The gentleman in the middle.
I had just a general question.
How do you-- poets work with other poets to produce poetry?
You mean, like collaborative poetry?
Yeah.
Have you ever done it?
I'm too neurotic and selfish.
I don't.
[LAUGHTER]
I did try once to work on a collaboration with a friend
of mine, and about two rounds in I
felt like, oh, I want-- like that's my work, so.
[LAUGHTER]
Just trying to be honest.
But a lot of people do it, and yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I think it works well.
For me, it's more like I never really
worked on a direct collaboration.
But I'll read something.
And I'll get pissed off by it.
Or, I don't know.
I think I react to other people's poems.
I also will write in response to them.
And usually, unbeknownst to them, thank goodness.
[LAUGHTER]
But either has a positive spin or I
think I can say something better, or whatever.
But yeah.
So it's I'm reactive, but not necessarily collaborative.
Yet.
But there are some really good collaborations
that are out there.
Like my two favorites are two that Olga Broumas did.
She did one with T Begley called Sappho's Gymnasium, which
is fantastic.
And then she did one with Jane Miller actually called
Black Holes, Black Stockings, I think.
And they're both in her book Rave.
So you should check those out if you're
interested to see how awesome a collaboration can be like.
I know you mentioned Mayakovsky and his writing
poems in, as I understand it, a situation of duress.
And I'd like to hear you talk about--
I think both of you could address.
Today it seems that poets can say things,
and maybe if there's not much consequence perhaps with what
they say in our society.
Or, they can say what they like to say.
And you seem to be skeptical of whether or not
that's actually true.
Well, I think that there's a perception
in contemporary United States that you really
can do everything.
And so this sort of surplus permission
I think silences a lot of people, too.
Because if you can say everything,
then why should you say anything?
But I think once you dig deeper, and especially if poets
become activists, which some do grow to become,
activists do have to suffer consequences.
So I think poets, maybe censorship is not completely
on the level of words.
Although it is.
I mean, artists have--
I think poets don't have the visibility necessary to suffer.
But things happen like the Dixie Chicks dis Bush.
And suddenly their record sales plummet.
Or, they can't be heard on certain radio stations
or whatever.
So I think poets are just not present enough
to really suffer by it.
But I think when poets become activists,
then it still does happen.
So I think there is this surface of permission.
And we're all sitting in our homes
watching cable and nothing is happening.
And then when things do start happening,
then the stakes are high again.
So anyway, if that makes any sense?
Oh, there's one.
We should have--
Yeah, I read a question and answer session that you did.
And you talked about Native poets
and just the different concepts like alterity.
I was just wondering what's your relationship with Native poets?
Well, that piece came about because I went--
at AWP last year I went to a panel of writers
who graduated from the Institute of Arts--
of Indian and American Arts, or American Indian Arts.
I'm an Indian-American.
[LAUGHTER]
You know?
And it was just an amazing breath of--
breadth with a D in it-- of work.
And then I got this, I had to answer
the survey which is, what's American
about, American poetry?
And I was like, well, what's America?
About America.
What is it?
What is the project of America?
And I'm sorry to say that it seems
like from the beginning the project of America
has been a project of expansion.
I mean, it was an expansion westward from England
to the coast.
And then-- I was looking for my passport,
because I wanted to read the quotes on my passport to you,
because all the quotes are in the passport
are this manifest destiny.
Like, this land belongs to us.
It's for us.
We have this God given right to expand to the West Coast.
And then let's go further--
to Hawaii, and Guam, and let Philippines.
Let's keep going.
And then the last line of the passport--
So then Paul Virilio writes about the American arms
reaching around the globe.
And then they touch each other eventually.
[LAUGHTER]
And then the last page of the passport is space.
And there's like satellites up there.
And there's a quote from, I think,
it's Lyndon Johnson, where he says something like,
"Whatever the future holds we will bend it to human will."
[LAUGHTER]
I'm not making it up.
Those are the things that are on the passport.
It was selected by the agency to put on the passport.
And then at the very last line of the passport,
on the very bottom, is a new line it's not on the new--
the old passport.
Does anybody know what the new line at the bottom
of your passport says?
It says this document contains sensitive electronics,
please do not bend or submerge in water.
[LAUGHTER]
So how do you feel about that?
[LAUGHTER]
No, I'm asking you.
How do you feel about that?
So this was a certain moment for me
where I was trying to answer what is
American about American poetry?
And it led me back to those Native American Indigenous
communities that are creating art, and creating literature,
and have been existent all along--
throughout what we consider to be American history.
And I started to think about Judith Johnson's essay,
"The Poetics of Generosity," where
she says, "Well, maybe Muriel Rukeyser is the mainstream.
And you have to think of Charles Olson in relationship to her.
And maybe Charlotte Bronte is the mainstream,
and you have to think about those male--
other canonical authors in relationship to her."
So then I thought if we're going to talk,
have a dialogue about American poetry,
why don't we put those poets who I talked about--
I talked about Bryan Bearhart, Layli Long Soldier, Sherwin
Bitsui, Orlando White, and a poet
named Natalie Diaz who does not yet have a book,
but-- and a poet named ML Smoker,
who has a couple of books from Hanging Loose, I think.
