Hi.
I have a question for both of you.
It's very general or very broad, but who
is your targeted audience?
Or who were you expecting to read your poetry?
Or who are you targeting to feel or to experience what
you guys were both for anyone to try to understand
what you guys were writing?
[LAUGHTER]
Go ahead, says Jane, go ahead.
So when she was here, Alice Notley
said in very colorful language that basically poetry is
just better than any other art.
In an interview, she said, "Poetry
is the art that we are."
And so that sets the bar very, very, very high.
But I take her seriously in thinking
that when poetry's firing, it is that kind of mystical singing
the cosmos into existence.
And so in that case, I'm not thinking
of a demographic or a person, I'm
thinking of a body that's alive with a spirit,
and that's my target audience.
That's who I hope will be called through the incredibly
fickle apparatus of taste and subjectivity,
right, who will be called to put these words into that matrix
of the body and the spirit.
That, for sure.
[LAUGHTER]
I never think that anyone is going to be my audience.
I'm always surprised and honored when somebody is listening.
And I don't think that what I intend
is what is going to be received.
And I hardly know what it is that I
intend by the time I'm done.
I might know a little bit in the beginning,
and that changes as I write.
And by the end, it really is something just
to go away from and write something else.
That's the process of being an artist
and on to the next thing.
So I'm grateful if anybody is listening at all.
And each time I hear my own work,
it feels a little different.
So I'm a different receiver of my own work.
So thank you for listening.
Great question.
Does anybody else have any questions?
Here's one.
Ah.
I have a question about both of you
use language that needed explanation.
And it made me wonder when you read the poem,
you probably don't have the benefit of the explanation.
I haven't seen your books, but how
advisable is it to use, let's say, languages or reference--
language or references that people wouldn't
understand just reading?
Thank you.
That's a great question.
I hope everyone heard it.
Language is a gift that we're given.
We're not born with it.
And it expands hopefully as we get older.
And so I think it's part of the artistic process that we
writers go through-- and you may yourself be a writer,
so you know this--
to expand the number of words, and the meanings of words,
and the multimeaning, the contradictory meanings
of the words.
And it puts tremendous pressure on the reader,
there's no question about it.
And that demand we hope is met with an equal force.
That is, the reader will be so moved
to figure out what the hell is going on that she'll
look it up and think about it.
And that's a deal that the writer makes with the reader.
And honestly, the other choice is not a good one.
To use the simplest words, kind of
funnels down to a point where you have a president who's
saying things that a five-year-old knows
better than to say.
[LAUGHTER]
So those are really the only two choices.
It either grows and gets enormous and difficult,
or it shrinks and get so simple that it
is meaningless and dangerous.
So there you have it.
[APPLAUSE]
So there's words, and then there's references.
And in this book, I have many, many notes in the back
and, in some cases, in the beginning of each section
to share those references.
But I also say like, maybe this is a confession, I don't know,
there's only so much poetry that I can really
build a relationship with.
And there's a lot more poetry out there,
and I'm responsible to read broadly
because it's my practice, but also as a teacher.
And I try to read as much as I can.
But my attention can really only build an intimate relationship
with a poet at a time.
And I go deep when I fall in love with somebody's work.
And so when that happens for me, I read, and reread, and reread,
and reread.
So there's that because helps to--
that degree of accessibility changes the more time
is spent that I give to the work.
And the other thing is sometimes, too,
poets make interesting choices to just steal things.
So in that gorgeous introduction,
Kou had quoted a line from Alice Notley.
"We are the masters of seeing and hearing
at the double edge of body and breath."
And it's been a totemic line for me for a couple of years now.
And I wrote to her recently and asked about the poem
in which that line appears.
And she said, by the way, that line I took out an essay
by Robert Creeley.
[LAUGHTER]
And in the first versions of that poem,
I had quotation marks around it, but that seemed too literary.
And the poem really didn't want to be a literary object, so I
took the quotation marks out.
So there's a little bit of like, who really owns
these things after a while?
And I noticed that Sarah said "with attribution"
when she was talking about using Jane's maxims.
So I don't mean to scandalize the librarian--
[LAUGHTER]
A speech is not art.
--but there's a little bit of language
in which we're available to one another to be used.
We have time for one more question.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
So for each one of your guys' pieces of work,
it's titled after an animal, Thunderbird and The Real Horse.
So I was wondering what the importance with each of those
were?
Or like more--
I guess a little bit more eloquently to say,
was it the work that inspired the title, or maybe the animal
or did it somehow work itself into the work?
Did you hear that question?
How the animal names in the titles of their books
influenced their work?
Yeah.
I think she's referring to a book that I wrote
called Thunderbird, which refers to a number of things.
My mom had a beautiful Ford Thunderbird,
red, convertible, really cool.
It met an unfortunate end, which I won't go into this evening.
Not my fault, I'm just saying.
[LAUGHTER]
And there are a number of other references to the Thunderbird
that--
probably why I was so taken with it
is there's so many meanings of Thunderbird, including
Thunderbird Trail.
For those of you who live in West Tucson,
you'll know that place.
So I'll talk to you.
There's a lot more.
In the case of this book, it was really--
it came out of research.
There's a whole section in the book
that I did not read from that tells
the story of Adah Menken, who is this amazing woman who
is friends with Whitman.
And she's considered the first kind of proto Madonna,
like a celebrity from the 1800s.
She was a stage performer.
And she became most famous by doing
a stage show called Mazeppa based on a Lord Byron poem.
And in that show, she's so determined
to be famous that previous productions of the show
had put a dummy on the back of a real horse
and run that horse across the stage to depict the moment when
the hero is being tortured.
And he miraculously survives that.
And Adah Menken was determined to put her body in the back
of that horse, and so she did.
And she would do that stunt three or four nights a week
for a few years.
And she's thought to have died in her 40s
because of doing this stunt over and over again.
But more broadly, the horse in the book--
the book is concerned with how we
might use one another to become people, [INAUDIBLE]
and how we might use one another to undo that.
So Fred Moten and Kou also mentioned
has this line, "amalgamated or being amalgamations,
we are constrained to use identity
against the zombies who invented it."
And so I'm really interested in how
we can use one another in intimate relationships
to be more amalgamation than person, to be more loose.
And in some broad way, I hope that my daughter
can use me to not have to show up
as a discrete, and consistent, and disciplined human being.
She can use me to show up as a looser amalgamation.
So I hope I can be the horse.