Well I want to welcome everyone to the Helena Schaefer
building.
This is home of the Poetry Center in the Humanities
Seminars Program.
I'm Gail Brown, Executive Director of the Poetry Center.
I see we get another group coming in,
so I'm just going to pause here for a second
and resume in a minute, while these folks get seated.
It's really gratifying to see so many different groups of people
in the audience tonight, this afternoon rather.
We have students, former students, faculty,
I think maybe not just from English
but from some other departments across the College
of Humanities, and of course, our friends and patrons
of the Poetry Center, it's nice to see you all here.
And what?
Old folks.
I didn't say that Liz, didn't come out of my mouth.
You all should have bio sheets, they're
sort of more formal biographies, our panelists are here.
This is a first of a series of events
we hope to do with faculty from the creative writing program.
So let's get started.
We have a nice program and let's get going.
"Once You've Settled Yourselves Like Books About You"
is a title from a poem by Barbara Cully, in her book
The New Intimacy.
I have a feeling she may have had
these words in mind, when she suggested today's panel to me.
Our conversations over the years have often
touched on the subject of identities, the writer
self, the teacher self, the self as citizen of the world,
and the different types of engagement
those identities elicit from us.
So a life in letters is in Barbara's mind,
and in mine, an opportunity for students
to learn more about the work and working lives of their teachers
and mentors, and for our various communities
to engage with the poets they have read
and admired for years.
So please do gather yourself like books about you,
and welcome poet, lecturer, teacher, Poetry Center Advisory
Board Member and friend Barbara Cully.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you Gail.
Thank you everyone for being here.
Our illustrious panel of poets will
be introduced by some of their former students.
Simmons Button will introduce Alison Deming.
And, needs a microphone.
And we're just doing this from the audience I understand,
so should I sneak back over here, maybe I'll stand up.
Hi.
I'm Simmons, and I would like to direct you
this afternoon to the virtual Alison Hawthorne Deming.
That's an Alison I'm very familiar with because I've
helped in crafting her website.
And if you've been to a website--
which is @alisonhawthornedeming.com--
you will find that there are a series of quotes that
rotate on the home page, and I'd like to just read
real briefly from one of those.
What it takes to dazzle us, masters of dazzle.
All of us here together at the top of the world,
is a night without neon or mercury lamps.
Respectfully to Alison, I disagree.
I think what it takes to dazzle us
is an outstanding teacher, an excellent writer,
and an amazing person.
And I have been dazzled by Alison really since I first
met her several years ago, when we
met to discuss the MFA program.
And I was trying to decide whether I should
apply to poetry or nonfiction.
I'd already met with Steve, but I
wanted to really talk about content versus form
and a few other things.
And I'll tell you again, I was dazzled from the beginning.
When I entered the MFA program, and I worked with Alison both
in nonfiction and poetry, I became further dazzled,
further enamored, sorry-- you see I can't even talk about
it--
I've been so dazzled, so enamored,
that my wife got a little bit nervous actually.
She sort of approached me point blank
and said, "Is this something that I
need to be worried about?"
She had not yet met Alison in fact, and I said, "Well,
I understand what your concern is."
and not long after fortunately, we had a potluck at our home
and Alison and many other folks came over.
And she said, "OK, I completely understand
why you are so exuberant about Alison,
because she is just such a wonderful person."
And, there are a few people I think who have such an energy,
such a passion.
I mean, Alison and these people are every bit as mortal
as the rest of us and yet, when you're around them,
they lift you up and it's kind of a wild, kind of a dizzying,
but yet, still a delightful rhyme.
And Alison is one of those people,
it's evident in her poetry but more
so I think in her personality, whether in the classroom
or not.
So, I don't think I could ask for anything more
than to be dazzled.
I certainly couldn't have hoped for more than a teacher,
a mentor, and a friend, than what Allison gives.
And so, I expect when we hear from her today,
we all too will be dazzled.
So really, it's my pleasure to introduce
the wonderful, the inspiring, and of course, dazzling
Alison Hawthorne Deming.
[APPLAUSE]
[INAUDIBLE]
Goes green, I'm so sorry.
Do I have to start over?
OK.
Sorry to just ruin the whole moment, sorry Jane.
OK.
All right.
So, "Coachella Valley Palm Trees" you guys got it, OK.
So the trees are like big furry monsters
from your childhood, the cuddly kind,
and after walking around a bit hidden from the sun
by this huge palm nest, you ultimately drive
or hike back to where you came from, back into the aridness.
And you were invigorated by this apparition
of life, this entrancing important fissure in the earth
that created some wondrous oasis.
Jane, has the same effect for me, like the oasis,
it's hard to tell if Jane is truly there in front of you
at the time.
Only later, do you know some peace has been put into motion,
the fault is shifted.
When I was in my first semester as an MFA student,
I felt like Jane was going to cut my head off,
and hand it back to me with the big dark truth, and of course,
what the hell is the truth?
But it felt fantastic.
And so, lucky am I to have Jane as teacher, mentor, reader,
confidante.
She cultivates presence like no one else.
I want to share a quote from one of Jane's interviews,
it reads, "Really, writers are still
at that primal confrontation.
What is this body I am dealing with?
Where in the vast emotional immature self,
is the one unsentimental deed that
will access language of great refinement?
Yes, these are the questions, and here is the fault line."
Everyone, Jane Miller.
[APPLAUSE]
Think Clifford will introduce Steve Boylan.
I'm still here Steve.
Good afternoon.
I spent a lot of years not understanding my father.
He was hardworking to the point of absence,
brooding, quick to anger, but every now and then,
usually after a drink or two, he would sit my brother
and me down at the dining room table
and tell us stories of his childhood.
Some careening narratives starring young country boys
long since dead, and the mischief they caused.
And my father would often stop, laugh to himself
as if coming to terms with something he had forgotten,
then take another drink and continue to confuse us.
I didn't understand Steve when I first met him
either, but over the years--
over the years of reading his poetry
and occasionally being fortunate enough
to sit down with him over a drink,
he has taught me how to be more patient reader, and a more
patient listener.
His poetry is at times blunt, wry, sad, but always beautiful
in its ability to place you in the midst of several emotions
at once.
