Nomenclature and the Hole in the Universe

So, AWP.

We meet again.

The melodrama factor in my internal monologue is really so high that when I strapped my badge around my neck and turned to face the bookfair last Friday, those words actually came to mind, and not even ironically. It was as mad(dened) as it is, and as tiring, and as clique-heavy. Since I don't have a clique, there was as much dead time as there usually is, during which I strolled or sat and maintained that wearying, pleasant smile. It wasn't bad, though. Saw one genuinely stupendous thing -- a newish online-gone-print project called Sidebrow essentially staged a Brechtian event during a panel on innovative collaboration. I am an instant and huge fan of Sidebrow, and if I can squeeze in time, I'm going to go through their anthology & whatever's new on their website and see whether I can write something new of my own to hook into their projects. So there was that, and I saw a few decent readings, and found out about a couple more new and new-to-me magazines. The TSUP reading went very well, contrary to my irritable expectations, and I got to meet the new winner, B. K. Fischer, who seemed immediately cool, lively & super smart & generally checked into the kinds of energy I dig. And the couple times I went by the TSUP table, someone was buying my book. HA! As ambivalent as I feel about being published, I did enjoy that bit of fuck-you to certain individuals who treat me with inadequate cordiality.

I also ran into someone from my MFA whom I hadn't seen or heard from in years, and it was even someone I completely like. She's not really in writing anymore, although it sounds like she kind of wants to get more deeply into it again, but she lives about two hours from DC, where this year's convention was, so she'd come up to it. We hung out quite a bit, and I was not only thrilled to run into her for her, but also to have someone to alleviate the sense of being a reprehensible isolate when everyone else I knew was off having dinner and drinks with each other. I asked her to send me her thesis; hopefully she will, and I'll see what we might do with it as far as a book. She's not a hugely prolific writer and never had much to do with revision, so my bet is that it's not a book as is, but she's also very talented and an extremely clever, thoughtful, playful writer. She ought to be able to make a book, on that. I'll be very happy if I can help her there.

The coolest thing, though, even cooler than running into Gilgamesh Rhapsode (she's very into Gilgamesh) was a bookmark. Not the kind in your browser, no, a real, paper bookmark. I need to take a photo of it and send it around, and hopefully if I do I'll also remember to post it here: my name is on this bookmark. The Allegheny Review, a journal for undergraduate creative writing that published me years ago, made up promotional bookmarks with a list of their previous authors on it, and they included me. Not only this! There are two lists, one big list in bright white print (navy background), and another below it in smaller, yellow print, and I'm on the better one. I'm on there with contemporary luminaries like Victoria Chang, a poet with excellent pubs and even excellent poems, and the very cool fiction-writer Ben Marcus. At the top of this list with all these swell people on it is David Foster Wallace. Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace. Of course, I'd be happier about it had his life not made him want to shuffle off his mortal coil, but given those limits, I am thoroughly delighted to appear on a list of writers with D.F.W. Even if by chance, even in terms of undergrad publications, that I got lifted out of the masses and set up with him is writer-cool of an alpine order.

Feel a bit like I should pour one out for Wallace after that, but I'm at a coffee place and I think they might revoke my unlimited-refills privileges if I dumped my coffee out on their floor. Perhaps the thought can count.

On the way back (by bus; airfare ended up being unattainable by the time I got part of my loans situation figured out), I started the first poem I will ever have written as a male persona. It's a ghost who first showed up in my head when I was about 19. I had the name Israel for him, but that never seemed quite right, and then I had the initials R.A.F. Recently I read that Edgar Allen Poe used Israfel as a pen name, and then there I was going through his city on the way to DC and back, so this has come together into a poem where this ghost talks to the person he's haunting. I don't think the person is aware of the poem. (Can't call it speech, because it's from a ghost; can't call it communication if the other person isn't involved -- but nor is it a letter or quite a monologue or anything else I can think to call it just now.) Brought my Victoria-Regina tarot deck for reference imagery and am going to see what I can do with that tonight. Possibly also work up a scrap of a poem I wrote just almost a year ago, for which pieces of this ghost poem seem to be better-intended. Yes, you can write in a coffee place, even write the way I write. You can write anywhere your resources are at hand. Frequently this isn't the case even in your own apartment, and as frequently it comes to be somewhere totally else. They have crepes here. Important.

