Poet and PhD student Kathy D’Arcy travelled coast to coast during her recent visit to the US. Her literary odyssey included attending the AWP conference in Los Angeles, the Split the Rock poetry festival in Washington DC and stepping into two oceans with dolphins.  Here she shares her impressions along with extracts from her journal and some poetic resolutions for the future.

“Then AWP – 2 days of labile, scorched explosion.  See attached to-do list.”

When I got out my AWP journal to write this blog post, I  found an enormous list on the first page: names of conferences, organisations, publishing houses, poets, and at the bottom, in capitals, “I NEED TO TAKE POETRY MORE SERIOUSLY.”

who is the ‘you’?  To whom am I reaching off the page?

It’s an oasis, with row after row of every kind of book and bookmaker imaginable, although if you don’t want to have to throw away most of the clothes you brought you have to avoid catching too many eyes and coming away with too many gift bags.  I wasn’t there for the very end, but am told that that’s the time to collect freebies, since nobody wants to drag loads of books back to the office.  There’s a sense of flow, thousands of people are wandering around in book-loving daydreams, and random meetings and conversations abound.

make sure that where I want to be present, I am, and where not, I am not.

The building itself seemed too big for human-sized inhabitants, as did the Marriott Hotel, in a very debsy ballroom of which us non-performing plebs lashed into the two hours of free drink laid on for us each night.  The enormity of everything hammered home how seriously literature and the pursuit of excellence therein are taken by the AWP and its members.  I think in Ireland we have a habit of allowing our ingrained self-deprecation to leak into the way we talk and think about writing, and this was a thrilling wake-up call.

in your poem, are you the host or the guest?

Some events that stand out for me are: the keynote lecture by Elizabeth Alexander, who compared Zora Neale Hurston’s dream of a kind of Père Lachaise for illustrious black artists to ideas about restructuring libraries and canons; Rigoberto Gonzalez’ s beautiful reading of his long poem about a young drowned man (the speaker’s lover) – mermen, marlin, the filthy water from the factory, the 1911 Mexican Revolution; the incredibly moving tribute to Eloise Klein Healy, whose closing address (“it’s really worth it; it’s worth feeling things,”) brought the room to tears – and where I met Alicia Suskin Ostriker, a long-time hero; the panel on intention versus inspiration in poetry, which included Mark Doty.

sometimes you have just pieces of a thing, and they will remain pieces for some time.

 There was also a very inspiring and reassuring panel discussion on poetry book prizes – of which there are of course so many in America and so few elsewhere.  Most of the panelists had been sending their poetry collections out for around ten years, constantly taking feedback and rejections, before winning prestigious prizes.

reward people for being there – page after page after page.

 I knew the poets Jan Beatty and Celeste Gainey, and their workshop initiative The Madwomen in the Attic through Pittsburgh poet and fellow madwoman Tess Barry, and I went with them in Celeste’s tiny rental car to an off-site event in Chevalier Books, in the more tree-lined part of LA; the launch of the anthology Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace, put together by Carolyne Wright, M.L. Lyons and Eugenia Toledo to celebrate and highlight Ledbetter’s victory over workplace gender discrimination.  It was a small, refreshing event after the hugeness of the convention centre.

a beautiful morning walk here where I was human again and could feel the world,

 On the last night I performed at the slam, getting probably extra-generous votes for my accent.  Then Jan and I ended up in an other-worldly conversation with Richard Blanco and Tim Seibles on the steps of the Marriott, before I retreated to the upstairs debs one last time.

the fearful metro (red line to North Hollywood, blue line to Long Beach), a guy gets on and            plays a song called Fuck Donald Trump then gets off again.

