AWP Day 1 / Out of Sequence 2

The New England Review reading was great. The fiction writers in particular gave life to their selections, and the audience laughed. A lot. This is important.

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Some panels, which will go unnamed, were not so good. This is a sketch of a bad panelist about to neuter the poetry s/he claims to love:



This is a sketch of a series of panelists so in love with themselves that their egoheadballoons begin floating up through the empty room.



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Got to meet C. Dale Young and John Gallaher in person. Yay nonvirtuality!

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Received an email from one of the high school students I performed for yesterday. He was too shy to raise his hand when I asked if there were any budding writers in the audience. He notes in his email that he's been trying to look at things differently, like looking at a tree stump and instead of thinking "a tree was there" thinking "a homeless man's stage." This kid gets it. I haven't responded yet, but I'm very excited.

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Talked with my veryvery good friend Logen, who expressed disappointment on how fame works. Specifically, how the production of one good volume of poetry can get a poet "in" with a press, which then gives that poet seeming cart blanche for publication. Yes, we were oversimplifying a bit, but there's something about the sequence of publications that is disturbing. The work doesn't always improve. It often gets worse.

I added some comments about my performances at the high school yesterday and how changing the order of poems affects the reception of later ones. If I performed "Ma'am please put those jeans down" by Glenn Phillips (since I have it memorized, and it's rightly a crowd-pleaser) or "ADD TV," the kids would go crazy for anything else I did after that, even if I screwed up. Maybe the masses aren't quite so fickle as we think? To a/our fault?

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Incredible Hulk Quandary Haiku

rippling suddenly
with verdant musculature
what would you do first?

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I'm officially coining the term "nah-vant garde." So there.