OK, I have a question for staff.
So, some of my personal favorite poems of yours,
are the poems that contain the story.
Maybe it's just the hint of a story,
but there might be characters or sense
of place, a significant change.
I love your poem that you read when
there were ghosts about reading, watching
films in smoky theaters in the Dallas--
beautiful poem.
And I know that you write prose, as well as poetry.
So I think you can answer this question, which
is, how does a poem tell a story in its own unique way?
What does it do with to a story.
That for example, a novel, or a television drama,
or a Hollywood blockbuster.
You know?
I think in some-- that's a good question.
It's a great question, because I do work in a variety of genres.
I think they all have different gifts
for the author, and different trials, and tribulations.
Because you're trying to decide how to best clothe your ideas.
For me poems, are about intensity.
They're about moment, and story is longer it goes from A to Z.
A poem goes from A to R, to M, It need not
follow the same sense of plot, but it can add up to a story,
and I think it does it by finding
strong, electric, sensibility, in the immediate moment
that you're reading it.
When my students asked me, "Professor Ríos,
where should the best line in a poem be?"
Science fiction writers say, "it should be at the end:
I woke up as if from a dream."
Journalists say, "it should be the first line, the hook line."
My answer is always the same, It better be the line I'm reading.
I don't think I ask that of prose.
Prose leads one line to the next in poem,
a line takes care of itself.
It may play well with others.
I want it to play well with others,
but if my poem falls on the ground,
and breaks into its lines.
I want each of those lines to be tough,
and be able to take care of itself--
go hunting with the wolves.
My line should be able to get a good job in another poem.
And prose doesn't work that way, prose is more plot based.
One thing, builds on another.
They're not all equal players.
So I think a poem is structured differently it.
It asks something of me, the writer,
differently in the moment.
And I have to be there for it.
Thank you, that was a great answer.
It was like a poem meets a comedy routine.
Often how I feel.
OK here's an audience question.
Has your bilingual language helped
challenge, or pave the road towards your poetry success?
And P.S. Thank you for your hard work.
Oh that's very kind.
I grew up in a household of cultures, of languages,
of foods.
My father was born in Tapachula in Chiapas,
in the border of Mexico.
And my father's sister is here tonight, my aunt Lily,
and uncle John.
I was the ring bearer at their wedding.
And they were the oldest members at my son's wedding
this summer.
My mother was born in Warrington,
Lancashire, England.
I look a lot more like my mother.
But we grew up on the border in Nogales,
in between geographies.
The border is a very special place.
We grew up in between languages--
we want to say English, and Spanish,
but there is no such thing.
Languages don't work that way.
They're much more complex.
One word does not corral a whole culture's ideas.
What I learned though, and how my sense of languages
has helped me understand how writing might work,
and how possibility, and imagination might work,
is very simple ultimately.
Different languages see the world in different ways.
And that's easy to say, but profound to understand,
and difficult to believe if you don't
speak more than one language.
I'm going to give you just a simple example.
If I go like this.
In English, I'd say I dropped the bottle.
I, capitalized front of the sentence.
Rugged individualism, and its smallest incarnation.
"I dropped!"
What was it this time?-- end of the sentence.
"Ah the bottle!"
Could have been the pen, what do I care?
Rugged individualism, encoded into language.
I did it.
That same moment, in a romance language and in Spanish,
for example.
Would be rendered completely differently.
I would say something like: "Don't look at me,
look at the bottle, we were both there.
The bottle-- it fell from me."
I don't-- maybe I did it, maybe the bottle did it?
It's rugged pluralism.
A sense that we're all in this together,
but what's more exciting about that
is that it suggests the possibility
of an inherent life in things.
I don't know if I am a agent of all action.
And so when I write, I think it's
that sensibility that infuses, how I go about telling a story.
With possibility, not with a sort of Romanesque, "I did it."
approach.
Which I think would be a little bit
damaging to my particular kind of work.
I'm excited to think that language can work that way.
If you've ever tried to learn a romance language,
the hardest thing is not the words,
it's those articles, la or el--
which is it?
And it doesn't matter, it's a little strange today
that we can talk-- that we don't talk about this very well,
but it's genderizing language, right?
Male and female--
But that's language alive with itself it.
Suggests that the world is fooling around
whether you like it or not.
They might be talking, and I don't even know it.
What do I know?
Making a date for later.
In English we emasculate language right?
It's the book, the bottle, and we are somehow
in charge of all things.
And I think that distinction for me,
growing up with both of those.
I'm not saying one is better than the other.
I'm not saying that at all.
But I am also saying that it doesn't have to be either, or.
And that's where we missed the boat.
It can be also end.
And for me to have both those language,
both those languages, triangulating me
toward a third place that joins them all,
has been very important to my work.
Thank you.
OK here's the next question.
Besides Nogales, are there other special geographical locations
you've read about?
That's a difficult question because I think they are--
I've used many other names, but the truth of it
is, that's the home of my imagination.
You know, where I grew up.
And the adventures that I had, the places that I went--
Coronado elementary school-- the Arroyo, the places
I wasn't supposed to go.
I can try to write them under other names,
but I think the truth of it-- and I have--
I worked Indianapolis into a poem once.
