by Kay Ryan
But to return to the sestina: it is especially good for obsessive-compulsives, say the practitioners (both kidding and not), perfect for those who enjoy being “boxed in.” The sestina says over and over, “You must say it some other way” (other than the easy way). The sestina-writer creates her own monster as she battles it, the meanings of the six repeated words twisting and writhing away as the dragon of the sestina grows sextet by sextet. I enjoy the panel’s emphasis on what a titanic wrestling match it is to write a poem. I certainly feel this when I write a poem, even though it’s not a sestina.
What a fine panel this panel was, inviting the mystical by way of stringent form, celebrating at once the exercise of intention and the fruitful thwarting of intention. I felt completely removed from the modern world.
WHERE ARE THE POET-CRITICS?
Friday, April 1 (hump of the conference)
9:00–10:15 AM
Herb Leibowitz, who edits Parnassus, was supposed to be on this panel, and I really wanted to meet him. He edited an essay of mine for his magazine once, and he was so fussy that it seemed like a grooming ritual from another hemisphere, important in ways that I couldn’t understand. I hoped all the people on this panel would be smart and particular like that.
Herb Leibowitz didn’t show, but the present speaker seemed to fit the bill. I had come in quite late, I’m sorry to say (panel hangover from yesterday), and the room was excitingly jammed, people sitting on the floor, a hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred, in all. There was a smart feeling here. The severely dressed woman to my left, taking furious notes in her Moleskine as I snuck into the last free seat, would not deign to tell me that it was Linda Gregerson speaking although I whispered my inquiry. It was my shoddy behavior of arriving late and wanting to be caught up. I hate that too.
Linda Gregerson spoke of the importance of the poet-critic in a precise and strenuous manner that I appreciated very much. It’s satisfying to watch someone being exact in front of you. It makes you automatically feel that what they are saying matters. There was a compelling, hesitating quality to her sentences, as though in each she was rejecting a variety of possible formulations, very quickly, before fastening upon the happiest. We have to listen to so many dumb people; it’s such a pleasure to watch somebody’s brain working that fast. A second panel member, Cynthia Hogue, was also compelling, but not in that close-cropped-hair way I especially like. Hers was a more relaxed-haired intelligence. She spoke of having bought the whole deconstructionist thing of the eighties and of having adopted its alienating jargon. At the time she found it intellectually exhilarating plus she had to get her PhD. It had taken her years, she said, to purge her language of this theoretical luggage and to come to understand that criticism and poetry should talk. I like this very sophisticated AA confession thing, confessing to being a reformed deconstructionist. I am failing to get across the high level of discourse this panel was at, but it was a high level. It appears that the theoretical zealotry of the eighties is in major decline and it’s getting to be OK for all sorts of good sense to reign again. This was a serious and passionate gathering. Cynthia Hogue said, and it thrills me when someone will go this far: “Critical writing is spiritual practice.” Of course it is. Everything truly attended to is spiritual practice, isn’t it? More of that, please.
TRANSGRESSIVE AND POST-CONFESSIONAL NARRATIVE IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY
12:00–1:15 PM
Such a lot to think about, just in the panel’s title!
The word transgressive is thick upon the ground here at AWP. I could also have attended panels titled, “Transgression and Convention: Writing the Erotic Poem” and “Impure Poetry: The Poetics of the Transgressive, Taboo, and Impolite.” It’s funny how writers will all want to jump on the same bed till the springs pop out. Then they go jump on another one. Transgressive apparently means sex now. Didn’t there used to be other transgressions? Will there be others again? How about, transgression against obsessive self-regard? That would be a good one: “Hello. I’m Jen and I keep having impersonal thoughts.”
Then post-confessional. What could this mean? Is post-confession what comes after confession? Perhaps contrition? Or Hail Marys? Or dedication to good works? Or does post-confessional mean confessional like Sexton or Lowell, but ironic and self-conscious now—saying, I am confessing, I see myself confessing, but I know no one can really confess?
In the event, transgressive and post-confessional narrative turned out to mean loosely plotted tales of sex and attitude, read really fast and/or at high volume, which left me feeling amused and pleasantly avuncular, grateful to not be listening to a mumble panel.
Wait; I can’t feel avuncular. I’m a genetic woman. But I do. Am I starting to have transgressive issues?
A DRINK IN THE BAR
Friday night and none too soon
I met up with someone I knew, a longtime magazine editor not used to AWP and as ill at ease as I was. We had a drink in the bar of the Fairmont. I’d already had a drink there earlier and had set my backpack on fire in the candle on the low table between the cozy chairs. Big flames. I was wise to that this time. The editor hated being there. He knew it was going to make his life harder; every writer you meet means one more personal rejection letter you have to write. We both resented, but from opposite ends, personality horning in on the real question: the words on the page.
TELLING SECRETS, LOUD SILENCES, AND CONSENSUAL REALITY: THE ART OF THE MEMOIR
Saturday, April 2
1:30–2:45 PM
Phillip Lopate, etc.
