AWP: Conference update, Day 2

Sartorial notes:

*Young man, expatiating on freedom and constraint in the genres of poetry and film, with tattooed neck, fingers, hand, forearms; hair in a short, highly groomed faux-hawk; white Pumas; Manchester United scarf and wrist warmers; jeans and denim jacket; and a cigarette--wait for it!--behind his ear. Foot bouncing, as with all the young dudes.

*Young, hot poet--book recently published by Fence press, if that gives a clue--wearing conference-y black suit, with a side-parted bob, also black. Here's some of her monologue:

"It [the experience of collaborating with an artist and a musician for a web-based version of a poem of hers] made me think about the place of imagery in my poem . . . so, instead of just hanging things on the Christmas tree of my poem, so that the reader would just grok that and then we'd just sit around, roasting chestnuts . . . but enough about me--let's read some of my poetry . . . my students [after reading online poetic collaborations such as these] are like [slacker monotone] 'I'm thinking about submitting there' [back in her own voice] yeah, like your poem about tailgating--'cause I encourage poems about tailgating--so if you see a bunch of poems about tailgating [clicking noice--click, click--with her tongue and teeth], that's my baby."

Really cool site I got from a really cool session:

Collaborations between poets, artists, and musicians that become digital artworks:

www.bornmagazine.org

Check out a poem called "Hoops"--it's a basketball poem. [fans of basketball poems: listen up!] But others are even cooler.

Another really cool session on the video essay:

So, apparently, you just need a Mac, a mini-digital camcorder, and a microphone from Radio Shack. Somehow it looks harder than that. These guys root the video essay in the French New Wave--Godard made them, and Chris Marker, and Agnes Varda. One really great idea that I thought helped me to think about the essay-istic quality of these pieces is the idea that the visual and the voice-over are two sequences that "cross and signal to each other, but which don't ever fully explicate one another." This seems like a productive idea for thinking about all kinds of genres which use both the visual and the textual. Visual rhetoric types, are you paying attention?

Session on Post-Confessional, Transgressive Poetry:

A very confused but nonetheless interesting session. Brian Teare, a poet whose first book The Room Where I Was Born won the Brittingham Prize, recounted an episode where Robert Duncan, whose essay "The Homosexual and Society" had been published in 1944, had a poem's acceptance rescinded after John Crowe Ransom read that essay. Ransom apparently wrote him a note in which he said that, in light of the essay, he couldn't help but read Duncan's poem as endorsing homosexuality, and he could not therefore publish the poem, since he would never see homosexuality as anything but abnormal. The best part, though, was that Teare asked the audience, "I ask you: is this anyway for a New Critic to behave?" (He also said that this might be the first time that the name John Crowe Ransom led to a discussion of sodomy, "but I hope it won't be the last.")

Another guy on the panel whose name I did not get read a poem of his own called "The Endarkenment." There will be a cash prize (well, not really--but how about a mention in this blog!!!!) for anyone who can either find the poem itself or tell me where it was published.

Crisis Averted: Baggage Found.

And now I must have lunch.