And as I promised, there is a time for Qs,
if you have some Qs for either of our readers.
And if so, we have a roving microphone,
which we'll happily--
OK.
Good.
We could just break into song.
OK.
No questions.
[LAUGHTER]
Ander, do you have any questions?
I do.
Ander has questions.
I do have one question.
Look at--
[INAUDIBLE]
This is a question I've been meaning
to ask Brent for a while.
I think it's obvious, listening to both of you read,
that you can hear the poet in you.
But I think what is interesting--
and you and I haven't really talked about this--
is having a law degree.
Has that changed the way that you construct sentences?
Has it changed the rhetoric?
Yes.
Go.
I was going to answer.
I've enjoyed studying law.
I haven't really thought about that.
But everything that happens to you, linguistically,
has to change you somehow.
I wonder if the declarative nature of the law has made--
maybe it's made-- in addition to being in times
an apocalyptically-minded--
but I wonder if it's made my language more
like a summons, more like a--
not a laying down of the law, but something that is
declarative in the same way.
I don't know.
That's a good question.
Given.
That's what I was going to say.
It must make you feel more declarative.
That's the word I was going for.
Well, I think it--
I always have regretted-- for a long time,
I regretted even going to law school.
I thought, Oh, God.
Why did I do it?
I did it when I was so young.
But it does provide you with a sense of human structure.
We were talking about the wolves entering into Utah.
I think it probably was the Center for Biological
Diversity, was the group that was pushing for that.
And I was the general counsel for them.
But I think the idea of the juristic nature of humans
is something that--
That can legislate wolves.
I mean, that's very interesting.
We said if we sat down, then the questions would come.
But we tried that maneuver already.
It didn't work.
Donohue.
Hey, Nicole.
Can you talk a little bit about, maybe,
some fears you might have had when you were either thinking
about, or writing in the perspective of a violent man?
Violence to man?
Or violent man?
Well, when you're writing in the perspective of the rape
fantasy.
It's not real, but--
No.
It's--
Can you just talk about if that concerned you,
or what you thought about when you were writing it.
That piece is really hard to read,
but also really fun to read.
Because you feel it's so--
I think-- it's so wrong.
It's just so-- you're not supposed to shift pronouns.
Even from a workshop point of view.
Stop shifting your tenses and your pronouns,
let alone the fact that you're putting these bodies
on display.
And the essay, I think, is still complicated for me,
in a lot of ways.
What is the-- is there a purpose in violence?
Is that part of it?
Or is the violence not-- is it that idea of the wolf
being vicious.
It seems like the word vicious is a word that only
exists in human categories.
You wouldn't say wolves are vicious.
And I think that's why I include that letter from the editor,
to say there's a difference.
Because you have some sort of motivation.
The motivation in that essay, in that fantasy part,
it overtakes the writing of it.
It's just the fantasy goes and unfolds in this way,
because that's the nature of fantasies.
And there is no stoppage.
There's no stoppage till the end, and I let it happen.
Brent and I were talking earlier today
about how, in formal poetry, that you use form to let you--
you have these bonds against you that you're struggling against,
and something about that lets you be free.
And I feel that for this essay, for that part of the essay.
I'm going to do these really hard things.
I think it lets me think things that I wouldn't normally
think, and certainly not normally present or produce.
Does that makes sense?
Or put them on stage.
I find it a very odd thing to do,
but important for the essay.
To perform that essay is important for how
the essay works.
I have a question for both of you.
Both of you deal in the subject of the body.
And I'm really interested in what you take in or shrugged
off in this hybrid swap, in relation
to going into the subject in poetry, and in prose.
Do you find yourself entering it differently?
You mean differently with regard to bodies of prose
and bodies of poetry?
Talking about it-- just entering the subject matter.
How do you approach that?
I put up the wall at sex with dead bodies.
[CHUCKLING]
In this crematory scandal, there was
a lot of fears and many fears about what actually
had occurred at the crematory.
And of course, necrophilia was one of them.
But for some reason, I think the writing prose
allowed me some more proximity to the idea of especially
a dead body.
I don't know why, but there seemed
to be a length and meditative quality to writing about it.
Gave me some more freedom with regard
to thinking about the bodies.
Because in poetry, I really haven't written too much
about bodies, or dead bodies, particular.
Yeah.
To me, poetry seems more skeletal than fleshy.
And I think that is evidenced by the form, too.
That it's pared down.
And you can-- it seems, therefore,
once you get beyond skeletal, cerebral.
