Talk, Drink, Eat: Writers Conference Poem by Kevin Rabas

I heard Kevin Rabas read this poem about what really goes on at writers' conferences--indeed, many conferences. As AWP board member and former conference chair, I have seen the hard work staffs and organizers put into conferences. First-rate programming is the first step, and the second step is to make sure the bartenders are ready for sober and less sober writers who spend long hours congregating. Despite warnings the bar in Chicago ran out of some essential supplies, for example. People who use words for a living love to talk--no surprise. Talk, Drink, Eat. This poem, from Kevin's forthcoming book Sonny Kenner's Red Guitar (Coal City 2013) is about one writer group's expedition out of the conference hotel to find local flavor:

When the Writers Gather and Drive

 

                                   AWP Austin, for Amy Sage Webb

  

Amy, a foodie, says she knows about this great place

 outside of Austin, and we gather around my car

in the Hilton parking garage, which is lit like a cave.

We can’t get the child’s seat out, and so Amy volunteers

 to sit in it. I have on my first pair of roper cowboy boots

 since I was 12, and I floor it, unintentionally, and we barrel

 out of the Hilton parking garage and into the purple Texas night,

 four writers looking for fine food on the outskirts of town,

 down and around lots of curves and rises and falls in the road,

 Amy, perched like a baby bird, in my toddler’s child seat.

 Like a scene from Wonder Boys, movie of writers and their cars;

 Grady Trip’s trunk holds a dead dog, a tuba, and a set of suitcases perfectly,

 just like in the ad. Although I’m driving, Amy is in the lead, saying,

 “Go left here. Now straight through the next two lights. Now right.”

 Bart is in the backseat with Amy, and he says, “There are almost no

 families with siblings who are writers. The Bronte Sisters,

 the Brothers Grimm, they are the exceptions. We’re alone

 in our families.” “But we’re all brothers and sisters here,” someone says,

 and Jeffrey tilts his ballcap back, and I step a little harder on the pedal,

 and we scale a series of small curves. Like a rollercoaster climbing, we make our way

 up the mountain and to the restaurant that looks like a cabin from the outside.

 Inside, it’s finer than the Ritz, and we take shots in the entrance,

 using my disposable camera, pulled from a pocket and snapped into light.

 This is the life you never hear of, the once a year gathering of the birds,

 of the tribe. There are a bunch of us, say 8000. But we live all over

 the country, and there seem to be no two in one town, people who choose paper

 over television, legal pad and quick pen script over that email or Facebook

 you’re just dying to write, people who watch and write down what

 the neighbors do and do not do, who record the town, in secret, for about 35K a year,

 and sink into ecstasy when a small press picks up what they have written

 and prints it, and it stays in print, in a few libraries and in the homes of friends,

 decades after the writer passes, a record, a sketch of that time, traced and retraced

 until it almost takes on paint, the way revision works. Someone spent a lifetime

 writing and rewriting a moment, a scene depicting your life, and that someone

 is speeding down curves, in a loaded car, full of wine and fine food, the best meal

 they may ever have had, and that is the way of it, once a year, when the writers gather,

 Webb in the coxswain spot, giving directions, as the car sways and rumbles, writes

 its way into the oncoming night.

 

Kevin Rabas co-directs the creative writing program at Emporia State University and is co-editor of Flint Hills Review. He has two books of poetry, Bird’s Horn and Other Poems (Coal City Review Press) and Lisa’s Flying Electric Piano (Woodley Press), a Kansas Notable Book and Nelson Poetry Book Award Winner. He is a winner of the Langston Hughes award for poetry. "When the Writers Gather and Drive" reprinted with permission of the author. It was first published in Blue Island Review.

AWP 2013 Conference Features Nobelists Walcott and Heaney

Seamus Heaney

The 2013 AWP Annual Conference and Bookfair will be in Boston March 6-9, 2013, at the Sheraton Boston Hotel & Hynes Convention Center. Keynote speakers will be Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney, both of whom have won Nobel Prizes in poetry. For more information, see the AWP link:
http://www.awpwriter.org/conference/2013headlinersbios.php

I have followed both of their works since the 1980s. Both are incredible, but I had the pleasure of spending time with Heaney years ago.

Derek Walcott

 In 1985, I had the pleasure to be at a very small conference that featured Seamus Heaney as keynote. I took a van full of Haskell Indian Nations University, then Haskell Indian Junior College, students to Pittsburg State in southeast Kansas to be part of the Kansas Writers Association, a state group of college creative writing departments and independent writers. Most of us were AWP members also. Michael Heffernan was one of the organizers, as well as Stephen Meats, poetry editor of Midwest Quarterly, and the special collections librarian, Gene DeGruson. Altogether maybe there were 75 attendees. This background helps to explain the intimacy of the event.

Heaney did his keynote, and I remember his chattiness and charm. His poems had sounds I had not heard arranged so densely in a poem. His poems taught me about country life in Ireland and those politics as well. He was companionable, comfortable, and engaging as a reader. But also, despite his reputation, even then, he participated and seemed to enjoy all the events. He did not present his talk, collect a check, and speed away to the airport.

For me the greatest moment came during the open mic. All the visiting program directors read, and he paid rapt attention. Although I was dry-mouthed, I stood up at my turn, read a few poems, and got caught up in the words; I hammed it up a bit. I had the sense he was encouraging some of the local texture I was adding to the poems. Heaney applauded and congratulated me afterwards. Perhaps he was just being polite, but I was thrilled. It buoyed me through the next years of learning the craft. I will never forget his kindness at that time, when he was prominent but not yet a superstar. His hair was coal black, his words apt, his heart kind.