WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.660 align:middle line:90% 00:00:00.660 --> 00:00:01.810 align:middle line:90% Well, welcome everyone. 00:00:01.810 --> 00:00:02.610 align:middle line:90% I'm Gail Browne. 00:00:02.610 --> 00:00:03.780 align:middle line:90% It's great to see you all. 00:00:03.780 --> 00:00:05.363 align:middle line:84% I know many of you were at the reading 00:00:05.363 --> 00:00:09.270 align:middle line:84% last night, which was just, I don't know what, amazing. 00:00:09.270 --> 00:00:10.590 align:middle line:90% It was mesmerizing. 00:00:10.590 --> 00:00:12.480 align:middle line:90% It was a wonderful experience. 00:00:12.480 --> 00:00:15.660 align:middle line:84% And we're happy to have Dan back with us this afternoon 00:00:15.660 --> 00:00:18.180 align:middle line:84% to sort of continue the conversation we 00:00:18.180 --> 00:00:22.558 align:middle line:84% started last night about his work and poetry in general. 00:00:22.558 --> 00:00:24.600 align:middle line:84% Many of you know-- if you weren't in the audience 00:00:24.600 --> 00:00:26.730 align:middle line:84% last night, you would not have heard 00:00:26.730 --> 00:00:28.650 align:middle line:84% this part of the introduction, that Dan 00:00:28.650 --> 00:00:31.590 align:middle line:84% was one of our Next Word in Poetry, one of our first, 00:00:31.590 --> 00:00:34.560 align:middle line:84% I think, readers in that series in 2004. 00:00:34.560 --> 00:00:36.150 align:middle line:84% And since that time, he's gone on 00:00:36.150 --> 00:00:39.150 align:middle line:84% to publish a number of other books of poetry, 00:00:39.150 --> 00:00:42.810 align:middle line:90% Mulberry, let's see-- 00:00:42.810 --> 00:00:44.730 align:middle line:84% I knew I had these memorized, Dan. 00:00:44.730 --> 00:00:45.840 align:middle line:90% I'm sorry. 00:00:45.840 --> 00:00:50.520 align:middle line:84% This Nest, Swift and Passerine-- beautiful title. 00:00:50.520 --> 00:00:53.445 align:middle line:84% And The Whaler's Dictionary, which is a book of prose. 00:00:53.445 --> 00:00:55.320 align:middle line:84% I guess Spell, I think you had just published 00:00:55.320 --> 00:00:56.380 align:middle line:90% Spell when you came here. 00:00:56.380 --> 00:00:56.880 align:middle line:90% Yes. 00:00:56.880 --> 00:00:57.672 align:middle line:90% Yeah, that's right. 00:00:57.672 --> 00:01:01.740 align:middle line:84% So, many, many books of poetry for us 00:01:01.740 --> 00:01:05.489 align:middle line:84% to enjoy and think about and maybe talk about some today. 00:01:05.489 --> 00:01:07.668 align:middle line:84% So I'm just going to open this up to questions. 00:01:07.668 --> 00:01:09.210 align:middle line:84% Feel free to ask whatever you'd like. 00:01:09.210 --> 00:01:10.335 align:middle line:90% We'll go for about an hour. 00:01:10.335 --> 00:01:14.760 align:middle line:90% 00:01:14.760 --> 00:01:16.710 align:middle line:84% Speak into the mic when you ask the question. 00:01:16.710 --> 00:01:18.170 align:middle line:90% Yeah, that helps. 00:01:18.170 --> 00:01:18.975 align:middle line:90% Who wants to start? 00:01:18.975 --> 00:01:21.890 align:middle line:90% 00:01:21.890 --> 00:01:26.930 align:middle line:84% Well, one of the pleasures, Dan, in your poetry for me 00:01:26.930 --> 00:01:29.765 align:middle line:84% is the variety of shapes the poems take on the page. 00:01:29.765 --> 00:01:33.560 align:middle line:90% 00:01:33.560 --> 00:01:35.300 align:middle line:84% Thumbing through your most recent book, 00:01:35.300 --> 00:01:40.250 align:middle line:84% we see stanzas and paragraphs and columns and things 00:01:40.250 --> 00:01:42.440 align:middle line:84% that I wouldn't know what to name, to be honest. 00:01:42.440 --> 00:01:43.850 align:middle line:84% And I'm wondering if you can talk 00:01:43.850 --> 00:01:48.950 align:middle line:84% about how you arrive at the shape of the poem on the page 00:01:48.950 --> 00:01:50.420 align:middle line:90% or the shapes, I should say. 00:01:50.420 --> 00:01:56.510 align:middle line:90% 00:01:56.510 --> 00:02:00.320 align:middle line:84% It became, in some ways, a real issue for me in a way 00:02:00.320 --> 00:02:03.710 align:middle line:84% that I had to have some sort of sense of order 00:02:03.710 --> 00:02:07.700 align:middle line:84% about the page in my third book, Mulberry, 00:02:07.700 --> 00:02:10.220 align:middle line:84% which when I had originally conceived of it, 00:02:10.220 --> 00:02:13.835 align:middle line:84% and you'll see how practical the idea was, 00:02:13.835 --> 00:02:19.820 align:middle line:84% was a giant scroll that was composed in various columns. 00:02:19.820 --> 00:02:22.190 align:middle line:84% And, of course, at some point, I realized 00:02:22.190 --> 00:02:27.290 align:middle line:84% that one couldn't have a page that had these three 00:02:27.290 --> 00:02:29.240 align:middle line:84% inter-penetrating columns and one could 00:02:29.240 --> 00:02:30.440 align:middle line:90% see all these connections. 00:02:30.440 --> 00:02:33.350 align:middle line:84% And so I had to sort of begin to think 00:02:33.350 --> 00:02:35.600 align:middle line:84% about certain quadrants of the page 00:02:35.600 --> 00:02:38.060 align:middle line:84% as occupying a different sort of thinking. 00:02:38.060 --> 00:02:42.740 align:middle line:84% In that book, there's running through the entire book 00:02:42.740 --> 00:02:47.540 align:middle line:84% a sort of central column justified on the left hand 00:02:47.540 --> 00:02:50.150 align:middle line:84% side that is a sort of confessional voice 00:02:50.150 --> 00:02:55.190 align:middle line:84% in many ways that seeks ways not to come 00:02:55.190 --> 00:02:57.290 align:middle line:90% to closure, essentially. 00:02:57.290 --> 00:03:00.980 align:middle line:84% And it's the sort of central axis around the whole poem. 00:03:00.980 --> 00:03:05.930 align:middle line:84% And the left-hand column are poems dealing most typically 00:03:05.930 --> 00:03:10.430 align:middle line:84% with early American history, poems that are actually 00:03:10.430 --> 00:03:14.270 align:middle line:84% centered dealing with aesthetics and the erotic 00:03:14.270 --> 00:03:17.420 align:middle line:84% and these poems that would be on the right dealing often 00:03:17.420 --> 00:03:21.470 align:middle line:90% with philosophy and theology. 00:03:21.470 --> 00:03:24.830 align:middle line:84% And then the second half of that book 00:03:24.830 --> 00:03:28.010 align:middle line:84% takes all the lines from those three columns 00:03:28.010 --> 00:03:32.540 align:middle line:84% and undoes them and restitches them into other poems. 00:03:32.540 --> 00:03:36.020 align:middle line:84% You can see it's all mixed in different ways, 00:03:36.020 --> 00:03:39.740 align:middle line:84% paying attention to where their original column space was. 00:03:39.740 --> 00:03:42.830 align:middle line:84% And so that book, when I turned to a working 00:03:42.830 --> 00:03:45.470 align:middle line:84% on This Nest, Swift Passerine, I had 00:03:45.470 --> 00:03:49.010 align:middle line:84% a way of intuitively thinking about different parts 00:03:49.010 --> 00:03:51.900 align:middle line:84% of the page offering a different kind of thinking. 00:03:51.900 --> 00:03:54.680 align:middle line:84% So if you trace your way through there, 00:03:54.680 --> 00:03:58.850 align:middle line:84% you'll notice that the poems that are all centered in a way 00:03:58.850 --> 00:04:02.540 align:middle line:84% have a certain kind of meditative quality, 00:04:02.540 --> 00:04:06.740 align:middle line:84% often a kind of ecstatic meditative quality 00:04:06.740 --> 00:04:09.740 align:middle line:84% that things that are absolutely fragmentary 00:04:09.740 --> 00:04:14.730 align:middle line:84% are typically going to be on the right-hand side. 00:04:14.730 --> 00:04:19.070 align:middle line:84% Things of more lyric coherency in terms 00:04:19.070 --> 00:04:22.910 align:middle line:84% of an actual individual poem will be on the left. 00:04:22.910 --> 00:04:26.180 align:middle line:84% But that book gets much more complicated 00:04:26.180 --> 00:04:30.200 align:middle line:90% in its visual formal life. 00:04:30.200 --> 00:04:32.240 align:middle line:84% By the time you get to the third section, 00:04:32.240 --> 00:04:34.850 align:middle line:84% there's a page that's dealing with all sorts of issues 00:04:34.850 --> 00:04:39.320 align:middle line:84% of reflection and dullness and ways 00:04:39.320 --> 00:04:43.910 align:middle line:84% in which two-column poems will be interacting with one 00:04:43.910 --> 00:04:48.890 align:middle line:84% another, the right hand column somehow composing itself 00:04:48.890 --> 00:04:52.290 align:middle line:84% by listening in echo to the sounds of the other. 00:04:52.290 --> 00:04:57.740 align:middle line:84% And so there's all different kinds of tensions in a way. 00:04:57.740 --> 00:05:00.000 align:middle line:84% The architect Buckminster Fuller, 00:05:00.000 --> 00:05:07.550 align:middle line:84% he had this word for a structure's integrity, which 00:05:07.550 --> 00:05:10.310 align:middle line:84% he called it's tensegrity, a combination of tension 00:05:10.310 --> 00:05:11.900 align:middle line:90% and integrity together. 00:05:11.900 --> 00:05:13.970 align:middle line:84% And in many ways, I've come to think 00:05:13.970 --> 00:05:16.460 align:middle line:84% of that as a sort of poetic formal principle 00:05:16.460 --> 00:05:20.510 align:middle line:84% that one has to find the right tensegrity for a given poem 00:05:20.510 --> 00:05:22.010 align:middle line:84% when you're operating in a broader 00:05:22.010 --> 00:05:25.580 align:middle line:84% field of a page, a tensegrity of the page 00:05:25.580 --> 00:05:28.070 align:middle line:84% where different modes of consideration 00:05:28.070 --> 00:05:32.270 align:middle line:84% can somehow bring themselves into a kind of harmony, 00:05:32.270 --> 00:05:33.050 align:middle line:90% essentially. 00:05:33.050 --> 00:05:36.320 align:middle line:90% 00:05:36.320 --> 00:05:36.820 align:middle line:90% Thank you. 00:05:36.820 --> 00:05:42.450 align:middle line:90% 00:05:42.450 --> 00:05:43.950 align:middle line:84% I was remembering how last night you 00:05:43.950 --> 00:05:46.680 align:middle line:84% talked about how your writing and your reading 00:05:46.680 --> 00:05:47.760 align:middle line:90% are so intertwined. 