I'm not gonna make that lame barbaric AWP joke

The Pill is back from Denver, where this year’s AWP was held, and glad to be breathing once more the heavily oxygenated sea-level air of home.

It took a day there not only to acclimate to the thin air but also to get into the groove of the unheimlich. The uncanny, you know, is when something’s familiar but off. In this case, your correspondent, a long-time academic, noted the structural familiarity of the conference setting (I have measured out my life in partitioned hotel ballrooms) filled with content whose texture, taste, and odor were just different enough to bring about estrangement. E.g.: a panel on poets reading Keats, in which Stanley Plumly presented a smart, thoroughly researched paper on the form and structure of the odes (the Pill settles into the Spartan comfort of the straight-backed chair, set just too close for comfort to the rank in front of it, feeling right at home). Could still have been at home when Ann Townsend glossed “visionary” through the poet’s near-sightedness and medical education, but felt the shape of the room shift when one after another potentially suggestive connection or insight was tossed out but left undeveloped, so many intellectual larvae squirming on the thinly carpeted floor (along the with the unpronounced “ed” syllables that regularize Keats’s iambic verse). Ah, back in Kansas when David Baker took the podium and performed a deftly deconstructive analysis of Keats’s habit of correspondence and manner of corresponding (though the bright colors of Oz flashed through from time to time, as when Baker, abjuring the word “discourse” because it was too redolent of “our theory-soaked departments back home,” cast a weird aspersion over his own scrupulous reading).

“Theory,” it turns out, is a noxious substance in which many departments, critics, readers, and institutions are soaked, steeped, stewed, brined, or drowned. It was with something like alarm that I realized, at a panel on “Flarf and Conceptual Poetry” the next day, that I am equipped with those gills enabling one to breathe the stuff. I kept them out of sight. Well, except for the hour and a quarter of Flarfers duking it out against Conceptualists in “papers” that were really performances, and that included some of the best poetry – juxtaposition, lacuna, music – read in the panel sessions, from the opening gambit of K. Silem Mohammad, the moderator, who wondered whether Flarf (the intentionally bad) and Conceptual (the intentionally boring) might be “the poetry of our time because they are the poetry we deserve” to Vanessa Place’s lines “flarf still loves poetry; conceptualism loves poetry enough to put it out of its misery” and “the best flarf is virtuosic; the best conceptualism is failure.” I find myself confirmed by this stuff, both on the page and in the room, in my taste for modernist rather than postmodernist experiments, for surrealism, say, over and against dada. And, look, this stuff is indeed masturbatory. But let us remember, Gentle Reader, that masturbation is quite pleasurable, and, as play with the erotics of language, these performances are too. And don’t even get me started on the ethical gains possible in this Levinasian unsaying of the said . . .

But my gills are showing.

There is a lot of poetry to experience at the AWP, from readings by big names in big rooms to readings by groups of poets (western poets, alumni of various creative writing program poets, African Diasporic poets, this or that Press poets). What, then, to make of the fact that the poetry that most captured your humble correspondent, that, really, grabbed him by the lapels and shoved him up against the wall and demanded his lunch money, was read “offsite,” at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, by the winner of the Wick Poetry Center’s first book award, Edward Micus. Micus read from The Infirmary, and these are poems that needed to be written, that need to be read. The feet of Micus’s ladder are firmly planted in the foul rag and bone shop, but we’re not talking about unmediated cri du coeur. These poems are worked, and they gain intensity from the carefully constructed frames that enclose, the painstakingly built fires that energize, their already potent contents (war, illness, torture, suffering). I was scarred for a day or more (hell, I might still be) by Micus’s prose poem, “In a Room Somewhere in the North of Nicaragua,” and moved by the resigned humanity, couched in unexpected developments of the image of a soldier’s marijuana smoke, that concludes “Robertson”:

A hot shrapnel scrap
kissed his kneecap
sent him back to Burlington.

Jesus – what a war –
to leave him hanging here

back in the world
his brain uncured
still smoking in its skin.

The poetry on offer in Denver was not confined to the panels and readings. Indeed, the heart of the conference is the book fair, a fluorescent-lit warehouse of an exhibit hall (the Pill overheard someone say that s/he had overheard Poet Laureate Kay Ryan say the book fair was like a Costco for the small press world, and, you know, once PLKR puts an image like that in your head, it’s there to stay). It’s overwhelming and a little disheartening: so many poets writing so many poems and publishing them in so many finely produced books and smartly edited literary magazines (and, Reader o' Mine, there are so many finely produced books and smartly edited literary magazines) for so few readers. It feels like a closed loop, a universe whose contraction mirrors the expansion of the bigger one in which we’re all spinning entropically toward heat death.


The book fair is not only chock full of books, many of them looking pretty good on a quick flip-through (though many others look as though it were more important to the author that the book existed than that it might be a book someone would want to read). It’s also a Costco stocked to the rafters with metonyms for the contemporary po-biz. Item: MFA student poets in last year’s Brooklyn chic – porkpie hats topping off faux-thrift-store tweed over untucked old-skool striped business shirt – picking up skads of Xeroxed submission guidelines, deaf to the offers of half-price copies of the mags they hope to publish in or cut-rate copies of books published by the presses they hope will invest $20K to bring out their slim volume. You don’t gotta be Derrida and Lacan, you don’t gotta be Wimsatt and Beardsley, you don’t gotta be Brooks and Warren to explicate that text. It’s a bad sign in the system, a bad sign for the system, because where I worried a paragraph ago that nobody was reading these writers except each other, what becomes apparent after a few hours in the AWP book fair is that too many of them are not even reading each other.