To celebrate this huge convention of writers, I'm giving myself a couple days of writerly retreat, reading, studying, writing, and listening. Here's my favorite poem on writing, Stanley Kunitz' perfect and transcendent The Round, which captures the ecstasy that keeps us moving the words forward. Kunitz used a perfect contrast as the center of his poem's strategy in conveying this state universal to writers. He puts us writers in "the steamy old stinkpile" to which we must retreat to capture the sublime, suggesting that digging deep into the subconscious is what releases
Also investigated flarf, a new and anti-poetry poetry movement. Listened to a reading by flarfist Sharon Mesmer of a poem taken mostly from online texts and using the words in a hilarious, absurdist, pop cultured rant. The reading and a discussion of it on Jacket.
We are all at AWP, in that we are together in this crazy adventure on a raft in a wildly heaving ocean that we call writing.