I said, what if we think about these contemporary poets?
Why are all the festivals and everything, Dodge Festival
and everything-- we need to pay attention
to what the actual American culture is,
and think about ourselves as new arrivals to that, frankly.
And it's just it's an issue of--
I was teaching Lucille Clifton to my students.
And they're upset about her Afro-centrism,
I guess you would say.
And I said well you have as a mainstream it's automatically
European-centered.
And so what Lucille Clifton is saying, instead of making it
evening the playing field, let's make
it African-centered so as a counterbalance
to you as a reader for that.
So I'm saying all of us as American citizens,
let us see ourselves as the marginalized thing.
Let's practice that and make this poetry actually
the mainstream of American poetry.
So what's American about American poetry should consider
these poets first and foremost as American poets,
Indigenous American poets.
That site of marginality, of marginalizing
ourselves will be good for us in the long run, I think.
And it will start us thinking about a lot of things
that we haven't really thought about very much.
Because that manifest destiny led then
to this idea of American exceptionalism, where we--
our thing is the best, which led to this intervention in Iraq.
And we are now seeing these democratic movements happening
in the Middle East, where it's like we were talking
about this at dinner earlier.
It's like, we will sort our own shit out.
We might take a little bit longer.
It might not work with the deadlines
that you need for your financial interests.
But we are people who live in a place,
and we'll figure our stuff out.
It might be different than how you would like it.
And had that intervention not happened,
who can say what would be happening now?
That though people in Iraq would have
been at some forefront of some democratic, powerful new
democratic movement that could be happening right now.
And we never had a chance to find out,
because we automatically think that our culture is
the superior one.
And that we know how to do everything properly.
And we'll educate you and give you democracy.
It's ridiculous I'm sorry I went a long way from that question.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]
I went along with your question about Native American poets.
But these two things are not unrelated, obviously.
[LAUGHTER]
Now everyone is scared of me.
[LAUGHTER]
It's all up here--
I have one more question.
One more question.
I have a question.
Do you, have either have you done translations?
Since you talked about it, I'm curious.
Do you want to or--
Sure.
Yeah, I've actually, I've been for the past years.
Well, actually for the past couple of years
I've really started translating, because I just
found more time to do it.
And I translated a number of contribution by Croatian women
poets for this new anthology that Juliana Spahr
and Stephanie Young put out that it's called--
the short title is A Megaphone .
But there's a longer and more obscene title
that you should look up.
But it collects, basically, experiences of women writers
worldwide.
And it's a kind of amazing amazing project.
They gathered all these individual regional editors.
And I was editor for Croatia.
And so I collected, and solicited, and translated
women poets' essays.
So it's an amazing little capsule
of what's happening for women poets worldwide.
And also I've been translating a Serbian poet Zvonko Karanovic.
He's really amazing.
He's a kind of like a--
I guess his heritage is beat poetry.
But there's a lot of European surrealism.
And it's really a thing of its own.
And he was a he was one of the only people writing
anti-government poetry in '90s Serbia.
And you know he had a tough time of it.
So I've been having some success recently getting support.
But a translation to come out.
I really enjoyed, I think, I said in class today-- like,
to me, poetry is like a cheap high,
because translating poetry is like a cheap high,
because you feel like you wrote the poem.
But you really haven't, so.
[LAUGHTER]
You're like I did this all myself.
No, you didn't.
So it's a good way, I think, for me, also,
when I'm having a hard time writing,
it's a good way to sort of prime the tap,
and get things flowing again.
And just inhabiting somebody else for a minute.
I think that must be what actors feel.
It's a very pleasurable experience.
Actually, I think, who was it?
It was I watched like some interview on PBS.
I Think it was Rachel Weisz and she said,
how strange it is for actors when they look at other people
and think they're only that person.
[LAUGHTER]
But like, oh, how could you just be that person all the time?
Don't you just go ballistic?
So I think with translating how writers or anyone who
speaks in their language can get freed up,
even if they can't act.
I'm translating the work right now
of an Iranian poet named Sohrab Sepehri.
And he's a pre-revolutionary poet.
He died in 1980, in fact.
He's a beautiful kind of mystical, strange spirit,
a Sufi.
And I guess, as a Muslim with Hindu leanings
I'm very attracted to him.
He traveled in India.
And he went to Varanasi and other places.
And then came back to Iran and wrote this poem
called "The Water's Footfall."
and I'm working on that.
It's a long poem.
And it'll be published as a small book in April soon.
So you'll be able to hear it.
And I read it in an English translation a long time ago,
and that phrase just stuck with me.
This passage goes, "I am a Muslim.
The rose is my qibla.
The surface of the stream is my prayer rug.
The sunlight on the flowers is my clay tablet.
My Kaaba is over there by the riverbank,
under the acacia trees.
My black stone is the wind, it drifts from orchard
to orchard and town to town."
So that's my current rapture.
[LAUGHTER]
How pretty.
Yeah.
All right.
Thank you so much.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
That was really fun.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]
Thanks for coming, everyone.
[LAUGHS]
I'll see you later.