A week later

My AWP is lasting longer than other people's who had to get right back to real life and to work. I saw Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie last night with my mother at The Guthrie. It was a gorgeous production that had me weeping at play's end. Am I like the unmarried "crippled" daughter who can only appreciate her glass ornaments (vis-a-vis "poems") and whose anxieties are so severe she cannot see through a typing class? Ah, but I have so many years of work experience. Could "old maid" be the word for it? What about "crippled?" My mother dropped her hearing device during the play and said out loud, "Damn!"

I saw Rosellen Brown outside the Hilton on the night of our arrival to Atlanta, a Wednesday, and thought she looked more beautiful than ever, though we are all "older" now than we were then. I heard her panel discussion about "different ways to tell a story" and learned that she sometimes writes fiction from poetry, that she drafts in poems first.

A list of writers from the panel of late-career bloomers, starting with Wallace Stevens, made me cry. Dorianne Laux was on the panel. She had been a waitress until she was 38. From the dais, she seemed to call out that some older people "are tired!" and "55-year-old women have sex!" and "Gerald Stern is so alive!" I had read some of her poems about lovemaking in a publication of The Loft during one of her visits to the Twin Cities. Later, I met her to talk with her, and she said that Rosellen Brown is the second smartest woman in the United States.

I met a poet from Washington, D.C., named J.D. Smith. Besides Yusef Komunyakaa, he was the most humble man I met at the event. He wrote me a dedication of his book called Settling for Beauty. I was taken by the title because I had realized at the conference that I had left off the Romantics, except for Blake, and that I would need to consider my relationship to truth and beauty. My other question, "what is experimental writing?" I had placed first.

I saw Phil Brady and co. from Youngstown, Ohio (he and his cw colleagues play in a great Irish band together), Bob Mooney, Eric Miles Williamson, Tom Williams, Ardyth Benfer, Robin Reagler, Lance Larsen, Tim Liu -- all old friends from the past -- and met Amy King, Evie Schockley, Susan Steinberg, Janet Holmes, Deborah Poe, Larry Fondation, his friend Jessica, Nancy McKinley, and Brian Clements. All of it made me happy, at first.

International Women's Day: Work

Women are admitting to sins that are not sinful: such as their love for poetry -- in trying to account for how men discard them and ignore their talent. "Work" was shorthand for something I wrote called Work on What Has Been Spoiled. My list of paid jobs runs to 30 and covers 20 years. Work is a topic: What is it and who is allowed to do it? Not long ago, on our poetics listserv, a woman poet wrote that she had been taught that work is a privilege. I have read her writing to discover whether she is among those who deserves paid work or not. "Privilege" always means 2 per cent to me; I don't know why. She might remain sanguine if it did mean that. I was taught that paid work is a requirement. Imagine, we came from such different sets of instruction ... from our families, and in particular, our parents. In requiring paid work of me, my parents required it of the world. Work is an acknowledged human right -- a secret, perhaps -- further, appropriate paid work based on training is a human right. That these are rights suggests that people denied them suffer human indignities. People have begun to say to me that I might have to leave my native country to have these human rights honored. Is it a right to stay in one's country? Citizenship in one's native country is a human right.

Cold

I returned from Atlanta with a cold and am just now noticing it loosening. For years, I have slept only 4 or 5 hours per night, but when I returned from the conference, I slept 10 hours in a row. I like having colds -- I get one per year -- because it loosens my lungs, which very probably get too tight due to smoking. I like coughing once a year during a cold and blowing my nose.

I am the personal care attendant to an alcoholic who refuses to pay a regular salary and who instead throws perks my way, perks I accept, like a trip to a convention. My job is to answer the ringing phone all day, all hours, and to give succor.

I know of no way out. That there are employed women has me dumbfounded: how did they achieve it? Was I friends with women? Yes. Were they sex objects? Yes. Are they mothers? Yes. Am I? Mother of men.

Women at the convention I overheard saying the word "blog," said it with disdain, but they were women who keep blogs.

Each morning of the conference I rose at 5 a.m. and took a long time waking up, until I was ready to act at 8 a.m. By 4 p.m., I was too tired to find a stranger to eat dinner with -- the thought of it overwhelmed me, so I ate appetizers or alone in a hotel restaurant. I wanted to discern which women knew women there. The evidence suggested that many of them did. I wondered how they had met, found employment, agreed to be friends, to eat together as friends and to attend the conference as friends. In most heterosexual arenas, female friendship seems secondary, and sex performance the particular emphasis, something I secretly reject in favor of "meaningful relationships," what men still protest not to like. I wish we could understand this better: what about "meaningful relationships" dissatisfies men and what about sex-as-performance without solid friendships dissatisfies me.

