I think I’m in AWP-withdrawal, which I wasn’t expecting.  Let’s hammer out the last day in Denver.

Well, it started slow for just about everyone I know thanks to the drinking and altitude and lack of sleep.  I think the altitude was blamed for a lot of behavior beyond the altitude sickness some people experienced…what will we blame when we’re back at sea level!?  It was cold out Saturday, so I ditched my plan to explore Denver and got a chai tea latte and wandered over to the book fair where I sat with Billy Merrill for a while at the Academy of American Poets table.  I made some targeted hits to get books I wanted, such as that Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman book I mentioned.  And on my return trip from the Nightboat Books table I finally ran into Charlie Jensen!  (And found myself a little tongue-tied!)

I met up with Saeed and we wandered the fair and I bought MORE books: Jennine Capo Crucet’s How to Leave Hialeah from which she read at the WILLA event (and her reading was a nice tonal breath of fresh air, like a sunbeam break in the clouds during that set); fellow UM alum Amy Quan Barry’s Asylum and Controvertibles; Edwin Torres’s In the Function of External Circumstances; the Persistent Voices anthology, and the My Diva anthology.

We then resumed our “spot” outside the fair and soon added Randall Mann and Susan Steinberg to our little, tired, hungover group.  We people-watched, in particular the non-AWP folk arriving for the auto show, and had a segueway sighting as a man wheeled around the corner and into the book fair.  D.A. Powell stopped by and we decided to all go to lunch at WaterCourse, a vegetarian restaurant with yummy food and yummy waiters.  And Doug gave me a copy of the first issue of the new journal he oversees, L0-Ball.

Here’s a pre-lunch pic of Randy and Doug:

And Saeed and Susan:

Saeed had to run to get to his panel on time, so after we finished lunch, Randy and I ducked into the end of the “Persistent Voices” reading and delivered Saeed his food.  I thought there would be more people at the reading and was surprised at the small group gathered in such a large room.

I don’t recall much of the rest of that afternoon.  More bookfair wandering and sitting about chatting with people.  Caught up with Graeme Bezanson, co-worker of mine at the day job (who I just saw walk by and we gave a collective thumbs-down on being back at work).  While I was grabbing the copy of Bloom with the red cover and wrestlers (hot!) I heard a voice ask “Are you the real Matthew Hittinger?”  I turned and it was Shaindel Beers who wanted to make sure it was me and not a model hired to impersonate me.  She was interested in a copy of Pear Slip, so I walked her over to the Spire Table to sign one for her and it turned into an impromptu book signging.  Met Liz Ahl who was chatting with Damian Dressick, one of Spire’s new authors whose book Fables of the Deconstruction is forthcoming (click to check out the cover!) and found out from Shelly that they sold A LOT of copies of Pear Slip this year, which is great news.  I had a handful of strangers recognize me from the author photo and tell me they bought a copy, which is the type of news any writer loves to hear, especially when it’s unexpected.  I think I’m going to take Liz’s advice and make a shadow box of the front and back covers of Pear Slip (if you take two copies of the book, the back and front covers line-up to form a complete picture of that pear).

Had an early dinner with Christian, Saeed and Patrick.  Yummy burgers.  And a fun waitress.  Took a post-dinner nap.  Caught up with Jaswinder Bolina at the Hyatt bar.  Then dancing.  All these years I’ve been coming to AWP and I’ve never gone to the late night dancing.  It starts off awkward.  But once those of us with rhythm get out there it gets fun.  Formed a circle with Christian, Saeed and Patrick and danced with lots of people, including Marie-Elizabeth Mali, Patricia Smith, and Cyrus Cassells.  A bunch of them went off to a gay club in Denver, but I called it a night (part of me wishes I had gone now…though I’m sure my thighs are thankful I didn’t…)

Here’s Patrick, Saeed, me and Christian pre-dancing:

And I couldn’t leave without taking a picture of that big blue bear attacking the convention center!

Sunday there were so many of us heading to the airport that I couldn’t get on a shuttle until my third attempt.  Then the crazy long security line.  But once I got to my gate I found a little NYC poetry contingent there including Billy Merrill, Stephen Motika, and Ryan Murphy.  Fun being on a plane with people you know.

So that’s this year’s AWP.  I’m writing this Monday morning and am exhausted so I’m sure I’m missing more interesting details and gossip and whatnot.  I’ll end by saying this was my favorite AWP so far, not so much because of the conference itself (actually very little to do with the conference) but because of the wonderful people I met this year and the advice/reaffirmation about what to do next with my manuscript.  It was fun to meet just about everyone I’ve “met” in facebook land, in person (except you Daniel Casey!).  It’s weird when you reach your 30s and find that most new friends you make are co-workers with whom you may or may not have much in common.  I forgot that giddy feeling of making new friends where there is a shared bond and connection.  I think that’s why I’m having that withdrawal feeling this morning, missing the new friends, wanting to hang out more.  All I’m saying is I’m not waiting until D.C. to see them all again.

