[APPLAUSE]
We'll move to the Q&A now.
And I'm open to it all.
Up front?
I'm just wondering, as far as the rhythm goes with the words,
is that--
as far as the rhythm goes with the words,
does that pattern fall into place as you're writing?
Or is it just sort of the flow back and forth
to find what's happening?
I hope-- You guys heard that.
I hope that it happens naturally, either way.
I know that I believe in sculpture.
So I'm sculpting a thing that has some shape, some container,
when I making the poem, as writing is text.
So I'm not free or liberated of that.
I could never read any of those poems the same way twice.
So it has to do with mood, time of day, what I ate,
how I'm feeling.
Do I feel Rocky Horror Picture Show or do I feel Soul Train?
Do I feel-- so I don't know.
Not to be bored by it.
Knowing that a reading experience
is like having something passed through your body.
So I don't want to know it that way.
Am I probably revising when I'm reading?
I'm saying, [INAUDIBLE] I'm switching, I'm changing,
so that it's slightly improvisational.
I just can't read regular.
I'm not a regular reader.
If I were reading "It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times."
I go, or in my younger and more vulnerable years, you know,
I would be that person.
I hope that it doesn't matter that the [INAUDIBLE]
of the poem is a thing that becomes
your content, your rhythm, your digestive meal,
and then leaves you in a different way it would leave me
if we both ate it.
But I don't I don't know that I privilege one or the other.
But I know that a reading, a reading
is a different thing from my writing.
And maybe they shouldn't be.
But right now they are.
And the body plays a larger role.
Most people write sitting down and I'm trying to resist that.
I'm trying to write more moving around and standing up a lot
these days.
But I know that because of the body is here
and it's worked up, breathing, what we talked about earlier.
It may sound like I'm going for a rhythm.
But I don't think there's no such like formlessness.
I don't that anything is without rhythm.
Echo, stutter, two trains passing in the night, shadow.
I don't think that it can be not rhythm.
I think that we've been taught in the cerebral way,
we've been taught to learn and read and receive information
and ideas.
We've been taught a certain stillness.
And often a stillness comes across in the prose.
And poetry doesn't have a poem's not a monopoly
on lyricism or movement.
And I think that poems want to be
akin to things that are like in a way
--that joke Annie hall makes about a relationship.
It's like a shark.
It has a constant motion or it dies.
And I feel that way about the lyric impulse.
[INAUDIBLE] So I don't know about rhythm.
Because in culture you know when you say to the Black man,
you know, well, I hear that rhythm
and does that-- you know.
And that's not the whole truth of it.
It's just like it's become such a thing.
[INAUDIBLE] And I know that that's not the case.
I just know that I read funny.
[LAUGHING]
I could dance to Catcher in the Rye, probably.
Hey, over the corner.
Speaking of reading funny, you would stop to [INAUDIBLE]
And I found that very interesting.
Gloss?
To--
Put lipstick on?
And by the way--
Yeah.
To put lipstick on exactly.
No do you find that writing so rhythmically
limits the amount of information in some way,
that then you have to sort of break rhythm--
Right.
--to give that information?
And--
Good question.
--have you had the impulse to put notes in your poems?
Two good questions.
[INAUDIBLE],, Léopold-- Senghor famous poet,
says that all images must come wrapped in rhythm.
Now I know it's an African notion.
But it doesn't limit.
The rhythm doesn't limit because, hmm.
When I played a joke about T.S. Eliot or if I do Bishop--
the art of losing isn't hard to master.
So many things.
And you know it's a villanelle But there's rhythm all over it.
Now obviously, that moment in literary history,
for the most part tends to put the rhythm
at the end of the line.
And then on occasion has an internal or slant line.
In Bishop there's a few innovative things
with that form.
So I made the joke about costuming form.
There's no such thing.
It doesn't limit it.
It makes it multiple.
It makes it multiplicity.
It means that my line breaks, if you
want to look at it conceptually, my line breaks
occur continuously throughout the line.
And it's almost like we joke about Michael Jackson.
Before Michael Jackson moonwalked, he had to what?
Robot.
And then there's a point after he wrote--
[INAUDIBLE] I can't give up on using Michael Jackson
But maybe he died for this.
[LAUGHING]
But then after he roboted and moonwalked.
There's some MTV awards performance
where he is doing them both at the same time.
Like, damn.
And that means he's taking the bones out of his body,
put them back in, and it's so fluid.
Now if T.S. Eliot can do that, and I don't mean in the room,
they come and go, talking to Michelangelo.
That's just a baby robot right there.
That's not even a break dance movement.
You know.
And what I'm saying is when the rhythm becomes as complex.
Like for those who listen to hip-hop, Outcast,
that internal rhyme in an Outcast line,
that line breaks many times before breaking a final time.
And the internal becomes-- so that means that the idea gets
to change more than once.
