All right, who has a question?
I'm going to drink water.
So I was really fascinated to hear
how you read from Non Sequitur.
And I was curious about that already.
And I'm just curious now how you made the decisions of how
to stage it.
And then, if that's separate from or related
to how you read it at poetry readings, when it's just you.
I had no say in how it was staged.
That is purely Fiona Templeton, who
is a brilliant director and a poet and playwright,
and her theater company, The Relationship.
And it was her idea to do it the way they did,
with the narrator saying the names.
The way I read it, I just found it fun to read that way.
And I also am not a performer.
[LAUGHS] So I couldn't act out the characters,
but I can read it.
But the way that they staged it was really well done.
And the way that they had the characters
speak to one another, like, I think,
the brown vagina and the internal monologue
were played by the same actor.
So the way that they did that on the stage
was an interesting conversation.
I think the ghost of Audubon and the Blunt Institution
was the same actor.
And so they're like-- the cool thing
about that play is that there are
kind of infinite possibilities, but also infinite
impossibilities.
And I did have a really hard time trying to get it staged,
initially.
When I saw that prize, I almost missed it.
I got it in right under deadline.
I was just like, might as well.
So it was cool to win that and to see them staging.
Other questions.
You shared a lot of poetry about your encounters
with celebrities.
And I was wondering, what do you think
is so spectacular about encountering a celebrity
and do you think it grows more mundane as it occurs
more often?
It's definitely mundane when you live in Los Angeles.
Because you get to see them almost every day when
you're going out, especially in Westwood area.
But at least in our area, that's like a hotspot.
I saw-- like, half the people that I
talk about in the book that would be out next year,
I saw at the Barclays Center.
[LAUGHS] They shop a lot.
Yeah, it's super mundane.
And I think the spectacular part is
what you learn about yourself in relation to celebrity.
Is it really that big a deal?
They're just regular people like you.
But they just do extraordinary things that are made public.
But I think my hero is my mom.
She doesn't do anything in public.
She makes really awesome food and made
a lot of sacrifices that made it possible for us to live.
And I appreciate her for that, much more than I would
a celebrity.
Somebody, some people would say being a mom is mundane.
And it kind of is.
I am a mom.
I have a 15-year-old who is hiding, playing video games.
And he doesn't care about people listen to me read poems.
He just wants me to make dinner.
[LAUGHTER]
So that goes back to what I was saying earlier
about the spectacular and the mundane
and switching those things around in poetry.
And it's all connected.
Not to sound New Agey, but it kind of is.
Did I answer that question?
OK.
Anybody else?
I forgot to read from Black Peculiar, sorry.
I have a really general question.
I was just wondering what got you started in poetry?
Oh, I was always a reader.
My dad taught me to read when I was three,
used to read the newspaper.
And I used to memorize nursery rhymes and things like that.
So I think it was always in my head,
like the music and the sound of it.
And my mother was a jazz singer before she had us.
My dad used to play the drums.
It was always music.
And I don't find the music and poetry that separate to me.
But I didn't start writing seriously
until my son was born, actually.
I took a modern poetry class online
when I was in the service.
And I just fell in love with it.
And I got obsessed.
And I had like a bookstore two blocks from me.
And I would go and read.
And I started with A and just started reading everything.
And I would read whatever I could find online.
And I'd say maybe six months after that class,
I started to send work out.
This is like 2000.
So that's how I got started with poetry,
just kind of cycle obsession.
So thinking about spectacle and thinking
about what you were saying with Non Sequitur,
and that you wrote it, then it was
performed kind of separately.
Once it was performed and had its own life,
did that make you want to go back to change it at all?
Could it change what you were writing afterwards?
And so what was the relationship between the public
and the private?
The first reaction I had was, I freaked out a little bit.
And I didn't tell anybody when I was there.
I was like, oh, yes, of course, it was awesome.
But like, OK, so the part with the Faith Evans,
like the girl that performed it didn't know the song.
So she was, it was off-key a little.
But I had to relax my control and realize that that
could be part of it too.
And the way that I wrote it was so that it could
be interpreted in many ways.
There are options, all in the stage directions,
to give the director--
the director that chooses to stage it--
a lot of freedom to interpret the play.
So I kind of had to put my money where my mouth was on that one.
And once I did that, it was great.
It was fantastic to see what was possible for it
to do in real life.
Well, that's a good place to stop, speaking of real life.