My last panel!
I went to this because I love Phillip Lopate’s essay anthology so much.
Memoir is the perfect thing to hear talked about or read aloud. You can stand lots and lots (as opposed to poetry). It’s juicy stories: father with hands cut off, son bathing him; mentally ill daughter who must constantly tell her life aloud; the brother who married the Headless Woman in the circus; the father who choked his wife (but not all the way).
The concern of this panel is, How far can you go, telling other people’s secrets? A tormenting question, and not just legally. The memoirist whose brother married the Headless Woman, for example, lost good relations with a sister over her tale-telling.
The audience is very interested. Judging by their detailed questions to the panelists, they intend to Try This at Home. Is it fair to write about your young children? Your still-living parents? I am refreshed by Phillip Lopate’s candor; he is less concerned with being seen as a good guy and a non-exploiter than he is with making “something shapely.” I think it’s good to admit what a wolfish thing art is; I trust writers who know they aren’t nice.
BRIEF DILATION UPON PANELS
There is something inherently Monty Pythonish about panels. The setup is perfect for farce: starched rigidity (topic, table, moderator, time limits, matching water goblets) combined with a thrumming undercurrent of overcivilized competition. Soon after introductions, the dramatic differences in style and talent among the panelists begin to tear the table apart. In the best panels a happy anarchy ensues resulting in a shambles enjoyed by all.
THE BIG FINAL READING
4:30–6:15 PM
(especially long session—the star treatment)
Anne Carson and W. S. Merwin
Amazing disorienting mystery room! They have gutted the interior of the conference floor (where I have occupied so many paneled interiors these last three days) to create a single room the size of a sports pavilion for the big final reading. Hundreds and hundreds of AWP attendees drain through the large doors. There is an irresistible pull to this room. I can’t calculate the strength it would have taken not to come. Maybe if you were early, it wouldn’t be like this; it’s probably the great suck of people. Something important must be going to happen if there are this many people here. We are thousands, maybe a million. We darken the long rows of chairs. We are one organism—a seated organism.
I am pretty far up front, maybe thirty or forty rows b
ack, and Anne Carson is quite big, I mean the top half of her that I can see. She is larger than the top half of a gelcap, maybe a gelcap half and a half. It is easy to make out her black tuxedoish jacket and the blazing white shirt whose collar flies up into dramatic wing tips like a magician’s. She is sporting an insouciant brown ponytail! I always thought of her with her hair down and this is much more playful. I can see it bounce when she turns her head suddenly to the side. These are show clothes and this will be a show! I can’t see her expressions, but fortunately she has a microphone for expressions. It’s hard to judge, when a person is in the gelcap size range, but she seems gamine, elfin. Oh, and really, really smart. How does smart sound? It isn’t the Greek and Latin references. The smartness is a tone, something light—dry—exact and amused. It makes it a pleasure to listen to her language and thought experiments; they are offered lightly; you are under no emotional obligation to care. Which of course makes it more possible to do so. Noting what a very big audience it is (as though she hadn’t known it would be), she begins differently than she had planned. She’ll start with a thirteen-second (as I recall) interactive love poem relying upon the audience for a small recitative part. She divides us in half with her tiny commanding arm: this million will say this when I indicate (“What a deal!”) and this million will say this (“I’ll take it!”). She says her parts, we roar our briefer parts, and we’re in cahoots, co-creating (we flatter ourselves to think) a heady ambient smartness. It keeps on like that. She does a bunch of Catullus translations—in which she lobs modern references into classical poems (at one point Catullus looks in the “fridge”) the way she lobs Latin into her contemporary stuff—not quite beautiful or exactly amusing, but always out of left field.
W. S. Merwin reads second. Not a fortunate match. We are assured that he has won every prize winnable but it is hard to see why here today. The poems drift across the acres of convention space as vague and shapeless as clouds; I keep feeling like maybe I’m taking mini-naps and missing the pieces that connect things up.
But what could you tell about anybody’s poetry anyhow in this big-top atmosphere? The room is all out of proportion with how poetry works. The pressure is all wrong. This place is right for revivals and mass conversions, for stars and demagogues. I don’t think I’d trust poetry that worked too well here. Aren’t the persuasions of poetry private? To my mind, the right-sized room to hear poetry is my head, the words speaking from the page.
ON THE WAY HOME
It’s over.
On the Sunday morning flight back to San Francisco I had the aisle seat next to two young women who, judging by their totes, had been to AWP. Except for serving as a mild obstacle in the passing of snacks, I was invisible to them and their friends seated across the aisle. My seatmates spent much of the flight planning out an elaborate future exchange of poems, something that would spur them to write after they no longer had the support of the creative writing program they were finishing. Near the end of the flight, when it’s safe to talk to strangers because you will soon separate, I offered my opinion on the Carson/Merwin reading they’d started discussing, and then we all said who we were. The young woman by the window said, “Wait, are you the Kay Ryan who wrote an essay about becoming a poet? Because I used that essay in the first creative writing class I ever taught, and it worked so well!”
