OK.
We have approximately 15 minutes left for question and answers.
The mic in the middle of the room is for audience members
to come and ask questions.
I'm going to ask if Tenney and Barbara will come and take
these two seats.
And we'll use this hand-held mic here.
And please don't necessarily restrict
to questions of what you heard.
If there's anything else you want to ask these poets,
please do.
I think all of these poets have also either are
or have been teachers.
And also all of them have been intensely involved
in poetry communities at different times.
And we would just love to let you
have a chance to question them or say something to them.
And when that period is over we'll have book sales.
Thank you so much for such a wonderful reading to all three
of you.
I have a question for Charles Bernstein.
I was just curious, what similarities or affinities you
see between the poems that you chose
to translate in your latest book and your own work?
I think we kind of saw that in the last poem.
But I'm curious in general, what other similarities
or affinities might have guided you?
You know I don't really--
the things I've translated are I had
some kind of almost compulsive desire to translate.
Because I wanted to read them better
or were dissatisfied with aspects of the translation,
especially there's a few Baudelaire poems
that I didn't read that have been translated many times.
"La Muse Venale", which I translated, the "Venereal
Muse" and [Speaking French]
So I don't know.
I mean, without giving a long talk as I would often.
I could talk about the significance of each
of the poets, certainly the Carlos Drummond de Andrade,
"In the Middle of the Way" has a reverence
a resonance with all the whiskey in heaven.
I didn't necessarily realize when I was translating.
It's a very crucial poem in Brazilian modernism.
And I was curious when I was in Rio
once to be walking on the street on the Ipanema beach.
And there I saw a statue of Carlos Drummond de Andrade.
I think on the Coney Island beach
we have no statue of Hart Crane.
So I'm not answering your question but just deferring.
I think that there were resonances--
I mean, "the Hugo" is just overwhelming poem for me.
And I got very interested in that as well.
I can't answer that question in an explicit way.
Because it's easy to talk about Apollinaire and Baudelaire
more easily than some of the other poets.
One thing I wonder.
There are many people in the audience I know
but many people I don't know.
And this could be take a long time to articulate,
but I'm very interested in the fact that Tenney and Barbara,
and I have been for several years part of a singular poetry
community here in Tucson involved with some of you
in the audience.
Charles, of course in New York and in Buffalo
has been part of a few poetry communities.
And it seems to me there is something
about all of your practice that is very social in orientation.
I think came through so clearly in Tenney's reading
today but in all of yours.
And it's a huge question to address.
But could you say something about your community
of practice at this time or what that has
meant to you over the years?
I don't know.
I guess I like not to articulate it.
My sense is for me it's usefully sort of lumpy or tessellated
or something like that.
So that, I mean, the commitment to POG is really important.
I feel like I wouldn't be doing the work I'm
doing if it weren't for that.
I don't know exactly what it has to do
with my zen community, or my English department community,
and so on.
And I guess for me and the issue in the book
that you just published for me is sort of what all the, here I
am looking out the window at the trees, thinking about zen stuff
has to do with all the collage stuff from Iraq
or the world of banking.
And it was a question that I didn't really want to solve.
So
Well, I've been part of a--
well, New York has multiple communities.
But I've been part of two other communities
of poets and artists, one that was in Detroit where I grew up.
And there it was very--
the artists and the writers were very involved
and we lived kind of--
I don't know-- a separate life in the Cass Corridor
from the rest of the city.
But it was very inspiring.
A few people are here from there remember it.
And that was very inspiring.
Then I went to New York.
And in New York, you could be any place
and have so many poets sitting at a table you don't even
know them.
And it's a different kind of inspiration
that you feel around you.
But when I came to Tucson after many years there.
Wow, it was just so great being involved in a small poetry
community that was interested in experimental and off-centered
things.
It was very inspiring and wonderful.
In terms of the poems I read today,
those were definitely about looking
at the world as a community and thinking
about how something far away relates
to something very close.
And so I don't know if I'm answering your question.
