Well, welcome everyone.
I'm Gail Browne.
It's great to see you all.
I know many of you were at the reading
last night, which was just, I don't know what, amazing.
It was mesmerizing.
It was a wonderful experience.
And we're happy to have Dan back with us this afternoon
to sort of continue the conversation we
started last night about his work and poetry in general.
Many of you know-- if you weren't in the audience
last night, you would not have heard
this part of the introduction, that Dan
was one of our Next Word in Poetry, one of our first,
I think, readers in that series in 2004.
And since that time, he's gone on
to publish a number of other books of poetry,
Mulberry, let's see--
I knew I had these memorized, Dan.
I'm sorry.
This Nest, Swift and Passerine-- beautiful title.
And The Whaler's Dictionary, which is a book of prose.
I guess Spell, I think you had just published
Spell when you came here.
Yes.
Yeah, that's right.
So, many, many books of poetry for us
to enjoy and think about and maybe talk about some today.
So I'm just going to open this up to questions.
Feel free to ask whatever you'd like.
We'll go for about an hour.
Speak into the mic when you ask the question.
Yeah, that helps.
Who wants to start?
Well, one of the pleasures, Dan, in your poetry for me
is the variety of shapes the poems take on the page.
Thumbing through your most recent book,
we see stanzas and paragraphs and columns and things
that I wouldn't know what to name, to be honest.
And I'm wondering if you can talk
about how you arrive at the shape of the poem on the page
or the shapes, I should say.
It became, in some ways, a real issue for me in a way
that I had to have some sort of sense of order
about the page in my third book, Mulberry,
which when I had originally conceived of it,
and you'll see how practical the idea was,
was a giant scroll that was composed in various columns.
And, of course, at some point, I realized
that one couldn't have a page that had these three
inter-penetrating columns and one could
see all these connections.
And so I had to sort of begin to think
about certain quadrants of the page
as occupying a different sort of thinking.
In that book, there's running through the entire book
a sort of central column justified on the left hand
side that is a sort of confessional voice
in many ways that seeks ways not to come
to closure, essentially.
And it's the sort of central axis around the whole poem.
And the left-hand column are poems dealing most typically
with early American history, poems that are actually
centered dealing with aesthetics and the erotic
and these poems that would be on the right dealing often
with philosophy and theology.
And then the second half of that book
takes all the lines from those three columns
and undoes them and restitches them into other poems.
You can see it's all mixed in different ways,
paying attention to where their original column space was.
And so that book, when I turned to a working
on This Nest, Swift Passerine, I had
a way of intuitively thinking about different parts
of the page offering a different kind of thinking.
So if you trace your way through there,
you'll notice that the poems that are all centered in a way
have a certain kind of meditative quality,
often a kind of ecstatic meditative quality
that things that are absolutely fragmentary
are typically going to be on the right-hand side.
Things of more lyric coherency in terms
of an actual individual poem will be on the left.
But that book gets much more complicated
in its visual formal life.
By the time you get to the third section,
there's a page that's dealing with all sorts of issues
of reflection and dullness and ways
in which two-column poems will be interacting with one
another, the right hand column somehow composing itself
by listening in echo to the sounds of the other.
And so there's all different kinds of tensions in a way.
The architect Buckminster Fuller,
he had this word for a structure's integrity, which
he called it's tensegrity, a combination of tension
and integrity together.
And in many ways, I've come to think
of that as a sort of poetic formal principle
that one has to find the right tensegrity for a given poem
when you're operating in a broader
field of a page, a tensegrity of the page
where different modes of consideration
can somehow bring themselves into a kind of harmony,
essentially.
Thank you.
I was remembering how last night you
talked about how your writing and your reading
are so intertwined.
And I was curious was there ever a time for you as a writer when
that was not the case, perhaps when you were very young
or when you started?
Did you ever write poems that were not
interacting with texts.
I know maybe it's difficult to admit it.
But I'm really curious how that might have happened.
Or did it just happen all at once?
Like, you started writing because of reading?
Well, that's a great question.
I think I did start writing because of reading.
But I didn't know that was the case.
And so I wrote really awful, awful poems.
I was a teenager.
But the moment that in some ways is a pivotal moment
was being a junior in high school.