Steve is one of the few poets that pisses me off, and awes,
and humbles me, in the space of a few well-crafted lines.
His poetry forces you to be patient,
not to give you answers, but questions
that help you navigate you through your own experiences
in the world.
Ladies and gentlemen, Steve Orlen.
[APPLAUSE]
Can you hear me all right?
Excellent.
I've had the pleasure of knowing Boyer Rickel for several years
now.
Initially as his student, and the MFA program as someone
he invited to co-teach an undergraduate class,
and then as his friend.
As his student in the graduate program,
I quickly learned that Boyer is immensely
attuned to the cadence and music of a piece of writing.
He has an incredible ear for sound,
the most developed and focused of anyone I've met.
And he helps develop that ear in everyone he works with.
I later learned that his parents taught music, clearly
a contributing factor to his awareness
of the music and language.
Boyer is precise, careful, and a meticulous writer,
who often uses discipline processes,
repeated over time to produce and craft his writing.
This practice has produced-- among his other works--
Remanence which is a gorgeously lyric and meditative
book of poetry, that offers much to come back to time and time
again.
He is a detailed and insightful reader,
who is both gracious and liberal with his feedback.
Boyer is also a caring, genuine, and wonderful human being.
He's immensely generous in both his mentorship, and teaching,
and in his friendship.
There are many of us in this room today
who count him as an integral part of our writing community.
We're extremely blessed to have him
here affiliated with the university,
and our creative writing program.
It's my absolute pleasure and honor
to introduce Boyer Rickel.
[APPLAUSE]
When asked what poetry is, Dillon Thomas
replied that a poem is like a city having many entrances.
Poetry is the apex of culture, the spire of civilisations,
the scalpel of emotion, and the anvil of thought,
whispering and bellowing the unsayable with mere words.
I'm going to add another quote, one that you
might be familiar with.
"The distinction between the personal and the political
gives the political realm too much and too little scope.
At the same time, it renders the personal too important
and not important enough.
We need a third term, one that can describe
the space between the state and the supposedly
safe havens of the personal, let us call this space The Social.
The Social is a place of struggle
where books are published, courses are taught,
and poems disseminated.
It is a sphere in which."
end quote.
And that's from Carolyn Forché.
A sphere in which we, this building, and this conversation
reside.
This panel was inspired with MFA students
in mind, because they sought you out,
they crossed rivers and mountains
to study at your feet, but the audience is everyone.
Does poetry matter to the world and in it?
This is as much a question for us, the audience,
as it is for our four illustrious panel of poets.
The building we are in answers yes,
the students who have come to learn and earn
advanced degrees in poetry have answered yes, the University
institution as a whole, by housing
the poetic enterprise within its enterprise,
has answered yes as well.
A well remembered poet, Larry Levis said yes,
by saying ecstasy is just as much a birthright in this world
as misery is a condition of it.
How do we nod our own yes to poetry while saying yes
to everything else we love.
And where do we put it?
Next to everything else we love?
Our poet teachers have managed this negotiation
over a lifetime, measuring themselves out
not with Prufrock's coffee spoons,
but with the individual letters becoming books,
one digital, lyrical, cognitive gesture at a time,
and we are grateful.
The hope of this event is to prompt
the individual and collective reflections
about how these poets have made their choices.
Aesthetic, philosophical, pedagogical, over years,
and careers, but equally true, less lofty, and more humble.
We are here because of a loneliness for, and a deep love
of the conversation.
I've overprepared, so the Cully seminar version of this event
will appear next time I teach a graduate course in poetry.
Today, the floor and microphones belong to the poets.
I've prepared a set of questions,
I'm hoping that more than one of you
will answer each question so the similarities and disagreements
among you will emerge.
The premise here is as ambitious, as it is confident.
What you have to say, what you have written, thought,
and done, will inform us not only about you,
but about the origins and destinations
of poetry in our times.
Thank you each for coming.
And to start, what would you like to read to us of the books
we have on the table or that you brought?
I've put little post-its in some of your books,
and I've put some of your books with those post-its right
in front of you.
But I know that you have brought some work
and that you might have some planning
that you did on your own, so ignore my post-its.
It's just part of my--
we'll call it process or diagnosis.
Before starting with the questions
let's just hear a poem.
And start with Jane because she has a mic down there.
How's that?
OK.
This is for Valentine's Day, coming up for all of you.
And the poem is called "A Little Myth."
A little myth about me standing below a window shouting
Valentina, Valentina, until I'm joined
by a couple of friends who happened by and others
on their way to dinner, end up joining
in the melody Valentina, who apparently is not home.
I announced, there is no Valentina, there never was.
A little perturbed but forgiving,
the crowd dissolves into night mist,
but one last voice stays and tries again, Valentina.
It amounts to so little, yet poetry remains
on nearly every corner calling.
Down the road.
All right.
"Metaleptic."
Emotions float, the fish's motion
is it's thought, unknown forms embedded in stone
invite our guesses at things, at origins.
Some ancients believed the soul adheres to bones,
each surface is a depth, like corpusants a glow that's cold,
its source invisible.
Whispers at a wall, audible, yards, distant,
sea bob of cormorants, a circling whale.
What we take on faith that waves approaching shore advance
is pattern, not displacement like wind,
the rose a magnet makes of iron filings.
Earth warms, fireflies, no longer light, a river's turns.
What shakes the heart at the scent of skin,
love stings, love swings, love rings, love strings,
love wings.
I came off a long period of several months,
and it was of writing lyric poems which were in this book
and, well I was able to start up again,
I gave vent to my narrative, long winded pieces."
This is called "The Last Train."
She took me on my first train trip,
the last time a train would take the twice daily 40-mile trip
from Holyoke to Hartford and back.
I was very small and don't remember much
except, my mother had a sense of occasion.
And though we weren't Catholic or rich,
she dressed me up as though we were
going to the Easter parade.
Gray day, light rain, the depot crowded with the smells
that will be gone in an hour.
Across the street, the tenements they'd
always been there, down Railroad Street, the canal and even
in the rain, men would have been fishing,
and because it was Saturday, fishing with their sons.
