Thank you for being here because I don't, of course,
know any of you personally.
So I have to sort of get a gauge on your faces.
My sister, Helen, is here.
And that's always nice to see one beloved face out there.
But last night I was just introducing three poets exactly
as you just introduced me, giving
thanks to the donors and the people in charge.
And the three poets I introduced were very young and wonderful--
Sandra and Ben Doller and Srikanth Reddy,
who's written a very good book called Voyager.
And so we had earlier had a Q and A at Georgetown,
too, where the conversation went somehow very quickly
to the subject of form, which seems
to be sort of a fretful subject right now.
And Srikanth, who calls himself Chicu,
was particularly articulate about the subject of form
and how troubling and how paralyzing it
is for him to find the shape for all the notes he takes.
And so that made me think about just
the post-millennium generation of poets following out
of the language period and John Ashbery
and what's going to happen now and how complicated
that must be for young people.
And so that was one thing I wondered if some of you
would want to talk to me about today
or the book, The Winter Sun, which is semi-autobiographical,
but it's an attempt to do a new kind of essay,
which I'm getting more and more comfortable with.
And someone like Anne Carson was the great pioneer of that.
But I think all of us are wrestling with this form issue
now, what comes between things, and how can we
follow on things?
And of course, I'm now in the end days.
And so I have a different sort of look on it
from someone of under 40.
That's what I was calling these poets last night
and remembering we used to say never trust anyone over 40.
And so I was very moved by this conversation
about how troubling that is, the whole formation.
And I don't know whether there's a presiding kind of aesthetic
in the poetry program here.
We're very diverse.
So that's what I wondered, because certain places are
very committed to experiment and others
to much more formal poetry.
And so I wasn't clear here what you would--
I might even ask you a question, what
you would say as younger writers about that issue.
I mean, it really interests me about whether it's one teacher
or whether it's a poet from my generation
or if you're influenced by the younger group of poets,
like Peter Gizzi and people who are now maybe in their mid-40s
to mid-50s.
I'm just very concerned about the questions of the way poetry
can be taught, which is to pluck pieces of other people's work
out and insert it into your own poem to sort of elevate
the language and whether that's ethically good for you to do,
what it does to you.
I don't care about the line of the poem
but what it does to the person writing poetry
to keep pulling and sticking things in
and constructing poems out of other people's suffering,
let's say, people's really hard worked poems.
The only thing is then I heard these three poets last night
who all do that, and they all were fantastic.
I mean, hearing the work was totally great and very
different from reading it on the page.
So that's another issue, too, is poetry
as a score for music, the music of speaking it
out loud in public or poetry as just a written,
private relationship.
So those were questions that are just
really in my mind today because of yesterday and many times
before.
Why don't you start?
Which question do you want her to address?
Yes?
I'm interested in the essay form.
There's a lot of lyric essays being written now--
lyric essays.
And I'm thinking, there's Essay Press,
which is also kind of messing around
with how the essay is produced.
So I guess, from your perspective--
and you said you were playing around with the essay form
in Winter Sun.
And so I'm interested in kind of--
I am interested in the perspective you have as far
as where it's been coming from.
Anne Carson, certainly that seems a good place to start.
But there's the grand piano stuff, too,
is also what I'm thinking of.
So I mean, there's--
it seems like a lot of approaches.
So I guess, what do you think?
I think it's definitely something
that's in process now, generally speaking.
And it's like so much right now.
That's the problem.
We're in this sort of information age, technology
boom, and we really don't know where it's going to lead.
So everything is in this transitional mode.
And I think these formal questions definitely
have to be conscious of that mystery of what's
going to happen to words and how its expression going to take
form.
So for me, I'm really like a late Victorian writer.
And so what my instinct is lyrical
and from something that has an echo from my childhood, really.
And I'm very-- I've been very sort of, oh,
overly obsessed with World War II and the Cold War and history
and that whole period and trying to shuck that--
I mean, literally, very deliberately
trying to stop brooding over the 20th century.
And so, for me, that kind of playing with pleasure,
with the pleasure of writing, of moving everything around
and shaping it is like an attempt
to move out of something heavy for me,
which was the 20th century, really, in a nutshell.
So that form seems appropriate to it?
It seems-- for me, it's got a lightness.
It allows for me to change my mood in the middle and to--
but I had one central idea running
through the whole thing.
But, of course, I didn't know I had it until it was done.
And so, for me, the real work was
in the formation of those blocks and how
they would balance together, just sort
of looking at it that way.