If you're walking across campus, you stop.
You switch.
You go somewhere, you change your mind.
And that means there's more things
to consider in the possibility.
Right?
The linearity is now no longer linear.
That means you're not being told where to go
and the focus of that is widescreen, as opposed
to the 16 millimeter square.
Whoop!
There's more to see, which is why the director's get mad when
they chop it up put it on TV.
Now I'm trying to answer that question conceptually.
I don't think it needs notes.
It may need something where we slow down
and pay more attention.
And you're gonna lose something because no one's
the great communicator for everyone.
Except, say, Willy Shakespeare Not all of us
is the sum of our age.
Everyone's not living together, not listening to each other--
a lot are being free in a way that we just
ain't free right now. it takes time to get to, that given
how we compartmentalize everything.
So I think I don't need notes.
And I think if I do need notes, wouldn't it
be great if I write the book, you write the notes,
you write the book.
And I write a notes so it becomes this community, thing
like the reading is?
I don't have an answer, but it can't be that it's limiting.
It could just be I'm not a good writer yet.
And I will accept that!
Because, no.
Growth, I hope there's lots of room for growth.
All right.
Yes.
I wanted to know how much you're poetry, when you originally
write it is meant to aloud, and how much--
Same question.
[INAUDIBLE]
What's the [INAUDIBLE] page?
[INAUDIBLE]
I think it's all going to be smoked.
[LAUGHING]
It's like, roll that sucker up.
And don't read it or write [INAUDIBLE]..
Because I don't know.
I don't have any hints.
I'm making a joke about intentions.
I'm just trying to make a good door.
I'm trying to put the hinges on it.
I want the door to open.
I want it to close.
And if the cops come, I want the door to not do anything.
[LAUGHING]
I'm just trying to make a functioning, like [INAUDIBLE]..
I'm trying to make something that works
in the world that's useful.
All the extra, the thing I enjoy about writing
is when I'm doing the writing, I'm
flying through the past and the present and the unknown.
That's the best part.
Like up here now.
We have some fun and get a book.
Yay!
[LAUGHING]
But that feeling when I'm sitting there like at 3:00
in the morning, and I'm like, I told the class today
that I've never been high.
I haven't smoked a joint yet.
I'm saving it for like some big day.
OK.
One day if I win a Pulitzer, I'm going to smoke a joint.
[LAUGHING]
Well, I may not win a Pulitzer And I may not smoke.
But when I'm making a poem, I'm high.
Or I'm low.
Or I'm something.
That's like, Woo!
Who am I?
[LAUGHING]
So I don't know about the meant to be that.
It's whatever you do what it wants--
You know, it's not mine anymore.
You know what I'm saying?
Come here with it.
You know.
[INAUDIBLE]
[LAUGHING]
This side of the room's turnt.
These are the expensive seats.
[LAUGHING]
Hey lady.
[INAUDIBLE]
Do you like--
I'm sorry.
Do like--
Go ahead.
Do you like poems that rhyme rather than don't rhyme?
Or do you like poems that don't rhyme?
I like everything. but you mean, rhyme in a traditional way.
Like [INAUDIBLE].
You mean, "I think that I shall never see
a poem as lovely as a tree."
A tree.
You mean that.
You mean, "Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away."
When I was in college, grad school,
I got bored with my workshop.
I was that kind.
So I went across town to another workshop
and it was Derek Walcott.
And he was teaching.
I begged him.
And he didn't even answer me.
I asked if I could be in the workshop.
He didn't answer me
But I knew that I just went to the class and lied and said,
you said I could be in it, he wouldn't embarrass me.
I was like, remember you said I could be in this class.
Come on.
So I went to class and then I got
in [INAUDIBLE] disappointed.
He said, listen to this.
He says, next week we're having a special guest.
He's going to give a lecture on the ballad form.
I was like, John Cougar Mellencamp
is coming into our class?
[LAUGHING]
Diddy, diddy, Jack and Diane, kids growing up
in the heartland?
Ugh!
[LAUGHING]
I'm trying to find a way to play hooky.
And it rained.
And I had nowhere to go.
I'm going to go to class.
So I go to class and I think, the guest is not here.
There was no guest.
And Derek goes, the guest is in the bathroom.
He'll be out [INAUDIBLE].
And this little short man comes out of the bathroom and says,
Hi, I'm Paul Simon.
I'm here to talk to you about the ballad form.
Paul Simon goes to our class.
[LAUGHING]
He talks about "The Sound of Silence" for two hours.
[LAUGHING]
He had an anthology with him and it was in it
in the ballad section.
And I was like, Paul Simon's [INAUDIBLE]..
And so, "Hello, darkness, my old friend.
I've come to talk with you again."
Da, da.
Now, I like that.
But in the history, in the technology of the syntax,
in the way that language is a machine
and inventive and organic, well, that's a little old now.
