We cross genres (and defy categorization) one morning, and bend them the next. Art Taylor leads panel questions resulting in answers such as “playing with constraints” and “letting a story go where it needs to go.” The next day Helen Phillips (Hum) and Pemi Aguda (Ghostroots) talk hauntings and “anxiety as a motivator” and how “short stories deep dive into atmosphere.” Everything is a blur. I am wearing a summer dress and winter coat. I am eating breakfast at night and invisible lunches and wearing my left shoe on my right foot and right shoe on my arm.
And I forgot my pen.
Valerie Witte (Rupture in the Interiors) sets out a speaker and presses play to begin “Books That Refuse to Behave: Readings in Autotheory.” We listen to her voice as she recounts being a teenage girl with other teenage girls doing the Irish jig. The text is haunting and layered.
Did I tell you my hotel feels like a haunted dollhouse?
Medievalist A.W. Strouse (Form & Foreskin) is the East Coast equivalent of what we call a freeway flyer on the West Coast, taking trains up and downtown and walking across Central Park to teach at various colleges (stopping at Bloomingdale’s for restroom cruising and poetic inspiration on the way). My preconceived thought that the panel, put on by peer-reviewed press punctum books–
EDIT NOTE: IN BALTIMORE, LOWERCASE IS THE NEW UPPERCASE
–will be scholarly and intimidating falls away as this group is heavy on enthusiasm and experimental poets and Strouse says, “Language has a body. And is a body.” “Retrieving images from the borders of memory,” someone says. “We don’t have to disengage,” says another. “Bring more of ourselves to the page and hopefully more of it to the reader,” I hear.
Or am I imagining this?
Sarah Rosenthal (One Thing Follows Another: Experiments in Dance, Art, and Life through the Lens of Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti, with Valerie Witte) reads from a poetic essay in “alphabetized” sections out of order and everything feels just right.
I won’t notice the flamingos on the tapestry of the armoire until my final night.
Hybrid writer lauren samblanet (like a dog) shares their practice and explains you can draw a circle and leave behind whatever you need to after the panel and talks about how they brought physicality to the page by writing around their hair and bodily fluids. I keep drawing circles throughout the conference and wonder what parts of me I could part with in my notebook.
Somone tells me there are 15,000 people here. Someone tells me there are 11,000.
More readings, panels, meetups, coffees, and impromptu huddled conversations under fluorescent lights within paneled walls (What would happen if this conference were held in natural light? In the forest? By the sea?) in no particular order slide me to my final night with “Resistance + Reinvention,” a fundraiser for Ukraine at Library Nineteen where Ilya Kaminsky (Deaf Republic) reads translation including a version of “Little Palm” by Lesyk Panasiuk, (translated by Kaminsky and Katie Farris). After, standing on the sidewalk in 40-something degree air (I no longer know if it’s Fahrenheit or Celsius) I keep saying I’ve never seen anyone interact with the page like Kaminsky and my friend Audrey says it’s like davening when he reads.
I’m staying on Read Street.
I keep thinking how the Free State Review reading at Normal’s Books & Records on E 31st Street is what started my AWP experience where owner/writer Rupert Wondolowski can make you cry with a tribute poem and Jenny Keith knows how to wow with words and performance so evenly they miraculously inform one another.
An announcement in the book hall informs us it’s 5pm and now closed. It’s more crowded than I’ve ever seen on any day of any conference. I imagine what it would be like if we were allowed to go on until after midnight. I imagine it like a night market in Marrakech only with books and swag and candy.