[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Cathy.
OK, we have time for some questions, and we're, as usual,
recording this for VOCA, our audio-video library.
So if you have a question, just raise your hand,
and I will bring the mic to you.
If you can speak into the mic, that'd be great.
Hi.
So I've been really worried in my writing
lately about finding the right word,
and I noticed that your poems are so full of--
I don't know.
It's beautiful language, just beautiful words.
I'm wondering when you run across a word
that you really like or that really speaks to you,
do you keep track of things like that?
Or do you just remember or write down?
I mean, I'm jotting down words constantly, all the time.
I have just a vast storehouse, but it sounds
more organized than it is.
It's just in random notebooks, or it's just in Word docs
and so forth.
I was talking earlier today about random dictionaries
that I had, and I like reading dictionaries.
And so I jot them down, and then I
think that act of kind of writing down
words and free writing and kind of collaging in those words,
it just helps you.
And then when you're writing your poems,
a random word or phrase like "buck nun"
will suddenly appear in my mind, and a lot of it
is also influenced by sound, too.
And so that helps.
I mean, I tend to be more of a maximalist,
as you can see, with words.
I mean, of course, there are other poets--
say, someone like Louise Glück--
who's all about using as--
her craft is about having as limited a vocabulary as
possible and using what you can from that.
But I think it's always very important.
I mean, for me, it's always important to write down words.
Thanks.
You said when you were reading from the last section of Engine
Empire that the smart snow was a technical device
or something like that.
Could you say more about that, more about the snow
throughout that last section?
Oh yeah, I hesitate to--
I mean, I'll explain it to you, but I kind of
want it to be sort of ambiguous what the smart snow is,
because I want there to be kind of metaphorical possibilities
for the smart snow.
But I will tell you how I thought
of it, which was kind of dumb.
I mean, it was really obvious.
Someone inspired me.
Someone said, this woman, an artist, Suzanne Bocanegra--
she was commissioning these poets and artists to write
recipe poems, which is always fun,
so write a poem using the format of a recipe.
And so I was struggling to write this poem for her,
and I was doing research of--
maybe I'm giving too much away-- but smart dust.
And this is something that a lot of scientists and people
in the tech world have been inventing,
and these are basically motes that are sensors.
And they could go to, say, volcanic areas
and be able to get the temperature and so forth.
And so I was just sort of reading up on that,
and then there was a blizzard.
And I was like, smart snow.
So that was sort of my initial spark,
but I was kind of thinking about what would a ubicomp world
look like, basically where information or just media
is just everywhere.
It's just embedded all around us.
I mean, we're already kind of there.
But I wanted to have a kind of--
I didn't want it to be just so explicit,
so that was kind of sort some of the issues
that I was grappling with.
And also, I was thinking about James Joyce, "The Dead,"
in the last passage about the snow and how snow is falling,
and it's like, snow is falling in Ireland
and everywhere and everything.
And I was thinking about just sort
of the smart snow as a connective tissue
that kind of connects everyone together,
but how this sense of connection can also be burdensome.
So that was what was going through my mind.
So you mentioned that you wrote a poem when you went to Japan,
and now since you're in Tucson, you
think you'll write a poem about Tucson?
I got to write a poem about a Tucson toilet.
Toilets don't look that different here
than they do in New York.
Yeah, I will.
I mean, I love the--
I mean, I'm actually really inspired by the desert.
I come from LA, so I mean, the desert
is something that's always in my mind.
So I went this afternoon.
We went to the desert, and it was just really beautiful.
So maybe I'll write a cactus poem
or some poem that sort of inhabits the Arizona landscape.
So in your poems, you use a lot of words
that are from different-- or specifically in Dance Dance
Revolution use words that are from different languages
that your readers might not necessarily
know how to read properly.
So what do you do to ensure that your readers will read it well,
like get the right sound out of it or the right [INAUDIBLE]??
I mean, I don't care.
Yeah, I think that it's really up to you,
whatever sound you get from it.
And I didn't initially think of it this way.
I think when I started writing it, I was just writing it.
I wasn't thinking about readers at all.
But once it was actually out there,
I think it kind of needs to be read out loud.
I mean, that's what people have told me,
that you have to read it out loud in order
to make any sense of it.
And I really like that idea, that people are reading it
out loud, and they all have very different ways of reading it.
And I welcome that, and I'm totally open to it.
I mean, it's a book of mispronunciations,
so you should mispronunciate as much as possible.
And in fact, I think even the way
that I read it is not always-- it's not consistent.
It's changed throughout, because this came out in 2007.
And I've told people this before.
I heard the voice in my head, but I never
actually read it out loud while I was writing it.
And so when it actually came out and I
was asked to do these readings, I
was petrified because I was like, I don't know
how I'm going to read this.
So I think I read in terrible, I mean, accents before.
I think it was Rastafarian, Irish.
Who knows?
So it's definitely morphed.
It's definitely morphed.
And the way I'm reading it now might change again five years
from now.
And I've heard people say--
different people have said, oh, it's not
how I imagined the voice to be.
I'm like, well, you should read it.
And I would love to do a rendition of Dance Dance
Revolution where I'm not reading, where
some other people are reading in the guide's voice
because I think that's more in the spirit of the book.
Sometimes, my husband likes to make fun of me
in the guy's voice.
This was when I was working revising it.
I was really frustrated by it.
But yeah, so does that answer your question?
Yeah?