Thank you, Alison and Luci.
They're here now to answer questions, if you have any.
And so I'll invite anybody to ask Alison or Luci
if they have things to comment on or ask them about.
I'm sure they'd be happy to answer.
Alison, I'm interested in this idea of the marriage of science
and art.
And in Salt do-- you actually described it as science
made art.
But I was wondering if you could speak
to maybe an applied art made science,
or the artist as a scientist.
Well, sure.
I mean, I certainly feel it goes both ways.
And in part, poets are people who
want to look very, very carefully at the world
and find a new language to describe their experience.
And that I think is basically what scientists do too.
So I think that an artist is practicing science,
even though the difference is, we don't really
have a hypothesis.
Our hypothesis is maybe if I look at this
and reach for language, I can come up with a new form
that will be engaging, delightful, musical,
or whatever.
But for me, I see science and art
as standing side by side as two equally legitimate ways
to read the world and to try to understand our place in it,
which will always remain just a bit beyond our reach.
Ruth, repeat the question.
Oh, sorry.
I'm sorry, I didn't catch the question myself.
Could you repeat the question for the rec--
No, no, no.
You don't want it now?
OK.
It's cold.
Any other questions?
Sure.
Luci, thank you so much for sharing with us.
I'm curious, what was it that compelled you to start
writing as a little girl?
The question was what made Luci start writing as a little girl?
When I learned to read, I was very surprised
that you could read really wonderful stories and books,
because I grew up in a family that we didn't speak
a lot of English, but we were very much practitioners
of the oral or literary tradition.
And so when I learned to read, I was very fascinated.
I also didn't know at a young age
that you could write your own work.
So I really like reading and I like writing too.
But what I would do is take the Bobbsey Twins story from there
and make all the characters people in my family,
and change all the places to around Shiprock.
And I kept that.
But later on I found out that you could actually
write your own work.
But I think the combination of Navajo and English, that
already inherited sense of stories and songs
and just the love of language combined with reading probably
was a very good thing.
I have one question also for Luci.
I'm fascinated by how you manage to combine writing in the Diné
Navajo language and in English because they seem so very
different.
And do you find that awkward?
No, I don't think I find it awkward.
I feel, especially when I'm writing in fixed form,
when I'm writing like villanelles or sonnets
or, my favorite, the sestina.
I really like the fact that I can use Navajo and English.
I have more freedom than I would if I just knew one language.
So I like being able to go between the two.
And I think that there are sometimes
concepts in Navajo that--
a connotative meanings that words have
that don't exist in English.
So just like working with it to get
at the essence of what I'm trying to say
is really, really wonderful.
Sometimes when I'm reading entirely in Navajo,
it's hard to switch back to English in a poem.
Maybe that would be one thing, because it
uses different-- languages use different parts of your mouth.
So sometimes that's a little awkward, but nothing
that really effects the work.
Well, I can say the end result is not awkward.
It's beautiful.
Thank you.
Do the Diné have a name for Tucson?
It's
Hoozdoh yázhí.
It means-- hoozdoh means hot-- that's the name for Phoenix--
and yázhí is small.
[LAUGHING]
It's small, hot place.
[LAUGHING]
Any other questions or comments?
I have a question for Alison.
You read a poem that has Eurydice and Orpheus.
And I was curious if you could talk
about why you think those ancient stories are timeless
and what about them makes [INAUDIBLE]..
The question was about the poem concerning Eurydice
and why would Alison think that they are still
relevant and timeless.
Well, you can read Joseph Campbell,
who can probably say it much better than I.
I'm trying to think.
I wrote a whole set of them.
And I think the first one was Persephone,
because I was asked by Kore Press.
They had a blog that they started
called Persephone speaks.
And they said, would you write something for the blog.
And at the time, I just hated the whole blog thing.
Now I've given up, like I gave up about cell phones.
Now I like blogs.
So I wrote a poem.
And so the first one was, I said, OK, well I'll
just challenge myself to see if I
can find a very contemporary, sassy irreverent,
Persephone voice.
There are so many.
Everybody's got a Persephone poem.
And I felt it was a successful experiment.
And then I wanted to ask myself which of those stories
seem to have a resonance with something that was really
going on in my life.
And the astronomers have this term--
averted vision.
Like, when you look at something very small
in space, like the Pleiades, if you look straight at it,
you can't really see it.
You have to look like this.
And it has something to do with the rods and the cones.
I don't know what.
But you can see it better with averted vision.
And I think using these figures--
I mean, for a poet.
A psychologist could give you really greater answers
than this.
But for the poet, writing in these great ancient stories,
I think, is a way that we can look with averted vision
and possibly get past the literal first level
of the experience of something we might be going through.
