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Monday (Post AWP/Why Didn’t I Get President’s Day Off?) Musings

I survived my first AWP. It was a whirlwind but I had a great time. I’ve decided that the book fair is by far the highlight of the entire event. I came home with tons of free journals and ideas of places to submit to. I talked to a lot of different editors, students, and teachers. In line with my fellow AWP bloggers, I give you the highlights of my conference:

*Arriving at the Hilton Chicago and realizing that hotel parking was $53 a night. After cursing the expensive price and circling the surrounding streets (Garmin is a lifesaver) I found parking for $20 a night.

*Wandering the book fair Thursday afternoon with my friend and fellow poet Larry O’Dean while he made hilarious comments about small presses, big presses, and all things literary.

* Walking into our hotel room. You’ll see pictures of the beds. Enough said.

* Attending the AWP offsite event “Reading Between the Lines” at The Beat Kitchen. Out of twenty some readers (prose and poetry) yours truly was dead last.

*The Beat Kitchen. I had one of the best steak sandwiches I’ve ever had. Delicious.

*Waking up at 7:45 Friday morning to sit at Murray State’s table. We were a major sponsor and we had a prime spot. I liked promoting New Madrid to people. It was fun.

* Trying to convince some guy that even though his last two novels had been “well received by The New York Times” that New Madrid would be a good place to submit his short stories.

* Wandering the book fair on Friday afternoon and receiving a free bag from The Poetry Foundation with this Marianne Moore quote on the back ” I too dislike it.”

* Attending a panel (one of the few panels I attended) called Writing Our Passions: Forbidden Topics. To be honest, I wasn’t real impressed.

* Running into Corey Marks and Will Tyler at the bookfair and then eating Chicago deep dish pizza.

* Listening to Mary Jo Bang and Frank Bidart read.

* Buying Dana Levin’s new book.

* Eating sushi with Natalie and Michael.

* Reading a vampire story by Kim Addonizio in Indiana Review. I’m still trying to figure out if she was trying to be ironic or not…

* Paying $14 for a vodka tonic at the hotel bar.

* Riding in a limo because it was cheaper than a cab to Lou Malnatis for more pizza.

* Voting for the best ice sculpture in the park across the street from our hotel.

* Did I mention the bookfair?
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A collage from AWP…
These first two pictures are from The Beat Kitchen where we had our reading. The nook is where we read and then there is a shot of the crowd.

These next three shots are from our table at the bookfair. We handed out all of our journals for free. The issue with Abe Lincoln is the one I worked on.


These photos are from the hotel, Chicago Hilton.

Finally, some of my favorite snow scultptures from the contest across the street.


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This is a sketch that Dmitry did of our reading at The Beat Kitchen. Check out his website.


I’m the one with the glasses.

Friday (Finally) Musings

English Sonnet

London returns in damp, fragmented flurries
when I should be doing something else. A scrap
of song, a pink scarf, and I’m back to curries
and pub food, and long, wet walks without a map,
bouts of bronchitis, a case of the flu,
my halfhearted studies and brooding thoughts
and scanning faces in every bar for you.
Those months come down to moments or small plots,
like the bum on the Tube, enraged that no one spoke,
who raved and spat, the whole car thick with dread,
only to ask, won’t someone tell a joke?
and this mouse of a woman offered, What’s big and red
and sits in a corner?
A naughty bus.
Not funny, I know. But neither’s the story of us.

Chelsea Rathburn from Poetry February 2009
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Another piece of information in the growing saga that is is the disappearance of the book:
In a move that could bolster the growing popularity of e-books, Google said Thursday that the 1.5 million public domain books it had scanned and made available free on PCs were now accessible on mobile devices like the iPhone and the T-Mobile G1.
This is the quote that closes the article: “Consumers will trade a certain amount of quality for convenience and cost,” said Michael Gartenberg, an independent technology analyst.
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I’ve been following the blog chronicling the first 100 poems written for the first 100 days of the Obama Adminstration. After all the hoopla surrounding Elizabeth Alexander’s reading, I thought I’d take a stab at it. Alexander’s poem is accomplished. Mine is not. This is a first draft, and I wrote it last week. It isn’t supposed to be anything but a poem I tried to write (that’s my generic disclaimer).
Voices

The halls vibrate with shared voices.
Students crowd outside classrooms, looking
up from their iphones, tucking MP3 players
back into their pockets. Pressed together, they read
copies of the Indianapolis Star, spread open and held
by many hands, murmuring quotes and figures.

Pushing into class, they ask questions
about speech, poetry, and prayer. Across
the street, grown men emerge from the auto
labs to watch the televisions set up outside
the cafeteria. They returned to school for
promotions but just yesterday a Honda plant
closed in Greenwood and now these men
clutch class schedules in their hands wearily
reading descriptions about engineering, accounting,
and communications.

A woman stands in front of the largest T.V. Her
hair is a pure white cloud held in place with pins.
She is studying Spanish and often strolls the halls
of our department, a thick wooden walking stick
stomping out her arrival. Her eyes are still, caught
in a clear gaze, but her lips tremble as the cameras
pan out to the audience.

The audience all wrapped up in wool, cotton, and
down but underneath they speak Spanish, French,
and Afrikaans. They oil engines, they build bridges,
and they crunch numbers. This audience studies literature,
religion, and history. They sing hymns, pop songs, and opera.

