Hello, everyone. Oh, sorry, I'm loud.
OK, let's go ahead and get started.
My name is Cybele Knowles.
I'm the events coordinator here at the Poetry Center.
And I'm happy to welcome you to the Poetry Center--
or back, as a case maybe, if you're here last night.
And I know very many of you were.
Just want to thank you, Franz, for coming all the way
to Arizona to give a fantastic reading.
It was really wonderful.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
I don't really think Franz Wright needs
any introduction at this point, but I'll just
say a few quick words.
He's a poet.
He's a translator.
He's a Pulitzer Prize winner.
He won the Pulitzer for his 2003 collection,
Walking to Martha's Vineyard.
And another wonderful writer named
Denis Johnson has said of Franz's poems,
"they're like tiny jewels shaped by blunt, ruined fingers--
miraculous gifts."
I love that.
So thank you for coming.
And we're going to just take questions.
And if you could do me a favor and speak your questions
into the mic, we're recording this Q&A session for posterity.
And your question will get onto the tape if it goes to the mic.
So I'll run around and pass this about.
What sense do you make of Rilke now.
Have you changed your feelings about him?
Sometimes he seems, like, ponderous, like,
Rodin to me now.
Yeah.
That's a good question.
And that's true.
And sometimes he almost seems to me like one of those--
there are certain writers--
he's not really, but there are certain writers
that I think appeal to younger people and adolescents
and the adolescent in everyone.
And he's a borderline.
I mean, of course, well, there are very major writers
that that could be said of.
And it's a wonderful sort of form,
writings for younger people.
But I just think that I felt very differently.
Well, I mean, I feel very differently about everything.
But I think I had an exaggerated idea of--
I see better what's strong in him
and what doesn't work as well.
And I like his work that is--
my favorite work of his is the middle period--
Neue Gedichte, the New Poems.
The really crystalline sharp poems
that often have to do with--
well, his idea was--
he was kind of stuck.
Like Yates, he began writing in a much more flowery sort
of 19th century romantic way.
And then he was dissatisfied with that.
And he became one of the--
I guess he could be called a modernist.
I know what happened.
He went to Paris to become--
when he was still probably in his late 20's or 30's--
Rodin's secretary, and which would
sound like a pretty good job.
But he did it for a while and then he, being Rilke,
it didn't last very long.
You can't have two major--
like, two guys who want to be the--
I mean, he had great reverence for him.
What he learned from him was, I think
it was Rodin who told him, you've
written enough about your--
you've looked inward enough.
You need to look outward and go look at--
you need to think about--
it's interesting, sort of like the concept
that the Japanese haiku poets had and some of the Chinese--
the Tang dynasty poets.
If you look outward--
he would tell him to go to the zoo.
Like, go write a poem about an animal or something.
He did write "The Panther," which to this day
all German children learn in school.
And the idea was somewhat like Elliott's
objective correlative.
Instead of saying straight out saying something
about the way you feel, you talk about the way
you feel by describing something outside yourself.
And the way you speak about it will, in an unspoken way,
be talking about the way you feel.
And so that was when you start getting the real Rilke.
And then he had different styles.
Some of them are much like the later elegies and the "Sonnets
to Orpheus."
And I translated for a long time the unfinished fragmentary work
that he did while he was trying to write The Elegies,
trying to find a vocabulary and a style for The Elegies.
And that work interests me very much.
But to me, he was like THE poet, what a poet is.
And he's still a poet I love very much.
But I have to say the same kind of worshipful attitude
about it.
Last night, I think for a while there you
were talking about channeling William Burroughs.
And within your work that I heard,
there's a lot of different voices,
a lot of different characters.
When you're composing, do you find
yourself adopting a persona?
You become someone else in order to deliver
what would be your real authentic emotions,
but perhaps create a different situation in which
to present them?
Yeah.
And you do that.
Baudelaire's idea was that it's the very first thing
a poet needs to do is create a persona.
And you're always doing it.
It's confusing, I think, because I also
mentioned that lyric poetry--
you speak in the first person, everyone
assumes that you're speaking literally about yourself
all the time.
Whereas in fiction, we accept the idea
that it might be made up.
It might be something you made up in order
to tell a higher truth.
And I feel like free to make things up,
even though I'm speaking in the first person in a poem.
But I think every poem you write you are
looking for a different mask.
I know what happened to me in the last couple of years.
The reason I was able to write this book of prose
that I've been trying to finish is that, I had always
told this to students.
