Dinner With a Potential David

"Poetry is dancing with the dwende." Very mythical, yeah?
-Jay Udall

On Saturday, Katherine came to the bar for a bit and invited me to come to dinner with the 2nd David-candidate on Sunday. Candidate #2 is the poet Jay Udall. Nice guy. He's getting the campus tour/going through interviews right now and will be in class tonight to workshop a couple of poems and talk to us.

Candidate #1 was a gal who signs her name Darlin', though her formal name escapes me. Also nice, and a fiction writer. I didn't like the way she ran workshop, though. She separated criticism and praise (which is so restricting, because most comments work best as "Your strongest part is X, the weaker part is Y, so take another look at Y and think what you were thinking for X" and without being able to make a comparison, it's tough and less helpful) and let the author say something at the end. I don't want an explanation. The point is that you say it in what you wrote, and if you didn't, tough. I can understand her idea behind doing things that way, but I'm not sold.

Going back to last night, I learned a few things about Jay that won't likely come up in class tonight. For instance, I know he has a six year old daughter and tendonitis in both arms, which is why he can't play guitar anymore. He did bring his harmonica, though, so I can easily picture him and David having a "jam" session, or at least what passes for one when you get two geeky poets together. I'm very curious to see what he does in workshop. From asking last night, I get that he does pretty much what David does, but he didn't mention whether the writer was silent during comments. One nifty thing he did mention was that he often likes to have someone other than the writer read the poem aloud (then have the poet read it) because someone who didn't write the poem will read it differently. I think that's a neat idea for making sure what's on the page is what you mean to be on the page - i.e. like the line breaks are where they ought to be kind of stuff.

Dinner was neat, there were six of us all together, and I was the only one who was strictly a student and nothing else. After being bummed out about the T.A., the semi-special dinner was nice and makes me feel a little more loved. I was a representative for the collective graduate students. I'm important again. Or maybe at least convenient.