As far as I can tell (apologies if I missed somebody), I am the ONLY current Harriet blogger not to have been at AWP in NY. What did I miss? Was there a secret meeting of Harrieteers? What did go on at all those parties? What was the most fabulous reading I missed?

So here's a post for everyone who WASN'T there. What are your excuses? Your reasons?

I'm very gratified by the strong response my recent posts, especially "AWP, Communazis, and Me" and "Who You Callin' 'Post-Avant'," have received. It's wonderful to know that people are reading and that they care enough to comment.

However, I have been disturbed by the tenor of many (by no means all) of the responses, which have been hostile and sometimes vitriolic, even descending to the level of personal attack, either direct or implied, including all kinds of baseless negative assumptions about me (including insinuations that I am some kind of conservative or even reactionary). Many of them have also engaged in what felt to me like willful misreadings of what I had actually written.

I shouldn't have been surprised that my post on AWP and its discontents should have received some rather negative responses, since in that post I criticized Charles Bernstein's hyperbolic parody of AWP as Nazi, Stalinist, and MCarthyite. I would remind everyone, though, that criticism is not attack. But I was shocked that my post on post-avant poetry received so many such responses, as I considered it an innocuous description of a phenomenon that is much mentioned but not much defined.

More below the virtual fold.

Well, I survived my ninth AWP conference. I’ll say what every New Yorker (including me) said about the conference being held in our city this year: it wasn’t fair. We didn’t get to feel as if we were leaving our duties and obligations behind since we simply skipped over from our respective Big Apple dwellings. But to even out the score, I heard many out-of-towners share this sentiment: that they didn’t feel they came to New York; they came to AWP.

I have just returned from my second time attending the AWP conference, which (like last year) was wonderfully exhilarating and utterly overwhelming. Here in Pensacola I lead a life rather thoroughly isolated from any literary community or scene, and so the opportunity to see and talk to so many fellow writers was and is particularly exciting to me. I am pretty poor and the trip has practically bankrupted me, but it was worth it.

I am, as I have written, done with discussing Charles Bernstein's piece, my critique of which was only a part of a post that engaged considerably larger topics, which were simply ignored by most commenters. But the discussion around my post has brought up some issues I do think worth pursuing, both about the tenor of discourse in the online poetry world and about the question of insiders and outsiders in the poetry world(s).

More follows below the fold.

This post is in two parts. The first is a simple announcement of my participation in the upcoming AWP Conference in New York City.

I am chairing a panel on Saturday, February 2 at from noon to one fifteen on Gay Male Poetry Post Identity Politics, featuring “emerging” poets Christopher Hennessy (whose wonderful blog Outside the Lines focuses on the relationship of identity and creativity), Brad Richard, Aaron Smith (whose entertaining blog focuses on anything but poetry), and Brian Teare. Here is the description of the panel from the conference schedule, written by moi:

What does it mean to be a gay male poet today, after gay liberation, the somewhat domesticated gay rights movement, the revived radicalism of Queer Nation, the AIDS epidemic and ACT UP, and intellectual interrogations of “queerness” and identity itself? Contemporary gay male poets can take their gayness for granted on several levels. They also can explore, question, and even explode that identity. On this panel, four emerging gay male poets discuss what the words gay male poetry mean to them.

I hope that all interested parties will try to make it. Let’s make this panel a party!

The second part of this post is about my impression of the role that some phantasmatic nightmare image of AWP plays in the imaginations of many participants in the various online poetry worlds. To read more, look below the fold.

I’m trying to get my blog momentum back, but it’s not going to be easy: I’m currently in residence at Vermont College of Fine Arts up in snowy Montpelier. Yesterday it was ten degrees below zero, this morning it felt warmer: three below. And while I was up here I finished editing my forthcoming book of stories, Men without Bliss, and reading nominated books for the National Book Critics Circle (finalists for the award will be announced next week in San Francisco!), and of course, my teaching duties: poetry workshop, poetry lecture, poetry chit-chat.

