If you have a question, raise your hand.
I will come to you.
That includes for outside.
I'll try to see through the reflection in the window pane.
I love that you're outside.
You make me happy out there.
Any questions?
Hi.
Thank you so much.
Would you say a little bit about Antarctica
and how it occurs in your poems?
Yeah, it is a lot.
It shows up a lot.
It shows up twice in Smith Blue, and then that trip.
In 2008, my father retired, and he
got himself a trip to Antarctica on the National Geographic
Lindblad Expeditions trip.
And my mother gets really seasick.
And so she was like, I am not going on the Drake Passage.
And I was like, well, you can't go alone,
someone has to go with you.
So I got to go on the trip.
And it was--
Antarctica is a place to be if you're
a person who can't stop paying attention
because the sun never sets.
And you can't-- like I like just--
and the landscape is just so different.
And I just could not not be looking.
And I just took notes and notes and notes,
and I would stay up like insane.
You remember that movie Insomnia where the guy just never slept?
Like I was that person with a notepad,
just taking all these notes about this landscape that was
so-- it was just so different.
I would gauge things wrong.
I kept thinking that the mountains were giant,
like they were 14--
or they had to be fourteeners because they
were all just like snow.
But it's like this--
it's like we're way below the tree line--
above the tree line, right?
That's why there was all snow peaks because--
and they were like 2,000 feet.
And it's like they're not very high.
But they look to me like what I understand 14,000, and 15,000,
and 16,000-foot peaks to look like because of the way that
the snow was on them.
And that kind of thing, I was like, oh, wait this
is our planet.
And I'm having to completely readjust everything
that I know.
Also when you have bad allergies like me,
Antarctica is amazing because nothing could grow there.
And I was super healthy.
It was awesome.
I don't think McMurdo Station would be like that.
I think it would just be filled with all kinds of human gunk.
So I'm not necessarily going to go there.
Just in the sense of perspective change,
though, in 2013 and 2014, I was able to go to Southern Africa
a couple of times--
Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique.
And what I found there was that I kept being like--
I'm driving across the nation of Namibia, and I'd be like,
oh this looks like Lubbock, this looks like Long Beach,
this looks like Riverside.
Like it just looks so much like Texas and really like
lots of parts of California.
And then I had to just do the opposite thing.
I'm like, I am in Namibia.
Like I am not in So Cal.
Leave that alone.
And that opposite sense of this feels so familiar
that I'm being lazy in my attention
and not paying attention, like that was
the opposite of the Antarctica thing,
where I was like it's so--
I have no perspective, and so I'm
going to give wrong details.
So anyway, that's how Antarctica happened.
And I took tons of notes.
But I really did get back to the notes
because I was looking for the Antarctic seabird ticks
and then--
you should journal.
Everybody should journal.
Journaling is very important for being a writer.
What else?
Back of the room.
Thanks so much.
So you talked about just grief coming into your poems.
And also one thing I know about your work
is you just have this amazing command of history
and just so many facts.
How do you balance--
I think your work is so beautiful and so
full of amazing details and so much in love with the world.
I think how do you just balance all the information
in your head when you sit down to write the poem kind of thing
and just knowing versus grief and love?
Yeah.
Well, I guess you don't really have a command of history,
particularly as it is represented
in America, without having an intimate relationship
with grief, all right?
I feel like-- but I also feel like you can't really--
we can't understand where we are in this moment-- we certainly
can't understand where we are this moment,
this political moment, without understanding history.
I keep reminding people that the whole reason
for the electoral college was so that a whole bunch
of Southern slave owners could have more vote and more power
because there were fewer of them,
and they wanted more power and control in their election.
And it's still working.
So the way that historical legacies that
are built on exclusion and the pain of certain parties
who don't get their voices continues
to affect how we look forward into the future.
And so I just feel like as a writer,
isn't that part of my job?
