@ AWP
I love the majesty of glowing invertebrates—
jellyfish, anemone, deep coral, slinking eels, subtle instinct depths I don’t know
but I’m afraid of water;
later, the woman on the hotel tv said
something awful about oil,
chemicals, and translucent
plastic domes.
Things make their own light in vast depths.
Vast is a meaning and no word—
no call center, no registration.
Vast only sorts out its years when tired of being vast.
That{in which will bite,}
compose vast.
What organic chemicals compromise me,
what appears from depths I don’t know
to strike my body in places I don’t know.
The webbing between my fingers and toes
is the soft stringing jellyfish flesh,
my fingernails are hard points of blue crab.
The Earth tastes salty, too.
I fear from fields of tall grasses and flowers
for insects and holes buried by things I don’t know,
because what I don’t know is a hole
I’m so far in—
will they join me?
Are these riders
approaching from distant lands I don’t know and from
directions I’ve yet to go?
Like desert beige and mountain brown
there were tables,
tables of books, shiny and new.
There was white, dark blue,
comfortable letters, mastheads,
there was watercolor
and there were the silhouettes of trees, always.
There were skinny boys with beards,
scruff, tight pants, golden brown hair, some like a lion’s mane,
some like grains pushed to the side of where a shadow pours into tracks
left through a desert.
Prepare to me like hands dust.
There were girls with glasses and shaggy streaks of blonde
in brown or oily tan hair. There were button up shirts and tight sweaters there
like emblems on flags. There were genders with escutcheons.
They look hopeful,
the look I see from behind slab after slab of glass
in the aquarium. They looked the fish they pour into the biggest tank—
that’s where the bigger fish have learned every line, every crevice;
they are waiting there.
There was a frog at the aquarium.
It pressed its hands to the wall and it looked out with languid yellow eyes.
There was a girl with a black coat and oversize flower talking on her cell phone in the lobby the whole time.
I saw her there after 8 hours of lectures and working the table,
and I kept a broadside for myself.
| Russell Jaffe |
|
levelheaded: @ AWP
Five years ago Kay Ryan wrote an essay about her first time going to AWP after “A Lifetime Of Preferring Not To.” AWP, or The Association of Writers & Writing Programs, holds an annual conference “to celebrate the outstanding authors, teachers, writing programs, literary centers, and small press publishers” (see here). Ryan’s take is the opposite of single-minded. Her impressions represent the profound and sometimes contradicting emotions of an established poet visiting the conference, and along the way, introduces the readers (especially those who have never been) to the nuts and bolts that make up the event. But Ryan’s essay is written from the point of view of a poet who published six collections of poetry over 20 years, received multiple awards, and vast recognition. “If I were young and hadn’t published anything, it would be different,” she says.
Russell Jaffe’s situation is very different from Kay Ryan’s (for now!). His outlook on the AWP conference is that of a poet not as established or recognized as Ryan, but rather aspiring, hoping, taking first steps (interestingly, they both have a lack of confidence when their visits begin). As a result, his poem is a tantalizing take of the event which, in opposition to Ryan’s prosaic, journal-like discussion of the actual occurrences, gives way to an imaginary world that is mixed up with the real one through a foggy view of the tables, books, and AWP event-goers.
Here’s the entrance to Jaffe’s alternate world, and what a great way to introduce and celebrate the conference’s game-players:
I love the majesty of glowing invertebrates—
jellyfish, anemone, deep coral, slinking eels, subtle instinct depths I don’t know
but I’m afraid of water;
Since we’re right under the “@ AWP” title, the reader is welcome to draw connecting lines between these oceanic inhabitants and the creatures that appear at the conference: poets, publishers, speakers, woman on the hotel tv, girl with a black coat. They all seem to be out of the speaker’s reach and point to his seclusion (compare to Ryan’s “A Drink in the Bar” section; “I met up with someone I knew,” she begins).
At least until the thirtieth line (“there were tables, / tables of books, shiny and new”), we get very little AWP and lots of emotions, depicted through undersea dwellers, through bodily oddities such as “webbing between my fingers and toes,” and through nature, as in “I fear from fields of tall grasses and flowers.” It is left to the reader to make the connections between those images and the conference, to infer what the equivalent of tall grasses and flowers might be, and who the “soft stringing jellyfish,” or the riders “approaching from distant lands” could be.
It is enough to point out six occurrences of the phrase “I don’t know” and the presence of “fear,” “I’m afraid,” and “I’ve yet to go” to understand the speaker’s uncertainty, and perhaps anxiety. The speaker’s case is one of a hopeful alienation. He is an outsider. He seeks a way in. He doesn’t find it but still hopes, asking “[W]ill they join me?” He tries to decode the “skinny boys with beards” and the “girls with glasses and shaggy streaks of blonde.” He hopes to belong, to break through an invisible barrier, just like the frog in the aquarium who “[presses] its hands to the wall” and “[looks] out with languid yellow eyes.”
– The Editors