I wonder if you could say something about how
your sense of vocation is a--
I wonder if you could say something
about how your sense of vocation as a poet has changed
or not changed through the years.
Oh, I think-- ooh.
It probably has changed along with everything else--
just self-knowledge.
I used to do it with complete spontaneity, and I never--
I've been very lucky in that I don't ever think of an audience
or anything.
I just do what I want very willfully.
And I still do that.
So it's all me and it.
And so that's always been sort of a liberating position
to have.
And that hasn't changed, but I think
my sense of the kind of weight has changed,
where the weights go now.
I mean, it was much lighter once.
I have a lot of questions.
I have a feeling.
Oh, you go.
Thank you.
[INAUDIBLE] every time she--
Uh-huh.
I was wondering if you could speak
about contemporary poetry, specifically
conceptual poetry and this trend,
now, of including other people's work, often
without giving any credit, just making it part of the poem.
Well, it's part of a general thing called sampling,
which is part of the entire culture.
It's not just poets doing that.
It is a kind of ironic relationship to language
and a distanced relationship to it.
So it's used as material rather than personal expression.
It's very much coming out of the sort of Marxist documents.
Pages are just there, materials to be moved around.
And so I can't--
I don't judge it.
I mean, it, to me, is completely natural for this environment
when everybody's archiving and studying and feeling skeptical.
I can see why that would happen.
But I think it's-- as I was just saying,
I think it's very much a transitional thing.
I don't think that's--
I don't think it's formed something importantly new yet.
I do think the language poets were really important.
I would never not say that.
They were really important to the sort of ennui
that was in American poetry for a long time.
And they broke that up so that everybody
has to think about them.
I'm going to go back to the weight, when you were talking
about the weight and how that shifted for you,
and that-- you mentioned that you shucked the 20th century
or you're attempting to shuck a lot of the baggage
or the weight of the 20th century.
But yet your weight is going in different areas now.
And so I wondered, where?
Where is it going?
Where is the weight going?
Is it going into content?
Is it going into--
because you can use so many forms--
essay, poetry, writing.
How is it, in your own mind, distributing now?
Well, now it is more in the--
I read more philosophy now than I would read ever before.
And so I'm more thoughtful, I guess, in that sense,
and not so--
I guess, in the beginning, your body and your poems
are the same thing.
Now I'm much more in my mind, and that's probably
a natural aging thing.
In relation to what you just said about philosophically,
I have long admired and been intrigued by your treatment
and your theories of time.
Would you mind talking about that just a little bit?
Yeah.
It mostly came out of actual experience,
physical experience, almost like being struck,
seized by a sense of--
and I'm sure it's partly because of Einstein's theory
of relativity and the slow way that we process information
from the sciences.
It takes forever for you to actually really understand.
And then, one day, it does.
And that was sort of it.
I was walking along a river with my dog,
and I suddenly realized I was walking on the past.
I was walking, in other words, permanently in space
and there was no past or future.
And it was sort of terrifying, actually, for that moment.
But then I tried to make sense of it,
and that sort of became a kind of triggering moment for--
the way I also began to write lines and put words on paper
was in that kind of suspended state.
but it's very hard to reproduce, probably impossible.
I think Leslie Scalapino--
I don't know if any of you know her work.
But I would say she was permanently
in that state of mind, trying to find
a permanent present by bracketing and doing
all the things she did.
Can you talk a little bit about the difference in process
between writing essays and writing poems?
Well, I wrote loads of novels when--
and they're all-- five of them are
in a collection called Radical Love, five of my novels
that I ended writing in 2000.
But they were becoming more and more sort of essayistic.
I'd suddenly start having a monologue in the middle.
And so I sort of naturally moved from fiction more than
from poetry into writing these essays.
And then, because I write poems sort of all the time--
I'm just jotting them down and listening to sounds
all the time--
it just inevitably became almost like they're
the same thing to me now--
writing prose and writing a poem.
Yes?
Thanks.
So you mentioned your obsession with World War II,
and I was also thinking of your latest book
and how you begin it with a quote by Celan.
And I'm wondering what your relationship is to his work
or how he influenced your work and maybe what that quote--
what was the relationship you intended, maybe,
between that quote and that book?
Well, he-- I think he's so broken,
and then he makes the best of being broken.
And so that was--
he's sort of a model for some things
I've been saying already of taking--
trying to get beyond, using language
to try to heal and get beyond whatever the original trauma
was, and then not succeeding at it.
