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--
I'm going to come stand up--
OK, good.
And look official.
We could just break into song.
OK, no questions?
[LAUGHTER]
Ander, do you have any questions?
I do, I do have one.
OK.
I'm pretty nervous.
[LAUGHTER]
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,
you can hear the poet in you.
But what I think 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.
Brent, go.
I was going to answer.
I've enjoyed studying law.
I haven't really thought about that.
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
apocalyptically minded--
but I wonder if it's made my language more like a summons.
More like not a laying down of the law
but something that is declarative in the same way.
I don't know.
It's a good question.
That's what I was going to say.
It must make you--
Do you have a theory, Nicole?
Well, I always have regretted--
for a long time I regretted even going to law school, you know.
I thought, why did I--
I did it when I was so young.
But it does sort of provide you with a sense
of human structure.
Like we were talking about the wolves entering into Utah
and you're probably-- the Center for Biological
Diversity was the group that was pushing for that
and I was the general counsel for them for a while.
But I think the idea of the juristic nature of humans--
You can legislate wolves.
You know, I mean, that's very interesting.
You said if we sat down, then the questions would come.
But we tried that move already, it didn't work.
Hey, Nicole.
Can you talk a little bit about 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, or like--
I mean, it's not real, but.
No, I mean--
Can you just talk about if that concerned you
or what you thought about--
I mean, that piece is really hard to read,
but also really fun to read because you feel--
it's so wrong, right?
It's just so-- like, you're not supposed to shift pronouns.
I mean, even from a workshop point of view,
stop shifting your tenses and your pronouns,
let alone the fact that you're putting bodies on display.
And the essay, I think, is still complicated for me
in a lot of ways.
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, right?
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.
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 have these bonds against you
that you're struggling against.
And something about that lets you be free.
And I feel that for that part of the essay.
Like I'm going to do this really hard thing, because I
think it lets me think things that I wouldn't normally think.
And certainly not normally present and produce.
That make sense? 'Cause I'm on stage.
I find it a very odd thing to do but important for the essay
to inform 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 of poetry and in prose?
Do you find yourself entering it differently?
[LAUGHTER]
Do you mean differently with regard
to bodies of prose and bodies--
--talk about it.
Just entering the subject matter, how do you--
I put up the wall at sex with dead bodies.
[LAUGHTER]
I think in this crematory scandal,
there was a lot of fears and many fears about what
actually had occurred at the crematory and, of course,
that was--
necrophilia was one of them.
But for some reason, I think 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 sort of a lengthened, meditative quality to writing
about it.
It gave me some more freedom with regard
to thinking about bodies.
Because in poetry, I really haven't
written too much about bodies, or dead bodies particularly.
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.
So poetry, I always feel like I'm
playing in the body of the word, whereas in the 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.
Where as 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, whenever-- I think it can 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.
So, 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?
[LAUGHTER]
Sure.
Oh, yeah.
That's the problem with leaving the microphone with Brent.
Hand it off.
Oh.
[LAUGHTER]
I told you where I drew the line.
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 continue to constantly--
I do think it's related to that question of bodies
and where do you put--
what is the subject the essay is occupying?
It seems to me to be the most essential ones, right.
Bonnie Rough's book, Carrier, is about her--
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, attack, attack, sex and death--
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 how much.
Or in Cheryl Strayed's Wild book,
she talks about her sexual experiences
and the heroin 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-- 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 that the person once held?
I don't know.
[LAUGHTER]
I've forgotten the question.
[LAUGHTER]
So, if you think about the momentous points of human life,
obviously sex and death are related.
I think of them in terms of endpoints.
They're similar in the sense-- well,
it's the little death in French.
[LAUGHTER]
So, there's a moment of death in sex.
OK.
[LAUGHTER]
When you're writing about a traumatic event,
like a pregnancy or the death of a parent,
does that 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 how does that process work?
I can tell you about my experience with this,
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 are so many black comedy, awful, Gothic themes involved
with it, that I felt like I wanted to give
some sort of voice to that.
But for me, I don't think I could have written the book had
I not actually gone on this little, contrived pilgrimage
from Tuscaloosa over to the crematory site
where it occurred.
So 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 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 happen 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 not be in charge of,
and how do we let nature just be nature, or can we even--
until I can ask questions like that,
those things just seem isolated and not part of a narrative.
But once I had this bigger landscape
upon which to thread them, I think it made more sense.
All right, guys.
Thank you so much for coming.
[APPLAUSE]