I had the idea that and I tried to do it when I was younger.
If you find that you're really good at one particular thing,
then focus on what you're not good at.
And it makes something happens where the work becomes
fuller and more human.
And for me, it was enough image.
The image was very important to me.
And so then I tried to learn more
about technical things about sound, musical aspect
of poetry.
And then what helped me with the prose
was I realized I had spent a lot of time reading theater stuff.
And my favorite playwright is Harold Pinter.
And his work strikes me almost as prose poems sometimes
in an odd way.
But a lot of reading in Beckett and Pinter and other
playwrights, but not just them.
Eugene O'Neill, I like very much-- and like that,
and going back to the Greek playwrights.
And I found out in these prose pieces
that these other parts of myself could come out and talk.
And sometimes several of them come out
and talk to each other.
And they have a conversation.
It's not a conversation--
they're conflicting with each other.
It's like a sort of dissonance.
And so that was what turned out to be
the thing I needed to concentrate on, the thing
I was weaker at.
And then once I realized I could do that,
I could put that together with the lyrical qualities
of writing.
Then I got something--
I don't know how successful it is,
but it was so much more satisfying to me.
I had a feeling I'd never had of something was lifted off of me.
I felt lighter and--
It's convenient.
Yeah, yeah.
Thank you.
So when you begin writing and you're
aware of needing to adopt a persona,
are you often already connected to the emotions
you want to get at and you find the right voice?
Or do you start with voice, hoping
to be able to connect to something
and get more clear about what you're
feeling about the subject?
I always start from language.
I've never ever once written anything
with a pre-meditated or a pre-conceived subject.
Like, I'm going to write something about this,
so I'm going to write some--
I never.
Well, I tried when I was young and it never worked.
It was too conscious.
It was too wooden and stiff.
And what I do is just keep what I know lots of writers do.
For me what's always worked, and again it's
something if a younger writer asked me,
I always suggest this.
I find myself saying this, never sit down with the idea
that you were going to write a finished piece of work.
It can happen.
Rarely, but for me, rarely.
To get depth and space in a piece of writing,
I believe that you--should--you can go too far.
But I remember saying to a teacher of mine, David Young,
I always cultivate a deliberate unconsciousness
of subject material.
And David said, maybe you should cultivate a little bit
more consciousness.
[LAUGHING]
And he was right.
If you do one thing, then try to do the opposite to balance it
and get it more whole.
So I needed to do that.
I needed to become more conscious.
But what works for me is I have just the habit of listening
in on-- everyone has this, I think
Breton called it the incessant murmur of language
flowing through them.
You hear it sometimes when you're
going to sleep, this almost stream that's
separate from your conscious control of your mind.
You can hear it sometimes, snatches of it.
It's this flowing underneath consciousness,
a stream of just blah, blah, blah, like, different words
coming from your memory and from your imagination
and your hopes.
And I've trained myself.
That's what the first piece I read, I think,
that there's an untitled prologue
at the beginning of the prose book
which is about that listening.
And writing is paying attention and listening.
And there are two different things.
Listening is patience and waiting.
We all talk to ourselves as you're walking along
or when you're alone, especially.
Mainly when you're alone, of course,
you can hear it more clearly.
And I would find that in a certain mood,
in the right mood, that I would be listening
to that inner conversation.
The language would start to become heightened
and more interesting.
And then I would go, there.
And I wouldn't start there.
I would wait for a while.
As soon as you start to write, everything changes.
It's almost as if you're unconscious or withdraws,
like it conceals itself again.
And so I would wait and write something largely in my mind
first before I went to go--
because your mind goes, oh, he's got a pen in his hand
and he's ready now.
Now we're going to shut down.
[LAUGHING]
You get very inhibited.
You get self-conscious.
So I would wait.
I get a good line or a couple of lines and I go, OK.
And I'd wait before writing them down.
I often do this while I'm walking somewhere
and where there's no people.
And I'd wait and see what would come next,
if something was going to come next.
And often it would.
It would suggest something else, and then something else.
Then at a certain point when I thought, all right,
I've got enough material that I'm not
going to be able to remember it all,
then I would start writing.
And then the act of writing, you feel confident because you
already have this start, this material,
so you don't feel as inhibited and you feel confident.
Then each thing will suggest something else.
And it just starts to roll along.
And then you get a draft of something.
And I never try to write--
it happens that I write finished things without revising them,
but very seldom.