So I'm sort of interested in failure and looking at failure.
And I think he's a really great example of failure--
of the beauty of failure.
I have a question kind of stemming from that.
You talk in "Come and See," the essay "Come and See,"
about how poetry--
you discuss how poetry itself is survival itself,
and you just mentioned finding that sort of--
the beauty and failure through language.
I just was interested in what your relationship to language
is at this point after writing that essay.
Oh, after writing that.
It changed a lot.
Really what changed, it was from 2000 to 2007.
I was involved in translating some poems from the woman I
mentioned in that essay, Ilona Karmel and her sister,
who were in labor camps and ended up in Buchenwald,
but they both survived.
Anyway, I spent seven years adapting
the poems they wrote in the labor camps in Polish
with the help of Polish translators.
But somehow that process of translation
was much more of a real experience than I had ant--
I thought I was just going to do that, sort of say
this looks like this.
But it turned into grueling--
really like digging a garden.
I'm digging and digging and digging
until there's nothing there.
So it was-- I think translation can really change a writer.
And it's a great thing to do, but it
can be harrowing depending--
it can be really harrowing because you often
can't find the person.
Is there a person there?
Yes.
Online, I heard a interview between you
and fellow named [INAUDIBLE].
Oh my god, years ago.
Yeah.
Was it just many years ago?
Yeah.
Well, I hope this is not too late to ask this question.
It's too late for me to remember, I'm sure.
Well, one of the things he mentioned--
you both were talking about this French mystic, Simone Weil.
And I looked into her philosophy and some of the things
that she said.
And I was just wondering if you could
talk a little bit about how she inspired you,
or what was it about her?
Some of the things she said were so radical and so
difficult to achieve, and she herself fell victim--
I guess you could say that-- and that she
died sick and starving.
I wonder if you could address that.
Yes.
Well, she was like the major person--
thinker for me.
And all she really did was write a lot of notebooks.
And I love Camus' notebooks, and I love her notebooks.
They're in the same period--
again, back in that '40s.
But she was afflicted with genius.
I mean, she had terrible headaches,
and she couldn't adjust socially to anything.
And she wrote these--
she was trying to break through to have belief.
And she was too, ultimately--
she was too skeptical, too profoundly
skeptical to have the belief she wanted to have-- longed for.
But she explored that problem better than anyone else
of how you can't force it.
You either-- it's a gift, I guess, to have faith.
And she, to me--
that was sort of, in a nutshell, what's
fascinating about her journals is
how deeply she explores that.
One of the things that was quoted that she said
was, in order to have understanding and faith,
you have to hit your head against the wall
so hard that you fall unconscious.
And when you recover, you resume hitting your head
against the wall.
And then she said, perhaps, ultimately, you'll
find yourself on the other side of the wall.
And I thought that was beautifully said
but painful to read.
That's it.
It's a perfect example of what I would say-- a perfect example.
So why did I love her?
Why?
Why did you love her?
I think there's something so--
first of all, as a writer.
She writes like Camus.
She has that beautiful mid--
that French, mid-20th century style, which is just
perfect and easy to translate.
So it's just wonderful to read her--
but also because of the intense seriousness of her occupation.
So that was-- and it was rare to find a woman like that.
Maybe you can explain this to me from your earlier remarks.
I don't know whether you're familiar with the rock lyricist
Ray Davies, but one of his songs is, "I'm a 20th century man,
but I don't want to die here."
I think that the 20th century will probably
require endless processing.
It certainly was an incredible period of time.
I wonder why you feel an urgency or a necessity
to move out of that contemplative practice
into something post-millennial.
Because I think it's gotten to be too heavy
and that it's also affecting the way--
people who are-- like me-- who are too
turned in that direction write that it isn't good for writing.
And I believe that in poetry is something
that is continually trying to be expressed in a million ways.
And I don't think it's good to be too nostalgic and too angry
for poetry.
But-- I mean, I think it was just so
perfected by Walter Benjamin.
He said everything there was to say.
So now it's up to us to go along after that.
There's got to be something after that.
Can we go back to the notion of form for a moment?
I wonder if you could talk maybe first about some of the reasons
why you think that's occurring now and if it's being mirrored,
or is it mirroring an earlier time in literature
when that happened?
I doubt that it ever happened before.
I think it has to do with excess information and abundance
of people trying out things.
I mean, I just think it's a mass phenomenon.
We have a new kind of population in the world.
So I can't imagine it could have ever happened before.
Maybe can we then be a bit more specific about the that?
