“Advice for Writers”: Spotlight on US Poet, Playwright and Translator Zack Rogow, and His Mega-Rich Resource of a Blog

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

This blog posts on Mondays. As of 2019 the second Monday of the month is devoted to my writing workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing. (You can find my workshop schedule and many more resources for writers on my  workshop page.)

This past spring I attended the Associated Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) annual conference and bookfair, where I read from Meteor, my book of poetry, as part of the Gival Press 20th anniversary celebration. AWP is not for the FOMO-ly challenged. In the crowd of 15,000+ conference-goers I missed many events and many friends, among them the poet, playwright and translator Zack Rogow. And it didn’t seem at all right to have missed Rogow for, the last time I was at AWP, it was to participate on his panel with Mark Doty and Charles Johnson, “Homesteading on the Digital Frontier: Writers’ Blogs,” one of the crunchiest conference panels ever. (You can read the transcript of my talk about blogs here.)

Should you try to attend AWP next spring 2020 in San Antonio? Of course only you know what’s right for you. But I can say this much: AWP can be overwhelming, an experience akin to a fun house ride and three times through the TSA line at the airport with liquids… while someone drones the William Carlos Williams white chickens poem… AWP can also prove Deader than Deadsville, if what you’re after is, say, an agent for your thriller. Book Expo it ain’t. 

On the bright side, however, Zack Rogow attends AWP. He is one of the most talented and generous poets and translators I know. Watch this brief documentary about his life and work and I think you’ll understand why I say this:

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Writers Blogs: Questions and Observations Post Panel at AWP (Associated Writing Programs) Conference in Seattle

Apart from getting my picture taken in the book fair holding a loft a giant stuffed fish, late yesterday afternoon I was on the panel chaired by poet Zack Rogow with novelist Charles Johnson (standing in for E. Ethelbert Miller) and another extraordinary poet, Mark Doty.

Doty gave the lie to my rather cavalier assertion that blogging about oneself was narcissistic. I still have zero interest in blogging about my personal life (so far, no tweeting about my food, either!!), but Mark read from his blog a piece about his personal life, a painful story about how his house "bit him," pure poetry, and all I can say is, I salaam.  Do read more over at Doty's blog.

Charles Johnson paid homage to dear Ethelbert, who has long been an angel of both Washington DC and national literary culture.

Zack Rogow's talk, about his go-to blog, Advice for Writers, started out with practical tips for bloggers and ended with a reading from his blog of his new translation of Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo," the poem that ends with one of the most jarringly perfect last lines.

My talk was "Eight Conclusions After 8 Years of Blogging."

To get a sense of the level of things, I first asked the audience, maybe 150 writers, how many had blogs? Up went the overwhelming majority of hands. How many had been blogging for more than 2 years? A sparse scattering. Five years? I counted two hands. Oh my goodness, I felt like Methuselah.

As for the questions, what struck me about many of them (both during and after the event) was their anxious flavor, the concern about the variety of problems a blog could bring a writer. There are valid concerns, of course, and it's good to get one's mind around the genre, or at least take its temperature and a sounding before doing a cannonball into the deep end. But it seems to me that what we basically have here is the very same fear around any writing, any publishing. It's all just "monsters under the bed" stuff, after all. Or, as Rose Rosetree calls it, STUFF, that is, astral clutter, including frozen blocks, in one's personal energy field.

Speaking of clutter, one of the many appealing things to me about blogging is that it doesn't require physical space except for, say, a place to plunk one's laptop while typing. All of my book projects, on the other hand, have each produced a mountain of research files and then contracts and then marketing materials and such, plus a little (well, not so little) library of related books. Finding space is a challenge.

More anon.

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