We can’t walk on our heels back out the front door of pleasure’s experience. I’m denied the mercy of undoing in myself anything that’s pleased me.
But one granted mercy: the deeper our experience, the less ourselves we are in it. Pleasure won’t let me go backward (the thought is Hemingway’s, from Death in the Afternoon), but it will let me be anonymous.
Cough cough cough… This thought occurred to me tired of mortal flesh, in a Chicago Best Western, drinking warm white wine for a hellacious head cold and hiding from the 5,000-attendee Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference. This is the scene:
I mostly didn’t throw money at the conference’s bookfair. I regrettably blew two shots at hearing readings from American Hybrid. I went to forums on multiformalism and prison poetry. I moderated a talk on pedagogy. I mostly didn’t sleep.
And I’d been anonymous: hearing an 84-year-old William Gass read; hearing Zach Savich teach a no-account drinking song to an upstairs room full of dunked poets and ardent-poet-followers at the Hopleaf before he read his own poems; hearing Johannes Goransson share his translations of the ludicrously violent, beautiful work of Aase Berg. I know I’m hearing my heroes when I quit thinking about heroes when I hear them. Or anything– quit thinking about anything, slip into what.
It’s easy to resent the teeming, handshake-seeking supermall of AWP– to get hung up on the networking, the cupidic smiles and gossip and anxiety-smell– but resentment hardly seems worth it. This year I saw a dozen friends. And if, after a weekend of hearing strangers talk taste, I left thinking I prefer appetite to taste, at least I learned something.
An understanding of metatheater– a sense of when a performance is about performance, comment over creation– is not as important as critics believe. Or: as critics would have us believe. Yesterday afternoon I walked through Grant Park to the edge of the water. In pleasure I encounter my huge impassive featureless ancestry, like a lake.
The Polish playwright and novelist Witold Gombrowicz once wrote, in an essay on Bruno Schulz: “Not only imaginary events, but those which we recall, in their flesh and bone, are really nothing but a form of chance, just a mask behind which a chaos watches us, a magma as somber as it is anonymous.”
Here are two irreducible poetic kernels by Susan Parr. Here is an excellent new 138-year-old journal seeking submissions. I’m off for cough drops.