Denver 2

April 8, 2010

The sad old moon crossed my window all the night, above the twinkling blue-white city, through the clear prairie air. The east, before dawn, is a succession of colors I have never seen in the sky: dark rust at the very bottom, succeeding to dark sap and then dark emerald before it hits turquoise and the possible blue. Quite amazing. I don’t know why it is still flat dark here whereas the light would be plain and plenty back home, even considering the two hours’ difference on the clock.

For about an hour I thought Denver was going to be a solitary and reflective time for me. But I left the hotel and walked to the Denver Performing Arts Center and met the man running the ticket desk, who spoke to me a long time about the plays, and conspired with me to return on Friday and go to student rush (for which my faculty ID apparently entitles me) to see the play, Mariela in the Desert, about Mexican painters. I don’t know why he concluded I needed a discount ticket– I thought I was dressed rather nattily–but I will do as we plotted. Continued to Bayou Bob’s , off a “market” which is a street which stretches, I’m told, for three miles, with only the traffic of a shuttle. At Bayou Bob’s I was bought, by the bartender, Drew, my first drink in Denver. When I sat down he said, “Are you from the convention?”
“Yes. AWP.”
“I could tell.”
“Yeah?”
“You look like a writer.”
Drew is a writer too, studying film and creative writing at. . . some school I forget the name of. He was a wonderful introduction to the life of the city. He pointed to my vodka tonic and said, “This is on me.”
Wandered a little from there, until I came to Leela’s, an alternative lifestyle café, which was featured in the article I opened Westworld (the local arts rag) to read when I sat down at the bar. I was very happy at Leela’s. Two boys were playing on keyboards, quite silently, but with looks of transport on their faces. The dress was leather jackets, multiple piercings, extravagant mohawks. The article was about how cartoonists–I mean graphic writers-- gather there and draw improv based on one another’s ideas and energy at the moment. It would be the place I would find the first evening of a first trip to anywhere. Returned to the Hyatt, plunged into the melee in the lobby. Handsome waiter. Hated the woman next to me because her purse occupied the only available seat. Thought “ she is one of those.” Moved to sit beside an older woman, who turns out to be the poetry editor of Agni magazine. We talked abut her late start in poetry, and how I thought it not only didn’t matter, but might be a useful distinction. We were joined by Chris Arigo, who knew my name from a course he teaches on Environmental Literature. I thought I knew him, too, but realized the person I though he was I met 20 years ago, when this lad was in elementary school.

The man on the plane explained to his son why I was slaughtering everybody at Trivia by saying, “if you live long enough you learn a lot of things.” My struggle to take that as a compliment was largely a success.

Another look out the window, where the green band has devoured all the east and south, and where, oddly, the moon has not moved. Maybe this is a different universe with different rules.

Late afternoon:

Now that I know what I’m looking at, I can see the Denver Art Museum and the mint from my window as well, And, now, in this day of blazing blue clarity, the distant, snow clad peaks. They don’t, from here, look higher than the Blue Ridge, but they are very far away, and start from a plain already a mile high.

Spent time at the Book Fair, going rather systematically from table to table, noting those who had published me, those who had not, and those who had published me so far in the past that nobody remembered it. I bought six or seven books, and was given at least that many gratis, as well as a pile of postcards, leaflets, advertising materials. I enjoyed talking with everybody, and enjoyed the effort that went into being cheerful and encouraging. Emerson Blake from Orion was setting up his table when I arrived. I was going to introduce myself, but it looked like he was already having a bad day. One never knows why one person treats another badly, but in the grand order of things perhaps I had it coming. Stopped by Milkweed and Pecan Grove, stopped by other places relevant to my life where nobody was at the table. I was happy. I felt I was connecting with– something.

Right after the Book Fair I made for the art museum. The building is more distinguished than the collection, like those spectacular frames you see sometimes valorizing a mediocre painting. I liked the cowboy paintings, and certain landscapes, and the overall attempt to have the West stand in for Tuscany and Arcadia. There is a Ghirlandao. Many groups of toddlers gathered at the skirts of grandmotherly docents, naming the names of colors and telling what they saw in this or that passage. One granny let a child call lilac, black. I wondered how that was educational. I approve of the museum as classroom. I don’t always acknowledge that lessons should be taught as though Art were some artifact from Neptune, as likely to explode as entertain.

Sat in the lounge and wrote, and a passionate lad named Jason came to me and told me of his website, and I listened, for his sake, as though there were going to be an exam. Met Rick, and we dodged a kid vomiting in the hallway and went to a session on poetry in the 00's. Fascinating, but combative. The fascinating combatant was wrong and the tedious one was right, and what does that say about the world? I didn’t care. I had forgotten that the point of such sessions is to gather notes for your own poems. I wrote one as I sat in the steamy room with the overflow crowd. Rick says there are 10,000 people at the conference. As I walked to the hotel, two boys were reading from a poem about Columbus, and the light kept pouring down in unimaginable purity, and I suddenly felt very happy to be right here.