Now we're going to do a Q&A.
Sure.
So if you'll raise your hand, I'll
come by with a microphone when you have a question.
I think we met years ago.
And anyway, good to see you.
Where did we meet?
Thank you so much for being here.
With that last poem, that method of what you talked about,
the different images coming together to create this whole,
it seems like it would be a hard thing
to sustain through as long of a poem as that was.
So what was the process of writing
that, or how did you sustain your attention
or that approach?
Thanks for that question about sort of form and craft.
I think I've been known for writing a lot of sequences
where the sections are discrete passages,
and then I can, like, change the tone
and change the syntax or the varying imagery.
But I think it's always good to give yourself challenges
to try and do different things you haven't done before,
and I wanted to think about how I could write a long poem where
those pauses between sections of a sequence were--
that they disappeared so that there was
one kind of continuous notion.
And I thought of Gamelan music.
I don't know if you know that Indonesian form of Gamelan
music which has lots of repetition
with sort of bamboo xylophones and gongs.
But you can kind of hear over time the transitions,
the changes to the music.
So my process was to write lots of sections
and to start with that.
And then instead of saying, well, I'm
going to then juxtapose them or move them around
to create a sequence, I'm going to sort of look at all
these different sections and see which
ones I can dissolve the boundaries in between.
And then I gave myself the formal structure
of creating one and two line stanzas instead
of blocks of lines.
I thought I want a lot of white space
because that breathing room can allow room
to transition or jump to a different register.
So I gave myself just--
again, it's a kind of like invented form.
I thought, OK, if I have a poem that's
one line and then two lines, two lines, one, two, two, one, two,
two, one, two, two, one, two, two, one,
that that kind of rhythm would set up a kind of pattern
that I could use in language.
So I probably had--
the last poem took me 9 months to write.
So I probably had about 20 sections of poems.
And then I started to play with stringing them together,
and I didn't really know where the beginning was
or the end was.
So I was working from the inside out.
But I was looking at certain images like the image of glass.
Or there's the image of the coyote that
appears and disappears and things like that.
And I thought, well, I don't want them too close together.
I want them to recur like music so that they're coming back
to kind of form of insistence.
And then as I strung them together, a lot of the sections
started to meld together.
And then eventually, I was able to have
sort of what was a beginning.
And then I didn't know where the end was.
I had all these sections that were sort of hanging out there.
And I sort of decided to run with it as far as I could
and then to just sort of cut it where it seemed like that
had a kind of resonance to it.
So that was my process of creating
that kind of a form which I hadn't done before.
But again, it took a lot of time,
and I was meeting with students in a class this morning,
and we had a wonderful conversation about process.
And it was about making a mess and then
trying to clean it up to clarify it and making a mess
and then clarifying and that kind of back and forth.
And so that was very much at work in this process.
I noticed in one of the early poems
in Sight Lines, one of the sections,
there were some words that have strike-throughs.
And then it seemed like another similar word.
Maybe-- is that a revision process, or how
did that come to be?
So again, that came up in the class I visited this morning.
That process of strike through lines
started in my previous book, Compass Rose.
And it came out of a collaboration
I did with a sculptor.
And I haven't done collaboration a lot,
but the two times I've done it have been at times when I'm
like thinking, what can I do next,
or I need a kind of challenge.
And so once I worked with a Chinese composer.
And then this last collaboration,
I worked with a sculptor in Santa Fe.
And she's very meditative, and she does abstract drawings.
And she layered graphite-- like 50, 60 layers.
Then so I would go to her studio and watch her work,
and I thought, I like how the process of creating
becomes part of the final work of art.
And I thought, well, how can I get her--
instead of revising a poem and then selecting the best
draft or the best language and then letting
the process, a lot of that fade or disappear, how could I
incorporate some of that?
And I thought, well, if I had a voice and someone was speaking,
a man or a woman, she could say something and say, that's not
quite right and then revise it.
So like in the first poem, "Water Calligraphy,"
it's a person who was actually tortured during the Cultural
Revolution in China.
And he's thinking, and he says sun-- no, moon.
And so there's a strikethrough with sun,
and he's correcting himself.
So you can see that process.
And it has to do with accuracy but also
trying to show how the mind sort of moves and twists and turns.
And I think it also has to do with the idea
that the words are necessary, so that they're there,
but then they're not accurate.
So they're crossed out, and they're stuck through.
And I liked that that created a kind of tension.