I had a really extraordinary English teacher,
to whom I owe a tremendous amount.
Well, there were two moments.
One, I had sort of fancied myself a poet.
I thought that about myself when I had no right to do so.
And we had an assignment to read a Shakespeare sonnet.
And we were to get up with our group--
of course, I took charge of this group because I was a poet.
And I gave this interpretation of "That Time of Year Thou
Mayst in Me Behold"--
Shakespeare, forgive me.
And I was wrong in the most arrogant, awful sort of way.
And my teacher simply said, you're wrong.
And I thought, I am wrong.
I have no idea what I'm talking about.
And so there was this kind of humiliation
publicly for which I was very, very grateful.
And then later on, I had started seeing
the woman who is my wife.
We've dated since high school, which was,
of course, this very intense thing.
And we were in that class together.
And we were reading John Donne's "A Valediction, Forbidding
Morning."
And she, our teacher, went through this poem
that makes one realize that whatever figurative language
is, it's not abstract.
It seems abstract to us because we seldom
tax our mind in a way that recognizes
figurative precision.
And all of a sudden, I felt it.
I felt this poem.
I felt why it was being written.
I saw how it worked.
I saw this woman who would be my wife sitting
four seats in front of me.
And I just, I guess, for the first time in my life I
thought, it can be done.
Someone can write a poem.
There can be such a thing as a poem.
And I think I wrote--
I've always since then written into that realization, which
isn't about me, per se, at all.
It's about finding a finding a way
to participate in this thing that is kind of inevitably
and impossibly and continually possible,
that it can be expressed.
I still can't get over it.
Express route.
Following up on-- I was also thinking
a lot about this reading-writing interaction.
And for example, earlier in the week
when I was reading some of your poems and then started writing,
I found myself writing my own poems about nesting.
And I've been thinking about nesting all week.
And so I'm wondering how you--
and that was kind of accidental based on what I had read.
So I'm wondering how you choose what you read
or if you read what you kind of want to write about more,
or learn about more, or just in general, if you're
reading everything at all times and it comes out.
Well, I'm never reading everything at all times.
There's a number of things--
and I mean, I'm very interested in what
you said before you actually asked a question, just
that notion of influence that you're
talking about from reading, which
is a thing that a lot of us have been taught to avoid or feel--
an anxiety about, to give the phrase.
And I've always thought of influence
as the most important thing one can expose oneself to,
that reading is this grand experiment in being influenced.
And it's very hard to be honestly influenced
and let another's voice very fundamentally into one's own,
feels to me like a very important thing.
As to how I choose what I read, I sort of--
all these books, they're also books
that if you learn to see it in a certain way
are these repositories of their own influences.
Nothing is coming in and out of itself.
And so with books that I love, I tend
to read the books that made those books possible.
So when I read Emerson, I worry about Montaigne.
And I read Montaigne.
And because I read Montaigne, I read Plutarch.
And the thing that is so exciting to me
at some level about being involved in literature
and certainly reading is, in some ways
the primary involvement, is that every one
of these great masterpieces, if you
press on it in the right way, it links to all
these astonishing places.
And I just follow the things I love.
I love the things those love.
And that's how I do it.
It's purely chosen by bliss.
I have no system at all.
I'm absolutely irresponsible as a scholar because I'm not one.
I'm a poet.
Let's see if I can form this.
I was wondering if you'd be willing to talk
about the new work that you read last night.
We were talking about over the span of your books
that the glass being on the textual
and going more and more profound, deeper and deeper,
and that suddenly it seemed to me that you'd reach the bodily
and that it was a portal and it seemed
like you were in new territory.
And does that make sense to you?
Or can you speak about your new work or how it might be?
Yeah.
I mean, I can try to speak about my new work.
Well, one of the things that I think has opened up
is a real sense of atavism, of ancestry,
of tradition and a very radical sense, one
that is more palpable and tangible than simply
writing a poem that has as its primary thinking another text.
I've become concerned with these stories that
are always underneath texts.
And part of, I suppose, what is it
most bodily is that I've been given over
to various forms of repetition, the sensing
of needing to stay and repeat and vary a single line until it
in some ways has revealed every capacity for its thinking
that I'm capable of paying attention to.
At the same time, I have this daughter
that I didn't have when I was writing
any of those books about other books.
