How Do You Spell AWP?

The AWP Conference took downtown Boston by storm, and during one: the largest gathering ever of its kind took place at the Hynes Convention Center over the later half of a week in early March, 2013. In Chicago the year prior, and booked for Seattle in 2014, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ annual gathering was a carnival of meditative poets, nonfiction essayists who gazed longingly onto the snowy streets of Boston, and book publishers, both large and small. Mostly, however, the critical mass of attendees were MFA in Creative Writing programs, their students and devotees.

Being “pre-MFA” was not, in my circles, a common social or academic moniker, while I earned my Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Goddard College (’04). Competition for perspective creative writers, childrens’ book authors, and  only the most rarefied online nonfiction bloggers was relegated to the ad space available in Poets and Writers magazine. Now, nearly ten years after my adventure in the low-residency study of creative written expression, almost every major sponsor of this conference bore those esteemed initials—including the University of Florida at Tampa, whose admissions strategy consists (in part) of sponsoring the conference name badge lanyards, that everyone had a chance to be a walking advertisement for a specific degree program.

Not to be mistaken for an academic conference, the AWP seeks an audience built of individuals from every side of the higher ed fence: professors, administrators, and educators are welcome, as are undergraduate and graduate students, however undeclared, unrequited, or undecided. Those who dwell far outside of any canonizing academy are warmly welcome as well: from publishers to small press operators, from purveyors of representative creative objects to the purposeless and the poetic. The primary audience of the AWP is intended to be “writers”—those who profess to record, through acts of written (or maybe not) expression their own, or others’, experiences. This conception of audience is diluted by the lack of that actual action: when I saw someone putting words in a sequence, they were usually doing it virtually, digitally, upon a handheld device. I saw few people jotting notes, even during the hour-and-a-half sessions; those that were writing by hand were doing so with their own supplies (attendees received no notebook—not even a pen—in canvas tote bags upon arrival). Just about all of those that used mobile devices chose Apple—be it for immediate credit card transactions, or for checking Facebook during sluggish moments.

In the sea of commerce and promotion that was the three halls’ worth of Book Fair, one traditional creative writing journal championed its release of a digital edition and mobile app device, exclusively for the iOS; I had a good-natured exchange with the press’ representative about the ethics of open-source programming, rallying for the Android operating system as a less-nefarious alternative than supporting Apple’s technological monarchy.

My MFA was my last degree completed via a dial-up Internet connection: transferring data, and mere ‘browsing’ was a premeditated, intentional condition in my writing process, one that could be turned off, in every traditional sense. Today, such analog isolation is a rare condition, treatable: there were, among the hundreds of booths at the Book Fair, representations of literal basement printing presses and their products, including limited-edition chapbooks, bookmarks, and printing techniques unavailable on any common laser printer. In a few conversations, I found supporters of the New Analog Aesthetic: what drives our need for physical, printed writing may be all too close to what is driving the new popularity for vinyl records. I saw no one wearing Google Glass at the AWP Conference, though its debut was a scant few weeks away, at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas; perhaps more remarkable was that the AWP either could not afford or did not consider creating a mobile device application to accommodate the volumes of scheduling information and registration materials. Instead, a glossy book contained as many flashy ads featuring introspective writer-candidates happily pursuing an advanced degree.

Across over twelve thousand participants, a spectrum of attention-grabbing and attention-delivering will no doubt develop: given Boston’s erudite urbanite climate, there were no doubt as many events, readings, and conversations happening outside of the Hynes as within. Presses—including Dave Eggers’ McSweeny’s, the New York-based outfit that has somehow won control of the throttle that steers the ultra-creative, ultra-cool publishing world—hosted off-site readings; in the evenings, MFA programs hosted cash-bar receptions inside and outside of the Hynes. While it’s worth wondering if there is a growing technological solidarity developing across different populations of writing conference attendees, it’s also worth noting that a number of individuals roamed the halls and presentations, clearly outside of any virtual blizzard of tweets, posts, and other time-wasters. Two members of this latter category were Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney, superstars from a generation long-removed from the hip and the young at the AWP. It was majestic to see over ten thousand make it back from dinner and fill a chasm of an auditorium, in time to hear two poets speak of the noble truths they’ve discovered, a conversation that, at its best, included Walcott’s dismissal of monetary gain through pursuit of his craft (“career was an obscene word I hesitate to use even now”), and at worst, left Heaney describing himself as more of a classical antique than one might have imagined (Gerard Manley Hopkins over Eliot; Robert Lowell’s nickname was Cal, short for ‘Caligula’). I couldn’t help but wonder if there were literary ‘darlings’ driving the conversation writ large at AWP; this came through finding not only the stark difference of ego between Richard Russo and Amy Bloom on Friday night, but through the near-total dismissal of some of my favorite authors: while my experience was not comprehensive, I saw no mention in any panel or Book Fair booth, of Ginsberg, Baraka, Williams, Brautigan, Vonnegut, Irving, Patchen, Whitman, Paley, or Dos Passos. I bought Ferlinghetti’s latest, telling the New Directions representative “this crowd should be at this man’s feet,” not just for his poetic accomplishments, but his forging a place for poetry as useful and lawful political speech. Other terms not overheard at AWP include: interdisciplinary, gun control, bipartisanship, brinksmanship, environmentalism, song lyrics, economic rights, 50 Shades of Grey, the closing of Borders Books and Music. Next month’s New York-based ASJA is one of the AWP’s main competitors, and has only two sponsors: Barnes and Noble and Google, two corporations that seek to unseat Amazon’s grip on the throttle of word-based web commerce. Apple was not a sponsor of the AWP, but they should have been, or at least should have sent a photographer: I saw caught more than a few glimpses of aspiring youthful hipsters locating themselves in specific dramatic  poses, silhouetted by the raging wind and snow beyond massive windows, looking deeply and with great contemplation, into either their twelve-pound conference directory or into their high definition touch screens, to read their email, each other’s blogs, the news, Facebook, or to book their next flight or ticket to their next non-virtual destination, be it a secluded residency, meeting of hipster egos, or collaborative poetic geocache (Kenneth Calhoun: in the future, “programming and storytelling are going to become inseparable”).