the courage to dedicate themselves seriously to their writing, despite the demands of family (or day job) are an inspiration to me and to the rest of us Bread Loafers, especially to those of us who, unlike William Carlos Williams who scribbled poems on prescription slips between patients, need time and tranquility to write.

These are, then, some of the highlights of my first stay at Bread Loaf, although there’s plenty more I could mention if I had the space. Last night, for instance, I strolled over from my dorm to a reading by Carl Phillips. There, sitting on the porch outside the screen-doored Little Theatre, I listened to stunning poetry as the late-summer crickets chirped softly all around me in the cool evening air. And Monday evening there was Mark Doty’s poetry by moonlight and this afternoon one of my favorite poets, Linda Pastan, will read to us. Tonight? A concert with Francois Clemmons and George Matthew. It’s all in a day’s work up here on the Mountain.

This week, five poets dispatch from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. Bread Loaf, which has been meeting annually for 81 years, divides its participants into different categories—scholar, fellow, waiter, staff, and participant. Each day of the blog will feature a poet from a different category.

***

Sarah Harwell, waiter

It’s Friday, 6 a.m., one more day and the conference ends and I got four hours of sleep last night so I apologize in advance for everything that comes next. In fine literary mode, the weather is a physical manifestation of the end of the conference—it’s so cold now we can see our breath and hung over, shivering writers are pushing each other out of the way to get to the chairs in front of the fire. There is nothing meaner than a cold writer. Fall is here. Get out of Dodge. Time to leave our Poetry Summer Camp, which for waiters at least, is more like Poetry Boot Camp (between the sleep deprivation, physical labor and constant parties, I have turned to jelly. Will tell you anything, do anything sexual or not, just give me a full eight hours of sleep . . . ) and return to our piddling, striving lives where writing is fit between washing the dishes and working our six jobs.

The social staff has a motto for the conference, “No scandal, but hoping . . . ” Well, I’m here to tell you that Bread Loaf is not the scandalous place it once was. No predatory professors looking to bed young female writers (well, ok, that did happen to one person, but young female writers are not the pushovers they once were), and parties, aside from wild, flailing, nerdy, writerly dancing, were remarkable only for their sexual restraint.

Not to say that it was completely scandal free. Spoken by a waiter who has a relationship waiting for him back at home, “Here at Bed Loaf, I’m just trying to keep my dick in my pants.” So far he’s done a fine job. Others have been less successful. One benefit of being a waiter is that you see people as they eat, which means their mouths are open and they can’t lie as well. Even fiction writers. So I see who they sit next to, who their eyes linger over, I see when they’re in a terrible mood, when they’re love struck. I count 15 affairs, several with married people, three smitten poets (oh like that’s news), 21 ready and randy fiction writers, 300 people who are lonely and feel insecure about their writing, and one soon to be defrocked priest (only kidding Michael).

My only gossip, real gossip, is that my workshop leaders Linda Gregerson (smartest woman in the universe) and Richard Siken (who won that stupid, ageist poetry prize—the Yale Younger) have birthed a love child. Me. I want my poetry to have the intelligence and finely wrought lines of Linda, and the passion and myth of Richard. The workshop has been intense, sort of like a Vulcan mind meld. The idea of it ending is painful, and reminds me of the time I was abandoned by my parents and sent to live in an orphanage. I asked Richard if I could come live in his apartment, but he said no. His apartment is too small. Then he looked scared. Maybe I’ll have better luck with Linda.

There are a myriad of opportunities to embarrass yourself here, besides writing a blog. Like the time I sat next to a very famous poet, whom I admired, but had never seen. She very politely said she liked my reading (all the waiters give three minute readings), and I very politely asked if she wrote poetry or fiction and which workshop leader did she have? Sigh.

My roommate (one of three Southeastern Asian women who are on the staff or waitering) was approached by an editor of an important journal who told her how much she enjoyed her reading and asked if she could send her a sample of her work. My roommate, who is a poet, was very excited and wrote her e-mail address down. Only later did she realize that the journal only accepted stories. No poetry. The editor had gotten her mixed up with one of the other two Southeastern Asian women who write fiction. You know how all those American-born foreigners look alike.

Another waiter got an e-mail from an editor who was interested in seeing his non-fiction book. He was so excited he immediately forwarded this to the love of his life and in a mixture of baby French and English (pookie, sweetie-ums, hootchie-cootchie whatever) expressed his great joy and did his victory dance. Too bad he hit the reply button instead of forward.

