AWP Guerrillas, Part Two

Not one half hour after I posted yesterday's entry on AWP's capricious selection (non-selection, rather) of panels, I got an automated announcement from them that another panel I'm on had been accepted. Organized by Janet McAdams, the panel is called "Editing Indigenous, Editing the Americas"; its purpose is "to enlighten our audience about the complications and rewards of publishing and delivering Indigenous writing and translation to larger reading communities." Surely this is a good thing.

Less than an hour after that my phone rang. When the caller ID read "George Mason University," I gulped. AWP headquarters. Sure enough, the caller was Christian Teresi, Director of Conferences, AWP. He said he was calling to answer any questions I might have. We talked for a while. I told him that the AWP has gotten a lot more diverse and interesting since I first attended (Albany, late 1990s). But many of my colleagues who have proposed panels on (among many other subjects) Hawai`i and Pacific (Indigenous) work have been turned back. To see more amazing rejections, look to Phil Metres's blog; he's been collecting evidence. I've also heard stories on facebook from Tim Yu (who proposed John Yau and Mei-mei Berssebrugge on a panel that was rejected) and Stephen Hong Sohn, who had a similarly stellar panel turned down.

Lest one think that paragraph two indicates on-going ethnic bias on the part of AWP, the first paragraph argues against that bias. Neither is evidence enough for any conclusion. But that's one of the problems: there is no evidence, because panels are rejected without any feedback or context. The process might, in fact, be rigorous, but it seems capricious. Capriciousness is the writer's friend (so much room for interpretation!), but it's the institution's enemy (so many angry writers!). I've lived in English departments long enough to know that capriciousness can provide cover for unstated agendas. Simple words like "craft," like "theory," take on fierce, yet unspoken, allegorical meanings and are used to exclude others (and Others).

There is reason to be suspicious of the capricious. After all, D.W. Fenza, an energetic enthusiastic partisan of AWP, has laid down a stark agenda in essay after essay. I'm sure he does not speak for all members of AWP, but he is the Director (currently on sabbatical). So, when he takes on "critics," calling them out seven times in one paragraph of "Advice for Graduating MFA Students in Writing: The Words & the Bees" (2006), and remarking that they "sustain a parasitic lifestyle" and engage in the "systematic humiliation of literature" with "gruesome interrogations" and live in a world he calls "academentia (forever)," well then.

Close-reading Fenza's essay may be exhilarating fun, but it's too easy. He's clearly on a romp, and it would be easy to respond with a romp of one's own. As Patrick Playter Hartigan advises in yesterday's comment stream (where Fenza also makes an appearance), go for the goal, not the stance (even when you're faced with such a one). So true, though one of the problems with AWP is that it represents institutions rather than writers, branded ways of thinking about literature and writing rather than new or synthetic ones, ways that bring together craft and culture, content and form, and yes, theory and practice.

In his essay, "Who Keeps Killing Poetry?" published in The Writer's Chronicle in 2006, Fenza cites D.G. Myers's The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing since the 1880s. This important book explores the origins of creative writing as a discipline that grew out of composition, emphasized creation over reception. While dense, the book is useful in teaching the pedagogy of creative writing, something I've been drawn into in recent years in my work with Ph.D. students. What it shows most starkly is how the workshop method developed as a tool for teaching creative writing. The workshop method emphasizes craft, community, and other good things, but often at the expense of content, experiment, or immersion in unfamiliar--in all senses of the word--literatures. The danger of workshop classes is that they are often content-free. They also tend to be conservative. If you have a group of students whose experience of literature is limited and based on notions of realism and linguistic transparency, it's hard to encourage experiment and risk-taking of a new kind if they are mostly talking to one another. "But that isn't realistic!" "No one talks that way!" Mark Wallace has written on this pressure to "make it real."

AWP is like a giant old-fashioned workshop, seems to me. What it needs are some good Bernadette Mayer exercises to remind it that its role is as much creative as it is institutional. Joseph Harrington remarks in yesterday's comment stream that institutions are meant to be gate-keepers. Perhaps this is true, and perhaps entering the institution ourselves is a danger we should think more about. And yet what I and others love about AWP is that it IS too big, it is diverse (in some ways, at least), and it offers a place where we can see each other, swap books and tales, and show off our wares as small publishers and poets and writers.

So what to do, aside from guerrilla tactics? I thought it amusing that the Director of Conferences offered to advertise an off-site event for me, as if that is what I wanted. Co-opted before I began!! I still think guerrilla tactics would be good fun, even good for AWP itself. But what are those positive goals that Patrick is advising us to shoot for, now that the AWP is clearly listening, or at least hearing? Here are some AWP experiments, after Mayer.