Some people are wearing their jeans way down here now.
Some people are finding their sexualities
and voting for Black presidents.
I'm not saying we shouldn't.
I'm just saying, Gertrude Stein said it best.
Someone asked Gertrude Stein, what's the role of the writer?
The role of the writer is to continue language.
Now I'm not saying you shouldn't rhyme.
Or anyone shouldn't.
I'm saying that my learning, my contribution
is for me to have heard it, to grab what I can of it,
and to attempt in my way to continue it or add to it,
not necessarily to inherit and keep it there.
And there are a lot of great poems that do ABABA.
I'm moving it around a little more.
I'm like a a little guy in space.
Like you move it around and around.
Like my pattern is all, it's like, you know what I'm saying?
It's like, great, it's all over that.
I'm like, I wanted to be a football player.
I didn't want to be this.
[LAUGHING]
I wanted to be like, my middle name is
Sayers because of Gale Sayers, the Chicago Bear runner.
And he was like this.
He could stop, go.
Now that's how I write.
My prosody right, my verse reverses.
I'm like, I'm getting to the tacklers.
I'm Heisman I'm flipping.
I stop before I go in the end zone.
Look back.
And that's me in literature.
Now I don't know if that's going to last.
But I have a good time with it.
Some rhyming is so good thing.
[LAUGHING]
There are tools in the toolbox.
Got lots of tools.
And the body has to start making its own.
According to who you are, how you breathe, right?
All right.
Yes.
How is your orientation towards race changes
as a result of being a part of the community like Cave Canem
versus like it was an individual before Cave Canem.
It's a difficult question.
I always thought, before Cave Canem like Yeats has this poem.
I think it's Yeats' poem where he says,
Mad Ireland hurt me into poetry.
And when I was sending my first book around I say names.
One of the big presses asked for my book
because I was in like, Best American or something.
Like, we want to see your poems.
We want your book.
And then held it for a year.
And they sent me a note back.
Yes.
They sent me a note back and said, well,
we like these five poems, we decided.
But we just feel like we'd like to see
a book from someone more hurt, a poet more hurt in the world.
[LAUGHING]
I was like, wow.
You know?
And I was thinking of hurt in literature.
And I know Yeats said that mad Ireland hurt me
in the poetry or something.
Or someone says about Yates, Mad Ireland hurt him.
And I'm thinking, I don't remember.
But anyway.
I'm not hurt into the poetry.
Way before, like Cave Canem this historical moment,
Black president, all that stuff.
I always felt like (SINGING) "We are the world.
We are the ones that make a brighter day."
I felt that before the song.
[LAUGHING]
I feel like, why did they kill Kennedy?
Like I was that kid.
[LAUGHING]
You know?
I was a sensitive kid.
I read comic books and cried about assassinations.
[LAUGHING]
You know?
So I always felt like, there's something rotten in Denmark.
And why?
And I knew that the color thing was bad.
But I knew that people had to come to a place of work.
And I also knew this was a small historical moment
in the life of a planet that isn't even that old either.
And so in that way, I could taste, don't tase me bro.
Some cell phones are so big when they ring,
they actually tase you.
[LAUGHING]
So nothing's changed, in that Cave Canem is doing
is providing community.
It makes elbow space in the literary scene,
a literary environment that's usually all white.
And in that moment, that small big work, small big work.
It's a big work that's small.
In that way, that's a good thing.
But that's a repair kit.
And it would fix, trying to fix something, that perhaps maybe,
I didn't know who you are, I'm not right, I'm not the judge,
is wrong or shouldn't be.
So I always feel like there's room for, I would say,
there's as many canons as there are people writing.
And I really feel that way about care.
Care in the craft, and passion of the craft.
And I'm not going to simply, why everybody should be judged or--
I know that.
Like this year I judged the National Book Award.
I judged the poetry category and we just
turned in the five finalists.
And I am shocked by who the five finalists are.
And I'm one of the judges.
And if I wasn't one of the judges, and I saw that list,
I'd be like, sellouts.
And I'd be smacking myself across the head.
[LAUGHING]
But then having been a part of that, I'm like , Why--
[INAUDIBLE]
Am I surprised?
And so it's difficult. It's complex.
Because it's just like, I don't know.
I don't know.
There's just a lot of work to do.
And there's room for everything.
And so we keep going.
We keep going.
Seamus Heaney said, keep the level high.
Keep the spirit level high.
Yes.
Sorry.
Can you discuss a little bit about your editing?
[INAUDIBLE]
OK.
Before I answer your question--
[INAUDIBLE]
--great.
Before I answer your question, do you think I need an editor?
[LAUGHING]
No, that wasn't the question.
I know.
This is my question for me.
You're helping me.
Having listened to me and the wonderful green colors,
do you think that I need an editor?
