I won't be at AWP this year. I'm going to miss these things/ people/ situations:
1. The book fair. The best thing about AWP. All those books and journals. All those editors desperate for attention. All those authors desperate to make a sale.
2. Sycophants!
3. The expensive drinks. The cheap food finds.
4. The sloppy ass kissing by MFA students.
5. The swag.
6. Watching AWP virgins stress out. I'm talking to you, Land Mammal.
7. The terror the surges through my body when someone walks up to me and says, Are you Lorcaloca?
8. The Con Tinta peeps!
9. The dick measuring contests. I won this. She won that. He won what?
10. Watching all the old and ugly male poets hook up with young things.
11. Old teachers.
12. Meeting bloggers for the first time. I'm talking to you, Brent Goodman.
13. [scratch that] I meant to type: The glory. Really.
14. Catching up with all the deadbeats. Those MFA graduates with no awards, no publications, no books. Wait, I have no book. Damn!
15. The terrible dancing.
16. Watching MFA students from piss-small MFA programs talk up Iowa graduates.
17. All the book launches: Ali Stine, Randall Mann.
18. Catching up with old classmates.
19. Kissing drunk poets.
20. Walking past the tables of journals I don't like and sticking out my tongue at the editors. Which journals? Third Coast, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Antioch Review, New Letters...
21. Hanging out with James Allen Hall.
22. Getting ignored by the editors of journals that I love. Which journals? Tin House, American Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, Virginia Quarterly Review...
23. Latino hotties: Jacob Saenz, Paul Martinez Pompa.
24. The endless po-biz talk.
25. You.
About Me
- Eduardo C. Corral
- Eduardo C. Corral is a CantoMundo fellow. He holds degrees from ASU and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, jubilat, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Post Road. His work has been honored with a "Discovery"/The Nation award and residencies from The MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. He has served as the Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University and as the Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University. He's the interview editor for Boxcar Poetry Review. He won the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.
7 comments:
Hi,
Why am I not on this list?
This feels like discrimination.
Steve
How about being the subject of rumors and gossip? That's always fun!
I'd be interested to hear if Forrest Gander's in attendance. He recently sent me an email telling me he couldn't answer any of my questions because he was so busy with life's tragedies. But then I saw him on the schedule for a reading at AWP, so I'm confused.
Ooh, I was going to make my own list but yours is too good.
I'm not attending AWP this year either.
I'll miss the rumors and gossip.
Oh! I forgot about Randy's book coming out. I will definitely miss that.
That is a vicious list, Eduardo! And yet, as I'm reading it after the fact, I recognize many of the things you listed (#15!! #9, #16).
Also the book fair is much better with a small five-year-old in tow. You get more candy that way. (PS Thanks to Rigo, my son also came home with a wind-up boxing kangaroo, a scuttling crab, and a dancing elf!)
I missed you Eduardo!!!
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