So we're going to have Laynie and Anne stand up here.
And we have a mic we're going to pass around,
so they're going to do questions for about 10 minutes,
and then you can talk to them and have them sign some books.
Thank you to Ann and Laynie so.
Thank you.
OK, we're here, we're going to answer anything
you ask in two minutes.
[LAUGHTER]
Anyone?
What is a world governed by women look like?
Well, we'll see.
I feel it's-- I think it's already going on.
There's a subtext here, we have a very wonderful women poets
in the audience.
It's not a done deal.
I mean, we have to deal with-- as Amiri Baraka calls
hers Condo-skeeza?
That was Condo-skeeza And she's out of those loops.
There's so many women now going into the military.
I mean, it's as I think a civil rights come into this,
be able to do whatever you want on some levels
in the civic sphere.
I haven't entirely visualized it.
I feel like I'm already living in it.
Yeah, there's another good word, Maitre-tism.
Yes, thank you.
And actually that you can take that out of there, if you want.
Questions?
Ask them questions.
They want to answer your questions.
The question I guess for Anne I'm
not sure I have the right word, but both of the things
that you did that are really different,
they have the quality of being entertainments, you know.
So there's the dialogue between the two characters
in the first one and the staging of an opera,
and somehow, the quality of entertainment,
which makes it less real lets it be more real.
I wonder if you can talk about the impulse
toward that deflection and how you think you might use it.
Well from some point of view, we right
to engage ourselves and create forms and structures that are
part of our own way of being.
I mean, I'm interested in, always been interested
in ritual structures.
Thus, the college proper where you work with dreams,
you work with objects, you work with implements,
you work with chant, you work with visualization
as a Buddhist.
And so those kinds of-- and then studies
in various shamanistic practices, and so on.
So there's always texts, there's always body, speech, and mind.
And then thinking of the three poets--
meto, logo, and thano poets, so there's
always this kind of triad of activity.
But I don't know if entertainment
is the word I would use as much as enactment and sounding.
But I want to be--
I want people to laugh.
Yeah, I mean, I didn't mean like, watching TV,
I meant like a sort of a mask or an entertainment
in that sort of theatrical sense.
But thank you, that's great.
This is a question for Laney, and we've kind of
had a discussion about this before, but how does your job
and having kids, because it seems like you're working
so influenced by your job and having kids,
how does that go into your process, writing?
How does motherhood, or how does work or both?
Well, it seems like--
yeah, both, pretty much.
Like, being around kids, I'm never around kids.
We've had this like, we have talked about,
and I'm never around kids.
And I feel like your work is generous in that way,
and playful.
It seems to have quality and a lot
of the words, particularly the poem
you read that was for your kids.
Well, it's always evolving because kids are always
changing.
But I think the main thing was that when I became a mother,
I needed some kind of breakthrough
in order to think about time and how to work.
And before that, I'd always had a concentrated, quiet
around me, where I was choosing my sources,
and I was deliberately--
a lot of things were taboo and I didn't choose to include them.
And when I became a mother, I realized
if I did that, I might have to wait
20 years to get any work done.
I needed a new strategy and so I kind of
exploded that notion to let it everything participates.
And that for me, that was really radical because before that
in my work, I didn't do that, so it was really liberating.
But as I said, it's always changing, as the kids in life
is always changing.
Yes, living in the INAUDIBLE
[LAUGHTER]
Laynie, was mentioned that you won the Gertrude Stein
Prize many times, and I was wondering then
if you were influenced by Gertrude Stein heavily.
And then I thought maybe a good question for both of you
would be what were some of your really strong earliest
influences?
I was influenced, by Gertrude Stein
I think before I read Gertrude Stein,
and then again after I read Gertrude Stein.
And I mean, so many influences, I mean, it could go on but--
Give me a couple.
Definitely Emily Dickinson, and Sappho and HD, and novels too,
like Proust and James, and Lucille are
all important writers for me.
And then my peers and living writers
have always been really important to me.
Some of the writers here today, Alice, and Mei-Mei and Anne,
and Bernadette, who the book's dedicated to.
Oh, it's so huge, vast.
I mean, one is just reading, reading all the time.
And I'm interested in long structures,
and I'm interested in forms like the Raga
and Indian music, that sort of thing as well.
So there was always women vocalizing.
So that plays into a lot of this, the great epics.
The things we were reading, many of us, back in the day.
Of course, Stein is for-- and I got a little oh,
irritated with her certain point.
[LAUGHTER]
And with all the masters as well.
And there's one more Olson, with all these Olson conferences
coming up.
And I was thinking, I'm older than Olson was the day he died,
you know.
What is this?
I'm still looking to these kind of figures.
But all the poetry of the new American poetry so-called,
so many again, people in this room, and sense of community,
and coming up together around the lower East side seeing
at St Mark's.
And reading and engaged with one another's
work and mutually supportive and building our own thing, so.
And I'm wondering how much you rehearse,
I mean, I get the feeling that there's a lot of spontaneity.
But are you ever at home, like scaring your neighbors,
working a routine, or?
Oh, I should get better at that.
No, no, no rehearsal.
I mean, sometimes I hear something first
and I like to just say it sounded in a way.
And I've been working a lot, collaboratively
with my son, who's a musician and composer,
so we have takes of things for recording.
We're working on another CD right now, so that's the most,
you know, another take.
And I'm working with my husband who makes movies,
and I watch him doing take after take
after take with working off.