--Tear out pages from previous year's programs and write all over them. You might choose to erase words to create new proposals (see Ronald Johnson, Janet Holmes), or you might add new words.

--Cut up old programs and splice pages together randomly. Anything new pop up?

--Write down lists of talks you'd like to hear, then ignore the list and open yourself up to surprises! Make decisions more transparent. The AWP website has a long list of "Event Types," but everything I've seen that was rejected fit one of those types. Christian mentioned that some people will volunteer panelists who don't know they're being proposed, but that's not the case either, in my experience.

--Write lists of goals for the organization. Make decisions not based on who's on the board, but on goals of the organization itself. Christian told me that the Board decides, and the board is always changing. Well, there's one way not to be transparent! If the AWP sets goals for (let us say) including some panels on literature and theory (don't tell Mr. Fenza), or literature and journalism, or literature and cultural studies (as Joseph Lease suggested to me backchannel) and gets board members who know these things, then we might get somewhere.

--Write lists of writers outside MFA programs that you like to read. Invite them to AWP. De-emphasize programs, and re-emphasize writers and teachers of writers. This would be difficult as the AWP has as in its name the term "writing programs." But many of us teach creative writing, even if we are not faculty of MFA tendering institutions. Or, if we are, we don't teach in that track. Some of my colleagues do not teach creative writing, but have had great influence on students who write. I'm thinking now of someone like Craig Howes, who has been on dozens of fiction committees over the years.

--Write short descriptions of different kinds of diversity, ethnic, theoretical, stylistic. Encourage diversity ON panels, as well as in the program itself. Encourage panels that include poets and parasites, the morally upright and the "morally repugnant" (sorry, I go back to Fenza's rhetoric--it's seductive, isn't it?) On that last blast, see Reginald Shepherd, Charles Bernstein, Christian Bok, et al.

--Write a short play about AWP, then perform it on the street outside your house. Have events outside the buildings. Street theater, poet's theater, slam poetry in the streets. This is a way to reach out to the communities in which we're camping out for a few days. Get out of the hotels!

--Write poems in the form of AWP panel descriptions. Then turn the descriptions into poems. Make those panels happen.

--Collaborate with strangers who goad you. Add their goals to your list and vice versa. As Mayer puts it: "11. Get someone to write for you, pretending they are you."


I'm glad that Christian Teresi called. While he couldn't clear up matters that are opaque (like how panels are selected), he sounded open to suggestions. Let's start making them. We needn't attack. Just do.

A call for guerrilla poetry action at AWP Denver, 2010

[Jade Sunouchi behind the Tinfish table, AWP 2009, Chicago, Illinois]

I've attended several AWP conferences in recent years, mostly to push Tinfish product by sitting and standing behind a small table in a cavernous room--in Austin, the next room down had Toyota trucks in it--underneath terrifying buzzing lights, bathed in a cacophony of unintelligible sound. Along the way I've been on a few panels--there was the "what to do about genre" panel organized by Joyelle McSweeney where some of us argued for teaching writing without enforcing genre boundaries; there was a panel on translations from Asia with Tinfish writers and translators Craig Perez, Don Mee Choi, and Steve Bradbury; most recently, there was a fractious and well attended panel on Annie Finch's and my collection, Multiformalisms: A Postmodern Poetics of Form (Textos, 2009). I still get emails from people who witnessed that afternoon's conflict between those who think that breaking established form is akin to violence (we got questions about domestic and non-domestic violence, oddly enough) and those who prefer their metaphors more gently cooked (or mixed).

But I've also been included in proposals for exciting panels that never happened because they were turned down. By whom one does not know: the AWP website notes the "Selection Process" that "Conference Committee members submit rankings to AWP Director of Conferences for tabulation. Each proposal is given an aggregate score based upon these rankings. Proposals are sorted by aggregate score and the top-ranked proposals in each event type are marked for acceptance." The apparent mathematical rigor of the process (mirrored by the model proposal under the "Craft of Poetry" event type on "Mirror Neurons, Mathematics, Metaphor, and Mind: Where Science and Poetic Craft Meet"?) is not matched by any sense of what these rankings are based on. I tend to agree with Charles Bernstein, who wrote on my facebook page that, "the AWP says it is a service organization with no agenda. That's why those with different agendas that conflict with their no agenda have no place on their panels." But let's look more closely at the proposed panels and at the AWP's mission.

