Good.
Well, good morning, everyone.
I thought I'd begin by saying a few things,
and then I'd be happy to answer some questions.
And I thought --
I wrote a poem this morning.
I hope you all did.
And so I have the rest of the day to myself pretty much.
It was Max Bierbaum who said that the hard part of being
a poet is figuring out what to do with the other 23 and 1/2
hours of the day.
But I thought I'd read you this.
Obviously, I've never read it before,
but it's kind of couched, and it's hard to be reading it now
because it's as if I wrote it tomorrow.
And it's got the title is "Lying in Bed in the Dark I Silently
Addressed the Birds Of Arizona."
"Oh birds of Arizona, who woke me yesterday
morning with the excitement of your chirping,
where do you go to die?
So many of you, and yet never a trace of your expiration,
no lump of feathers happened upon there
on the pavement, another there on the square of lawn.
Are you down in the scrub turning in circles?
Do you tilt and fall on your side?
Do you lie there breathing among the warm rocks?
Lie there breathing, lie there, as the moon rises,
as the members of your flock fall silent,
as the world revolves around the center of your tiny eye?"
That's done for the day.
Now the other thing--
[LAUGHTER]
Do not laugh now.
I try to write very quickly.
I don't revise much, and I have no work habits whatsoever.
I'm a very terrible role model for anyone
who's interested in pursuing the craft of poetry,
but it wasn't always like this.
But I try to write quite rapidly and everything in one
sitting pretty much, only because-- not
to make it sound too spiritual, but there
is the word chi for energy.
And I want to get a sense of chi running through the poem.
And the run of meaning and the rhetorical momentum of the poem
is something that's carrying me through to an ending.
And if the poem isn't going well, I usually just pitch it.
General workshop advice holds that you should always
save everything.
I believe in throwing things away.
I think if you save something for a later poem,
it'll sound like it's tacked on to the poem
or Scotch-taped onto the poem.
I can tell in a student writing where there's an image that
they saved, and then they put -- use later.
It doesn't work often.
So apart from my bad work habits, the only thing
I just like to--
I'll start with a comment, and the comment
is that one of my abiding interests in writing poetry
is to write poems that are reader-inclusive or
reader-friendly.
This comes out of probably having read too many poems,
not just written by others but written by me, a long time ago.
Poems that are, as my friend Helen Henry Taylor
so genteelly puts it, deflective of entry,
poems that seem oblivious of my presence as a reader.
So I'm always eager to acknowledge
the presence of the reader perhaps
just out of the loneliness of composition.
I don't like to write feeling completely alone.
And I also think poetry--
if you took all of writing and arranged it on a scale,
and on one end of the scale, you would
have fixed meaning where the meaning is absolutely
certain and clear to everyone universally,
and on the other end, you would have
writing where meaning is fluid, poetry
would be on the fluid end.
I think that's why poetry, for me,
calls for the reader's participation.
Because the meaning is fluid, it asks the reader
to come in and participate in the experience of the poem.
And I think that poem is really completed
in the mind of the reader.
On the one end, on the far end over here
with examples of a text with a fixed meaning,
you would have, for example, a cookbook.
It doesn't make any difference who is reading the cookbook.
We all get the same thing out of it.
So if it says add 1 cup of sugar, you don't look at it
and say, well, what's she getting at?
[LAUGHTER]
What's she driving at?
What do you mean sugar?
You just add the sugar.
So that's an inflexible text.
Then if you move through other texts,
you come in the middle to law, which is interesting,
because lawmakers are trying to make a stable text.
Whereas lawyers are trying to destabilize the text
and make it fluid.
But on the far end, I think over here,
you have poetry, which is where the meaning is delightfully
fluid.
I will read one other little poem.
Well, the last three books of mine
start with a poem to the reader and just
as an acknowledgment, a kind of verbal welcome mat.
And I was going to read one from this book,
but maybe I'll read this other one that's a little newer.
And it's called "August in Paris"
because our August in Paris is like being in the desert.
And there's just nothing going on, but "August in Paris."
"I have stopped here on the Rue des Ecoles just
off the Boulevard St Germain to look over
the shoulder of a man in a flannel shirt
and a straw hat who has set up an easel and the canvas
chair on the sidewalk in order to paint
from a droll angle, a side view of the Church of the Ascension.
But where are you, as you paused to look over my shoulder,
to see what I am jotting in this notebook?
Alone in this city, I sometimes wonder what you look like,
if you are wearing a flannel shirt
or a blue wraparound skirt held together by a pin.
But every time I turn around, you
have fled through a crease in the air
to a quiet room where the shutters are closed
against the heat of the afternoon, where there is only
the sound of your breathing, and every so often,
the turning of a page."
So I'm trying to accomplish a kind of intimacy, I guess,
with -- with the reader in that case, like an exchange,
maybe an exchange of privacy might be one way to put it.
I kind of alluded to the fact that I
used to write poems that were just as deflective of entry
as any when I didn't know what I was doing.
I spent a long time writing poems that--
I was really pretending, I think, to be a poet.
I was interested in language, but I didn't quite
have my wheels on.
And I went through a number of phases
of imitative self-disguising.
And I went through a long phase where-- well,
I had a kind of brooding romantic genius phase that I
was in for quite a while.
Have you rescued any poems you had?
No.
Those were all destroyed, and it yielded very few poems
that anyone would want to read.
So I'm also -- by trying to be clear,
I'm actually trying to create a balance between the clear
and the mysterious, I think.
I think this is --
I don't know how many are in workshops or write themselves,
but I find that in some workshops,
it's very important, that poems succeed or fail
on the understanding of the poet of the difference
between the clear and the mysterious.
There's a time to be clear in a poem,
and there's a time to be mysterious.
And knowing when to turn the card over,
which cards need to be turned over, is important.
I mean, in a typical workshop, if you've been to workshops,
you know sessions like these, where someone reads a poem,
and there's a kind of a polite silence.
And then someone says, well, "nice title" or something that.
There's more silence.
[LAUGHTER]
Then someone says "it's a really neat image at the end
there", more silence.
Anyway, gradually, it's revealed that no one understands
anything about what the poem is about.
So we turn to the poet for help as a last resort.
And the poet says, well, the poem
was written when my younger brother was in the hospital
and undergoing this surgery.
And suddenly, it becomes at least 58% clear.
But that was a card she didn't turn over.
We needed to know that.
She should have called the poem "Poem Written
While My Brother is in the Hospital Undergoing Major
Surgery."
And that's something to be clear about.
How she feels about this brother, whom she's always
hated, who is now perhaps going to die, must remain mysterious.
If the poem tries to clarify that in 18 or 25 lines,
it's going to be a forced poem, right?
It's going to be a simplification.
So I'm trying to be clear in the beginning and mysterious
at the end.
That's the formula, I think.
Stephen Dobyns said if you get the reader to accept something
small in the beginning of the poem,
the reader will be much more inclined to accept
something more difficult and complex later on in the poem.
So now, we can have some questions.