Well, I think it was a really valuable experience, but I wouldn't do it again the way I did it.

I live in DE/PA area and I went with a friend. We were interested in travelling on as tight a budget as possible and while taking as little time off work as possible. So we ended up taking midnight trains both ways, and only taking off Friday (I think Thursday was the first day of the conference). It was pretty impossible to sleep on the train on the way there; we both dozed off for a few hours.

Then when we got there it was snowing of course. Silly me hadn't checked the weather in Boston and in PA/DE we were having record high temperatures that weekend (pretty sure it hit 90 degrees) so I had like, a hoody and a leather jacket. It didn't bother me that much but it was unexpected. We got in Friday morning, Friday night we crashed at a friend's place, we stayed all day Saturday (which was the end of the event) and took another late night train back. I was exhausted by the end of course; the crying baby on the train on the way back led to much bleary-eyed discussion of "spawn" and how I was never going to "whelp."

As for the conference itself - it was both fun and extremely overwhelming. I got Stephen Dunn, Bob Hicok and Brian Turner to sign copies of their books for me. I wanted to get C. D. Wright to sign "Rising, Falling, Hovering," but she quite clearly did not want to be at the reading - it was a 4-poet panel of readers that was supposed to last an hour. She stood up and read one poem. Then booked it immediately afterwards. I went to a lot of seminars but not as many as I had planned; I spent several hours sitting on the top floors of the convention center enjoying the sunlight and kind of rejuvenating. I went to one on Levis and several panel readings; I went to a panel about oppression in poetry (which probably factored into my Afghan landais blog post which I wrote much later); I went to one about "geek culture," you know, stuff like that. I told my friend afterwards that if I did AWP again I would never do it the way we did it. I'd want to be able to take the time and either crash for two nights or get a hotel. Really I don't see me doing it again unless they bring it to Philadelphia, or I have a nice belt of money saved up that I can afford to blow on it.

I found it valuable but exhausting and not valuable enough to repeat. Maybe if I were more of an established poet it would be better for me in the sort of "see and be seen" culture of conferences - one of the reasons I was interested in going was because I think either Gaiman or King strenuously advises writers to go to conferences, that they're the "next step" and help with networking - but I wasn't really connected enough to benefit from any of that. I did get lots of free journals and leads on journals I might want to submit to, so there's that.

Mixed bag, positive experience, you should've gone. I used my old student ID (even though I graduated years ago) and got discount "student" pricing for the weekend. Wouldn't have gone otherwise.