I guess we try to use this microphone.
I'm happy to pass it around about 10 minutes.
Questions?
Do you have a question?
No, no, no.
[LAUGHS]
But I can pass it.
This question is going to be really annoying.
So I'm sorry.
But you're both speaking either sort of from California
at some point in your work.
And I was wondering if you could talk about that a little bit
and what such a large and diverse and elusive state, how
you negotiate that and who your influences have been?
You mentioned Jeffers and Didion.
And sort of your relationship with writing from California,
or from California literary history, or to it.
You want me to go first?
Yeah.
All right.
[LAUGHS] Yeah, California is a very big place.
California, for me, was a very small place.
I lived in LA without a car.
So you can imagine sort of what my life might have been like.
And I couldn't I couldn't really experience
the California that was beyond that and beyond the city
limits.
Yeah, Northern California versus Southern California, I mean,
they're notoriously completely different worlds.
But as I sort of got over my loathing for California,
[LAUGHS] I started to develop a new relationship to it
through the book.
I did start to look for, well, who are these California,
not just writers but musicians, and the Southern California
Gothic poem musicians and artists.
And for me, they're the people who
are able to show how that relentless brightness
of California is a dark thing sometimes.
[LAUGHS]
Yeah, like most true Californians,
I'm a non-native species, slightly invasive.
[LAUGHTER]
And I feel that part of my mission as a poet
has been to grapple with that identity.
California, to me, has always been about frontiers.
It's always been about edge.
We get to the Pacific, and suddenly, we
have to consider that is this the death of the imagination
or are there other ways to invent the idea of castles,
the idea of gold mountain, the idea of Hollywood,
the idea of the dream?
And so my work really, for the past few years,
has been trying to reconcile the mythos of America,
this idea that there's always someplace to push toward,
and then the reality which is that we have in fact run out
of resources.
And now we have to steward them.
So it plays out in all sorts of ways,
even at the level of form.
I think, just worrying about the edge of the page
for me is like worrying about a fault line.
So thanks.
I guess this pertains to both of you,
but I know, DA, you just put together
a joint memoir with David Trinidad using the lines
from the celebrity biographies.
And I was wondering what that relationship is like.
I mean, if you've caught any flack for autobiography,
I know you mentioned that thing about confessionalism
and how you deal with the lyrical eye in your work.
Yeah, the lyrical eye.
I think that once you begin to try and codify
any part of your experience into language,
you're risking an extraordinary amount of failure.
So you have to be prepared that as soon
as you start putting yourself on the page, it changes.
And the project that you mentioned
is a book called By Myself, An Autobiography, which
I co-wrote with David Trinidad.
And we assembled it actually by lifting sentences
from 300 celebrity autobiographies and memoirs--
Patty Duke, Patty Hearst, Eva Gabor, Eva Peron,
Donny Osmond--
[LAUGHTER]
--General Norman Schwarzkopf, all the sort
of people that you might expect.
[LAUGHTER]
And what we were exploring was the idea
that we all essentially have the same story.
We all tell the same story.
We all had the unhappy childhood with the kindly grandmother.
We all got passed over for the part of Cinderella
in the Christmas pageant.
[LAUGHTER]
So we were just trying to play with issues
of identity, gender, sexuality, race,
and show that, in fact, all stories are the same story.
Maybe it was sort of a clever way to do that,
but our mission wasn't grand.
It was just to write the kind of autobiography
that anyone writes but without us
having to talk about ourselves.
[LAUGHTER]
I guess I would just add that I always proceed from the idea
that the I is always a fiction and something,
especially for a poet, that you get to create.
And the fun of self-creation in life
can also happen on the page.
And actually, David Trinidad was my teacher
at Columbia College in Chicago.
And so I would say I learned some of that from him too.
So it all makes sense.
[CHUCKLES]
So this again.
The whole room seemed to--
And if there are no more questions,
we'll be happy to just step over and sign books,
and you can talk to us individually.
Yeah, feel free to talk to-- by the way, thank you.
Fabulous reading.
Let's have another round of applause.
[APPLAUSE]
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.