Apollinaire writes in the first two lines
of the title poem of this book, which would normally
be translated as shadow or shade, sort
of title of my very first book Shade, relating to this poem
too.
You there, a new close to me souvenirs
of my companions dead at war.
So World War I for Apollinaire and his the dead, fallen dead
of the first world war.
So for him, umbra shadows are the dead
who are always there with him.
And how we can hear the voices of the dead
is one of the most archaic aspects of poetry.
But we hear them in the living.
And to honor the dead, means to honor those living who
are meaningful in their social spaces in the world and to us
Yes.
[INAUDIBLE]
You want to [INAUDIBLE] the mic?
I'm loud enough.
I just think when you think of a community practice [INAUDIBLE]
[INAUDIBLE]
This will be a non-answer.
It's sort of an oblique response to what you said
and sort of picking up on what Charles said.
And I'm quoting this all over the place.
It's on the back of Barb's book.
And there's this wonderful talk by Norman Fisher on the zen
teacher, Guo Gu and some point in the talk says "We're alive
and we're dead.
We think we're alive now and we'll be dead later
but that's baloney.
Actually in each moment in every breath, we're alive
and we're dead.
And we don't know that and that's why we're suffering."
And for me that has something to do with the space
that poetry might hold open and something
like the sort of space between the living and the dead
that Charles talked about maybe echoing in umbra, so.
Gosh.
I don't know how to--
I don't know where to go with this.
Readers, I've always been a reader myself.
And so I've been engaged with reading and writing
through my own experience as a child reading.
Readers are having-- reading to my children
that's been a-- as they grew up was a really big influence
on my writing.
And just having the sound of your voice and someone
listening to it and going back and forth with them
and making up stories.
And I don't know what else to say.
Yeah.
Reading children's books had an enormous impact for me
in the mid 80s.
You could see in the select when I was doing that.
This is just all of a sudden a lot
of things interested me sort of was transformed by that.
I always think of that Gertrude Stein
quote from The Making Of Americans I write for myself
and strangers
I think to me one of the kind of fundamental aspects of writing
is to think of myself as the reader of my work
and the sole judge of what I want and don't like.
So my aesthetic taste rather than how this would work
or how this would go or if it would make sense
to anybody else.
I have no real ability to do that.
And I think in a curiously paradoxical way that
has often been talked about.
The more intensely you're aware of your own taste preferences
and judgment and articulate that in poetry,
and this is specific about poetry rather than other forms,
the more that possibility is to have
that potential of other people encountering it,
both as performance and recorded performance
as well as in live performance as well as in book form.
So for me I just want to say that--
and I hope this isn't taken wrongly but--
Charles is one of the key inspirations
I think for a lot of people in that regard.
And the sort of flippant way of saying,
like you read Charles and you say,
shit you can do anything you want at any moment in a poem.
If you want to do it, screw it, do it, right?
But the sense that it's incredibly freeing.
And that weirdly enough, the more
you do that, in some sense, the more honed the work becomes
and the more rigorous it becomes.
And that's pretty amazing.
And I think in a way that's one of the lessons of all
of the new American poetry but particularly of language
writing and particularly of Charles's work
and its willingness just to boing all over the place
and be wonderful and it does that.
I know if I can blurt in here.
I feel like in the poem I'm entering a conversation
with people alive and dead.
In the sense that when you put a poem out there,
it's part of the bigger conversation.
But even in an individual poem I may be in a conversation
with Sir Walter Raleigh, who Alice Notley was reading
in my house out loud yesterday, and with my old high school
baseball coach, and with perhaps some of these people.
And in a way, that's one of the reasons
I write the work, to enter into and be
a part of that conversation.
People closest to me are part of it.
People I've never known in my life are part of it.
And there's a space in there I think for readers, whether they
be the dedicated readers these people are
or someone coming to the work for the first time
to if they're tuning in they're becoming
a part of that conversation.
I certainly feel as I read other people's work.