Before leaving, Celeste told me to visit the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition in LACMA, and I spent a day wandering through that huge, sprawling collection of buildings beside the La Brea tarpits, discovering colourful close-ups of genitals subtly superimposed on magazine articles, admiring beautiful nudes and Mapplethorpe’s groundbreaking self-portrait with a bullwhip in his anus, and wondering if the exhibit would attract the same admiring crowds in Ireland (a group of elderly ladies followed an enthusiastic guide through the rooms after me).  On the purple line back, a homeless man sang softly into my ear from just behind me, growing ever more threatening as his voice lowered (or was that just my imagination?).

she’s just a daydream girl, just a daydream girl

After that, I drove across America to the Split This Rock festival in Washington DC, where Jan, Celeste and their fellow Madwomen were presenting again.  Pilgrimage is a huge part of my writing practice (and, increasingly, of my identity), and I felt that with eleven days between the two events, America was calling me to traverse it for a future piece.

Day after day I drove through deserts, over mountains, into and out of strange towns and past stranger signposts.  I got incredibly good at stealing lunch from breakfast buffets, and hid plastic forks variously about my person.  I discovered that in gas stations “chicken salad sandwich” means a beige chicken-flavoured paste, vacuum-sealed into beige bread, and that I could have as much beef as I wanted for a few dollars pretty much anywhere.

I saw the Lincoln Memorial in the distance from a taxi, the oblong head of the giant statue a silhouette against celebratory floodlights.   Less than two weeks after I put my feet in the freezing Pacific at Pismo Beach, I walked into the Atlantic in Delaware: on both coasts, dolphins jumped through the waves at sunrise.

truckers: no fine for use of runaway truck ramp. 

 Split This Rock was on the opposite end of the spectrum of literary events as well as on the opposite side of the continent.  Founded in 2008, on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, its mission is to “celebrate, teach and cultivate poetry that bears witness to injustice and provokes social change.  Also unlike AWP and so many other literary events, it’s poetry-specific.

Young people were everywhere, including on stage, and there were street events and loud, exuberant slams that seem to happen around DC all the time, outside of the two-yearly festival.  At the Madwomen event Jan, Celeste, Tess and other teachers of the workshop at Carlow University (Emily Mohn-Slate, Sheila Carter-Jones and Maritza Mosquera) outlined their feminist teaching practices and read poetry about blowjobs, Obama, lesbian love and casual sexism.

Their aim was to spread madwomen workshops around America and further afield, and I was one of several participants who agreed to try to set a branch up (I’m talking to Tess about this).  We discussed VIDA and the exclusion of women writers from the canon(s), but the event was a celebration.

           “less top

            than bottom

            least top

            more bottom

            less ’s’

            more ‘m’

            more bottom

            more bottom

            less homo

            more sexual”

           Celeste Gainey

Later there was a reading by young slam poet Cedric Harper, STR poetry contest winner Lauren Alleyne (whose winning poem, Self Portrait with Neo Nazi Demonstration, is at http://www.splitthisrock.org/programs/contests-awards/2016-annual-poetry-contest) Jennifer Bartlett, Jan Beatty and Regie Cabico.

            “. . . the mother might

            say your child must be angry

            because you are disabled

             so I told her, your child

            must be angry

            because you are a bitch…”

 Jennifer Bartlett

 

         “Dear American Poetry

          I see you’re publishing

         straightman/straightman/white white white how

         nice.

        Are you kidding me? . . .”

        Jan Beatty

  

                                                                                                “queer me    

                                                                                                shift me    

                                                                                                transgress me  

                                                                                                tell my students i’m gay   

                                                                                                tell chick fil a i’m queer 

                                                                                                tell the new york times i’m straight   

                                                                                                tell the mail man i’m a lesbian            

                                                                                                tell american airlines 

                                                                                                i don’t know what my gender is . . .”                                                                                                  

Regie Cabico  

           

The end of the journal, as with all of my other attempts at journals, dissolves into fragments of poetry during the interminable return to an Ireland that seems so poetically stagnant after all this.  I am dreaming now about huge, winding roads and a landscape that Heaney never turned into a woman.  As usual, the next part of the journey has already overtaken me.

            “I have a place to write and when I’m there, things happen, and I’m not going to tell you                 what they are because you’ll think I’m crazy” – Mark Doty (AWP)

Kathy blogs at http://www.kathydarcy.com/