Thank you so much.
I have this terrible thing, which
is that I had on Jane Miller's watch upside down
and I had no idea.
Now I just noticed.
I could have looked over there but oh well.
So I thought maybe it was midnight but I guess it's not.
[LAUGHTER]
And you were very patient.
Thank you.
Let's pick three questions.
Three questions.
Now's your chance.
Did you write this, your California poems away
from California or you wrote them in California.
I wrote most of them away.
And one of my friends joked that it
should be called the California poem written
in New York but yeah.
I would go on little research trips
and take the train up and down the coast.
But I don't think I could have written it if I was still
living in California.
It would have been-- and I love Lenny's story
of feeling nostalgic for California while in California.
But yeah I wouldn't have been able to write it
I think if I were still there.
Yeah.
Have you read from two sort of landscapes tonight
that being California and the human body.
Do you have a new landscape you're working on or--
Well, actually while I was working on the California poem
I was also working on a portrait of my father so there was that.
And I don't--
I have much-- I still have this problem of uncollected hours.
And so I'm writing small poems that are not necessarily
related thematically except there's been a series of dreams
about my childhood friend Charlene who, I don't know,
she seems to take on--
I don't know.
She does all kinds of amazing things in my dream.
And then as I said earlier, today she just emailed me
20 million years later.
So I'm a little bit worried now about the poems.
I don't know what I'm going to do.
I didn't tell her I've been writing poems about you.
[LAUGHTER]
But it's just-- and so she keeps--
so the Charlene says and she'll say something in the dream.
And so just Charlene says suggests
that I should write a lot of poems called that unless she
sees them and then I'll stop.
Yeah.
Do you begin writing the minutes or in the hours
do you find that process of writing a bit if you
look at time differently.
In the process of writing that, that
does that translate to after writing it
do you have a different experience of time
after writing it and/or working in that mode.
That makes sense?
Yes, it does.
And I think one of the things I guess because I mean I--
my whole family has always had a really bizarre sense of time.
Like my father was one of those classic characters
who would go out to get a pack of cigarettes
and like it took him 12 hours.
But I was definitely--
I guess when you're in this state where--
I mean there's this weird nine month
thing where a creature is being created
and so there's a real embodiment of time and it slows down
and it speeds up.
And so part of the drawing was trying
to get at that embodiment of time.
And then also the way that when we're not
thinking like that time flattens out and speeds so quickly.
And so the hours were in a way trying to give them flesh.
And an hour is really long when you're thinking about it
in this way.
It makes it very--
it makes it very fleshy.
And I don't know.
I think I would have to--
it's easy to lose that sense of fleshiness
to time when you're not in the middle of the process
and you're in the middle of doing some quotidian things.
But it still can come back definitely.
Yeah.
I think we all have--
I mean it's a very strange abstract concept that we
rule so much of our lives by.
It really has a--
I think we all experience many protruberances in time.
I think that was three.
So we'll end on protuberances in time.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much.
Thank all of you.