This year's rejections included panels proposed by Philip Metres and Joseph Harrington. You may know Metres from his fine book on poetry about war, or for his own poetry, or for his translations from Russian, or for his blog. Joseph Harrington wrote a well-received book on poetry and the public sphere, published by Wesleyan, and is circulating a marvelous book of documentary poetry on his mother's death and Richard Nixon's resignation, events that occured on the same day in 1974. No slouches, these guys. Metres's proposal was for a panel entitled "Off the Page and Into the Streets: Poetic Interventions in the Public Sphere." Panelists would have been Kaia Sand, Laura Elrick, Jennifer Karmin, Philip Metres and myself. Here's Phil's description (ordained by the extremely careful wording on the AWP site for how to propose a panel):

"Poets . . . share their experiments in guerrilla poetry, bringing poetry off the page and into the streets. They provide a guide for creating your own spatial poetic interventions, whether signage, walks, installations, or street theater--and what it means for poetry and social change." Under the "how it would contribute" rubric, he writes: "The panel would be pitched to inviting a discussion about how to integrate poetry into our lives as citizens, as workers, as consumers, as recreators."

Joseph Harrington proposed a panel to include himself, Eleni Sikelianos, Craig Santos Perez, Brenda Coultas, and me, on "Experimental Docupoetry." "There is growing interest in poetry based on testimony, reportage, and research," he writes. "Through these forms, experimental docupoets investigate not just their subjects, but also the relations between evidence and memory, truth-claims and genre. This panel will explore this growing body of work and the insights that poets and other nonfiction writers might gain from it." He might have added that the "growing interest" in the subject started growing decades ago, at least since Charles Reznikoff wrote Testimony and Muriel Rukeyser her magnificent oeuvre. Fortuitous perhaps that on the first page of Chapter One of Al Filreis's Counter-revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960, I read, between parentheses: "(In the late 1940s and 1950s, dubbing a poet 'journalistic' could even, at times, be coded red-baiting.)" (3) This may offer a hint to the AWP volunteer reviewers' non-selection of this panel, even if "red-baiting" is a bit passe these days. But not according to the mission statement of the organization itself, as transcribed in David Fenza, Executive Director's "About AWP: The Growth of Creative Writing Programs":

"More than any other literary organization, AWP has helped North America to develop a literature as diverse as the continent's peoples. This, of course, is also a boast for the democratic virtues of higher education in North America and the many public universities that comprise AWP. AWP's members have provided literary education to students and aspiring writers from all backgrounds, economic classes, races, and ethnic origins."

What follows this paragraph is another that begins with the phrase "the largest system of literary patronage the world has ever seen," which is perhaps telling. But the paragraph I just quoted seems to invite just the kinds of proposals put forward by Metres and Harrington. Follow Fenza's essay further and there's seems more reason yet to include panels on cutting edge poetics. Did you know that AWP saved literature? So it seems. "AWP rescued literature from the exhumations of philologists to elevate literature's status as a living art, an art that compels each new generation to add its own interpretation, readings, stories, and poems." The italics are Fenza's, as is his ongoing invocation of the terrible past, when literature died in the classroom, and the magnificent present, when AWP members share a living art with their students. Included among these classrooms by Fenza are those in "hospitals, prisons, elementary schools, high schools, and community centers as well as in colleges and universities."

But the portion of Fenza's essay that seem to mandate panels like Metres and Harrington's are these: "Many students, especially today's students, feel that the world is not of their making, and not theirs to form or to reform; but writing classes often demonstrate the efficacy of the human will--that human experience can be shaped and directed for the good--aesthetically, socially, and politically."

So what gives? Is this just bullshit? Are there simply too many stunning panels to accommodate them all? Has the AWP's vaunted patronage system mandated a fleet of panels associated with particular programs, specific directors, advertising needs? Is the AWP more interested in programs than in people? Is the experimental crowd still unwelcome? Where do questions of ethnicity and gender fit in here? Was the content of these proposals too radical for the volunteer judges? There's no way to know. The answer, as in so many standardized (and standardizing) tests, is probably "all of the above." I do not want to presume, though I do. I've been to enough AWPs by now to know that not all the panels are scintillating enactments of a living, re-forming art. Reading the works of the authors I've mentioned in this post (the links are deliberate and mandatory!) gives me faith that a living, activist, historically informed art can already be found within and without the classroom. Not so easy to find in the cosmopolitan hotels where AWP sets up shop, however.

So let me call for guerrilla action at this coming AWP convention in Denver in April, 2010. Nothing too specific, since this is a blog available on the internet to anyone who cares to find it. But let's think of some ways to protest the stodginess of the organization, spill some metaphorical blood on its metaphorical white pages or its literal 600 page program! Let's take AWP to the streets, organize some off-site panels and workshops and signage! After all, Donald Fenza tells us "that the study of literature should include the play of creation as well as the work of conservation"! Who knows, we might just rescue literature from the exhumations of AWP.