I forgot to take a picture of the demon horse at the airport, so I’m stealing this from the web, and leaving this as your last image:

Til next time!

It’s Saturday morning as I type this and I have a pounding headache, so bear with me as I try to narrate the rest of Friday.

I met Joe and Chenelle Milford at the Starbucks at their hotel (after visiting two other Starbucks in the same block vicinity–all these hotels seem to have Starbucks attached to their lobbies) and we had a great chat about everything from Gilgamesh (which Joe is teaching to his world lit class) to the joys and frustrations of putting a lit journal together to potential names if Chenelle’s “bump” turns out to be a boy (congrats!).  We were joined by Amy Gerstler who, after Joe and Chenelle left for the airport, I had a lovely chat with as I walked her over to the conference registration.  We chatted about writing about art and my book mss and my recent visit to Otis College in L.A. where she has taught and where her husband currently teaches.  And she suggested I check out Otis’s press, Seismicity Editions, where I’ve discovered Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman, edited by my friend Stephen Motika, is from.  Very exciting!  I’m picking up a copy of that today at the book fair.

I wandered the book fair some more and bought a ton of books.  Here’s my haul so far: from Marsh Hawk Press, Neil de la Flor’s Almost Dorothy and Sharon Dolin’s Serious Pink; from The University of Arkansas Press, Michael Walsh’s The Dirt Riddles and Eric Leigh’s Harm’s Way (they love the gay poets there!); from the University of Pittsburgh Press, Daisy Field’s She Didn’t Mean to Do It and My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again, Bob Hicok’s Words for Empty and Words for Full, Denise Duhamel’s Ka-Ching!, and Shara McCallum’s The Water Between Us and Song of Thieves.

Ran into Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon at the Pitt table; you should buy her Open Interval if you haven’t already (it was a finalist for the national book award).  And met two more writer friends from the online world: Brent Goodman (his book The Brother Swimming Beneath Me is a Lamda finalist this year!) and Steve Fellner of the Pansy Poetics blog who gave me a big hug and dished with me about the conference. And you should get his books: All Screwed Up and Blind Date with Cavafy.

On my way to a panel I ran into Saeed Jones (check out his blog here) hanging out outside the book fair.  I joined him and we commenced with a multi-hour anti-panel that morphed as people walked by and joined us.  We were first joined by Randall Mann where we had a good follow-up conversation about the Queer Desire panel.  Christian Gullette joined us and we chatted about RuPaul’s Drag Race and Project Runway.  Michael Montlack joined us and we went for lunch at this yummy Vietnamese place where the conversation turned to politics and the second volume of the Gay Divas anthology.  Saeed and I grabbed cupcakes before the Gay Divas reading.  The reading, “Diva Complex: Gay Men Explore the Diversity and Meaning of Diva Worship” was lots of fun, with readings by David Trinidad on Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, Jeff Oaks on Wonder Woman, Paul Lisicky on Wendy Waldman, and Christopher Hennessy on Princess Leia.  I’m picking up the anthology today.

Here’s a pic of Saeed, me, and Christian:

Post-reading I took a much-needed nap and then went over to the Bloom party at the Wrangler, a gay bar in Denver.  Had a nice bitch-fest with RJ Gibson and Christopher Hennessy, got to meet Miguel Murphy, nice chat with Paul Lisicky, and a long chat with the amazing Julie Enszer.  Love her!  Billy Merrill and I caught up on the history of how we know each other from when we first met back in 2007 when I heard him read this amazing sequence of poems.  From the Bloom party a bunch of us headed over to the WILLA event at the Denver Press Club.  WILLA stands for “Women in Letters and Literary Arts” and the night was full of great readings by the likes of Cate Marvin, Erin Belieu, Patricia Smith, Nickole Brown, etc.  There was also burlesque dancing

which got the crowd fired up, and a representative from Denver’s roller derby team, Fonda Payne,

to keep the readers on their allotted 2-3 minutes, and to affix tattoos like this one on my forearm:

I made it through most of the event (where I saw fellow Michigan MFA alum, poet Jaswinder Bolina, and a co-worker from my day job, poet Graeme Bezanson) but exhaustion overtook some of us and Saeed and I decided to go, realizing when we got outside how effing hungry we were (neither of us had dinner, just drinking for hours) so we wandered until we found a combination Pizza Hut/Taco Bell to meet out late night hunger pangs.  I’ve never been in one before, and must ask, do they all play classical music over the sound system?

I’m sure I’m forgetting lots of stuff from yesterday, and I’ll come back and revise as I remember more things, but now to deal with this headache and find some breakfast.