00:05:47.760 --> 00:05:51.660 align:middle line:84% And I was curious was there ever a time for you as a writer when 00:05:51.660 --> 00:05:54.120 align:middle line:84% that was not the case, perhaps when you were very young 00:05:54.120 --> 00:05:55.350 align:middle line:90% or when you started? 00:05:55.350 --> 00:05:59.190 align:middle line:84% Did you ever write poems that were not 00:05:59.190 --> 00:06:00.420 align:middle line:90% interacting with texts. 00:06:00.420 --> 00:06:04.380 align:middle line:84% I know maybe it's difficult to admit it. 00:06:04.380 --> 00:06:07.103 align:middle line:84% But I'm really curious how that might have happened. 00:06:07.103 --> 00:06:08.520 align:middle line:84% Or did it just happen all at once? 00:06:08.520 --> 00:06:12.030 align:middle line:84% Like, you started writing because of reading? 00:06:12.030 --> 00:06:17.470 align:middle line:90% Well, that's a great question. 00:06:17.470 --> 00:06:20.340 align:middle line:84% I think I did start writing because of reading. 00:06:20.340 --> 00:06:22.570 align:middle line:84% But I didn't know that was the case. 00:06:22.570 --> 00:06:27.540 align:middle line:84% And so I wrote really awful, awful poems. 00:06:27.540 --> 00:06:30.330 align:middle line:90% I was a teenager. 00:06:30.330 --> 00:06:36.960 align:middle line:84% But the moment that in some ways is a pivotal moment 00:06:36.960 --> 00:06:41.280 align:middle line:84% was being a junior in high school. 00:06:41.280 --> 00:06:44.050 align:middle line:84% I had a really extraordinary English teacher, 00:06:44.050 --> 00:06:46.290 align:middle line:84% to whom I owe a tremendous amount. 00:06:46.290 --> 00:06:48.832 align:middle line:90% 00:06:48.832 --> 00:06:50.040 align:middle line:90% Well, there were two moments. 00:06:50.040 --> 00:06:55.320 align:middle line:84% One, I had sort of fancied myself a poet. 00:06:55.320 --> 00:07:00.810 align:middle line:84% I thought that about myself when I had no right to do so. 00:07:00.810 --> 00:07:04.740 align:middle line:84% And we had an assignment to read a Shakespeare sonnet. 00:07:04.740 --> 00:07:08.550 align:middle line:84% And we were to get up with our group-- 00:07:08.550 --> 00:07:12.090 align:middle line:84% of course, I took charge of this group because I was a poet. 00:07:12.090 --> 00:07:15.960 align:middle line:84% And I gave this interpretation of "That Time of Year Thou 00:07:15.960 --> 00:07:19.260 align:middle line:90% Mayst in Me Behold"-- 00:07:19.260 --> 00:07:21.870 align:middle line:90% Shakespeare, forgive me. 00:07:21.870 --> 00:07:27.450 align:middle line:84% And I was wrong in the most arrogant, awful sort of way. 00:07:27.450 --> 00:07:31.140 align:middle line:84% And my teacher simply said, you're wrong. 00:07:31.140 --> 00:07:33.120 align:middle line:90% And I thought, I am wrong. 00:07:33.120 --> 00:07:35.400 align:middle line:84% I have no idea what I'm talking about. 00:07:35.400 --> 00:07:37.950 align:middle line:84% And so there was this kind of humiliation 00:07:37.950 --> 00:07:44.010 align:middle line:84% publicly for which I was very, very grateful. 00:07:44.010 --> 00:07:48.840 align:middle line:84% And then later on, I had started seeing 00:07:48.840 --> 00:07:50.880 align:middle line:90% the woman who is my wife. 00:07:50.880 --> 00:07:54.480 align:middle line:84% We've dated since high school, which was, 00:07:54.480 --> 00:07:56.220 align:middle line:84% of course, this very intense thing. 00:07:56.220 --> 00:07:59.730 align:middle line:84% And we were in that class together. 00:07:59.730 --> 00:08:03.270 align:middle line:84% And we were reading John Donne's "A Valediction, Forbidding 00:08:03.270 --> 00:08:04.200 align:middle line:90% Morning." 00:08:04.200 --> 00:08:10.080 align:middle line:84% And she, our teacher, went through this poem 00:08:10.080 --> 00:08:14.880 align:middle line:84% that makes one realize that whatever figurative language 00:08:14.880 --> 00:08:17.460 align:middle line:90% is, it's not abstract. 00:08:17.460 --> 00:08:20.130 align:middle line:84% It seems abstract to us because we seldom 00:08:20.130 --> 00:08:23.520 align:middle line:84% tax our mind in a way that recognizes 00:08:23.520 --> 00:08:25.680 align:middle line:90% figurative precision. 00:08:25.680 --> 00:08:27.900 align:middle line:90% And all of a sudden, I felt it. 00:08:27.900 --> 00:08:29.610 align:middle line:90% I felt this poem. 00:08:29.610 --> 00:08:31.390 align:middle line:90% I felt why it was being written. 00:08:31.390 --> 00:08:32.850 align:middle line:90% I saw how it worked. 00:08:32.850 --> 00:08:36.659 align:middle line:84% I saw this woman who would be my wife sitting 00:08:36.659 --> 00:08:38.669 align:middle line:90% four seats in front of me. 00:08:38.669 --> 00:08:43.830 align:middle line:84% And I just, I guess, for the first time in my life I 00:08:43.830 --> 00:08:47.820 align:middle line:90% thought, it can be done. 00:08:47.820 --> 00:08:49.530 align:middle line:90% Someone can write a poem. 00:08:49.530 --> 00:08:52.240 align:middle line:84% There can be such a thing as a poem. 00:08:52.240 --> 00:08:55.650 align:middle line:90% And I think I wrote-- 00:08:55.650 --> 00:09:00.120 align:middle line:84% I've always since then written into that realization, which 00:09:00.120 --> 00:09:02.050 align:middle line:90% isn't about me, per se, at all. 00:09:02.050 --> 00:09:05.580 align:middle line:84% It's about finding a finding a way 00:09:05.580 --> 00:09:11.450 align:middle line:84% to participate in this thing that is kind of inevitably 00:09:11.450 --> 00:09:17.990 align:middle line:84% and impossibly and continually possible, 00:09:17.990 --> 00:09:19.430 align:middle line:90% that it can be expressed. 00:09:19.430 --> 00:09:20.930 align:middle line:90% I still can't get over it. 00:09:20.930 --> 00:09:27.860 align:middle line:90% 00:09:27.860 --> 00:09:28.720 align:middle line:90% Express route. 00:09:28.720 --> 00:09:33.540 align:middle line:90% 00:09:33.540 --> 00:09:35.280 align:middle line:84% Following up on-- I was also thinking 00:09:35.280 --> 00:09:38.250 align:middle line:84% a lot about this reading-writing interaction. 00:09:38.250 --> 00:09:40.500 align:middle line:84% And for example, earlier in the week 00:09:40.500 --> 00:09:44.190 align:middle line:84% when I was reading some of your poems and then started writing, 00:09:44.190 --> 00:09:47.850 align:middle line:84% I found myself writing my own poems about nesting. 00:09:47.850 --> 00:09:49.870 align:middle line:84% And I've been thinking about nesting all week. 00:09:49.870 --> 00:09:52.890 align:middle line:90% And so I'm wondering how you-- 00:09:52.890 --> 00:09:56.550 align:middle line:84% and that was kind of accidental based on what I had read. 00:09:56.550 --> 00:09:59.490 align:middle line:84% So I'm wondering how you choose what you read 00:09:59.490 --> 00:10:04.410 align:middle line:84% or if you read what you kind of want to write about more, 00:10:04.410 --> 00:10:07.420 align:middle line:84% or learn about more, or just in general, if you're 00:10:07.420 --> 00:10:11.310 align:middle line:84% reading everything at all times and it comes out. 00:10:11.310 --> 00:10:13.695 align:middle line:84% Well, I'm never reading everything at all times. 00:10:13.695 --> 00:10:16.260 align:middle line:90% 00:10:16.260 --> 00:10:17.950 align:middle line:90% There's a number of things-- 00:10:17.950 --> 00:10:20.670 align:middle line:84% and I mean, I'm very interested in what 00:10:20.670 --> 00:10:23.430 align:middle line:84% you said before you actually asked a question, just 00:10:23.430 --> 00:10:25.650 align:middle line:84% that notion of influence that you're 00:10:25.650 --> 00:10:27.180 align:middle line:84% talking about from reading, which 00:10:27.180 --> 00:10:34.830 align:middle line:84% is a thing that a lot of us have been taught to avoid or feel-- 00:10:34.830 --> 00:10:37.680 align:middle line:90% 00:10:37.680 --> 00:10:43.200 align:middle line:84% an anxiety about, to give the phrase. 00:10:43.200 --> 00:10:44.970 align:middle line:84% And I've always thought of influence 00:10:44.970 --> 00:10:48.630 align:middle line:84% as the most important thing one can expose oneself to, 00:10:48.630 --> 00:10:54.000 align:middle line:84% that reading is this grand experiment in being influenced. 00:10:54.000 --> 00:10:56.670 align:middle line:84% And it's very hard to be honestly influenced 00:10:56.670 --> 00:11:07.330 align:middle line:84% and let another's voice very fundamentally into one's own, 00:11:07.330 --> 00:11:12.090 align:middle line:84% feels to me like a very important thing. 00:11:12.090 --> 00:11:15.840 align:middle line:84% As to how I choose what I read, I sort of-- 00:11:15.840 --> 00:11:18.780 align:middle line:84% all these books, they're also books 00:11:18.780 --> 00:11:20.790 align:middle line:84% that if you learn to see it in a certain way 00:11:20.790 --> 00:11:23.430 align:middle line:84% are these repositories of their own influences. 00:11:23.430 --> 00:11:27.070 align:middle line:84% Nothing is coming in and out of itself. 00:11:27.070 --> 00:11:30.990 align:middle line:84% And so with books that I love, I tend 00:11:30.990 --> 00:11:34.450 align:middle line:84% to read the books that made those books possible. 00:11:34.450 --> 00:11:38.940 align:middle line:84% So when I read Emerson, I worry about Montaigne. 00:11:38.940 --> 00:11:40.110 align:middle line:90% And I read Montaigne. 00:11:40.110 --> 00:11:43.140 align:middle line:84% And because I read Montaigne, I read Plutarch. 00:11:43.140 --> 00:11:49.410 align:middle line:84% And the thing that is so exciting to me 00:11:49.410 --> 00:11:52.680 align:middle line:84% at some level about being involved in literature 00:11:52.680 --> 00:11:55.420 align:middle line:84% and certainly reading is, in some ways 00:11:55.420 --> 00:12:03.240 align:middle line:84% the primary involvement, is that every one 00:12:03.240 --> 00:12:05.070 align:middle line:84% of these great masterpieces, if you 00:12:05.070 --> 00:12:08.160 align:middle line:84% press on it in the right way, it links to all 00:12:08.160 --> 00:12:10.590 align:middle line:90% these astonishing places. 00:12:10.590 --> 00:12:14.670 align:middle line:84% And I just follow the things I love. 00:12:14.670 --> 00:12:16.560 align:middle line:90% I love the things those love. 00:12:16.560 --> 00:12:18.360 align:middle line:90% And that's how I do it. 00:12:18.360 --> 00:12:20.760 align:middle line:90% It's purely chosen by bliss. 