Blogging Schwartz, Skyping Metres, Meeting Lederman

Yesterday was a technological free for all in Poetry & Poetics. The reading was from Leonard Schwartz's chapbook, Language as Responsibility, and from Phil Metres fine blog, Behind the Lines. Schwartz's chap comes in three parts: first, an interview with Israeli poet, Aharon Shabtai; second, an essay on the poetics of translation (Ibis Editions in Jerusalem, which publishes English language translations from both Arabic and Hebrew); third, a poem in response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Leonard writes to us of this three part structure: "I think of conversation, proposition, and poem each functioning in relation to one another, but each in their own sphere. Dialogue between two individuals (interview), propositional claims or truth claims (essay), and then the poem, as a kind of epistemological frame for conversation and for statement, a kind of writing that is a form of address to be sure, but does not specify the "to whom", a kind of writing that allows us to pull back from the dreaded missionary purpose of much political writing, which is to convert a reader to the writer's belief... and is itself a problem." Metres's blog, despite its occasional ventures into lighter subjects, provides an amazing archive of news and commentary about the Middle East, along with Metres's own meditations on poetry and protest.

In one of his missives to us, Leonard had mentioned the argument between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov over the role of politics in poetry. Leonard sides with Duncan, thinks poetry should be political, to the extent that it is, unovertly. Phil, playing devil's advocate, took the Levertov position, that one's politics should be up front in poetry, as in other things. When Lian Lederman joined us later, she took the Duncan position, preferring art that deals obliquely with politics to what she called "propaganda." She showed us an Israeli website where artists' responses to Gaza are posted. Some are rather lurid in their portrayals of the parties in conflict, while another simply showed signs asking the reader to share a moment of silence for all of the dead. That one she thought most effective.

Phil used the phrase "producing dignity" for what a politically aware poetry can do in places like the Middle East. The second time he used the phrase I asked him what it meant. Lian lept in (that sounds like Lester Young!) and argued that art, by presenting complicated images of people on both sides of a conflict, can humanize them, one to the other. She and Phil shared a humanism and idealism that seemed bracing for its opposition to all the guns and butter of the USA and Israel.

Phil read two poems for us, one by Mahmoud Darwish, "A Ready Script," and another by Yehuda Amichai, Wildpeace." Without commenting on them extensively, it seemed clear the ways in which each poet avoided the certainly of category and "side," and instead entertained complexity, or what Lian later referred to as an internal state of conflict, in which sides are not opposed, but contained within each person. She referred us to The Third Side by William Uri, a book that argues for the responsibilities of those not directly involved in a conflict to assist in resolving it. She also directed us to work by Prof. Daniel Bar-Tal.

After Phil left us, Lian talked to us about her design work on Language as Responsibility. She began by telling us that she had grown up on an island, namely the island of Israel. Then she pointed out that the chapbook comes in the shape of Israel, roughly a long narrow rectangle, and that the density and claustrophobia of the place is reflected in the small book without margins. You must literally move your thumbs in order to see the text. One student remarked at her frustration that she could not take notes inside the book, or even underline many sections of it. As the book contains three sections, Lian had three goals for her design:

1. erasure and borders
2. multiplying icons--the skyline of Jerusalem repeated over and again
3. the map of Israel, embedded in the fold of the chapbook

The cover integrates Hebrew and Arabic lettering, and is also stamped (Lian was working at the time for the Rubber Stamp Plantation in Honolulu, as I recall) with the punctuation to a Shabtai poem. That the poem she chose was about sex is a lovely subtext on the surface of the book.

Lian also talked to us about her design for Sarith Peou's Corpse Watching, a selection of poems about the author's experiences in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge time. The poems are oddly flat, as she noted, so her design is equally plain. The cover resembles a manila folder; the words are in a typewriter font; the "second book" running to the left side is a series of photographs of Cambodians who were murdered at Tuol Sleng. The book is as beautiful as the subject matter is horrible.

Somewhere along the way I described my marketing strategy for the Peou book, which involved offering to send extra copies of the book to the war criminal of your choice. Mine went to Henry Kissinger, and then another later on to Gen. Peter Pace, who was living in my mother's old house at the time (so I knew his address). There's a sad, wry irony to marketing books in this way, as tiny interventions, goads, pokes in the ribs against the shock and awe of the military industrial complex. The work seems impossible, but as Phil Metres says, we need to do it for ourselves, to prove our agency, and we need to do it to create conversations in the future. Dialogue, if taken properly, can heal conflict. Or so we hope.

For more on our Skype adventure, see Phil's blog.