Q: What Are Poems?

A: Poems are words that take you through three kinds of doors: closed doors, secret doors, and doors you don’t know are there.

--Stephanie Strickland

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Live-Blogging Final Conan

11:35

The Silver Jews and now Conan. The 90s are finally over.

John Mayer's song for Conan:

Look at me
I used to live in NYC
Now I'm as douchey as a man can be

11:40

Told A. I would stop.

Last Episode of Late Night with Conan O'Brien

to air tonight. White Stripes to play, which might look a little somethin' like this.

*
I remember how I put a picture of Conan with a milk moustache on my bedroom door. He was everything I wanted out of humor in the 90s: sarcasm, self-deprecation, spazziness. Okay, so, the picture is still there, whatever.

I remember when I created my first online profile on AOL, and listed my favorite TV shows as "Felicity, Buffy, Friends, and Conan."

I remember when my sisters and I went around adding the phrase for me to poop on to the ends of all of our sentences, and especially to each others' (after a sufficiently dramatic pause), which made us laugh so hard we'd cry.

*
Conan'll be back June 1, so there'll be no tears tonight, but I'll still watch, and feel sorry for his move to the opposite coast, about which he says: "I think putting us in Los Angeles, on the other side of the country, a place I'm genetically not engineered to exist in, could be just the ticket for us."

*

In the meantime, we'll have some Jimmys:



My favorite Jimmys, ranked:

1. John
2. Kimmel
3. Fallon

*

Apparently I am precisely aged to be "a member of the demographic most likely to view Conan with love and affection: people who reached late-night-TV-watching age at around the same time Conan's show started getting good, around 1995 or so. If you're like me, you started watching Conan regularly at around age 13 or 14, and continued as a highly regular viewer for the next eight or nine years, your loyal fandom enabled by the fact that, as a teenager and then a college student, you had no problem staying up until 12:40 every night."

Haha

"Although we enjoy reading your blogs about your conference experiences, the survey enables us to track your evaluation of a few specific components of the conference.

"To complete AWP's 2009 Conference Survey, please visit us online."

MIT "Labette" for Filmic Narrative

“The idea, as we move forward with 21st-century storytelling, is to try to keep meaning alive,” said David Kirkpatrick, a founder of the new venture.

In the USC Filmic Writing program, they told us very ceremoniously that we were Our Culture's Storytellers. In the past, every town might have one; now, we were it -- we were the yarnspinners at the firepit.

But the other half of what college was teaching me was how silly it was to say things like "keep meaning alive." There was a Derrida conference poster in the hallway of the English Department. I defected. Arrived at the Pomo Expo.

This is an undergrad struggle, maybe, but perhaps an essential 21st-century one, too. I am still as seduced by Meaning as anyone, but I resist pat answers, master narratives, Oprah, etc. That's why I quit diary writing.

Oh, and screenwriting. And fiction writing.

Here's what I think now: writing doesn't need to "make sense" of things, extract "meaning," but it should provide an interesting organization for thinking and imagination. This is a very basic idea of what I think poems should do: create new patterns. The word "framework" seems applicable, too, but sounds a bit cold. With "pattern," you can imagine a kaleidoscope....

a / long / division by hanna andrews

My Favorite Day of AWP

The morning after, at home with a big stack of books.

I put on Destroyer's Rubies and read Noelle Kocot's Sunny Wednesday. A. tells me not to read the depressing book first, but I explain that it's not, she's got one of the best imaginations of any poet and that's never depressing. Sometimes it seems that imagination is hardly valued in poetry. (Hardly valued anymore?) Also, imagination is different from innovation.

He interrupts my reading with lines from Chelsey Minnis' Poemland (I guess so far this is a Wave Books commercial, okay by me):


When I read poems I don't like them...

But I like them like pouf-roses...

I like them like gilt saws...

And I like them like dark brown ram shearling!...


To enchant someone meaninglessly...

Is like getting insulted and kissed by your riding instructor...


It's only now that I've grabbed the book to retype it that I realize it's riding instructor, not writing.

At the time, a couple minutes ago, A. said he'd first read that poem in the halls of the AWP Bookfair, and felt very strongly the evolutionary/breeding impulses there, the desire to enchant someone meaninglessly...

I felt like the book in my hand and the book in his were in competition. "She always makes me laugh," I said, "but I don't know. Right now I sort of have more admiration for this"--waving Sunny Wednesday--"someone who's still trying to write an old-fashioned poem."

