A few days ago, in his Sewanee Writers’ Conference craft talk, Richard Bausch said, “A writer is a bookish person.” (He also praised the value of exposition — reversing the “show, don’t tell” directive — and bemoaned the number of how-to-write manuals that Amazon peddles: 4,470 and rising.) Looking around the dorm room where I’ve spent the past week, I see evidence of my own bookishness: stacks of poetry and prose by Charles Martin, James Magruder, Alan Shapiro, Matthew Pitt, Jehanne Dubrow, Cheryl Strayed, David Yezzi, Mary Jo Salter, M.O. Walsh, Aryn Kyle, Padgett Powell, Andrew Hudgins, and Beth Bachmann. These are writers from whom one can learn something. As Bausch said later in his talk: “Take in the great writers! They give you ammunition.”
Bausch was referring to Dickens and Tolstoy, I think. But who’s to say we don’t have a Dickens or Tolstoy on this Tennessee plateau? I’m midway through the 12-day conference; I’ve attended readings by Robert Hass, Dorothy Fortenberry, Elizabeth Spencer, Beth Henley, Diane Johnson, Claudia Emerson, Christine Schutt, Jill McCorkle, and others. I’ve heard Wyatt Prunty lecture on Larkin; I’ve heard Charles Martin compare translations of Horace. The pace here is relentless (it’s basically breakfast-reading-reading-panel-lunch-workshop-reading-reception-dinner-reading-beer), but the feeling, at least for me, is one of time standing still, or standing apart — of the temporal world clearing its calendar so these poems and stories may be heard, so these new friendships may be forged. My rational side knows that the world has continued to spin (George Steinbrenner died; I bought a house, in absentia), but my Sewanee-romantic side believes otherwise. And how could I jump ahead, emotionally, to the time when I won’t be here, when readings by Greg Williamson, Catherine Wing, and Mary Jo Salter are still to come?
I need to dash now to a Fellows reading (featuring Dylan Landis, Julie Tosh, and Will Wells); I’ll post further thoughts about the conference soon. I haven’t even mentioned the brilliant readings by the conference staff members (including two of my Waywiser press-mates, Erica Dawson and Carrie Jerrell). Or the panels! (One featured KR Editor David Lynn, who was asked by an audience member, “I have three manuscripts — one is 1,000 words, one is 5,000 words, and one is 22,000 words. Which should I send to The Kenyon Review?” David’s immediate answer: “The best.”) Or Padgett Powell’s reading from The Interrogative Mood. (There was no Q & A afterward; the whole thing was Q.) Or, my biggest omission of all, Alan Shapiro’s reading of last night, which moved from comedy to meditation to elegy, and which left at least one audience member in tears. (Alan’s also the nicest guy — no small designation — in the world.) Here are the closing lines from “Open-Mike Night in Heaven,” a poem that Alan didn’t read last evening, but one that I keep thinking and thinking about:
What am I doing here?
You wise guy, you, you
Holy Trinity of stooges,
what’s the big idea?
Why have you brought me
to the edge of heaven
if not to look back
to the infernal regions(how infernal? Don’t ask,
my aunt would say —
that is, Dantesque)into the smoke-filled clubs,
the dives, the mine shafts
of the lower circuits,
where the ones
you’re eternally killing
make howls that
from this distance sound
almost like laughter.