[LAUGHING]
And I sometimes think the Michael Jackson
poem is excessive.
[LAUGHING]
And I think I really needed an editor with that.
My editing process?
I go away from it.
I try to forget, wrestle myself away from it.
Forget that I knew it, it knows me, and I come back.
I look at the line.
I'm really interested in making a line that you can pluck
and that sort of reverberates, like Wallace Stevens
talks about in "The Man with the Blue Guitar."
He's riffing on a Picasso painting.
I'm interested in that kind of thing.
I would love to be as someone who's solely
and purely does not need prose, as of pure nuance.
Nuanced energy.
That's a difficult thing to do in my best not my best poems.
In the poems that follow me around the world,
like when I can hear them long after I
read them or written them.
I've abandoned all of the sort of prose and referential hinges
and it's just floating there.
Which means it also is in defiance of known meaning.
It wants to have meaning and personal Helicon It looks
into the well and the sound of the rock
comes splashing up through the reflection.
Something with a clear, new music in it.
And I don't mean music in a rhythm sense.
I'm mean music in the meaning that is hadn't
been discovered yet since.
So I do think that I walk away, I forget, I come back.
My favorite poem is almost always a poem I'm working on.
I try to be different or have something happen to me before I
come back to the poem.
I don't know, it could be someting emotionional,
it could, be something.
It's a book, can be something.
Just as long that I forgot what my other intentions were so
the poem has an outcome that I didn't
know what's going to happen.
Or I've allowed something of the poem to be in charge of me.
Like I have to go, I forgot what I was working on with this.
So now I'm back and it's in charge of me.
I have to go with it.
And that way, I discover something.
That, oh, I didn't know I was going here.
And that means I was a bit of a different beast.
Or I laid it in a way.
And then I just hope.
You know?
And then I abandon or I lay it down.
And I think it's much different from making
a piece of music or sculpture or sinking
a cue ball in the corner.
[LAUGHING]
Last one?
Second to last one.
Next, a second.
Go
I'm sorry.
Two more people.
[INAUDIBLE]
Be more intuitive?
Well, [INAUDIBLE]
Yeah.
I know Senghor said that.
I don't know that there's anyone, any type of writer
has a monopoly on intuition.
I know that--
Jazz?
In the scale of jazz, jazz is more,
I don't know that jazz is necessarily more
intuitive than playing Mozart's "Jupiter
Symphony," second movement.
So the context is important.
Jazz is improvisation, though I grew up in a very percussive
music scene , playing the drums and the congos in Washington,
DC.
Go-Go needs to be continuous, to keep going percussively,
to talk over the music.
That rhyme.
I find myself being guttural, being
percussive when I hit things up against each other.
I don't know think I'm wise enough
to be considered intuitive.
I don't know that I have any of that in me.
What I do have in me is that I'm a nit picker.
I will I use the term worry and worriation a few times tonight.
Langston Hughes talks about that in an essay
when he says that, sometimes it's best to worry the subject
or worry the line, as opposed to be like so on subject.
And I think that's some of what Richard Hugo was talking
about in The Triggering Town we he's
talking about writing off subject.
So I'm a gatherer.
I tend to throw a lot of things that
are seemingly unrelated in a pot,
and look to find the sameness and difference in them.
Be it shape, be it sound, be whatever.
And then I go, oh, look how this is connected.
And I make my thing.
I wait for the intuitive thing to happen in my life.
I don't know.
He said that one of your poems is entitled,
"Godzilla's Avocado."
Yeah.
Is that right?
Why Godzilla's?
Right.
At the end-- thank you.
Why Godzilla for the "Godzilla's Avocado."
Well, know, Godzilla's got some funny skin.
[LAUGHING]
I don't know what that is.
[LAUGHING]
But I know that Godzilla was a response
to the whole nuclear atomic, the thing, science gone mad.
Here comes to creature.
Look what you did.
And now it's-- [GODZILLA ROAR] Godzilla wasn't just some, oh,
look a monster.
Godzilla was a response.
I forget.
Gojira was the original.
Gojira, or whatever it was, came out of the ocean.
It was like, as a result of testing and dropping the bomb.
But when I was a kid, I just always
thought avocados look like something that
would come out of a Godzilla.
[LAUGHING]
I don't know.
They just seemed like, mm.
But then--
[LAUGHING]
But I know the whole thing with pesticides
and how we think with food and all that stuff that's going on,
it's happening.
And I wondered about that.
In the poem I played with the idea of pesticides and bees
and what's happening right now with colony collapse and all
that.
And what we do with food and how we hurry to food.
We hurry to everything else.
In our hurry to all these things,
I rush to it, we we're changing and missing
and [GODZILLA ROAR].
[LAUGHING]
Then our kids go off and whatever.
Yay?
Yippee?
Yeah.
Thank you guys.
[APPLAUSE]