The conference affirmed for me the place a still-to-be-named poetry magazine run by me (and a friend I've asked to come on board as co-editor) could have. The writing world is just full of people like me, who are fireworks & nymphly acrobatics compared to the hordes of narrative poems about tractors and pregnancy, but who have long ceased to be impressed by Language poetry's manic jockeying for its own hip edge. We all kind of wince tiredly at the former and look over our shoulders and roll our eyes at the latter -- but nobody's standing up and making any claim for the kinds of poetry we do as having distinct character, a center of gravity, a recognizable set of aims. Everyone coasts along and lets the discourse more or less remain silent on what we do. Crucially, this means it's silent on how what we do is actually already a critique of quite a lot of what's out there, already an alternative. We tend not to be soapboxers; most of us just say what we write is poetry, and don't get into the mud trying to argue about what ours does.

Well, I'm the person who gets into that mud. I end up there when I don't mean to, because I go and believe things and act on those beliefs and they don't turn out to be what the arbiters of whatever arena want. If there's a need for an entity to voice this work as a coherent aesthetic position, and there is, I can do that.

It's therefore increasingly incumbent on me to figure out a damn name. I'm determined to have a name that's a statement, as I wrote here when I was initially working through some of these ideas. The vast majority of titleable things have nouns as their names, from "The Metamorphosis" to The Egoist to The Godfather. You might get a noun with an interesting descriptor, like Tin House or Six Characters in Search of an Author or my maiden cowboy names. Names: Ulysses, Margie. There are some indeterminate titles that are a little more active, where words that are mostly verbs get substantiated into nouns -- Blast or Radical Scatters -- and gerund phrases that lean active: Being a Green Mother, Smashing Pumpkins. And there are the nonsense or unidentifiable-case titles, which can be interesting, like LIT, Swink, Versal, and Jubliat. Titles that are full-on noun/verb/direct object statements, though, are very rare. They stand out, though. The Walls Do Not Fall -- even though the verb's negated and intransitive, that's a title that instantly establishes a world. Passion Leaves a Trace. "Rimbaud Decides to Put Away Childish Things." Years after running across it in a clearance sale, I remember a yarn -- I think from Alchemy Yarns -- called She Threw a Brick. Two books of poems that I haven't found all that interesting as books with absolute top-shelf titles, both from Alice James: Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form and Shahid Reads His Own Palm. The way two points call a line into existence, three points a plane, four our own spatial dimensions, these phrases instantiate realities. There are agents and actions and (in all but the H.D. book) recipients of those actions. They're instantly relational statements. I'm so set on finding one for this magazine. Also one for the Magpie book, for that matter.

This morning I started thinking of titles in terms of (popularly imagined) Native American names, though, too. Walks Delicately with Deer. Stirs the Fire. Stirs the Fire Steadily. Stirs the Fire at Dawn. Chief Rainy Mountain, Squaw Sights Her Bow Twice. (My made-up Indians are gender-equitable. Of course. I'm a guilty white person; don't expect me to deviate from that.) Lightning Down to the Rapids. Spotted Trout, Burning Pine, Mare's Hoof, Big Shine Around the Moon. I like that vibe, too, though if I use it to make a journal name, hopefully I'll be a little less heavy-handed.

Everything I'm thinking of so far with the mix of beauty, potential danger, and alien quirkiness is too girly, though -- dragonflies, naiads/oreads/dryads. Fountain pens don't have components with quite the right combination of sound and form. Daggers, too high-fantasy; any birds I'm thinking of, too approachable; plants. . . I do so much with plants. It would feel like a default setting. There are a lot of poisonous and thorned and sticky and vining plants that get the mood I want, but surely I can go bigger than that. Broken glass, too inanimate. Lava, too masculine (Pele notwithstanding). Tapestry and needlework occurs to me, but too feminine for the most part and too European. Usually these kinds of negations turn me around to see what I need, or at least they do in poetry when I have some noumenon I want to get at (yes; pretentious white person as well as guilty white person). Not happening yet, though. The next question then would be whether I can name the difficulty naming the thing, and use that. Maybe. Then it becomes naming a threatening, amorphous darkness in these terms, and I could perhaps come up with that if I stew with it a while.