Part of my job is to help to consolidate
all this information that is all over the place
and overwhelming and seemingly disparate,
but also to make these connections
and to point out the ways that they are not so disconnected.
In much the way that when we really
understand ocean systems, we learn
that what happens over Hawaii, it affects the storms that
are happening in Seattle, and way down in Peru,
weather in Peru is drawing down all the cold or hot water
in the currents, and there's going
to be very different currents in Juneau, Alaska.
These are all directly connected.
We are all directly connected to everything.
And so I think in poetry, I'm doing that same thing.
And I'm saying so the history of what we did there
when we built that sand dune--
a change is the history of how this house can stand or not
stand in this place.
And isn't-- like let's talk about the filigree on the gable
in that house, too, while we're at it.
Like it's just-- it's also how my brain works,
but I find it part of my role as a writer is that--
maybe it's like a version of didacticism
made as pretty as I can possibly make it
and as appealing as I could possibly make it.
Thank you.
Thank you for that answer or for doing that work?
[LAUGHTER]
We've got time for one more.
We'll do two more because I saw those hands at the same time.
The two hands, yeah, it was like a tie.
How much of your discovery and embrace
of all of the interrelatedness of life
do you think you gain through the process of writing poetry?
Wow!
[LAUGHTER]
Yes.
[LAUGHTER]
I think it honed it.
I mean, I think I always thought that way.
But I think that writing poetry honed it.
I think the first book I had really small poems.
And it was like--
they're all little sonnets, 14-line poems.
And I could be like, OK, I can pull these ideas together,
and I'll write another poem, and another poem, and another poem,
and I'll do that 52 times over and over.
And then as I've developed as a poet,
the poems get longer and longer.
And now I'm writing essays.
And so I'm just like, who knows what's next?
Maybe next time I could actually write
a real memoir, like not a bunch of linked essays that
become a memoir, but like a--
whew, that sounds scary.
So I think just with time, you learn
how to work those tools with more stamina.
But I think also it was also innately maybe already there.
Question number two.
I'm just wondering-- like you're kind of
at the apex of Camille Dungy.
I hope not.
I mean in a way--
Because I haven't won all the prizes, Aisha.
There's three more I'm waiting for.
At this moment, at this very moment.
And I'm just wondering how it all
developed from when you were a kid, like what
you were interested in, and when poetry came in, and?
Poetry's always been part of my life.
My grandmother was a librarian.
My family believed in literature.
I lived for some time in Iowa City, Iowa,
where writers are just people who
need dry cleaning and babysitters
and are normal people.
And so that's important, to be a young writer
and know that writers live, and walk,
and tell you boring stories at the grocery store.
And so-- and so that was part of it.
And then when I went to college, I just
realized that there were ways I could--
I thought I was going to be a physician because that's
what you do, and then you write on the side.
But basically that's what Ethan Canin does.
Most of us are--
we have to make a decision whether we're going
to be physicians or doctors.
And so I just decided that that was where
my attention was going to be.
And so that-- it was definitely sophomore year in college
that I can mark as the moment where
I said, all right, that's the track I'm going to be on
and I'm going to dedicate it to.
But then you got to re-- you got to renegotiate that contract
on a regular basis.
That sweet girl I'm trying to write about,
I don't write about her right now because every time I
try and wake up before her, she's like--
20 minutes after I wake up, she's like, OK, mom.
I've gotten as early as 5:30, and then I was like, forget it.
I just-- I guess this is just going
to be a quiet time in my life because I'm not getting up
at 4:30 in the morning to try and beat her and then have her
show up at 4:45, right?
I'm not doing it.
And so that just means the new renegotiation.
It means I have to figure out how
I get that work done when my life isn't accommodating it.
But the work has to happen, and that's-- just keep doing that
in your life.
You just have to recommit in different ways.
Camille, thank you so much.
I'm personally so glad that you're a poet and not a doctor.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm being selfish.
Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]