The 2009 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop started yesterday (With a bang, not a whimper! They let Jay and me drive a golf cart!) I’m reminded of a few things:
1.) All good things begin with a confession. Here’s one: chances are good I’ve forgotten your name already. When Genesis was being workshopped, they edited out the part where Adam used nametags for all the animals Yahweh paraded before him–that detail didn’t carry enough emotional freight, you know? Show, don’t tell. But it’s true: viz., a cardinal’s breast. Nametags are an act of God. (I promise I’ll know names by Monday!)
2.) Workshops that witch doctor the manuscript you brought with you are completely different than what happens here. This experience is about writing something new here, now. You’ve got to bring something to the idea shop. None of this works unless the writer sweats for it. We just keep the shop stocked. Assembly is an art act. The instructions are the body played across a specific moment. There’s no magic to the process…
3.) ….but there is magic to the place. It never ceases to amaze me how many people are smitten by Gambier when they see it for the first time. Such a cupid, this place. Tigerlilies like a sundress. Oak gecko’d trees. Fireflies like Apollo’s boy hucking the stars into the sky at night, or light that wants to be low among us….
4.) In a room full of strangers, all we have is where we are from. Until the stranger part imitates intimacy, and then becomes intimacy. I always forget this.
5.) Carl Phillips‘ class used “90 North” by Randall Jarrell today. Do you know it? I think it may be the most devastating poem I know. I wish I had been in that workshop. But usually I wish I had been in each of the workshops, by the end.
6.) For levity’s sake–try adding “like a bear to its floe” after, oh, anything. I sang like a bear to its floe. I dreamt of bees like a bear to its floe.
7.) The Peter Taylor Fellows will read tonight. I’m excited–this year they are Jennifer Grotz, Amos Magliocco, Jason Sack, Jason Gray, Nicola Dixon, Derek Askey and Jessica Handler. It’s okay to be a little jealous like a bear to its floe.
8.) Nancy Zafris told me a story about first lines, and read an excerpt from a children’s primer that teaches us to dress up our prose in adjectives. Let’s say this: most adjectives are like sweaty silk shirts. Beware the ??ber-blinged sentence. The wages of sin!
9.) Deborah Digges‘ absence is palpable–she was supposed to teach here this summer before her untimely passing. It has sent me back through her books. There’s a poem at the end of Late in the Millenium called “Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species.” It destroyed me when I found it last night–utterly, wholly, transcendent. A taxonomy of the ecstatic possible. Find it!