Sadly for Benjamin, they did indeed have bouncers guarding access to writers, both poets and otherwise.
What a span of five days. If you were there, you know how people approached their clothing choices, how much drinking went on, and you understand why there was wheat growing in the halls, why cheese was stapled to stairwells, how the fires licked you feet like hot little tongues of kittens in the elevators.
Or maybe that was just me.
My impressions of Nueva York--my first visit--is that it has low ceilings, deliberately spaced support columns, and intensely bright florescent lights. Sometimes, there are taxi drivers with bluetooth earpieces mumbling to their brothers in law about the availability of virgins--both in paradise and walking on the island around them. Boxes composed of smaller boxes jut straight up into the air, and people will hold doors for you without you even having to ask them. On an island that used to be a small forest, then a series of small farms and orchards, and then none of those things, most of the wildlife tended toward the small end of the scale, and even weeds have a hard time finding a purchase--with one rectangular exception in the middle of the concrete, tarmac, steel and glass.
I also learned that a managing editor cannot go sight-seeing. At least, not at their own conference.
A bit more forthrightly, I found that NYC is smaller in reality than it is in the cultural imagination. I found that it's essentially like every other large city in what it offers. You can get a cheap meal, a very good mid-priced meal, and if you want to spend someone else's yearly salary on a meal, well, you can. And nobody sane wants to drive there, yet, somehow, people find themselves driving in the city.
The panel went pretty well. I'm not comfortable with my own authority and/or expertise, so I had a sense of being disembodied the entire time. And I started out talking too fast and too far from the mic. I settled in, though, and tried not to read my paper since NO ONE ELSE on the panel had anything written formally. At AWP, they expect you to phone it in.
In fact, these attitude--that the conference, and, indeed, working as a professor--was a distraction to "the work." I had dismissed this position as...immature. If you're not making money as a poet--and that's a very short list--then you must do something else, and do it well enough to keep your job. Teaching, for example, allows for some nice downtime during the summer, and the work feeds back into your writing. This is, in fact, one of the points in my ACA/PCA paper, and a way to think about our practices as linked, ecological. Yet I the practices of my panelists (to her credit, the moderator had a sheaf of paper she skipped around in) suggested that this major appearance was to be treated as "meh." Of course, I could be the asshole here by actually writing stuff out, and one of the panelists had clearly done this talk about a dozen times, so I'll cut him some slack. Back in the halls, though, I had a student ask about the PhD program, and their concern was that the coursework, teaching and comps would take away from their "work." It was...strange.
Ok, enough. I did have a good time on the panel. I had a good time trying to answer questions. The whole conference was something like strapping yourself to a rocket. And I regret that I couldn't get out to the larger scene, but I was exhausted after each day. D had a great time, and got a chance to hang out--however briefly--with people who mostly relate to her from this blog.
There are a dozen little narratives I could relate, but it's late in my day and I need to put dinner together. Plus, I need to write that paper for next week.
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