Reports from the conference have mostly all been positive -- people are connected to each other in different ways. I studied short fiction most. Poets dominate at the AWP. I always managed to get along fine with poets.

Alternative poetry

What is it alternative to? It is alternative, for one thing, to a top-down system that rewards a tiny per cent of writers near the top -- and most of them deserve greater recognition for their work, their bearing, and their position -- and turns the majority of the rest of writers, especially young writers, into lifelong paying customers, if not of poetry and writing, then of therapy for it, and into audience. The alternative poetry scene operates in cities around the country, possibly the world, and continues its work more as a collective based in poetic friendship. There is love in it.

A poet from San Francisco

Before going to the AWP convention in Atlanta, I had started dating a beautiful African-American man in Minnesota. Caught in the hotel lobby at the Hilton, as if at a station at the metro, my head swivelled each time I saw anyone of African-American descent -- man or woman. Each time, it wasn't him, of course; and each time our eyes grazed, I asked myself, what am I doing? Staring at all these people. Back in the hotel room, the man himself asked on the telephone how many African-Americans were in attendance, and I tried to guess. I couldn't guess, but I explained that I had kept an African focus when I attended panel sessions -- so maybe I had seen or met more African-Americans than were "there" by other measures --who were not invisible.

I had gone to the conference with the question, "What is experimental writing?" A decade or even two have slipped since I first started asking that question. "Experimental," to the establishment, I realized, by the end of four days at the conference, means writing about or for the underclass of America. That isn't what it means to the avant garde itself, whose writings tend toward elliptical and cerebral. The establishment poets suggest that "experimental" is merely a matter of technique or aesthetics, perhaps of technology, and seem to side against it. They sidestep rivalry with braver writers and their own mysterious gaps in comprehension. Consistently, they balk when the poet or writer is writing about people who are disenfranchised.

I used to write short stories about people who drink beer. Had the people in the stories been sipping wine, they might have become a book, and I might be employed. My stories were said to be "experimental," and that meant that "most readers" could not be expected to understand them very well. "Most readers" later came to mean people who had been sitting in that workshop, who could understand them.

A white poet from San Francisco, Jay, landed at my bar table, where I had just landed. We talked. He advanced a theory, based on his recent viewing of The Departed, the ghastly movie I had suffered alone in the hotel room, that the poet Gerald Stern was like the Godfather of creative writing. I countered him. First, I clarified that I like Gerald Stern's poetry -- a thinner and thinner qualification, I believe, as time is passing -- like saying you like rock n' roll no matter how it is made or to what end; second, I said creative writing reminds me more of the Olympics than of organized crime. Then I suggested he write fiction instead of poetry. He admitted that he had won fiction prizes in the beginning. "There you go," I said, confirming for myself that I would have made a good "doctor" of creative writing. Before the conversation was over, Jay had called me a cow, appropos of my having told him that I am a Taurus. And he accused me of thinking more highly of my work than anyone else does. It was too late. I had let myself be insulted by him, "the employed."

Later, I mentioned the conspiracy aspect of this exchange to a few other "employeds," alums drinking in the bar -- men who had gotten jobs a decade or two ago -- and one of them said that comparing the field to a crime syndicate was the "product of a sick mind." The Catholic I was talking to was diagnosing the anonymous writer from San Francisco with a serious mental disorder, whereas I had diagnosed him as a fiction writer. Had I been hired, and Jay had been in my class, I would have said the same thing -- that he should write a novel, not that he was suffering a world's worst form of mental illness. Since The Departed was chosen as the year's best film, Jay is no sicker than the Motion Picture Academy and not the only one with an affinity to unbearable violence in the movies.

Writers who don't love enough

Love was missing in number at the Associated Writing Programs Conference in Atlanta, attended by 5,000 writers. If anyone there loved anyone else on earth, she had invariably stayed at home, especially to tend children and pets and plants. Writers don't love. Once I met a maestro who guessed, "You don't like love very much, do you?" And I thought of going home and writing a bestseller called Writers Who Don't Love Enough. It was a jest, but someone should write a book called that for writers who don't love enough. The happiness lasted an hour. The happiness lasted in the eyes. The eyes teared at readings; the cupped hands clapped echoingly for C.D. Wright, gratefully for Yusef Komunyakaa, Stephen Dunn, and Evie Shockley.