After urgency by Rusty Morrison
How to draw the constantly shifting selves together
around an object of scrutiny and let this simply be
the way that it’s raining again outside, so lightly,
hardly more than fog, so that I leave behind my
umbrella, open the door, then decide to just stand
at the very edge of the front porch, neither
immersed in nor protected from the suffusion
in the air of nearly imperceptible rainfall.
“Decide who to be and go be it,” sing the Avett Brothers. Let this be advice to you as POETs/ WRITERs/ individual pebbles in the OCEAN that is AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Professionals, and also the shorthand for the conference of all 12,000 of us good peoples who come together once a year, this time in Minneapolis.) I’m going to go ahead and assume that you are going/ have gone/ would like to go to be among 11,999 of your closest writer peep friends/ feel the same feelings that every other writer person on the planet feels at one point – isolation, am-i-doing-this-right, why-didn’t-i-go-to-CPA/ beauty/ fighter pilot school. As you head into the fray that is the life of a writer, specifically the life of a writer for the three-and-a-half days of never-ending panels, booth after book-fair booth, off-site readings, drinks with friends, drinks by yourself in the hotel lobby, the search for coffee, and general writerly angst and elation (rock star poets! Book signings! Swag!), please remember that you are only one person. You can’t possibly meet everyone, hear everyone, buy every book, attend every reading, AND market yourself. You can’t – okay, let’s be honest, I’m talking to myself here – I can’t be all those people. I’d be crushed underneath that stack of hats.
My virgin AWP experience was EXHAUSTING. I never ate. I bought 20 pounds of books. I had a four-year old in preschool who had to be dropped off and picked up 45 minutes away. It was NO fun and simultaneously so frickity-fracking AWESOME I decided I never wanted to be anything but a writer for the rest of my life. Flash forward several AWP’s and here I am in Prague, preparing for the transoceanic flight, the wicked jet lag, the Americana overload and the stimulus package that is AWP2015. I can’t wait to see my writer friends and fellow Minerva Rising staff. I can’t wait to hear Linda Hogan on stage with Mary Szybist, moderated by Eric Pankey, an old Mason professor of mine. I can’t wait to eat American pizza and drink American beer and shop at the Mall of AMERICA the AWP book fair!!! I am prepared to be exhausted. And I have to be prepared to wear a crushing stack of hats.
Editor; Poet; Friend. Expat on home soil. Reader; Collector; teacher, student. Yogini and Minerva. Decide who to be and go be it? I can’t even decide which underwear to pack. I feel no small amount of anxiety. Did I mention that Hubby, three kids and I are fitting in a five-day trip to London right before I get on the plane at Heathrow to fly my loony ass all the way over to the USofA??
But this is what poetry can teach us. How to draw the constantly shifting selves together. I am sure AWP will put my shifting selves to the test. I can already feel the light rain of anxiety, that underlying, overwhelming desire to be everywhere and all at once, attend every panel, be a part of every conversation, buy every chapbook and journal and magazine and submit to them all. Listen as an editor. Collaborate as a team member. Be a part of a living body of writers, all moving our pencils to the stirring of the human heart. But hopefully this time I will be able to stand on the porch, enjoying the energy but not feeling drenched by it, letting my shifting selves be drawn together, letting myself simply be.
photo from http://homestretch-annie.blogspot.com/2012/08/rain.html.
