The Word from AWP
March 9, 9:00 a.m. Publishing as a Creative Act: Integrating Publishing into the Writing Curriculum
This was a really interesting session. The first presenter spoke about The Publishing Laboratory at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, which was part of the creative writing curriculum. (The department name, for anyone interested, was The Department of Creative Writing and Publishing.) Some of their projects included
Their curriculum included work in editing and design; acquisitions and selections; contracts and permissions; printing and production; marketing and promotions; and business and finance.
The presenter talked about one of the goals of this part of the creative writing curriculum, which was to “demystify the process” of what happens to writing once it’s written.
The next presenter was a guy (M. Scott Douglass) from Main Street Rag, which has since 1996 been publishing a literary magazines, chapbooks, and, most recently, Print-on-Demand books. The most useful piece of information I got from him is that the print-on-demand equipment, such as a binder and cover feeder, cost about $43,000. Sometimes, his outfit can publish 2000 books in a day.
Break: visiting the bookfair. Most interestingly, I found and later bought a book published by Tupelo Press, The Imaginary Poets. In this book, a couple of dozen different poets “found” a poet, wrote a “bio,” “translated” a poem, and wrote an essay about the poem—but all of it was totally made up. The reading was wonderful and hilarious, but more than that. I thought this would be a wonderful assignment in a literature class: it would get at many of the practices of literary studies, but in an imaginative way, one that could involve imitation and/or parody, not only of poets and poems, but also of literary critics or practitioners of literary commentary. If anyone’s interested in taking a look at this book, I’m happy to share my copy.
March 9, 10:30 a.m. “Dwelling in Possibility: Dimensions of Digital Media.”
I got to this session late, but even so got a lot of great ideas. The presenter I heard most from talked about a lot of ways to use hypertext, including as an interpretive strategy as well as a means of composing. Here are some examples:
In a word, this exercise makes writing out of reading.
In the discussion that ensued, one of the presenters made the point that it was useful to work collaboratively with someone who already understands something about code. Her point was that “code is a form of writing,” and that the collaboration should thus be more than someone “technical” helping the “writer” to achieve her/his vision. She also said that hypertext documents “generated their own means of approach”—again, hitting the reading-as-writing idea.
The other presenter made the point that there is “publishing,” but there’s also “privashing”—that is, making publications for intimate audiences. I can’t quite remember the context of this point—but it’s kind of a cool idea. Oh, well.
Sites to check out:
University of Virginia’s Emily Dickinson site
Word Circuits: New Media Poetry
March 9, noon. Poetry Foundation Presents: Poetry in
This session was misnamed, because it didn’t really discuss the greatness of audiences or poets, but it was fascinating nonetheless, because it featured some findings from the first national survey of American readers that specifically focused on poetry reading. The report of the study’s findings will be available from the poetry foundation website on April 1, the first day of National Poetry Month. I will summarize the scope and method of the study, along with the findings I found most interesting, but urge anyone who’s interested in poetry to check out the report when it’s available. (In advance of the report’s release, read a little bit about it here.)
Lisa Schwartzman, a social science researcher (formerly of NORC, now of Mathematica) was the principal investigator. The study used a sample of more than 1000 adults, randomly selected, that met two criteria: that they read for pleasure, and that they read principally in English. Researchers conducted telephone interviews that lasted as long as 40 minutes; the interviews took place between June and October of 2005 (fresh data!).
The investigators’ analysis revealed two large groups: those who have read poetry in the last five years, which they labeled “current audience members,” and those who have not, and thus are “potential audience members,” or “lapsed readers.”
Positive perceptions of poetry, found among readers in both groups, included the belief that poetry makes one appreciate the world, makes one laugh, helps one understand others, provides comfort, keeps one’s mind sharp, and helps one to understand oneself. Negative perceptions of poetry, also found among readers in both groups, included the idea that understanding the meaning of poetry is difficult, poetry is boring, poetry is irrelevant, reading poetry is hard work, and reading poetry is a waste of time.
The investigators saw the key findings here as being:
Poetry moves from person to person not mainly in the form of a purchased book, but rather as a loaned book, a poem received from someone else, perhaps e-mailed or copied. The investigator’s belief is that the currency of poetry is the individual poem.
Both current and potential audience members had experience with poetry as young people. Both groups had similar numbers in terms of their parents or other relatives having read them poetry. I thought it was interesting that lapsed readers of poetry had higher numbers for teachers being an influential person with regard to poetry. I have suspected that the teaching of poetry isn’t necessarily a good thing for helping people have a good relationship with it. But I’m no statistician, so I’ve probably made an unjustified inference.
Readers of poetry do a lot of things with their spare time (which the study quantified at about 39 hours per week, which excludes work, sleep, time with family, housework, eating, etc.)—slightly more than those who don’t read poetry. So the excuse that you don’t have time to read poetry just won’t wash! Also (sorry to be random . . .), many people encounter poetry incidentally—at a wedding or funeral, in the newspaper, at some public event, on public transportation.
Finally: statistically, the audience for poetry is a well-educated white woman.
Dan Stone from the NEA spoke about the
The NEA has launched a couple of programs which they hope will help to reverse the trend they see: The Big Read, where communities read and discuss the same book, and Poetry Out Loud, which is a recitation project in the schools.