To me, I would say writing is revision.
It's like sculpting.
That you get a draft and it's like a block of material
that you can sculpt something out of or it's a canvas.
And I write things 50 times, often.
And now I have a new trick I've learned, which works magically.
I wish I had stumbled on this sooner
where I'll take a poem or a prose piece
that I consider to be finished.
It's finished.
Can't do any more.
And I'll take a notebook or a piece of paper
and I'll copy it out by hand, slowly.
I even have a brush I used that slows me down even more.
It's a half pen, a half paintbrush.
And it's like a calligraphy brush.
And I'll do it in print instead.
And that slows it down.
And the more slowed down, it is the more meditative it becomes.
forget.
Your attention, again, turns outward rather than inward.
And so when your attention turns outward,
those voices can start welling up.
And I'll always find something-- not always,
but I'll think something is absolutely finished
and I'll copy it out by hand and find seven, eight places that I
go, how did I not see that this could be made so much better.
This could be said in so much better way.
So the revision process, I continue
to do it for a very, very long time
before I consider something finished.
I know that now.
That was hard to accept for a while, but now I love it.
I love that process.
Because have something that's pretty finished,
and then it gets even a little better.
It's a wonderful feeling.
It's like someone came up and said, pointed and went--
it's like you have this inner--
writing, in a way, it is splitting yourself
into the person writing and the person watching and going,
no, that's another person, a critic or an editor.
If you're own critic, your own editor, as much as possible,
then you can take it farther.
But still, that also brings up the necessity for me.
And I think, I don't know any writers
who don't have a few people they show things to.
Well, of course, you have an editor.
And I'm blessed with a particularly brilliant one,
Deborah Garrison at Knopf who's just the most phenomenal.
There's a kind of ESP that we've developed where she'll
say something-- she's tactful.
And she doesn't want me to get upset, because she
knows that I go, what--
no, I'm not going to change.
She won't bring up everything at once.
She'll just touch on something enough so
that it gets in my head and I think about it over a few days.
And then I start doing, oh, I see.
And then often, and this will happen--
it just happened recently.
She'll say, I felt that the previous version of this
was maybe better.
And I said, no, this one's so much better.
Then I thought about it and I went, wait,
the earlier one's ending was better.
I need to get the ending and somehow
graft it on to this longer, fuller piece.
And then I did that.
I mean, I wrote to her and I said,
you know what I'm going to do, I'm
going to sort what you said think about what you said
by taking the ending from the other one, the previous one,
and trying to get it onto this.
And she immediately wrote back and she goes, she said,
it's uncanny because that was what I exactly what I
was going to suggest.
So we've gotten to a point where we know each other's--
how we work pretty well.
And my wife is really good at it.
Part of revision is reading something out loud to her.
And she has that same ability to not just come down
on you with this is bad.
She has a way of also saying, it's really good, Franz, really
good, and building it up, and then, but, I like this.
Because I'm very insecure and vain.
And they're trying to wrong my right.
So I have her.
And I have several writer friends that I send things to.
And I get all their suggestions all together.
And then I choose from the ones that--
and again, the few times I've taught.
I haven't-- not very often.
But I always say, you got to shake this thing, which
you have really strong when you're young,
which is, this is sacred.
You can't change a word of it.
And you've got to realize, no, it's not.
The wonderful thing is that you can
go on and sharpening it, like sharpening it like a blade.
You can sharpen it till there's no blade.
So you've got to know when to stop.
This is something Charles Simic said to me--
I've been blessed with some really, really good teachers.
They weren't teachers, but writers I correspond with
and that mentored me in a way when I was younger.
And he said, you have to leave something a little rough
in front.
He goes, you're trying too hard-- the lyrical absolute
he said.
You're trying to make it too perfect.
A little roughness makes it poignant, human.
It's like that Islamic thing about where they leave a flaw.
And that idea is different.
It's not falling prey to hubris.
The way that we're made in the image of God
is that we can make something out of nothing.
It's not like we look like-- that's what I think.
We can do a little tiny--
in a small way, we can make something
that didn't exist before.
That's fabulous.
And René Char has the most beautiful phrase in the world
about that.
He said, "A work of art of any kind
is a contribution of the creature to the creation."
Perfect.
Thank you.
That was so generous.
Thank you.
Franz, could you talk a little about your translation,
what motivates you to translate, if you're
bilingual in the language that you translate, and just
in general comments on translating,
what you get out of it.
