Finding Happiness at 2011 AWP DC

If anyone mentioned that he or she had never seen the Steiny Road Poet happier than the four days she spent at the Associate Writing Programs (AWP) Convention & Bookfair, this would be absolutely true. She has found that passing The Word Works scepter to Nancy White, a former winner of the Washington Prize, has made this literary organization suddenly leap into the future -- we are now taking manuscripts for the Washington Prize electronically. We have a gorgeous new logo. We updated our Internet name to WordWorksBooks.org. We are sending electronic newsletters. We are saving money with print on demand production of our books. And we bought an expensive piece of real estate at AWP -- a booth with two big tables -- and covered all the costs by selling lots of of our beautiful books!

One particular high point was the celebration reading of selected Washington Prize winners as a scheduled event of the AWP catalogue. There were around 60 people in the audience to hear Nathalie Anderson, Peter Blair, Fred Marchant, Brad Richard, Jay Rogoff, and Enid Shomer. Fred moderated and created a warm community feeling for the program that included more than the usual nods to Nancy and the Steiny Road Poet. And it was February 3, 2011, Gertrude Stein's 137 birthday! Fred chose to read poems by both Nancy & S.R. Poet, including Karren Alenier's "Stein Writes It All Down."



The last day of AWP, the Steiny Road Poet paused for photos with friends Deborah Ager and Reb Livingston, with whom she also had photo opps at the 2009 AWP Conference in Chicago.  How things come full circle.

More Allen Ginsberg Than You Would Want to Know

The Steiny Road Poet entered 2011 with just a few more pages to read of Bill Morgan's I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. It's a funky biography by a man who worked closely with Ginsberg and on Ginsberg's vast archive of works.

Morgan's bio of Ginsberg is funky because it is not totally objective. Still, Morgan's spin on Ginsberg doesn't get in the way of the documentation which is extensive. The Steiny Road Poet walks away from this record of years that she could not put down understanding a much bigger picture of the Beat poet whom she personally experienced as a tremendously generous person and, much more surprising, filling in gaps in her understanding of what happened in America from 1950-1990 and how it affected her.

And no, she didn't know that Ginsberg had more than a passing acquaintance with Paul Bowles. Those familiar with Bowles and the Beats have seen the 1961 photo of them together in Tangier. She knew from Paul Bowles himself that he had visited with the Beat writers when they visited William Burroughs in Tangier. However, Bowles was careful to say, and said it in the interview the Steiny Road Poet and two journalists did with him in 1982 (see Conversations with Paul Bowles p. 128), that he was not involved with Beat writing.  In 1961, Bowles invited Ginsberg to spend a week with him at a house in Marrakech. (In I Celebrate Myself, Bill Morgan claims the house belonged to Bowles—see p. 333, but that may be confused with the house he owned in Tangier.)  In 1993, Ginsburg made one last trip to see Bowles. Bowles, who died in 1999, outlived the younger Ginsberg by two years.

What led to Ginsberg's death was Hepatitis C that he had contracted in South American in 1960.  More surprising is that he did not contract the AIDS virus over his life time of multiple sex partners and this bio does not skimp on the outrageous sexual adventures of this son of a high school teacher. Another surprising fact about Ginsberg is that he always went after straight men. His life time partner Peter Orlovsky was a straight man who had many girl friends but Peter came from a family challenged by mental illness. Eventually mental illness and severe drug addiction plagued Orlovsky and his relationship with Ginsberg.  

Articles on Ginsberg by Karren Alenier
Photos of the Beat Poet, Allen Ginsberg
Howl: Absorbing Poetry through Film
Howling in the Nation's Capital
Playing the Hydrogen Jukebox                                                                                                                                                                                                    

10 Minutes: A Play

Here, the Steiny Road Poet is not asking for your ten minutes, maybe only one.

She has written a ten-minute play entitled "Who Killed Jackie Bass." The title is a statement not a question. This poetic play is important to the Poet because it is a memorial to a murdered relative.

The play has been submitted to a competition and now the Poet would like your help in putting good energy into the universe so that even if the play doesn't make it to the stage this summer, the title will get caught in collective consciousness.

Here's a quote from the play:
"Did you ever meet Jackie Bass? You wouldn’t forget her. She had smile larger than her hands and her hands were so warm—they were better than gloves in January."

So, please, no applause now—just give the Poet a cyber-hand and send along your star-powered energy to keep this title alive.

If asked earlier this summer, the Steiny Road Poet would have said political operas are not her kind of torch—that she would rather ignite something more exotic. However, by accident or intervention from the universe, she got involved with the Dana Beyer campaign that would have put the first transgendered woman into a United States political office. The Poet was told that if the candidate got 5,000 votes, she would win. Dana Beyer made her goal but the three incumbents got more votes and kept their seats.

