Question in the back somewhere.
Hello.
I was wondering if maybe you would each talk
about the impulse that you had in creating
what was for Josh a long poem and for Jane a series of linked
short poems.
I think, I don't want to stop.
Look, I think I want to just prolong--
not this reading.
The reading's over.
You can go home at any moment.
But I think that--
yeah, I think, I like the image.
I like to kind of hover, and I like
to see if I can sort of stop time in my poems
and sort of zero in on something and sort of linger there.
And pretend that I can sort of press pause on things when you
can't.
And I think they have this kind of stalled out and yet on-rush
kind of quality.
This moment, and yet there's like a billion of them
and they just kind of go by.
I think, and that's just I guess one of the obsessions of mine.
I think that the long poem is sort of the frame for that.
But there's no--
I guess, in some ways I don't know what the impulse is,
but I think it is just sort of-- there's a stalling kind
of quality and wanting to like--
wanting to hover there in a certain moment.
And, Jane.
But like Josh, I know the way of putting that, I think,
is that I am a lyric poet.
And I think in very condensed and associated ways.
And I wanted to see if I could include the reader
in the process of my poetry.
So the last line leading into the title
is a way of your seeing how it's constructed.
So you get to see that line again, and think
about where it might go.
And that's why some of the poems ended up
to be quite short as a result. Also
just to change because my recent work
before this book was very long poems, so I needed to--
I just set myself a new assignment.
I just have two questions.
One for Josh and one for Jane.
Doesn't matter what order, but Josh,
I was wondering if you could just--
Joshua, sorry-- if you could just
speak about the relationship between photography
and your work.
Because no one has said anything,
and I think that to me is quite striking.
And then, Jane, I've noticed as your work has progressed,
your sense of humor has become more and more
into the forefront of your work.
In kind of combining with a certain immediacy, which
I love.
And it touches me in a very particular way
that is rare because I don't often
like poems that have humor in them, but yours transcend that.
And so I wonder if you could speak about that somehow,
if that doesn't bother you.
Thank you.
Well I tried to pick some of the funny ones tonight.
There's a dark-- we could get into some dark shit
in my works, a little--
but I was trying to be a little bit upbeat, which
is hard to do in the same breath that you're
talking about Stalin and Nazis, and such.
But I do think that it is part of my culture
to mix humor with darkness.
That it's a bit of theater, a bit of play to try to--
music is often used for that and I do think of humor
as a form of music to me.
So it breaks up the misery.
It breaks up the darkness, and it gives people
a chance to get involved.
So I did try to present some of those.
Thank you for asking.
I'm glad I was funny.
In the photograph for me quickly is that--
I mean, I'm obsessed with the image
and obsessed with sort of the isolated sort of moment.
I'm obsessed with the image in writing,
but also in terms of film, in terms of photography
it's something that's, you know we're
visual creatures, if we're lucky enough
to have that sense right.
And so I did a book that has photographs in it, also
by my friend Tim Rutili.
He took Polaroid photographs for it,
and it's a book called Selenography.
And they're on facing pages, the text and the photographs.
And it was something to I guess counterpoint off of,
to draw from, to speak to, to charge up
the way that the writing was sort of working.
And I guess to sort of be inspired
by it, but I think my--
I don't really need any more images.
Might be better to take some out.
[LAUGHTER]
OK.
I think we have time for one more question,
and we got one here.
Hi.
So this is for both of you.
I have noticed that you guys use tone very differently,
and I would like to know, as you approach a poem
how do you think of your tone?
Do you know exactly what you're going
to write when you come in, or is it just something
that flows with the words?
I'm not sure what--
I don't know if you heard the question.
She's asking us about tone and whether we
enter the poem knowing what our tone is going to be.
And if you mean voice, you mean the personality of the poem?
Yes.
For me, I never know what it's going to be.
And if I do know I throw that out.
And I don't know at the end either.
I mean, I was quite surprised at some of the things, which
is, seriously, from all of the people
were laughing at because to me they were just sort of not that
funny, but like my parents thinking they've been poisoned,
for example.
Married 50 years, thinking they've been poisoned.
So I'm not sure about tone.
I think I'm the last person to realize what it is.
I'm thinking of other things, like the music of the vowels,
or how to change what I once knew into something new that's
hopefully more interesting.
So there's a lot of other processes going on.
And I don't know that--
you may yourself be a writer.
I think it's very difficult when you say, to know ahead of time
what--
I think sometimes, as going to classes with Jane today
too sort of taught me, that I think sometimes
even after the fact--
I wrote Swamp Isthmus which is what I read from tonight--
I wrote-- I started it about seven years ago.
And so the tone to me that I was--
when I was writing, which is just like roughly
to say that the emotional disposition of the speaker is,
was, or the speaker is about the book were really different
than I experience them today.
Talking with them-- talking about them
with students, or tonight too, like it really changed.
Doesn't seem like it's a static thing.
I would like to say that I knew what
sort of the feeling of that was when I wrote it,
and I think I did know something about it when I wrote it.
But now it seems like kind of radically different actually.
I don't know the parts that are funny, or silly, or darker,
or more fucked up, or strange, or whatever.
Reading it tonight, it felt--
it felt quite changed from that, which I'm glad about.
Although, it's really othering to look at your own writing
and not know exactly who these voices are that are speaking.
But to me it's like a conjuring in that way,
and you kind of conjure it across time
too from what you might have planned to do
or what you thought you were doing at the time, ends up
being, for me, quite different to in the moment.
Thank you.
Thank you guys for coming.
Thanks a lot.
[APPLAUSE]