I'm becoming a part of it.
Just made me think about one of the theorists
that was most influential to me, Mikhail Bakhtin.
And he talks about how language is just
composed of many different-- just as we learn it--
of the community of people that we've talked to
and we participate with.
And I've tried in my writing to bring that to the fore.
I mean, he thought it happened more in the novel
than it did in poetry.
But I think we've moved with poetry.
So that it happens more and more in poetry,
especially in all three of our works.
[INAUDIBLE]
Also it's a good question [INAUDIBLE]..
You knocked it out of the park.
So in my work they're like little--
like everybody's little references
to other poems and poets.
And a lot of them are actually people
who are alive that I've either studied with
or I know reasonably well.
And I guess what occurs to me through that
is, I mean, those moments feel very close and funny, sometimes
but tender a lot.
And that reminds me that even if some of those people I
didn't-- like Kenneth Koch, who I studied with a lot.
And I felt like he knew me in a way but not very well.
But since I heard him in class, there's a certain aspect of him
that I really knew.
And it's really sort of deeply ingrained.
And that however obliquely you knew those people,
that those are-- if you're a writer,
those are among the most intimate relationships
that you have.
And that you really can hear that and feel it
when it comes back in the work.
OK.
I think I'm supposed to bring--
Yes, another question, please.
The other day I was reading a speech
given by a guy named Alex Ross, given to the Royal Philharmonic
Society on the issue of clapping when listening to the symphony.
And people clapping between movements and--
I've always attended the symphony always
but poetry readings I've barely known it they exist or not.
But it seems here today that people were willing
to clap and laugh and during the reading.
It's positively social for something
that seems to me such an asocial activity as writing.
And for such efforts for such a communal activity
is making music, performing the music.
The performance of it becomes so inhibited and strict.
I just wondered if you have any thoughts
on this general subject of--
I mean, there's appropriate times to respond
and inappropriate times too perhaps
Well, for me, I don't think of writing is asocial.
And it takes more time than I have to explain that.
But I also have been to readings where there's
been no clapping whatsoever.
And ones that are have-- and I've
come to feel that if I am moved to do that then I'm
one of the people that starts clapping.
And I notice when somebody else starts clapping,
other people want to.
It makes me think people actually
want to but they're not sure if they should.
You want to say something?
[CLAPPING]
I'm pretty old so I remember a time when
people didn't do this.
But now people clap during tennis matches.
So anything goes any place after that, I think.
I was just thinking about how in jazz performances you clap.
And the relationship between poetry performance and jazz
as it came into being.
And so I think that you'll see different types of poetry
readings will invite that and others won't.
I think you make a very important point
that poetry is fundamentally asocial.
Because imaginary poets are also fundamentally
asocial because they don't exist.
And for that reason , I find it particularly disturbing
if people should laugh in a poetry reading since good
poetry can never be funny.
But I'm going to answer your question
with Baudelaire's answer in one of his most famous poems.
"Be always drunk, that's all.
That is the only question, so not
to feel the horrific heaviness of time
weighing on your shoulders, crushing you to the ground.
You must be drunken ceaselessly.
But on what?
On wine, on poetry, or on virtue in your fashion but drunken be.
And if some time on palace steps on the green grass by an abyss,
in mournful solitude in your room.
If some time you awake drunkenness dimmed or done.
Ask of the wind, of the wave, of the star, of the bird,
of the clock, of all that flees, of all that wails,
of all that roils, of all that sings, of all that speaks.
Ask, what hour is it?
And the wind, the wave, the bird, and the clock
will answer, it is the hour to get drunk,
so not to be the slavish martyr of time.
Be drunken, be drunken without stopping on wine,
on poetry, or on virtue in your fashion."
[CLAPPING]
OK.
I'm going to officially draw this to a close
by saying thanks for attending this reading.
The authors again will be autographing books
in tent C in the Madden Media signing area on the mall just
south of this building.
But they'll be here for a few minutes.