Poetry, I always feel like I'm playing
in the body of the word, whereas in an essay,
I feel like I'm playing--
actually, that the force of the essay is in bodies.
I tell my students, put your body in a place.
Use prepositions.
Organize yourself around where you are.
Whereas in poetry, I feel like the speaker's voice
does so much of that work from the beginning,
that it's not as body-centric.
Which is very interesting.
I think it's a really compelling question that you
can write a thesis about.
Also, whatever, I think to be different for different people,
too.
But prose, somehow, for me, allowed more of a vigil,
I think, because of the hours-long nature of it,
as opposed to poetry.
It was about my father's dead body, and other dead bodies.
This reading seems to have paired sex and death.
What would you say is the relationship between those?
Oh.
Sure.
Oh, no.
That's the problem with leaving the microphone with Brent.
He can hand it off.
Oh.
[LAUGHTER]
I told you where I bring the law in.
That's right.
There is no combination.
They're separate.
And that's why they had separate readers come.
Because we don't want them to cross the line.
I do think it's related to that question of bodies,
and where do you put--
what is the subject that the essay is occupied?
It seems to me to be the most essential ones.
Even Bonnie Rough's book, Carrier,
is about the possibility that the son she's pregnant with
might be the carrier of a disease that her dad had.
And it was a horrible disease he was tortured
by, and died really young.
And in fact, she goes on to have an abortion,
and she talks about the reasons she did that.
It's a pretty major book.
To go on the page and say, (WHISPERING) attack.
Attack.
[LAUGHTER]
(SPEAKING QUIETLY) Sex and death.
(NORMAL VOLUME) To go on the page
and say that she's going to have this abortion.
She plans it, and she describes it.
And how much did she suffer for doing that?
I don't know, but not much.
I don't know how much.
Or in Cheryl Strayed's Wild book.
she talks about her sexual experiences in the heroine,
and the trek through the Pacific Crest Trail.
It happens on her body.
And so I think the proximity to, then,
death, what's the next thing that's going to happen?
How far can I push this body until it
gets to a different kind of narrative entirely?
Which is what, I guess, in some ways, is more metaphysical,
is what happens after you die.
What do we do with bodies, and what do they
make us think about, once they're just
the shell of the person they once held?
[INAUDIBLE]
[LAUGHTER]
I've forgotten the question.
Can we move on?
[LAUGHTER]
Sex and death.
Go.
Riff.
[LAUGHTER]
[INAUDIBLE]
Moving forward.
I think, if you think about the momentous points of human
life-- obviously, sex and death are related--
I think of them in terms of--
as endpoints.
They're similar in the sense--
well, it's the little death, in French--
there is a moment of death--
Yeah.
--there is a moment of death in sex.
OK.
Next question.
[LAUGHTER]
Anything else?
Really hard.
Please.
When you're writing about a traumatic event,
like a pregnancy, or the death of a parent,
does a moment come where it crystallizes, and you think,
oh, I can write about this now?
Or are you just frantically writing about it
the whole time, and then you com back to it?
How does that process work?
I'm going to tell you about my experience
with writing this book.
I actually started out writing some poems about it.
And as I learned more about the craziness of what turned out
to be the Tri-State Crematory incident,
there were so many black comedy, awful, Gothic things involved
with it, that I felt like I wanted to give
some sort of a voice to that.
But for me, I think, actually--
I don't think I could have written the book,
had I not actually gone on this little contrived spiritual--
not spiritual-- contrived pilgrimage
from Tuscaloosa, over to the crematory site,
where it occurred.
It was like an actual premeditated pilgrimage,
where I chose to try to create some sort of meaning and sort
of ritual in the--
because there really wasn't any, with regard to desecration,
particularly.
I think that that's what prepared me
for writing something other than a poem about it.
Something that was longer.
For me, I couldn't really write about it
until I could contextualize it in something bigger.
Because these individual or personal things
that happened to me, they seem, in a lot of ways,
traumatic to me, but ordinary on a big level.
And so, until I could find a way to connect it
to this environmental theme, and this idea of,
where do we draw boundaries between what humans should
be in charge of and what they should try not be in charge of,
and how do we let nature just be nature, or can we, even.
Until I could ask questions like that,
those things just seemed isolated,
and not part of a narrative.
But once I have this bigger landscape
upon which to thread them, I think it made more sense.
All right, you guys.
Thank you so much for coming out tonight.
[APPLAUSE]