It’s AWP decision time, folks. Next week will be here in a matter of days. Seven, to be exact. The schedule has been up awhile on the AWP website:
http://www.awpwriter.org/conference/2010sched.php
A quick looks reveals that there’s plenty for everyone, and, as usual, a tremendous overlap of events I would like to go to. Here’s a quick overview of some things I find interesting (I’m sure I missed some in my cursory glance).
Thursday
10:30 a.m.-11:45 a.m.
Room 207
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level
R136.
A Tribute to Reginald Shepherd. (Brad Richard, Robert Philen, Catherine Imbriglio, Timothy Liu, John Gallaher) Join us to celebrate the life and work of Reginald Shepherd (1963-2008), a major poet (Some Are Drowning, Wrong, Otherhood, Fata Morgana), anthologist (The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, Lyric Postmodernisms), and essayist/critic (Orpheus in the Bronx, A Martian Muse [forthcoming]). His brilliant lyricism, intelligence, wit, and generosity are sorely missed. Our panelists, including Shepherd's partner, Robert Philen, will discuss his legacy as writer, editor, and friend.
Noon.-1:15 p.m.
Rooms 301, 302
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level
R160.
Poetry & Memorability. (Joshua Kryah, Jill Bialosky, Mark Irwin, Claudia Keelan, Paul Hoover, Laura Kasischke) A majority of the art that survives is memorable in one way or another. Heidegger has argued that art, to a certain extent, "forces being out of forgetfulness" and thus creates truth. What makes a poem memorable? We will examine metaphor, form, imagination, concept, image language, mystery, and radical gesture as it leads toward producing works of art that are finished to the eye, but unfinished to the heart.
1:30 p.m.-2:45 p.m.
Rooms 301, 302
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level
R183.
Poet in the Desert / Desert in the Poet. (William Stobb, Claudia Keelan, Donald Revell, Christopher Arigo) From a cognitive/aesthetic point-of-view, deserts are landscapes with the middle ground removed. Present are the near-at-hand and the distant. The poem becomes the middle ground, while the poet in the desert internalizes vastness. Enacting a time-honored tradition, four poets return from the desert to offer their vision to the tribe.
3:00 p.m.-4:15 p.m.
Room 207
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level
R204.
Poetry After the '00s: What Comes Next? (Tony Hoagland, Laura Kasischke, Donald Revell) Poets and critics advance, retract, and debate the multiple and overlapping states of American poetry after the '00s—after the end of the old schools (New Narrative, post-avant, flarf, Ellipticism, neo-Objectivism), what poets, poetry, poems look now like useful examples, and why? The arguments in Stephen Burt's Close Calls with Nonsense may serve as starting points; present with him are poets discussed in the book, and critics—some of them poets themselves—likely to give his positions a vigorous dispute.
4:30 p.m.-5:45 p.m.
Centennial Ballroom
Hyatt Regency Denver, 3rd Floor
R234.
The Poetry Society of America Centennial Celebration: 100 Years of American Poetry. (Alice Quinn, Matthew Zapruder, Jean Valentine, B.H. Fairchild, Joy Harjo, Kimiko Hahn, Cyrus Cassells, Diane Wakoski, Gary Young) A reading celebrating the 100th anniversary of the nation's oldest poetry organization, featuring recent PSA Award winners reading their own works as well as important American poems of the past century. Hosted by Alice Quinn, PSA Executive Director.
FRIDAY
9:00 a.m.-10:15 a.m.
Room 201
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level
F111.
Hybrid Aesthetics and Its Discontents. (Mark Wallace, Arielle Greenberg, Craig Santos Perez, Michael Theune, Megan Volpert) Recently, numerous writers and anthologists have tried to move beyond distinctions between mainstream and avant-garde poetry that from the 1950s well into the 1990s often dominated discussions about new directions in poetry. This panel considers if and how this work has changed the aesthetic, cultural, and ideological implications of the mainstream/avant-garde distinction, looking at the extent to which boundary-crossing hybrid aesthetics have or have not been truly transformative.
10:30 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.
Rooms 401, 402
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level
F140.