I go back and forth.

There's a line in Sunny Wednesday that includes rubies:


Better to keep on walking,

Mumbling a song of soft
Sad clauses like someone in love,
Leaving a trail of rubies
Like bullet holes across the faded

Forehead of the snow.


I remind A. of when I said Noelle Kocot was the most Destroyer-like poet (I want to write an essay about Destroyer and contemporary poetry but I haven't found the right angle or even the obtuse one). "See?" I say. "A trail of rubies!" It's weak evidence but seems necessary to mention as "Your Blood" plays.

I ask A., "Hey, for someone who hates poems about poetry so much, why do you love Chelsey Minnis?"

He nods and smiles. "No, I know. This is something I have to reconcile."

Ten minutes later he looks up and says: "Maybe because it's so revolutionary that she can talk about whatever she wants. It's just exactly what I want to hear.

"At a time like this, when information has done what it's done to language, to walk around thinking, Now I'm going to write a poem, or, Now I'm going to write an essay, is no use to us--first of all constructing anything meaningful.... Why don't you just say, I'm constructing text? And if it's very short, people can call it a poem."

I agree.

The album's over. I scroll through and then put on Loney, Dear. That's wrong, though, so when I come back from the bathroom I scroll a little further and then put on Lou Reed's Berlin.

A. says he's glad no one at our school would ever say Find your voice.

Switchback AWP Happenings!

I wish I could promise an actual 1960s-style Happening, but you never know what will happen when you stop by the Switchback table with wishes and requests. You can find us beside Featherproof Books and dancing girl press at tables 754/755, and all of our related events are listed here.

Zoom!

I couldn't be exciteder (once your chapbook comes out you're allowed to use words like exciteder and no one will bat an eye!!):

Inside a Red Corvette: A 90s Mix Tape is now officially available from the greying ghost press. Since the chapbook is so much for and about all the relics of my teenage self that are still with me--songs, clothes, friends!--I love that Carl wrote this in the description:

Imagine finding that tape you made after school that one hellish tuesday - the same that got stuck in your car's deck until you yanked it out with a screwdriver after you sold it to a junkyard for parts.

I think I will always, in one way or another, write for that hellish Tuesday. That's the stuff, man. That's the stuff.

Thanks, Carl!

It's Your Birthday When Your Chapbooks Arrive

I had them delivered to my office, since Chicago postal workers like to "go postal" and steal my mail, but having them sitting here is making it very hard to concentrate at work! It's like being at work on your birthday!

Carl packed them in a box full of multicolored paper strips, so digging down to the bottom was like birthday confetti!

Happy birthday to us all.

Dear St. Gyros

Thank you for putting "Filthy/Gorgeous" on that mix you made for me so I can walk down the street feeling like I'm bedazzled at the foodcourt.



I feel like Kath and Kim would understand how I made my first-ever pan of Scotcheroos for Superbowl Sunday even though I didn't really know who was playing in the Superbowl. I feel like I sorta did it in their honor.

St. G says: "Stop blogging, start living."

What We've All Been Wondering

Does Michael Phelps' lung capacity allow him to take monster bong hits?

Spoiler: the answer is yes.

Isn't the biggest point of interest clearly not that an Olympian smokes pot, but that a potsmoker can win so many of these guys?



Also, when you first saw Michael Phelps on TV, didn't you kind of think he was the guy you saw smoking pot in the corner at a college party?

Final Joos Song

A song that once got us through a fall and a spring (and a summer and a summer and a summer) in south central LA:



Smith & Jones Forever

Are you honest when no one's looking?
Can you summon honey from a telephone?
They sat there with their hooks in the water
and their moustaches caked with airplane glue.

o come let us adore them
California overboard
when the sun sets on the ghetto all the broken stuff gets cold.

Smith and Jones forever!
Smith and Jones forever!
Smith and Jones forever together forever and ever.

Build a stage for Autumn's bitch.
They walk the alleys in duct tape shoes.
They see the things they need through the windows of a hatchback
The alleys are the footnotes of the avenues.

o come let us adore them
California overboard
holding up their trousers with extension cords.

Smith and Jones forever!
Smith and Jones forever!
Smith and Jones forever together forever and ever.

I've got two tickets to a midnight execution.
We'll hitchhike our way from Odessa to Houston
and when they turn on the chair
something's added to the air
when they turn on the chair
something's added to the air forever

Smith and Jones forever!
Smith and Jones forever!
Smith and Jones forever together forever and ever.....