Sorry.
Because I guess I'm thinking that some of the sampling, some
of the collaging, maybe, some of these things
have happened before in modern poetry.
And I'm trying to discern the differences between some
of these things that happened earlier
and what's specific about what's happening now
that's different, not necessarily new or anything.
I'm just trying to, for myself, discern it.
Well, I think it's different because it's
all part of a new culture, which is music and poetry and movies.
I mean, they're all like one phenomenon now.
And they weren't when TS Eliot was--
or Marianne Moore were using references.
Music is really the great art form, now, and so is film.
But they're poetry, too, as far as--
So it's related to sources?
It is.
It's related-- yeah-- and to the whole environment.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Yes?
Just to warn you, this is not [INAUDIBLE]..
OK.
Thank you.
So I'm thinking about how you just introduced
those three younger poets.
And I feel like I've read a lot of books recently that were
contest winners that you selected,
and I feel like you have a very active role in the engagement
in the furthering of young poets'--
I don't want to say "careers" because that's
an awful word-- but in our knowledge of who's writing now
and what they're doing.
And so my question is, what in the newer generation of poets
do you see as the most exciting thing that's happening
or the most--
maybe the newest-- and I think that's related
to the last question.
What's the new thing that you're so excited about?
Well, I suppose the cross-genre thing
where people are bringing narrative back into poetry.
So I think that's really exciting.
And also I like the way languages
from other cultures who have become Americans
are influencing the sounds.
And so, I mean, I've just read--
I don't remember his name, but a young Indian poet who
was using all the beautiful names from India
in his sentences which were otherwise completely American.
And so it just--
it was fusion.
It was-- and I guess that's what I am interested in now
is how that's being done.
You mentioned the word "narrative,"
which I was thinking about as you were talking.
And I wonder if you could--
is there a new narrative?
Is our society so disjunct that there is no narrative?
And I'm speaking of narrative here in the terms of story.
And I was just curious your thoughts about a new narrative
or a disjunct narrative or no narrative at all.
Well, I think all the great narratives are on HBO and AMC.
I mean, those are the ones we all care about what's
happening.
And so they're alive and well, but they've just
taken another shape.
I just don't know if people have the mental--
the time to sit and read novels anymore.
But-- HBO.
In poetry.
Oh, in poetry.
Well, that's what's emerging now is these sort
of fragmented narratives.
Dawn Lundy Martin-- does anybody know--
she's a wonderful writer.
Oh, she's just great, and her book Discipline is great.
And that's a kind of narrative that's fragmented,
but you get the whole picture, believe me, by the end.
So that's what I think is really exciting.
And partly because it's short.
It is influenced by film.
So there are short scenes.
And the responsibility now of young fiction writers is to be
very, very painterly, very specific about what objects
they put-- like the old fairy tales used to be,
that there were four things that keep recurring--
and that we have to sort of go back to that but in a new way.
Could you talk a little bit about how
narrative informs the new essays that you've been writing?
Well, who am I talking to?
Did you say?
Yeah.
It was-- I think it's because I just
have that impulse from writing all those novels for children
and everything.
I wrote a lot of young adult novels.
And so I just feel that impulse.
It's part of my psyche.
But does-- how does the, like-- you know you're talking about
how HBO--
and those are the narratives that we like nowadays.
How do you deal with that in writing?
Or how do you try to live up to that?
Or do you?
I don't.
But I do-- I like movies better than anything in the world.
And I do find I am influenced by the way scenes are framed,
but probably in a more abstract way.
Yeah.
I-- you talked about shucking the 20th century and World War
II in particular because--
shucking--
Well--
No, no, I'm not laughing.
Chucking?
Shucking?
No, no-- because it had gotten too heavy.
And I guess this addresses more you as a political figure.
I'm wondering if the post millennium are 21st century
wars--
Iraq and Sudan and all the uprisings
that are going on in that area, but other places--
if that is coming into your work at all.
It does.
It way over infiltrates them, I think.
But it does, definitely.
Yeah.
So you--
I mean, it's impossible not to have that in your body
after you've read the Huffington Post.
It went, you know--
Yeah.
It's all there.
Yeah.
So do you see that as a substitute for the World War II
angst?
I think--
Or all the same?
Oh, that's a good question.
Well, it wouldn't be something I would want to have.
So I don't think it would be a substitute.
I think it's just an inevitable influence is
that presence that we all feel of violence,
unnecessary violence.
Then how is it different from the relationship with the World
War II, and isn't it also equally heavy and--
It's equally heavy.
