WEBVTT

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Oh, now the awkward ugly part.

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Can we just have a moment
of silence, and then--

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[LAUGHTER]

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I think we have time for,
just maybe, a few questions.

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Let's prolong this

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[LAUGHTER]

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Really, that silence is
where mystery comes from.

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Yes, Mildred.

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I missed the talk--

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Mm-hmm.

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--on the New York scene.

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And I once studied with
Kenneth Koch very briefly.

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Oh, you did?

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Oh, cool.

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I knew some of the
others, just tangentially.

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Yeah.

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I'm just catching up
with Ashbery's Gifts.

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Would you say any way
in which your work

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has been influenced by them?

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Or maybe you said it already,
but of course I wasn't here.

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I think I implied it, but I'm
not sure I said explicitly

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what was--

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and I avoided talking
about Ashbery,

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for all sorts of reasons.

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Not that I don't like
his work, I do, but.

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Well-- somebody--

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George Sheldon said
something really wonderful

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at dinner, where we were
talking about when I came here.

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And I had a large
group of poems,

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when I came here, that were
in the voices of characters

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on pinball machines.

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And they-- John Anderson, who
was my first teacher here,

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was doing this thing
in his workshop

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where he asked us to
bring in 10 poems,

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and we would spend half
of the workshop, one day,

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dealing with them.

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People would write a bunch
of things about them.

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And I got pretty
trashed by the workshop.

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People really hated the poems.

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And George said--
at dinner, that he

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said-- he felt like that
those poems actually

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have a lot more to do with what
I'm doing now than the work

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that I started to do
after I got trashed.

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That George felt like I had--

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the people that-- what was--

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George where are you?

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What was the word you used?

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Verbal texture.

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Yeah, well-- yeah, the
poems but what did they--

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I started-- I became earnest,

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Oh, really?

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I think.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah, I became
earnest for a while.

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So, yeah, so my project was
earnestness for a couple

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of books there.

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And you know, I'm not sorry
about that, that's good,

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you know.

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And I was teaching
myself some things.

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And maybe earnestness is not
quite the right word for it.

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It's a certain kind of
seriousness, weight,

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which was in me,
but there was also

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this other thing, which was more
comic and more about the moment

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than about a kind of
retrospective look at the past.

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So the New York School,
when I finally came to them,

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which was later than,
probably, a lot of other people

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in my generation--

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because they were not people
that I read, initially--

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when I came to them,
they were huge.

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And Koch, for me--

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they returned me to that thing
that I had been doing before.

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And Koch, for me, his
late book, New Addresses,

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is just a magnificent book.

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It's one of the--

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I heartily recommend it.

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If you had one book to
buy in the last 15 or 20

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years of poetry,
that would be one

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of the ones-- that would be
a desert island book for me.

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It's just full of life.

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And Koch was one of those people
who said "yes," over and over

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again, in his poems.

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That's a great thing.

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So not so much in the new work,
but in otherwise-- elsewhere

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you have a lot of interrogation.

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You ask a lot of questions,
and you also use "we" a lot.

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So who's included
in those questions?

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Who is excluded from your "we?"

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You are excluded

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[LAUGHTER]

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I am forgiving you
for everything.

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Everybody.

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I guess I hadn't
noticed that-- the "we."

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I think, for me, I
know what you mean.

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But, for me, the way that
begins in my poetry is simply,

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I'm reading somebody's poems
that have a lot of "we"

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narrational strategy, narrating
from a first person plural.

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And and I just decide I'm
interested in trying to do that

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and see what happens.

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I don't know if it has
any sort of meaning.

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I'm sure it does.

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But, yeah, interrogation--
self-interrogation,

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self-confrontation,
those are things

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that have been in my
work for quite a while.

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You don't think they're in the
new poems-- that's interesting.

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Well, in the couple you
read, you're not saying we,

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and you don't have the question
that drives the poem a lot,

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otherwise, elsewhere.

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Yeah, maybe they're
less about arguments

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and they're more
lyric in some way.

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Even when they're meditative,
they're driven by music,

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and they're not trying to
present a problem or an issue.

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Hm, it's a little
hard for me to tell.

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I think-- I suppose, also, I'm
not interested in confession

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exactly, in my poems,
and not interested

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at all in confession.

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And as I was saying in
class the other day,

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a whole lot of what
appears to be a moment

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or occasion that the
poem is centered on

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is actually sort of fabricated,
for the purposes of the poem.

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It doesn't mean that
didn't happen in my life,

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but there's a lot of invention,
I think, that goes around it.

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So I'm not-- so maybe the "we"
is a way of displacing the "I"

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into something broader, and
also of not making it so much

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about my guilt, or my sins,
or my problems, or trouble,

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whatever, but, sort
of, something that's

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shared as a human, in some way.

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Hi, I was wondering
what attracts

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you to incorporate images
or allusions to American pop

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milieu?

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How do you think that
serves your poems?

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Or why do you tend
to incorporate

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Scarlett Johansson, or
Gore-Tex, or things like that?

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Yeah, I'm a shallow person.

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[LAUGHTER]

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That's my life.