When I taught creative writing at Lynchburg College in Virginia, I discovered, like many creative writing teachers, that violence pervaded the lives of many undergraduates students. After receiving several poems about assaults, suicide, and abuse, I conducted an unscientific survey. I asked students to anonymously list violence they, their families, or friends had experienced. All but fifteen of my 50 students were victims or had a close friend who had experienced one of the following: abuse, murder, suicide, assault, or rape.

All AWP attendees should be granted some sort of transitional grace period before re-entering the real world. Oh, yeah. We definitely need it.

Today, thousands of us hobbled off airplanes, dragging carry-ons bulging with obscure litmags, new tomes by first-time authors, glossy MFA brochures, a billion business cards, 12 Gettysburg Review sippy cups and an assortment of neon condoms emblazoned with logos and attention-grabbing lines that probably made perfect sense at one time or another. Wrap your head around it—read the Dos Passos Review!

How’s this for poetic inspiration? At about 3 a.m., when I should have been snoozing contentedly, dreaming stanzas, I was in the back seat of a cab hurtling toward Gladys Knight’s Chicken & Waffles because—

1) I’m in Atlanta, where they fry everything but chairs.
2) I’ve always been fascinated by the pairings—hot, sweet, crunchy, doughy, syrup, Tabasco.
3) I’m at AWP, which seems to have brought out some giddy, reckless muse/scoundrel (I call her Caldonia), who doesn’t surface until I’m away from home and surrounded by 20-year-olds who think a good ol’ hefty helping of potential heart attack at 3 a.m. is “fun.”
4) I think there’s a book somewhere that lists chicken & waffles are a black person’s rite of passage. If you can handle ‘em, you can keep your membership card.

Now it is 10:20 a.m., and I am reminded approximately every 23 seconds of my early morning feast. It was best tiny death I’ve ever consumed. I must write about what is happening to my body.

Or my body will win.

Yesterday, in the chaotic wonderland that is the AWP bookfair, I happened upon a woman I hadn’t seen in at least two decades. Before she even saw me, I watched as she haggled gently but persistently with someone at the Red Hen table—like so many of us, she was trying to sell herself, trying to convince powerful strangers that her words were worth something.

—(point of departure - 1) When I taught a week-long "writing workshop" at Naropa last summer, after the first of four meetings, I received a note from a student in my mailbox. She said that she found the material I had presented interesting, but felt that she needed to concentrate more on her own writing. What is this elusive "writing"?

Recommended reading from the editors on the AWP panel “Books Every Poet should Read (But Probably Hasn’t).”

Michael Wiegers, editor at Copper Canyon Press, pulled out this fact to explain why he organized a panel called “Books Every Poet should Read (But Probably Hasn’t).”

“With so many books coming out, the publishing industry puts serious marketing pressures on literary titles and can end up silencing them,” he said.

The idea was for the panelists—editors from other small poetry presses—to recommend books that for one reason or another have stopped circulating. A packed crowd under four gigantic faux crystal chandeliers in Ballroom A at the Hilton in Atlanta clearly disoriented the panelists. Who were these people? Instead of shoving manuscripts in editors’ faces, they were scribbling down book titles to, uh, maybe buy?

Maybe it’s how much we’ve been bombarded recently by the particularly icky, and frustratingly addictive, aspects of celebrity. Maybe because I’m mesmerized as Anna Nicole grabs a buzzing blade and opts for bald, Britney Spears weeps openly in a courtroom after deciding to bury herself in the Bahamas and James Brown—could it be?—finally calls it quits with that skanky golddigger Cameron Diaz and—after spilling his woes to a gushing Oprah—is adopted immediately by Brangelina. Maybe it’s because the sprawling Associated Writing Programs conference (sometimes referred to as “too many panels, too little time”) just happens to come on the tail end of the Oscars this year. And maybe it’s because I’m tired of Hollywood grabbing the headlines and having all the juicy fun while we poets twirl dutifully in dimmer orbits, sipping chai, submitting to Kingsley Tufts, and sharpening our pencils.