The Skinny...

I've talked about this so much with so many people that I'm sick of it, but I need to rehash one last time, here... because it was the biggest thing that happened to me at AWP...


My insane panel, and the insane reaction it received.


The topic was (basically) "Why do poets start writing prose and how do they feel about it?" I hadn't realized it was going to be so heated. I had no idea it was such a provocative subject.


My goal in pitching this panel was just (honestly) that I know a lot of people who are, like me, working in multiple genres, and I wanted to force poets to talk about money and audience (which they don't do often in public. I wanted to hear people say things like:


"It's nice to know that other (regular) people are reading your work. It's nice to get fan mail from strangers."


Or


It's nice when my grandma "gets it."


Or


"There are things I jsut can't say in a poem."


Or even


Man, aint nothin wrong with a paycheck."


Because those things are true, but poets sometimes get uncomfortable talking about them. And I like to force private conversations out into the open.


Of course, I had planned to go slow... begin with aesthetics and hybrid forms, the lyric essay and prose poetry. I was going to ask about whether or not certain ideas/subjects demand new forms... about whether linebreaks and tight revision get in the way of communication.


But we never really got there, at least not all the way there. (I'd never moderated a panel before, and I wasn't prepared for what happened)


Because first we all got up and told our "stories." We (the panelists listed in the post below) each explained how we'd come to write prose (specifically nonfiction) , and in different ways, we discussed why "nonfiction writer" is sometimes a hard hat to wear. Some of us even used the word "shame."


Now please, understand that nobody ever meant to suggest that nonfiction is shameful. None of us feel that way about any genre, and I did my best to explain that. I tried to state (over and over) that the world is full of amazing nonfiction and sloppy poetry. We weren't saying poetry was better. We weren't even saying it was easier (to write), though we did at one point talk about it being easier for most people to read, and we said it might be easier to publish. But we really didn't mean to judge nonfiction or nonfiction writers.


I think what we meant was...


Well...


You know how if you're from somewhere. Like, you're from Baltimore (which I am)... and you think of yourself as being a Baltimore girl. And then you move to, say, Atlanta (which I did)....


No matter how you like Atlanta, it feels funny when people ask where you live. So you say, "Atlanta, but I'm from Baltimore, really." Because your identity is still attached to Baltimore. You don't hate Atlanta. You don't think other people should be ashamed of Atlanta. It's not a southern/northern thing. But on some level you're ashamed (or conflicted-- a better word) at having jumped ship.


Poetry is like that for me, a bit. I'm a poet on the inside, but because prose comes faster, and is easier to publish, my prose credentials are lapping my poetry credentials. So there's some confusion for me on the outside. On the inside I'm still just writing, all kinds of things. But I do have an outside self and it does connect to a lot of things in my life. I do care (I'll admit it) how people see me. I want to be respected as a poet by other poets. I fear losing that... and however much it shouldn't feel like that, it does sometimes. It DOES feel like writing books for children will compromise how seriously I'm taken.


Anyway... I think that was a big part of what I wanted to say. And I wanted the conversation to provoke discussion. I wanted it to bear fruit. I wanted to hear other people say things.


But once people heard that word "shame" they stopped listening I think. They didn't hear me say


"I'm not saying all nonfiction is bad. Some of it is amazing. I'm just saying that there's a lot of bad personal narrative on Livejournal and maybe that affects how I feel about my own personal narrative."


They didn't hear me say,


"I'm not saying all poetry is inaccesible and limited. I'm just saying that for me personally, there are things--like childbirth and politics-- that I can't write in a poem. And I can write about them in an essay."


What the poets heard was "Poetry is academic and inaccesible, and I want to make some fucking money."


And what the nonfiction writers heard was, "Nonfiction is easy. I could do it in my sleep. Any monkey could."


And so a lot of people (oddly, most of them much older than me) got up and left. And one man just kept yelling from the front row, and then he left too.


And then, that night, I was telling someone about this, and they were like, "Was that YOU?" Apparently, this dude was sitting outside the room and got to overhear the angry people leaving the panel early. He seemed entertained by it all.


And then, over and over, I got to have people come up to me and say, "Oh, man! I heard about your panel."


Which was lovely.


Of course, I did have a lot of interesting conversations as a result, and that was, I guess, ultimately the point. But I didn't sleep well Thursday night.