I just wanted to know was that just one long poem?
Or was it--
I mean you didn't break, you didn't stop,
you didn't have a tape.
Like most poets would stop and introduce a poem again
and then have another one and you just
went straight through it.
Yes.
So I was just curious, is that intentionally one long poem
and it just popped up?
No, it's more, I mean, it's a talk.
It's more like a lecture about the many parts in poems.
But it's being all one long thing is purposeful
in relation to the kind of continuity of the experience
but that's it.
Yeah.
I know you put a lot of importance
on writing poems and letting them
sit in the moment, your experience,
the first time you've written them.
So I was just wondering how you go about editing your poems
when you have to kind of alter that first experience you
have with them?
I think that what I've been thinking about with all of this
is allowing some of the same things that
create poems to edit them.
Allowing the experience of reading them aloud to be what
helps you come to edit them.
So that instead of imagining that the experience of writing
a poem is one thing that you use certain capacities
or facilities--
You use certain things for writing it and then you go in
and you think about it and fix the things in a different way.
To imagine that something like hearing your poem, that
reading your poem aloud, that experiencing
the poem in the same way or not, dissimilar to the way as you
start to write it, that that might be a way
to begin to edit poems, so to use
some of those same practices.
Yeah.
What were your reasons for typewriter and whiteout?
I mean it's how I've always worked.
I think that the reason, I think the whiteout in particular,
it made me pay attention.
It sort of heightened the experience
and also was very freeing because very quickly,
using whiteout, I would make a poem disappear.
So I will have made a poem and then in the attempt to fix it,
it would go away.
But since I was writing so many poems,
I didn't feel the loss of that.
I felt more of an excitement.
I have a bunch of poems in the pile that are like three words
and they're just sitting there all separated.
And I think, oh, well that was part
of the movement, the overall movement of making the poem.
So the whiteout, in particular--
A typewriter, I've always felt that in editing, going back
to editing, the main experience is to re-encounter
the entire poem.
I think it's very easy to imagine,
if you're editing a poem, that you
can go in and find the problem and fix it
without re-encountering the entire poem.
So if you have to retype it each time that you work on it,
you have to encounter the entire thing.
So I mean, that just very simply,
is why I've never switched from typewriter which has its pains
but it's also a pleasure.
I like the sound.
I like being able to look directly at it, ink everywhere.
You know, I enjoy it.
We have time for about one more if there is one more.
Well, then that may be it.
So thank you again, Joshua.
[APPLAUSE]