Synthesizing Gravity

by Kay Ryan

  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 writer’s 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 couldn’t imagine making a play or movie, for instance; so many people involved. I don’t like orchestral music. I don’t like team sports. 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. Certainly not zillion-strong international ones, giant wheeling circuses of panel discussions.

  How, then, one wonders, can it be that I have just come back from AWP’s* annual conference in Vancouver, treading upon a lifetime of preferring not to?

  IT WAS EASIER THAN I THOUGHT

  I was invited to attend as an outsider, and to write a piece for Poetry. I could go but retain my alienation. This was so doable. Of course, in truth I could only do this now, when I am quite old. If I were young and hadn’t published anything, it would be different. Now, even if my sense of my self is threatened, shouldn’t I already have used most of it up? How much more can there be left? Maybe I would never have been influenced, as I feared I would, but to this day I believe I needed to guard against something, even if that something was imaginary. I needed to protect something valuable. 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. You’ll note a feral protectiveness—a wariness, a mistrust. But the important point is that this mistrust is the outside of the place that has to be kept empty for the slow development of self-trust. You have to defend before it looks like you have anything to defend. But if you don’t do it too early, it’s too late.

  One must truly HOLD A SPACE for oneself. All things conspire to close up this space. Everything about AWP has always struck me as closing the space.

  ANOTHER FEAR

  I have a weak character. I am very susceptible to other people’s enthusiasms, at times actually courting them. I like to sit among people who feel strongly about a basketball team, say, and get excited with them. I love to love ouzo with ouzo lovers. These are, of course, innocent examples. But this weakness concerns me in going to AWP. If I’m exposed to the enthusiasms of others, I know that I am capable of betraying my deepest convictions, laughing in the face of a lifetime of hostility to instruction, horror at groupthink. The only way I’ve ever gotten along in this world is by staying away from it; I have had only enough character to keep myself out of situations that require character. Now here I am, going to AWP. How am I going to remember: these people are THE SPAWN OF THE DEVIL? They will seem like individuals, not deadly white threads of the great creative writing fungus.

  REGISTRATION

  Wednesday, March 30, 2005

  I am given a black tote bag when I register. Very nice with the AWP logo. I see on a table behind the registration station hundreds of these black bags, primed with schedules, and stacked up like gunnysacks at the potato packers. The schedule is a 230-page affair. I note with rising alarm that there are up to fifteen choices for what to do each hour-and-a-half session, morning to night, for three days.

  What we have here before us is the exhilaration of bulk: bulk bags, bulk panels, bulk poets. Even though this is Canada, we are having an American experience: the American romance with bulk. Attendees who use American institutions such as Costco won’t have a problem. They already know how to handle things like AWP. They already know about proportion. A Costco sense of proportion is understanding that you have to get enough bulk to fill up your pickup-bed-sized shopping cart. And you have to have that shopping cart (which will hold four steel-belted radials) because regular-sized ones would look miniature in proportion with the wide avenues of the towering metropolis of bulk. Everything conspires to shame you out of any natural modesty you came in with. You cannot just want a bottle of Tabasco sauce.

  Any more than you could just want to go to one panel or hear one writer read.

  The AWP catalog says to you, as the Costco shopping cart says to you, Think big! Glut yourself! All this wouldn’t be going on if it weren’t a good idea to heap your day up with it! And don’t worry; it’s all disposable! One panel will wipe out all memory of the previous panel, just like with TV. It would be wrong, unthrifty, to go back to your room and sit.

  Plus, as with Costcos, which are inevitably situated a long way from wherever you live, you have come so far, all the way to Canada! You’d better fill up.

  THE BOOKFAIR

  Because this is only Wednesday, registration day, most of the tables in the big hall are still empty, but there are signs announcing the names of the presses and journals that will be occupying them. There are venerable names and new ones. Some of these journals I’ve had dealings with for decades. Slow dealings, sending off poems in the mail, waiting for a reply. By the time I’d get my poems back (usually all of them) they would look new to me. I could see them in a new way, maybe like children getting off the bus from their first day of school. They’d been somewhere where they had had to fend for themselves. You could get a new respect for them, and also you could think to yourself, How could I have sent them off looking like that?

  In any case, it was a distant, silent relationship with these presses and journals. I wanted something from them, but I had to count on the words I’d put on the page to get it for me. Whether or not I started out liking the patient discipline of this exchange, I came to like it. It slowed me down. If I’d gotten those poems back at email speed, say, they wouldn’t have been away long enough for me to lose hope the way you need to. You really shouldn’t be living for a reaction all the time.

  I also liked the fact that there were no faces or voices; we were all disembodied, writer and editor alike. Just the slow old mail. I wanted my poems to fight their way like that. Fight and fight again. No networking, no friends in high places, no internships. I think that’s how poems finally have to live, alone without your help, so they should get used to it.