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I couldn't exclude
it if I wanted to.

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I try to, at times, just
as a kind of exercise--

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write a poem without a
lot of this stuff in it.

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And I don't seem to
be able to do it.

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I need that social texture.

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I was on my way to
being an anthropologist,

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and I got derailed, and I
ended up here, which is great.

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But I think I've always
had this interest in--

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I was a kid who was very--

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by eighth grade, very
politically aware.

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It was 1968, so it was a good
moment to be politically aware.

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But I was very--

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I was a kid who was interested
in the news, for instance.

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And I love American culture.

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There's a part of it
that I don't love,

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but I love a lot of it.

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And I think, for me, one of
the struggles for my work

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has been to celebrate things.

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Because I think, by nature, I'm
a fairly fatalistic, cynical

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person, right?

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So one of the projects
for me, as a poet--

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it's a difficult
thing to navigate

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because I think if you try to
do it too self-consciously,

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you can't do it in a
way that's healthy.

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And not healthy for
you or the poems.

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But I think one
of the projects is

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that Koch thing-- saying yes.

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And so for me, saying yes to
certain things in the culture

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that are part of our
texture-- and also, I really--

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we were talking about this
yesterday in class, right?

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That is the backdrop
of our lives,

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and the way in which we receive
that stuff, through media,

00:08:27.790 --> 00:08:30.580 align:middle line:90%
is increasingly where we live.

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So I want to say, I'm of
a generation of poets that

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is very interested in saying
something about where we live,

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and how we live, at
this moment, and that

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learned from certain
historically conscious poets--

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Eastern European poets.

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Like Milosz, Transtromer, Adam
Zagajewski, Zbiegniew Herbert,

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Wislawa Szymborska--

00:08:57.730 --> 00:08:59.980 align:middle line:84%
it's great that I've actually
learned how to pronounce

00:08:59.980 --> 00:09:02.650 align:middle line:90%
those, pretty impressive--

00:09:02.650 --> 00:09:05.470 align:middle line:90%
and also Seamus Heaney.

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That was part of my
coming of age as a poet,

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especially when I
returned back east.

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It was just a very big thing
in Boston and New York,

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and Heaney was
around at that point.

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And so, yeah, it
became part of my--

00:09:22.396 --> 00:09:25.130 align:middle line:84%
and figuring out
a way to do that.

00:09:25.130 --> 00:09:30.070 align:middle line:84%
But again, this sort of
purity, impurity thing is--

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if you go there,
where's the mystery?

00:09:32.950 --> 00:09:37.330 align:middle line:84%
If you go to those sources in
the culture and that texture--

00:09:37.330 --> 00:09:43.510 align:middle line:84%
if you go to Scarlett
Johansson, and in Gore-Tex land,

00:09:43.510 --> 00:09:44.210 align:middle line:90%
where is the--

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I mean, believe there's a
mystery, a daily mystery,

00:09:47.000 --> 00:09:49.330 align:middle line:84%
and you can't
fabricate the mystery--

00:09:49.330 --> 00:09:51.370 align:middle line:84%
I can't fabricate the
mystery in my poems

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by excluding that stuff.

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So if I'm going to
get to the mystery,

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that's the way I've
got to get to it.

00:10:01.330 --> 00:10:03.160 align:middle line:90%
Yeah.

00:10:03.160 --> 00:10:03.790 align:middle line:90%
Anybody else?

00:10:03.790 --> 00:10:05.690 align:middle line:90%
Wendy had a-- did you want to?

00:10:05.690 --> 00:10:06.190 align:middle line:90%
No?

00:10:06.190 --> 00:10:07.260 align:middle line:90%
No, OK.

00:10:07.260 --> 00:10:10.160 align:middle line:90%


00:10:10.160 --> 00:10:11.384 align:middle line:90%
Vic has a--

00:10:11.384 --> 00:10:15.180 align:middle line:90%


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Do the Cambridge
ladies actually live

00:10:17.550 --> 00:10:23.370 align:middle line:84%
in [INAUDIBLE] They do and
he was so right about that.

00:10:23.370 --> 00:10:24.700 align:middle line:90%
Well, some of them do.

00:10:24.700 --> 00:10:26.520 align:middle line:84%
Yeah, there's still
some of them left.

00:10:26.520 --> 00:10:28.740 align:middle line:90%
It's really an astounding thing.

00:10:28.740 --> 00:10:29.880 align:middle line:90%
They're still there.

00:10:29.880 --> 00:10:32.010 align:middle line:90%
I love it, actually.

00:10:32.010 --> 00:10:34.130 align:middle line:84%
I hope-- they're
getting quite old--

00:10:34.130 --> 00:10:35.880 align:middle line:84%
like all of us, they're
getting quite old.

00:10:35.880 --> 00:10:39.490 align:middle line:90%
[LAUGHS] Enough?

00:10:39.490 --> 00:10:39.990 align:middle line:90%
Yeah.

00:10:39.990 --> 00:10:40.990 align:middle line:90%
Well, thank you so much.

00:10:40.990 --> 00:10:42.800 align:middle line:90%
[APPLAUSE]

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