New York, Friday January 31st, 2007

Instead of the hissing gasses of Philadelphia's Market-Frankford line, the metro platform was filled with the whine of a Japanese violin streaming from hidden loudspeakers. The stop was clean, efficient and, to use a rash and broad sort of personification, happier. In the moment it took me to figure out the ticket-computer, I realized that the violin was playing out the theme to the Godfather.

As I fumbled with street names and the directions, the calm of general observation (more common in international travel) began to set in. New Yorkers seemed to have more expressive faces. No, not in variety of expression, but rather they appeared to walk with one consistent expression on their face. A face someone might make when surprised, or pensive, or angry. I decided I would keep this to myself. I wouldn't want to blow my chance of acceptance into the world of American writing and poetry with a jejune comment like that.

Whenever my boss spoke to one of the senior editors about the AWP Conference, a secret glance seemed to be exchanged between them, one reminiscent of two pilgrims silently recalling their trip to the Holy Land. This year the annual conference had landed only two hours away, and my boss said that for the first time registration had closed from being sold out. However, Painted Bride Quarterly had been reserved a table, and I had been reserved a place behind it.

The conference had technically started the day before, so by the time of my arrival, the hotel that served as headquarters was now a veritable hive of what communists call "intellectuals." On the first floor, there was a modest line of tables covered with the various banners belonging to different presses and publications. I couldn't find the booth for PBQ, so I went up a floor. The second floor of the conference was roughly the size of a high school gymnasium, packed with a dizzying array of mismatched colors and unexplained acronyms, MAR, SR, RAR, AA, FIELD, UNC, PBQ—ah here we go.

I didn't recognize the two people sitting at the booth, and despite knowing this already, the two explained that they were New York interns with the magazine, and I explained that I was an intern in Philadelphia. They got up to go look around the floor and I took their place and pulled out the conference guide from my bag.

It was the 40th anniversary of the American Writers and Poets conference. Writing groups, publishing houses, universities, anything and everything that could be associated with any part of the literary world was featured in some degree. Three floors of the book fair all containing independent and university presses, writers organizations of almost any genre, school, or focus imaginable. At any time one could hear the nasally pitch of people explaining who they were, what their group did, and why. Across from me was the table for the Swanee Review. A young lady with black curly hair sat guard, complacent like a statue in a remote mountain shrine, doing a crossword puzzle. To my right was another organization whose purpose, after listening to them bark at passers-by for a half hour, was still somewhat ambiguous. I listened to different conversations about mixed-media grants and classroom writing techniques, personal five-year dream plans and department conflicts blues. After a couple hours something began to make me feel uneasy, and luckily the two chief editors came to relieve me of my post. A fellow Philadelphia intern arrived with them, and we began to negotiate which lecture we'd like to attend.

The conference ran from 9am until roughly 6 at night. At any one time there were around sixteen different lectures going on:
Grand Ballroom: A Reading & Interview with James Tate
Still Here & Writing: Responding to Trauma
The Hazards & Pleasures of Writing Across Race & Culture
Avante-Guard Latino/a Poetry
In my head I added:
Identifying & Critiquing Reasons for Duality in Lecture-naming

I shuttered as my finger passed over "Kitsch & Pop Culture as Social Critique," but decided on Saturday's "New York in the 50s." A nostalgic panel discussion would be just the thing to clear my mind so it could locate the source of my anxiety. I would then attend PBQ's reception at 7 o'clock.

My fellow intern told me of plans to go see a poetry contest/reading at Stain, a Brooklyn venue. The rest of the day passed much more quickly due to our anticipation for the journey as well as some hormonally-stifled kidding as to which one of us should speak to the cute intern at The Gettysburg Review.

The poets at Stain all had on sashes like the ones they give beauty pageant contestants; apparently that was the theme. Some poets used visual aids or accompanied their poems with guitars, most of the poems possessed such a sardonic overtone that I had a hard time caring about any of it—maybe they had attended the kitsch lecture. I sat at a stool and watched a black cat float around and thought that without some great form of oppression, poets seem to be at a loss of what to do. The people in the front kept hushing the people in the back, reminding me of honor students scolding a noisy group at a library. If that wasn't enough, the soon-to-be winner of the poet pageant got on stage dressed as a beatnik, and the part of my brain responsible for distinguishing inadvertent irony from satire seized like the thigh muscle of an ill-conditioned marathon runner.

Everyone there seemed to be a part of some club. Is that what it is to be a writer?

I was staying at my aunt's apartment; when I got home she was still out—in one of the infinite idiosyncratic artist's nooks that make New York one of the most diverse cities in the world, and also one of the worst in which to feel misplaced.

Saturday morning, I was the first one in, and sat watching the other sleepy faces gun down coffee and warm their throats for the last day of the book fair.

"You'll see Jack," the New York editor told me, "this place turns into a madhouse on the last day. The conference has an effect on people." I told her that maybe it was the hypnotic florescent lights that hung high above the tables. She gave me a smile like a sister would give her younger brother who wasn't quite ready to know why older girls eat those little mints even though they don't taste good. "Maybe," she said.

By the time I was relieved by another intern, what the editor said had come true.

The docile book fair had exploded into a rushing market place of shouting peddlers and hurried business transactions. A heavy fog of urgency befouled the floor and I had no idea why. How can there be 7,000 writers in one place? For a moment, my mind flashed to a unhappy place.

Writing has now assimilated to the ethos of American progress. Thought is a commodity, and while it satisfies the few who thrive on the archaic and distilled values of the thinker's lifestyle, the "square" can accept it as a profitable enterprise and thus coexistence can occur without empathy, each existing in isolation in culture and perception, yet neither autonomously, intrinsically relying on the services of the other to support their own. Shouldn't a schizophrenia diagnosis be honored with the same weight of an MFA. After all, isn't distorting reality the goal of all of this? The line separating commercial psychosis from deviant insanity is an arbitrary one at best. Creativity and insight stem more often from the latter, and I wonder how many there would agree.

My mood passed. As thanks for my early arrival, I was permitted to attend two lectures that day. I went to the Gettysburg Review's 20th annual poetry reading and the 50s lecture. Whereas the poetry reading at Stain possessed a neo-bohemia décor but boasted little in terms of content, this reading provided mental stimulation despite the blinding phosphorescence of the pasty-colored furniture of the lecture room.

At the 50s lecture, the speakers were all unfamiliar to me, but they used the names of people who were. They spoke of a time and culture I would never know or understand but often dreamt about, where business was done in hidden, smoky bars; where everything was this or that, and the process of writing a novel or journalism piece was all like one scrappy noir.

After the reception there was a dance party scheduled for all the members of the conference. I could have sworn I saw my high school guidance councilor bust a move to "Baby Got Back" and quickly took my leave.

On the train ride home I put on Bob Marley to meditate upon this peculiar gathering I had just attended. Later my boss would ask me with a worried expression if I had a good time. I thought about something the old timers had said at the 50s lectures, about the eternal force of discouragement know as the omnipresent "they." "They" say you can't go against the grain. "They" say that to be what you want you must do it a certain way—"who are They?" the panel asked. "They are no one."

Somehow, "They are no one" seemed to pertain to my understanding of the conference itself. Any social critique of collective bodies and consciousness, right or wrong, seemed irrelevant. I certainly did not leave with a warm and joyous feeling of finally finding the niche of society to which I belonged, and at certain points the conference was disheartening, but who says that's not fun?