What was the dream? It’s hard to remember now the response which seemed so logical then, or what it was in response to. Movement happens and you think what you think to get in, or get out.
The state of the dream is this: I only remember it in scattered passages. They come and go, a myth assembling and dissembling itself. I know I had a dream, but I may not recognize it in a lineup.
Was the dream merely to do a set of actions, or to accomplish a set of goals? I have to say it was to do a set of actions. And those actions we have done.
“Born into this, out of this.” Though I am necessarily in this milieu, I am not of it. I am a blue collar worker. When I traded in my oscilloscope and voltmeter for an MFA, nothing changed. I am a blue collar poet and publisher, and I go about life, as a friend said recently, like we’re living in the depression.
Everything I have done in this business I have done on my own, with much help. Yes, the summer of 2009 is when we embarked onto the world with a vision and a plan, but that track was laid as early as 2003.
The pieces began to come together at my first AWP conference in 2004. Sy Hoahwah and I drove to Chicago because the writing program gave us money to go, a considerable amount of money. I drove all night and we got there at sunrise. I was completely sober and intently focused at that conference, and I saw many things and was transformed.
I saw how small the writing community is in this country. My undergrad poetry mentor, a poet of some acclaim, met up with me and my new grad school friends. I was by far the oldest of the grad school group, and being the only one of us who was married and that I had a small child at home, I felt even older. For a little while none of that mattered. My mentor, and some notable writer friends he studied with in the University of Virginia MFA program, hosted us at an old Italian restaurant in the heart of downtown Chicago. There must have been a dozen of us crammed around the undersized table in the private back room. There was a plain black phone on the wall in the room. It was a direct line to the server. This back room was said to be where the performers from the opera would dine after their shows.
Everybody relaxed after a couple of wine bottles were opened. We snacked on the bread with olive oil and cheese while we waited for the few plates of pasta we would share. My mentor kept the conversation going by asking my new friends questions about where they were from and how each ended up at the Arkansas MFA program. Some of my friends were awe struck by my mentor’s MFA buddy. Him and his wife lived part time in Chicago and were staying out by Wriggly Field. They had taken the train downtown to have dinner with us. After that dinner, it seemed my grad school friends looked at me more like someone who may belong, or maybe I had just started to see myself that way. I think when they saw how much my mentor respected me and my point of view, they decided to give me the benefit of the doubt. In either case, I decided it was cool to bring writers together.
Sy told me something important on the drive back to Fayetteville, as we stuffed our faces with real Chicago pizza:
“No offense, but I don’t know who the Chris Pappas who lives in Fayetteville is, but that Chris Pappas who was in Chicago is the real Chris Pappas. It was obvious to everyone but you.”
I thought deeply (mindlessly) about this for the rest of the drive, as Sy snored in the passenger’s seat. I decided I needed a change in my personal life. When I got home, my wife (who was my second wife) sat me down and started to explain, through a long, convoluted explanation, that she wanted to move out and be separated for a while. During this entire speech I sat quietly and tried to restrain my jubilation, tried to act confused, tried to seem upset. And when she was finished, I said, “Okay.” And we were finished. In March of 2004 (seven months after arriving in Fayetteville) I got my own house for the first time since my last divorce, and only the second time ever. My life changed quickly after that.
Since arriving in Fayetteville, I had been clean cut and clean shaven up to that point. I had not worn a beard in five years because I worked at a restaurant that did not allow facial hair, but I started to let it grow and kept it for the next five years. I let my hair grow unimpeded for the next few years also, and before long I looked the way I imagined myself. Over the next year the true transformation happened gradually, and painfully, gleefully. I became less certain about everything, especially poetry and people. I immersed myself in teaching, and taught my first seven semesters in graduate school, including two summer sessions that first summer, without a break.
These changes were not seen as positive by some people. Davis McCombs, the director of the Arkansas writing program, told me during a heated discussion in his office that when he first met me he thought I was a good poet and a good person, but “now I know you are neither.” I told him he cared more about tenure than about poetry and that he treated graduate students like undergrads due to his fear that some of us knew more about poetry than he did. This argument arose partially because of a contentious conference I had with Maurice Manning (whom I would publish in the second issue of Mêlée a few years later) while Manning was visiting our program. The exchange I had with Manning had embarrassed Davis. Davis and I also had a disagreement about the virtues (or non-virtues) of Li Young Lee’s poetry in class during a presentation I gave on Lee. He gave me an “F” on the presentation.
Davis later recanted and changed that grade, admitting that he overreacted. Our dispute eventually subsided because of the launch of Mêlée during my fourth and final year of grad school. I had asked some of the faculty and students for work for the first issue, but the magazine was not a student magazine, nor was it an Arkansas magazine. It was a national success due to the time and money we (Lisa Holmes, the student contributors and myself) put into publicizing it (providing two free subscriptions to every writing program in the country—over 400 programs at that time—and staging two high profile readings in Fayetteville and at the Atlanta AWP in 2007), and most of the students from the program published in that issue have gone on to do great things and achieve recognition on a large scale. I had resisted asking Davis for work out of spite, but decided this was the opportunity to prove I was the better man. So I approached him in his office and asked if he would be willing to submit something, and he replied, “I thought you’d never ask.” There was a feature on Mêlée in the department newsletter in the spring of 2007 in which Davis was quoted as follows:
“The success of Mêlée does so much to raise the profile of our Creative Writing Program and is a testament to the extraordinary calibre of our students. Their creativity, hard work and ambition are evident on every page. Chris Pappas, in particular, deserves credit for this great accomplishment.”
The Vancouver AWP in 2005 was a turning point for me. After I had discovered the year before how much money the program would give us to go to conferences, I shared that news with my classmates and successfully convinced a large group (over twenty of us) to travel to Vancouver and take advantage of the opportunity. The program allotted each one of us up to $1100 to travel to the conference, and if you said you had no credit card to put the expenses on, they would give you half of the money up front in cash. We each had a meal per diem of $98 a day. Along with meals, we had air fare covered, hotel, cabs, and conference expenses. The air fare was about $550, and we all crammed into a few rooms, so each of us was left with about $500 to spend for the weekend trip. None of the other writers at the conference could believe how much we got. Not even the full professors we encountered received anything close to what we did. The administrators changed the conference funding policy after that year, mostly because a fellow student who did not get his paperwork in on time, and therefore could not join us, heard how much fun we had and told on us.
On the flight to Vancouver there was a buzz about us. Most of us were on the same flight, but we were scattered all over the plane, infecting the people with energy and imagination.
[to be continued]
ManuFactured Artists 