But
attending a conference like AWP is a lot like traveling, even when it takes
place on your doorstep. There is nothing so foreign as the landscape of the
three gigantic exhibition halls in Hynes Convention Center, crammed with row
upon endless row of booths bannered with MFA programs looking for tuition
money, lit mags searching for submitters, publishers looking for readers.
If the international cuisine of the Prudential Center food court didn't transport you to new lands, you could listen to readers from all over the world at one of the many panels on literature, publishing, and almost any aspect of writing culture imaginable. From essayists discussing the urge toward memoir to a conversation over big versus indie publishers, I found that many of these panels were stimulating in the way that travel is, breaking me out of my habitual ways of thinking about writing and pushing me into new practices and points of view.
On the exhibition floor. |
If the international cuisine of the Prudential Center food court didn't transport you to new lands, you could listen to readers from all over the world at one of the many panels on literature, publishing, and almost any aspect of writing culture imaginable. From essayists discussing the urge toward memoir to a conversation over big versus indie publishers, I found that many of these panels were stimulating in the way that travel is, breaking me out of my habitual ways of thinking about writing and pushing me into new practices and points of view.
Outside, the blizzard blew. |
"No,"
she laughed, "I heard some young people talking it up on the bus from New
York, and I pricked up my ears." Her hostel was full of conference-goers
as well, and she followed them to Hynes. "I'm meant to be here," she
confided, and told me about the book she had just self-published about her
travels around the world. We listened to the panel together, learning how
to capture and document that elusive essence of place.
And
while a conference, like travel, is exhausting, there were periods of
contemplation as well. One evening, after a day of navigating the chaos of the
exhibition, I stumbled out of a Grub Street
party at a noisy and crowded bar and headed back to Hynes for the keynote
speaker. There I found Vets Auditorium full of writers gathered to hear a
conversation between poets Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney.
My
brain was fried from the day of speakers, my head was woozy with one drink too
many, and my ears were ringing with the bar's loud music and the louder sound
of writers' networking. I settled into my chair and focused in on the speakers,
who were conversing from two armchairs on the stage.
Walcott
was saying something about silence, stillness, and serenity, what he called the
"prologue before articulation." As I listened, the noise of networking fell away. "Where silence is," Walcott
said, "real art arrives."
"Yes,"
Heaney nodded, "But you have to be able to dwell in the clamor as
well--that is the condition we inhabit."
Later
Heaney would tell us about reading Virgil when he was a school boy in Sixth Form.
The required text was Book Nine, but all he remembers about that course was his
teacher continually asserting with regret, "I wish it were Book Six, lads,
if only it were Book Six."
Perhaps I had taken in one panel on literary tropes too many, but every word Heaney spoke seemed to hold the potential for metaphor,
and now when I think back on the blur that was my trip through the foreign
lands of AWP, my sense is that if nothing else, the convention was for me Sixth
Form. A conference about art is not art itself, if anything it is the dissonance
that distracts us from creation. Yet it is in that chaos that we dwell, and if
it is a clamor that points us on to Book Six, to the silence before articulation,
then it was a trip worth taking.
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