But the difference is that was the invention
of large-scale war from World War I, right up to Hiroshima.
It was all mass technology working
in a violent, horrifying way.
So that was the first time to ever see it like that.
Now it's just appalling.
It's the drones, all of it.
It's just beyond--
It's-- I mean, the Hutus and Tutsis and how they used
mallets or--
Machetes.
--machettes, machetes.
And that was interesting going back
to a very, very basic weapon.
But look at Sarajevo.
So it's everywhere.
Yeah.
The basic.
Sort of going back to basics--
Yeah, right.
--in war.
So in light of all the heavy awareness
that the writer sits down with when she's at her desk,
what do you think is the function of the poet
in the world?
I think the great thing is it has no function at all.
I think that's the beauty of it.
It's absolutely useless.
And it's-- but I really believe that poetry is everywhere.
It's in the room now with us.
It's walking down the street out there.
I believe in poetry as a phenomenon underlying--
structurally underlying everything we do.
So it's bound to want to get out.
And that's the only way I think of it.
I don't think it has any function otherwise, except--
Not even subliminally?
I don't know, really.
After all this, I wouldn't be sure.
After all the work that you've put in
and the years and the books and the teaching
and the lectures and the conversations,
isn't it the case that the moral fiber of your being
is expressing itself to some moral vibration among us?
Am I just a fool hoping--
[INAUDIBLE]
No, no.
I think-- no, as I say, I believe
there is a poetic structure everywhere.
And so to become conscious of that
and to teach how to become conscious of that is important,
but not in a functional sense.
It's more to be happy.
[LAUGHTER]
Are there poets that you started with that
were influential to you when you first
started writing that you've never left,
that you've always returned to, and that you still return
to who remain important to you?
Yes.
Thomas Hardy is one.
And--
Good choice.
And then I loved early Celtic and Chinese poetry.
And for some reason, I've always liked poetry in translation.
So I like that strange tone of the translator, even when it's
bad, when it's too much or something.
I think it's seductive and interesting.
So I've read Baudelaire.
I keep going back to the French surrealists.
And, yeah, I love that period very much-- and Frank O'Hara.
[LAUGHTER]
What do you think--
so I'm curious what the job--
what you think the job is or the responsibility
of the young poet is.
What do the young poets need to attend to?
Is it violence, or is it--
Oh.
Oh, I see what you mean.
You mean-- well, you should probably notice--
Or should we-- do you think there's--
I think it's your job to notice that injustice
and to remark on it.
You've got to include that.
So that's as much everywhere as the spirit of poetry
I'm talking about.
There is-- the big, giant things are all being acted out every
minute everywhere, on buses and on--
anywhere you go, you can see the imbalances
and how unfair things are.
So I think that has to be always in the context
of your consciousness, really.
You can't just leave it behind, or it would just be a fantasy.
Now we've run out of steam here, I think.
Hypothetical-- what would life be like for you
if you unplugged your television set?
It would be desolate.
[LAUGHTER]
I find interesting when you're talking about the narratives
and these narratives.
And yet, in your poetry, narrative
is something that I would think of in terms
more of the contemporary, as far as the fragmentation,
the sort of more postmodern rather than
late Victorian group of narrative.
So, I mean, how do you reconcile, I guess, that,
or is it just fine?
Like, this is a place not for narrative, or it's OK,
or whenever it comes in, that kind of thing.
I don't even think I know that I'm being postmodern or--
I mean, I think I really just am listening all the time
to the way people talk.
And things drift off in completion in words.
I mean, I really do love the way people talk to each other.
That interests me a lot, just to be alert.
So I'm sort of recording, but I don't ever
think I'm part of some movement at all.
I wish I did, but I don't.
I guess, in narrative is something
that would be structured and thought about and created
in, say, a novel' or through the essay or something like that.
But in poetry, that's just sort of a contemporary vibe, right?
You can kind of meander.
You don't have to structure in the same way you would
a fictional narrative or a non-fictional narrative,
something like that.
But, I mean-- so those are very different modes, I guess.
They are.
But even in my fiction, I was very strange.
So I think structure--
cramming things into a structure has never
been the way I worked anyway.
And I never had a--
I only have a high school degree, and I don't have--
I never had workshops or anything.
So it's just a wild thing, just is write.
[LAUGHS]
I imagine you've been through many Q&As.
Is there a question you long to be asked that nobody's ever
come up with?
Do you want a drink?
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
That's my question.
Do you want a drink?