I don't remember boarding the train, or what
passed in the window frames.
She probably squealed for joy when we crossed the Connecticut
River, because she always referred to it as my river,
and a week before she died she said,
that's one thing they can't take away from me.
I remember tugging at her sleeve,
we were in Hartford by then standing on the platform
and pointing, she bent and whispered
that it's impolite to point.
I imagine this journey meant the end of an era tour,
and though she wasn't a particularly reflective person,
she was sentimental, meaning she had
an acute awareness of the passage of time
and how it affected her.
And the era that was passing on a single day,
a Saturday in 1947, was a memory she spoke of often.
As a little girl standing with her father
in front of the small depot holding a sign "Rooms To Let."
I was pointing at a Black boy, about my own age.
I'd never before seen a Black person,
I didn't know what to think or say.
She said he was a Negro, it's all she said.
I remember that the Negro boy, who
must have seen plenty of white people in his brief life,
was pointing back at me.
He was smiling.
When someone smiles and you don't know why,
you join in anyway.
We each held our mother's hand, I imagine
the boy's mother caught my mother's eyes,
and because they were both good people, both polite and aware
of what can pass between people at moments like this,
also smiling.
It's so intriguing to have Barbara put these post-its.
I love to read something but I think
I'll follow what my pals have done and read something new.
This is called "The Prisoner."
The municipal gardener planted a laurel outside the County Jail,
he placed it beneath the window, bars cutting up the light
on the ground he worked.
The prisoner could catch a whiff of fragrance
for one week, the musk of spring.
When the prisoner was released, the gardener
happened to be kneeling pulling weeds invisible to everyone
but himself.
He glanced up to watch the prisoner cross the threshold
to freedom, saw him pause, arrested by the fragrance
he'd known in captivity.
I know a prisoner, one who stays locked
in her mind, no movie more compelling than the suspense
of what one moment will do to the last and the next.
The real plot unfolding in a theater
where nothing happens but this separation of herself
into parts that are not parts, but only the whole that
feels partitioned, the argument that she should not
feel a certain way, though feeling
comes without pre-existing conditions, covenants,
exclusions.
You will not feel lonely, you will not feel angry,
you will not feel lost, when love abandons you.
Sensible shoes, and sensible goals, little dreamer.
Come back to the bars on the windows and doors,
this is the play of her mind, enthusiasm meeting
antagonist, the scent of laurel caught in the neuron net.
Thank you.
The questions I have come in four different categories.
And the first is the life, each of these poets
have lived a life as an artist in the context
of the academic setting, and each
have made their aesthetic choices inside the community
that they work in and give their work to.
The first question I have about the life is, is your poetry
the byproduct of a life or the engine of one?
And I think Jane, you and I have talked about this a little bit
so I thought you might want to take this on.
But there are other--
no, no, no, no, no, no.
No, I wouldn't either, that would be redundant,
especially in public.
Well, for me the answer is that it is very much.
I guess I'm just a writer by accident,
and I consider myself a lover with many failures
and a few successes, but with that as the engine of my life.
And writing is kind of on the side of all of that
and, I do it very infrequently, and when I do,
I try to disappear and to get it over with as fast as I can,
so I can come back to my life.
I realized that it is a part of my life, but it's very small.
I love words and I love people who use words even more.
So--
Nice.
Thank you.
Who would you like to answer that question next?
Who would I?
Yeah.
I guess I'd love to hear Boyer's answer.
Boyer, is your poetry the byproduct
of a life of the engine of one?
Oh, those are hard metaphors to attach to.
And you can discard them for your own.
I mean, there is such an integration for me
of the experience of my community and the writing
that I do, that it's hard for me to--
it is hard for me to separate them.
I can't imagine the life without the writing,
but I would never have arrived at the community without poetry
and in the opportunity for teaching.
I know that when I was in a very low place in my life--
seven or eight years ago--
and was not writing, it was through a relationship
of language and imagination that a student who
became a close friend brought me to,
that restored me to my writing.
So it's a very complicated relationship for me,
and if I'm not writing I don't feel terribly alive actually.
It's extremely important to me to be engaged with language
and imagination at all times, in relation to the world
that I experience.
And so, I wish there were a way to create
a hybrid of the things that those two metaphors suggest,
because that's how it would be for me.
Softie.
And you don't have to answer it if you don't want to,
I can give you a different question.
No I'd like to.
You like to?
Yeah.
I can, because you can throw anything in there,
into that question I mean.
Poetry is just the whole thing for me except for my wife
and son, and drinks with my friends,
I don't want to leave it.
My wife and I are the same way about this,
we both just like to do our work all the time,
and then, it's like parallel play you know, and--
So, she likes to be inside her imagination all the time,
which is visual, and I like to be inside my verbal one,
as many hours a day as I can do it, which is six, seven, eight.
And I was born--
this sounds like more than I mean it to sound--
but in a sense I was born to be a writer of some kind,
as I was born with--
like my father and my son-- with the ability
to use language, and grammar, and spelling,
without having to study it, and also
just to love words right away.
My father sent me to the dictionary all the time
and, I love the sound of them.
What made me different from my father
was that, he had no sensibility, he had no particularly well
examined innner life, and like many of our fathers.
But, I was born with that--
I started to grow into that terrible confusion
that you have in childhood, of trying to figure things out
in some way, and you have nothing, no experience yet
to help you with all of that.
And that produces the alienation,
I think that's common to many writers,
and it also produced in me the desire
to try to understand how people live.
I felt like I didn't know how to be and so,
my poems began that way.
I was trying to figure out how other people live,
so I could learn how to live, and for the most part
I haven't stopped my engagement with that.
So, it's my engine, everything else is lard, I don't know.
Well, I guess maybe fewer, I don't like engine or byproduct
but I'll take fuel.
I think my writing is really, really central to my life,
it's what gives me energy and a sense of direction,
a sense of having a shred of hope that I might resolve many
of the confusions that I live with, to which all of us
live with.
I mean, I love what Steve says about the terrible confusion
of childhood, I felt that way in my childhood so profoundly,
and I think books saved me, reading saved me.
I saw things that I was experiencing in my inner life
kind of lifting off of pages and it was remarkable.