National Book Critics Circle: The Practice and Purpose of Poetry Reviewing. (Kevin Prufer, Matthew Zapruder, Craig Morgan Teicher, Nickole Brown, Timothy Donnelly) Poetry books sell in small numbers, yet the poetry publishing scene is booming with new books. Readers' enthusiasm often takes the form of book reviewing—in literary journals, on blogs, and in the pages of newspapers and magazines. There's some debate about what the point of poetry reviewing really is: to explain esoteric writing? To keep the art form from getting sloppy? To please the poet under consideration? In this panel, poetry reviewers, publishers, and poets will debate these questions.
Noon.-1:15 p.m.
Centennial Ballroom
Hyatt Regency Denver, 3rd Floor
F167.
Writing In(to) the Age of Obama: Poetry, Politics, and the People. (Rachel Zucker, Cate Marvin, Major Jackson, Patricia Spears Jones, Brian Teare, Matthew Rohrer) Poets who participated in Starting Today: Poems for Obama's First 100 Days (originally a blog, now a forthcoming book) will describe the anxiety and pleasure of writing an Occasional, political poem. They will discuss what makes a poem "political"—is it content, tone, intended audience, authorial motivation?— whether poetry should be more or less political than it is, whether all poetry is political, and how poetry has changed since Obama's election.
Mineral Hall
Hyatt Regency Denver, 3rd Floor
F169.
Gurlesque Poetry: A Reading. (Lara Glenum, Cathy Wagner, Dorthea Lasky, Danielle Pafunda, Cathy Park Hong, Elizabeth Treadwell) Five poets will read from their works as featured in Gurlesque, a new anthology of contemporary women poets and visual artists now out from Saturnalia Books. Gurlesque poets perform their femininity in a campy or overtly mocking way, drawing on burlesque performance, girly kitsch, and the female grotesque. Their often humorous work assaults the norms of acceptable female behavior by irreverently deploying gender stereotypes to subversive ends.
1:30 p.m.-2:45 p.m.
Rooms 301, 302
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level
F183.
Jean Valentine, Poet. (Celia Bland, Kazim Ali, C.D. Wright, Catherine Barnett, Miguel Murphy) Jean Valentine speaks with a prophetic authority of the inner life, plumbing the visible and the invisible–the red candle of "find it," the chimpanzee of longing, and the cliffs of the mind. Join us as poets discuss the pleasures and challenges of Valentine's poems on the occasion of her 75th birthday, followed by a reading by Valentine.
Room 304
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level
F185.
Collages & Collisions: A Braided Reading. (Sarah Maclay, Gail Wronsky, Louise Mathias, Molly Bendall, Holaday Mason, David Dodd Lee) Recent experiments with the braided reading have led us to The Uberbraid: three pairs of poets involved in ongoing collaborative projects will join one another in a completely collaborative reading involving all six at once. Beyond traditional call and response, we will lend our voices to one another's already collaborative work, further erasing boundaries while magnifying chance connections at the level of line and image, as well as whole poem. Format fatigue? Try our sound-collage.
4:30 p.m.-5:45 p.m.
Rooms 301, 302
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level
F226.
Colorado’s Innovative Writers Past and Present. (Julie Carr, Noah Eli Gordon, Eleni Sikelianos, Bhanu Kapil, Dan Beachy-Quick, Matthew Cooperman) This panel includes five writers currently living and teaching in the Front Range, whose writing reflects the vibrant history of innovative writing in the area. Each participant will speak about a particular writer or group of writers who lived in Colorado and who has influenced his or her own work. The participants will then speak toward and briefly read from their own work in order to demonstrate this lineage.
SATURDAY
9:00 a.m.-10:15 a.m.
Rooms 102, 104
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level
S102.
The Colorado Prize for Poetry: A Reading by Recent Winners. (Stephanie G'Schwind, Rob Schlegel, Craig Morgan Teicher, Jaswinder Bolina, Endi Hartigan, Karen Garthe) The Colorado Prize for Poetry, judged every year by a different senior poet, is an aesthetically diverse book series. Winners from the past five years read from their award-winning collections.
Room 207
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level
S113.
