I Go to AWP
by Kay Rayn
Except from Poetry Magazine: … Once, when I was about twenty-five and not yet entirely aware of the extremity of my unclubbability, I did try to go to a writers conference. Thirty minutes into the keynote address I had a migraine. It turns out I have an aversion to cooperative endeavors of all sorts… I love the solitary, the hermetic, the cranky self-taught. Make mine the desert saints, the pole-sitters, the endurance cyclists, the artist who paints rocks cast from bronze so that they look exactly like the rocks they were cast from; you can’t tell the difference when they’re side by side. It took her years to do a pocketful. You just know she doesn’t go to art conferences…The most important thing a beginning writer may have going for her is her bone-deep impulse to defend a self that at the time might not look all that worth getting worked up about.
*Association of Writers & Writing Programs Annual Conference
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An old debate: Can poets write prose; prose writers, poetry? Not the stuff of the 1950s and 60s “two worlds” Art vs. Science debate, but still lively dinner chatter. Kay Ryan CAN write: poetry AND prose. In poetry, I look for the person-poet in it. Alas, not to be found in too much contemporary (contempt?) poetry. In her writing, poetry and now, as I have discovered in her essay, her prose, I can find HER. The glory of her essay: I could look at the AWP through her eyes. Most of the comments posted on Poetry Foundation –– gibberish! Oh, oh. Me too, here?
Amicus poeticae,
Neal Whitman
After reading the essay I thought, with relief, “Oh God. I can relax and just write.”
Kay Ryan’s essay? critique? was long and I found repetitive although I so admire her aversion to the coercion suggested by “conferences”.
Dear Frances,
So good to see you posting a comment. Soon, a poem? More please.
Amicus poeticae,
Neal Whitman