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.

Poems in "Dogs Singing: A Tribute Anthology"

Virtually anyone who knows me is aware that my non-literary enthusiasms include dogs. In fact, it would be fair to say that many of my favorite people go about on four feet. I have also grown increasingly interested in dog and other animal welfare issues.

Sometimes, though, enthusiasms cross paths, and I have ended up writing poems about dogs. Some of those poems have succeeded.

I am thus greatly pleased to note that two of those poems, "Aubade" and "Policy", will appear in Dogs Singing: A Tribute Anthology, forthcoming in November from Ireland-based and internationally known press Salmon Poetry.

I first met Jessie Lendennie, Salmon's publisher and the editor of this anthology, in early 2004. I was wandering through the Book Fair at the Chicago AWP Conference and stopped at the Salmon table, where we ended up talking about, well, dogs.

To mix animal metaphors for a moment, I am a very small fish in this anthology's pond. Far better-known writers in Dogs Singing include but are not limited to Kelly Cherry, Stephen Dobyns, Jane Hirshfield, Maxine Kumin, Les Murray, Alicia Ostriker, Richard Peabody and C.K. Williams.

The poets included are not being compensated for their work. Instead, proceeds will be donated to canine welfare organizations in Ireland.

With the holidays not all that far away, Dogs Singing would make a wonderful present for the dog and/or poetry lover in your life, and maybe for yourself.

Dogs and Poetry

Last week my wife Paula Van Lare and I had the pleasure and the privilege of volunteering for a couple of days at the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Kanab, Utah.

More specifically, we worked at Dogtown, as featured on the National Geographic program of the same name.

You may wonder what this has to do with my writing.

Fair enough.

While only a small portion of my writing has involved dogs, last week's experience made me want to share a couple of previously published dog poems. I have another tangentially canine poem coming out shortly (more on this soon), and I am trying to publish a couple of others.

For now I hope you enjoy these two.



Policy

Because Nubians are still enslaved
I walk my dogs twice a day.

Because a child conceived tonight will inherit addiction
I leave my dogs offerings
of fresh water, with ice cubes.
Because envelopes and marketplaces explode
I hug my dogs and even carry them
where no shrapnel flies.

Because a manatee is sliced
by motorboat blades
and the last wild tiger
has been born,
I keep my dogs' tags and shots
up to date.

Now that any fact can be known
in an instant,
the smallest love is news.

Things touch at a near or far remove:
jays pass raspberry seeds
over fresh fields,
armadillos, burrowed into freight,
widen their range.

Word of my program
will ride the jet stream,
and land like a petal,
or it will bounce, devoutly, off a satellite.




Aubade

Dog, and I believe that I can call you that
with a high degree of accuracy,
in a purely denotative sense, though,
unsullied by cultural associations,
please listen,
since I seldom ask that much of you
(the couch is yours no less than mine,
the pillows, past and present, more so):
You would, if you a possessed a consciousness
of cause and effect, self and other
and the mortality that swallows them,
be grateful to know nothing
beyond that which you know right now
because, for me,
it’s seven-thirty on a partly cloudy
Tuesday, forty-five degrees,
with a sixty-percent chance of rain
and the certainty
of a commute and a day’s work
in which I’ll be wagged by—appended to—
devices engineered by men
who get out even less than me.
Really, they exist,
though you might have gathered otherwise
from the long and many evenings that we share—
like tonight, when we’ll
resume this small symposium.
Until then, fellow traveler on the planet,
Don’t scratch that spot behind your ear—
It’s already bare.
A new rawhide bone is on your bed
and, as always, cane mio,
the kibble’s in the bowl.

Humor Issue of Poemeleon Now Online

The eagle--or some other, perhaps less majestic bird like a curlew or wood duck--has landed.

The humor issue of Poemeleon (www.poemeleon.org) is now online. In addition to my dog leave-taking poem Aubade, which originally appeared in The Bark, the issue features work by poets including Sherman Alexie, Julie Kane, Martha Silano, Marilyn L. Taylor and Charles Harper Webb.

My thanks to editor Cati Porter for including me in such fine company.