And then once I did that, I thought,
I've got to be really sparing with this.
You can start to correct the corrections
and revise the revisions.
And then again, you can end up with a big mess or lots
of strikethrough lines, and it overwhelms the poem.
I have two questions.
So at the beginning, the lady mentioned that there
are classes offered here.
So my first question is, do you think poetry is learned,
or it's just something, like, gift, called a gift?
So maybe one day, it just flows out of you in some way?
I sort of want to reject both extremes.
I guess my feeling is when I used
to teach at the Institute of American Indian Arts,
I would tell the native students poetry can't be taught.
I can't make you a poet.
You can't just will yourself to be a poet.
But I said, if you have a passion for language,
if you enjoy playing with language and experimenting,
I can help you develop your voice and your vision.
And that is a lot of hard work, and there's
no substitute or easy path.
Almost all of my peers, my contemporaries,
went to graduate school.
I'm an anomaly in many ways.
I'm a science dropout, and then I started--
I was in at MIT, and I started writing poetry.
That wasn't supposed to happen.
And then I transferred to the University of California
at Berkeley, and I thought, I'm never going to graduate.
I have science credits.
I want to study classical Chinese.
I want to learn all these different things that I
think would help me as a poet.
And I went to UC Berkeley poet and critic Josephine
Miles, who rescued me, and she said, create your own major.
Take whatever you want.
And I remember, she said, I don't care if it's Swahili.
But someday, you're going to be a poet.
It really means a lot if someone believes in you.
In 2002, I traveled Taiwan with Derek Walcott.
And Derek said to me behind every poet,
because the path is so difficult,
there's someone who says this poetry is worth
doing because it's a life work.
And I think if you feel that urgency and necessity
of language, that's also a kind of prerequisite.
So again, I'm giving you a long answer,
but you can't just sort of learn or will to be a poet.
It's years of learning and discovering.
But I do think along the way, teachers
can be extremely helpful.
Other artists can be helpful.
I found conversations with scientists helpful.
So it's a solitary task when you're sitting on the computer,
facing a blank page, writing by hand how do you write a poem,
how does it create itself.
It's years of work.
And you know, my feeling is get all the help you can.
If it's a class, great.
If it's talking to the artist, great.
Thank you, and thank you for your answer
because when you just mentioned play with the language,
it actually has some connection to my second question.
So how necessary is it to make sure the grammar is correct
when you write a poem?
Because English is my second language.
So when I write in my own language--
I'm Chinese, by the way--
I may not write just regular sentences.
But I have more freedom to make it sound not wrong
and still convey my message.
But when I write in English, sometimes I
may focus on the meaning first, and then I realized,
was that right grammar?
That actually bothers me from time to time.
I think it's important to know the rules in order
to be able to break them when that's necessary.
So for instance, the monologue that I read to you
in the voice of Salt is a run on sentence,
which normally scares me.
I like to have punctuation because it kind of makes
me feel safe.
Or also, it becomes a kind of interesting tool in my hands
where, oh, if it's a semicolon, I think then
it changes, like, this phrase to that phrase.
If it's a semicolon, there's like a certain connection
between them.
Or if it's a dash, which I use a lot in this book,
it's more like a leap or a jump.
So I think it's important to know all the tools
and have them at your disposal.
But then at a certain point when necessary,
it's fine to sort of, like, transcend them
or break them or violate them.
But at least you know that you're doing that.
I'm going to circle back to China
just very quickly because I have gone
to China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan for international poetry
festivals.
And you know, poets like Xi Chuan or Tang Di,
who's at Peking University, they'll say,
we don't understand this thing where all these American poets
go to graduate school and learn to study to be a poet.
We're like, studying ancient art.
We're looking at paintings.
We're working as journalists.
We feel like it can't be taught.
So what is going on there?
And you know-- and then they come to realize, well, again,
however you learn your craft and your training, whatever works
is fine.
But Chinese is a huge influence on my poetry
because I've translated classical as well
as modern poets as early as Tao Yuanming, 365-427 Common Era,
to Wen Yiduo, assassinated in 1946, who's writing in baihua,
in colloquial Chinese.
And he's violating the traditional,
subverting the traditional Tang Dynasty imagery
and transforming it with a lot of the ugliness of China.
It's important to learn that tradition
and, again, like punctuation or grammar,
to be able to violate it at the points that you need to.
Thank you.
Should we stop?
Yes, [INAUDIBLE].
Thank you very much.
OK, great.
Thank you.