00:12:20.760 --> 00:12:23.340 align:middle line:90% I have no system at all. 00:12:23.340 --> 00:12:30.420 align:middle line:84% I'm absolutely irresponsible as a scholar because I'm not one. 00:12:30.420 --> 00:12:31.140 align:middle line:90% I'm a poet. 00:12:31.140 --> 00:12:40.150 align:middle line:90% 00:12:40.150 --> 00:12:42.850 align:middle line:90% Let's see if I can form this. 00:12:42.850 --> 00:12:44.830 align:middle line:84% I was wondering if you'd be willing to talk 00:12:44.830 --> 00:12:49.780 align:middle line:84% about the new work that you read last night. 00:12:49.780 --> 00:12:54.460 align:middle line:84% We were talking about over the span of your books 00:12:54.460 --> 00:12:57.910 align:middle line:84% that the glass being on the textual 00:12:57.910 --> 00:13:02.920 align:middle line:84% and going more and more profound, deeper and deeper, 00:13:02.920 --> 00:13:08.980 align:middle line:84% and that suddenly it seemed to me that you'd reach the bodily 00:13:08.980 --> 00:13:11.590 align:middle line:84% and that it was a portal and it seemed 00:13:11.590 --> 00:13:13.880 align:middle line:90% like you were in new territory. 00:13:13.880 --> 00:13:15.820 align:middle line:90% And does that make sense to you? 00:13:15.820 --> 00:13:20.590 align:middle line:84% Or can you speak about your new work or how it might be? 00:13:20.590 --> 00:13:21.160 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:13:21.160 --> 00:13:24.010 align:middle line:84% I mean, I can try to speak about my new work. 00:13:24.010 --> 00:13:31.230 align:middle line:90% 00:13:31.230 --> 00:13:34.380 align:middle line:84% Well, one of the things that I think has opened up 00:13:34.380 --> 00:13:41.160 align:middle line:84% is a real sense of atavism, of ancestry, 00:13:41.160 --> 00:13:46.770 align:middle line:84% of tradition and a very radical sense, one 00:13:46.770 --> 00:13:53.010 align:middle line:84% that is more palpable and tangible than simply 00:13:53.010 --> 00:13:58.350 align:middle line:84% writing a poem that has as its primary thinking another text. 00:13:58.350 --> 00:14:03.450 align:middle line:84% I've become concerned with these stories that 00:14:03.450 --> 00:14:06.840 align:middle line:90% are always underneath texts. 00:14:06.840 --> 00:14:11.730 align:middle line:84% And part of, I suppose, what is it 00:14:11.730 --> 00:14:16.920 align:middle line:84% most bodily is that I've been given over 00:14:16.920 --> 00:14:21.210 align:middle line:84% to various forms of repetition, the sensing 00:14:21.210 --> 00:14:28.470 align:middle line:84% of needing to stay and repeat and vary a single line until it 00:14:28.470 --> 00:14:34.770 align:middle line:84% in some ways has revealed every capacity for its thinking 00:14:34.770 --> 00:14:39.060 align:middle line:84% that I'm capable of paying attention to. 00:14:39.060 --> 00:14:41.850 align:middle line:84% At the same time, I have this daughter 00:14:41.850 --> 00:14:44.370 align:middle line:84% that I didn't have when I was writing 00:14:44.370 --> 00:14:46.980 align:middle line:84% any of those books about other books. 00:14:46.980 --> 00:14:51.210 align:middle line:84% And there's something about watching 00:14:51.210 --> 00:14:57.390 align:middle line:84% her come into language, about the mistakes that 00:14:57.390 --> 00:15:00.330 align:middle line:84% are these wondrous mistakes that she makes in language 00:15:00.330 --> 00:15:09.190 align:middle line:84% of thinking about any given word as often a type of knowledge 00:15:09.190 --> 00:15:13.150 align:middle line:84% that begins in mistake and ends because 00:15:13.150 --> 00:15:15.850 align:middle line:84% of that mistake in a sort of memory, 00:15:15.850 --> 00:15:19.470 align:middle line:84% in a sort of remembrance of what is correct. 00:15:19.470 --> 00:15:22.570 align:middle line:84% And one of the things that's going on 00:15:22.570 --> 00:15:24.820 align:middle line:84% is trying to find a way to replicate in 00:15:24.820 --> 00:15:29.680 align:middle line:84% a poem through repetition that process of realization 00:15:29.680 --> 00:15:32.710 align:middle line:84% turning into a mistaken realization 00:15:32.710 --> 00:15:39.550 align:middle line:84% and then reorienting itself back into memory, of paying 00:15:39.550 --> 00:15:43.030 align:middle line:84% attention to the world in a way that I couldn't have done 00:15:43.030 --> 00:15:45.865 align:middle line:90% without refrain in a sense. 00:15:45.865 --> 00:15:49.220 align:middle line:90% 00:15:49.220 --> 00:15:50.980 align:middle line:84% There's also just a music, a rhythm. 00:15:50.980 --> 00:15:53.110 align:middle line:84% I'm more given to meter than I used to be. 00:15:53.110 --> 00:15:58.660 align:middle line:84% And the bodily nature of that music and in a poem 00:15:58.660 --> 00:16:00.370 align:middle line:90% is more important to me. 00:16:00.370 --> 00:16:05.890 align:middle line:84% I want, someday, for my daughter to come to a reading 00:16:05.890 --> 00:16:10.060 align:middle line:84% and hear something that she doesn't understand 00:16:10.060 --> 00:16:12.730 align:middle line:84% that might still be beautiful to her 00:16:12.730 --> 00:16:17.020 align:middle line:84% and finding a way to manage that that's accessible in a way. 00:16:17.020 --> 00:16:19.960 align:middle line:84% I often haven't been accessible in my previous work, 00:16:19.960 --> 00:16:24.820 align:middle line:84% that it's more open, it's more at hand 00:16:24.820 --> 00:16:28.960 align:middle line:84% and yet is losing nothing of its rigor, hopefully, it's thought. 00:16:28.960 --> 00:16:31.420 align:middle line:84% These things are very much on my mind. 00:16:31.420 --> 00:16:41.030 align:middle line:90% 00:16:41.030 --> 00:16:43.520 align:middle line:90% So, Dan, you've been doing-- 00:16:43.520 --> 00:16:45.600 align:middle line:84% well, you've been teaching for a very long time. 00:16:45.600 --> 00:16:48.920 align:middle line:84% But right now, you're at Iowa for this semester. 00:16:48.920 --> 00:16:52.680 align:middle line:84% That's a school-- that's where you studied. 00:16:52.680 --> 00:16:53.930 align:middle line:90% That's where you got your MFA. 00:16:53.930 --> 00:16:59.330 align:middle line:84% What has it been like to go back to Iowa as a teacher? 00:16:59.330 --> 00:17:01.670 align:middle line:84% I'm still sort of trying to figure that out. 00:17:01.670 --> 00:17:04.550 align:middle line:90% 00:17:04.550 --> 00:17:06.530 align:middle line:84% The thing that it makes me realize most 00:17:06.530 --> 00:17:09.260 align:middle line:84% is how deeply embedded memory is inside 00:17:09.260 --> 00:17:13.940 align:middle line:84% of location, how tangible memory is when you return 00:17:13.940 --> 00:17:17.780 align:middle line:84% to a place you used to live, that I have 00:17:17.780 --> 00:17:19.430 align:middle line:90% all sorts of memories about. 00:17:19.430 --> 00:17:24.369 align:middle line:84% But there are memories that aren't physical. 00:17:24.369 --> 00:17:28.810 align:middle line:84% But when I'm walking around Iowa City, I see these places. 00:17:28.810 --> 00:17:30.700 align:middle line:90% I remember being in them. 00:17:30.700 --> 00:17:32.920 align:middle line:84% I remember who used to live in these houses. 00:17:32.920 --> 00:17:35.140 align:middle line:84% And it gains a kind of mythological life. 00:17:35.140 --> 00:17:39.880 align:middle line:84% At the same time, that time in my life 00:17:39.880 --> 00:17:44.980 align:middle line:84% is incredibly intense, filled with the turmoil of figuring 00:17:44.980 --> 00:17:49.240 align:middle line:84% out what my ambitions were, of struggling with ambition, 00:17:49.240 --> 00:17:57.740 align:middle line:84% of just the awful hothouse of that time and a young writer's 00:17:57.740 --> 00:17:58.240 align:middle line:90% life. 00:17:58.240 --> 00:18:02.360 align:middle line:84% And it was filled with intensities for me. 00:18:02.360 --> 00:18:05.500 align:middle line:84% And so being back there and feeling that intensity 00:18:05.500 --> 00:18:08.470 align:middle line:84% in my students, of still recognizing 00:18:08.470 --> 00:18:12.460 align:middle line:84% its vestiges in myself, of wondering 00:18:12.460 --> 00:18:14.980 align:middle line:84% what is the most honest way to teach, 00:18:14.980 --> 00:18:21.160 align:middle line:84% the most helpful way to teach, and to realize 00:18:21.160 --> 00:18:24.190 align:middle line:90% that I'm not a student anymore. 00:18:24.190 --> 00:18:26.140 align:middle line:84% It's just the most shocking thing, 00:18:26.140 --> 00:18:29.770 align:middle line:84% that there's this distance from where I was 10 years ago 00:18:29.770 --> 00:18:33.010 align:middle line:90% to where I am now, when-- 00:18:33.010 --> 00:18:39.543 align:middle line:84% to realize that-- yeah, to realize that in these 10 years 00:18:39.543 --> 00:18:40.960 align:middle line:84% since I was a student to where I'm 00:18:40.960 --> 00:18:47.560 align:middle line:84% at now that the devotion to the work I've tried to practice 00:18:47.560 --> 00:18:50.710 align:middle line:90% has come to something. 00:18:50.710 --> 00:18:53.410 align:middle line:90% 00:18:53.410 --> 00:18:56.740 align:middle line:84% There's something to say to my students. 00:18:56.740 --> 00:19:01.130 align:middle line:90% That's shocking to me, actually. 00:19:01.130 --> 00:19:01.630 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:19:01.630 --> 00:19:13.300 align:middle line:90% 00:19:13.300 --> 00:19:17.080 align:middle line:84% My question is about how you walk 00:19:17.080 --> 00:19:22.870 align:middle line:84% the line between writing as a private thing 00:19:22.870 --> 00:19:24.470 align:middle line:90% and writing as a public thing. 00:19:24.470 --> 00:19:28.450 align:middle line:84% And I think you're in a position right now as a teacher to-- 00:19:28.450 --> 00:19:31.330 align:middle line:84% but yet still close enough to the experience as a student. 00:19:31.330 --> 00:19:34.030 align:middle line:84% I feel like as students, a lot of times 00:19:34.030 --> 00:19:37.510 align:middle line:84% the work can be too personal or too much 00:19:37.510 --> 00:19:39.460 align:middle line:84% of focusing on your personal experience 00:19:39.460 --> 00:19:43.090 align:middle line:84% without remembering that it's also a worldly experience 00:19:43.090 --> 00:19:46.870 align:middle line:84% or how to speak to something much larger than yourself. 