How to Write

The established poet and writer Kay Ryan goes to a writers conference for the first time and leaves a beautiful little account of the dizziness of all these creative types talking in lit-crit slang about the business of being creative.

The deep pleasure of the piece is Ryan's prose. I'd forgotten what reading good poets' prose could be like. After months of plowing through politics and polemics and history, it's like icewater in the desert.

Because this is only Wednesday, registration day, most of the tables in the big hall are still empty, but there are signs announcing the names of the presses and journals that will be occupying them. There are venerable names and new ones. Some of these journals I’ve had dealings with for decades. Slow dealings, sending off poems in the mail, waiting for a reply. By the time I’d get my poems back (usually all of them) they would look new to me. I could see them in a new way, maybe like children getting off the bus from their first day of school. They’d been somewhere where they had to fend for themselves. You could get a new respect for them, and also you could think to yourself, How could I have sent them off looking like that?

She signs up for a string of seminars. Some of the presenters mumble and drone, and the whole thing makes her think of Monty Python. One of them is titled "Transgressive and Post-Confessional Narrative in Contemporary American Poetry."

The word transgressive is thick upon the ground here at AWP. I could also have attended panels titled, “Transgression and Convention: Writing the Erotic Poem” and “Impure Poetry: The Poetics of the Transgressive, Taboo, and Impolite.” It’s funny how writers will all want to jump on the same bed till the springs pop out. Then they go jump on another one. Transgressive apparently now means sex. Didn’t there used to be other transgressions? Will there be others again? How about, transgression against obsessive self-regard? That would be a good one: “Hello. I’m Jen and I keep having impersonal thoughts.”

Then post-confessional. What could this mean? Is post confession what comes after confession? Perhaps contrition? Or Hail Marys? Or dedication to good works? Or does post-confessional mean Confessional like Sexton or Lowell, but ironic and self-conscious now—saying, I am confessing, I see myself confessing, but I know no one can really confess?

In the event, transgressive and post-confessional narrative turned out to mean loosely-plotted tales of sex and attitude, read really fast and/or at high volume, which left me feeling amused and pleasantly avuncular, grateful to not be listening to a mumble panel.

At the end, like a fireworks finale, two "famous" poets read. But the fireworks fizzle.

W.S. Merwin reads second. Not a fortunate match. We are assured that he has won every prize winnable, but here today it is hard to see why. The poems drift across the acres of convention space as vague and shapeless as clouds; I keep feeling like maybe I’m taking mini-naps and missing the pieces that connect things up.

Yup. I've seen Merwin recommended so often I tried to discover him, on more than one occasion. It read like dull prose with line breaks.

And on the way home she encouters a fellow conference-goer who recognizes her and calls her an inspiration. Ryan is mortified.

What in the world was this lovely, unfledged creature doing teaching a creative writing course? And what in the world was my essay doing encouraging these ever expanding fuzzy rings of literary mediocrity, deepening the dismal soup of helpful, supportive writing environments? Shouldn’t I have been up on my back legs at least as much as Simone Weil would have been? Simone Weil, you will recall, abominated all mediocrity and would have recommended vaporizing all of its creators but for the fact that the mediocre grows in the same soil as the great and therefore kill one, kill the other. Simone Weil would have starved herself to death before she would have gone to AWP.