So I fell in love with language because of that.
For me I don't write all the time,
I always have a lot of writing projects
going, either poetry or nonfiction,
and I go through periods where it's really hard
to find the time to write but, it's
really central to my sense of who I am,
my trajectory, my sense of balance,
my sense of place in the world, and I don't separate it out
like oh, there's teaching and writing.
One of my teachers way back at Stanford W. S. Di Piero
you know, I said, "Oh, I have this terrible struggle
between work and what I have to do for money, and my writing."
He said, "Why is it a struggle?
It's all one thing."
And, I've tried for a long time to feel that that was true
and all of a sudden it does feel true, it is all one thing
and it's all fuel.
When reading your work Alison, I noticed the tension in it that
you make very good aesthetic use of, which seems like a tension
that-- like you're saying--
exists in your life as well, and the way I characterize that is,
the tension between knowing and mystery, and not
knowing and solving, and witnessing and healing,
enigma and documentary, and this notion
of solving for x or not and as an alternative,
allowing the dissolution of all things to happen around you.
And, I felt very much that there was
no distinction between the art and the life
in looking at your books over the course of my review of them
especially as you have written your most recent work,
it seems like that is a dominant theme.
In terms of the integration of the life and the aesthetic,
I have a question for Boyer that goes into the aesthetic realm,
because it seems like if we look at your work
where we've got a kind of C change--
maybe almost literally "sea"--
because I know that you like to hang out at the water's edge.
And, I was wondering if you could--
in continuing your discussion of the the art and the life
being so integrated--
where then does this transformation--
the C change that appears in the work come from?
Teaching and my students.
About 16 years ago, 18 years ago,
Steve said, "You need to teach the form's course,
it's your turn."
And, I don't know if he was just bored with it or, because he
had taught it so much or, he had some better project and I
didn't.
Of course, I wanted to do it because I didn't know what
it was about, and so, I started teaching that course
with the notion that I was just a student at the table.
And I still very much teach that course
as a student at the table, because I don't have
a deep writing history in the traditions of form
and traditional English prosody, but I love it.
And, the first four or five times that I taught the course,
I did the assignments every week.
I wrote the sonnets and the villanelle's,
and the horrible blank verse poems,
and I put them on the worksheets not to be discussed, but just
as a form of demonstrating that I
was in the middle of this humiliating experience
with my students.
They could see how I was struggling with the forms.
But what I discovered was that I love
having a set of conventions to work through.
So often, those formal conventions
led me into places imaginatively,
and intellectually, and emotionally,
that I don't think I would have gotten
to if I didn't have the conventions to consider
and to constantly be working in tension at some level against.
And it led me to think about creating my own conventions,
poems that would be written in series so that I would find out
how my mind when writing in series fell into patterns,
and then I could challenge those patterns.
And, at the same time that I was beginning to realize that I
could work in a new way that would actually give me more
work to do rather than each poem being a reinvention of myself
as a poet-- which is the way I had worked for so many years--
poets in my classes started taking me to new poets
that I might not have gotten to, and I started rereading poets
that I'd always loved but not quite understood why,
and what it was about them that I found ungraspable and yet,
necessary in my reading of them.
Rae Armantrout, Peter Gizzi, there
are so many poets now who are central to my love
of contemporary poetry, that were
brought to me by my students.
And, at the time, I was seeing how
these new forms of imagination were functioning,
I was trying to overlay them with these personal conventions
and these forms.
And, that's how it happened.
I mean, I can't imagine how I would
have gotten into the place of the sequences
that I've been working on without that interplay
of the life of teaching a course that I was forced to teach,
and these amazing students who came in and took me
in directions I don't know that I would have gotten to.
Steve, all of your poems are moving.
And I mean that in both senses of the word,
they move on the page, they tell stories,
and they also move us emotionally.
For example the poem "The Pripet Marshes" you remember that one?
It might have ended after the first page
but, what keeps it going?
What keeps the poem going and moving
so that it will eventually move us?
And what keeps you writing?
After that point where it might have ended.
Thank you.
I always write my first drafts fast and without looking back,
and I don't care.
I mean, I have to have a rhythm and a subject to start me
and, I just scribbled till I run out.
And, there's usually an ending in narrative
but, in that kind of buildup that you find in narrative.
And so, that tells me where the poem is going to end.
And then, when I work on it--
this is what I've learned from writing lyric poetry--
is to keep going past that ending.
And, sometimes it's stupid, nothing interesting comes of it
but, when I was writing lyric poems, I'd have four lines.
So where can I go next?
Elsewhere, is what I was learning--
and where do I go after the next thing?
Elsewhere.
And, it's a different kind of logic to these lyric poems
that I was--
many of them-- that I was working on.
And so, I think it's the same thing with the narrative poems.
I want to go--
if I tie things together, have I made it hard for myself?
Have I put myself in a corner?
Which is what most poetry does, you
said resolved but I know you didn't mean resolve
the issues in your life, but at least put them
out there for yourself to examine.
And so, the narrative brings me all the way through.
It's what happens in between or what I end up
putting afterwards, is the more challenging and interesting
part.
And you even you said in an interview
one time, that you didn't think that you told stories exactly
correctly, and there was kind of a quirk
that you have of getting sidetracked, and in that way
it became almost a habit of form.
Can you talk about that a little bit?
Yeah.
I mean, it's not a--
is it a form?
It's a method of development or--
A process.
A process of-- it's how you'd get from one thing
to another in a poem, and reading
a straightforward chronological narrative,
unless you're reading fiction, and it's
kind of boring in poetry.
So, mine just mirrors the meandering of my mind
that associates its left branching, it just goes around
and I have to fix these things up later,
and sometimes they have to create segues.
But, I think it's the way my uncles used
to have conversations, they'd sit down with their big cigars
and drink, and they'd be telling stories
and you just couldn't follow them, because they went here,
and then they went over there, and then
someone would interrupt, and they'd go back.
And, maybe I learned that way but, what I'm doing
is a mirror because, I do write very quickly on a first draft.
I'm really just mirroring the meanderings of my mind.
Hey, not bad.
But when I run out of story, usually the poem
is going to fail.