I don't anymore.
I stopped really doing it quite a while ago.
I think I did it really a lot between the ages of about 15
and 30, a lot.
First of all, the first impulse was
that I wasn't thinking about translation.
I was thinking about how to read a poem in another language
more closely, with more comprehension.
And to begin to try to translate it
is to do that, because you immediately
start having to make your own choices about how
you're going to do this.
And pretty soon, you're kind of in the mind of the writer.
You're not only understanding the poem better
and the different levels of meaning,
but you're starting to see into the process itself,
how the writer arrived at certain things that
seem very mysterious.
And so for me, it first started out as a way
to read better in another language.
And then once I got going translating--
and I started pretty early--my father--
You might remember in the '60s, Hermann Hesse became this
huge--
he was rediscovered and was hugely like a rock star.
Hermann Hesse-- those books sold hundreds of thousands
of copies of his novels.
And so he moved over to Farrar Straus Giroux
and his editor there, one of them, Michael [INAUDIBLE],,
asked him if he would-- because they were having
so much success with Hermann Hesse's novels, they said,
why not try to translate some of his poems, which
are not great poems.
But some of them are very beautiful and very nice.
And so we did one that was called
Wanderer, or Wandering or Traveling,
that Hesse wrote literally.
And he knew this, of course, I realize now.
Basho created almost this form where, while going on foot,
traveling long distances--
there's something about walking where your mind becomes still
and the chattering slows down and it becomes still
and voices can well up without your willing them to.
And sometimes they're very interesting.
So Basho had this style, which is
very touching, he would talk about some interesting thing
that had happened to him the day while he was walking somewhere.
Then he would talk about the situation he was in,
then give you the poem he wrote as a result of it.
And Hesse did this with a book called Wandering--
I think it's still in print, I think it is--
where he would write a prose piece, not really
a prose poem but a dialogue or travelogue or something.
He describes some things he saw.
He had been kind of booted out of Germany somehow
for pacifist activities around the First World War.
So he walked over the Alps--
is it the Alps-- into Switzerland from Italy,
into Switzerland or something.
He walked into Italy to get out.
He walked from Germany to Italy.
And partly with this in mind, it would give him
ideas for things to write.
So he'd write a prose piece.
And they even included some of these little watercolors
from little places he saw in Italy.
Then he'd write a poem, then he'd have a poem.
And my dad did the prose parts and I did the poems.
And the poems are not very good, but they're like little songs.
And they're lovely in German.
They're very hard to get in English
because it's a little bit like when you
hear a song you really like.
And then you just write the lyrics down.
And it's like--
[LAUGHING]
Doesn't make it, because it's the combo--
it's this music and the words.
So you almost feel with some of these poems
that if there were music it would be better.
So they're not that great.
But I was like 17 years or something.
So that was exciting.
And I think the idea was that would
help me pay my tuition at Oberlin when I went to school.
And it did all right, because there would be a royalty check
and we'd split it.
And it would be a lot of money.
It would be like $800, which in 1972 was a lot of money.
I remember giving a friend $100 who need some money.
And my rent was like $45 a month, whatever,
and being able to live on it over the summer and just write.
So it was great.
And then my dad did one that was just poems.
It's much better.
That's a great book.
I guess Herman Hesse's poems.
It's one of those rare cases where the translation is better
than the original-- they are.
I mean, his translations are better than the original poem.
That doesn't happen too much.
The other case I can think of is maybe a Baudelaire translating
Edgar Allan Poe.
The French loved Edgar Allan Poe.
And it's easy to see why, because he had this regular,
long, like "The Raven--" da, da da, da, da,
da-- it's the same rhythm over and over again.
And the French like that.
Because they have a longer line.
Than they think more in terms of the iambic pentameter
line, which is the basic line in English.
There's a longer line, I think, in the French.
And anyway, of course, Baudelaire's translations
of Poe were going to be better than Poe's poems,
He's like an infinitely better poet.
But that doesn't necessarily mean it.
But sometimes it happens.
It's an uncanny thing when it happens.
I've had the experience of a frankly,
even with some of the very minor poems of Rilke, where
suddenly I'll look at a line, and I'll go, it's better.
Just by accident.
I stumbled on something that's really better.
It's got a bigger meaning, more levels of meaning.
I forget what we're talking about now.
Are you bilingual?
No.
I don't really--
I would not be able to--
if ever.
I guess I could speak German, sort of, when I was a kid.
But no.
