Thank you so much Rusty and Fred.
We're going to have both come up for a Q&A.
You guys can share that one.
[INAUDIBLE]
Does anyone have a question?
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Fred, do you listen to music when you write a first draft
or while you're writing a first draft?
I listen to music all this time, basically.
But I would say, I don't consciously
do it like put something on because I'm getting
ready to write right there.
And I listen in the obsessive way like.
And now, the technology allows you
to listen to the same song for 15 times in a row without--
so a lot of times I'll do that.
But I would say that there are a lot of things
running through there all of which show up for me as music.
Some of which are songs and things
that would be recognizable in that way, but a lot of it
is just stuff that my kids say.
The music of it is important to me
so that I don't try to spend a lot of time
within the poem deciphering stuff.
Perry is my three-year-old son Julian's sister
that doesn't exist that he was mad that we
weren't going to have for him.
And so he decided that he was going to have Perry himself.
[LAUGHTER]
So stuff like that.
But and it's this music or the soundtrack that
keeps running through my life, I guess you could say.
[INAUDIBLE]
Oh, OK.
Yeah, Fred.
Yeah.
How do you navigate this line between accessibility
to those whose music you want to capture,
and the radical avante-garde tradition
that you find yourself in?
So how does it feel like to have someone
whose music you're trying to capture recognize the music?
Well, talking about lost parents, I had a--
few days before my mom died, or maybe a month
or so, I had my first chapbook had come out.
I sent her a copy and she called me to talk to me.
And I think she always had a total love for music
and language, but for some reason for her poetry
was always in some sense inaccessible for her.
And so she was saying, "I just don't know
what you're talking about."
And so much of that first book literally just
be phrases lifted from stuff she said, stories she told me.
[LAUGHTER]
So it was like her own stuff put back
in a certain way that was not recognizable.
We talked for a long time, but it just was not going to be--
Did you tell her that?
Yeah.
No, I told her.
But it was partly just being not ready to recognize
that her speech was material for poetry.
So that was a very real kind of experience
of what I think you're asking about,
but I just had to decide to push on.
Because what I'm trying to do is,
I don't want to capture the music I want to make music.
And I can't play an instrument, but I
can make music with words.
And I want the music to have feelings in it,
and to have information, and knowledge,
or questions, or thought in it.
But I'm also just really wary of.
It's not that I don't believe it's
possible to have something direct and definitive to say,
it's just I'm working my way towards that.
And I guess in a unconscious way,
it might be that there's a--
maybe later I'll get it.
Maybe later, at least, it'll seem that way to me.
Probably won't seem that way to anybody else.
[LAUGHTER]
Yes, I have more of a comment than a question.
The log line that comes to me is like, what beat is that?
It's delightful.
Being a student of jazz, and, blues, and poetry
too the music through.
It just makes you want to go.
What beat is that anyway?
[INAUDIBLE]
Somebody must have some questions for Rusty.
[LAUGHTER]
I do.
Rusty, I heard you go into great detail
when you were talking of, what was it, experimentation?
Or the one about your mother.
You were describing how the form in great detail,
and it sounded to me that you love the forms of your poems.
How long does it take, or how do you
know when the form of your poem is right?
I neglected to thank Janice for having us in her class.
She's so wonderful.
And talked about this a little bit, so it's fresh in my mind.
For me, I'm always looking for form.
Until I find a form for a process,
I don't feel I've really entered into writing the poems.
And so I'll compose, or I'll bring language to a page,
but there's a certain quality of color or a certain sensibility
that I'm moving toward.
And it's when the form consulates, that I can then
bring that to the page.
And a really honest answer is, I know the form is right when
I get that kind of body shiver.
And I really look for that.
And I said this to the class, that there's
a great essay by Henry Bergson called Laughter
and the meaning of the comic.
And he says something that really resonated for me.
That "When you hear a joke, you laugh.
And then only later do you figure out why it's funny."
And I'm constantly fooling around with form
as I'm writing a poem.
And something will just--
He would call it the laugh, I get a body shiver.
And I think, oh, that's the way it should constellate
That's the way it should work.
So yeah, thanks.
My question, I think which is for both of you,
is maybe a little bit similar in terms of the form.
And I'm wondering, how much of it
is visual as you're writing versus aural?
A-U, aural.
Do you want to answer first?
Well actually for this, the book that this is
a part of has been very visual.
So one of the poem, there's a chapter called I ran from it
but was still in it that this will be included in this book.
And for some reason I decided that I
wanted to make things in boxes, that I was just interested
in that look on the page.
Partly, I think because I was always interested in silence.
And when I first started writing poems,
I think I must've written 7,000 assignments.
I thought in iambic pentameter for a long time
[LAUGHTER]
So I was getting back to that look on the page.
And then with this one, it's much more
spread out on the page.
And I wanted there to be much more space.
And even in the previous books, I
knew I was writing this stuff that was pretty dense.
And I felt that one way I could give people a break in a way,
was to just create.
Put some air in it, is what I was calling it.
In Microsoft Word you can single space, or 1 and 1/2 space,
or double space.
And I would just almost at random, just aerate the poems.
[LAUGHTER]
Just to break up the density of it.