00:19:46.870 --> 00:19:47.800 align:middle line:90% Does that make sense? 00:19:47.800 --> 00:19:50.710 align:middle line:90% Yes, it does. 00:19:50.710 --> 00:19:55.505 align:middle line:90% Well, the primary thing-- 00:19:55.505 --> 00:19:56.380 align:middle line:90% I mean, the primary-- 00:19:56.380 --> 00:20:01.420 align:middle line:84% I think about that problem now is very different 00:20:01.420 --> 00:20:07.780 align:middle line:84% than it used to be, where I think 00:20:07.780 --> 00:20:10.840 align:middle line:84% one of the primary crises of poetic language 00:20:10.840 --> 00:20:12.160 align:middle line:90% is that it's never private. 00:20:12.160 --> 00:20:15.220 align:middle line:84% I mean, there is no private language. 00:20:15.220 --> 00:20:19.660 align:middle line:84% There's always this language that is all of ours. 00:20:19.660 --> 00:20:22.750 align:middle line:84% And so whatever is involved in the poetic act, 00:20:22.750 --> 00:20:28.090 align:middle line:84% it's taking something that is interior, yes, 00:20:28.090 --> 00:20:30.550 align:middle line:84% but interior already in a language 00:20:30.550 --> 00:20:36.350 align:middle line:84% that then the poet risks putting outside of himself, 00:20:36.350 --> 00:20:40.420 align:middle line:84% putting outside of herself so that the very nature, I think, 00:20:40.420 --> 00:20:42.370 align:middle line:84% of any kind of poetic expression, 00:20:42.370 --> 00:20:45.940 align:middle line:84% regardless of whether or not another person ever sees it, 00:20:45.940 --> 00:20:52.000 align:middle line:84% is that you're taking this profound risk of making 00:20:52.000 --> 00:20:55.960 align:middle line:84% a world that, for you, might be absolutely real as long as you 00:20:55.960 --> 00:20:59.080 align:middle line:84% don't utter it to yourself or anyone else 00:20:59.080 --> 00:21:03.850 align:middle line:84% and making it available not for another person's belief so much 00:21:03.850 --> 00:21:07.000 align:middle line:84% as another person's doubt, of making it questionable, 00:21:07.000 --> 00:21:09.340 align:middle line:90% of making it foreign, 00:21:09.340 --> 00:21:13.030 align:middle line:84% which is to say that any time you write a poem 00:21:13.030 --> 00:21:16.090 align:middle line:84% it might be too naive to simply think 00:21:16.090 --> 00:21:18.390 align:middle line:84% that when you say I in that poem, 00:21:18.390 --> 00:21:21.910 align:middle line:84% it is reducible to the I that is you. 00:21:21.910 --> 00:21:28.180 align:middle line:84% It becomes, of necessity, radically other. 00:21:28.180 --> 00:21:30.730 align:middle line:84% This is inside Rimbaud's sense that I 00:21:30.730 --> 00:21:33.820 align:middle line:84% am the other, which is a sense that 00:21:33.820 --> 00:21:37.480 align:middle line:84% predates his letter in which he which he says that. 00:21:37.480 --> 00:21:40.420 align:middle line:90% 00:21:40.420 --> 00:21:43.090 align:middle line:84% Poetry's awfulness is that it's always othering 00:21:43.090 --> 00:21:46.270 align:middle line:90% your most intimate self. 00:21:46.270 --> 00:21:50.140 align:middle line:90% But that's also a kind of-- 00:21:50.140 --> 00:21:52.870 align:middle line:84% it's also its necessary beauty, its, I think, 00:21:52.870 --> 00:21:54.580 align:middle line:90% deeply moral importance. 00:21:54.580 --> 00:21:57.220 align:middle line:90% 00:21:57.220 --> 00:22:01.000 align:middle line:84% I think more closer to what you're asking, 00:22:01.000 --> 00:22:08.620 align:middle line:84% how can you take that which is private, experientially 00:22:08.620 --> 00:22:11.200 align:middle line:84% most likely, and put it on the page in a way 00:22:11.200 --> 00:22:15.080 align:middle line:84% that it's OK for other people to see it. 00:22:15.080 --> 00:22:21.360 align:middle line:84% I don't have any good answer for that I 00:22:21.360 --> 00:22:25.530 align:middle line:84% guess because in the end, I think if it's on the page, 00:22:25.530 --> 00:22:27.840 align:middle line:90% it's not yours anymore. 00:22:27.840 --> 00:22:30.960 align:middle line:90% You're not your own on the page. 00:22:30.960 --> 00:22:37.008 align:middle line:84% And it sort of negates that problem. 00:22:37.008 --> 00:22:39.300 align:middle line:84% And I think where people get upset is when they don't-- 00:22:39.300 --> 00:22:42.970 align:middle line:90% 00:22:42.970 --> 00:22:45.670 align:middle line:84% when they value the poem as a part of themselves. 00:22:45.670 --> 00:22:55.420 align:middle line:90% 00:22:55.420 --> 00:22:57.130 align:middle line:90% Can I ask another question? 00:22:57.130 --> 00:22:58.860 align:middle line:90% I think so. 00:22:58.860 --> 00:23:00.490 align:middle line:90% OK. 00:23:00.490 --> 00:23:02.950 align:middle line:84% This is more about your work with your last one, 00:23:02.950 --> 00:23:04.150 align:middle line:90% The Whaler's Dictionary. 00:23:04.150 --> 00:23:06.580 align:middle line:84% I don't know if-- that's the last one I'm aware of. 00:23:06.580 --> 00:23:09.510 align:middle line:90% 00:23:09.510 --> 00:23:12.900 align:middle line:84% That seems more of a prose book than a poem 00:23:12.900 --> 00:23:14.640 align:middle line:90% in my interpretation of it. 00:23:14.640 --> 00:23:19.830 align:middle line:84% And I was wondering more about the editing process and you 00:23:19.830 --> 00:23:22.050 align:middle line:90% working with Milkweed and how-- 00:23:22.050 --> 00:23:25.740 align:middle line:84% whether you worked with the nonfiction or the poetry editor 00:23:25.740 --> 00:23:29.940 align:middle line:90% with that and how that might go. 00:23:29.940 --> 00:23:34.350 align:middle line:84% I should say that I am continually shocked and weirdly 00:23:34.350 --> 00:23:39.420 align:middle line:84% offended that book is always shelved in poetry 00:23:39.420 --> 00:23:41.700 align:middle line:84% because it's not a book of poems in my mind. 00:23:41.700 --> 00:23:46.290 align:middle line:84% It has a certain kind of poetic something. 00:23:46.290 --> 00:23:51.660 align:middle line:84% But it's odd the way it's shelved in, like, Borders, 00:23:51.660 --> 00:23:55.890 align:middle line:84% which, strangely enough, carries occasionally. 00:23:55.890 --> 00:24:00.810 align:middle line:84% It's always in where an actual book of poems I would write, 00:24:00.810 --> 00:24:04.080 align:middle line:84% which they don't carry, would be. 00:24:04.080 --> 00:24:09.060 align:middle line:84% And I just-- there's just some ridiculous bias 00:24:09.060 --> 00:24:15.780 align:middle line:84% that a poet can't write things that aren't poems. 00:24:15.780 --> 00:24:18.480 align:middle line:84% It's weird in a way that-- and it's a weird book. 00:24:18.480 --> 00:24:21.600 align:middle line:84% But because it's weird, it must be poetry. 00:24:21.600 --> 00:24:22.755 align:middle line:90% And it's not. 00:24:22.755 --> 00:24:26.190 align:middle line:84% They're weird essays, weird meditational, 00:24:26.190 --> 00:24:30.660 align:middle line:84% devotional essays to a book I love that loves me back 00:24:30.660 --> 00:24:32.640 align:middle line:90% in complicated ways. 00:24:32.640 --> 00:24:35.970 align:middle line:84% It makes me keep having to write books about it. 00:24:35.970 --> 00:24:38.580 align:middle line:84% Milkweed is an extraordinary place. 00:24:38.580 --> 00:24:45.360 align:middle line:84% I feel more grateful than I know how to say to be with them. 00:24:45.360 --> 00:24:50.850 align:middle line:84% And I work directly with the head editor, Daniel Slager, 00:24:50.850 --> 00:24:56.700 align:middle line:84% who, in an amazing act of editorial responsibility, 00:24:56.700 --> 00:25:01.840 align:middle line:84% proof edited that book himself and then hired another person 00:25:01.840 --> 00:25:02.340 align:middle line:90% to do it. 00:25:02.340 --> 00:25:06.450 align:middle line:84% I mean, I've never seen a press more devoted to making 00:25:06.450 --> 00:25:09.930 align:middle line:90% a book work, come out clean. 00:25:09.930 --> 00:25:13.570 align:middle line:84% I mean, it was astonishingly intense. 00:25:13.570 --> 00:25:16.140 align:middle line:84% I had to go through proofing it two times. 00:25:16.140 --> 00:25:20.040 align:middle line:84% And that book is insanely hard to edit 00:25:20.040 --> 00:25:24.420 align:middle line:84% and to proof because it's not linear in scope. 00:25:24.420 --> 00:25:26.770 align:middle line:90% It's all interconnected. 00:25:26.770 --> 00:25:31.140 align:middle line:84% I mean, writing it almost broke up my marriage because it 00:25:31.140 --> 00:25:36.810 align:middle line:84% was so complicated to kind of keep what originally had been 00:25:36.810 --> 00:25:41.400 align:middle line:84% over 130 essays that are interconnected, inter-cross 00:25:41.400 --> 00:25:46.230 align:middle line:84% referenced with one another in some kind of order and feeling 00:25:46.230 --> 00:25:49.440 align:middle line:84% like I was walking around in this stupor, 00:25:49.440 --> 00:25:56.170 align:middle line:84% really, for 15 months trying to remember what connected to what 00:25:56.170 --> 00:25:58.260 align:middle line:84% and having written so much that I didn't even 00:25:58.260 --> 00:26:00.450 align:middle line:90% know what was what. 00:26:00.450 --> 00:26:06.240 align:middle line:84% And so to end up with these astonishingly generous and yet 00:26:06.240 --> 00:26:10.860 align:middle line:84% precise readers who helped me to cut 00:26:10.860 --> 00:26:16.960 align:middle line:84% against the unnecessary lyricism of my own prose voice, 00:26:16.960 --> 00:26:19.500 align:middle line:84% but also that felt the shape of it, 00:26:19.500 --> 00:26:22.200 align:middle line:84% that kept me on track, that gave me 00:26:22.200 --> 00:26:25.860 align:middle line:84% an ability to keep all the interconnections 00:26:25.860 --> 00:26:29.190 align:middle line:84% livid and bright, and would suggest ones that weren't there 00:26:29.190 --> 00:26:31.500 align:middle line:84% and would cross off the ones that 00:26:31.500 --> 00:26:33.390 align:middle line:90% probably weren't necessary. 00:26:33.390 --> 00:26:36.690 align:middle line:84% I mean, I owe them a tremendous, tremendous debt 00:26:36.690 --> 00:26:42.030 align:middle line:84% for not simply bringing the book out but for making it better. 00:26:42.030 --> 00:26:47.100 align:middle line:84% Yeah, I can't rave enough about milkweed. 