And you can buy books right here.
[RECRODING REPEATS] OK.
We have approximately 15 minutes left for question and answers.
The mic in the middle of the room is for audience members
to come and ask questions.
I'm going to ask if Tenney and Barbara will come and take
these two seats and we'll use this hand-held mic here.
And please don't necessarily restrict
to questions of what you heard.
If there's anything else you want to ask these poets,
please do.
I think all these poets have also either are
or have been teachers.
And also all of them have been intensely involved
in poetry communities at different times.
And we would just love to let you
have a chance to question them or say something to them.
And when that period is over, we'll have book sales.
Thank you so much for such a wonderful reading to all three
of you.
I have a question for Charles Bernstein.
I was just curious, what similarities or affinities you
see between the poems that you chose
to translate in your latest chapbook and your own work?
I think we kind of saw that in the last poem.
But I'm curious in general what other similarities
or affinities might have guided you?
I don't really-- the things I've translated
I've had some kind of almost compulsive desire to translate.
Because I wanted to read them better
or were dissatisfied with aspects of the translation,
especially there's a few Baudelaire poems
that I didn't read that have been translated many times, "La
Muse Venale", which I translated,
the "Venereal muse" and Amadeus.
So I don't know.
I mean, without giving a long talk as I would often.
I could talk about the significance
of each of the poets, certainly the Carlos Drummond de Andrade
"In the Middle of the Way" has a resonance with all
the whiskey in heaven I didn't necessarily
realize when I was translating.
It's a very crucial poem in Brazilian modernism.
And I was curious when I was in Rio
once to be walking on the street on the Ipanema beach.
And there I saw a statue of Carlos Drummond de Andrade.
I think the Coney Island beach we
have no statue of Hart Crane.
So I'm not answering your question but just deferring.
I think that there were resonances.
I mean, "the Hugo" is just overwhelming poem for me.
And I got very interested in that as well.
I can't answer that question in an explicit way.
Because it's easy to talk about Apollinaire and Baudelaire
more easily than some of the other poets.
Oh.
One thing I wonder.
There are many people in the audience I know
but many people I don't know.
And this could be-- take a long time to articulate,
but I'm very interested in the fact that Tenney and Barbara,
and I have been, for several years, part of a singular
poetry community here in Tucson involved with some of you
in the audience.
Charles, of course in New York and in Buffalo,
has been part of a few poetry communities.
And it seems to me there is something
about all of your practice that is very social in orientation.
I think came through so clearly in Tenney's reading
today but in all of yours.
And it's a huge question to address but could you
say something about your community of practice
at this time or what that has meant to you over the years?
I don't know.
I guess I like not to articulate it.
My sense is for me it's usefully sort of lumpy or desolated
or something like that.
I mean, the commitment to [INAUDIBLE]
is really important.
I feel like I wouldn't be doing the work I'm
doing if it weren't for that.
I don't know exactly what it has to do
with my zen community or my English department community
and so on.
And I guess for me and the issue in the book
that you just published for me is sort of what all the, here I
am looking out the window at the trees, thinking about zen stuff
has to do with all the collage stuff from Iraq
or the world of banking.
And it was a question that I didn't really
want to solve, so.
Well, I've been part of a--
well, New York is multiple communities.
But I've been part of two other communities
of poets and artists, one that was in Detroit where I grew up.
And there, it was very--
the artists and the writers were very involved
and we lived kind of--
I don't know-- a separate life in the [INAUDIBLE]
from the rest of the city.
But it was very inspiring.
A few people are here from there remember it.
And that was very inspiring.
And then I went to New York.
And in New York, you could be any place
and have so many poets sitting at a table you don't even
know them.
And it's a different kind of inspiration
that you feel around you.
But when I came to Tucson after many years there.
Wow, it was just so great being involved in a small poetry
community that was interested in experimental and off-center
things.
It was very inspiring and wonderful.
In terms of the poems I read today,
those were definitely about looking
at the world as a community and thinking
about how something far away relates
to something very close.
