Oh, now the awkward ugly part.
Can we just have a moment of silence, and then--
[LAUGHTER]
I think we have time for, just maybe, a few questions.
Let's prolong this
[LAUGHTER]
Really, that silence is where mystery comes from.
Yes, Mildred.
I missed the talk--
Mm-hmm.
--on the New York scene.
And I once studied with Kenneth Koch very briefly.
Oh, you did?
Oh, cool.
I knew some of the others, just tangentially.
Yeah.
I'm just catching up with Ashbery's Gifts.
Would you say any way in which your work
has been influenced by them?
Or maybe you said it already, but of course I wasn't here.
I think I implied it, but I'm not sure I said explicitly
what was--
and I avoided talking about Ashbery,
for all sorts of reasons.
Not that I don't like his work, I do, but.
Well-- somebody--
George Sheldon said something really wonderful
at dinner, where we were talking about when I came here.
And I had a large group of poems,
when I came here, that were in the voices of characters
on pinball machines.
And they-- John Anderson, who was my first teacher here,
was doing this thing in his workshop
where he asked us to bring in 10 poems,
and we would spend half of the workshop, one day,
dealing with them.
People would write a bunch of things about them.
And I got pretty trashed by the workshop.
People really hated the poems.
And George said-- at dinner, that he
said-- he felt like that those poems actually
have a lot more to do with what I'm doing now than the work
that I started to do after I got trashed.
That George felt like I had--
the people that-- what was--
George where are you?
What was the word you used?
Verbal texture.
Yeah, well-- yeah, the poems but what did they--
I started-- I became earnest,
Oh, really?
I think.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I became earnest for a while.
So, yeah, so my project was earnestness for a couple
of books there.
And you know, I'm not sorry about that, that's good,
you know.
And I was teaching myself some things.
And maybe earnestness is not quite the right word for it.
It's a certain kind of seriousness, weight,
which was in me, but there was also
this other thing, which was more comic and more about the moment
than about a kind of retrospective look at the past.
So the New York School, when I finally came to them,
which was later than, probably, a lot of other people
in my generation--
because they were not people that I read, initially--
when I came to them, they were huge.
And Koch, for me--
they returned me to that thing that I had been doing before.
And Koch, for me, his late book, New Addresses,
is just a magnificent book.
It's one of the--
I heartily recommend it.
If you had one book to buy in the last 15 or 20
years of poetry, that would be one
of the ones-- that would be a desert island book for me.
It's just full of life.
And Koch was one of those people who said "yes," over and over
again, in his poems.
That's a great thing.
So not so much in the new work, but in otherwise-- elsewhere
you have a lot of interrogation.
You ask a lot of questions, and you also use "we" a lot.
So who's included in those questions?
Who is excluded from your "we?"
You are excluded
[LAUGHTER]
I am forgiving you for everything.
Everybody.
I guess I hadn't noticed that-- the "we."
I think, for me, I know what you mean.
But, for me, the way that begins in my poetry is simply,
I'm reading somebody's poems that have a lot of "we"
narrational strategy, narrating from a first person plural.
And and I just decide I'm interested in trying to do that
and see what happens.
I don't know if it has any sort of meaning.
I'm sure it does.
But, yeah, interrogation-- self-interrogation,
self-confrontation, those are things
that have been in my work for quite a while.
You don't think they're in the new poems-- that's interesting.
Well, in the couple you read, you're not saying we,
and you don't have the question that drives the poem a lot,
otherwise, elsewhere.
Yeah, maybe they're less about arguments
and they're more lyric in some way.
Even when they're meditative, they're driven by music,
and they're not trying to present a problem or an issue.
Hm, it's a little hard for me to tell.
I think-- I suppose, also, I'm not interested in confession
exactly, in my poems, and not interested
at all in confession.
And as I was saying in class the other day,
a whole lot of what appears to be a moment
or occasion that the poem is centered on
is actually sort of fabricated, for the purposes of the poem.
It doesn't mean that didn't happen in my life,
but there's a lot of invention, I think, that goes around it.
So I'm not-- so maybe the "we" is a way of displacing the "I"
into something broader, and also of not making it so much
about my guilt, or my sins, or my problems, or trouble,
whatever, but, sort of, something that's
shared as a human, in some way.
Hi, I was wondering what attracts
you to incorporate images or allusions to American pop
milieu?
How do you think that serves your poems?
Or why do you tend to incorporate
Scarlett Johansson, or Gore-Tex, or things like that?
Yeah, I'm a shallow person.
[LAUGHTER]
That's my life.
I couldn't exclude it if I wanted to.
I try to, at times, just as a kind of exercise--
write a poem without a lot of this stuff in it.
And I don't seem to be able to do it.
I need that social texture.
I was on my way to being an anthropologist,
and I got derailed, and I ended up here, which is great.
But I think I've always had this interest in--
I was a kid who was very--
by eighth grade, very politically aware.
It was 1968, so it was a good moment to be politically aware.
But I was very--
I was a kid who was interested in the news, for instance.
And I love American culture.
There's a part of it that I don't love,
but I love a lot of it.
And I think, for me, one of the struggles for my work
has been to celebrate things.
Because I think, by nature, I'm a fairly fatalistic, cynical
person, right?
So one of the projects for me, as a poet--
it's a difficult thing to navigate
because I think if you try to do it too self-consciously,
you can't do it in a way that's healthy.
And not healthy for you or the poems.
But I think one of the projects is
that Koch thing-- saying yes.
And so for me, saying yes to certain things in the culture
that are part of our texture-- and also, I really--
we were talking about this yesterday in class, right?
That is the backdrop of our lives,
and the way in which we receive that stuff, through media,
is increasingly where we live.
So I want to say, I'm of a generation of poets that
is very interested in saying something about where we live,
and how we live, at this moment, and that
learned from certain historically conscious poets--
Eastern European poets.
Like Milosz, Transtromer, Adam Zagajewski, Zbiegniew Herbert,
Wislawa Szymborska--
it's great that I've actually learned how to pronounce
those, pretty impressive--
and also Seamus Heaney.
That was part of my coming of age as a poet,
especially when I returned back east.
It was just a very big thing in Boston and New York,
and Heaney was around at that point.
And so, yeah, it became part of my--
and figuring out a way to do that.
But again, this sort of purity, impurity thing is--
if you go there, where's the mystery?
If you go to those sources in the culture and that texture--
if you go to Scarlett Johansson, and in Gore-Tex land,
where is the--
I mean, believe there's a mystery, a daily mystery,
and you can't fabricate the mystery--
I can't fabricate the mystery in my poems
by excluding that stuff.
So if I'm going to get to the mystery,
that's the way I've got to get to it.
Yeah.
Anybody else?
Wendy had a-- did you want to?
No?
No, OK.
Vic has a--
Do the Cambridge ladies actually live
in [INAUDIBLE] They do and he was so right about that.
Well, some of them do.
Yeah, there's still some of them left.
It's really an astounding thing.
They're still there.
I love it, actually.
I hope-- they're getting quite old--
like all of us, they're getting quite old.
[LAUGHS] Enough?
Yeah.
Well, thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]