What did the Poet learn?

1.    Hard work and integrity are not enough to win. Does this sound like the business of getting an opera on stage? While Ms. Beyer visited 10,0000 doors in her district and people whom the Steiny Road Poet met after the fact were impressed by the candidate’s sincerity, intelligence, and record of achievement, it did not enable the candidate to push past the weakest incumbent although it was respectably close. Apparently a teacher’s union push made the difference in getting a significant people out of their apathy to go down to the polls to vote.

2.    Ordinary people, including the Poet, do not like being interrupted by phone calls about who to vote for. They especially hate robo calls. Never mind that you haven’t read the literature or websites on the candidates, who wants a computer generated call to tell you what to do? Do the Millennials have this right about  not communicating by direct phone calls? Text them or grab them by the sleeve or there is no exchange. More people told the Poet that coming to their doors to talk about Dana Beyer was the preferred communication. And OMG, the deluge of paper sent to each household! An entire forest went under in just the Maryland primary election alone.

3.    With some voters, there is no winning ever. A handful of people said, “I am not a Democrat” despite being carried on the Democratic register. “It’s too much trouble to change parties,” one bubby told me while asking me why I thought the Democrats were not responsible for our government’s huge debt. When the Poet pointed out (much against the instruction of her campaign manager’s advice to never argue with the voter) that Bill Clinton left office with U.S. finances in the black and George W. Bush left the American people in a deep red hole, the old woman looked at the Poet blankly. Then the Poet realized the woman had been brainwashed by someone close to her and so she backed away quietly. Also there were people who complained bitterly about how many times campaigners came to their doors and this was their reason not to vote for a sufficiently qualified candidate.

4.    Privacy? Unless you have zero contact with the world, people with Palm Pilots know where you live, how old you are, and how you voted in the last election.

5.    This was not entirely a thankless job. In this market, there were people with advanced degrees walking door to door in 90-degree heat to carry the message of candidates like Dana Beyer. They weren’t volunteers either and they got less pay in their pocket after taxes than minimum wage. However there were some people who understood how hard the job is and they thanked the Poet for doing this work.

6.    Some people in one of the wealthiest counties in America do not keep up their property. Just stepping onto their porches was dangerous.

Did the Poet run into people she knew on the campaign trail? Yes, other poets, composers, a government official she worked with long ago and she also campaigned on a street where she once lived with her parents and siblings.

Does the Poet have any ideas for an opera? Yes, she thinks she could write a 10-minute opera about the incredible people who came to the door to talk to her. People like the friendly bubby who was making stuffed cabbages, the deaf woman she signed with based on having learned how to say more with her finger tips, the woman who arrived home on her bicycle and insisted the Poet sit down with her on the front porch to talk about the candidate’s politics, the rabid Republican spouse of a registered Democrat who wasn’t home, just to picture a few.

Three Gun Shots: A Blood Simple Case

If someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I am Li Changdi, I might answer like Louis Jourdan (he was in the 1958 film Gigi) did once in Positano (the Steiny Road Poet was at a table near where he was sitting on that dazzling piazza by the water) -- "I used to be Li Changdi." Now Li Changdi is a little gun shy -- don't point at her and ask her to speak to you in Chinese. She can still say Ni hao (hello) but she's getting nervous about the bloody lot of words she is supposed to have mastered.

The Steiny Road Poet fell off the learning-to-speak-and-write-Chinese wagon back in March after she completed her classroom project which had her represent herself as a Chinese broadcast film critic. This is where this post starts as the reviews are beginning to appear for Zhang Yimou's remake of the first Coen Brothers' film Blood Simple.

In Chinese, Zhang's film is called San Qiang Pai An Jing Qi (translated as The Stunning Case of Three Gunshots). Changdi would tell you that san is the word for three. The American title is A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop.

What was really hard in the classroom film report project was finding out how to say Blood Simple and the Coen brothers in Chinese. Her laoshi (teacher) said find out by yourself. So she called up a neighbor who is from Beijing and got the words: Xue Mi Gong bei Ke en Xiong Di. Changdi guesses that xue means avenge but she has no leads on mi gong. Xiong Di translates as brothers, so the rest of the phrase is by (bei) the Coen (Ke en) brothers.

Does she want to see Zhang Yimou's film? Yes, because out of all that struggle to say a few simple things in that Chinese film critic report like, "Xiang xiao le ma?" (Do you want to laugh?), she still harbors the idea of learning more Chinese.