The End of the AWP

So I can stop feeling guilty, a skill at which I excel.

Packed up, checked out, and went to the Richard Hugo panel, presented by current Montana faculty. They went (as far as I could tell), oldest to youngest. Patricia Goedicke and Greg Pape spoke about Hugo as a person and teacher, lots of super anecdotes and material from his classes and "The Triggering Town". The next speaker discussed "Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg" in some detail. Some of her analysis I agreed with, some I didn't. The final speaker read what I recall as a academic assessment of some kind, off her laptop. My interest decreased as things became increasing dry and theoretical. Guess I'm just naturally shallow. But nobody could ever ruin Hugo for me.

"Here's the right madness on Skye. Take five days
for piper and drum and tell the oxen, starting dancing.
Mail Harry of Nothingham home to his nothing.
Take my word. It's been fun."

"Four Northwest Women Poets" -- wonderful reading. Lucia Perillo, Nance Van Winckel, Linda Bierds, and Dorianne Laux. They were all great, but Linda Bierds was my favorite. The stand-out poem was a pantoum (I think--one of the repeating forms, anyway) about the man who discerned the helical structure of DNA. Ok, I found it online here. I sat with Paul and saw Jeaninne -- good crowd.

Happy discovery in the Fairmont gift shop -- they have several proprietary tea blends specific to their various hotels, and Vancouver also offered the Empress blend, to which I became addicted the last time I was in Victoria. Most of my vices are boring like that. Still, yum.

After some solid book-fairing, the final event: "The Unknown Pagoda: Southeast Asian American Writing". The handsome man I'd been staring at all weekend because he looked so familiar turned out to be Oliver de la Paz, who is very nice in person and will be moving to Washington soon; yay! And he read some wonderful pieces, as well. The reading was a combination of fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry, which worked well. Eileen Tabios read some interesting ... did she call them "footnote poems"? Very abridged pieces that invite the audience to provide context and meaning. Ordinarily, I'm wary of poetic forms that are overtly informed by the poet's politics. But in this case, I found her explanation interesting and persuasive. She blogged about it this week as follows: "during the Southeast Asian Writing panel at AWP, I'd discussed writing open-ended poems and I'd noted how the notion of the audience being the ones to complete a poem is not an idea that originated with me. Nor did I concoct the related idea of how meaning is unstable. Instead, I said, my primary impetus had more to do with trying to avoid English as a communications tool with its reliance on specific narratives (due to its colonial history in the Philippines)." Nick Carbo introduced everyone, and Denise Duhamel was sitting in front of me. I mention this because after each person read, in addition to clapping, she voiced a little "Whoo", like the front half of the Simpsonian "Whoo Hoo!" I thought this was delightful, and more like what I would like to hear at poetry readings than the usual appreciative "Mmmmmmmmm" (which I do, too, sadly; it's a sickness) and restrained applause.

An honest cabbie, nothing in my luggage that looked like a bomb, a good seat on the train, and Scott waiting at the station. Bliss.