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