And there's something about watching
her come into language, about the mistakes that
are these wondrous mistakes that she makes in language
of thinking about any given word as often a type of knowledge
that begins in mistake and ends because
of that mistake in a sort of memory,
in a sort of remembrance of what is correct.
And one of the things that's going on
is trying to find a way to replicate in
a poem through repetition that process of realization
turning into a mistaken realization
and then reorienting itself back into memory, of paying
attention to the world in a way that I couldn't have done
without refrain in a sense.
There's also just a music, a rhythm.
I'm more given to meter than I used to be.
And the bodily nature of that music and in a poem
is more important to me.
I want, someday, for my daughter to come to a reading
and hear something that she doesn't understand
that might still be beautiful to her
and finding a way to manage that that's accessible in a way.
I often haven't been accessible in my previous work,
that it's more open, it's more at hand
and yet is losing nothing of its rigor, hopefully, it's thought.
These things are very much on my mind.
So, Dan, you've been doing--
well, you've been teaching for a very long time.
But right now, you're at Iowa for this semester.
That's a school-- that's where you studied.
That's where you got your MFA.
What has it been like to go back to Iowa as a teacher?
I'm still sort of trying to figure that out.
The thing that it makes me realize most
is how deeply embedded memory is inside
of location, how tangible memory is when you return
to a place you used to live, that I have
all sorts of memories about.
But there are memories that aren't physical.
But when I'm walking around Iowa City, I see these places.
I remember being in them.
I remember who used to live in these houses.
And it gains a kind of mythological life.
At the same time, that time in my life
is incredibly intense, filled with the turmoil of figuring
out what my ambitions were, of struggling with ambition,
of just the awful hothouse of that time and a young writer's
life.
And it was filled with intensities for me.
And so being back there and feeling that intensity
in my students, of still recognizing
its vestiges in myself, of wondering
what is the most honest way to teach,
the most helpful way to teach, and to realize
that I'm not a student anymore.
It's just the most shocking thing,
that there's this distance from where I was 10 years ago
to where I am now, when--
to realize that-- yeah, to realize that in these 10 years
since I was a student to where I'm
at now that the devotion to the work I've tried to practice
has come to something.
There's something to say to my students.
That's shocking to me, actually.
Yeah.
My question is about how you walk
the line between writing as a private thing
and writing as a public thing.
And I think you're in a position right now as a teacher to--
but yet still close enough to the experience as a student.
I feel like as students, a lot of times
the work can be too personal or too much
of focusing on your personal experience
without remembering that it's also a worldly experience
or how to speak to something much larger than yourself.
Does that make sense?
Yes, it does.
Well, the primary thing--
I mean, the primary--
I think about that problem now is very different
than it used to be, where I think
one of the primary crises of poetic language
is that it's never private.
I mean, there is no private language.
There's always this language that is all of ours.
And so whatever is involved in the poetic act,
it's taking something that is interior, yes,
but interior already in a language
that then the poet risks putting outside of himself,
putting outside of herself so that the very nature, I think,
of any kind of poetic expression,
regardless of whether or not another person ever sees it,
is that you're taking this profound risk of making
a world that, for you, might be absolutely real as long as you
don't utter it to yourself or anyone else
and making it available not for another person's belief so much
as another person's doubt, of making it questionable,
of making it foreign,
which is to say that any time you write a poem
it might be too naive to simply think
that when you say I in that poem,
it is reducible to the I that is you.
It becomes, of necessity, radically other.
This is inside Rimbaud's sense that I
am the other, which is a sense that
predates his letter in which he which he says that.
Poetry's awfulness is that it's always othering
your most intimate self.
But that's also a kind of--
it's also its necessary beauty, its, I think,
deeply moral importance.
I think more closer to what you're asking,
how can you take that which is private, experientially
most likely, and put it on the page in a way
that it's OK for other people to see it.
I don't have any good answer for that I
guess because in the end, I think if it's on the page,
it's not yours anymore.
You're not your own on the page.
And it sort of negates that problem.
And I think where people get upset is when they don't--
when they value the poem as a part of themselves.
Can I ask another question?
I think so.
OK.
This is more about your work with your last one,
The Whaler's Dictionary.
I don't know if-- that's the last one I'm aware of.
