Well, I am home now, but I will give a short summary of Day 4, the last day of Desert Nights, Rising Stars. Liesl and I had a bit of a late start, groggy from the night before visiting with Carrie Kilgore and Gwendolyn Joyce Mintz. But we did find our way from the hotel to the first 8:15 a.m. session of Claudia Rankine’s poetry class: How shall we tell each other: the new documentary poetics. Rankine’s thesis is that all language must be available to the poet—the notion that there certain language that is available to poetry (while other language is off limits) is bunk. This means that you must “contaminate” the poem with as much daily material as you can. We also talked about Henry Louis Gates‘ thesis that texts “talk” to each other. For example:

Black Boy
Native Son
Invisible Man
Beloved

The most venerable texts in African-American literature are all responses to and informed by one another. Notice the connection Boy-Son-Man-Beloved and Black-Native-Invisible-Beloved as progressions. So our poetry is actually in conversation with what we have read and reflects and mirrors events. We read aloud from Mark Nowak’s Shut Up, Shut Down, and Juliana Spahr’s work–both of which deal directly with the world around them.

Then after the workshop, I wanted a cup of coffee, but because it was Saturday, everything on campus was closed, so I walked off campus to a weird corporate cafe, and had a cup with a chocolate scone, which was about a day’s worth of Calories. Sated, I waddled back to the conference, and into a lecture. Now, I thought I was in Lee Gutkind’s lecture On Creative Nonfiction, but apparently I was in Michael Stackpole’s Genre Fiction: Fast Track Writing Development. No matter, really, Stackpole was hilarious.

Then, there was a reading by Elizabeth Searle and Tania Katan, who many be my two favorite new writers in the universe. Searle is writing an opera based on Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerigan, and read aloud from it (really really funny) and Katan wrote a memoir, My One Night Stand with Cancer about breast cancer at 21 and again ten years later.

Then we went into workshop with Mac, and then emerged two hours later. I went to a panel with Mac and Mary Sojourner, Tom Wayman, and Paul Morris on teaching writing, which sort of reawakened all those weird ambivalent feelings I have about MFA programs, teaching, and academia in general. Most disturbingly, Mac pointed out that academia is a corporate environment. I suppose I knew that, but it’s still disturbing.

And then I drove back to Southern California.