Finally, Tree Swenson, of the Academy of American Poets, spoke in response. While she was pleased to put numbers to a situation we’ve always primarily interpreted anecdotally, and while she began to deconstruct the belief that there was once a “golden age” when everyone read poetry, and while she wondered why we’ve never asked these questions before, . . . finally, she was happy to recirculate the mystifications about poetry and its readership, such as: perhaps there’s something right about not being able to know whether the projects we start have any effect—perhaps it’s meant to be that poetry remains something of a mystery. Sigh. Oh well, you should see the great stuff on the
After a tasty lunch at the Mekong River Café, I attended what amounted to a reading in honor of the Poetry House. The Poetry House sponsors all manner of great projects, workshops, and activities, but they also maintain a collection of most of the poetry that gets published every year, and it’s open to the public. Isn’t that amazing? Here’s their website. Donna Masini, Cornelius Eady (whose dreads are now about 2.5 times the length that they are in this picture), and Mark Doty all read, with the latter two giving sharp, vivid, amazing performances of their own, and others’, poems.
At night, the estimable Walter Mosley gave a talk, a short, excited talk about associating with writers at AWP, and how that has given him the focus and wherewithal to put writing first and not the market. It was nice to see him at the conference—he went to sessions and readings, and I saw him several times, once on the street, even.
Friday, March 10, 9:00 a.m. “Do We Want to Genre?”
This was a terrific panel with very sharp presenters: Joyelle McSweeney (yes, another McSweeney!), Claudia Rankine, Susan Schultz, and Peter Conners, all discussing the genres, and some blurry boundaries between them, of prose poetry, flash fiction, lyric essay, and creative nonfiction.
Claudia Rankine began by talking about two texts, T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and Henry Louis Gates’ discussion of the signifying monkey and the talking book. Both writers saw the performance of any one writer having to fit into a tradition of, or speak in response to, other texts. Rankine suggested that “genre affords us conversation among form and content,” and in a sense helps to establish the readability (or lack thereof) of the texts we write. Even so, as Gayatri Spivak says, “habitual forms of imagination have to be retrained”; and as Muriel Rukeyser said of her own work, “it is our business to extend the document,” suggesting that disrupting the habits of the genre should be part of the work of any writer, leading to “contaminated fields of possibility.”
Chew on that.
Susan Schultz sees the problem of genre as a problem of family (she has written as an adoptive mother, which leads her to this insight). She sees genre as a “form of reproduction,” and likes the prose poem as a “path of excess—a place where all the genres get folded together.” Practically, she would like to see a creative writing course in which you would not teach the genres of poetry, fiction, and whatever else your third thing is. She tried to imagine the alternative, and came up with the idea of a “sentence boot camp”:
· A sentence in which you present a problem twice, make a quick argument about it, then come to an abrupt conclusion
· A sentence of long comparison beginning with “when the rosy fingers of the dawn . . .”
· A sentence composed while you sit under a tree
· A sentence that tells a story . . . and so on.
You wouldn’t privilege the rules or conventions of the genre, but rather the content of the genre.
I think this is a reductive notion of genre, but I really did like the idea of a sentence boot camp.
Joyelle McSweeney talked about “wearing away at the regime of the genre.” She too has thought about the practical results of teaching creative writing courses without the heuristic lens of the three genres. What if your creative writing course focused on
She wants a course in which writers learn about the “flexing and flexible fabric” that is language.
This is one sharp cookie, although you’ll have to check out her poetry for yourself. She said, in the course of something I can’t remember, that when people ask her if she thinks about the reader when she’s writing, she always says “Never!” If you don’t want to care about the reader, just slap the label poetry on it and no one will care. (!)
Lastly, Peter Conners spoke about his experience in developing the litmag DoubleRoom (prose poetry flash fiction, out of which comes the anthology PP/FF, available in April 06 from starcherone books).
This all gave me something to think about in terms of designing the Intro to Imag. Writing course at SLCC. Perhaps starting with the genres as the template is not particularly helpful. I could imagine a course that spent the first half in some kind of mix of exploration and language/image play, with the second half being some kind of genre initiations. This will be helpful to me as I think about the course, and I am going to e-mail Ms. McSweeney to see if she will share her remarks with me.
March 10, 10:30 a.m. “The Originality and Influence of Kenneth Koch.”
A bunch of estimable folks were involved in this panel. It got a little reverential for me, so I didn’t stay for the whole thing, but it’s certainly worth noting that Kenneth Koch, in the course of his poet’s life,
At one point, when he was writing a particular kind of poem, his assistant asked him if he was interested in Mallarme. He replied, “No, I’m interested in having some fun!” That’s a good philosophy for a poet, if you ask me.
March 10, 4:30 p.m.
I only stayed for the Donald Hall portion of this reading, but it was wonderful. He’s been around for a long time. I remember reading, as a young poet, his discussion of revision, and him noting with some severity that it could take a long time to finish a poem—as long as five years. When I was young, that seemed an eternity. Of course, I have poems that have hung around that long and longer at this point in my life. I credit Mr. Hall for helping me to see, maybe for the first time, what a life in poetry might look like. And he’s a swell poet, too.
Splendid dinner at La Fonda de San Miguel.
Next day, skipped the 9 a.m. session in which I could have learned about “Where are the poet-critics?” or “The Poetic Sequence,” either of which would have been enlightening, but I had breakfast to eat and a few last books to buy.
March 11, 10:30 a.m. “DIY Publishing.”
More ideas for the Publication Laboratory that we’re going to start at SLCC if I have my way about it. The presenters here all talked about their specific experiences with DIY publishing, which meant starting literary magazines, starting listservs that turned into publishing collectives, and other do-it-yourself models.
March 11, noon. “The Imaginary Poets Reading.”
March 11, 3 p.m. “Poetics for the 21st Century.”