That seems more of a prose book than a poem
in my interpretation of it.
And I was wondering more about the editing process and you
working with Milkweed and how--
whether you worked with the nonfiction or the poetry editor
with that and how that might go.
I should say that I am continually shocked and weirdly
offended that book is always shelved in poetry
because it's not a book of poems in my mind.
It has a certain kind of poetic something.
But it's odd the way it's shelved in, like, Borders,
which, strangely enough, carries occasionally.
It's always in where an actual book of poems I would write,
which they don't carry, would be.
And I just-- there's just some ridiculous bias
that a poet can't write things that aren't poems.
It's weird in a way that-- and it's a weird book.
But because it's weird, it must be poetry.
And it's not.
They're weird essays, weird meditational,
devotional essays to a book I love that loves me back
in complicated ways.
It makes me keep having to write books about it.
Milkweed is an extraordinary place.
I feel more grateful than I know how to say to be with them.
And I work directly with the head editor, Daniel Slager,
who, in an amazing act of editorial responsibility,
proof edited that book himself and then hired another person
to do it.
I mean, I've never seen a press more devoted to making
a book work, come out clean.
I mean, it was astonishingly intense.
I had to go through proofing it two times.
And that book is insanely hard to edit
and to proof because it's not linear in scope.
It's all interconnected.
I mean, writing it almost broke up my marriage because it
was so complicated to kind of keep what originally had been
over 130 essays that are interconnected, inter-cross
referenced with one another in some kind of order and feeling
like I was walking around in this stupor,
really, for 15 months trying to remember what connected to what
and having written so much that I didn't even
know what was what.
And so to end up with these astonishingly generous and yet
precise readers who helped me to cut
against the unnecessary lyricism of my own prose voice,
but also that felt the shape of it,
that kept me on track, that gave me
an ability to keep all the interconnections
livid and bright, and would suggest ones that weren't there
and would cross off the ones that
probably weren't necessary.
I mean, I owe them a tremendous, tremendous debt
for not simply bringing the book out but for making it better.
Yeah, I can't rave enough about milkweed.
And I had sent that book to some other places that
had wanted to see it, actually.
And no one would take it because they
said it was just-- it was too strange.
One editor wrote back and said, this is the kind of book
that I would buy for myself and copies for my friends.
And 20 years ago, you would have been
able to get this published.
But no one will take a risk on a book like this now.
And then there's Milkweed.
I was thinking about last night.
You talked about-- this kind of like on the side,
but right before you read a poem,
you talked about being in Chicago
and seeing the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Jeff Koons balloon.
And I was like, I wanted to see if you could expand about what
that experience because it's pretty
intense to go all the way--
the first artifact to now.
Yeah, I used to hate Jeff Koons's work.
And a good friend of mine, who's an artist,
loves Jeff Koons's work, a man named
Alex Jovanovich, who made me begin to at least not dismiss
it.
And I was back to give a reading, actually,
and the MCA had this giant Jeff Koons retrospective,
the first thing of which when you go in
is his famous bunny rabbit, mirror like surface
where you appear in it twice.
You appear in its belly and then inverted in its head.
And then I looked around and I noticed how many of his pieces
are involved with always giving you
a surface that is reflecting you back
and sometimes doing so in the most subtle of ways.
I mean, well, he has these quite deeply pornographic pictures
that he does with his former porn star wife.
I think maybe--
I think she's his former wife and a former star
of pornography.
So those are both former things.
And there was a kind of older woman.
She seemed like in her 70s.
And there's a guard standing behind a partition.
And he said, the question of the material behind this partition
is questionable.
And she was like, OK, thanks, and went in.
And he looked at me.
And he just looked at the ground.
And I thought, isn't that weird?
He won't tell me that there's objectionable things.
And you would go around--
you go around this corner and there's these small billboard
sized pornographic photos.
And what I realized about them is
that they're shot from an angle where the two, Koons
and his wife, whose eyes are looking at you,
can only see themselves as if I was a mirror reflecting them
back, that it's this angle that can only
be seen if in some ways the viewer is a mirror to what's
going on.
