Conference report, day one

I'm blogging tonight from a terminal in the coffeeshop of the very swanky Grand Traverse Resort. Not a whole lot to report, other than an uneventful trip and the first half of a preconference program called Poetry in the Branches. The most entertaining, if not necessarily the most useful, parts of the program were the occasional brief writing exercises. The first was to write a short poem addressing an audience and telling them to do something. Here's my rather uninspired free-verse offering:

An address to the audience

You with vacant eyes
waiting sadly in your chair
for beauty or vitality
to enter, by the ears or by the eyes,
that closely guarded chamber of your skull:
Hey! You! Get off your ass!
Write! Speak! Do!

The second was to respond to Kim Addonizio's "What Do Women Want?" and the third was to write something beginning with the phrase "I want...." I cheated and combined the two:

What Do Men Want?

I want a red convertible.
V-8, dual pipes, standard shift.
Four on the floor. Oh, yeah!
Roaring down the road
without a care, without a worry,
without a payment or insurance bill,
without paying for the gas.
Driving in the sun along the California coast.
And when it rains...

Hm.

No. I want a red truck!
4x4. Ground clearance. Yeah!
Now we're talkin'! In my red truck,
I'll go anywhere! And everywhere!
Up hill, down hill, through the woods, through the mud.
More powerful than any other driver on the road,
except...

Hm.

I want a red tractor-trailer.
Now we're talkin' power! Air horns!
I'll roam the country as I please.
No one gives me orders! I'm an independent man!
No one gives me orders!

(Except for that woman in the red dress.)

Not exactly masterpieces, but they kept me entertained.

Now I'm off to see if I can find the considerably cheaper hotel where I'll actually sleep tonight, perhaps a nice restaurant, perhaps a beach or bluff looking west over the lake so can feel all romantic and Byronesque and stuff as the sun sets and the full moon floats overhead.