I flew in to Chicago, this year’s host city for AWP, yesterday morning. I was prepared for the worst–last time I was in Chicago in February there were huge snowbanks and the lake looked like liquid, rolling ice. But not today. As we flew in over the water there was one moment when, as we banked, the angle of the sun turned the blue below to white-gold, the water looking solid, broken by the wave cap crinkles, like ice or the surface of some other planet.
After mistakenly going to the Palmer Hilton (where AWP was five years ago) and realizing no one was there, I made my way down to the Hilton Hilton. Within the first few minutes of stepping into the registration line I saw my friends Greg Wrenn and Jaswinder Bolina. Jaswinder was a year ahead of me at UM and his first book, Carrier Wave won the Colorado Prize for Poetry; Greg was a fellow with me at the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets back in June 2000 and his first chapbook, Off the Fire Road, was released yesterday from GreenTower Press.
I made my way to the Center table to find my friend Emily Rosko, another BYP fellow from 2000, and we wandered the bookfair for a bit. Ran into another Michigan alum, Brent Armendinger, who has a new chapbook out called Archipelago from Noemi Press. Picked up my contributor’s copies of the Spring 2009 Phoebe in which I have three poems and signed a copy of Pear Slip for the UM MFA program table where they have all the faculty and alum books on display. Emily and I lunched and caught up, we wandered the bookfair some more so she could pass out Center postcards, and I got to meet Mark McKee at the Missouri Review table. Mark knew me from the cover of MiPO and from googling himself where he found, via GoodReads, that I had read his new chapbook What Apocalypse? Also finally got to meet the very handsome Randall Mann in the flesh; his new book Breakfast with Thom Gunn sold out at the U. of Chicago Press table; they should have more in stock today (they better!).
What else, who else…ran into my friend Alex Dimitrov from NY and we grabbed some coffee and caught-up on Madonna’s “Blame it on Rio” spread in W magazine, her odd decision to take her tour back on the road this summer, and how overwhelming the conference can be (it’s his first time). And I went to the UM MFA Alum reading where I many many familiar faces and got to hear Rattawut Lapcharoensap (knew him as ‘A’ when we were at UM), Hui-Hui (Tung-Hui Hu) and Jason Bredle along with Patrick O’Keeffe and Nami Mun. Hope to catch up with the UM crowd tonight at the UM reception.
Conferenced out, I met up with my friend from high school Lori Felker with whom I’m staying while I’m here; Lori has an MFA in Film from the Art Institute and we went to the Gene Siskel Film Center for the “Through the Looking Glass: Videos by Cecelia Condit” program. Four of Condit’s films were screened starting with Possibly in Michigan from 1983, then Not a Jealous Bone from 1987, Oh, Rapunzel from 1996/2008, and Annie Lloyd from 2008. Condit gave some remarks at the end about her relationship with her mother and her return to her mother as subject again and again, as well as her dark humor, her composition process (she starts with the songs and composing the lyrics or narrative for each film first and then does the video work) and took questions from the audience. The one question that made me smile was from a very earnest artist who wanted to know if, being from the Midwest, she felt this adversely affected her work at all in terms of how it is made and/or received. It got me thinking about that mentality, that if-you’re-not-in-NYC-you-won’t-be-taken-seriously, the idea that to be an artist in the Midwest is to be alone and surrounded by redneck Republicans. I wonder if the tension of being an artist in the midst of red states is actually fertile in that it gives closer proximity to backwards or ill-informed thinking that needs to be resisted. I also wonder how much that type of thinking is self-imposed, that “oh I’m in the midwest great art doesn’t come from here” frame of mine that can short circuit an artist’s process. I forget how mythic NYC is to people; to me it’s just my home.
We met up with Lori’s Adam afterward and had dinner and went back to their place where I met the lovely Czubek, a crazy black and white cat who is quite talkative and affectionate. The cat and I are now friends on facebook.
Today I may hit some panels (I stopped going to them years ago when I realized most of them false advertise and what promises to be a discussion about a topic just turns into the poets reading their work, as if the work will just speak for itself–come on, stop being lazy guys, write a freaking poetics piece or panel essay and exert a little critical brainpower!). Alice Fulton is on a hybrids one at noon, and there are some queer ones that look interesting. Still have many friends to see and will try to meet some other writers I’ve “met” on-line this past year but have yet to meet in person.