I spend my days juggling the responsibilities of waitering (going to all the parties, rubbing our victory at the dance in the social staff’s collective face, oh yes, and scraping food off plates) with the insanely packed schedule that Michael Collier has created (more gossip: Michael Collier has either cloned himself or is on speed—he has been to every event, every reading, every meal and as of two minutes ago, he was still standing and speaking in complete sentences—what’s up with that?). I have listened to what seems like a million readings. By the time I get home I’ll spontaneously give readings to my daughter and my cat at the appropriate hours of 4:15 and 8 and 9:30. I will expect copious amounts of applause. I like the poetry readings better than the fiction readings, because if your mind drifts during a poetry reading (not to say that that has happened to me, but I have noticed other people looking glazed over) you don’t have to wait out the rest of the reading trying to figure out if Sally shot Freddy or if they were making noisy, violent love, or if they were actually just a figment of Ahman’s strange imaginings of the decadent American culture.

My favorite part, aside from the workshops and waiting on hungry people with a myriad of dietary restrictions, and occasionally large senses of entitlement, has been the craft classes. I will share some good lines from them, just to make you feel bad about what you’ve been missing:

From Linda Gregorson’s “Poetic Yield”

“We enter a poem to be changed”
“To write a poem we don’t have to understand it beforehand.”

From Richard Siken’s class on how to move forward without a narrative:
“Because I like to leap, I must learn to land.”
“There must be rags to wipe up the blood.”

From Jason Schneiderman’s class on the line:
“The line is both a presence and an absence.”
“The three functions of a line break, 1) to create a small break, a breath 2) to create suspense and 3) surprise/retainer of meaning/reviser.

As well he had a great line about the publishing panels:
“It’s like going to a panel where Brad Pitt gives advice about dating, but everyone in the audience just wants to date Brad Pitt.”

From Linda Pastan’s reading:
“Revision is the purest form of love.”

From Michael Collier’s class on Hart Crane’s two poems “Eternity” and “The Hurricane”
“Learn to create a tension between the form and what’s inside the form.”

(I thought about reprinting the entire poem, “The Hurricane” and showing how Bread Loaf replicates the hurricane’s “ground-rhythm” but then I thought better of it. Just know that being here is a lot like being torn apart by weather you can’t control).

From C. Dale Young’s class:
“Sometime doubt makes a poem more convincing.”
“It took Brigit Pegeen Kelly two and a half years to write ‘Song.’”

From Thomas Sayers Ellis’s craft class:
“There’s a brain in our toes.”

I didn’t go to that class but someone told me that line and I like it.

Just regular people have had good lines too. That’s the greatest thing about Bread Loaf—the conversations you have with people who love writing and books and words. Isaac (who once he found out that he was going to make an appearance in the blog would like the world to know that he is available and rich, and likes to date older women) is from Iran although he lives in Houston now (this is an improvement?). He told me that in the ‘90s Iran’s movie censor was blind, which seemed to both of us a great metaphor for a lot of things. Because Iran has such strict guidelines for what you can put in a movie (no sex, no touching, etc.), directors and writers have had to go beyond the traditional ways of showing desire. He talked about this scene in an Iranian movie where an older man fell in love with his servant. The way he showed his desire for her was an extremely delicate scene where he straightened her slippers. Restriction can be good for art. Look at Zbigniew Herbert, sonnets, Russian poets. It made me wonder what we (we being part of the cult of the individual and freedom of expression) write against. I personally want to write against the toilet paper aisle in an American supermarket.

I’m really tired now. I just want to say one more thing. The previous blogger talked about mothering and writing. There have been children here at Bread Loaf, some of the fellows have them, and the teachers. I have one myself, but she had to stay at home, and right now is missing her mom. It’s hard juggling children and writing, especially for women. Last night, Mary (who read an extremely funny story that someone should publish), Ru (who is the sexiest dancer on staff, and also writes a compelling story that someone should publish) and I were complaining bitterly about this (ok, I was complaining—they were looking politely bored). To shut me up, we decided to start a writer’s retreat like Yaddo or MacDowell that welcomes children. The kids will go to creative arts camp while the mothers will write. We’ll hire a cook. And someone to clean. So if you’re looking to give money to a worthy cause, Google my name. Find my e-mail. Help children of writerly mothers not have to go to therapy later.

This blog entry is dedicated to all of my fellow waiters who write as well as they bus.