This audience and this student are waiting,
waiting for his voice to come forward
and rise above the cold.

Tuesday (Snow. Again.) Musings

I think I’m over winter. The weather forecasted “snow showers” for today but when I left at 7:30 this morning, the snow was coming down at a steady clip. Needless to say, the morning commute was a mess. My students were all late (understandably) and one student informed me that they had closed three of the major interstates. The weather service issued a Severe Winter Weather Advisory and it is in effect until noon. I hope it stops snowing, because otherwise the evening commute is going to be very messy.
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I’ve discovered a market, Georgetown Market, that sells meat from local Indiana farms as well as cheese, eggs, and baked goods. I’ve decided to start dividing my grocery shopping between Georgetown and the Farmer’s Market. I really want to support local farmers and I think this is important. As an important side note, RJ and I had pork chops last night and they tasted wonderful.
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This article gives me hope:

In a hundred ways, we pretend that screen experiences are books —
PowerBooks, notebooks, e-books — but even a child knows the difference. Reading books is an operation with paper. Playing games on the Web is something else entirely. I need to admit this to myself, too. I try to believe that reading online is reading-plus, with the text searchable, hyperlinked and accompanied by video, audio, photography and graphics. But maybe it’s just not reading at all. Just as screens aren’t books.

One of the ways I like to procrastinate is by browsing the NY Times Arts & Design section and looking at their slide shows. Here are a few of my favorite pieces:

“The Dessert,” 1940, by Pierre Bonnard

“Time of Change,” 1943, by Morris Graves

Monday Musings

Her Kind
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.
I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.
Anne Sexton
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The Steelers won The Super Bowl last night. It was a tense game but those are the kind I like best. Watching one team destroy another isn’t much fun. I liked this cartoon depiction posted on ESPN’s page two this morning.
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Friday (Cooking!) Musings

RJ has created a blog to document Greg’s progress throughout his recovery. This is the link to the page.

My creative writing class was great again last night. We talked about voice and character in writing. I devised this exercise where I gave my students four index cards. One card had a name, another an age, another an occupation, and the final card had one or two personality traits. Then I put the students in small groups and asked them to put their characters in a situation together so they could interact. They seemed to enjoy it and begin to understand how to make a character.

The snowstorm we got on Tuesday/Wednesday morning continues to be annoying. The owners of our apartment building came during lunch yesterday and plowed out the parking lot. This is awesome, but of course the only person who didn’t move their car was the girl who parks next to me, so when I got home last night I still couldn’t park in my spot. I switched with RJ and he parked on the street.

Today is my first cooking class at school. I’m really looking forward to it.
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I will be watching the Superbowl this weekend. The Steelers are RJ’s team, so in that spirit here is probably one of the few sports related articles you’ll see on this blog.

Myron Cope left behind something far more personal than a legacy of terrycloth, a battle flag for a city and its team. In 1996, he handed over the trademark to the Terrible Towel to the Allegheny Valley School. It is a network of campuses and group homes across Pennsylvania for people with severe intellectual and developmental disabilities. It receives almost all the profits from sales of the towels.

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I’ve started following the blog Starting Today: Poems for the First 100 Days. I like the concept and I think I might try it myself. I’m not expecting anything, but I think it’s worth thinking about. I’ve linked to this page under my Links section.

I like the one posted yesterday:

Day #10: John Paul O’Connor

New Time Old Time

The unchosen have always been the starbeams
for the poor, the tortured and beaten, the homeless,
the suffocated. They have been the wind that bursts
open poppies in an endless field, just as this morning
the January wind blew the seeds of this poem jotted
down with coffee 3 days before my daughter’s 39th birthday.
She is, at this moment, in a classroom downtown studying
nursing, while her daughter, my little Izzie, sits
at Wanda’s Daycare spilling blocks onto the carpet
with no awareness of the children’s blood spilling
in the Congo while fathers’ heads are crushed
like brittle stone and mothers’ bodies are torn open
by monstrous attackers, children they, all written
off as lost Africa which will remain lost for the next 100
days as it has for the past 300 years. It’s a tell of people
my age when you hear us say, I’ve seen this before,
Camelot and the revolution just around the corner.
Today my around the corner is the Fine Fare,
where I pick up milk, orange juice and peanut butter
for my girls before getting back to work.
I’m lucky to have work, I’ve heard a dozen people
tell me in the past week. The Dominican check-out girls
have no union though surely they thirst for something
greater. I can’t know. I don’t speak their language.
I am one of those who has sat at the bar with his whiskey,
whispering to himself on an unchosen night, I was born
too late, thinking I might have liked to have lived through
the Depression and now it looks as if I will get my wish.
But will I get my FDR? No I will get my Obama,
the first president to have a name that begins with O.
O, Obama, be not the chosen, but the unchosen
of the unchosen revolution, not around the corner
but here on St. Nicholas Avenue where the swollen tribes
of unchosen are chanting, Africa come home, and raising
their sunbroad arms to demand of you to be what they believe
you are.

John Paul O’Connor resides in New York City and in Franklin, NY. His poems have appeared recently in Indiana Review, Eclipse, Lilies and Cannonballs and Rattle, on whose website you can hear him read his poem, “Stone City.” John hopes we will all do what Obama has urged us to do, which is to keep the pressure on to make sure he is the president we want him to be.
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