And that made something click in me,
this way in which whatever Koons is about,
part of what he's about is the absolute beauty
and mercilessness of reflective surfaces,
of always putting ourselves in a position where we're
witnessing ourselves think about a thing
that in its perfection--
and the pornographic pictures are in their way
absolutely perfect--
offer us no place to rest secure in finding
a difference that makes of our thinking a genuine thinking.
It's unsettling.
You never find flaw.
You never find error.
You never find the difference that the categorical mind
needs in order to kind of come to a certainty of analysis,
of judgment.
And that became troubling in a very beautiful way
or beautiful in a very troubling way to me.
And then three hours later, I'm at this other museum
where there's these cylindrical scrolls, which is also
in that poem, where you roll it across mud
and a woman is braiding and unbraiding
her hair to infinity, if there's material enough,
where there's cuneiform written in these little pieces of mud,
and this Dead Sea scroll that is torn mangled,
and this translation that says, to study circumcises the heart.
It calms the blood.
Many words are missing.
If not, there's fire in the veins.
Many words are missing.
Anger.
And it's still-- it startled me, that thought of--
well, of study, of reading as a strange sort of circumcision
in a way that limits us.
And I think that's true and a powerful idea
in many ways, that at the very first act of creativity
isn't expansiveness but a reduction, a compression that
makes a space for the nothingness
in which one begins to do one's work.
And that, for me, in ways that we've all
talked about in a variety of ways,
reading is this thing that creates that space in me.
It does in some ways, to use the language, circumcise the heart.
And it was just dizzying that they fit together, that--
yeah, those museums, they didn't seem all that separate to me
in a way.
So I am presuming about you that you're not just a reader
but that you are a rereader.
And I'm wondering if you can talk
a bit about the distinction, if there
is one for you, between entering a text and re-entering a text,
and if that has any correlation to your poems,
particularly I'm thinking about Spell and Whaler's Dictionary,
if those seem like progressive projects
or if they both embody a similar space that you enter
into in relation to Moby Dick.
I have a certain problem with Moby Dick,
of which Spell and A Whaler's Dictionary are indicative.
In some ways, I wrote A Whaler's Dictionary
because I feel that I had failed in a certain way
with spell, which is to say that I wanted to write poems
about this book that is a mystery to me
and a book I love.
And I realized at some point that the book, also it
had to be about itself.
It had to become formally coherent to its own world.
And so I started--
if you know that book, it moves away.
It becomes about its own writing in a way.
There's letters to these editors.
And I felt like I needed to do that to learn something
because I was very young.
I was writing that when I was at Iowa, actually,
and not showing it to anyone.
It was my secret rebellion against workshop.
And I felt like I had betrayed in not the right way what
it was I wanted to do, which was pay the utmost fullest
attention I could to this one work that still
for me has in it every question I can ask about writing.
I ask it because that book asks me to ask it.
Rereading is, for me, it's we're,
actually, reading begins.
There's that line in Emerson's experience
where he says that it seems as if an impenetrable screen
of purest sky has been pulled down behind us and before us.
You will not remember, it seems to say,
and you will not expect.
And I feel like in some ways that's
also a strange kind of reading advice, that somehow reread
but to divorce yourself from the sense of knowing what's
going on or your concern of plot frees you
in a way to read what the book is really about.
I think the great example of this
is Proust, where part of, I think,
the deep work that In Search of Lost Time
accomplishes over its thousands and thousands of pages
is that it's so long that you forget, in some ways,
what has gone before.
And so when you go back to reread it,
suddenly you're in the position that the narrator himself
is, where you have to somehow recognize
that which you've already experienced
with the uncanny sense that you haven't experienced it before.
Suddenly, your memory is taxed.
You're in that position.
And that is--
I mean, that's really a maddening thought,
that you read Proust the first time
when you read it the second time because then you're
in the experience of memory that book is actually about.
And that also shocked me.
Moby Dick is the same way.
I mean, there are strange harmonies
of how odd time behaves in Proust and in Moby Dick that
make them strangely similar books in a way.
But because Moby Dick is so deeply
about the need of meaning, the need of answers,
the impossibility of meaning, the impossibility of answers
that it's returning to the book in which,
supposedly, you should have the answers for having read it,
just as Ishmael should be able to say
his own name after the experience that has removed him
from his name, that suddenly the book then isn't this mystery.
There's no tension.
There's no plot.
