Question in the back.
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.
Like, I think I want to just prolong the--
not this reading.
[LAUGHTER]
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 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.
And that's just, I guess, one of the obsessions of mine.
I think 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 to sort of-- there's a stalling quality
and wanting to hover there in a certain moment.
And Jane.
Well, like Josh, another way of putting that I think
is that I'm a lyric poet and I think
in very condensed and associative ways,
and I wanted to see if I can include the reader
in the process of my poetry.
So the last line leading into the title
is a way of you are seeing how it's constructed.
So you get to see that line again and think
about where it might go.
And some of the poems ended up to be quite short as a result.
Also just to change, because my recent work
before this book is a very long poem, so I needed a--
I just set myself a new assignment.
I just have two questions, one for Joshua and one for Jane.
Doesn't matter what order.
But, Josh, I was wondering if you could just--
Joshua, 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
to the forefront of your work, and kind of
combined 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 to 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.
You can get into some dark shit in my work, so good luck.
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,
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, breaks up the darkness,
and gives people a chance to get involved.
So I did try to present some of those,
but thank you for asking.
I'm glad I was funny.
[LAUGHTER]
It was funny And the photograph for me, quickly,
is that, I mean, I'm obsessed with the image,
I'm obsessed with the isolated moment.
I'm obsessed with the image as in writing, but also
in terms of film, in terms of photography.
We're visual creatures if we're lucky enough
to have that sense.
And so I did a book that has photographs in it
also by my friend Tim Rutili.
We took Polaroid photographs for it,
and it's a book called Selenography and they sort of--
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--
I guess sort of charge up the way
that the writing was sort of working,
and I guess to sort of be inspired by it.
But I think I don't really need any more images.
I need to take some out.
[LAUGHTER]
OK, I think we have time for one more question.
Have we got one here?
Hi.
So this is for both of you.
I've 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.
Do you mean voice, or do you mean sort
of 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,
just seriously for a moment, that people
were laughing at, because to me, they were just
sort of not that funny.
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-- 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 started about seven years ago.
And so the tone to me that I was--
when I was writing, which is just roughly
to say the emotional disposition of the speaker, or the speakers
of that book, who were really different
than I experienced them today, talking with them,
talking about them with students, or tonight too.
Like, it really changed.
It doesn't seem like it's a static thing.
I would like to say that I knew what 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,
and I don't know the parts that are
funnier or sillier or darker or more fucked up or strange
or whatever.
And then reading it tonight, 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.
It ends up being, for me, quite different too in the moment.
Thank you.
Thank you guys for coming.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]