#35: AWP & me & you

Dear Readers:

Each month you will receive an email containing one boredom, one horror, one glory, except I didn’t do it that way this month. It’s the 35th one.

Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play” kicked off poststructuralism by noting the inconceivability of “an unorganized structure”—like, coherence and lack of coherence, or meaning and meaningless, chase each other around a center, but what if that center is not a center? “Structure, Sign, and Play” was written as a speech to be delivered at a conference at Johns Hopkins University. I think Derrida should have talked to the people who were producing the conference, because a conference is an “unorganized structure”—at least the way we did it when I worked at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.

When I worked for AWP, “the conference” as we called it—simply “AWP” to the rest of the creative writing world—was the most dramatic part of the year. We worked for 20 hours a day and never went outside, we had to look beautiful and wear make-up and foundation garments, we had to be nice when our superiors (in the organization and in the creative writing world) were mean. There was a lot of sprinting and crying and sweating and apologizing and getting yelled at and hit on. It was chaos. Meanwhile, all the writers we knew from school, writing retreats, and other things like that were experiencing a kind of bacchanalia, kissing, seeing old friends, exploring whatever city the conference was in, taking drugs, buying each other’s books, making important connections with editors of literary journals and presses. We were the ultimate insiders because we were the ones actually making this thing operate. We knew the real secrets behind the unorganized structure of the conference: the writers were just tourists. But we were writers, too, and that made us the ultimate outsiders, because we were the only writers in the whole place who didn’t get to play and learn and network and act really annoying.

Last week was the conference. I would love to go and find out about beautiful new books and journals and poems and see old friends and classmates and gossip and complain and feel like I’m part of something literary. That sounds so fun! Unfortunately, like with Southwest Airlines, I may or may not be permanently banned from the conference. With both AWP and Southwest, I’d rather just avoid the whole thing altogether than find out the specific terms of my banishment. I don’t feel like litigating either one, but you can rest assured I’m on the side of right in both cases. (Trust me.)

So obviously I’m biased, but I think the conference, despite how fun I know it would be to attend as a writer, is emblematic of a serious crisis in poetry. Who could look at this gathering of 10,000 people partying and eyeing the institutional affiliations on each other’s nametags and think poetry is in a good place in our country? Actually, wait. That probably means poetry is in a good place in our country. I guess I just don’t like it being in that place.

There are three kinds of relationship you can have with academic poetry:

1. Ignore it.

2. Be an AWP-style creative writer and have assigned microscopically different exchange values to thousands of poets and poems.

3. Be lovingly curious about poetry in the Stephanie Burt way.

Ignoring it seems like the most reasonable one of these. I am not compelled by Burt’s argument that a normal person has a lot to gain by casting their gaze to the esoterica of the AWP-style poetry world. This is a really curmudgeonly thing to say and it feels especially curmudgeonly because Burt brings such an inviting, light, sunny tone to her middle-brow (sorry! I can’t help myself! I know I didn’t need to say that but I absolutely can’t help myself!) poetry criticism: Stephanie Burt, not the normal people, is who gains when normal people read High Literary poetry. It elevates her even further above her Harvard post and into the hearts and minds of a broader educated American public. And for what? So people can be bored/confused/ever so slightly stimulated by something that might not be good, but who knows, because no one in the world has the tools to determine whether it is or not?

I might have to start putting myself in the ignoring category, because in recent years I have not been feeling like much of an AWP-style writer. And not just because I may or may not be permanently banned from the conference. I don’t know what the cool journals are now. I don’t know the names of the younger poets and I can’t remember the names of the my-age poets besides the ones I know in real life. I can’t think of a reason to submit my writing to a literary journal, where it probably won’t be read but perhaps my name would be seen in the table of contents or Contributors’ Bios section by some people I went to school with. I think I would get more satisfaction and readership by just putting my poetry in my newsletter.

(But is it poetry if it’s in a newsletter? Lyric poetry is, by definition, not rhetorical. It is a different kind of utterance—a more private thing, like a whisper or a thought floating in space. But when I write my newsletter, I think about my readers. If I sent you a poem in my newsletter, it would contain an implicit, “Hi, I’m Lucy, who you already know a lot about! You’ve read my prose, you know what my voice sounds like. OK, now read this poem.” You’d have a nice juicy context for reading it. That’s why inauguration poems are perfect for newsletters—they’re written to be delivered to and received by a specific crowd at a specific occasion. And though for some reason neither of my [inauguration] [poems] were selected to be presented at the inaugurations I wrote them for, I did write them with those big, booming intentions. But a lyric poem? It undoes itself, its subtlety and strangeness, by being in a newsletter. I have written lots of lyric essays, too, but I would be embarrassed to publish one in my newsletter, just wandering around right in your face. We need literary journals to publish things like that, even if nobody ever reads them. I’m not exactly sure why, but I really think we do.)

Burt is asking us to be content with a poetry that is less than anyone in my three categories deserves, and less than our beyond-understanding moment asks for. I’m going to do some shoulds here. Poetry should be is rigorous and rigorously anti-establishmentarian. It should directly oppose any government, any rule, an institution—Ploughshares or the University of Pennsylvania or Submittable or Twitter—but be utterly bound by internal structures invented by the poet. These internal structures should work like a code that some people are compelled to figure out, because to figure it out would mean to unlock a vision of another world, maybe a utopia, that feels fundamentally life-altering to know about. Politicians should make speeches opposing it, telling people not to read it. People shouldn’t ignore it; they should hate it. They shouldn’t feel lovingly curious, curious but ambivalent, toward it: they should feel compelled to go to one side or the other, hate or love or both. Poetry should disturb and scare people, like the feeling I had when I first saw a Nan Goldin photograph in eighth grade, like glimpsing at the “open door” Henry James talks about in The Art of Fiction. A writer, he says, “a woman of genius” who was “blessed with the faculty which when you give it an inch takes an ell, and which for the artist is a much greater source of strength than any accident of residence or of place in the social scale” glanced at the door—: and then a new world was made.

Sincerely,

Lucy