G.C. thank you so much for that reading.
Do you want to do the Q&A?
We have a few minutes for a short Q&A. Does anyone
have a question?
And if you have a question speak into the mic
so it gets onto the recording.
Which will only make everyone more self-conscious,
but that's fine.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm here.
I'm live.
[LAUGHTER]
Ask me about lycans, medieval theology.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah.
Thank you for that reading.
It was lovely.
I was wondering when you were working collaboratively
with John what happened to the poems
that you were writing by yourself?
Were there any poems?
Not to separate them, but I was just curious
what happened to that process in that place with yourself?
Well, like most of us who teach, I mean,
there are some people who can write poetry while they teach--
In Joshua's case, he doesn't really
write poetry while he teaches.
He teaches while writing poetry, which
is beautiful and different.
I was discovering I couldn't write much while teaching,
and it was really painful.
All of my energy, psychic energy,
was being drawn to my students, which sounds beautiful
until you're in that position.
[LAUGHTER]
And then you feel like there's something vampiric happening
in the world that you have no control over.
And John felt the same way.
So in some ways, the project was--
we told everyone we weren't writing.
I mean, because in the sense of writing our own work
and our usual process, we weren't writing.
We weren't writing anything.
I think I wrote maybe eight poems of my own
in that 16 months that were separate from this.
It almost felt like not writing.
Most poets either write early in the morning or late at night,
the studies show.
And apparently there's sound neurological reason for this.
It has to do with chemicals in the brain and something else.
But I'm a night writer.
I write from 9:00 to 1:00, 9:00 to 2:00, usually.
And he's an early morning writer.
And so we switched it up.
He would come home from work--
children, children, children, wife, wife, wife, bed.
And then he would read what was on the computer from me,
and he would write back.
And I would wake up in the morning-- coffee, coffee,
coffee.
[LAUGHTER]
And then I would read his poems, and write back.
And because it wasn't the way we normally did it,
I actually don't have a lot of memory of writing some of mine.
[LAUGHTER]
When we were revising, which was much harder
than the actual writing, there was one time
that I really kept pushing against one poem.
And I wanted to make changes in it.
And then I really wanted it out.
And he kept saying, "OK, OK."
And I said, finally I said, "Well,
you're really not defending this poem."
He said, "Dude--" quote, unquote--
"why would I defend it?
It's your poem.
If you don't want it, chuck it."
[LAUGHTER]
And I didn't remember that it was my poem.
[LAUGHTER]
So the answer, I mean, the answer
is, we didn't write much else.
But we wouldn't have anyway.
We would have just felt cruddy about not writing.
And this way something was happening almost
without any effort.
The hardest thing for an artist or a poet
is to make up something new out of whole cloth.
You all know that.
Most of you have experienced what
it's like to stare at a blank sheet of paper, and think,
I'm going aphasic.
I have no talent.
I have no imagination.
I should be working for the Postal Service.
[LAUGHTER]
You think these things.
And apologies to anyone who's working for the Postal Service.
Put the gun down.
But I didn't have to during this time,
because every time I'd have another poem.
And all I had to do was write a response to that poem.
And that was also very beautiful--
to keep that chain of art going in a way that was sustaining,
not having to start over again.
But not writing, you said that it wasn't a constraint.
I don't think we did much writing separately.
I mean, again, I know I did almost none.
And I don't think he did much either.
Another question?
You mentioned rules when you were in collaborating.
And I was just wondering, did you start with a set of rules?
Mm-mm.
Or, did they just come about naturally?
And how many did you end up having?
Well, they came and went, because John and I
share a quality.
We don't share many qualities, but we're poets,
we're men of a certain age.
We're in their 40s.
But we're easily bored with our own work
and with other people's, too.
So we changed them up.
Originally, the way this started is
John as a gesture of wanting to be friendlier with me,
he was sending emails to me talking about poetics.
Talking about in a prose in a reasonable way about how
and why we do what we do.
Well, I had just had a friendship
that self-destructed with another poet,
because our conversations about poetics went to a place
where she didn't want it to go.
So I was not about to answer these emails.
[LAUGHTER]
I was like, no.
I want you to--
"Stay my-- Please stay, my friend."
And so I didn't do that.
So I started writing back poems as answers to his emails
about poetics.
And then he got really profoundly annoyed.
And he wrote some poems back to those poems.
And we did that for about a week or so
in annoyance with each other.
And then, suddenly, he said, "Should we do this?"
And I had just come off of two or three
also failed collaborations.
I had wanted to collaborate with another poet,
but just because you're friends with someone
doesn't mean you work the same way with them artistically.
And those collaborations at all failed for different reasons.
And so this time it didn't fail.
But the rules just came--
we would every now and then we would suggest one
to each other.
And then we would do it for a while.
The rules were made up as we went along.
We were already doing the thing with the words in the title
almost rule-like before we decided, hey,
look what we're doing.
Let's make it a rule for a little while
until we're bored with that.
Can I ask what you're working on now?
What am I working on now?
I don't really know.
I was in the process of writing a book when
the collaboration interrupted and going
back to that was really hard, because I
was almost two years older and had
all these other experiences.
So I finished that book, which may actually
be two books in August and sent it off to my publisher--
and have no idea what they think.
I had a residency at the MacDowell Colony
in July and August, and spent a lot of time
thinking about lycans, and reading
the work of Gennady Aygi, the Russian poet, and RS Thomas,
who's a Welsh poet, and writing really short poems that I
think are homages to them.
I don't know what-- as I told that Penn State grad student,
I don't know what they're doing yet.
But I'll need some years to figure that out.
OK, one more question.
Where or what do you draw most of your inspiration
to write from?
I wish I could say my dreams.
My dreams are really boring.
And mostly like being trapped in a doctor's office waiting
room for years
[LAUGHTER]
Scraps of language I overhear.
A lot of the time, scraps, little scraps of language,
Eavesdropping.
A few words here and there that have a shine to them.
Yeah, that's usually where I get things from.
And I just start playing around with them,
and they suggest something else.
And then we go from there.
The language is, it's older than we are.
And it's bigger than we are.
And it's smarter than we are.
And sometimes you can do worse than trust
the language to show you where to go has been my experience.
It's a hard one to learn.
Thank you all, again.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]
Thank you all for coming.
Stick around, buy some books, get them signed.
And you can actually check our spring reading series
on our website.
We've published it.
Thanks.