Thank you so much, Rusty and Fred.
We're going to have you both come up for a Q&A. And OK.
You guys can share that one.
[SIDE CONVERSATION]
Does anyone have a question?
Do you listen to music when you write a first draft,
or while you're writing a first draft?
I listen to music all the time, basically.
But I would say I don't consciously
do it-- like, put something on something because I'm getting
ready to write right then.
But there's certainly-- and I listen
in a kind of obsessive way.
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 kind of 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, you know?
I mean, 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.
But I'm happy to try to do something like--
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 you know, stuff like that.
But it's sort of this music or this soundtrack
that keeps running through my life, I guess you could say.
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah, Fred.
Yeah?
How do you navigate this line between accessibility
to those whose music you want to capture
and the sort of radical avant-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--
a few days before my mom died, or maybe a month
or so, I had my first chapbook come out,
and I sent her a copy.
And she called me to talk to me.
And I think she always had a kind of 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 and so much of that first book
literally would just be phrases lifted from stuff she said,
stories she told.
[LAUGHTER]
So it was like her own stuff put back
in a certain way that was not recognizable.
And I remember feeling--
we talked for a long time.
But it just was not going to be--
Did you tell her?
Yeah, no, I told her.
But it was partly just not being ready to recognize
that her speech was material for poetry, you know?
So that was a very real kind of experience of what
I think you're asking about.
But I guess I just had to decide to push on
because what I'm trying to do is I don't want
to capture the music, you know?
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 feeling 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 that I'm working my way towards that.
And I guess in a sort of unconscious way,
it might be that there's a kind of, maybe later I'll get it.
Maybe later, at least it'll seem that way to me.
Probably not going to seem that way to anyone else.
[LAUGHTER]
Yes.
I have more of a comment than a question.
The logline 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 comes through.
It just makes you want to go, what beat is that, anyway?
Really, thank you.
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?
The one about your mother.
You were describing 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, just so when Clive talked about this a little bit.
So it's kind of fresh in my mind.
For me, I trust that--
I'm always looking for form.
Until I find a form for a process,
I don't feel like 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, a certain sensibility
that I'm moving toward.
And it's when the form constellates that I can then
bring that to the page.
But 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 Henri 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--
I mean, he would call it the laugh.
I'm going to call it the sort of, again, kind
of 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 sort of 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 oral, [INAUDIBLE] oral.
Do you want to answer this?
Well, with this, what I just said-- well, actually,
for this, the book that this is a part of,
it's been very visual.
So one of the poem--
well, there's a chapbook 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 sonnets.
And when I first started writing poems,
I think I must have written 7,000 sonnets.
I thought in iambic pentameter for a long time.
[LAUGHTER]
So it's like 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 put some air in it,
is what I was calling it.
And so in Microsoft Word, you can single space or 1
and 1/2 space or double space.
And I would just, almost at random,
just kind of aerate the poems--
[LAUGHTER]
--just to break up the density of it.
But with this book, it's sort of a combination
of those with making stuff really dense again and then
creating even more space and using--
which is part of the reason why the print,
it's 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.
I mean, 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.
Just one more quick one, Fred.
How do you deal with them allusions?
You make so many allusions, both personal and public.
How do you navigate that?
Or do you just assume people are going to 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 it came to my mind,
but it's an-- see, that's the thing is [INAUDIBLE] my head.
[LAUGHTER]
But anybody ever see that 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
Nic Nolte And Nic 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 kind of really venal way.
And his best friend was the quarterback
played by Mac Davis, kind of loosely based on Don Meredith.
And the Don Meredith character called the Nic Nolte character
poot for some reason.
And at one point, he's complaining, I'm not going to--
they took my job away, they won't let me start.
And Mac Davis' character says, he
says, I can't worry about that right now, poot.
[LAUGHTER]
And that's basically where I'm at.
[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--
I mean, 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 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.
I mean, a lot of those names of people
that my mom went to school with, that one section,
I grew up in a-- it's like my autobiography.
I grew up in a bass 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.
But I'm not trying to--
what I'm trying to do is to use that material in order
to convey a kind of content that is not
reducible to the meaning of those words
but to the sum of the meaning of those words
when they're put together, trying to make something--
to use the old-fashioned form, where the whole is
greater than the parts.
Just riffing off that, it seems like the sentence in both
of your work is the base, the baseline.
That other meaning that is achieved is about progression.
And it may be one of the only things, 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,
that 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 up on their way
to the end.
And so, too, in the other work.
That shifting valence 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, that's--
thank you for saying that because that's
kind of the magic for me.
Yeah, I mean, part of me, I'm interested in--
I mean, I think Rusty's at a place
that I'm trying to get to, to have
a bit more comfort with everything
that the sentence can do.
And I'm still not there yet, I think.
So my tendency is more to suspend the sentence,
just let everybody-- just say, you're free to go.
[LAUGHTER]
[INAUDIBLE] 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,
named Renee [? Gladden. ?]
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 it can do has been an inspiration.
And in a lot of ways, those blocky,
kind of box-like poems that I've been working on were an attempt
to try to--
I mean, at one point, I started calling them like shape prose
in a way that would help me to get back
towards some of what sentences can do
and as a kind of possibility for just using words as materials.
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.
I speak for all of us.
[APPLAUSE]