There were tons of good things that folks just didn’t want to take home with them. For instance, I found this great little card with the word ANTI in red on one side and this Alfred Starr Hamilton-like poem on the other:

Anti—met a traveller from an antique land.
Anti—had stood—a Loaded Gun.
Anti—puts its clothes on in the blueblack cold.
Anti-’s eyes are nothing like the sun.
Anti—catches tigers in red weather.
Anti—will always end up in this city.
Anti—will dies in Paris on a rainy day.
Anti—has wasted its life.
Anti—, too, dislikes it.

Nicely done! Go to their site for more information.

I also found a great picture of Michael Martone throwing a wadded-up ball of paper in the air. His long, gray hair is so incredibly retro that I had to pick the poster up off the floor and take it for my Maryland archives. I believe I glimpsed his Indiana phisog among the starlets.

Another gem is Estuary Magazine. I found this stranded in the middle of an empty table. Inside this issue—volume 11—is a fine poem by April Gentry, a name new to me.

Missing: July
I remember my father most
in the kitchen
those rare summer evenings
when he was mine

We never spoke
or at least
not enough
The work, not the words,
remains

The chipped enamel sink cradled dinner’s corn
small startled bugs paddling from refuge to refuge
Each ear swaddled in blankets of crisp green
rocked gently in the salted-down sea

One by one he skinned each clean
shucks and stalks snapped away
fistfuls of silks, golden sweet as doll’s hair
softer, straighter than my own

the staccato thunk of that fresh-sharpened knife
again and again against the battered board
kept cadence for
the deep bass rumble of his wordless, closed-mouth singing
and the insistent July chorus of cicadas

The cob exposed, a bone flayed clean
kernels fell in compact rows
huddled like secrets
even as baby teeth
the old black skillet
sighing its sugary steam of butter and corn

I remember my father most
here in the kitchen
these three scrawny ears
I’ve not sown nor harvested myself
The same iron skillet
heavy as memory
The dull knife unsteady
kernels cling to the cob

I hum between close-mouthed sobs
A voice barely my own
succumbs to the drone of cicadas

Estuary is from Savannah State University. It features literature and art from any person associated with SSU or any other Historically Black College or University. For more information contact them at estuary[at]savstate.edu

I was not alone in my scavenging from the tables. A gentleman with a stutter kept me company. He mentioned the tra tra treasures he was finding and asked if there was a good ca ca chiropractor nearby. I laughed and he laughed! but the treasures!

The Abstract; Tales of Wickedness and Sorrow by Goodloe Byron with its delightful illustrations is a dip in graphic noveldom with a splash of the old Penny Dreadfuls. this book deserves its own review, and will hopefully get one if I find the right person to do it. This is a brown paper book from www.brownpaperpublishing.com

Still have a few more, but it’s 3 in the morning. Better hit the hay. Jess

Though there’s no picture of him on this site, my friend the poet Rich Murphy stopped by to camp out with us at our table. I’ve known Rich and his work for years, and appreciate his friendship. The Maryland poet Kathy Mangan stopped by to talk about old times. I’ve known Kathy since the 1970’s. She came to AWP to hang out with Baltimore friends who publish Passager, a magazine with the interesting mission to “bring to light the collective imagination of those over 50.” To find out more about this enterprise from the University of Baltimore, check out Passager.

Next in the stack of AWP gifts is Are You Famous? by Ken Waldman, Alaska’s Fiddling poet. There’s Ken on the cover looking down-home and folksy and ready for a night of entertaining the upper middle class. He looks squeaky clean and mighty wholesome and he’s got a fiddle tucked under his chin. The blurbs breathlessly tell us that somehow he is another Carl Sandburg, another Kerouac, another Whitman, but what is jam-packed between these covers is a navel-eyed view of the world. If we’d run this book through a computer it would no doubt break down under the trillions of words having to do with Ken’s precious, down-home self: I, me, mine, I, my, mine, I, I, I, I. Take a look at Steinbeck’s Travels With Charlie, or Sandburg’s best work, or Kerouac’s On the Road, or even take a step back to Bartram’s Travels. What fine writers do is give us a sense of the places they move through, memorable slices of life, startling language, interesting dialogue. What we end up doing in this book is learning everything we don’t want to know about how Ken sets up readings, gets gigs, publishes his conversational effusions in the magazines. AWP Conferences seem to be his nesting grounds. We hear him whine about his credit card, see him get down to writing on a broken computer, list the grants he applies for. Is this elevating stuff? No. This is the chaff of po-biz plain and simple. Here’s a typical example from the book:

“My car has over 285,000 miles and I just spent $600.00 in Georgia for work on the suspension and alignment after it started shaking and rattling. But what was I going to do? [I’m wringing my hands now for this poor fellow. My God, Ken!] I was performing that night in Savannah. So I got my car fixed and was off, though got stopped on the way, pulled over by a cop in rural Eatonton, ostensibly for the broken side view mirror on the passenger side. But there was something else going on. He called a backup, so soon a second patrol car pulled in behind him, now two rows of blue lights flashing.”

What would Steinbeck, Sandburg, Whitman or London do with such a scene? We’d hear the talk, see the pot-bellied cop swallowing his chaw of Red Man in excitement to see an honest ta gawd longhair fiddler in his flashlight beam! We’d get a whiff of the man’s breath as he leans in over the rolled-down driver’s side window.