[LAUGHTER]
Yes.
Hi.
I had the privilege of hearing you read at UC Berkeley,
I think, maybe like six years ago now.
Right.
Lyn Hejinian introduced me.
Yeah.
And I asked you then if you thought there was a--
if you would talk about it or if you thought
there was a correlation between certitude and evil.
And you said, yes, there is.
I think one makes the other.
So to sort of piggyback on that, I've
been thinking a lot lately about Keats' notion
of negative capability and not irritably grasping
after fact and reason and maybe that it's
reaching for certitude and--
I guess I don't have a real question.
But I wonder if you have anything
to say about any of that.
I think I still believe the same thing,
that the dangerous people are the ones who
are full of certainty.
But I'm sure a million people have said that too.
And the Keats thing reminds me a little bit of the way
I'm thinking now about failure.
And so now there's a negative thing, not as
a negative part of the world but as
something very real and kind of has its own honor.
Beckett has a favorite quote of mine about failure.
"Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better."
Yeah, there we are.
[LAUGHTER]
So since this idea of failure is coming back up again
and the concept of the beauty of failure--
and I'm sitting here thinking about how long you
have written, all you have written,
and with the idea of beauty of failure.
But then I got to think of, now, what will she
be writing next and in the future, and the beauty--
the idea of the concept of the beauty of failure
to what you will be writing.
And then I got back to the present,
since you mentioned that, and this whole idea of the beauty
of failure in your writing and how
you deal with that, what you think
about your own writing in those terms, the beauty of failure,
the beauty of it, the failure of it, how they go together--
just some thoughts on that.
Well, partly because I've just begun
to think about this kind of failure
as a real interesting phenomenon,
not being a loser but--
No, no.
No-- something else, sort of like entropy.
I mean, it's built-in failure.
And so I do--
I guess partly because of aging--
and let's just face it, you do begin to fail.
And so I'm seeing it now more.
I'm more aware of it in gestures and in what
happens around me and politically
and everywhere, that there is this phenomenon of failure,
which is good when-- it often is very good to see it happen,
because, in a way, if nothing works, then what a relief.
Nothing works.
[LAUGHS]
So when we write--
I'll just put it in the "we" now.
When we write and when we fail, there can still
be a beauty in that, I think, and I'm
thinking that that's kind of what you're referring to.
But I'm also knowing that you're referring
to the old traumas, the things that have happened previously.
And I heard you say that we can never quite get over that,
and I agree.
But we try.
We try so hard.
But there is beauty in that failure
of not being able to get over that
or not being able to write what we would love to write
or what we think would be wonderful to write
or what would really make us happy to write.
But there's happiness in this.
I heard you say that.
Yeah, no, there is.
There is.
There's happiness just, first of all, being alive at all.
But then I think the trauma thing is very interesting
because most people have one central thing that
happens in their life, and everything after that
is swirling around it.
And it's very-- you can't ever resolve that, whatever it was,
that event.
And so you're like in a tide pool forever,
knocking up against the same things over and over again.
But then it begins to form its own order around that,
and that's sort of powerful to realize
that that's what's happened.
So then that hole or that space there becomes--
has its own mystery and force us.
And rather than trying to solve it endlessly, just let it be.
Let everything take shape around it.
I think we have time for just one more question.
Who's it going to be?
I have a question about the book cover on your latest book,
Come and See, because I know you had control over that.
Can you kind of just talk about that process
and how you came up with this concept?
And I'm just really interested in the way that you shaped it,
and it's really beautiful and perfect, I think.
It's an incredible picture.
Well, I was at a place in Italy, a retreat for artists,
and this young woman was there who
does video installation and all kinds of installations
all over South East Asia.
And she's very well known there.
And she showed us on a video, and I saw this, and I said,
it just says it all for me.
And so I asked her if I could have it for the cover.
And then it became so prominent as an image of--
well, each of those little dangling things
are pieces of glass with blood in them
from the people she was staying with in Cuba.
It's a very-- got deep political message in it.
But for me, it also is kind of beautiful
because it's the bad suspended like that.
It's so weird and surreal.
So I was hoping to hit that note in the book.
Yeah.
Fanny, thank you so much for talking with us tonight.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Thanks.
Great questions.
And thank you.
Thank you, all, for your--
each of you had really, really great questions.
You were a fabulous audience tonight.
And please, come back tomorrow, 7 o'clock, and hear Fanny read.
And buy a book tonight.
She'll be happy to sign.
OK, see you soon.