And so I'm interested in that process,
but I love the rawness of just coming into the space,
having an idea of what you're going to read.
It's always going to be a little different every time,
and then making the selection for the particular reading.
But I've been enjoying reading from manatee because it
has a lot of different moves.
I'm intrigued with your movement,
and I've never seen anyone move like you do.
And I just would like to hear some of it.
You know, as you wouldn't have to say any words,
and I get along.
Oh.
So I'd like to hear some about--
The most zen poetry where I just--
[LAUGHTER]
Well, I guess it's something about--
I always, these forms sometimes seem
limiting and it's never quite enough
to express what is going on in the psychophysical system
and the imagination the way things come quickly and sort
of getting-- so there's ways that the body has
to take on some of it, and work it, out and let the sparks fly.
And it was wonderful with "Red Noir," the play that Judith
Marlena directed to New York because the fourth wall comes
down for the last third of the play,
and your seats are taken away, and you too,
have to come up on the run around
and start moving with the flow.
And that's her anarchist ethos, you know,
that the people have to make the peace as well.
So I provided texts that people can pick up easily.
And so then people are invited on stage
to mouth certain things and move in their various gestures.
"The nipple is the cause," that was my favorite one.
And it was always, there was always
this older wonderful actor who would initiate that,
who had been with Judith for many years,
and some very beautiful and elegant the way
he would do that.
"The nipple is the cause."
[LAUGHTER]
Anyone else?
I was wondering if you guys could
comment on your relationship with technology.
And like, do you own a TV?
Do you feel the need to filter the internet, everything?
Do you write on a computer, or by hand, in a notebook?
What sort of is your relationship
with technology and maybe how it's changed over the years?
I like everything.
So I like to write by hand, I like to write on a computer.
I'm amazed at all the new possibilities for technology,
and I feel like I'm just starting to tap into it.
I recently created a piece with PowerPoint presentation
with images, a couple presentations
with poetry using that.
And I feel like it's such an exciting time to have access
to high tech, low tech, and the possibilities
for communication with other writers in the internet
and publication are just terrific.
So I'm very excited about it to see how
it will develop for all of us.
Yeah, I'd say all of the above, but I spend probably
more time reading actual books, and I'm still
very interested in creating books and text on page
that I can read solo.
I mean, there's all this other kinds of things going on.
I mentioned working with my son.
So I'm in a studio with technology,
and my husband works with technology,
and the internet is so important.
I mean, I don't think I could--
it's been breaking down lately and it really is rupture
but I love to be away from it.
I didn't bring my computer here so I could just be
in Tucson in a different way.
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you.
I don't know about those Kindles, those book things.
I see people on airplanes and it would
be great to not have to carry all these books everywhere,
you know, that one has to read every-- a book a day at least,
but the Kindle, what do you think?
Does anybody have?
Oh good.
Oh, there's so many Luddites here, OK.
[LAUGHTER]
It's like the car, it'll never last.
[LAUGHTER]
I wanted to ask you, you mentioned a number
of performers, of one kind or another,
in different media, most of whom were professional.
And what I'm wondering is among performers
who are not so much professional as possessed
in one way or another, on street corners,
or in villages in northern Mexico,
or wherever, if you would talk maybe
a little bit about such ones you've
met that have influenced you.
Sure, well a lot of travels in South America, Mexico, India,
I mean, India is amazing that way.
There's just always something going on in the street.
And then trying to go to festivals to hear things
like, the bowels, for example.
But they're more anonymous.
And in Indonesia, when I was working
in Bali for the Naropa Program, there's no word for art.
And it's also all the rituals involve, art,
and they are not necessarily identified.
You can go to performances that go on all night,
and people are very refined in their performance,
but it's not about that kind of thing, so.
Thank you.
Anyone else?
But I have a question.
I'm going to ask you the last question.
I'm curious with both of you, what's in the next nine months
creatively?
It's awful question, but I'll ask it anyway.
9 months, that's just--
OK, a year.
A year.
That's a hard question because every day something new
could happen that we don't know the answer to.
[LAUGHTER]
But I guess reading and writing hopefully, and travel,
and teaching, and I don't know.
I'm not sure I know specifically beyond that.
Maybe you have a better view.
While I'm finishing the big Iovis epic,
I'm still about 20 pages to go, and that's
take about a year or two years to finish.
So I'm still working on the end of that.
It's about 900 pages, and a little scary.
So I think I'll drop dead and finish, so I have to finish,
sort of definitively finish that,
or new anthology from Naropa of transcripts
I've been editing, transcripts from all kinds of people
in the last months.
And Naropa itself, I have a couple of catalogs here.
Our program is coming up and that's the biggest performance
in well, I've just it's a community and collaboration,
and all kinds of things go on there.
And work with Ambrose in a new secret text.
[LAUGHTER]
I have one thing I forgot, which is the biggest
probably project I've been working on
is answering the phone.
Now, I'm co- editing a large anthology of conceptual writing
by women with Vanessa Place and Carolyn Bergvall that's
going to be coming out from the Les Figues Press eventually.
So that's a big project.
And I worked with Noah Soderstrom today.
We did some collaboration.
Well, we have to end our speaking part of our event
this evening, but I want to thank Anne and Laney and all
of you for coming.
The Poetry Center, all of the sponsors, Sybille and Gail,
and buy some books, have them sign it.
Have a lovely evening.
[APPLAUSE]