00:26:47.100 --> 00:26:54.510 align:middle line:84% And I had sent that book to some other places that 00:26:54.510 --> 00:26:56.370 align:middle line:90% had wanted to see it, actually. 00:26:56.370 --> 00:26:58.920 align:middle line:84% And no one would take it because they 00:26:58.920 --> 00:27:01.860 align:middle line:84% said it was just-- it was too strange. 00:27:01.860 --> 00:27:04.740 align:middle line:84% One editor wrote back and said, this is the kind of book 00:27:04.740 --> 00:27:08.130 align:middle line:84% that I would buy for myself and copies for my friends. 00:27:08.130 --> 00:27:10.530 align:middle line:84% And 20 years ago, you would have been 00:27:10.530 --> 00:27:11.790 align:middle line:90% able to get this published. 00:27:11.790 --> 00:27:15.240 align:middle line:84% But no one will take a risk on a book like this now. 00:27:15.240 --> 00:27:17.505 align:middle line:90% And then there's Milkweed. 00:27:17.505 --> 00:27:22.370 align:middle line:90% 00:27:22.370 --> 00:27:25.470 align:middle line:90% I was thinking about last night. 00:27:25.470 --> 00:27:28.500 align:middle line:84% You talked about-- this kind of like on the side, 00:27:28.500 --> 00:27:30.060 align:middle line:84% but right before you read a poem, 00:27:30.060 --> 00:27:32.190 align:middle line:84% you talked about being in Chicago 00:27:32.190 --> 00:27:37.170 align:middle line:84% and seeing the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Jeff Koons balloon. 00:27:37.170 --> 00:27:40.230 align:middle line:84% And I was like, I wanted to see if you could expand about what 00:27:40.230 --> 00:27:42.540 align:middle line:84% that experience because it's pretty 00:27:42.540 --> 00:27:44.100 align:middle line:90% intense to go all the way-- 00:27:44.100 --> 00:27:46.410 align:middle line:90% the first artifact to now. 00:27:46.410 --> 00:27:52.110 align:middle line:84% Yeah, I used to hate Jeff Koons's work. 00:27:52.110 --> 00:27:55.170 align:middle line:84% And a good friend of mine, who's an artist, 00:27:55.170 --> 00:27:57.720 align:middle line:84% loves Jeff Koons's work, a man named 00:27:57.720 --> 00:28:04.920 align:middle line:84% Alex Jovanovich, who made me begin to at least not dismiss 00:28:04.920 --> 00:28:06.030 align:middle line:90% it. 00:28:06.030 --> 00:28:10.530 align:middle line:84% And I was back to give a reading, actually, 00:28:10.530 --> 00:28:14.820 align:middle line:84% and the MCA had this giant Jeff Koons retrospective, 00:28:14.820 --> 00:28:16.620 align:middle line:84% the first thing of which when you go in 00:28:16.620 --> 00:28:22.020 align:middle line:84% is his famous bunny rabbit, mirror like surface 00:28:22.020 --> 00:28:24.210 align:middle line:90% where you appear in it twice. 00:28:24.210 --> 00:28:28.260 align:middle line:84% You appear in its belly and then inverted in its head. 00:28:28.260 --> 00:28:32.940 align:middle line:84% And then I looked around and I noticed how many of his pieces 00:28:32.940 --> 00:28:38.610 align:middle line:84% are involved with always giving you 00:28:38.610 --> 00:28:40.800 align:middle line:84% a surface that is reflecting you back 00:28:40.800 --> 00:28:44.670 align:middle line:84% and sometimes doing so in the most subtle of ways. 00:28:44.670 --> 00:28:52.470 align:middle line:84% I mean, well, he has these quite deeply pornographic pictures 00:28:52.470 --> 00:28:57.900 align:middle line:84% that he does with his former porn star wife. 00:28:57.900 --> 00:28:59.070 align:middle line:90% I think maybe-- 00:28:59.070 --> 00:29:02.250 align:middle line:84% I think she's his former wife and a former star 00:29:02.250 --> 00:29:04.830 align:middle line:90% of pornography. 00:29:04.830 --> 00:29:07.530 align:middle line:90% So those are both former things. 00:29:07.530 --> 00:29:10.350 align:middle line:84% And there was a kind of older woman. 00:29:10.350 --> 00:29:11.910 align:middle line:90% She seemed like in her 70s. 00:29:11.910 --> 00:29:15.150 align:middle line:84% And there's a guard standing behind a partition. 00:29:15.150 --> 00:29:19.200 align:middle line:84% And he said, the question of the material behind this partition 00:29:19.200 --> 00:29:20.100 align:middle line:90% is questionable. 00:29:20.100 --> 00:29:23.310 align:middle line:84% And she was like, OK, thanks, and went in. 00:29:23.310 --> 00:29:24.480 align:middle line:90% And he looked at me. 00:29:24.480 --> 00:29:26.280 align:middle line:84% And he just looked at the ground. 00:29:26.280 --> 00:29:28.170 align:middle line:90% And I thought, isn't that weird? 00:29:28.170 --> 00:29:32.970 align:middle line:84% He won't tell me that there's objectionable things. 00:29:32.970 --> 00:29:34.200 align:middle line:90% And you would go around-- 00:29:34.200 --> 00:29:38.250 align:middle line:84% you go around this corner and there's these small billboard 00:29:38.250 --> 00:29:41.430 align:middle line:90% sized pornographic photos. 00:29:41.430 --> 00:29:43.380 align:middle line:84% And what I realized about them is 00:29:43.380 --> 00:29:50.910 align:middle line:84% that they're shot from an angle where the two, Koons 00:29:50.910 --> 00:29:54.720 align:middle line:84% and his wife, whose eyes are looking at you, 00:29:54.720 --> 00:29:59.190 align:middle line:84% can only see themselves as if I was a mirror reflecting them 00:29:59.190 --> 00:30:02.640 align:middle line:84% back, that it's this angle that can only 00:30:02.640 --> 00:30:07.200 align:middle line:84% be seen if in some ways the viewer is a mirror to what's 00:30:07.200 --> 00:30:08.340 align:middle line:90% going on. 00:30:08.340 --> 00:30:11.760 align:middle line:84% And that made something click in me, 00:30:11.760 --> 00:30:16.080 align:middle line:84% this way in which whatever Koons is about, 00:30:16.080 --> 00:30:22.290 align:middle line:84% part of what he's about is the absolute beauty 00:30:22.290 --> 00:30:26.100 align:middle line:84% and mercilessness of reflective surfaces, 00:30:26.100 --> 00:30:31.140 align:middle line:84% of always putting ourselves in a position where we're 00:30:31.140 --> 00:30:33.750 align:middle line:84% witnessing ourselves think about a thing 00:30:33.750 --> 00:30:36.240 align:middle line:90% that in its perfection-- 00:30:36.240 --> 00:30:38.730 align:middle line:84% and the pornographic pictures are in their way 00:30:38.730 --> 00:30:39.675 align:middle line:90% absolutely perfect-- 00:30:39.675 --> 00:30:43.840 align:middle line:90% 00:30:43.840 --> 00:30:50.260 align:middle line:84% offer us no place to rest secure in finding 00:30:50.260 --> 00:30:53.290 align:middle line:84% a difference that makes of our thinking a genuine thinking. 00:30:53.290 --> 00:30:54.850 align:middle line:90% It's unsettling. 00:30:54.850 --> 00:30:56.590 align:middle line:90% You never find flaw. 00:30:56.590 --> 00:30:58.030 align:middle line:90% You never find error. 00:30:58.030 --> 00:31:01.840 align:middle line:84% You never find the difference that the categorical mind 00:31:01.840 --> 00:31:06.490 align:middle line:84% needs in order to kind of come to a certainty of analysis, 00:31:06.490 --> 00:31:07.690 align:middle line:90% of judgment. 00:31:07.690 --> 00:31:13.420 align:middle line:84% And that became troubling in a very beautiful way 00:31:13.420 --> 00:31:16.840 align:middle line:84% or beautiful in a very troubling way to me. 00:31:16.840 --> 00:31:21.790 align:middle line:84% And then three hours later, I'm at this other museum 00:31:21.790 --> 00:31:28.810 align:middle line:84% where there's these cylindrical scrolls, which is also 00:31:28.810 --> 00:31:32.080 align:middle line:84% in that poem, where you roll it across mud 00:31:32.080 --> 00:31:35.440 align:middle line:84% and a woman is braiding and unbraiding 00:31:35.440 --> 00:31:39.820 align:middle line:84% her hair to infinity, if there's material enough, 00:31:39.820 --> 00:31:46.660 align:middle line:84% where there's cuneiform written in these little pieces of mud, 00:31:46.660 --> 00:31:53.110 align:middle line:84% and this Dead Sea scroll that is torn mangled, 00:31:53.110 --> 00:31:59.860 align:middle line:84% and this translation that says, to study circumcises the heart. 00:31:59.860 --> 00:32:01.640 align:middle line:90% It calms the blood. 00:32:01.640 --> 00:32:03.760 align:middle line:90% Many words are missing. 00:32:03.760 --> 00:32:06.940 align:middle line:84% If not, there's fire in the veins. 00:32:06.940 --> 00:32:08.260 align:middle line:90% Many words are missing. 00:32:08.260 --> 00:32:08.980 align:middle line:90% Anger. 00:32:08.980 --> 00:32:10.030 align:middle line:90% Anger. 00:32:10.030 --> 00:32:19.860 align:middle line:84% And it's still-- it startled me, that thought of-- 00:32:19.860 --> 00:32:24.030 align:middle line:84% well, of study, of reading as a strange sort of circumcision 00:32:24.030 --> 00:32:27.960 align:middle line:90% in a way that limits us. 00:32:27.960 --> 00:32:31.200 align:middle line:84% And I think that's true and a powerful idea 00:32:31.200 --> 00:32:38.460 align:middle line:84% in many ways, that at the very first act of creativity 00:32:38.460 --> 00:32:46.290 align:middle line:84% isn't expansiveness but a reduction, a compression that 00:32:46.290 --> 00:32:48.960 align:middle line:84% makes a space for the nothingness 00:32:48.960 --> 00:32:54.330 align:middle line:84% in which one begins to do one's work. 00:32:54.330 --> 00:32:57.750 align:middle line:84% And that, for me, in ways that we've all 00:32:57.750 --> 00:33:03.450 align:middle line:84% talked about in a variety of ways, 00:33:03.450 --> 00:33:06.560 align:middle line:84% reading is this thing that creates that space in me. 00:33:06.560 --> 00:33:12.600 align:middle line:84% It does in some ways, to use the language, circumcise the heart. 00:33:12.600 --> 00:33:15.670 align:middle line:90% 00:33:15.670 --> 00:33:18.250 align:middle line:84% And it was just dizzying that they fit together, that-- 00:33:18.250 --> 00:33:21.490 align:middle line:90% 00:33:21.490 --> 00:33:25.750 align:middle line:84% yeah, those museums, they didn't seem all that separate to me 00:33:25.750 --> 00:33:26.620 align:middle line:90% in a way. 00:33:26.620 --> 00:33:33.430 align:middle line:90% 00:33:33.430 --> 00:33:36.670 align:middle line:84% So I am presuming about you that you're not just a reader 00:33:36.670 --> 00:33:39.640 align:middle line:90% but that you are a rereader. 