If I can't find a reason in narrative for continuing with
this story-- which happens to be quite a bit--
then I'll put it away and maybe something
will happen later but, that's another thing I
liked about the lyric poem.
To start with nothing but four lines,
or to take a narrative poem that I didn't like,
but it had these great four lines I thought--
great four lines in there-- and then to build a poem around it,
in front of it, and then back of it, that was interesting.
Would it take two pages of a bad narrative poem,
and end up with eight lines from within it?
And that was the poem, and it was a lyric poem.
We're kind of excavating the poem out
of the draft of the poem.
Yeah, I did some of that.
Well, when I learned more about--
when I started to understand some of the lyric strategies
that I could take, I did it in as many ways as I could.
And made a reliable process out of that.
Yeah.
What's fortunate is I'm a moron and I forget what I've done.
And so, I have to rediscover what I do every time I do it.
No wonder it takes eight hours a day.
Yeah, that's right.
[LAUGHTER]
Well it takes eight hours a day because I'm slow,
and because I don't see everything right away,
I don't take any distance from the poem as I keep drafting.
It's not a good idea, but I'm right up close to it.
And so, I don't see sometimes, you just
cut the first half or--
And so, I end up putting as much work
into a poem that's not going to work as I do into a poem that's
going to work.
A bad poem, same amount of hours,
days, months as a good one.
I mean, I'm working on a bunch at the same time so--
Yeah.
Does that?
Which is a good function of a studio.
It sounds like you have a functional studio that you
can enter each day, whether or not
there's going to be something productive at the end of it,
and that you trust that.
Well, it's my office, I write in my office seven days a week.
But, unless I'm in the middle of two or three drafts at the same
time-- which happens but doesn't happen all the time like
today--
and, you're not a poet unless you're writing a poem,
and you don't know where the next one's going to come from.
And, another one came to me today, and then
by the end of the day, I said no, I don't
think this is going to do it.
Well, you all know if you're an artist that there's
a great anxiety if you don't know what's going to come next,
so I like it best when I'm in the middle of three or four
different poems.
Different rough drafts or less than rough drafts.
Thank you.
This is a question I'm going to direct to Jane
but, I think that maybe others of you
have thought about it too.
How do you deal with the tremendous power
of traditional forms and genres to reinscribe
familiar arguments about the world?
It seems like there's almost an ideology that comes,
or baggage of ideology that comes with a traditional form.
So, how do you work against that power of the form
to reinscribe familiar arguments about the world?
And how does that play out?
And I know Jane, you and I have talked about this especially
in terms of confessional poetry, or whether you want
to write from lived experience.
And, the idea of narrative itself,
the arc of a narrative seems to posit that it's possible
to make a kind of order out of the chaos of our lives,
and you I think-- especially in your book Midnight's-- have
resisted that the lie, the fiction,
that order would come by simply writing up the events
of a life.
What was the question?
How do you deal with the tremendous power
of traditional forms and genres to reinscribe
familiar arguments about the world,
and do something else instead?
Well, I have a very easy time of avoiding form.
I think it's because I have a lot of order in my daily life.
I eat regularly, and I try to exercise regularly,
and I try to pay close attention to the people I love.
And so, as an artist, I have no regard for order, diligence,
attention, of that sort.
I do have a lot of attention for my work,
but it isn't ordered at all.
In fact, after having an office near Steve Orlen for over 20
years, and have to watch him go in there every day,
create something every day, I mean,
I could just strangle him.
The guilt and regret that I have over not
being able to live that kind of a life as an artist but,
of course, one goes on in one's own way.
So for me, anything formal that I do
has to sneak up on me without my being aware
and eventually it is the last thing that I pay attention to,
and I have to, so I do.
But, I write in a very messy way and try to pull it together
at the very last moment.
I don't know whether that answers your question
but, it's an ordeal to face the sense of stanza organization,
or over the long haul, and I've actually
forced myself to write very long books so I would have
to have an overarching order there to find,
and even having at one point written a book of essays
that almost killed me because, I could not make order out of it
until the very last moment, and with a lot of help
from many, many people, my students, my peers,
and you in fact, Barbara.
And Alison can jump in here.
She's very accomplished in two genres.
She writes essays and poetry, and I
imagine struggles with the conventions of both.
Yeah, of course, we all want to always be doing something new,
and I never want to be-- what was the terrifying phrase
about the old arguments?
You know, here we go again, let's say it one more time.
What was that awful--
Reinscribing the familiar argument about the world.
I mean, of course, none of us want to be doing that,
and it's a terrible shock when you do something
that you think is very new and you look at it
and you said, "I've been saying the same thing for 20 years,
how did that happen?
And so, is how we're feeling about 5,000 other people
I can think of but nonetheless, one is under the obligation
to try to make it new on one's own terms
and in one's own forms.
I have a different relationship to order actually,
I have a tremendous sense of artistic chaos.
I do think that writing poems, and essays, and lyric essays,
are all about creating art and I don't necessarily
mean imposing a false sense of order
so much as I mean, how do we find a temporary sense of order
that encompasses more of the chaos with which we're
forced to live, because of the time in which we live?
And, I think when we're struggling for form,
we're struggling for some sense of temporary order and pattern
that helps us to feel--
even as in this little poem I read--
that there is a whole of which this chaos is a part,
and somehow artistic form is one of the ways
we metonymically create a sense of the whole of which
all these fragments are a part.
So, just to say one other thing about that is that, sometimes--
because this spins off of the last thing Steve said--
how do you keep the thing going when that's the question
and you don't know how to do it, and you've got a pile of chaos
on your desk?
Sometimes for me, it is a formal challenge and particularly
if I'm working on a long poem.
I'll come up with some arbitrary thing I want to do,
like there's a long poem called "The Flight"
that's about 20 pages long in my new book,
and it's got a six line stanza that steps in like the Williams
triptych line-- for those of you who know it--
except it's to go 6 times and it's
got all these different ideas of flight.
And every time I got stuck, I just tried to say all right,
you're going to stay with this form,
you're just going to keep going with it,
and you're also going to stitch it together
with this little word, so.
