Thank you, everyone.
We wanted to do a brief Q&A, so if you think of questions
you have for Rosmarie and Keith and if you want it to both come
back up briefly.
And then we have books for sale as well.
I'm just curious.
For Rosmarie, what led you to start
translating Jacques Roubaud?
I really love both of your volumes of translation
of his work, some of my favorite translation from French,
so maybe you could speak for a few moments.
Yes, admiration and envy.
I read his work for a long time, and I
loved it and was very envious.
It's the kind of thing I would have liked to have written.
And most of his earlier work is extremely, extremely formal,
and I had no hope of ever being able to translate it
until the moment when he wrote what I translated as Some Thing
Black, Quelque chose noir, which is also formal, nine
sections of nine poems of nine stanzas of nine,
et cetera, et cetera, but at the same time
had a great emotional impact because it
was about death, the very premature death of his wife.
She died at about 35 of apnea, and so there
was a very big emotional impact in this book.
And also the formals of the nines
were more manageable than some of his other formal devices,
so I thought, here's my chance.
I can maybe translate this book.
Yeah, he's a great writer.
In particularly the first half of Driven to Abstraction,
I could spend maybe 45 minutes on each page easily.
What was the pace at which you were writing like?
Yeah.
Well, I write very slowly, and I think on paper, really.
I'm not like Rimbaud, who composed his poems while he
took his walks in the, you know-- and then just came home
and wrote them down.
So I really don't start thinking until I have the paper
and the pencil there and start putting words down,
but then I also revise endlessly, quite compulsively.
So it's all very slow, so maybe that
gets into the slowness you found in reading.
Yeah.
Rosmarie, you talked about how you write very slowly,
and Keith, you talked about the process
that you used to write this other book,
finding time to write when you really didn't have the time.
And I work here in the library, so I
was pulling aside your books for you guys to sign.
And I was so impressed by how prolific you are,
so I was curious if maybe either or both of you
would talk about if you do write slowly
and you have so many obligations, how do you do it?
It's incredibly impressive.
I'd like to maybe learn how.
We've had a long life.
But even so, I think--
Many years.
Keith, slowly.
The question is, how did I write that many books?
I don't know.
I wasn't aware there was that many.
I don't know.
I write when I can, and it isn't all the time.
But sometimes, things are relatively fast,
and other times, they're slow.
And sometimes, they're impossible,
but I can't predict that ahead of time,
either, especially obvious with translation.
Sometimes, I think, well, this would be an easy one.
And so I start, and it just goes perfectly haywire.
And I read it, and I think, no, no,
if this original said that, I would never have liked it.
It's just out of the question.
I don't know why sometimes it's quicker than other times.
And I write at odd moments.
Rosmarie and I have a great difference in this.
When she sits down to write, she's
going to write such and such a thing.
And then she writes it, and then it's done.
And she does basically one thing at a time, whereas I sit down,
and I write a line.
And I look at it again, and I think,
that doesn't make any sense.
So I have the line, and it's there.
And the next time I sit down, I may write something that
goes with it, but it isn't at all accurate,
isn't all that likely, even.
But after a certain amount of time,
I have a batch of lines or thoughts,
or thoughts is maybe not quite what they are.
But they're some kind of series of words, perhaps.
And when I have a number of them that seem to have
some connection that I can make--
which maybe nobody else will ever
accept that connection, but that that's neither here nor there--
I start working on that, and if that doesn't work,
I put that aside and go back to something else.
And eventually, sometimes, I come up with a poem,
but I wasn't aware that it was that many.
I never thought of myself as prolific.
This is a question for you, Keith.
When you were selecting your segments for the poems,
were you reading for texture, or did you
find yourself drawn to certain things when you were selecting?
In the collages?
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Well, there are many ways, obviously,
that you can do that.
You can look for some particular kind of thing,
or you can or you can decide what page it's going to be on,
page 100, page 200 and--
when I was doing most of these, however, I
do remember that I was basically just pulling out the book
and flipping it open and looking down and writing something
as quickly as I could, which didn't mean necessarily
the first words that my eye lit on,
but there wasn't any searching.
At least, it didn't feel like a search.
Sometimes, some of these things I threw out later or changed.
As I say, I wasn't trying to prove anything about collage
or finding things.
I just wanted to write some poems.
And at the moment, I didn't have any mind,
and so I had this other system of finding something.
And for a long time after that, basically maybe even until they
were finally put in a book, if I read through it and I thought,
oh, I don't like that, I could still change it.
They were just poems.
Actually, I don't quite believe Keith
when he said that it was completely
sort of more or less haphazardly because I think,
if you do this, only the first time
can be completely haphazard.
As soon as you have one thing, it's going to be in your head,
and it's going to determine what you choose next, even if you're
not completely aware of it.
So don't quite take him at his word.
She doesn't believe anything I say.
It's a question for Rosmarie that I really
don't know how to ask, so I'm going to try to do it.
So Spicer apparently took a really long time writing poems
because he was waiting for the Martians
to show up and say something, the sort of dictation thing,
but the poems don't feel slow.
It's not like the Martians were sitting around
in a certain space.
It's like they were off having coffee or something like that,
and then they came and gave him one thing and then
the next thing.
So the compositional pace seems to have nothing
to do, in a way, with the space-time of the work.
My sense is that in your writing,
the compositional time is related somehow
intimately to the space and time that the work makes.
So I guess I'm trying to ask, what
is the compositional slowness about for you
as you're doing it, and how, if at all,
does that sort of fold over into the sort
of slow space-time of the actual writing or the space
that the writing makes?
I'm not sure I can answer that.
That's a hard question.
OK, I--
I really don't know how to answer it.
The one thing is I don't wait for the Martians because--
the Martians or the muse--
I find she doesn't get interested
until I start working, and I first
have to put something down on paper before anything
can possibly come like that.
And so there's a lot of writing things down
on paper that get lost again later that
are just sort of baits for, I hope
something is going to happen.
I hope this is going to lead to something, and often doesn't.
But further than that, I don't really know quite how it works.
Thank you.
Yeah.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.