Your question, right?
I will find you with the microphone.
Thanks, Erin.
I really enjoyed the way you explained your process
in the beginning of before you read
your new poem as creating these nets as a place of dwellings.
And you made the ultimate question a little bit.
So my question then becomes, if you're
becoming this participant in these conversations
that you're creating through text,
do you find that you have to add,
so that you're not just reflecting
what's already been created?
What do you need to add, so that these constructions
become a place of dwelling?
It's a great question.
And when I asked to myself pretty much every time,
I write a poem.
And there's a couple of things that perhaps
address what you're asking.
One that's become important to me
is actually from Shelley's defense of poetry,
where he says that the need to write poetry
is to keep linked these links that have always been linked.
And I think one of the difficult truths.
Although, that word makes me uncomfortable
in all sorts of ways.
But I don't have a better one.
One of the difficult truths about poetry
is that the only way you maintain those links
is by adding a link.
One can't help it.
The other thing that has been very important to me
for years revolutionary in many ways
is also from Thoreau in his journals, where in various ways
but most pointedly says Plato's thoughts are nothing to me
until I've thought Plato's thoughts, which is to say
there is this odd way in which when
one thinks about reading and writing
as not simply oppositional, or compensatory activities.
But as a deeply similar creative activity.
That reading is this act of thinking through another's
thoughts, your own thoughts.
And somehow the only way to address that activity
is by putting your own words to it even if sometimes
your own words or those words that have already been written.
And yet everywhere it's already been written.
It's not it's not an original work it is we're trying to do.
It's this keeping vital that without which our making
words might cease to be.
I suspect.
Does that at all get towards your question?
OK.
Question three.
Great.
I'm curious I think there are a lot of people
who are doing work now that's playing
with some degree of collage and with some degree
of incorporating other people's works and words.
And I'm curious if in your process
of talking about this project as you've
been moving around the world and reading from it.
You've met or encountered resistance
to that project or that idea.
Because I think a lot of times in poetry circles,
we talk as though we have this fear
that there will be resistance.
And yet, I haven't encountered or seen
a lot of actual resistance to the idea of collage
and pulling in other things.
I haven't.
I haven't personally met any resistance.
But I suspect poetry is a field where most resistance stays
curiously unspoken.
Collage and appropriation, these are certain kinds of buzzwords
and all postmodern poetics.
And my interest in these modes has really nothing
to do with a postmodern poetic as a theory I ascribe to.
It doesn't frankly interest me at some level.
All I'm concerned about is as naive
as it sounds is just being honest,
being honest to the idea that feels
necessary to do at the time.
And hopefully, that comes through in the work
in a way, where people who might have certain doubts.
And I have many doubts about such moves
myself even as I do them.
Either change their mind or hate me in secret.
Or just dislike me in secret.
I don't think I'd ever resist a hateful.
People that hate, they come up and talk to you.
The people who dislike, they just
wander out feeling good about their begrudgement which
is a powerful thing in itself.
More begrudgingly.
More silent, but grudging.
Isn't that a line from Keats more begrudging
more happy, happy love.
Oh, I got confused.
More happy love.
More happy, happy love.
Everybody thinks that's the stupidest line.
But it's not a better line in the English language.
I think we're going to invite you back tomorrow
to hear more conversation with Dan Beachy-Quick
And thank you so much.
Thank you.