00:33:39.640 --> 00:33:41.350 align:middle line:84% And I'm wondering if you can talk 00:33:41.350 --> 00:33:44.950 align:middle line:84% a bit about the distinction, if there 00:33:44.950 --> 00:33:49.030 align:middle line:84% is one for you, between entering a text and re-entering a text, 00:33:49.030 --> 00:33:52.330 align:middle line:84% and if that has any correlation to your poems, 00:33:52.330 --> 00:33:55.210 align:middle line:84% particularly I'm thinking about Spell and Whaler's Dictionary, 00:33:55.210 --> 00:33:59.350 align:middle line:84% if those seem like progressive projects 00:33:59.350 --> 00:34:03.190 align:middle line:84% or if they both embody a similar space that you enter 00:34:03.190 --> 00:34:07.980 align:middle line:90% into in relation to Moby Dick. 00:34:07.980 --> 00:34:13.409 align:middle line:84% I have a certain problem with Moby Dick, 00:34:13.409 --> 00:34:17.969 align:middle line:84% of which Spell and A Whaler's Dictionary are indicative. 00:34:17.969 --> 00:34:20.820 align:middle line:84% In some ways, I wrote A Whaler's Dictionary 00:34:20.820 --> 00:34:24.719 align:middle line:84% because I feel that I had failed in a certain way 00:34:24.719 --> 00:34:30.810 align:middle line:84% with spell, which is to say that I wanted to write poems 00:34:30.810 --> 00:34:35.489 align:middle line:84% about this book that is a mystery to me 00:34:35.489 --> 00:34:37.320 align:middle line:90% and a book I love. 00:34:37.320 --> 00:34:41.190 align:middle line:84% And I realized at some point that the book, also it 00:34:41.190 --> 00:34:42.330 align:middle line:90% had to be about itself. 00:34:42.330 --> 00:34:46.330 align:middle line:84% It had to become formally coherent to its own world. 00:34:46.330 --> 00:34:48.270 align:middle line:90% And so I started-- 00:34:48.270 --> 00:34:51.360 align:middle line:84% if you know that book, it moves away. 00:34:51.360 --> 00:34:53.909 align:middle line:84% It becomes about its own writing in a way. 00:34:53.909 --> 00:34:55.530 align:middle line:84% There's letters to these editors. 00:34:55.530 --> 00:35:00.390 align:middle line:84% And I felt like I needed to do that to learn something 00:35:00.390 --> 00:35:01.740 align:middle line:90% because I was very young. 00:35:01.740 --> 00:35:04.530 align:middle line:84% I was writing that when I was at Iowa, actually, 00:35:04.530 --> 00:35:06.220 align:middle line:90% and not showing it to anyone. 00:35:06.220 --> 00:35:10.005 align:middle line:84% It was my secret rebellion against workshop. 00:35:10.005 --> 00:35:13.500 align:middle line:90% 00:35:13.500 --> 00:35:22.830 align:middle line:84% And I felt like I had betrayed in not the right way what 00:35:22.830 --> 00:35:27.360 align:middle line:84% it was I wanted to do, which was pay the utmost fullest 00:35:27.360 --> 00:35:30.600 align:middle line:84% attention I could to this one work that still 00:35:30.600 --> 00:35:38.940 align:middle line:84% for me has in it every question I can ask about writing. 00:35:38.940 --> 00:35:44.400 align:middle line:84% I ask it because that book asks me to ask it. 00:35:44.400 --> 00:35:47.130 align:middle line:84% Rereading is, for me, it's we're, 00:35:47.130 --> 00:35:48.375 align:middle line:90% actually, reading begins. 00:35:48.375 --> 00:35:51.000 align:middle line:90% 00:35:51.000 --> 00:35:53.550 align:middle line:84% There's that line in Emerson's experience 00:35:53.550 --> 00:36:00.420 align:middle line:84% where he says that it seems as if an impenetrable screen 00:36:00.420 --> 00:36:04.770 align:middle line:84% of purest sky has been pulled down behind us and before us. 00:36:04.770 --> 00:36:07.710 align:middle line:84% You will not remember, it seems to say, 00:36:07.710 --> 00:36:10.500 align:middle line:90% and you will not expect. 00:36:10.500 --> 00:36:12.720 align:middle line:84% And I feel like in some ways that's 00:36:12.720 --> 00:36:18.510 align:middle line:84% also a strange kind of reading advice, that somehow reread 00:36:18.510 --> 00:36:22.500 align:middle line:84% but to divorce yourself from the sense of knowing what's 00:36:22.500 --> 00:36:27.390 align:middle line:84% going on or your concern of plot frees you 00:36:27.390 --> 00:36:30.510 align:middle line:84% in a way to read what the book is really about. 00:36:30.510 --> 00:36:33.030 align:middle line:84% I think the great example of this 00:36:33.030 --> 00:36:36.810 align:middle line:84% is Proust, where part of, I think, 00:36:36.810 --> 00:36:39.990 align:middle line:84% the deep work that In Search of Lost Time 00:36:39.990 --> 00:36:43.920 align:middle line:84% accomplishes over its thousands and thousands of pages 00:36:43.920 --> 00:36:48.780 align:middle line:84% is that it's so long that you forget, in some ways, 00:36:48.780 --> 00:36:51.570 align:middle line:90% what has gone before. 00:36:51.570 --> 00:36:54.480 align:middle line:84% And so when you go back to reread it, 00:36:54.480 --> 00:36:57.450 align:middle line:84% suddenly you're in the position that the narrator himself 00:36:57.450 --> 00:37:03.210 align:middle line:84% is, where you have to somehow recognize 00:37:03.210 --> 00:37:05.340 align:middle line:84% that which you've already experienced 00:37:05.340 --> 00:37:09.690 align:middle line:84% with the uncanny sense that you haven't experienced it before. 00:37:09.690 --> 00:37:11.480 align:middle line:90% Suddenly, your memory is taxed. 00:37:11.480 --> 00:37:12.480 align:middle line:90% You're in that position. 00:37:12.480 --> 00:37:16.740 align:middle line:90% 00:37:16.740 --> 00:37:18.690 align:middle line:90% And that is-- 00:37:18.690 --> 00:37:21.660 align:middle line:84% I mean, that's really a maddening thought, 00:37:21.660 --> 00:37:25.740 align:middle line:84% that you read Proust the first time 00:37:25.740 --> 00:37:28.740 align:middle line:84% when you read it the second time because then you're 00:37:28.740 --> 00:37:34.780 align:middle line:84% in the experience of memory that book is actually about. 00:37:34.780 --> 00:37:37.500 align:middle line:90% And that also shocked me. 00:37:37.500 --> 00:37:39.000 align:middle line:90% Moby Dick is the same way. 00:37:39.000 --> 00:37:41.280 align:middle line:84% I mean, there are strange harmonies 00:37:41.280 --> 00:37:48.360 align:middle line:84% of how odd time behaves in Proust and in Moby Dick that 00:37:48.360 --> 00:37:53.220 align:middle line:84% make them strangely similar books in a way. 00:37:53.220 --> 00:37:55.470 align:middle line:84% But because Moby Dick is so deeply 00:37:55.470 --> 00:37:58.830 align:middle line:84% about the need of meaning, the need of answers, 00:37:58.830 --> 00:38:02.550 align:middle line:84% the impossibility of meaning, the impossibility of answers 00:38:02.550 --> 00:38:06.270 align:middle line:84% that it's returning to the book in which, 00:38:06.270 --> 00:38:09.420 align:middle line:84% supposedly, you should have the answers for having read it, 00:38:09.420 --> 00:38:12.060 align:middle line:84% just as Ishmael should be able to say 00:38:12.060 --> 00:38:16.050 align:middle line:84% his own name after the experience that has removed him 00:38:16.050 --> 00:38:20.160 align:middle line:84% from his name, that suddenly the book then isn't this mystery. 00:38:20.160 --> 00:38:21.250 align:middle line:90% There's no tension. 00:38:21.250 --> 00:38:22.080 align:middle line:90% There's no plot. 00:38:22.080 --> 00:38:24.630 align:middle line:90% 00:38:24.630 --> 00:38:28.740 align:middle line:84% There's no reason to be reading it save to be experiencing it 00:38:28.740 --> 00:38:32.670 align:middle line:84% in a way that you cannot experience without turning 00:38:32.670 --> 00:38:34.110 align:middle line:90% to it again and again. 00:38:34.110 --> 00:38:38.790 align:middle line:84% And it's that moment where easier inclinations 00:38:38.790 --> 00:38:42.180 align:middle line:84% to read a book fall apart that I think what 00:38:42.180 --> 00:38:43.620 align:middle line:90% the book is reveals itself. 00:38:43.620 --> 00:38:45.300 align:middle line:90% You're included. 00:38:45.300 --> 00:38:46.560 align:middle line:90% Your memory's there. 00:38:46.560 --> 00:38:50.160 align:middle line:84% You have your own self to deal with in a weird kind of way 00:38:50.160 --> 00:38:53.070 align:middle line:84% as a character established in those pages. 00:38:53.070 --> 00:38:58.380 align:middle line:90% And real things happen then. 00:38:58.380 --> 00:39:00.330 align:middle line:90% Does that answer your question? 00:39:00.330 --> 00:39:03.120 align:middle line:90% OK. 00:39:03.120 --> 00:39:06.030 align:middle line:84% So you mentioned your secret rebellion 00:39:06.030 --> 00:39:09.240 align:middle line:84% against workshop and this manuscript you were writing. 00:39:09.240 --> 00:39:13.615 align:middle line:84% And I wondered if you could speak a little bit about kind 00:39:13.615 --> 00:39:16.926 align:middle line:90% of how you've-- 00:39:16.926 --> 00:39:19.140 align:middle line:84% what that looks like as a teacher 00:39:19.140 --> 00:39:23.010 align:middle line:84% to be thinking about some ways in which-- 00:39:23.010 --> 00:39:25.260 align:middle line:90% how workshops are fraught. 00:39:25.260 --> 00:39:30.750 align:middle line:84% And what are some ways that you've 00:39:30.750 --> 00:39:35.310 align:middle line:84% been able to turn that or rethink that as a teacher 00:39:35.310 --> 00:39:42.280 align:middle line:84% in considering what it's like as a student in a workshop? 00:39:42.280 --> 00:39:49.410 align:middle line:84% Well, I was so down on workshop after my own graduate student 00:39:49.410 --> 00:39:51.720 align:middle line:84% life that I refused to teach them. 00:39:51.720 --> 00:39:54.160 align:middle line:84% I didn't teach one for six years, 00:39:54.160 --> 00:39:57.540 align:middle line:84% in part because I didn't find an honest-- 00:39:57.540 --> 00:39:59.970 align:middle line:84% it didn't feel like there was an honest way to do it. 00:39:59.970 --> 00:40:02.670 align:middle line:90% 00:40:02.670 --> 00:40:05.550 align:middle line:84% And eventually, I had to teach them. 00:40:05.550 --> 00:40:07.260 align:middle line:90% And I was reluctant to. 00:40:07.260 --> 00:40:11.250 align:middle line:84% And slowly over the years, I've found 00:40:11.250 --> 00:40:16.320 align:middle line:84% an approach that feels honest, even if it feels 00:40:16.320 --> 00:40:20.220 align:middle line:84% in a curious sort of way, given what a workshop is supposed 00:40:20.220 --> 00:40:23.130 align:middle line:90% to be, kind of useless. 