Okay, I'll have to try this quickly. Your correspondent wanders into a writing conference. The highlight of the program Joyce Carol Oates reading from memoir, the events surrounding her husband's death. Wow. Real. Someone like you and I.

Then there was other stuff. My unnerved bowels are blindsided by a reading of New Directions Poetry droning over the sound system in a big conference room the size of the deck of an aircraft carrier, as one introduction put it. That I escape this reading to seek the solace of a rest room epitomizes the awkward feeling attached to being present. (I later find out, basically this is a class reunion for MFA grads, teachers, this from the nice young woman kind enough to talk to me, who was very cool. She was married.) I wander at the edges, investigate the book fair booths down in the basement of the Marriot Wardman Hotel, small presses, poetry publications, MFA programs, and so on. It should be noted, by the way, as far as New Directions poetry, that I've enjoyed my copy of Susan Howe's "My Emily Dickinson."

The second day, I sleep in. I run the dishwasher through, and miss panel discussions on various topics, but make it eventually and pass through the book fair again, (getting up there with a leisurely walk passing over Connecticut Avenue Bridge with the mist over the woods below, that nice breathing space of Washington DC that is Rock Creek Park.) And once that is done--they're all packing up anyway by the time I get there--having no desire to enter the bar area of the Stone's Throw Restaurant (where barkeeps move at a pace keeping with their union status), I go find a table and pull out the old yellow legal pad, my instrument of choice in this long battle of attrition or whatever it is, not really a battle...

When you're alone in a place where everyone seems to know people, that's as good a time to write as any. I write a bit, finally feeling restored to some feeling of groundedness, or maybe, why I too belong to this tribe that is upstairs mingling, cool haircuts, funky clothes, hip attitudes, social intelligence, artistic archetypes like the guys who look like Chuck Close.

It occurs to me, the correctness of the vision of my own little obscure book, a copy of which I'd brought along like a security blanket. And amidst writing, I pull it out and read, letting words I wrote washing over me. And here, I begin to run out of time to explain. Let me try: sorrow, the sad feeling that hovers over a notebook when there are people around enjoying themselves, really is the key to opening up the Universe in all its beauty. (All this is at the risk of giving up a great trade secret, but... ) That sorrow is a layer, an atmosphere, a condition we must enter into and spend time in, pay our respects to. And we are rewarded, oddly enough, by being able to enter, at least for a time, into the natural form of peace we somehow know instinctively and organically about, natural truth, let's say. And by the way, we have a wonderful system, kind of like checks and balances, of our nervous system to guide us toward the light, if you will. So did the creature invent soothing activities, satisfied with the invention of music and painting and words. Completely natural for us to write, as a way of maintaining our nervous balance, as Kerouac, natural athlete, knew as well, just like catching a football, don't need to think about it.

There is no avoiding the fact that life is full of sorrows, and things like loneliness. We go about life with our bullet holes and our bleeding wounds. Now and again a writer, like Joyce Carol Oates, will bring forth a life episode that captures the general condition, as she did with the hospital scenes of her husband's illness.

We try to shake away from that truth, to cling to a somewhat selfish belief that there is another way than passing through such things. Can't blame anyone. We all do it. But as a writer, you're not doing anyone any favors lying to them that life is perfect sustained happiness. That we are created human beings is enough that we'll always have some companionship in our condition. One reason I've never really minded the dreary task of tending bar, or whatever other dreary things without glory we pass through, striving to maintain some form of elegance.

By the way, all the greats have a good handle on this basic observation upon the fibers permeating existence. All we do is marked upon by failings, and that calls for some kindness, one form of that being making certain observations. And so we write, a kind of simple gospel about a real living person, such as we observe in our own lives.

And with that, time to get ready for work.