No.
I've translated a lot from French and German,
but I don't really speak them very well.
I found I had a knack for it.
I get a dictionary, and I just sort of start.
Sometimes I would look at other translations
to see if I get a literal sense of what was happening.
And I go, I know I can do better than that.
Or I'd get somebody fluent.
This is Pound's idea.
One great way of translating is to get one person's a poet,
and then you have someone who's fluent in the language.
And they work together.
And that that's an exciting way to go about it.
So sometimes that worked.
But I would do it by myself.
And I would show them sometimes to--
like René Char-- very difficult poets.
I just found that I had an intuition about it.
I would just kind of--
even if I didn't fully understand.
I remember Tomas Transtromer saying that at one point
he got interested in Whitman so much,
and he tried to translate him.
No.
He would read him.
And he knew he was reading him incorrectly.
But his interpretation of what he thought he
saw, because the poet--
we're so in the habit of thinking that way,
in language in that way.
He would know it was incorrect, but it would be a good line,
so he would use it in his own poems.
That's interesting.
But no.
I just found out I could do it.
I would show it to a fluent French-speaking person.
They go, it's fine.
And they went, your French is very good.
And I go, no it's not.
I don't know French at all.
Hardly at all.
German I know pretty well.
What do you make of translations of your stuff?
Oh.
It's so exciting when that happens.
And I've had the--
a woman at Amherst College, a wonderful young French
professor, translated all of Walking to Martha's Vineyard
into French.
And I've seen poems of mine translated into Spanish,
German, Vietnamese.
On the internet I've come across sites where people--
there's a Vietnamese site.
That's cool.
A guy started writing to me from Iran.
And he's studying, of all things--
in Tehran-- he's studying at the university American literature.
[CHUCKLES]
And we corresponded a lot.
It was fun.
And it was a while ago, so we said some things we might not
say now.
And we each had a few words to say about our own governments.
At least, he might not want to say now.
You can say anything here.
That's the genius of the system here.
Let everyone just say whatever they want.
And then completely ignore them.
It's great.
It's freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech.
I almost sometimes think that maybe the Russians
would kill their poets when they got out of line--
Mandelstam And maybe that gives them more power--
it certainly gives them more power.
It's discovered again that language
is subversive and dangerous.
And ideas are the beginning of the first step
towards dangerous developments.
I think it's absolutely ingenious,
the idea of freedom of speech, because it diffuses--
language is diffuse-- its power is diffused, in a way.
You can say any damn thing you want.
It's not going to do any good, but--
They're not going-- they don't care what you say.
Say whatever you want.
Franz, I'd like to ask you about one
of the epigraphs in your most recent book, Wheeling Motel.
Marguerite Yourcenar, the quote from her,
maybe I'll read it so everyone has it in their mind.
"He had reached that moment in life,
different for each one of us, when a man abandons himself
to his demon or to his genius, following
a mysterious law, which bids him either to destroy or outdo
himself."
Those are Roman.
It's the Memoirs of Hadrian, and a book that I cannot recommend
to--
when I found this book, I thought
it was among the very greatest books I'd ever read.
I read it 10 times, and I can't--
I'd read it, and want to start reading it over again.
She's a very great writer.
Not always, but that book is--
God, what a masterpiece.
But those are Roman concepts, one's genius and one's demon.
Your genius, I suppose, is the nobler and better side
of your nature and your soul.
And everyone has one.
It doesn't mean the way we use it, genius.
And your demon being your more self-destructive or wilder
or more animal like side of yourself.
Of course, all human beings are--
we're always trying to subdue that other destructive part
in ourselves, and try to transform it
into something higher.
We hope to.
And sometimes we succeed, and sometimes we don't.
But what is it about that quote that you're asking, though?
I just thought-- to me, it meant--
it seems self-evident to me.
I thought it was so wonderful because--
Yeah.
It's beautiful.
--you're in your 50s, and you go--
it's a point where--
I think poets in our culture, they
do tend to start to repeat themselves or start
producing paler versions of poems they did better.
And I really was interested in consciously trying
not to let that happen, and trying to go farther.
And I'm not sure it's so evident in that book,
but it's going to def--
I'm thinking, for sure, it's going
to be evident in this new one, this prose one.
It'll be the one nasty thing they won't be able to say,
is that I just sound like my older work.
Because it doesn't.
And it's really different.
That's all.
I think in middle age, and advanced middle age, you do.
