The year I was graduating from college, I went to visit an MFA program to see if I wanted to enroll there. Even though it was a 95-degree May day, the student who escorted me sported a long poetic scarf, which she wielded like an identity. Just looking at that scarf made me sweat. When I asked her if she planned to teach poetry after she got her degree or maybe go into book publishing, and if she was hoping to publish a book of poems, she waved at me and said, “Oh, I’m just here for the spiritual experience.”
I sat in on a pretty low-voltage poetry workshop–the students subdued and distracted, the instructor kindly but diffident. Nobody seemed to really like poetry much; the class felt like a required course, a prerequisite for something else unspoken. Afterward, my escort ushered me into another room, a kind of student lounge, with a couple cockroachy sofas, strewn with literary journals, their covers curling, and on the walls peeling posters for poetry readings long past. A poet was visiting for the afternoon, reading to the MFAers. I’d encountered his work in college. I thought of him as a poet of bogs and clouds, his verses nice enough but a little clammy.
In the flesh, he was a robust figure, his face Santa Claus pink, his eyes glistening, his hair graying into a halo. He smiled at us and began reading poems, in a crisp and lilting voice. I’d heard poets read before, my college teachers mostly, and they were good and inspiring. But in the drear of this lounge he grew utterly incandescent. The poems he read I remember as sorrowful, serious, the life in them ripe with solitude and rot. Yet he seemed thoroughly enlivened by the fact of reading them to us, by his awed delight that poetry existed at all and that we had the throats and mouths to speak it. I heard centuries in his voice–Yeats, bards, the storyspinners around peat fires who told clans who they were and where they came from.
I was too awed and shy to meet him afterward and thank him. But that hot May day, Seamus Heaney made me realize that poetry could take up residence in the blood, that it could resonate over time and into unlikely places, and that if we listened, it could bring us together in tragic joy.
I keep coming back to Come, Thief, Jane Hirshfield’s 2011 volume. My husband Clay and I used a poem from it, “A Blessing for Wedding,” at our marriage ceremony last year. I’m sure the poem is going to become to be recited at a lot of nuptials in the years ahead. Unlike most epithalamions, and most blessings, it stays blessedly off the subject, admitting nature, birth, death, in a litany of “todays”:
Today when the fire keeps its promise to warm Today when someone you love has died or someone you never met has died Today when someone you love has been born or someone you will not meet has been born
Within this larger world the marrying couple is contextualized:
Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears
Occasional poems are awfully hard to write. So often they strain to please their readers or the participants in their occasions, striking the bell too hard with their clapper and flattening out. But this poem can “surprise you inside your ears,” as do Hirshfield’s other poems. She writes from a place of Buddhist understanding (she has been lay-ordained in the Soto Zen tradition since 1979) but unlike certain other poets possessed of a system for spiritual apprehension, her poems constantly, gently, surprise. For the reader her connections can be subversively breathtaking, like being slapped on the side of your head while sitting on your meditation cushion.
I always feel my poems must start with conflict—“emotion recollected in anxiety,” as Galway Kinnell put it—but Hirshfield begins with a measured curiosity (a natural perception, or a musing to be expanded upon) and ends with discovery. Her stance of near-serene inquiry allows for perceptions that spin out like a bird with its own logic and startlement.
In “Sweater,” the garment that “takes on the shape of its wearer” and a spilled cup of coffee converge into a promise of renewal, and patience:
Patient the table; unjudging, the ample, refillable cup. Irrefusable, the shape the sweater is given, stretched in the shoulders, sleeves lengthened by unmetaphysical pullings on.
Thank goodness for the shock of that “unmetaphysical,” stitched right into the middle of the poem’s last line. Like Hirshfield’s poem, it brings us back to the blessing of the thing itself.
On Leap Year Day, February 29, several of us Urban Rangers leave New York for another urban range, this one in Chicago, the location of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual conference. AWP is to literary writers what a Honolulu orthondonture conference is to orthodontists—the cultural and social culmination of the year. Unfortunately, AWP conferences tend to be held in cold months in cold places, so not much Honoluluing is involved. Instead, poets, novelists, and creative nonfiction writers haunt a hotel, roaming the halls sometimes as lone wolves, sometimes in packs, on the hunt for… what exactly?