It turned out that she and I wound up waiting at the same Airporter bench, and she said again how happy she was to have met me. Oh God, wasn’t this just the perfect illustration of everything I hated? Wasn’t this the AWP predicament in miniature? What in the world was this lovely unfledged creature doing teaching a creative writing course? And what in the world was my essay doing encouraging these ever-expanding fuzzy rings of literary mediocrity, deepening the dismal soup of helpful supportive writing environments? Shouldn’t I have been up on my back legs as least as much as Simone Weil would have been? Simone Weil, you will recall, abominated all mediocrity and would have recommended vaporizing all of its creators but for the fact that the mediocre grows in the same soil as the great and therefore kill one, kill the other. Simone Weil would have starved herself to death before she would have gone to AWP.
But I had already gone to AWP. And in the presence of this pleasant and possibly promising person waiting for the bus with me I didn’t even think of vaporizing anything or anybody. No, I didn’t even struggle in my chains. Instead I felt pleased that my essay had proven useful, and flattered to be recognized, and wanted very much to be likeable in person.
* Association of Writers and Writing Programs
Specks
While writing a poem the hot wire of thought welds together strange chunks of this and that.
It can’t completely combine the disparate elements and make a new element of them, but it can loosen the edges of mutually disinterested materials enough to bond them so that a serial lumpy going-on is achieved, crude emergency bridges made, say, of brush and old doors, just barely strong enough to get the thought across before the furious townspeople show up.
Because thought is stolen, of course, ripped out of a case and carried off in a sack.
Anything nearby is pressed into service to forward the thought. The lathered horse falls out of the picture as the horseman hurls himself and the sack onto the speeding train. When he leaps to a crane, the train falls away, and so on, according to the laws of attention and expedience.
And you will note the presence of “speed” in the middle of expedience: only high speeds permit the transmission of thought, the brief mutations of substance, the continued whispered advance of some articulation which is at once autonomous and at the same time completely the product of what’s available to make itself out of.
Thus we cannot separate thought from conversion; we must see the two forces melted into one, thought as conversion itself, and thus never static, never possessable, but like the edges of combustion where the creosote is bubbling to explode in a ripply red line advancing across the desert.
It’s not so much what poems are, in themselves, but the infinitely larger optimism they offer by their intermittent twinkles: that beneath the little lights on their tiny masts, so far from one another, so lost to each other, there must be a single black sea. We could have no sense of the continuousness of the unknowable without these buoyant specks.
The poem is a space capsule in which impossible combinations feel casual. The body of the capsule is of necessity very strong to have broken out of gravity. It is the hard case for the frail experiments inside. Not frail in the wasted sense, but frail in the opposite sense: the brief visibility of the invisible.
Because what I am transporting in my hands is both weightless and invisible, and because it must be held loosely, it is impossible to know at the time if I have carried it or if what I have done is a comical act, a person pretending to carry something carefully; a farcelike delicacy of manners.
Some people have one great dream in life which they fail to fulfill.
Others have no dream at all and fail to fulfill even that.
—Fernando Pessoa
I have a note beside this that says: ha ha perfect Pessoa.
Maybe some of us are wired backwards and respond paradoxically to stimuli. Maybe what we think is orange is blue. But I for one have always laughed in the presence of the dismal. Not ruefully but with fresh relish. I cannot tire of Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet or Larkin’s night terrors. They are voluptuaries of the bed of aridity.
Yes, to write is to lose myself, but everyone gets lost, because everything in life is loss. But unlike the river flowing into the estuary for which, unknowing, it was born, I feel no joy in losing myself, but lie like the pool left on the beach at high tide, a pool whose waters, swallowed by the sands, never more return to the sea.
—Fernando Pessoa
As distinct as Pessoa is, he is nonetheless one of the category of writers who find themselves and their reactions so far outside the conventional that they have no tools but those they construct for
themselves for knowing anything, for finding their bearings. They must synthesize gravity, direction, time, substance. They can’t use anyone else’s.
It explains these writers completely. It is as though the atmosphere, beautiful and breathable to everyone else, were toxic to them, a poison gas. They are urgently occupied with building a conversion machine. Oh, and this conversion machine can never be finished. Every day it has to be built over again, but differently. To an outside eye, the machines would look identical, but to the poet, panicking for lack of air, something has gone wrong again. It all has to be undertaken again—from scratch.
Dust of Snow
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
—Robert Frost
I have a terrible time remembering anything, so I really appreciate a poem I can hold onto.
But additionally, greatness in a poem can be calculated as the relationship between means and ends: the bigger the disproportion the greater the poem. Which makes “Dust of Snow” ridiculously great. It is one sentence. Only two words go to two syllables. It doesn’t have any metaphors. You could cover it up with a matchbook.