  Tomorrow morning at the AWP bookfair a young writer will be able to meet everybody, editors, publishers, all in one place. They’ll all be sitting there behind their piles of books and journals. The hopeful young writer could have conversations, exchange email addresses, hand them manuscripts. Next month if he sent an editor some work he could start his email with, “I’m following up on our conversation at last month’s AWP bookfair …” It kind of makes me sick to think about.

  On the other hand, maybe there will be free key chains.

  THE CONFERENCE BEGINS

  My First Panel Experience

  Thursday, March 31

  9:00–10:15 AM

  “The Creative Process: The Creative Writer as Teacher” I’m sitting in the Vancouver Island Room on the conference floor of the Fairmont Hotel. The draped and elevated table of the panel setup looks like the Last Supper but just with water glasses. The room is aggressively paneled in white with elaborate gold trim. Even the chandeliered ceiling is paneled and trimmed. Good motif for panels, I guess.

  The question to be addressed by our panel is, How does the creative writing teacher stay creative? I have chosen this panel using my current selection method: What looks most inimical to your nature?

  These creative writing teachers have apparently gone into this line of work because they felt themselves helped by a writing teacher and feel a desire to pass it on. They resort frequently to various forms of the word “mentor,” both noun and verb. They share a meaning for this word so that it requires no explanation.

  Nor are they confused by the verb to workshop. As easily and comfortably as I might say, “We started sanding the table” do these creative writing teachers say, �
�We started workshopping poems.”

  Before we get to the question of how the creative writing teacher might stay creative, I would like to pause at these words, mentor and workshop. If, as my dictionary tells me, a mentor is a wise counselor, then to mentor would surely be to give wise counsel. And of course it would imply somebody on the other side receiving the wise counsel. Because it seems to me so deep and intimate, I have always had a very cautious feeling about this word mentor, as something far beyond the teacher of a class a student signed up for. It would be specific to two people who found some particular affinity, a relationship that would develop gradually. It would rarely occur.

  When I was a young writer, for some years I only knew one poet, Rosalie Moore, thirty-plus years my senior. We got to be friends and she was encouraging to me, but we barely understood each other. We stayed friends until she died in her nineties. Occasionally over the years someone would refer to Rosalie as my mentor and I always felt an electric shock, like red cartoon arrows flying off my body, like bristles. Rosalie wasn’t my mentor. She would agree with that. I just don’t think the word should be used casually. It should be deep. Some people have mentors, some never do. I didn’t.

  Workshop. In the old days before creative writing programs, a workshop was a place, often a basement, where you sawed or hammered, drilled or planed something. You could not simply workshop something. Now you can, though. You can take something you wrote by yourself to a group and get it workshopped. Sometimes it probably is a lot like getting it hammered. Other writers read your work, give their reactions, and make suggestions for change. A writer might bring a piece back for more workshopping later, even. I have to assume that the writer respects these other writers’ opinions, and that just scares the daylights out of me. It doesn’t matter if their opinions really are respectable; I just think the writer has given up way too much inside. Let’s not share. Really. Go off in your own direction way too far, get lost, test the metal of your work in your own acids. These are experiments you can perform down in that old kind of workshop, where Dad used to hide out from too many other people’s claims on him.

  BACK TO THE PANEL

  The ways the panel members say they stay creative are not what I would have said in their place, which is that I abandoned the teaching of creative writing and ran as though my clothes were on fire. Rather, one says she teaches but she also does her own writing projects at the same time, currently putting together an anthology of stories by sex workers. This is a person of an industry, social responsibility, and generosity beyond my imagining. A number of panel members, with members of the audience nodding in agreement, say that they are actually nourished by student work, and stimulated to do their own work. I am speechless. My sense of this panel, mostly made up of women and attended by women for what reason I can’t say, is that these are sincere, helpful, useful people who show their students their own gifts and help them to enjoy the riches of language while also trying to get some writing done themselves. They have to juggle these competing demands upon their souls and it is hard and honorable. I agree, and shoot me now.

  RECONSIDERATION: NEGLECTED AND FORGOTTEN POETS

  10:30–11:45 AM

  A different room

  I already feel stunned, absent, polite, and I’m just starting my second panel. I saw Margaret Kaufman from Marin in the jam-packed wood-paneled elevator coming down to the conference floor, all of us with tags around our necks and black totes. I was embarrassed to be seen. She invited me to join her and Jackie Kudler for dinner. I made vague distracted sounds.

  This is a big, big room, with big, big chandeliers and really lots of paneling. I didn’t get a copy of the handout of the poems; all gone.

  Ignored poet #1: John Logan. Presenter mumbled and did not raise his eyes. I take personal offense at this sort of behavior. He also didn’t introduce himself. What is it with that?

  These presenters assume that everybody has taken/taught writing courses. It’s natural life to everyone here. They refer to their own professors and various writing programs where they’ve taught or been students, and the audience murmurs, laughs, and groans in response, because that’s the kind of church this is. Obviously, this is a big part of the pleasure of a conference like this, the Good Sam Club quality, the fact that these people kind of know each other; they migrate all over the continent, not in trailers, but nonetheless as a fluid band, dividing, reforming. Tagged, like birds.

