Thank you C.D. For that reading.
I just was wondering, having read your work
for so long myself and just looking at the way
you use investigative poetics--
just kind of to use that term-- in different places
and geographies.
I'm curious with this because it was about a person in a way.
Right.
But also a space and a time and events in the way--
How did that change your experience
of writing the poem length, text,
the character of the person?
I noticed a lot of humor--
Right.
--which exists in your text anyway.
But it seems somewhat different.
I wonder if it's informed by the person.
And how?
Well, she was killingly funny.
I mean a lot of the things I put in there were invented.
Not all of them, but some of them were invented.
But they were very--
I knew her humor pretty well.
And I don't know how it was different.
It was just--
I wanted to write about her.
I always wanted to write about her.
I did write one little piece about her that ended up
in a book called Cooling Time.
But I always wanted to write more about her
because she was so riveting.
Even at her worst, she was so riveting.
And she was very aware of her failings.
I don't know how it was different.
It was just-- the person was what I went after,
and then the person had a context
that was very relevant to that place and that time.
And I guess I also wanted to write
my footnote to civil rights.
There's a very elegant canon of literature,
very beautiful canon of literature,
and I enjoyed getting in there when I was working on this.
So this is just a poet dealing with it.
It's just, I didn't want to be afraid to deal with it just
because it had already been dealt with so well [CHUCKLES]
by others--
people who had real credentials.
This person back here.
I hope this is going to break the ice
and ask why you chose the icon of Dear Abby to write about.
Well, because this was a very located piece of work
and located in time and geography.
And I thought giving things like food prices,
and passages from the Dear Abby column
were very telling about that time, and the kinds of food
that people ate in the Delta then.
Somehow, I thought that they really gave a lot of color
to it, the situation, the circumstance, and the way
people thought then.
Dear Abby was considered rather progressive,
to have a lot of insight.
So that's why, and also because I found them so hilarious.
It was absurd.
So I spent some time reading.
That town actually still has a daily newspaper,
which very few small towns still have a daily.
And so, it's a pretty good record
of what was going on there every day.
So the events of the time, even though they were very skewed,
of course, were unfolding in real time in that paper.
I was also reading the commercial appeal
and the Memphis main papers and the Little Rock main papers,
of which both of them had two main city papers--
rival city papers.
But I was reading that daily paper--
on microfiche.
It was miserable.
[LAUGHS]
C.D., over here.
What are you currently working on?
You know, I'm working on myself right now.
I mean, I have a project in the offing.
I'm going to write a book on a tree, which I always
wanted to write.
I love trees.
And it just fell into my lap.
It was offered to my husband first.
And he had so many projects going, he said, "Well,
why don't you ask me?"
And I said, "Yeah!"
I don't have anything going.
So I'm going to write a book on a tree.
At first, it was going to be on the Eastern Cedar
or the American Cedar tree.
I really love it, and there's one right outside my window.
But I ended up doing it on the Copper Beech, which
is, kind of, a snooty tree.
But it's local, and I can see them every day.
And I found more material and I think--
or I hope-- to find more.
Yes?
You may have to come out because I'm not sure we'll hear you,
sorry.
I guess I was just wondering if you
could speak a little bit about your process,
in particular the work that you've done that you
have interviewed people.
How'd you get from the interviews to--
I'm thinking of One Big Self, especially
in terms of what you read tonight--
Mm-hmm.
Seemed to say [INAUDIBLE] come out from interviews,
and so I was just wondering, how did you
get from a conversation with somebody to the poems?
How do you make decisions about how do you
change that, what gets left out, what
gets included and can help become a poem?
Well, she's asking about a process,
especially in a longer work, I take it--
which I've done a few of.
And where it involves talking to people,
it's really much more like visiting
than it is like an interview.
In my imagination, I'd love to be an investigative reporter,
though there's hardly any such animal anymore.
At least, if there is, they're not getting paid for it.
Not that you're getting paid for writing poetry.
People would probably pay you not to write poetry, but--
if they knew it existed, So--
or the threat it poses.
So really, it's very informal.
When I was working on the One Big Self prisoners of Louisiana
with Deborah Luster, she was making formal portraits.
And a certain amount of paperwork
had to be filled out-- waivers and everything
and was all self-selected, the inmates who were photographed.
And so, there was just a lot of set up and prep stuff.
And Debbie stayed very focused with the camera.
And so, I would just help do the paperwork,
help set up the backdrop because it was all
done outside in natural light and talk to people.
People were very eager to talk, especially
in a place like a prison, especially a maximum security
prison where they see people from the outside all the time.
But it's usually the same people over and over and over.
It's a limited number of players.
And so, they're eager to talk to somebody
else who's a stranger, who's not a missionary or a lawyer.
Though, at first, they hope you're
a missionary or a lawyer.
And then, they're, kind of, glad you're not
because then there's a different conversation to be had.
So it's very informal.
And it was a little harder in this town
because these events happened in 1969, a year
after King's death and 42 miles from where
King was assassinated.
