Tue, Jan29, in the late hours

Returning to the hotel (late) last night, I ran into my old classmate from the Buffalo poetics program, Bill Howe aka William R. Howe. (New York really is like a small town, you run into old friends all the time.) He and his wife L.A. are here with their press Slack Buddha, one of the great press names of all time. Apparently, of late they've been making many a chapbook at a furious pace, and an occasional letterpress chapbooks on their Chandler & Price machine, as well as being engaged as usual in many other projects. I'm looking forward to seeing what they've done.


(Here we see Bill taking an important 2am call, probably from Random House complaining that Slack Buddha is eating into their US sales.)

Tue, Jan 29, 9pm

At the Hilton at last, after a long day's travel:


Here's the view from the window, including some people still working. Go home, people! It's 9pm. Even Zukofsky's father was going home by now.

Tue, Jan 29, in flight

I've selected the excellent new bio of Louis Zukofsky by Mark Scroggins for my in-flight reading. Yes, rather highbrow for an airplane, but seemed appropriate on the way to NY given it's where LZ was born, raised, lived & died. Some engaging details so far about his father, Pinchos Zukofsky: he worked 6am til 9pm pressing pants (laborious work), only retiring at 81 yrs old. 9pm was actually leaving early, too--sometimes he worked til midnight, and ALSO was then their night watchman for awhile. Scroggins does a really nice job painting a picture of lower east side immigrant jewish culture (Pinchos born in a part of Lithuania that's now Belarus) just past the turn of the century.


This book is good, too, to help keep in mind that just because many poets will be in NY, it won't be all of them by a longshot. Many more take Zukofsky's route, who kept generally clear of such semi-professionalized gatherings of poets all his life.

Brent

Tue, Jan 29, about 9am

I'm only in the Oakland Airport and have already run into Malcolm Margolin, publisher of Heyday books (an SPD publisher), also heading to the AWP. We have a nice chat: apparently his panel, like SPD's on Jack Spicer, was also turned down, but he's going out anyway. He seems to know everyone else on the plane. Is Jet Blue the airline of choice for literati?

Brent

Tue., Jan 29, around 6:30am

Bye-bye, Mina. Daddy needs to go mingle with twenty million poet-types.

Brent

Monday, Jan 28, 5:08pm

SPD’s first experiment in “real time” blogging begins! Tomorrow morning I’ll get up somewhere in the highly unusual zone of the 6’s, get myself to the Oakland airport, fly Jet Blue to New York (O sweet coast-to-coast television), and prepare for three days of wall-to-wall poets and fiction writers at the:

As often as we can, Laura and I will check in with brief reports of what it’s like to be in NYC surrounded by 7,000+ creative writers (largely poets, I firmly believe). For the record, we’ve done this before (Palm Springs, Austin, Atlanta) but they tell us this AWP conference will be bigger than in previous years, plus it’ll be in mid-town New York (which apparently is a pretty major city on the east coast). We’ll tell you who we run into, be they famous, semifamous, infamous, antifamous or afamous. The books, the writers, the readings, the parties, the fatigue, the playing bongo drums in the Hilton in our berets, everything that makes AWP so special.

Brent