AWP 2012 in Chicago, or, Why Do We Do This?

This blog has been silent for a while, and generally for very positive reasons that I will mention in later posts, but that is not the matter at hand.

More to the point, tomorrow I will be joining several thousand writerly types in one of the great annual rituals like the migration of Monarch butterflies or the spawning of horseshoe crabs in Delaware Bay.

In other words, I will be attending this year's conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) in Chicago, where I have lived and near where I grew up.

With airfare and hotel paid for, and no-cage boarding arranged for Roo the Rescue Dog, the only question remaining is Why am I doing this? With plenty of company I can ask Why Do We This?

It's not for the money. No one I know will be turning a profit. A few in academia may break even if their departments fund them, but such funds are increasingly hard to come by.

Yet money is far from the only currency exchanged. Like other fine arts and some performing arts, writing depends on other economies. One is the prestige economy of publications and professional activity that may eventually turn to tenure and grants, though for relatively few. Even in these cases the amounts of money involved would seem bafflingly small to a financier circa 2006. Presenting papers and giving readings, though, can yield a slice of that small pie. Sometimes overlapping with the prestige economy is the gift economy of networking, favors exchanged and trading in books, journals and swag of usually modest dimensions; this serves as the framework for no small amount of conviviality.

Even without a quid pro quo, more than a few genuinely enjoy advancing the professional and creative development of others and/or buying a broke graduate student a drink. The term for these feelings in economics is "warm glow altruism effects".

While I took no action toward the proposals noted in this space last year, I will come in with a plan, as discussed in detail by several other bloggers. The centerpiece of mine will be the event shown in the flyer above, an offsite meet-and-greet (and signing) by poets affiliated with WordTech Communications, the publisher of my 2005 collection Settling for Beauty and my August 2012 collection Labor Day at Venice Beach. With any luck I will also have the opportunity to visit the fine people of Accents Publishing and American Book Review (and that leaves 25 more letters to cover). I also hope to stop in with Salmon Poetry, publisher of the anthology Dogs Singing, the proceeds of which go to two dog rescue organizations.

Another distinct pleasure will be attending a few readings and panels to get off my feet for a little bit and, more importantly, to remind myself that we are there for the art.

This could be fun. Please feel free to introduce yourself if you see me, assuming my badge has the right side showing.

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Work in The Lineup: Poems on Crime

The other anthology shoe has dropped, in a good way.


My poem "From a Deposition" is one among many by more than two dozen poets in Issue #4 of The Lineup: Poems on Crime, edited by Gerald So.


I am grateful and amazed to see my own work in the volume as poems by far better-known writers such as crime novelists Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman, and poets Randall Watson and Charles Harper Webb.


If you're trying to convince someone that poetry touches on real life and real people, you may want to share this collection. It includes vice, theft, muggings, murder and post-traumatic stress disorder, all in language that is moving as well as accessible.


As a man once said to me while he was trying to sell me a possibly gold chain in Chicago, "Don't cheat yourself, treat yourself."

AWP 2011 and Ideas for AWP 2012

It was fun, and it was exhausting.



After a few days of attempting my best impersonation of an extrovert, I am now ready to sit back and make sense of AWP 2011 in Washington, DC, where I live.



There are many lovely people I see only there, or only there and a couple of other places during the year. I may sing their praises in a separate post if I can do justice to anything like the right number of people.



Yet the mind already turns to AWP 2012 in Chicago, where I have lived and studied; I grew up in the Far West suburb of Aurora.



While it seems unlikely that I will propose a panel for 2012 myself, a glance at this year's schedule suggested a few that others may wish to take on.



They are the following:

1. No Text Please, We're Students: Reluctant Readers in the College Classroom


2. Writing Auto-Erotic Identities


3. Libel and How to Get It Right


4. Dairy Queens: Gay Male Poets of Wisconsin


5. New Opportunities in the Teaching of Fortune Cookie Composition


6. He Takes Out a Felt Tip, You Take Out a Ballpoint: Writing the Chicago Way


7. Establishing and Maintaining a Lactose-Intolerant Writers' Group


8. When Your Promotional Strategy is Better than Your Writing: How to Hide the Gap


9. War of 1812 Bicentennial Reading


10. Desire and Ambivalence in the Rejection Letter


11. Stranger Things Have Happened, but Not Many: When Political Poetry Is Actually Good


12. Reconsidering William McGonagall


13. Deservedly Neglected Illinois Writers


14. The Barbaric Yawp, or Teaching Creative Writing to Dogs


15. A Celebration of Solipsism: New Confessional Poets


16. Prize Winners Display their Fabulosity


17. What Would Nelson Algren Do?


18. The Ego Has Landed: Projecting False Modesty Once Your Career Takes Off

I wish the best of luck to anyone who wishes to make these ideas a reality. Attribution of the original source will be most welcome.

Settling for Beauty

I still have a lot to learn about publishing, but I can pass along one piece of hard-earned wisdom: if you have a choice, don't plan your wedding and your book launch for the same season. The wedding (appropriately enough) gets priority and the book launch suffers. I found this out in 2005 when my second collection, Settling for Beauty, was published in September and I got married in October.

With this in mind, I am back to promoting the book, beginning on Thursday, February 12 at the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs in Chicago. From 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. I will be signing at Table 750 of the Book Fair floor, which belongs to publisher WordTech Communications. On Friday, February 13, from 1 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. I will be signing Settling for Beauty and displaying The Best Mariachi in the World/El Mejor Mariachi del Mundo at Table 792, hosted by The Word Works, a DC-based press for which I have done some volunteering in the past.

While several poems in Settling for Beauty can be found online, I don't expect busy people to go looking for them right away. I would thus like to close this post with a poem from the book with the title "For Bad Wine":


For Bad Wine

Once in a field, in a wide rising stretch of paintbrush
& purple vetch, we stuck down

a tent, like punctuation, and drank through the evening
our bottle of bad wine.

Kate Northrop

Because the stores where finer wines are sold
are closed, or too far away to drive
on a rainy night, and because,
truth be told, we’re already a bit tipsy,
we’ll settle for what we can find in town.

Because the bottles of dusty neck and shoulders
that suggest long ageing, and a high price,
lie on their sides on a rack
too low to reach without stooping,
we’ll take one of the bright bottles
that stand close by.

Since so many of the labels are written
in strange languages that bring no comfort,
we narrow down to the plain-spoken domestics.

As, even in mid-life, we’re intimidated
by the corkscrew, the very cork,
the intricate and solemn techniques
and auguries of its removal,
we look among the simple screw tops,
such as we turned to open soda and juice
before our first high school drink.

Because we may as well toast our younger selves
who didn’t know Boone’s Farm from Bordeaux,
who knew we would get rich while doing good,
but in the meantime had to scrimp,
we will take the cheapest brand.

Because we now know better,
but have to save for retirement,
we will take the large and cost-effective jug.

Because we have our reasons
and don’t want to tell them again,
we’ll refill our glasses
and drain every drop.