And so I don't know if I'm answering your question.
Apollinaire writes in the first two lines
of the title poem of this book, which would normally
be translated as shadow or shade, sort
of title of my very first book since Shade
relating to this poem too.
You there, a new close to me souvenirs
of my companions dead at war.
So World War I for Apollinaire is the dead, fallen dead
of the first world war.
So for him, umbra shadows or the dead
who are always there with him.
And how we can hear the voices of the dead
is one of the most archaic aspects of poetry.
But we hear them in the living.
And to honor the dead, means to honor those living who
are meaningful in their social spaces in the world and to us.
Yes.
[INAUDIBLE]
Who are your readers and listeners
and how do you think about them?
[INAUDIBLE]
This will be a non-answer.
It's sort of an oblique response to what you said
and sort of picking up on what Charles said.
And I'm quoting this all over the place.
It's on the back of Barbara's book.
And so there's this wonderful talk
by Norman Fisher on the zen teacher, Georgiou.
And some point in the talk says some, "We're alive
and we're dead.
We think we're alive now and we'll be dead later
but that's baloney.
Actually in each moment in every breath we're alive
and we're dead.
And we don't know that and that's why we're suffering."
And for me that has something to do with the space
that poetry might hold open and something
like the sort of space between the living and the dead
that Charles talked about maybe echoing in umbra, so.
Actually, I don't know how to--
I don't know where to go with this.
Readers, I've always been a reader myself.
And so I've been engaged with reading and writing
through my own experience as a child reading.
Readers are having-- reading to my children,
that's been a-- as they grew up was a really big influence
on my writing.
And just having the sound of your voice and someone
listening to it and going back and forth with them
and making up stories.
And I don't know what else to say.
Yeah.
Reading children's books had an enormous impact for me
in the mid-80s.
You could see in the select when I was doing that this just all
of a sudden a lot of things interested me sort of was
transformed by that.
I always think of that Gertrude Stein
quote from the Making of Americans [INAUDIBLE]..
I think just to me one of the kind of fundamental aspects
of writing is to think of myself as the reader of my work
and the sole judge of what I want and don't like,
so my aesthetic taste rather than how this would work
or how this would go or if it would make sense
to anybody else.
I have no real ability to do that.
And I think in curiously paradoxical way that
has often been talked about.
The more intensely you're aware of your own taste preferences
and judgment and articulate that in poetry
and the specific about poetry rather than other forms,
the more that possibility is to have
that potential of other people encountering it, both as
performance and recorded performance,
as well as in live performance, as well as in book form.
So for me, I just want to say that--
and i hope this isn't taken wrongly.
But Charles is one of the key inspirations
I think for a lot of people in that regard in the sort
of flippant way of saying, like you read Charles and say, shit,
you can do anything you want at any moment in a poem.
If you want to do it, screw it, do it, right?
But the sense that it's incredibly freeing.
And that weirdly enough, the more
you do that, in some sense, the more honed the work becomes
and the more rigorous it becomes.
And that's pretty amazing.
And I think in a way that's one of the lessons of all
of the new American poetry but particularly of language
writing and particularly of Charles's work and its
willingness just to [? boing ?] all over the place and be
wonderful [? when it does that. ?]
I know, if I can blurt in here.
I feel like in the poem, I'm entering a conversation
with people alive and dead in the sense
that when you put a poem out there
it's part of the bigger conversation.
But even in an individual poem, I may be in a conversation
with Sir Walter Raleigh, who Alice Notley was reading
in my house out loud yesterday, and with my old high school
baseball coach, and with perhaps some of these people.
And in a way, that's one of the reasons
I write the work, to enter into and be
a part of that conversation.
People closest to me are part of it.
People I've never known in my life are part of it.
And there's a space in there, I think, for readers,
whether they be the dedicated readers these people are
or someone coming to the work for the first time
to if they're tuning in, they're becoming
a part of that conversation.
And I certainly feel as I read other people's work.
