[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Can we just--
Yeah.
Do we-- what's the--
Marie, would you like to take a few questions
from the audience?
I'd like a few answers from the audience.
[LAUGHTER]
Does anybody have any answers?
Go ahead.
We need to have you so we can record it.
Yeah.
I don't have any answers, but I've always enjoyed-- well,
I enjoy your work, but I am particularly fascinated
with poem, "The Split."
Could you comment on it?
That's an old one.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, these guys don't know the poem.
Well, is there anyone in this room who ever felt split?
[LAUGHTER]
Yes!
I did too.
I mean, when I was a girl, I had an imaginary friend.
Anybody here have an imaginary friend?
Sure.
Right?
She was very bad.
She did terrible things.
[LAUGHTER]
She was.
And I think in order to become a writer,
I had to beckon her back and integrate her.
I mean, the great thing about living a long time--
and I hope to live for at least another 60 years-- is
that it gets better, right?
Integration occurs if you stay present to it and work at it,
you know?
So that's an old poem and she's an old friend, Brett.
And I'm glad you bring her up.
She's here now, actually.
Now that you mention it.
Soon as you brought her up, she's appeared in the room.
Glad she's here.
What is she doing?
[LAUGHTER]
She's shaking her fist at that woman, saying, "damn you!
Why'd you bring up that poem?"
[LAUGHTER]
We were talking today in the class about how poetry
is this great art that can--
it's a way.
There are many ways, you know?
Play a violin.
Make pots.
Build a house.
Heal people.
There's many, many ways where you
can move beyond the self you think you are, which is,
of course, so small, and I, I, I,
I. And poetry can hea-- it is an act of transformation.
Jane so beautifully said that through writing
into what you don't know what you're doing, this--
it's a great, deeply unconsciously transformative
art, you know?
It's-- and saved my life, you know.
So when you bring out the split, I'm rocked kind of back
to the beginnings when all those parts of the self are still--
they've been exiled, you know.
And it seems like our job, maybe just as humans,
is to say, come home.
Come home, everybody.
The thief, the liar, the scared girl, the nervous girl--
whoever.
Come on home, you know.
It's OK.
And that poem is the beginning, the first attempt at that,
I think.
Anybody else?
Yeah?
It's the internal architecture of my life.
Not the Catholic church--
I have very little relationship with the Catholic Church--
but with these stories.
It's a big difference.
You know, because when people--
Louise Gluck has a relationship with the Greek myths, you know,
and I have a relationship with these stories.
They may mean, quite literally, the world to me.
They are the stories through which I can help.
Like some people, now there's-- who's the guy today in class,
Middle Earth, you know?
I mean they're mythic stories.
They're huge, big, roomy stories.
The Jews, of course, know that the stories are never finished.
They believe in Midrash so that you--
the imagination works with the Torah
and continues to write it.
And I believe that about these stories.
So as a girl, I was very lucky.
I went to a wonderful school and had brilliant nuns.
All of them had advanced degrees and they
were more radical than we were.
And I was affiliated with the Catholic left in the '60s.
But I don't go to church.
And I wish the Catholic Church would give its money back
to the people of the Earth.
But my opinion of the Catholic church doesn't matter,
but the stories are eternal.
They're big.
They're long.
And every culture has stories like this, whatever they are--
the deep, unconscious stories.
You know, I mean the Quran shares so many
of these same stories.
The Greek myths, the African stories,
there's so many of these.
So it's at that level that they mean a great deal to me.
And I have to tell you, I was ashamed of that
for a long time.
I was embarrassed.
And the person that helped me be less embarrassed
was Jane Kenyon, the wonderful poet,
Jane Kenyon who is a friend.
You all know her poems?
The great, wonderful, Jane Kenyon.
She was unembarrassed by her relationship with these stories
and I felt liberated by that.
I was sneakily writing about them, but embarrassed.
And Jane really helped me kind of
come out of the closet about it, so bless her.
Such a great poet.
Anybody else?
One more question?
Down here.
I wonder if you have any interest in Keats'
notion of negative capability?
Completely.
The reason I ask is because you were talking Mary's annunciation
and her having this moment becoming
a part of whatever this thing is and a banishment of the self.
And though it wasn't a literary writing moment,
I want to associate those.
So I just wonder what you think about it.
Well, you all remember Keats talked
about negative capability, which is being
able to rest in uncertainty, without any irritable grasping
after--
Fact and reason.
--fact and reason, which is what life asks of us.
Let's just say it, right?
Whenever we think we know the answer to something,
we're done for.
So that's something we talk about every day in classes
with writers and I, together working.
I mean, that's the hardest part about writing.
I don't really think writing is self-expression, you know.
I think it's some other--
a way of being in deep receptivity to something else.
It's a way, again.
It's a path.
It's a gate.
It's a way.
And negative capability is the only way
to walk through that way.
What else can you do?
I don't know.
If you're certain, there's nothing to be learned.
Robert Frost, the great Robert Frost,
a poet who deeply influences me and who I adore,
said, you know, "no surprise for the writer,
no surprise for the reader.
No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader."
And Auden said that great thing, if you
think what you're doing, then--
You're doing it wrong.
--you're doing it wrong.
You're lost.
[LAUGHTER]
So that's the good news.
We don't have to know what we're doing.
And when we do--
How can you tell if you're doing it right?
We never know.
We serve-- that's what we do.
But I can't-- I really want to thank you.
You're an extraordinary audience here, group of people,
and I'm so glad to have been with you.
Thank you so much for coming out tonight.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Marie.
Thank you every--