You're faced with this-- you're like,
am I really going to do anything better than I've done?
Is there any point, even, in going through this hell
that you go through when you write a book.
Once you're into it, for me, anyway, I take it too hard.
It kind of takes over.
I remember my father saying--
he was at a party somewhere, and he was sulking,
and he was depressed about something.
And Kenneth Rexroth came over to him and said, Jim.
He goes, the problem with you is you
worry too much about poetry.
He says, poetry is the work of a--
a pastime of a gentleman.
And somebody-- a book person--
you shouldn't take-- it shouldn't be so--
if you make it like everything, it's just going to--
And then my dad asked him, well, Kenneth,
why do you write poetry?
And he responded immediately in a rather crude way
that was interesting.
I don't know if I should say it.
But his response was to fuck women and undermine
the capitalist system.
[LAUGHTER]
He said, you got to have some other reason besides--
[LAUGHTER]
And then it frees your creativity.
But you do, you find yourself, should I even bother.
Right now, I'm at this other point where I feel--
I don't know.
I wrote this book in one year.
That's nev-- well, it has happened.
I wrote The Beforelife in one year.
But this is a much bigger deal.
And I know I can't go through this again.
I know I can't.
Not for a very long time, if ever.
Because I'm done, man.
I'm so mentally wasted.
Just nothing left.
What I find now, I'm having a great time
going back and rewriting things.
I have one more I have to write.
It's just, I keep putting it off.
It's like the old--
I'm fleeing from it and putting it off.
And whereas, while I was in the middle of working on these,
I was writing several of them a week.
And I wrote well over a hundred of them in a year,
so I was at least writing two a week.
And I was writing several at the same time.
I couldn't stop.
It was a big river of stuff.
And I'm pretty much out of gas now.
I feel kind of resentful about it sometimes.
I never get to enjoy anything, any accomplishment, or anything
that I do that I think is pretty good.
Because I'm immediately in the middle of the frustrations
of working on another one.
And so I never get this sense of accomplishment.
And I almost feel like--
I got this book of prose.
I got a new book of poems at the same time that I wrote.
And how this happened, I do not know, but it did.
And I go, these can't be.
I must be diluting myself.
And I've shown them to people who tell me the truth.
And they go, no, it's pretty good.
And some of it is some of your best stuff.
It's like gambling.
Maybe it would be good to quit while you're--
before you start doing that thing where you start to lose,
and then you panic and you lose everything.
That wouldn't happen.
I just feel tired.
And I feel like it's killing me.
Really.
And it pisses me off.
I feel like I've been doing this for over 40 years.
Don't people retire after certain--
why not?
But my wife goes, sure you will, Franz.
Sure, you'll stop.
What will you do then?
It scares me because it's the only time I really feel good.
It's the only time I feel happy.
It's when I'm working.
It drives me out of my mind.
But when it's going well, it's the only time
I really feel like myself.
I don't know what to do, what's going to happen.
Yeah.
Oh, OK.
We'll get you.
Our instrument, practical instrument, for living.
That's the way I experience your stuff.
It's like a flashlight, or a [INAUDIBLE]
or an energy [INAUDIBLE]
That's not how I experience it, though.
I wanted to tell you thank you.
Thank you.
--big help for me--
That's-- well, that's--
Reading your book last night, and I thought, wow,
I could've used this.
[INAUDIBLE] to the soul.
That's a wonderful thing.
And I think that's why it's been helpful [INAUDIBLE]
That's a wonderful thing to hear.
And the reason that's so wonderful to hear
is that's what poetry meant to me when I was young.
It saved me.
I would find, oh, someone else has felt this,
has experienced this, and found a way to express it.
And something in me.
And that's the greatest thing.
And then, if you find that you can do that,
you've done that for somebody else, you just gave me--
that's the greatest payment, greatest gift for writing
that a writer could hear.
Because that's, I think, why writers start.
Because they want to do that, what writing does to them.
Thank you.
You wanted to say something, right?
Well, I now have a new question in relation to his.
What do you feel when you reread your poetry, if you ever do?
I don't really.
I don't look back.
I'm afraid that it will-- it's a distraction
from writing new ones.
I look at them when I'm going to give a reading sometimes.
I really don't.
Because sometimes they embarrass me very much.
And then when I know they're good,
the few that I really feel I know are good,
they're not alive to me the same way anymore.
What's alive for me is what I'm working on now.
That's what's keeping me going.
But largely it's because they embarrass me.