There's no reason to be reading it save to be experiencing it
in a way that you cannot experience without turning
to it again and again.
And it's that moment where easier inclinations
to read a book fall apart that I think what
the book is reveals itself.
You're included.
Your memory's there.
You have your own self to deal with in a weird kind of way
as a character established in those pages.
And real things happen then.
Does that answer your question?
OK.
So you mentioned your secret rebellion
against workshop and this manuscript you were writing.
And I wondered if you could speak a little bit about kind
of how you've--
what that looks like as a teacher
to be thinking about some ways in which--
how workshops are fraught.
And what are some ways that you've
been able to turn that or rethink that as a teacher
in considering what it's like as a student in a workshop?
Well, I was so down on workshop after my own graduate student
life that I refused to teach them.
I didn't teach one for six years,
in part because I didn't find an honest--
it didn't feel like there was an honest way to do it.
And eventually, I had to teach them.
And I was reluctant to.
And slowly over the years, I've found
an approach that feels honest, even if it feels
in a curious sort of way, given what a workshop is supposed
to be, kind of useless.
I go to rather great lengths to suggest that we're not here
in this class, this workshop to make each other's poems better.
I have no interest in making the poem better.
I don't care for good poems.
I'm not interested in judging the poem.
I don't care if anyone likes this poem
or doesn't like this poem.
All of that seems to me an abuse of a space of actual inquiry
because it places judgment in front of recognition.
And so what we try to do is recognize what
it is the poem is doing, what it's genuine crisis,
in the deepest sense of that word,
is, crisis's etymology being a point at which a disease either
kills you or you survive it, it's
etymology being the moment when a woman goes
into labor, of a finding this place, as Emerson would say,
that is the necessity upon which beauty rests
and to talk about that necessity,
to have a discussion about it, to talk about the poem
as if it is the complex, strange, failed, awkward,
intense, stunning, beautiful, brilliant, stupid, great, awful
thing it is, and to have students
value that conversation.
And if you really have it, inevitably but accidentally,
the poems get better because you've
talked about what the poem actually is.
And one of the things I worry about in the workshop is that--
and it goes back to the question that you asked in some ways.
It is a scary thing to write a poem
and to show it to people who gather around a table
to judge its quality.
And one of the inevitable consequences
of the falsity of that breach of trust,
and it is a breach of trust, is that people learn to hide.
And they wanted to hide in all sorts of ways.
They learn to hide behind their cleverness,
behind their intellect.
They learn to hide behind bald-faced confession.
They can too easily write poems whose heart
is an unnecessary evasion.
And so to open up a place where that doesn't
have to happen because we're going to think about it,
we're not going to make it better,
we're just going to talk we're going
to talk about the difficulty of the poem, that's
what I try to do.
And we start off not with each other's poems.
We read Heraclitus.
We read Diogenes.
We read the Homeric hymn to Hermes.
We read Hawthorne's "The Artist of the Beautiful"
for next week.
We read these things that make us realize that poetry isn't
what's happening around this table for this three hour
period at all.
We're participating in something larger than us.
And we need to participate that in the most mindful way
possible.
At least when I write poetry, and I kind of just started,
but I feel like a lot of the time
I at least attempt to incorporate the same desires
of my fiction writing into my poetry
writing in that I try and develop characters or develop
a common theme.
And I'm just wondering how you attempt
to do that when you write, and if you've ever written fiction
work before, and if those same desires can translate over
and how they translate over.
I have recently in the last two years
or so been experimenting with fiction.
And it does feel like a very different art to me, devoted
to different things, having, in some ways,
very different sources, I guess, different kinds of consequences
or causes.
I feel like I'm stuttering because I don't really know how
to articulate what I'm saying.
I think a poem contains a different kind of gravity,
a different kind of inevitability
than a piece of fiction does.
Fiction often has to move from one point to another.
It has to establish a kind of connection that
adheres to the sort of logic by which we recognize how
our own daily life moves from point A
to point B. Poetry is not, I think, all
that invested in A connecting to B.
It has a very different kind of inevitability, one that somehow
makes us recognize that our ability
to make a linear record of any given day
is also a trick of the mind, a habit of the mind,
that we to actually subscribe ourselves
to the actual information, the actual experience that comes in
on a day-to-day basis, there would be no way
to function in the world.