Instead, Ken passes by this invitation to show us what went on and informs us, solemnly:

“Afterwards he let me off with a warning and put out his hand. I thought about not shaking it, but what good would that do?…”

Well, maybe it would make for some interesting reading, Ken, instead of this steady drone and drivel about the auction of the soul.

Ken has a mysterious illness which he tells us about once in a while. I do hope he gets over it. Another source of tension for Ken is his lack of a girl friend. I hope he finds one. Appropriately enough, the final word of his narrative is “me.”

Maybe Ken is a better fiddler than he is a travel writer or poet, but I suspect that he wouldn’t be in the right place to connect with a new Woody Guthrie or a future Leadbelly. They’d be way the hell too dirty and unshorn and over on the wrong side of the tracks away from all the Starbucks coffee shops and Borders Books.

If I ever see Ken again I won’t ask if he’s famous. Instead, I’ll ask him to play “Niel Gow’s Lament.” Gow was an ancestor of mine and a very real fellow who suffered from more than an iffy credit rating. I wonder how Ken would play that tune?

Robin was kind enough to sign her book for me. No price is listed, but you can find more information about this book at www.wordtechweb.com.

My apologies for technical limitations that do not allow me to indent every other line. Here’s the title poem:

Smoke and Strong Whiskey

The word I’ve drawn is gratitude
but my throat is tight with longing.
Oh what could cure this wanting?
Smoke and strong whiskey? The
bodhram’s beat? Sing, on key, off key.
Sing even this wanting.
Wind shakes the needles from the pines,
the last wet pillows of snow.
It is the heart’s old talk of loss.
Cry, cry if you want to.
Wind will carry off the sound,
there’s no one to harm. Cry out
this wanting. It’s motion needed now,
a wind to shake the wanting out
that comes round every winter.
Move. I move with gratitude
into the winds that roar and cry
about my ears, roaring and crying
of winter, take the mountain path.

The words gratitude and move should be in italics.

AWP was a constant delight. My friend Robert Thompson (author of the remarkable City of Water), came bearing tidings from Joe Elliot, a name new to me, but one I want to see more often.

Here’s a poem from Opposable thumb:

For Instance

There is something about
an egg carton

that we don’t understand
but the dead do

They lie there underground
without day

without night
thinking of gray cardboard

the simple way it opens and closes
or sits in the hand

or the marvel of how
something so flimsy and light

can house two snug rows
of perfectly heavy fragility

as if it was nothing
an ordinariness sitting on the counter

quiet, not withholding meaning
but imbued with a dense

non-meeting out in the open
in a way we don’t understand

US$14.00 from SPD.

Sad news: farmers have banded together and have killed 133 monkeys! Their point is understandable: the monkeys kept coming down from the mountains to raid potato patches and generally hang out cutting up in simian fashion. Animal rights groups are protesting this action. My heart is with the monkeys of course, but as one who has studied Japanese Macaques closely, I can say that they do have a definite negative impact on agriculture. They’re too clever to keep out of the fields by common means. (Worse than bore-hogs, I hear.) They also break into homes and shops. Of course, they’re undomesticated, though the little ones are cute as all get-out, and their strength makes them fearsome scrappers with local dogs and children. This mass culling is unpresedented, however, and should be looked into. Jess

To answer David’s bio note: Sure, I remember Zahir (edited by a great lady named Diane), Dust, the wonderful Wormwood Review. I was there.

After a long disappearing act (thirty years he says) David Fraser arrives near the end of the first decade of the 21st century with 47 pages of poetry available for $14.00 from New Pages (see below) Press.

The cover features Denise (of New Pages, see below) looking cool with trout rippling past on their way to Ultimate Trouthood on the far side of the laminated spine. The back cover features a great blurb from Andre Codrescu. Oh Lucky David Fraser to be so honored!

Here’s a poem from the book:

Spaces

cat storm brewed
under cherry tree.

exposed film, prints
of the bare trellis
next to cherry tree.

diurnal bird speech
sated on cherries.

long grass around
trunk of…

waxwing drunk on over-
ripe cherries, in long grass
under…

dried pits at the end
of the branches above
drunken waxwings under
cherry tree.

opossum and skunk
forage for…
under…

this all happens outside
my small window, next to
the…

cat storm flashes in sky
above the small leaves
and transformed blossoms,
near the lilacs and blackberries
along the fencerow.

Yep.

Jess

Traded Alan Halsey’s Term as in Aftermath with Laura for this great book from Omnidawn. Alan addressed some poems to her in his latest, so I thought (correctly) that she’d be thrilled. The great thing about the AWP Conference is that you can just walk across the way and trade books! Generally it takes at least one week by post to do this.

Here’s a poem from A Semblance:

Why am I divided from him?
A continuous line begins with the brow
And becomes the nose by agreement
A piece of linen simplifies
The features of its women like
Masks or any other kind of quiet
A beautiful arrangement by convention
Only if accepted or if not
Why am I divided thoughtlessly?
A stylized head bisecting two scenes
Of life or its embroidered equivalent
House man clouds a child suspended from
Parentheses that by balancing unite and yet
Why am I silent in the foreground divided?

We hope to do a book of Laura’s in the near future.