Every single book of mine has--
I know I'm going to find things where I go, why did you
have to put that in?
The book would have been so much better without that poem.
And it's too late.
Sometimes it's not.
I have had opportunities to fix that.
Doing a selection-- Knopf did of my first four books,
and I got a chance to rewrite some things.
And that was very satisfying.
And delete some things.
And that saved me.
Just things that really--
I would wake up in the middle of the night,
and rise with humiliation and embarrassment.
And I got a chance to kill them and like get rid of them.
But I'm afraid that those are the ones I tend to notice.
The good ones, I go, OK, good.
And then I'll go look at the ones
that embarrass me, and writhe.
So that's why I don't like to do that now.
The other thing relates to growing as a poet,
and how the important thing is to cultivate what
you're not focusing on.
But it can be hard to even really notice
what you're not focusing on.
And that's where teachers are important.
How did you get a foothold on this thing
that you're not intuitively or naturally doing?
I usually have a pretty good idea
of what my strong points are.
And then I can try to go the other way.
But what you say about teachers.
To me, one of the most wonderful things a teacher can do--
and I think teaching is really just about the greatest thing
that a human being can do.
Many of the very greatest people in history have been teachers.
And what you can do, and what my best teachers did,
was save me time--
years-- by directing me.
Not telling me what to do, but go read this.
Things that I wouldn't have known how to find.
I might have taken me years to come across them.
So you save you time.
You always have teachers all through your life.
I always have looked for people to be teachers to me.
And it's very interesting to find myself at a point
where I seem to be in that position myself
with younger people.
And I find that very humbling and very exciting, too.
Is that enough of an answer?
But I'm not quite sure I fully understand your question.
I think so.
And, well, one more question.
It relates to poetry and prose.
Yeah.
And how it seems to me--
this may be very simplistic-- but how in poetry, there's
one voice, and in prose, there are many voices.
And the problem with having many voices
is that they clump together, and it's hard to make it as clear.
It can be true.
That could be true.
That's always a big question.
This question always comes up.
What's the difference between poetry and prose?
Eliot said prose has more words.
But he was just being sarcastic.
The difference to me is that usually--
I don't know about the voices thing.
There can be different voices in a poem.
But to me, poems are closer to a feeling of singing.
And it makes sense.
Lyric poetry, they're lyrics.
There was a time, right up until, well, it even
was true in the Elizabethan age, a lot of poetry was sung.
They're the lyrics of songs.
And certainly, in the ancient world,
the idea of a poem without music would have been preposterous.
The Iliad was sung, and all poetry was sung.
They were the lyrics of songs.
We get the words, but no one knows
what Greek music sounds like.
So we're missing out on half the--
I don't know.
Poetry to me feels like it's more
a matter of what you can suggest to the reader,
and less a matter of what you're going to tell the reader.
You give the reader credit for--
this is the analogy that I use, again,
the few times I've taught.
This seemed to be a useful analogy.
Poems, in some ways, to me, seem like they work like jokes.
They have a punch line.
It's a dark punch line, an anti-punch line.
But they work like jokes in this way.
If you tell somebody a joke and explain to them why it's funny,
it's not funny, is it.
Think how a joke works.
You're counting on the fact that the listener
is going to instantaneously fill in the certain missing
information that you're not saying in order to get it.
To get it.
And a poem, I think, works in a very similar way as a joke.
That's another aspect of it.
But it's more of a form of singing.
It's like comparing singing and talking.
Franz, could you talk to us a little bit
about winning the Pulitzer?
What was the dark side of it, as well as the bright side?
Right at the start, it was the most shocking thing
that I could possibly have imagined.
That day, April 5 in 2004, I was in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
And I cannot possibly imagine a more shocking,
more unexpected thing that had to happen.
They call you, and you go, come on.
You know it's a friend calling you, putting you on.
They're getting somebody to do this.
I wouldn't believe it for a while.
I went, no, I didn't.
And then they go, yeah, you did.
And then pretty soon, every newspaper in the world
starts calling you, and then your phone never stops ringing,
and it's frightening.
Nobody had paid any really attention to me critically.
I published about five books with small presses, university
presses, and private presses, and no one
had really reviewed me very much or paid very much attention
to me.
I wasn't unknown.
I'd won a Guggenheim grant.
I've won a lot of NEA grants and Guggenheim grants,
and I published a lot in magazines,
and I was known to other writers.
Yeah.
