The Sewanee Writers' Conference

Yesterday, the annual writers' conference got underway with a reading by Jill McCorkle. Today, I heard Tim O'Brien, author of one my favorite novels of all time (The Things They Carried), give a craft lecture and Romulus Linney read from a two-character play. Tonight, I am returning to hear Mary Jo Salter read. Over a period of two weeks, every day brings readings and lectures by outstanding well-known writers and by younger writers, one of whom was a classmate in The School of Letters but is now earning an MFA at Johns Hopkins. He was the best writer in my poetry workshop two years ago, and he's still terrific.

Here's one of his poems:

Dusk Arrangement
by Hastings Hensel

"The eye is burning, forms are burning, eye-consciousness is burning"- The Buddha
"Some say in ice." -Frost

Everything is burning; the ends of our cigarettes,
the charcoal-colored robins, the freckled sunlight
splotched and split like eggshell on the lawn.
Burning: the flamed hush of western pinks,
voices like wildfires in the city's under-story-
lawn mowers, buzz saws, cars at the far edge
of the ear's periphery. Burning: the top halves
of other houses, fenced in for the eye, the birch shadows like twisting runes, the burning glow
of Bradford pears sparked early like suburban stars.

Or melting: the ice cubes in our drink like stars,
the shade by the clothesline, the heel-print moon
in the sand-colored sky. Melting: box fan clicking
in the window, sentence of cloud, the cold ring
on the cocktail napkin. Melting: sky of stillness,
birdsong, dog-bark, ceaseless thrum of traffic.