So I'm back from Sewanee, physically at least. I imagine my mind is still gallivanting about with my liver in those Tennessee hills. It was an amazing 12 days. Totally surpassed any expectations I may have had. I had the chance to sit down and talk about my manuscript with Dave Smith, David Roderick, and Claudia Emerson. Still chewing on a lot of the things we discussed. But ultimately, I'm excited to sit down and write some new poems, as well as to revise/send out some of the older ones.
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Check the new blogs on the blogroll. Met lots of amazing people at Sewanee, including poet bloggers Lisa Fay Coutley and Anna Evans. Kick-ass writers, yes, but also great people who may or may not have defeated me at late-night/early-morning ping-pong. Any other Sewanee bloggers lurking out there?
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A very early draft of a poem, to disappear shortly:
*plish*
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Bought lots of books: Deborah Ager's "Midnight Voices", James Allen Hall's "Now You're the Enemy", David Roderick's "Blue Colonial", Jill McCorkle's "July 7th", Skip Horack's "The Southern Cross", Frank Giampietro's "Begin Anywhere", " Charles Sweetman's "Enterprise, Inc.", and Alan Shapiro's "Tantalus in Love". All cases in which I loved the words, but the fact they're all incredible people certainly didn't hurt...
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Killer opening line of the moment:
"The city is closing for the night."
from Deborah Ager's "Santa Fe in Winter"
(Midnight Voices, Cherry Grove Collections, 2009)
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Slept 13 hours last night. Still tired. Lots of people I need to email. Hoping to be somewhere near full functionality by the end of the week...
5 comments:
It's still the 27th! Luke, you can't post the poem for 30 minutes and *plish* it---not fair, not nice.
I've been called out...I'll re-post it after some tinkering. Let's just say I became very quickly embarassed after posting...
Okay then. I suppose I'll forgive you this once, but only because of the blog plug.
Hi, Luke, thanks for blogging. I got here from Mary Biddinger's Word Cage.
I'm interested in what you say about the conference. I've thought about going in the past and have been discouraged by some people who went.
It sounds like your experience was everything you had hoped for. Maybe I'll try to make it next year.
Hey John,
Thanks for stopping by! I would definitely consider it. I think a lot of it depends on what you're expecting to get out of the conference. In my case, I felt like I was in a rut, that I was rehashing the same sort of poem covering the same sort of material over and over again. What I wanted from Sewanee was to open some new avenues, both in my poetics, and in terms of friendships and the like. It did exactly that. Feel free to shoot me an email [see my profile] if you want to talk about Sewanee more.
Best,
Luke
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