So far at the conference I’ve overhead lots of talk about online vs. print, which seems to be a hot topic this year.  The conversation has many parts: on the shuttle ride over it was about the fight at some journals just to get an online submission manager (fear being that it would increase submissions exponentially and make it unmanageable to cull); then the wide spectrum of traditional print journals that are now wrestling with providing online content (or going online completely to reach wider audiences and cut costs); and now with the Kindle and iPad, the move to downloadable content, possibly making online html/website-based journals obsolete.

And yet I can’t help but think about the counter-trend too: the rise of handmade chapbooks and return to letterpress and book arts.  That actually might make a great panel for next year’s AWP, to contrast those two impulses.  With some title like “current trends in contemporary poetry: the handmade and the electronic” or something like that.  I wonder if anyone would be interested.

I think what Didi Menendez is doing with Oranges & Sardines and MiPOesias and OCHO, and the folk at Ouroboros Review, where the journal is online but laid out like an actual magazine, with turning pages and all, via a service like Issuu, is a good future for lit journals.  It can reach a wide audience, has a polished and professional look and feel, can be embedded it sites and blogs, and you have the option to purchase a hardcopy of the journal, so if you really like what you read, you can go to Amazon or Createspace and get a copy for your library.

Morning musings.  I passed out last night and couldn’t muster the energy to get back out there, so I ordered room service and watched Project Runway and called it a night.  About to eat some breakfast and then am meeting Joe and Chenelle Milford of The Joe Milford Poetry Show at a Starbucks down the street.  Check out the latest issue of their new online lit journal, Scythe.

Okay, I took some pics!

This is the Denver Convention Center where the book fair, registration, and panels take place:

And the entrance to Exhibit Hall A or whatever it’s called; the main hall.  What’s nice is the entire book fair is in one hall this year, with carpeted aisles!  Still a bit overwhelming, but more manageable, and there seems to be more thought to how things are grouped together.  I still don’t understand why they just don’t set up the tables alphabetically, but whatevs.

Upon entering the book fair a second time I ran into a friend of mine from Michigan MFA days, Rachel Richardson, and her hubby, poet David Roderick.  I then found the Barn Owl Review table and captured this great shot which I call “Biddinger upon seeing Hittinger:”

The visit turned into a photo shoot at the table (Mary I had to steal your photo from facebook as I had wonky eye in mine!):

Mary and I discussed our last names and how we are fellow “-ingers” (for those who ever wondered how to pronounce our last names, no hard ‘g’ but soft ‘g’ as in ‘-ing’).

I then had a nice, long chat with Rebecca Morgan Frank from Memorious about the trials and tribulations of getting your book manuscript published, especially after you’ve published almost every single poem in the mss with good journals and have placed it multiple times in contests.  But good news!  Her book will be coming out with the international small press Salmon Poetry. Woo-hoo!  Also, at the table you can hear Randall West’s finished composition for the winner of the art song contest.  (Side note: I hope to have news soon to share with you all about my collaboration with Randall West…)

Okay, that’s all the pics I have at the moment, but not the end of my adventures.  I got Neil de la Flor to sign a copy of Almost Dorothy (Marsh Hawk Press books are 50% off at the conference, can’t go wrong there!) and then went to the “Queering Desire” panel which was a fun meeting ground.  Ran into Paul Lisicky who was leaving the room from a previous panel; will have to catch up with him later at the conference, but we both admire each other’s pieces in the new issue of Knockout (which is a kick-ass issue which you should purchase and read cover-to-cover).  And then I got to meet some people I’ve only “met” online via facebook: RJ Gibson (whose new chapbook Scavenge you should purchase), Christopher Hennessy (whose important book of interviews with gay poets, Outside the Lines, you should own and read), and from the panel the hottie Jericho Brown (whose book Please you should own), and David Groff, who I admire more and more every time I hear his lectures which are full of humor, sharp insight, and eloquence (I remember being very impressed with him at last year’s AWP too).  I really hope the essays by David, Stacey and Maureen make their way into print soon; powerful stuff to chew on which I’ll try to summarize here, though my notes are a bit scattered:

What I wrote down from Jericho: he reads, at the turning of the seasons, three essays: one by Adrienne Rich, one by Langston Hughes, and one by T.S. Eliot (”Tradition and the Individual Talent” – I’ll work on getting the names of the Rich and Hughes essays).  I wrote down “we should not outlaw any part of the self in a poem” and “the more adjectives put in front of the word ‘poet’ the more context and complexity we can bring to the poem” which sort of turns what could be seen as reductive labels “this is a gay, black poet” to expansive ones.

What I wrote down from Maureen Seaton’s hilarious personal narrative: she opened by saying “Hi queer people!  You queer homos.  And queer heteros.”  She was the first of the panelists to put emphasis on queer as a verb (”to queer”) and what it means to “queer the world” simply by just being there.  Queer desire is big, fluid and messy, which are good things.  She raised some good questions too, including “are queers the only ones who write queer?” and “what would happen if we didn’t label our writing or ourselves anything?” which tied very nicely into Ely Shipley’s more philosophic approach to the panel topic putting pressure on language and how language can get in the way and limit, but also expand through the compression in writing a poem.