I'm becoming a part of it.
Just made me think about one of the theorists
that was most influential to me, Mikhail Bakhtin.
And he talks about how language is just
composed of many different-- just as we learn it--
of the community of people that we've talked to
and we participate with.
And I've tried in my writing to bring that to the fore.
I mean, he thought it happened more in the novel
than it did in poetry.
But I think we've moved with poetry.
So that it happens more and more in poetry,
especially in all three of our works.
Also a good question [INAUDIBLE]..
You knocked it out of the park.
So in my work, they're like little--
like everybody's-- little references to other poems
and poets.
And a lot of them are actually people
who are alive that have better studied with
or I know reasonably well.
And I guess what occurs to me through that
is, I mean, those moments feel very close and funny sometimes
but tender a lot.
And that reminds me that even if some of those people I
didn't-- like [? Kenneth ?] Cook I studied with a lot.
And I felt like he knew me in a way but not very well.
But since I heard him in class, there's a certain aspect of him
that I really knew.
And it's really sort of deeply ingrained.
And that however obliquely you knew those people.
That those are-- if you're a writer--
those are among the most intimate relationships
that you have.
And that you really can hear that and feel it
when it comes back in the work.
OK.
I think I'm supposed to bring--
Yes, another question, please.
The other day I was reading a speech
given by a guy named Alex Ross given to the Royal Philharmonic
society on the issue of clapping when listening to the symphony,
and people clapping between movements.
And I've always attended the symphony, always,
but poetry readings, I've barely known if they exist or not.
But it seems here today that people were willing
to clap and laugh and during the reading.
Positively social for something that seems to me
such an asocial activity is writing.
And for such efforts for such a communal activity
is making music, performing the music.
The performance of it becomes so inhibited and strict.
I just wondered if you have any thoughts
on this general subject of--
I mean, there's appropriate times to respond [INAUDIBLE]..
Well, for me, I don't think of writing as asocial.
And it takes more time than I have to explain that.
But I also have been to readings where
there's been no clapping whatsoever
and ones that are have.
And I've come to feel that if I am
moved to do that then I'm one of the people that
starts clapping.
And I notice when somebody else starts clapping,
other people want to.
It makes me think people actually
want to but they're not sure if they should.
Did you want to say something?
[CLAPPING]
I'm pretty old so I remember a time when
people didn't do this.
But now people clap during tennis matches.
So anything goes any place after that, I think.
I was just thinking about how in jazz performance as you clap
and the relationship between poetry performance and jazz
as it came into being.
And so I think that you'll see different types of poetry
readings will invite that and others won't.
I think you make a very important point that poetry
is fundamentally asocial, because imaginary poets
are also fundamentally asocial because they don't exist.
And for that reason, I find it particularly disturbing
if people should laugh in a poetry reading
since good poetry can never be funny.
But I'm going to answer your question
with Baudelaire's answer in one of his most famous poems.
"Be always drunk, that's all.
That is the only question, so not
to feel the horrific heaviness of time
weighing on your shoulders, crushing you to the ground.
You must be drunken ceaselessly.
But on what?
On wine, on poetry, or on virtue in your fashion,
but drunken be.
And if some time on palace steps on the green grass by an abyss
in mournful solitude.
In your room if some time you awake drunkenness dimmed
or done, ask of the wind of the wave
of the star, of the bird, of the clock, of all that fleas,
of all that whales, of all that wails, of all that sings,
of all that speaks.
Ask what hour is it?
And the wind, the wave, the bird, and the clock
will answer.
It is the hour to get drunk, so not
to be the slavish martyr of time.
Be drunken, be drunken without stopping on wine,
on poetry, or on virtue in your fashion."
[CLAPPING]
OK.
I'm going to officially draw this to a close
by saying thanks for attending this reading.
The authors again will be autographing books in tent C,
in the Madden Media signing area on the mall, just south
of this building.
But they'll be here for a few minutes
and you can buy books right here.