BRACE YOURSELVES
AWP IS COMING
Luckily for you, Lillian Bertram, a wonderful poet and someone who genuinely cares about you, has created this website:
You can add your two cents or get some advice here.
Lillian's also an amazing photographer and poet, and her first book, But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise won the Benjamin Saltman Award, and was published by Red Hen in 2012. You should get it at AWP, on account of poems like "Account of the Apparitions":
–the end of billion dollar days came. It was like
old times
again,
those old times everyone knew had occurred
but no one alive had lived them—
my old man, he held a lamp by his head &
peered into the darker corners of our house where
dust mixed
its potions of small & infinite clouds.
We would know to call it the Summer of Sorrow.
The Fall of Painted Statues with Paint
Worn Off,
when every girl
& friend
needed an abortion. Even me.
We all had one. Two. Hundreds.
It was all so hip. All so cruel. It was
a hip kind of cruel. It was a club.
We took blankets sewn
with thinning economic plans and called them
shawls. When we wore them,
we looked like movie stills, stretching to fit
the screen. We looked like faded slide film,
tattooed symbols behind our ears:
the $
and Eye of Horus—
Lillian will be at AWP, too.
Personally, for me AWP is a giant playground. All these books, all these people I like, imported. sometimes on someone else's dime, to one place, just to see me — what more could I ask for? I dash around, and then when I am too tired I stand in one place, and inevitably someone fascinating walks by. If I don't know them, I make things up about them, and if I do know them, well, then I am off on my next adventure! Who knows where I'll end up (though truth to tell, it is rarely a panel).
Speaking of panels, as an educator and someone whose brain personally needs lots of variety for intellectual stimulation, I wish panels would be less talking-too-long-in-turn and more like a
Black Took Collective Intervention, involving multimedia, breakdancing, yoga, sound design and perhaps running in place for everyone after writing in Coon Journals. Barring that, it could at least be a tad bit more interactive, with a "turn and talk" or some other kind of structured conversation protocol for both panel and audience.
Anyhoo, in case you haven't noticed this weeks' theme has been "OFF and OFF OFF and OFF OFF OFF SITE LITERARY INTERVENTIONS." The past three were in the world, and these next three will be AWP related. Brace yourselves.