But with this book, it's a combination
of those of making stuff really dense again, and then creating
even more space and using--
just part of reason why the print is printed out sideways
with really long margins to give me more room.
Yeah, it's very true for me as well.
That for me, the visual look is another voice.
It's not fair to say it that way,
but I can't come with the book and read my poems to you.
But I can create a visual experience of a presence
that I hope emerges from the way it takes shape on the page.
And so seeing it is a speaking agency or a response
agency that comes back at me, and then I think,
"OK that's working because it's talking back
at me from the structure as well as from the words."
Fred how you deal with allusions.
You make so many allusions, both personal and public.
How do you navigate Do you just assume people are going get it?
You don't give a damn if they get it or not?
It means it personally to you?
Or what?
Well, it's not that I don't give a damn, it's just that--
anybody ever see that movie--
I don't know why this came yo mind.
But it's-- see, that's the thing [INAUDIBLE]
[LAUGHTER]
But you may have seen a movie, I believe it's called Semi Tough.
Kris Kristofferson and Mac Davis.
They're playing for a team that's
roughly equivalent to the Dallas Cowboys.
There's this one moment before the big game where--
it's not Kris Kristofferson.
It's Nick Nolte.
And Nick Nolte, he can't play.
He's been demoted, and he's all upset.
And he had just shot his knee up with Novocaine trying
to sacrifice himself yet again.
And then he realizes that, well, the reason
that they had shot him up was to convince
the guy who they really wanted to play to shoot up too.
So he'd been used in this really venal way.
And his best friend was the quarterback
played by Mac Davis, loosely based on Don Meredith.
The Don Meredith character called the Nick Nolte character
poot for some reason.
And at one point he's complaining, "I'm not going.
They know they took my job away, they won't let me start."
And Mac Davis' character, he says, "I can't worry
about that right now, poot."
[LAUGHTER]
And that's basically--
[LAUGHTER]
It's not that I don't give a damn, it's just, I can't--
what I'm trying to do, I just can't--
so what I do try to do, see, is--
it's like-- we were talking about this at dinner with Sean.
Painters make paintings with paint,
and I do what I do with words.
And it's material for me.
And the material is not reducible to the meaning
of the words.
The meaning is part of the word, but it's not all of the word.
And I feel like I've got to try to take--
What I'm trying to do requires me
to not simply subordinate everything
to the meaning of the words.
Even though at the same time, so much of the meaning
is connected to stuff I've seen or music that I love
or something that my kids are saying to me or some memory.
A lot of those names of people that my mom went to school
with, that one section.
I grew up in-- it's like my autobiography.
I grew up in a base community in Las Vegas.
And then we went to Pittsburgh and then to Arkansas.
There's all these names of people
my mom went to school with.
What I'm trying to do is to use that material in order
to convey a content that is not reducible to the meaning
of those words, or to the sum of the meaning of those words
when they're put together.
Trying to make something to these old fashioned [INAUDIBLE]
where the sum--
the whole is greater than the parts.
Just riffing off that, it seems like the sentence
in both of your work is the base line
that that other meaning that is achieved is about progression.
And it may be one of the only things similar,
I think in your work, is the baseline is the sentence
and how you disrupt it.
And the other motive is to talk about progression
in all of its different meanings --I'm wondering
if that means anything to you.
Well it's funny you say that, because we were talking earlier
today about Whitehead and Olson, and that we
both share an affinity with that kind of work.
But what's most important to me is the movement
that I'm seeing.
That I don't want the sentence to be
a static experience for myself.
So that each time I return to my own sentences,
they shift perhaps mid-sentence.
So even those short terse sentences
in please, advise, stop I want them to change.
Change up on their way to the end,
and so too in the other work.
That shift in valance is probably
the real subject matter that is most important to me,
and then the content layers on top of that.
But my struggle is to not be a thing in the world but a moving
space.
And so if that can happen on the page,
thank you for saying that, because that's
the magic for me.
Yeah.
I think Rusty is at a place that I'm
trying to get to have a bit more comfort with everything
that that this sentence can do.
And I'm still not there yet, I think.
So my tendency is more, might like to suspend the sentence.
Just let everybody, you're free to go.
[LAUGHTER]
Clear the courtroom now.
But I think, in the last couple of years
I've been trying really hard to not let go of all the things
that the sentence can do.
And there's a writer, who I don't know if she's been here
yet, but I hope you all have a chance to have her out,
named Renee Gladman
Yeah.
And the work that she does with the sentence
and with just new ways of both disrupting and augmenting
the sentence as an already given form,
but also at the same time still taking advantage of what he
can do has been an inspiration.
At one point, I start calling them shape prose.
In a way that would help me to get back towards some
of what sentences can do.
And as a possibility for just using words as a material.
Well, I just have to add that in my reading of your work
I am amazed by how the disruption, nonetheless
the next page and the next page hold together.
It's like watching someone walking on air
and they don't have any land into them.
The sentence seems to have stopped,
but I'm still walking with you.
And so to me, that's pretty amazing.
We have time for one more question.
OK.
All right.
Well, thank you Fred and Rusty so much.
Speak for all of us.
[APPLAUSE]