Things I wrote down from Shipley’s paper: Lacan and mirror theory? (baby contemplating reflection for first time, can’t obtain reflection, reminded me of Narcissus).  ”The I is always Other” – Rimbaud.  The impulse to write about queer experience (noun, queer as identity) vs. to queer (verb, queer as action: to disturb, unsettle, inquire, complicate identity).  To be both/and.  To be not at all.  Perhaps all poetry is queer as it queers common language: “the queering of common speech” where poetry makes new and multiple meanings by condensing and enjambing language.

Things I wrote down from Stacey Waite’s paper in six parts (also hilarious – she likes instructions, being told what to do…lol): from the first sections “origins” : what queer does vs. what queer is.  With which body do you make and read poems?  What is the queer body?  From the second section “queer disrupts models of expectation” : Body as text, gender as performance.  From section three “queer desire queers the environment” : “knows the moment it talks about history, history slips and changes.” I liked the title for section four “queer desire knows what it cannot know” and section five “queer desire transforms your asshole into your heart temporarily.”  Its knowledge fades.

And stuff I wrote down from David Groff’s essay: why are explicit sex poems by queer poets so often bad / do we deem them bad because of some sort of internal censor or suppressed homophobia?  Conspiracy of exclusion.  Hetero gatekeepers do not take our desire seriously; nothing universal to them in the specifics of our desire.  Brokeback Mtn. the most mainstream we get and aside from Rufus Wainwright’s songs in it, the whole affair was made by straight folk.  Our lovemaking is a political act the moment we pull down the zipper.  Transformative power of transgressing “roles” such as penetrated or penetrator.  ”Desire is about everything but consummation.”  Desire as a state of being, sister to grief.  Both live in relation to a missing thing or object you want or miss.  Hunger, urge for union.  Our desire defines our identity.  The authenticity of our experience.  The concept of radical content.  Queer desire is not procreative but generative.  We can taste the sublime through our desire.

Last but not least I can’t forget the Wilde Boys!  Out en masse: Alex Dimitrov, Saeed Jones, Angelo Nikolopoulos (who I also finally got to meet in person), Jerome Murphy, Billy Merrill…and so many new people I’ve met.  Still learning names.  But for now, I am exhausted and need a nap.

I wasn’t sure I was going to blog AWP this year, but hell, I have free wireless in my room, so why not make use of it.

Alice Quinn was on my flight this morning in the row in front of me.  I noticed her when we were queuing up to board; she was chatting with four other writers (I assume since they all seemed to know each other).  I’ve introduced myself to her a couple times in the past, but didn’t have the courage to go through that potentially awkward “Hi, you probably don’t remember me…” conversation. She was in the row in front of me on the plane, and was in the shuttle in front of me when we left the airport.  Near misses.

So far all I’ve done is check-in to my hotel, grab a bite to eat, get my name badge at the convention center, and do a quick walk-through of the book fair. I’ve already seen lots of friends: Jeremy Chamberlin and Natalie Bakapolous at the Fiction Writers Review table (where I also got to meet Anne Stameshkin); Moriah Purdy (fellow Muhlenberg alum who is finishing up her MFA at George Mason U.) at the Phoebe table; Alex Dimitrov and Billy Merrill at the Academy of American Poets table (Marika! I delivered your note to Billy!); Shelly Reed at the Spire Press table (go buy their new titles! and Pear Slip if you haven’t already! I’ll sign it for you!); Stephen Motika at the Nightboat Books table; and the wonderful Patricia Smith, who gave me a big hug and started to say something and then stopped herself, then started again, and stopped again until I said “what? say it!” and she laughed and blushed and said “you’re just so handsome!” which in turn made me blush.  An awwww moment for me.  =)  She’s such a sweetheart!

I’m heading back to the book fair to pick up my copy of Barn Own Review 3 and to buy Neil de la Flor’s new book Almost Dorothy (and have him sign it!) and then at 4:30 I’m going to listen to the panel “Queering Desire: Queer Poets’ Aesthetic Libidos” with Jim Elledge, Jericho Brown, David Groff, Ely Shipley, Maureen Seaton, and Stacey Waite.  More updates to come!

And pictures Eduardo!  I promise!

UPDATED: with photos:

Fiction Writers Review table:

The pic I took of Alex and Billy at the Academy table didn’t come out the best, so I will spare them the way I know I would want to be spared from a potentially less than flattering pic…  ;)

Here’s Shelly at the Spire Press table:

And me posing with the lovely cut-out next to our table (it’s not our press, but I couldn’t resist!):