But it kind of wasn't true.
So there's an inherent regionalism,
but I think it's something else.
It's the person speaking who must speak
from what that person knows.
It's that simple.
You have so many awards and accomplishments.
But what do you want to be remembered for?
Well the awards and accomplishments of course.
I don't think it's a mystery.
I have a great teacher-ly instinct,
and for whatever it is that I may have written, and done.
I don't ever want it to have been simply performative.
I want it to have been meaningful,
and that somebody should carry something away from my work,
or something I've said, is what I want.
What is your earliest remembered interaction with poetry?
Oh that's easy, that's easy.
My earliest memory-- I got in trouble in second grade,
are you kidding?
I know right when the moment happened.
Poetry and writing, has so very little
to do with, pencil and paper.
It's an act of the imagination.
And we forget that, that's simply
its product, its daily guise.
When I was in second grade, I went
to Coronado elementary school, and I loved being in school.
So many kids we forget--
love being in school.
We're so busy talking about everybody
who doesn't like being in school,
and that they're bouncing-- when we got told about explorers
for example, I went to Coronado elementary school.
I know we've learned a lot of stuff since about explorers.
But at the time, it was still a broad brush.
I loved hearing that stuff.
And if you're a kid, and you hear about an explorer, what
do you think you want to do?
You want to explore, but you can't even
walk across the street without someone holding your hand.
So that kind of puts a crimp in your explorerly style.
But I remember listening to things in second grade,
and getting excited.
And we think about kids not behaving,
or you they're bouncing off the walls,
we want to blame it on sugar, and all these things.
Maybe it's knowledge.
That's an intriguing idea.
Kids don't know how else to react,
and to be told about an explorer,
and then be told that it's nap time.
Well I was a good student.
And because of my mother's language, to be honest,
in my particular sphere.
I got to be a good student.
It wasn't necessarily true, I could just speak English better
than a lot of my friends.
So I got done with homework faster in class.
But my class had large windows, and swear to God,
I would do all my homework, I was doing good.
But my teacher busted me, and called my parents into school.
For the egregious crime of daydreaming.
My parents-- this is mortifying in a Latino family.
The term maestro is a term of respect.
It has nothing to do with a school building,
it's anybody who teaches you anything.
And then a teacher at a school, that's like double.
So when my parents got called to school,
they went they sat down in the little second-grader chairs.
And Miss Lee, who I actually loved,
told my parents, she was glad they were there,
and my parents were worried.
They said, "well is something wrong?"
and she says, "Oh no, nothing's wrong."
"Has he not done something?"
I said, "no he's done everything."
"What's the problem?"
And Miss Lee said, "well..."
and then the big sigh, "he's been daydreaming."
My parents looked at her, and I was sitting
there I was hearing all this.
And they said "daydreaming?"
and she said, "yes, daydreaming."
and they said, "ah, daydreaming."
"OK, we'll take care of it. " And my parents went on to give
me one of the great gifts of my life.
I didn't know it at the moment, I
thought I was in total trouble.
We go outside, we get into the car, which in the 1950s--
do you remember cars--
remember the back seats?
Practically like a whole lounge back there.
And I had no seat belts either, you could just
like run back and forth.
With that knowledge, you acquired.
I was sitting there-- my brother wasn't with me,
because this was a special circumstance.
So I was there, and my parents didn't say a thing.
I thought they were just fuming, that I was going to get it
when I got home, and I was in so much trouble--
no dinner for me.
We get home, my mother cooks dinner, I get to have dinner.
We had a television set, which was a rarity back then,
it was a blond tin television set.
Who makes TV out of blond tin?
Nogales didn't have any television stations though,
so they only played Laurel and Hardy on a local translator.
So I thought, no Laurel and Hardy for me,
and the whole neighborhood used to come,
and gather in our house, when the TV came on.
But my mother let me have television watching time.
I thought, OK I'm going to get a talking to before bed,
I'll have bad dreams.
And nothing.
My parents never said a thing about it
Now they trusted that I would figure out that there
was nothing to be said.
Daydreaming.
This was their gift to me.
Now it took me 30 years to figure it out.
But I was not in trouble, but they needed me--
me to figure that out.
And that's how we did it,
Thank you.
And by the way, the tied to the question
was, that was the beginning of my writing.
Is to know that an act of the imagination is not wrong.
And I could live there--
I could be an explorer there.
That's where I could go, that's where
I could take everything I was learning,
and do something with it.
And that was the beginning of my writing.
OK one more question.
I made a promise to both Tyler, and an audience member
to end sort of on time.
When you wore your dangerous shirt, where did you go?
So I have a poem called, The Dangerous Shirt,
and it's the title of the last book of poems.
And it's just about having ironed a shirt,
and how dangerous that is, because If you iron your shirt,
you got to wear it.
And if you wear it, you're going to go out.
And if you go out, you're going to get in trouble.
Good thing is, I don't iron.
I didn't go anywhere, I made it up.
That's my way of getting out of that.
So I don't know, I'm not myself familiar
with all the poet laureates of all the states in the union,
but I think you will probably all
agree with me after tonight.
We must have the best one.