00:40:23.130 --> 00:40:29.220 align:middle line:84% I go to rather great lengths to suggest that we're not here 00:40:29.220 --> 00:40:32.910 align:middle line:84% in this class, this workshop to make each other's poems better. 00:40:32.910 --> 00:40:37.170 align:middle line:84% I have no interest in making the poem better. 00:40:37.170 --> 00:40:40.530 align:middle line:90% I don't care for good poems. 00:40:40.530 --> 00:40:45.150 align:middle line:84% I'm not interested in judging the poem. 00:40:45.150 --> 00:40:48.090 align:middle line:84% I don't care if anyone likes this poem 00:40:48.090 --> 00:40:50.070 align:middle line:90% or doesn't like this poem. 00:40:50.070 --> 00:40:56.850 align:middle line:84% All of that seems to me an abuse of a space of actual inquiry 00:40:56.850 --> 00:41:01.170 align:middle line:84% because it places judgment in front of recognition. 00:41:01.170 --> 00:41:08.090 align:middle line:84% And so what we try to do is recognize what 00:41:08.090 --> 00:41:11.930 align:middle line:84% it is the poem is doing, what it's genuine crisis, 00:41:11.930 --> 00:41:14.570 align:middle line:84% in the deepest sense of that word, 00:41:14.570 --> 00:41:21.410 align:middle line:84% is, crisis's etymology being a point at which a disease either 00:41:21.410 --> 00:41:24.860 align:middle line:84% kills you or you survive it, it's 00:41:24.860 --> 00:41:27.920 align:middle line:84% etymology being the moment when a woman goes 00:41:27.920 --> 00:41:33.830 align:middle line:84% into labor, of a finding this place, as Emerson would say, 00:41:33.830 --> 00:41:37.340 align:middle line:84% that is the necessity upon which beauty rests 00:41:37.340 --> 00:41:39.710 align:middle line:84% and to talk about that necessity, 00:41:39.710 --> 00:41:42.860 align:middle line:84% to have a discussion about it, to talk about the poem 00:41:42.860 --> 00:41:51.140 align:middle line:84% as if it is the complex, strange, failed, awkward, 00:41:51.140 --> 00:41:57.890 align:middle line:84% intense, stunning, beautiful, brilliant, stupid, great, awful 00:41:57.890 --> 00:42:01.550 align:middle line:84% thing it is, and to have students 00:42:01.550 --> 00:42:03.660 align:middle line:90% value that conversation. 00:42:03.660 --> 00:42:07.850 align:middle line:84% And if you really have it, inevitably but accidentally, 00:42:07.850 --> 00:42:10.970 align:middle line:84% the poems get better because you've 00:42:10.970 --> 00:42:13.760 align:middle line:84% talked about what the poem actually is. 00:42:13.760 --> 00:42:19.990 align:middle line:84% And one of the things I worry about in the workshop is that-- 00:42:19.990 --> 00:42:23.950 align:middle line:84% and it goes back to the question that you asked in some ways. 00:42:23.950 --> 00:42:27.130 align:middle line:84% It is a scary thing to write a poem 00:42:27.130 --> 00:42:30.730 align:middle line:84% and to show it to people who gather around a table 00:42:30.730 --> 00:42:32.720 align:middle line:90% to judge its quality. 00:42:32.720 --> 00:42:35.350 align:middle line:84% And one of the inevitable consequences 00:42:35.350 --> 00:42:39.640 align:middle line:84% of the falsity of that breach of trust, 00:42:39.640 --> 00:42:46.810 align:middle line:84% and it is a breach of trust, is that people learn to hide. 00:42:46.810 --> 00:42:51.438 align:middle line:84% And they wanted to hide in all sorts of ways. 00:42:51.438 --> 00:42:53.230 align:middle line:84% They learn to hide behind their cleverness, 00:42:53.230 --> 00:42:54.250 align:middle line:90% behind their intellect. 00:42:54.250 --> 00:42:58.390 align:middle line:84% They learn to hide behind bald-faced confession. 00:42:58.390 --> 00:43:05.950 align:middle line:84% They can too easily write poems whose heart 00:43:05.950 --> 00:43:09.820 align:middle line:90% is an unnecessary evasion. 00:43:09.820 --> 00:43:13.630 align:middle line:84% And so to open up a place where that doesn't 00:43:13.630 --> 00:43:17.960 align:middle line:84% have to happen because we're going to think about it, 00:43:17.960 --> 00:43:19.540 align:middle line:84% we're not going to make it better, 00:43:19.540 --> 00:43:21.040 align:middle line:84% we're just going to talk we're going 00:43:21.040 --> 00:43:25.720 align:middle line:84% to talk about the difficulty of the poem, that's 00:43:25.720 --> 00:43:26.980 align:middle line:90% what I try to do. 00:43:26.980 --> 00:43:28.900 align:middle line:84% And we start off not with each other's poems. 00:43:28.900 --> 00:43:31.150 align:middle line:90% We read Heraclitus. 00:43:31.150 --> 00:43:32.380 align:middle line:90% We read Diogenes. 00:43:32.380 --> 00:43:34.300 align:middle line:84% We read the Homeric hymn to Hermes. 00:43:34.300 --> 00:43:37.660 align:middle line:84% We read Hawthorne's "The Artist of the Beautiful" 00:43:37.660 --> 00:43:38.440 align:middle line:90% for next week. 00:43:38.440 --> 00:43:44.590 align:middle line:84% We read these things that make us realize that poetry isn't 00:43:44.590 --> 00:43:47.260 align:middle line:84% what's happening around this table for this three hour 00:43:47.260 --> 00:43:49.510 align:middle line:90% period at all. 00:43:49.510 --> 00:43:52.660 align:middle line:84% We're participating in something larger than us. 00:43:52.660 --> 00:44:01.405 align:middle line:84% And we need to participate that in the most mindful way 00:44:01.405 --> 00:44:01.905 align:middle line:90% possible. 00:44:01.905 --> 00:44:08.510 align:middle line:90% 00:44:08.510 --> 00:44:12.290 align:middle line:84% At least when I write poetry, and I kind of just started, 00:44:12.290 --> 00:44:14.150 align:middle line:84% but I feel like a lot of the time 00:44:14.150 --> 00:44:19.640 align:middle line:84% I at least attempt to incorporate the same desires 00:44:19.640 --> 00:44:23.150 align:middle line:84% of my fiction writing into my poetry 00:44:23.150 --> 00:44:29.000 align:middle line:84% writing in that I try and develop characters or develop 00:44:29.000 --> 00:44:29.900 align:middle line:90% a common theme. 00:44:29.900 --> 00:44:33.350 align:middle line:84% And I'm just wondering how you attempt 00:44:33.350 --> 00:44:38.900 align:middle line:84% to do that when you write, and if you've ever written fiction 00:44:38.900 --> 00:44:45.810 align:middle line:84% work before, and if those same desires can translate over 00:44:45.810 --> 00:44:48.780 align:middle line:90% and how they translate over. 00:44:48.780 --> 00:44:52.260 align:middle line:84% I have recently in the last two years 00:44:52.260 --> 00:44:55.230 align:middle line:84% or so been experimenting with fiction. 00:44:55.230 --> 00:44:59.820 align:middle line:84% And it does feel like a very different art to me, devoted 00:44:59.820 --> 00:45:02.310 align:middle line:84% to different things, having, in some ways, 00:45:02.310 --> 00:45:08.130 align:middle line:84% very different sources, I guess, different kinds of consequences 00:45:08.130 --> 00:45:10.303 align:middle line:90% or causes. 00:45:10.303 --> 00:45:12.720 align:middle line:84% I feel like I'm stuttering because I don't really know how 00:45:12.720 --> 00:45:13.980 align:middle line:90% to articulate what I'm saying. 00:45:13.980 --> 00:45:20.010 align:middle line:90% 00:45:20.010 --> 00:45:23.190 align:middle line:84% I think a poem contains a different kind of gravity, 00:45:23.190 --> 00:45:25.020 align:middle line:84% a different kind of inevitability 00:45:25.020 --> 00:45:28.290 align:middle line:90% than a piece of fiction does. 00:45:28.290 --> 00:45:32.020 align:middle line:84% Fiction often has to move from one point to another. 00:45:32.020 --> 00:45:38.760 align:middle line:84% It has to establish a kind of connection that 00:45:38.760 --> 00:45:41.790 align:middle line:84% adheres to the sort of logic by which we recognize how 00:45:41.790 --> 00:45:45.390 align:middle line:84% our own daily life moves from point A 00:45:45.390 --> 00:45:49.560 align:middle line:84% to point B. Poetry is not, I think, all 00:45:49.560 --> 00:45:54.510 align:middle line:84% that invested in A connecting to B. 00:45:54.510 --> 00:46:04.120 align:middle line:84% It has a very different kind of inevitability, one that somehow 00:46:04.120 --> 00:46:07.330 align:middle line:84% makes us recognize that our ability 00:46:07.330 --> 00:46:11.560 align:middle line:84% to make a linear record of any given day 00:46:11.560 --> 00:46:14.590 align:middle line:84% is also a trick of the mind, a habit of the mind, 00:46:14.590 --> 00:46:19.180 align:middle line:84% that we to actually subscribe ourselves 00:46:19.180 --> 00:46:25.900 align:middle line:84% to the actual information, the actual experience that comes in 00:46:25.900 --> 00:46:29.200 align:middle line:84% on a day-to-day basis, there would be no way 00:46:29.200 --> 00:46:31.150 align:middle line:90% to function in the world. 00:46:31.150 --> 00:46:33.730 align:middle line:90% 00:46:33.730 --> 00:46:38.410 align:middle line:84% And poetry exacerbates that peripheral quality 00:46:38.410 --> 00:46:42.370 align:middle line:84% of the eye, that peripheral quality of the mind that 00:46:42.370 --> 00:46:46.870 align:middle line:84% allows things in, that complicate 00:46:46.870 --> 00:46:49.930 align:middle line:84% our relation to our own life in the world 00:46:49.930 --> 00:46:53.800 align:middle line:90% because it complicates them. 00:46:53.800 --> 00:46:55.570 align:middle line:90% Fiction can also do this. 00:46:55.570 --> 00:47:01.460 align:middle line:84% But then that fiction is poetry, in my mind. 00:47:01.460 --> 00:47:05.700 align:middle line:90% 00:47:05.700 --> 00:47:09.540 align:middle line:84% A poem's relation to its theme versus fiction's 00:47:09.540 --> 00:47:12.610 align:middle line:84% relation to its theme-- that's a huge question. 00:47:12.610 --> 00:47:13.770 align:middle line:90% And it's a great one. 00:47:13.770 --> 00:47:18.120 align:middle line:84% And I don't think I'm smart enough 00:47:18.120 --> 00:47:22.530 align:middle line:84% to have an answer that's appropriate. 00:47:22.530 --> 00:47:27.590 align:middle line:90% 00:47:27.590 --> 00:47:32.290 align:middle line:84% I guess one of the things that one can't forget 00:47:32.290 --> 00:47:36.610 align:middle line:84% is that one of the gods that is the tutelary god of the poem 00:47:36.610 --> 00:47:37.990 align:middle line:90% is Hermes. 00:47:37.990 --> 00:47:40.300 align:middle line:90% And Hermes is a trickster. 