You go to a different--
One problem for me was I'm a very immature and disturbed
person, and I do stupid things that I regret very easily.
I'm constantly trying to watch that I don't, but I do.
And something comes out, and I go, no, you're
not going to do that.
And it goes, yes, I am.
And it does it.
[LAUGHTER]
And it's too late.
For one thing, whenever I do something really stupid,
or make a fool of myself, it would be localized,
and I could move somewhere else.
Now that's not possible.
And there's nowhere to hide anymore.
It was very thrilling.
The first thing I did was I just went out
and walked for about two hours, and I just
thought about my dad.
It made me feel--
I talked to him in a way that I hadn't for a long time.
Like, what do you think of this?
And this is weird.
And it was psychologically strange to--
I don't know.
It was thrilling.
And it was fun and thrilling.
And then people say a lot of wonderful things about you,
and you go, yeah, yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
You agree with that.
And then the other people start coming out, which they will
no matter who wins.
I know people who-- like Simic and Strand,
and different-- they've been getting this critical attention
from the time they were in their 30s, sometimes early, mid-30s.
I had no practice with this.
I had no callus over myself when it came to negative--
which you're going to get.
As soon as you have some little degree of success,
all these people are going to come out and go,
his stuff isn't so hot.
You didn't apply to win this prize.
You didn't ask to.
And I'm the first one--
I made a list of all the poets better
than me who never won it.
That made me feel better.
But I got a lot of--
yeah.
The worst one-- as I think some people know,
I have my nemesis--
what's his name--
William Logan.
Everyone kept saying to me, Franz,
if he wrote a good review of you,
it would be the ultimate humiliation.
Because he only writes about the most successful
poets, to put them down.
Because he's a very bitter guy who's
never gotten any attention for his work because it sucks.
[LAUGHTER]
It's really bad.
And so he figured, at some point, I can get attention.
It's very childish.
The reviews, if you read them, they are so viciously personal.
And I didn't know how to go, it's not you.
It's the fact that you've become noticed.
It would happen to anyone.
And I'm a pretty fragile person, and my sense of self.
And an easily enraged person, too.
I took it personally.
But I've gotten a lot better at it.
But it took a while.
It's been, now, about five years, and I'm pretty good.
Much better at it.
I haven't mastered it.
I still get mad sometimes.
The thing that's so aggravating about criticism is that I was
reading with Louise Gluck-- which was a staggering honor
for me--
at Houston a couple of years ago, a few years ago.
And somebody brought this up.
What do you think about reviewing.
And I just said--
I knew they were bating me, and they were trying to get me to--
and I just said, oh, well, I believe that they don't
read the books they review.
It's absolutely clear to me, when
I read a review of a book of mine,
that the person has spent about 10 minutes leafing
through the book and hasn't read maybe half or 3/4 of the poems.
It's easy to tell because they will say something
about your work that is completely contradicted by it
later, in another part of the book,
that you answer yourself, that you know yourself, and have
already responded to.
And they act like it's not there,
because they haven't read it.
And I can see that.
If you were a reviewer, and you get all these books every
month, and you have to write reviews,
you're not going to spend-- you can't.
You might not even know the person's work that well.
Reviews are stupid.
The good thing about them is that if you
get a review in a prominent journal that a lot of people
see, it sells books.
If you get a review in The New York Times Book Review,
you don't care.
They can accuse you of murdering children.
You go look at Amazon and on a Sunday morning or something
when the New York Sun New York Times.
It's happened.
Because my every my editor told me,
you're the only poet on our list right now
who's every single one of your last four
books is received a review--
a full-page review-- in The New York Times Book Review.
They have those sales numbers.
It'll be like 500,000, 200,000 and the higher the number
means the worse the sales, and it goes down.
The lower the number, the better the sales.
And you can see it.
It goes from 700,000 to 3,000.
And it's like, whoa.
You want to watch it all day, like the stock market.
You want to take a picture of it.
The day I won the Pulitzer Prize, it went to 200.
Which is like novel stuff.
A lot of things happen that really boost your egos.
Like, they finally notice how wonderful I am.
And then you got to deal with the other--
and I'm learning how not to respond.
I didn't know.
I had no practice.
And I'm very, very easily wounded.
It's a very thin skin.
That was tough.
Unfortunately, we're out of time, so we'll end there.
Franz, thank you so much--
Thank you.
--for your poetry, and your candor,
and for coming to see us.
Thank you.
Let's give him another round of applause.