And poetry exacerbates that peripheral quality
of the eye, that peripheral quality of the mind that
allows things in, that complicate
our relation to our own life in the world
because it complicates them.
Fiction can also do this.
But then that fiction is poetry, in my mind.
A poem's relation to its theme versus fiction's
relation to its theme-- that's a huge question.
And it's a great one.
And I don't think I'm smart enough
to have an answer that's appropriate.
I guess one of the things that one can't forget
is that one of the gods that is the tutelary god of the poem
is Hermes.
And Hermes is a trickster.
And as the muses, when they come down from Olympus
every morning, they sing a lie so it seems like the truth.
And they sing the truth when they want to.
Poetry's relation to our life is one
that enjoys as much the disorder that it
causes the midst of order as it does
in disorder creating order.
It complicates things.
It makes them difficult.
It undoes boundaries.
It undoes borders.
It is, as Thoreau says in the journals, a more severe logic
than the logicians logic.
And it's more severe because it's merciless.
It doesn't let you rest with what seems apparently at hand.
It disorders and re-orders.
And I'm not sure if fiction does that often in the same way.
At least, fiction doesn't need to.
I might be really wrong about that too, I should say.
Would you say that having focused so much on poetry,
and this might be an obvious answer,
but has that affected your foray into fiction writing?
Do you see any sort of effect in the way
that you write fiction now after having
focused on poetry for so long?
Oh yeah.
I don't have any interest in plot,
for instance, which will obviously
make my fiction really enjoyable to read.
The one thing it did, and the fiction that--
for fairy tales, for instance, they all have a plot.
But the deepest thinking that's occurring in a fairy tale,
it's not happening in the plot.
It's often happening in images and the way
in which those images also gain a very
curious kind of symbolic life.
One of the things I think that poetry is a training in
is the way in which an image isn't simply
the evocation of a sensible data--
sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell--
but that an image is it is in some ways
a contained thinking, an entire thinking,
an image that actually works.
And not just a thinking, by thinking here I also mean
a feeling, as thinking is also, as poetry knows,
deeply perceptive at its core.
And so one of the things that when
I'm working on fiction that I pay attention to
is not to construct a plot via a series of events
but through a reiteration and development of, per fairy
tales, certain symbols, certain images
that continue to develop and re-exert and reformulate
a thinking that had been inherent at one point
but over the course of the development of the story
changes its nature.
And in part, this is giving to things their symbolic life.
If one wants to think about the symbol
as that which is a many and a one at the same time, that
is part of the trick of learning to think symbolically,
which I think poetry is also a training in,
is that one recognizes that the symbol has a subterranean life,
that it's always exerting meaning in a way that
is more complex and perhaps completely
opposite to the surface that you're interpreting.
It has this wholeness to it.
And you get to see one side of that wholeness.
So that Emerson, he has this great definition
of the mystic as one who has nailed the meaning of a symbol
into one place.
And the poet is the one who--
or the artist is the one who refuses
to nail that meaning down into place and stake everything
on it, but to trust that somehow the symbol is a fluxional life.
And fiction, in ways that I think
can be very, very powerful, can allow
a real symbolic flourishing in certain images,
a real development, a real changing
over the course of time so that you build
into this place, as Moby Dick does,
and with many of its primary symbols
that's sort of nauseating, that's overpowering,
but that you can't explain, that resists your ability
to define it.
And that's what interests me.
That's what poetry has taught me about writing fiction.
One
Last question.
OK.
Well, I think I guess in a certain sense,
every answer you've given maybe answers this question.
But I've noticed that a term that you've
mentioned both in talking about reading
and writing and teaching that comes up is rigor.
So I wanted to ask you, what is rigor?
Well, I guess it's just ceaselessness.
It's not valuing what you've done.
It's doing what's next and refusing every excuse
not to, which becomes increasingly hard.
But I don't know.
There's work to be done.
And I want to be at work.
And I want my students to be at work.
I want to be at work.
And I think that's rigor.
Dan, thank you so much.
Let's give him round of applause.
Can we do that?
Thanks for coming to Tucson.
I know it's been a busy spring.
We've loved having you here and hope
to see you again real soon.
Aw, thank you.