Flarf and Conceptual Poetry. (K. Silem Mohammad, Christian Bök, Katie Degentesh, Vanessa Place, Mel Nichols, Yedda Morrison) Are the transcriptional blankness of Conceptual Writing and the deliberate awfulness of Flarf really the only relevant contemporary poetic options, as Kenneth Goldsmith has recently declared? Have they rendered both mainstream practice and what passes these days as experimental poetry obsolete? Six prominent Conceptualists and Flarfists explain why resistance is futile. And when they're done with each other, they're coming for you.
Room 304
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level
S117.
Hot/Not: A Panel on Sentiment. (Joy Katz, Sally Ball, Mark Bibbins, Jenny Browne, Sarah Vap) Are performance, surprise, irony, and other forces acting against sentiment in contemporary poetry? Which poems now risk sentimentality most boldly—as Richard Hugo said all good poems should—and how do they do it? Hear five poets with wide-ranging aesthetic sensibilities talk about these questions, discussing their shifting citizenship in the lands of irony and sincerity and their models of what might be called Muscular Sentiment.
10:30 a.m.-11:45 a.m.
Rooms 103, 105
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level
S123.
Criticism for Its Own Sake: The Rewards of Writing (and Reading) Reviews. (Dinah Lenney, William Giraldi, Sven Birkerts, Amy Gerstler, Dana Goodyear) Panelists will discuss the role of the critic as it informs the culture, as well as the art of critical writing, and when it's most rewarding for readers and writers. Do we need critics? What are their obligations? Do they deepen or enhance our understanding even when we disagree with them? Does criticism stand up as literary nonfiction, entertaining, enlightening, or offensive in its own right, regardless of its subject.
Room 303
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level
S138.
jubilat 10th Anniversary Reading. (Robert Casper, Dara Wier, Lisa Olstein, Jen Bervin, Peter Gizzi, Cathy Park Hong) A reading to celebrate the past decade of publication by the venerable poetry journal, featuring editors and contributors reading their own work as well as selections from jubilat's history.
1:30 p.m.-2:45 p.m.
Mineral Hall
Hyatt Regency Denver, 3rd Floor
S185.
Poets Past and Present at the University of Denver. (Eleni Sikelianos, Bin Ramke, Cole Swensen) This reading by three poets who either teach now at the University of Denver, or have taught there in the past—Bin Ramke (at DU since 1984), Cole Swensen (at DU 1996-2002), and Eleni Sikelianos (at DU since 2003)—will showcase the history of engaged, innovative poetry that has been present at DU for the past twenty-five years. In addition, the deep, long-lasting, creative relationships between these poets will be brought to light.
3:00 p.m.-4:15 p.m.
Room 207
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level
S196.
Tupelo Press 10th Anniversary Poetry Reading. (Jeffrey Levine, Ilya Kaminsky, Elena Byrne, Karen Lee, Joshua Wilkinson, Joan Houlihan) Tupelo Press celebrates ten years of publishing with a reading that, in turn, celebrates several astonishing new and emerging voices. Come and hear award-winning, provocative, and innovative Tupelo Press writers read from their work.
Rooms 210, 212
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level
S197.
BOA Editons: American Reader Fiction Series. (Jessica Treat, Martha Ronk, Joanna Howard, Daniel Grandbois, Anthony Tognazzini) BOA Editions, a long-standing preeminent publisher of poetry, recently introduced a new series: the American Reader Series in Short Fiction. Four of the first writers from the series, whose works straddles the line between poetry and prose in unexpected ways, read from their new collections and discuss the nature of their work as well as the making of their books.
4:30 p.m.-5:45 p.m.
Room 203
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level
S211.
The Iowa Review at Forty. (Christopher Merrill, Marianne Boruch, Nami Mun, Lee Montgomery, Matthew Rohrer, David Hamilton) Founded in 1970, the Iowa Review enters its fifth decade ready to reinvent itself while keeping its traditions in mind. To celebrate the acclaimed literary magazine's 40th birthday, and as a tribute to retiring editor David Hamilton's thirty-two years of tireless dedication to writers and writing, advisory board member Christopher Merrill hosts a lineup of outstanding contributors reading work that has been published in the Iowa Review over the years.