That once you get stuck--
and it's a little joke about sewing but it's SO--
so the poem sort of gets stuck and runs out of steam,
and I pick up the next gesture by saying,
so, I'm waiting for the plane to take off.
And you can connect anything to anything with one little word,
and then it becomes a kind of unifying gesture that I don't
think is an imposing of false order,
it's allowing a word to help you create
a pattern that feels orderly.
So, I don't know, that sort of spins off right.
And simultaneously, the poem is unraveling itself as well as,
stitching itself together.
Exactly.
OK.
Continuing with the aesthetic decisions
that we make as poets, and thinking about this chaos
issue, we certainly encounter enough chaos in the world
and sometimes that creates enough sorrow
that we need to write.
But this question sort of flips it on its head.
When you write, do you preserve or destroy
your source materials?
Anybody want to answer that?
Reserve.
I'm a hoarder, OK.
What do you mean by source materials?
OK.
Well, Alison answered that in terms
of her process materials--
you keep the drafts.
And that's an interesting answer interpretation of the question.
I was thinking more for instance,
if your source material is your third grade
year at a Catholic school, when you write about
that source material do you preserve it or do
you destroy it, if you write out of a lived experience?
I've gotten further and further away
from the source that starts me to write the poem.
Maybe my third grade teacher.
And I've gotten myself my autobiographical self,
appears less frequently as an engine in the poems.
It may have started that way but, I take that out
and, I mean I've got poems where the whole thing was changed.
And then, I got into fictions that are personalized,
but then I've lived a part of that.
And so, I'm creating 3/4 of a new character,
then the rest is my voice.
But I end up destroying it more and more as I've gotten older.
Who cares about myself?
Jane, what about you on this one?
I care about my small self, not over much
but, I try to get farther and farther into myself,
until I blast out the back, where
I hope there's some sort of communal archetypal human
that I can connect with.
But I have to go all the way through the material,
and I try as hard as I can to be honest.
Just exactly as I remember it, and if I can't remember I
wait, and then I wait more, and I just
wrack my brains trying to get every single angle of it
until some design comes through.
That is I guess, humane in the sense
that it belongs to more than just me.
Sort of Jung's idea that, if you get down
to the bottom of your dreams, you'll
find archetypal imagery there, it's
shared, and communal, and interesting.
So I don't think I'm interesting,
but I think that which I have in common with everybody
can be terribly interesting if I could just find it.
So, while I'm looking for me I'm looking for you.
I'm looking for us.
And Boyer, I think that you might
want to add something to that.
At the same time, I've seen in your work
a kind of shift from telling stories and working
from lived experience that you may or may not
preserve or destroy in the process,
and Arreboles your first book or in Taboo, your collection
of essays, but, kind of on the heels of that
question, why do you tell stories?
If you do, and why do you work from fragments?
If you do.
Oh, my source material actually is languages fragments,
is stuff that I collect and cull in recent years
from anywhere I possibly can, and when life is good
everything seems usable.
I collect in notebooks and then, when
I'm feeling the sort of confidence,
I can't write every day but I consider myself a writer
as long as I'm collecting.
But when I feel the confidence that I'm
ready to make the kinds of spontaneous connections
that will lead to something that matters,
then I start combing through the notebooks
and depending on whatever conventions
I've decided to work through.
The shaping works against the tension
of the materials and my life does come forward from time
to time.
Remanence is primarily a sequence
of poems built on five individual separate sentences
under a title that connects them in some way,
though they don't tell a story or provide a single argument.
My hope is, and my thinking as I created each one,
was that there's a range of resonances among them,
and that it leaves a kind of floating or indeterminate set
of possibilities in relation to that title.
So, I've really moved away from story
but, if one reads this I think, from beginning to end quickly,
you begin to see there are characters actually who recur,
there's landscape that is very central to the sequence
as a whole.
And, a kind of very indirect story with the only themes
I know--
Eros and Thanatos-- are present.
In the end it doesn't arrive at a different place thematically
as far as I can tell from my first two books but, I did feel
also after Taboo-- which has autobiographical essays--
that I simply couldn't do that again ever.
That I had gone into places in as direct a fashion
as I could, and it was really a form of difficulty
I didn't want to do again, and didn't think I needed to.
And so, it was a long process coming to the new material
and the new process of writing.
I don't know if that answers.
Yeah, it does.
In talking with you it's clear that your work is incubated
in a life story for all of you.
And one of my questions about community has to do with--
were quite simply-- are you a citizen poet or a private poet?
Anybody who teaches has one leg in community automatically,
you are in a classroom.
And so, I would like to know if you
have an answer to that question, are you
a citizen poet or a private poet?
But also in conjunction with that, looking back
over all the classes and the classrooms that you've been in,
and you've been teaching in, what
choices have you made over time that make you the teacher
that you are, or make you the citizen poet that you are?
Well, I love teaching, I love my job,
but it has gotten in the way of my work.
And so, it's become my work and that happened to me.
And so, I'm grateful now for it but, I've
fought it all the way.
I feel I'm a very private person, so I entertain and try
to be as controversial as I can in the classroom
so that I can leave it all there.
And I'm just exhausted at the end of every class,
I can't remember what happened.
And by the time I walk about 35 feet,
it's as if it never happened, which is part of my process.
I just have to just get it all out so
that I can go back to my deepest self
again and, thank you for understanding me.
I'm sorry I haven't had you all over for dinner,
but this is why.
And, as my friend Richard [? Cutrover ?]
says love you a lot.
But honestly, I've always admired the poet
William Merwin who would have been
and he still can choose to-- would
have been a great teacher, and walked away from that
because he felt like it would take too much out of him.
It's taken almost everything out of me
to be a teacher because, I wanted
to be a really good teacher.
And so, I've just--
like all of us here-- we work really hard at what we do
and I know that we're very proud of it,
but for me, if I don't get away from you all now and then,
I have nothing, no self at all to bring to the classroom
so, I try to get away as much as I can, as far as I can,
and as deep into myself as I can.
And so, the answer is, I wish I could
be a better political person.
I have come out for certain causes,
so far out that I don't know--
I like to think that when I have to, I will be there,
but it really is like pulling teeth.