So the whole Delta region, all the way
up and down the Mississippi River,
was just on fire, all these little towns.
And everything was very, very raw.
And that town didn't erupt as much as some towns did.
As far as I know, there were no deaths.
But there were some very brutal things that happened.
People now, even now, 40 years later, are still--
You bring it up and it comes very close to the surface.
It's very raw.
And so people were resistant to talking.
But I kept it very informal.
People blabber in the South.
It's like we just yammer away.
So sooner or later, somebody's going to start talking,
and it's going to lead to something else
and something else.
And at one point, I came very close to a very hot,
investigative situation where I found out
that someone had some videotapes in their attic
that had been left by their stepfather, who
had been the sheriff.
And they were of interrogations and they were way over the top.
And the guy didn't know what to do with them.
And he had called the town museum,
and they said, yeah, they'd like to have them.
And then he never brought them in.
And then I thought, I've got to go down there.
I've got to find this guy.
I've got to get these tapes.
And all my efforts, I didn't go down there for that.
And they couldn't get him to respond again
at the museum, which is barely a museum.
And I couldn't get him to answer the phone ever.
And I let it go.
It was like--
I don't know.
It felt outside of what I felt I could actually do
or knew how to do something with it.
Someone would know how to do it.
Yes?
Thank you for your reading, and--
Barbara, microphone.
All right.
I'm actually asking this question
because my daughter's too shy to but she wants
to know what V looked like.
And I wanted to thank you for dedicating this to Mary Cuddihy
and maybe tell us a little bit why you did that.
[CHUCKLES] Well, I haven't seen Mary in 12 years.
I was delighted to see Mary here.
And Mary's husband, Michael Cuddihy,
edited a very salient and significant and independent
literary magazine called Ironwood and also published
a series of books.
And it was one of the great thrills of my publishing life
to get to publish in Ironwood.
And during those years when I was beginning to publish,
I got to know Mary and Michael and so did
my husband, who worked for Mary and Michael for a while.
So it's great to see Mary again.
And she's one of a kind [LAUGHS] and just one of the great
people--
great people-- smart, funny.
There's a little of V in Mary--
smart, funny, wise, interesting, you know, incorrigible.
[LAUGHS]
And V looked--
V had very blue eyes which sits slightly close together.
So she kind of looked like a Siamese cat--
gray hair and-- gray very early on and the eyes
sit real close together.
And she's double-jointed so she could, sort of,
sit like a pretzel.
She was cool looking--
smoked all the time.
She didn't have any money so she always just
wore black or taupe or something, kind of,
classical-looking.
[BELLS TOLLING]
Yes?
I'm just wondering-- Maybe I should--
I hear you address your reader in One with Others,
and I'm just wondering what role the reader plays in that text
or in your writing.
Well, that "Dear Readers" is actually
just a nod to one of the great civil rights text--
I'm sorry, I'm blanking.
This is a very important book.
And I acknowledge the books that I read in the back.
I had a good time with footnotes actually.
But I'll tell you who uses Dear--
It's a 19th century convention, basically.
So that's artifice but it's also a calling to the reader.
It's also a direct address.
So it's both artifice and it's both intended to kind
of increase the intimacy of it, which sometimes artifice
actually can do, surprisingly.
I'm embarrassed, though, that I can't tell you this famous book
that you'll probably know as soon as I--
Maybe one more question.
OK.
Who's it going to be?
Richard would like it.
When you came to read last--
Yes.
--right after Deepstep come shining had come out,
many of us wanted to know why your work previously
was so different than Deepstep, and so we asked you.
And your answer was, "Life gives you
the opportunity to crack open.
And when it does, you should take it.
Oh!
And since then--
Glad to hear that.
Since then, many of us have cracked open.
And now, looking to you again, how does one
find the crystallizing moment that takes that fiery slop
and turns it into something cohesive and intelligible?
Because certainly you do that.
Actually, I thought this book was fiery slop.
I really thought I'd fail in this book.
It was a much less pleasurable experience
than writing Deepstep come shining.
And I just kept hitting a wall with it.
I just thought, I just can't get there--
can't get up on that one, as Miles Davis would say.
You have to keep getting up on that one,
and I just couldn't do it.
And so I overwrote on this one.
And then I started clearing it out some,
and I started feeling better about it, that it had--
So you don't always know.
It's not always that clear that you've
done what you set out to do.
Or even if you didn't do what you set out to do,
all the better, you did something else.
Was there a moment, or a line, or idea, or theory
that coalesced this book-- something
that you could point to?
I don't know.
There's a kind of afterword in the book that has everything,
sort of, compressed into one paragraph
that I wrote fairly early on.
And then I never could throw it away,
and I didn't know what to do with it.
And then, I finally put it at the very end.
And I felt like when I recognized
that I didn't have to throw it out,
because it did do something, it went a little extra
and that I had written it early on meant that I really
was onto my work--
that work and just wasn't trusting it.
I often don't trust it-- the process.
But I was really, really frustrated with this one.
But I felt good about it in the end.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you very much.