What does a writer want from other writers? Attending AWP demands you answer that question. Poets and serious prose writers are not necessarily sociable, conference-ready creatures, happily schmoozing over cocktails, backslapping each other, or joking like pharmaceutical-sales conventioneers. In fact, the traits that make a successful writer—the necessity of doing solitary work, sustained attention paid, the pleasure of being distinct from the pack—are antithetical to those of a successful conference-goer. We literary types aren’t (yet) used to functioning in packs. I’m reminded of the Jules Feiffer cartoon featuring his famous leotard-clad modern Dancer, who (as I remember it) performs her “Dance to Art”—a dance to music concerts, a dance to theatre, a dance to dance, a dance to all the arts except literature: “It’s not group.”
AWP is a manifestation, and an agent, of a new system that mainstreams writers and makes literary community a vital aspect of literary identity. Back in the olden days, we could remain in our garrets easily enough, emerging only to go through other people’s trash in search of breakfast, make fresh blankets out of old newspapers, give poetry readings in downtown bars, and teach composition. Today we are denizens of workshops and writing programs and public readings, defining ourselves not just by what we write but how (and how well) we come together.
To succeed as an author these days, you are encouraged, even required, to advertise yourself—to create a persona that defines (and perhaps limits) your aesthetic associations and your voice, to engender your own creative opportunities, and to woo your potential readers. Publishers large and small, literary and nonliterary, can be reliably expected only to print and distribute a few copies of your book on paper and/or on a screen. The rest is up to you, the entrepreneurial writer, with your firm handshake and shiny smile—so you’d better be as gregarious as a Chicago city councilmember.
The imperative to present a socialized literary self—to have a Facebook page, to pepper the Internet with tweets, to maintain a personal website—has become almost as essential to the success of a literary writer as literary quality. Nowhere else is this imperative enacted as it is at AWP—and nowhere else is it as vigorously resisted. One of the conference’s compelling characteristics is the stress between a writer’s desire to be a solitary singer and his or her efforts to be a distinctive voice in a larger chorus.
You make your way through the hotel hallways and lounges, the cash-bar receptions for MFA programs and magazines celebrating their 17th anniversary, the ballroom-sized poetry reading, and the aisles of the book fair showcasing the small presses or magazines you should buy books or journals from, whose publishers just might take your business card (don’t you have a business card? Of course you have a business card) and remember you a year from now when you write to offer your new manuscript and resist the urge to remind them that you were the one with the madras headband who discussed Sara Teasdale with them, the one who could not stop trembling.
Confronted with aisles and hallways and readings and lobbies and bars full of voluble poets and prose writers, no matter your steely resolve, no matter your level of accomplishment, no matter your Zen resolve, you compare and despair (as they say in AA). You wonder if like Thomas Pynchon you could fetishize your reclusiveness, but decide sadly that if you took to your bed and ordered room service for four days, appearing on Sunday only to disappear in dark glasses, no one would notice. Becoming famous for your anonymity would be like trying to get a reputation for always writing in black ink.
Wandering lonely as a cloud outside the Anne Carson megareading, you imagine Emily Dickinson at AWP, hiding in the 19th-floor linen closet and sliding breathless notes under the door, wafting like a bat after hours through the darkened book fair, stroking the spines of the books, helping herself to the complimentary Tootsie Rolls.
Yet you feel a peculiar rush. Here are 9,300 writers doing what you are doing, all of you extracting yourselves from your isolation. You are reminded, early on in the weekend, that you all share the same insecurities and reservations about being a writer among writers; in fact, that’s one of the things that you talk about most and that brings you together. Beyond that bond, you are united in love for the worthy written word. Your daily literary life may usually be a convention of orthodontists, but not this weekend; you are surrounded by people committed to your same misunderstood, often undervalued, and usually unprofitable enterprise.
So you make conversation, fearful and excited. You buy more books than you will have life enough to read. You attend AWP’s reading and its panels, which cover everything from prosody to pastiche to book promotion, and which serve as an MFA refresher course, and where you are a listener and student, all by yourself. You slap a few backs; you exchange a few cards; you maintain eye contact. You are a lone wolf pretending to be a dog. And maybe at night when the conference lapses exhausted into silence, you write a poem.