I remember when I first came out as a gay person
at this University it was scandalous,
this was back in like the 18th century or something.
In other words, it's just like it is now.
And, everybody thought it was just sort
of brave and outrageous, and I didn't really
notice that I had done it.
So, I guess I am political, but not really when I mean to be.
And so, thank you for respecting my privacy.
Yeah.
It's really curious what happens in a life,
I was a teenage mother and pretty much emotionally
disowned from my family.
I ran off to northern Vermont, I was a welfare mother
and raised my daughter myself, and worked
for Planned Parenthood and other women's health care
organizations.
That was like 15 years of my young life.
So, when I came into University, life was very late you know.
I was in my mid-40s, so I don't feel the same way
about universities and teaching that some of my colleagues do.
They've been doing it since they were seven.
So, that's a good thing but it's weird.
The really strange thing that's happened
is, I was a very private poet and wrote
in the closet for a long time.
And, it was an amazing discovery earlier in my life
to feel the social pleasures and the social function of art,
and what it meant to share poetry,
and the experience of poetry, and love of the poetry,
and the craziness of poetry with other people and loved it.
I mean, how thrilling that was for me,
and also thrilling that when you read your poem people's eyes
get bigger and you realize you can bridge
something between people.
It's a staggering realization if you've
written by yourself for many years as most of us have.
And over the years, that's gotten stranger for me
because I didn't plan to become a public poet or a citizen
poet, but it's something that happened that came out
of my work, that more and more people kept asking me to come
and do a reading for this environmental thing,
or for the Fishing and Game Department of Florida,
I'm thinking, what?
OK.
And, you know--
And you're a poet laureate for zoos now.
Yeah.
I'm a poet in residence at the Jacksonville zoo in Florida,
one of five poets around the country
putting poetry installations up in zoos.
So, this evolved and I can't tell you
how much I love it, the feeling that people are doing really
hard work to try to soften the brutality of human beings
on the natural world, want what we do,
and that has meaning for them, and we don't always
know exactly why or how, but it's true, it really does.
And so, I've become more and more committed to participating
in these kinds of things.
And so, I now believe much more strongly
than I could have possibly 20 years ago or even 10 years ago,
in the possibility for some poets and writers
to really be out there, and be a voice in a way.
I could go on for seven weeks, I got one more thing to say
and I'll stop but, I think one of the things we've
learned through the terrible era of George Bush
is that, having data and empirical knowledge
does not help us solve the terrible wounding,
and the terrible problems, and the terrible diminishment
of the world.
Data doesn't do that.
People don't care about climate change,
and they don't care about the extinction of animals,
because they don't feel it keenly enough.
We bring the heart into everything.
And so, there's a role for us and even the science
communities are asking us to bring that
into the conversation.
And so, I'm caught constantly now in that challenge
of how to remain true to the really private and inner
calling of being a poet, and at the same time
give something to those communities who
want a poetic voice in their particular social and political
struggles.
So, anyway--
Thank you.
Yeah.
The way that you describe yourself Steve,
is kind of like the introvert poet.
I think we're all recovering introverts,
those of us who write, but we teach, we're in our classrooms.
And, there's another aspect to this notion
of being part of a community and that is that we publish.
And, when I was in my MFA program,
there was a lot of talk about who are your influences,
and what are the origins of your work,
the source materials like we've talked
about some of those but--
So, this next question sort of pushes it a little bit.
Much has been said about the origins of poetry
in cultures and in individual artists lives, what interests
me more these days is the destination of what we write,
no matter from where you launch it,
where is it that you want your work to land, and to detonate?
That makes you a political poet or a citizen poet too,
or at least it's launched out of your living room, and somewhere
else.
And, unless it's going into a time capsule, where do
you want it to be?
Where do you want it to explode?
Yeah, there it is.
I speak from green, it's great we're under the interrogation
lamp here.
The sun is just blinding us.
No, maybe she should--
Yeah, I can't see these beautiful people, feel dreams.
Auden said this great thing about, "A poet is someone
who writes things by himself or herself in a room,
and to be read by another person sitting by himself or herself,
alone in a room."
So, that's who my audience is.
I want someone else to follow my thinking
and see if there's anything interesting about it.
And, I always wanted to move people, less now,
I think I want people to feel and think
but necessarily, break out into tears, that was my goal when I
was a young poet, make you cry.
So, that's my audience.
I'm not a political person, I avoid confrontation,
I don't feel like I'm part of any community except,
about a dozen friends who are all over the country
and we talk on the phone, and some are here too.
But I'm really happy for the academy that gave me a job,
I'm good for nothing.
My father asked the principal of junior high,
"Should he take Latin or French?
Which will help him get into college?"
And he said, "You don't have to worry
about your son going to college, he's going to jail."
And he hung up on him.
That's a true story.
So, even though I spent all this time in my office,
I feel very uncomfortable in the academy.
I like to teach, I like to sit down with a group of people
if they're nice, and if they're smart or smarter than I am,
which I have this semester and last semester.
I've been lucky enough to have, before that I had some.
I was going to retire because everybody was nasty but--
That's what it means by postmodernism.
Yeah, right.
So, I'm just a parasite here you know.
I give something to it but, what teaching
has done for me is to help me, force
me to articulate what I do intuitively.
I do it intuitively on the page, but one has to work,
and the students have to do the same thing, then articulate it.
And the older I get, the less good
I'm at it, because I can't remember what I used to know.
My students will say, "Well, that should do such and such."
Oh Yeah, I remember that, I used to say that too.
So, the forcing to articulate, plus I enjoyed people you know,
I like to see their lives and see their lives as they
come out in their poems.
Yeah.
And, Jane you answered this question in print one time
in APR, January, February issue, 2008.
This issue about where your poems are launched from,
and where you want them to land.
So I'll read a little passage that you wrote and then
maybe, you can add to it and update it since now it is 2010.
But you said, "Confessional material launches these poems,"
and you were talking about poems in Midnight's, "But
the destination is an emotional panoply, a spreading out,
my version of continuing my life as a painter in poetry,
which in part is what I have always done.
That is why in particular, it is such a pleasure and an honor,
to have a master artist such as Beverly, Beverly Pepper,
who contributed the artwork to the publication of Midnight's.
