I’m digesting–a dinner of edamame and vegetable fried rice from the Pacific Rim Bistro–and the days events. It’s Saturday evening, with only one more event to go before the conference wraps up. There are readings tonight in fiction and poetry, with the poets being two southerners, Coleman Barks and C.D. Wright. But, let’s get back to yesterday. It started out a little more relaxed as I skipped over the first session of the day, finding nothing compelling to attend, thus having some time to putz about, eat a late breakfast and get over to the Hilton for the 10:30 panel on Narrative Poetry: Past, Present, Future with B.H. Fairchild, David Mason, Kate Daniels and David Rothman. It proved to be highly engaging and, unlike the day before, my eyes did not glaze over with mental overwhelm, rather I found their arguments and advocation for the narrative poem not only intelligently outlined, but passionately felt. What I came away with was the understanding that every poem tells some kind of story, even if it is simply random words on the page, the mind will seek to make associations, to create a story. It is what we do as humans–and that a poem that is purely narrative is not a poem. It must have lyricism, it must sing, to connect in the way a poem, by its very nature, is required to connect. Otherwise, it is reporting, dry and unimaginative and leaves the reader with no emotional reverberation.

At noon I went to the Graywolf Press reading, which was lively — and after listening to mainly poetry for the last two days, it was great to hear some fiction and essay pieces read. The room was packed and the energy high. I particularly enjoyed the essay read by Anders Monson from his book of essays, Neck Deep about technology; from the telegraph to high speed internet–really how we communicate and connect, what goes obsolete and what never changes. Really lively and funny and true.  

I took a cruise through the masive bookfair, stopping at various booths to pick up a flyer, a postcard, submission guidelines, a couple of chocolate kisses, small yellow buttons with the Chinese letters for Poetry on them from Copper Canyon Press, and of course bought enough books to weigh down a small donkey. It’s the proverbial candy store for someone like me, and I suspect a good majority of the poets and writers and teachers of both, who mill about touching the covers, flipping through the pages and making small talk, while they calculate in their heads how much $$ they can spend and how much weight they can pack into their suitcases to take home. (Books are HEAVY!)

There were great readings by Charles Wright and Terrance Hayes in the afternoon. I had read Wright and especially love his new volume, Scar Tissue. He writes poems that speak plainly but with deep eloquence about place, relationships and our relationship with our interior landscape. Terrance Hayes is a young man, one who was a college athlete (basketball player) and an artist and has landed as a poet who has a strong sense of musicality in his poems, humor, and telling his story, as a young black man growing up in the south, with sensitivity and deep felt awareness. I was very impressed with him as a poet and a thoughtful and emotionally whole man. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of my camera, or more likely the limitations of my knowledge of the camera, the photos I took didn’t turn out for this reading or the reading in the evening with Thomas Lux, Marilyn Hacker, Cornelius Eady and David Bottoms. And, very unfortunately, Dean Young wasn’t able to make it. He got stuck in an ice storm in Iowa. It was my first time hearing Eady & Bottoms, both of whom (as well as Hacker & Lux) were a delight to hear. It was an affirmation, with the incredible diversity in the work of these four prominent poets, that the form is always secondary to the hand and heart that craft the poem. Below is a poem by Cornelius Eady he read about his parents.

 Cornelius Eady (Photo by Howard Gotfryd)
 

I’m A Fool To Love You

Some folks will tell you the blues is a woman,
Some type of supernatural creature.
My mother would tell you, if she could,
About her life with my father,
A strange and sometimes cruel gentleman.
She would tell you about the choices
A young black woman faces.
Is falling in with some man
A deal with the devil
In blue terms, the tongue we use
When we don’t want nuance
To get in the way,
When we need to talk straight.
My mother chooses my father
After choosing a man
Who was, as we sing it,
Of no account.
This man made my father look good,
That’s how bad it was.
He made my father seem like an island
In the middle of a stormy sea,
He made my father look like a rock.
And is the blues the moment you realize
You exist in a stacked deck,
You look in a mirror at your young face,
The face my sister carries,
And you know it’s the only leverage
You’ve got.
Does this create a hurt that whispers
How you going to do?
Is the blues the moment
You shrug your shoulders
And agree, a girl without money
Is nothing, dust
To be pushed around by any old breeze.
Compared to this,
My father seems, briefly,
To be a fire escape.
This is the way the blues works
Its sorry wonders,
Makes trouble look like
A feather bed,
Makes the wrong man’s kisses
A healing.

From Autobiography of a Jukebox
Carnegie Mellon Poetry, Publishers