And of course, one of the ideas that some psychologists--
psychotherapists write about is that all of those gods
dwelled in the human imagination in that period.
We exiled all of them.
And we got one great big one up there in the sky.
It's not the same.
And those gods still inhabit us, at least figuratively.
And when you go back to those stories
with an open mind and an open heart,
you suddenly feel, like, holy Moses,
these really do speak about the forces and conflicts
and contradictions and intensities of the inner life.
For Luci, what other Diné authors are you attracted
to, contemporary or recent past?
What are the Diné authors that you were attracted to or from
the recent past, or?
There's a number of really wonderful writers,
Diné writers--
very busy now.
Sherwin Bitsui-- he's reading here at the festival--
is a wonderful, wonderful writer.
Esther Belin, who's up in Northwest New Mexico.
And Irvin Morris, who's a novelist--
beautiful.
He's written a memoir called Glittering World, which
is the name for this world as Navajo people
that we now inhabit.
And it refers to the idea that glitter is something that's
beautiful but also dangerous.
And it's tenuous, but this is the world we're living in.
And a writer who was the first Navajo to write a biography
was Blackhorse Mitchell, or Blackhorse--
Yeah, Blackhorse Mitchell.
And he teaches up in Northwest New Mexico.
Laura Tohe is a really good poet.
She teaches at Arizona State.
Hershman John just graduated from Arizona State
and is a published poet by UofA.
And Orlando White, who just graduated from Brown,
is also a published poet.
So there's a really wonderful, just all this explosion
of Navajo writers.
And the younger writers that are in their 20's and 30's are very
much out of the School of--
what do you call it-- performance and slam poets.
So it's a very different kind of poetry.
It's very different from my poetry.
Still has really the wonderful essence and the cadence
and the images and the philosophy that we live
by as Diné people.
We should perhaps mention that Sherwin Bitsui
will be reading here at--
In this room?
1 o'clock in this room.
OK.
Yeah, thank you.
I just have one last question, since there
don't seem to be any more from the audience.
Everybody likes to read a story now and then.
But not so many people want to read a poem.
And yet I think that poetry offers something
very particular in helping us to appreciate the world around us
and the world that is made up of people.
And I wonder what Alison and Luci
think about how to encourage people to read poetry,
or even to come and listen to poetry.
[LAUGHING]
An interesting question.
Did you come out and say [INAUDIBLE]
Well, what I've been thinking about lately
these last few days, it's just been in my head.
I've been thinking of writing lines of poetry or small poems
from different people and just on small pieces of paper.
And then, like, going to a restaurant or something
and just leaving it under the salt and pepper shaker,
or going places and just tucking poems in different places.
I don't know why.
I've just been thinking, it would be really wonderful just
to come, all of a sudden, you're just doing ordinary things.
And then there's a poem.
And you would think, oh, I have to read this.
I wonder who left this and what does it mean?
Why did I find it?
So that's kind of my project.
I'm thinking of doing that after the break and just,
like, doing 50 of them.
And then just taking them, folding them up,
and tucking them in a newspaper stand or just
spreading them around town.
I would think--
That's right.
I would just be delighted to find a poem.
So that's, I mean, one way that I would get people
to read poetry, aside from encouraging people
to go to poetry readings.
I was just named to an advisory board.
It's a national project.
And it's called the Language Conservation Project.
And it's a project where in the national zoos
were going to find poems.
I'm on that board too.
Are you?
Yes!
OK!
[LAUGHING]
Find points to put in the zoos.
So at different exhibitions, there'll
be a poem that relates to that.
And it's going to be all over the country.
Started in New York.
And it's really beautiful, just beautiful.
And these poems are going to be there forever.
So then my idea kind of sprung out of that.
How can I do that on a smaller scale,
and yet still get poetry?
And April is Poetry Month.
Next month is National Poetry Month.
Yeah.
Just a couple of things that Zoo Project
is really exciting because it's an example
of the science-art thing going both ways,
because they actually polled people coming out
of Central Park Zoo after they installed all this poetry.
And the people who visited after the poetry was installed
had a higher degree of conservation consciousness.
And they exhibited evidence of having a biosphere thinking.
In other words, they saw humans as part of a larger ecosystem.
But I just want to say one other thing.
I don't think we should ever lament that poetry
has a small audience.
I mean, opera has a small audience, jazz.
There are lots of art forms that have small audiences.
And they're like the great secrets of human civilization
that carry through time.
And
If you look at it over a long time horizon,
there's a huge audience for poetry.
So I know that we sometimes want to evangelize and make
everybody love it.
But other people like TV, and that's OK.
But I think a festival like this invites everybody
and hopefully does broaden the audience
by a few small increments.
Well, two great answers.
Thank you very much.
And thank you to our audience.
[APPLAUSE]