The human figure and human heart have always
been central in my work starting points and process.
These autobiographical elements launch or lurch outward,
spreading by way of disassociation, distance,
faulty memory, music, the transformations of dream,
all of the distortions and refinement of improvisational
and composition, and finally, become
other, or just enough other, for me to see and to work with.
Well, I think I may have said that, I'm not sure.
I think that the beginning of the question
was where I would hope these would land.
These distortions.
I would hope to have a very young audience,
I don't know if it's possible.
But whenever I speak with a young reader, or someone new
to poetry--
who is not young in years, but new to poetry--
it's always very exciting, if any of this lands in someone's
young mind, I feel really thrilled.
And I've had some experience with that teaching here
in the undergraduate program, where anything lands, not
just my own work but where a poem will
land in a very young mind, and just
alter the mind considerably, and quickly, and it's very magical.
I think it's one of the great rewards of teaching,
to see how quickly that can happen.
And, it's a reminder I hope to me, but to anybody
who wants to be reminded to remain young in that way,
and to be able to respond so wide open.
Boyer, we've talked about this a little bit.
I remember one time when my book Desire Reclining was just
about ready to be published and Gail asked me
if I was excited about what was going to happen when it came
out, and I looked at her and I said "Gail, I
consider publication the end of the process."
And, I think I was young, I was very
naive in a way about my own sense of myself
as a citizen poet at the time.
And I don't think I'd answer that way anymore,
although I don't have illusions about going on big book tours.
But, Boyer, we've talked about this.
We've talked about the urgency to publish manuscripts
that we've had that we've finished and put in a drawer,
or finished and showed to publishers who,
for one reason or another didn't snap it up
and yet, our books keep coming.
So, where are you on this question
of where we know where it comes from, but where is it going?
Well, I certainly want readers, and the sense
of community from reading and having others
read my work is a powerful motivation but,
I have a sense that I would really--
I mean ideally this is ridiculous--
but, I would love to be a part of
the contemporary conversation about the nature
of imagination.
I would like to be somewhere in the stream of things
that are happening right now with the language.
Language is of course in a constant state of motion and, I
don't want to fall into some--
I really want to be a part of what is happening now
in naming the world, so that if sometime in the future somebody
comes back and happens to find something I wrote,
it will in some way reflect through a sensitivity
to the way in which imagination continues to grow and shift
where we are now.
It's an abstract ambition, it's not the person down the street
sitting alone in a room, it's more a sense,
I have this vision of language as a kind of,
I don't know almost liquid field,
and I want to be a part of that, as the currents shift and turn,
as long as I'm alive.
Yeah.
And now more than ever, it is possible to upload our work
into the culture, with the internet,
whether or not you get a card catalog number
from the Library of Congress.
It is possible to do that, and to interpolate our own thoughts
into the larger conversation.
And, I think that that's part of teaching too,
is letting students know that they have the agency
to do that if they want to, it's available,
with pretty low production costs.
Well, thank you for entertaining my questions,
and it's time to entertain some questions from the audience.
So, we'll take questions from you.
Wondering if you could talk for a moment about poetic concerns
that maybe you've moved away from since you've
been writing for a while, or poetic concerns that
seem to have stuck with you through several projects.
I wish Barbara would answer this question for me
but, I wish I could say that my themes and interests have
changed, but I don't know that they have.
I'm interested in tragedy and suffering,
and the transformation of tragedy and suffering
into kind of higher consciousness.
I used to think that--
I've said this in classes--
I used to think that the function of art
was the transformation of sorrow,
but I now think it's a transformation
of consciousness, but in the sense
that I'm interested in transformation.
I don't think that my subjects have changed very much.
The poems I've written in the last several years,
they are all about men, women, love, sex, marriage,
and I realized that, I better get out
of that as the only thing.
And, I don't usually challenge myself thematically or subject
matter wise, but I have been doing that lately
and it's been kind of interesting,
is to take a public, to find myself in a public issue
like, I've been working on a poem where historic deep hist--
deep history is the wrong word but, it's historical,
archaeological, going way back and seeing
how it relates to now.
It didn't make any sense, because you don't have the poem
but, I'm running around a museum with this little old man,
a docent in the little provincial museum,
in an unnamed European country village,
and we start to talk about the relics in there.
Now, that's not my usual subject matter,
but I had such a great time.
I wasn't in the poem.
And then so I told my wife, "Hey, I'm
working on this great poem and I'm not in it."
She said, "No, no.
Your poems have to have you in them."
And she's right, that I do best with that.
So I nudged my way into it.
That's all.
Oh, the other thing that's stayed the same though,
is same as Boyer especially, Boyer
and I share a passion for rhythm and song,
and for me, it's syntax and line that go along with that.
Those are the mechanical, technical variations,
that I have the most fun with, that I work on those
and hope that new subject matter,
new lines will come in, because that line's too long,
for the syntax doesn't feel fulfilled,
so I can make something up, and it's formal
just like you got to rhyme with something.
Syntax has its expectations.
You can predict by the first three parts of syntax
where it might possibly go, and you
can feel it when it ends, that's a sentence.
And I started writing long sentences,
because I didn't know how to start new ones.
And then, just was something I couldn't
do, start a new sentence.
Sometimes I have to look at some book of prose
or somebody else's books, figure out
what this new syntax was going to be,
in the next line of the poem.
So I started writing long lines and long lines, longer
sentences.
I find when you're working on a formal issue,
stupid stuff gets out of the poem.
Say what?
It's too many syllables, or stresses,
or the line is too long.
So you have to take out a couple of clauses,
and then you realize, Oh, I didn't need those.
Anyways that's--
Time for maybe one more question.
Well, if not, we also have plenty of time to buy books.
I forgot to mention that the UA bookstore is here
with books by our poets.
I want to thank Barbara so much for organizing
this panel, "Life and Letters" Alison, Steve, Boyer,
and Jane, let's give them all round of applause.
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks all for coming, appreciate seeing you here.
Come back next week Sinan Antoon much to enjoy the Poetry Center
and hopefully, we'll have another installment of "Life
and Letters" very soon.