00:47:40.300 --> 00:47:48.800 align:middle line:84% And as the muses, when they come down from Olympus 00:47:48.800 --> 00:47:54.290 align:middle line:84% every morning, they sing a lie so it seems like the truth. 00:47:54.290 --> 00:47:57.920 align:middle line:84% And they sing the truth when they want to. 00:47:57.920 --> 00:48:02.150 align:middle line:84% Poetry's relation to our life is one 00:48:02.150 --> 00:48:05.570 align:middle line:84% that enjoys as much the disorder that it 00:48:05.570 --> 00:48:07.580 align:middle line:84% causes the midst of order as it does 00:48:07.580 --> 00:48:09.090 align:middle line:90% in disorder creating order. 00:48:09.090 --> 00:48:11.060 align:middle line:90% It complicates things. 00:48:11.060 --> 00:48:12.200 align:middle line:90% It makes them difficult. 00:48:12.200 --> 00:48:13.470 align:middle line:90% It undoes boundaries. 00:48:13.470 --> 00:48:15.110 align:middle line:90% It undoes borders. 00:48:15.110 --> 00:48:19.430 align:middle line:84% It is, as Thoreau says in the journals, a more severe logic 00:48:19.430 --> 00:48:21.050 align:middle line:90% than the logicians logic. 00:48:21.050 --> 00:48:24.790 align:middle line:84% And it's more severe because it's merciless. 00:48:24.790 --> 00:48:33.340 align:middle line:84% It doesn't let you rest with what seems apparently at hand. 00:48:33.340 --> 00:48:37.980 align:middle line:90% It disorders and re-orders. 00:48:37.980 --> 00:48:41.950 align:middle line:84% And I'm not sure if fiction does that often in the same way. 00:48:41.950 --> 00:48:44.515 align:middle line:84% At least, fiction doesn't need to. 00:48:44.515 --> 00:48:47.500 align:middle line:90% 00:48:47.500 --> 00:48:51.010 align:middle line:84% I might be really wrong about that too, I should say. 00:48:51.010 --> 00:48:54.330 align:middle line:90% 00:48:54.330 --> 00:48:59.280 align:middle line:84% Would you say that having focused so much on poetry, 00:48:59.280 --> 00:49:00.780 align:middle line:84% and this might be an obvious answer, 00:49:00.780 --> 00:49:07.140 align:middle line:84% but has that affected your foray into fiction writing? 00:49:07.140 --> 00:49:13.530 align:middle line:84% Do you see any sort of effect in the way 00:49:13.530 --> 00:49:15.330 align:middle line:84% that you write fiction now after having 00:49:15.330 --> 00:49:17.130 align:middle line:90% focused on poetry for so long? 00:49:17.130 --> 00:49:17.820 align:middle line:90% Oh yeah. 00:49:17.820 --> 00:49:20.190 align:middle line:84% I don't have any interest in plot, 00:49:20.190 --> 00:49:24.150 align:middle line:84% for instance, which will obviously 00:49:24.150 --> 00:49:27.030 align:middle line:84% make my fiction really enjoyable to read. 00:49:27.030 --> 00:49:29.730 align:middle line:90% 00:49:29.730 --> 00:49:34.770 align:middle line:84% The one thing it did, and the fiction that-- 00:49:34.770 --> 00:49:38.370 align:middle line:84% for fairy tales, for instance, they all have a plot. 00:49:38.370 --> 00:49:42.150 align:middle line:84% But the deepest thinking that's occurring in a fairy tale, 00:49:42.150 --> 00:49:44.820 align:middle line:90% it's not happening in the plot. 00:49:44.820 --> 00:49:48.630 align:middle line:84% It's often happening in images and the way 00:49:48.630 --> 00:49:52.590 align:middle line:84% in which those images also gain a very 00:49:52.590 --> 00:49:55.320 align:middle line:90% curious kind of symbolic life. 00:49:55.320 --> 00:49:59.280 align:middle line:84% One of the things I think that poetry is a training in 00:49:59.280 --> 00:50:02.820 align:middle line:84% is the way in which an image isn't simply 00:50:02.820 --> 00:50:07.620 align:middle line:84% the evocation of a sensible data-- 00:50:07.620 --> 00:50:13.055 align:middle line:84% sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell-- 00:50:13.055 --> 00:50:16.050 align:middle line:90% 00:50:16.050 --> 00:50:18.060 align:middle line:84% but that an image is it is in some ways 00:50:18.060 --> 00:50:20.310 align:middle line:84% a contained thinking, an entire thinking, 00:50:20.310 --> 00:50:23.310 align:middle line:90% an image that actually works. 00:50:23.310 --> 00:50:26.130 align:middle line:84% And not just a thinking, by thinking here I also mean 00:50:26.130 --> 00:50:33.240 align:middle line:84% a feeling, as thinking is also, as poetry knows, 00:50:33.240 --> 00:50:37.050 align:middle line:90% deeply perceptive at its core. 00:50:37.050 --> 00:50:40.680 align:middle line:84% And so one of the things that when 00:50:40.680 --> 00:50:43.980 align:middle line:84% I'm working on fiction that I pay attention to 00:50:43.980 --> 00:50:48.540 align:middle line:84% is not to construct a plot via a series of events 00:50:48.540 --> 00:50:53.610 align:middle line:84% but through a reiteration and development of, per fairy 00:50:53.610 --> 00:50:56.340 align:middle line:84% tales, certain symbols, certain images 00:50:56.340 --> 00:51:00.630 align:middle line:84% that continue to develop and re-exert and reformulate 00:51:00.630 --> 00:51:02.940 align:middle line:84% a thinking that had been inherent at one point 00:51:02.940 --> 00:51:06.330 align:middle line:84% but over the course of the development of the story 00:51:06.330 --> 00:51:09.990 align:middle line:90% changes its nature. 00:51:09.990 --> 00:51:13.770 align:middle line:84% And in part, this is giving to things their symbolic life. 00:51:13.770 --> 00:51:16.470 align:middle line:84% If one wants to think about the symbol 00:51:16.470 --> 00:51:22.110 align:middle line:84% as that which is a many and a one at the same time, that 00:51:22.110 --> 00:51:27.330 align:middle line:84% is part of the trick of learning to think symbolically, 00:51:27.330 --> 00:51:33.480 align:middle line:84% which I think poetry is also a training in, 00:51:33.480 --> 00:51:39.760 align:middle line:84% is that one recognizes that the symbol has a subterranean life, 00:51:39.760 --> 00:51:43.260 align:middle line:84% that it's always exerting meaning in a way that 00:51:43.260 --> 00:51:46.350 align:middle line:84% is more complex and perhaps completely 00:51:46.350 --> 00:51:50.350 align:middle line:84% opposite to the surface that you're interpreting. 00:51:50.350 --> 00:51:53.010 align:middle line:90% It has this wholeness to it. 00:51:53.010 --> 00:51:55.530 align:middle line:84% And you get to see one side of that wholeness. 00:51:55.530 --> 00:51:58.620 align:middle line:84% So that Emerson, he has this great definition 00:51:58.620 --> 00:52:03.120 align:middle line:84% of the mystic as one who has nailed the meaning of a symbol 00:52:03.120 --> 00:52:04.650 align:middle line:90% into one place. 00:52:04.650 --> 00:52:07.740 align:middle line:90% And the poet is the one who-- 00:52:07.740 --> 00:52:10.620 align:middle line:84% or the artist is the one who refuses 00:52:10.620 --> 00:52:14.250 align:middle line:84% to nail that meaning down into place and stake everything 00:52:14.250 --> 00:52:19.200 align:middle line:84% on it, but to trust that somehow the symbol is a fluxional life. 00:52:19.200 --> 00:52:24.030 align:middle line:84% And fiction, in ways that I think 00:52:24.030 --> 00:52:28.500 align:middle line:84% can be very, very powerful, can allow 00:52:28.500 --> 00:52:31.830 align:middle line:84% a real symbolic flourishing in certain images, 00:52:31.830 --> 00:52:33.780 align:middle line:84% a real development, a real changing 00:52:33.780 --> 00:52:36.540 align:middle line:84% over the course of time so that you build 00:52:36.540 --> 00:52:39.000 align:middle line:84% into this place, as Moby Dick does, 00:52:39.000 --> 00:52:42.210 align:middle line:84% and with many of its primary symbols 00:52:42.210 --> 00:52:45.280 align:middle line:84% that's sort of nauseating, that's overpowering, 00:52:45.280 --> 00:52:47.940 align:middle line:84% but that you can't explain, that resists your ability 00:52:47.940 --> 00:52:49.290 align:middle line:90% to define it. 00:52:49.290 --> 00:52:51.120 align:middle line:90% And that's what interests me. 00:52:51.120 --> 00:52:54.918 align:middle line:84% That's what poetry has taught me about writing fiction. 00:52:54.918 --> 00:52:55.418 align:middle line:90% One 00:52:55.418 --> 00:52:56.780 align:middle line:90% Last question. 00:52:56.780 --> 00:52:58.582 align:middle line:90% OK. 00:52:58.582 --> 00:53:00.290 align:middle line:84% Well, I think I guess in a certain sense, 00:53:00.290 --> 00:53:04.580 align:middle line:84% every answer you've given maybe answers this question. 00:53:04.580 --> 00:53:09.105 align:middle line:84% But I've noticed that a term that you've 00:53:09.105 --> 00:53:10.730 align:middle line:84% mentioned both in talking about reading 00:53:10.730 --> 00:53:13.490 align:middle line:84% and writing and teaching that comes up is rigor. 00:53:13.490 --> 00:53:15.245 align:middle line:84% So I wanted to ask you, what is rigor? 00:53:15.245 --> 00:53:20.470 align:middle line:90% 00:53:20.470 --> 00:53:28.090 align:middle line:84% Well, I guess it's just ceaselessness. 00:53:28.090 --> 00:53:32.520 align:middle line:90% 00:53:32.520 --> 00:53:38.620 align:middle line:84% It's not valuing what you've done. 00:53:38.620 --> 00:53:50.430 align:middle line:84% It's doing what's next and refusing every excuse 00:53:50.430 --> 00:53:55.440 align:middle line:84% not to, which becomes increasingly hard. 00:53:55.440 --> 00:53:57.750 align:middle line:90% But I don't know. 00:53:57.750 --> 00:54:01.440 align:middle line:90% There's work to be done. 00:54:01.440 --> 00:54:06.870 align:middle line:90% And I want to be at work. 00:54:06.870 --> 00:54:13.950 align:middle line:84% And I want my students to be at work. 00:54:13.950 --> 00:54:16.068 align:middle line:90% I want to be at work. 00:54:16.068 --> 00:54:17.110 align:middle line:90% And I think that's rigor. 00:54:17.110 --> 00:54:19.680 align:middle line:90% 00:54:19.680 --> 00:54:20.910 align:middle line:90% Dan, thank you so much. 00:54:20.910 --> 00:54:22.350 align:middle line:84% Let's give him round of applause. 00:54:22.350 --> 00:54:22.980 align:middle line:90% Can we do that? 00:54:22.980 --> 00:54:27.150 align:middle line:90% 00:54:27.150 --> 00:54:28.320 align:middle line:90% Thanks for coming to Tucson. 00:54:28.320 --> 00:54:29.490 align:middle line:90% I know it's been a busy spring. 00:54:29.490 --> 00:54:30.750 align:middle line:84% We've loved having you here and hope 00:54:30.750 --> 00:54:31.980 align:middle line:90% to see you again real soon. 00:54:31.980 --> 00:54:34.130 align:middle line:90% Aw, thank you.