mark doty on not attending awp this year

Truly my system just rebelled at the thought of doing it again so soon after last year; Chicago felt like a kind of psychological boot camp, as if we were all slogging together through some difficult period of being in a community so large, vibrating and edgeless that it seemed to swallow all individual life. Everyone's always trying to analyze what's so strange about the experience of the conference: a vast number of fundamentally introverted people in one place, a social situation that makes everyone want to feel known and recognized, and then makes the known and recognized want to run and hide. These are true but not entirely an adequate explanation of the existential peculiarity of it.