Denver, Day Two (Part 2)

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.