  Do the presenters not introduce themselves because they are modest? Because they expect to be known? Because the previous presenter didn’t?

  I notice that these ignored poets tend to be unearthed by their old students. No surprise there, I guess.

  “… creative process that reflects dialectical [mumble] …” Blurry speakers, reading essays of routine critical phrasing …

  (I guess I shouldn’t have expected to like neglected poets since I don’t like many unneglected ones even.)

  “… relation between gnostic and experiential truth …”

  I hear furious clapping from some other room; I feel I have come to the wrong panel.

  THE AMERICAN SONNET

  12:00–1:15 PM, that same day

  My third panel in one morning! I’m off to a strong start.

  About a hundred people are waiting to hear about the American sonnet. The room is stuffed. That itself is something, don’t you think? A hundred people would choose the sonnet panel over the fourteen other panels on offer this session, ranging from “Women Writing Obsession and the Twenty-First-Century Imagination” to “Where It’s All Too Real: Alaska’s Nonfictional Demand.” It’s enough to make you think that maybe people interested in poetry are hungry for some order, some shared requirements. It’s moving to me. Most of the scheduled panelists don’t show up, including Gerald Stern, whom everyone misses a lot because of the way he is in person (I don’t know how he is) and because of his apparently freewheeling approach to the sonnet.

  Molly Peacock is a late-add to the decimated panel, but she says a nice thing. She says it’s wrong to think of the sonnet as a “container,” or prison; instead it is a “skeleton,” which allows something to live and move. I can see a beautiful animated x-ray of a galloping horse. This is a muscular and vigorous feeling about form. And in addition to the form’s usefulness as an armature, Peacock recommends the writing of sonnets as a way to measure oneself against the history of literature, and a way to connect with that history. Whatever one’s feelings about sonnet writing, I find these attractive thoughts, after so many years of everybody going it so damned alone. Wanting to be connected, wanting to be great in some great tradition, these are sweet ideas. But how can I reconcile them with my own preference for isolation from the other toilers? I explain it to myself this way: I don’t want to be connected to poetry in an easy, fellowshipping way, but I do want to be connected in a way that will earn me the respect of the dead.

  LUNCH BREAK

  I met up with Dorianne Laux at the sonnet panel. In spite of my abstract contempt for everyone in attendance here, I am on the functional level delighted as well as grateful to see this person whom I know and like, a warm human being, a strong poet, and the head of a writing program in Oregon. This is all so distressing. I knew it would be. We find Dorianne’s husband, world’s-nicest-poet Joe Millar, and collect Major Jackson, a young poet making a name for himself, teaching in a writing program, and not incidentally an old student of Dorianne’s, and we all go for lunch at a little place around the corner from the Fairmont. I am so happy to be tucked into this booth with these down-to-earth, generous people whose lives are writing, as mine is. Why have I kept myself from this camaraderie? There’s lots of relaxed book chat. Major talks about not yet feeling he has an arc for his new book. (What is an arc? Dorianne explains that this is a term current in creative writing circles and refers to a shape the whole book of poems should ideally have, like a narrative arc, as I understand it, and forgive me if I have this wrong.) Already it is coming to me why I don’t hav
e more of this camaraderie; just the thought of vogue shapes for poetry books oppresses like cathedral tunes. Dorianne seems to be able to coexist with stuff like this, letting it wash over her. The more I think about it, the more oppressed I feel—so many of us writing books of poetry, with or without arc. How in the world can I feel really, really special? No, I think poets should take the lesson of the great aromatic eucalyptus tree and poison the soil beneath us.

  THE CONTEMPORARY SESTINA

  3:00–4:15 PM, still that same day somehow

  I can’t stay away from these panels on forms. Just to say “the contemporary sestina” sounds as lovely and hopeless as saying “the contemporary minuet.”

  And again, there is a full house. I will admit to having no personal patience with using such an extremely strict form (or indeed any strict forms) but I feel an attraction to the general atmosphere of rigor it excites. It feels penitential, religious in its extremity, the sestina: a scourge against shapelessness, a six-sextet-plus-a-tercet rod of discipline.

  And indeed the panelists quickly establish an atmosphere of almost kabalistic mystery for the antique sestina, which had its heyday in the Middle Ages. We are plunged immediately into its spiritual possibilities. When we enter it, do we leave worldly time and enter ecstatic eternal time? Is the sestina another form of the medieval cathedral? Does the numerologically suggestive sestina allow entrance into the axis mundi? Perhaps the sestina—because of the ways it repeats—is an uroboros (accent on the second syllable, I note) eating its tail, cycling without end. And this question arises: Can a ritual (the form of the sestina, for example) be somehow satisfying in itself, even if we no longer understand why it has the pattern it has or what powers it was originally meant to invoke? Can the repetition of a pattern—alone—give us consolation? I cannot speak about the sestina particularly, but in general I think, yes; we are adjusted, physically corrected, by the repetition of patterns. They hit some deep drone part of our brains and make things better.