Oh, I see one.
There's a few hands.
Hi.
Alison and Susan, you've both spoken very deep concern
with your imagery in your poetry, which is admirable.
But I think that it isn't just out there that we
need to be concerned for.
I was very disturbed today to hear
that, I believe it's the Board of Regents of this University,
has decided that this concern that
has been raised about investment in corporations that basically
are dooming the planet have come down
on doing something about these investments
because they make money.
And what do you do with that money?
You give thousands of dollars in bonuses to overpaid people.
And you are all paying for this with your tuition or whatever.
And I think if you got out there and did some activist protest,
you--
which I think you mentioned in another context.
I wouldn't probably be making this little speech
if your concerns had not been for ecology and concern
for the planet as well as local things.
Thank you.
Thank you, David.
I'd love to have a response.
You want to go?
I mean, I think what's important about the context
that you bring, and something that I
try to think about in terms of my own work
and in terms of teaching, is that there
is something different between the activism we
do on the page and activism that can happen off the page.
And one doesn't make up for the other.
I think it is important to not just write and think and talk
amongst ourselves about this stuff,
but to figure out other ways to intervene, sometimes
with our bodies, right, in terms of the issues that
are difficult.
Well, just to mention one hopeful sign of some leadership
coming from a place where it may actually
be influential in this regard is that during the week
of great climate events in New York with the UN
conference and the demonstrations,
the Rockefeller fund decided to divest from fossil fuel
industries and to invest in alternative energy.
Now, when you have funds and moneyed aspects
of the culture taking that degree of leadership, that,
I think makes a very big statement in the marketplace
and within the culture of the market.
And so I found that to be a very encouraging thing,
and it may influence other change
in terms of what's happening at our institution.
I've been on an island off the Eastern coast of Canada
and I am pathetically uninformed about the most recent aspects
of that conversation, I apologize to you for that.
This is a question for Alison.
Your book Zoologist must have taken a great deal of research.
What is your research process like?
Yes, it took me 10 years to write.
I also wrote two poetry books in that 10 years.
But it's varied, you know.
I do a variety of forms of research,
both traditional archival library internet research,
and I do a lot of site visits and go out
into the field with scientists, because you're
trying to find a scene to enliven an essay.
It's just really helpful to be out in the field,
and particularly with scientific concepts or research
that might be really hard for me to get my head around.
I could read a bunch of research papers
and just be totally confused.
But if I say to the head of the spotted owl team
up in the Andrews Experimental Forest,
could I go out with when you do your rounds to look at the owl
nests tomorrow morning, I have that experience
and can render it into a scene, I can get it in a way
that it's a narrative that I can share with others.
If somebody wants to research, the research papers are there,
but I'm looking for more the story
that has a kind of human interest element
and where the emotions of the experience and the reflection
of the experience are as important as the science.
So, I do lots of different types of research.
But I do-- I think as all of us who do essays,
I do believe that we're always testing our research
against our own experience and wanting
to put our feet on the ground in a place
or with a person who knows the subject better than we do.
And we want to kind of feel, how does my experience butt up
against that?
Does it sound right to me?
Or no matter how good this guy's research might be,
does it really strike me wrong, you know,
I have an argument I want to register in the essay.
That's our great subjectivity as essayists,
we're just cranky and skeptical.
Hi.
I have a question for Susan.
Thanks for your reading.
I noticed in your work an inherent comfort
between the body as sight embodiment in your own personal
and also just the world, and then
you're dealing a lot with ideas that
are better in a way, real abstract, economy, capitalism,
where the sight of the body is in that,
and often I think there's a duality that people
perceive around that.
It's like the stock market or money
or just to be very trite, but generally speaking.
But I notice in your work a comfort
and a harmony in some sense, that even results in disharmony
by intention.
I'm wondering how that feels for you when you're writing it,
how it feels in the process.
I'm assuming the reflection in your poetry
is a true reflection of the feeling.
Or maybe I'm wrong, but I'm just curious if you could speak
on that, because it's--
I find it's very beautiful, but also truth telling.
Thanks.
Thank you for your thoughtful response to the work.
I mean, I feel like both of those, both the letter
project and the stock market project
got created out of a sense of lived experience
being different than another narration that was being told.
I think that's what Tyler was referencing
in the introduction, you know, that there was this way when
the financial crisis of 2008--
The continuing crisis, perhaps, is the way to talk about it,
was discussed.
It was being told the stock market was
one of the biggest indicators of what was going on.
And I mean, even though I'm a poet, I get money, right?
It's not like, why are they talking about the stock market?
We should talk about the trees.
But it was like there are these other things that
weren't being registered, and there's
a naturalness with which that number gets thrown out
as talking about the health of our economy and our nation.
The nation of Bhutan, they don't do a gross domestic product.
It's a gross happiness product.
They literally measure the happiness of their inherent.
So part of it was sort of using that frame
and in some ways then writing poems that maybe for me
were even more traditionally lyric
and first person than some of my other work.
That frame made me more comfortable.
I also had a kid.
I was in the process of getting pregnant and having a baby.
Some of you guys saw CAConrad here,
who's a poet who really believes in doing things
to get us into different frames of mind to making art,
like he has these great things.
Like you put your foot in a bucket and stand in a doorway.
He calls them somatic exercises, and my biggest somatic exercise
was having a kid.
It just completely also changed how I registered.
My own subjectivity had this secondary repercussion.
I think I felt more comfortable inhabiting a first person lyric
than maybe I had before.
I have a question, but I just want to say,
Susan, if you get money, I need to talk to you.
I mean, I basically get money.
This is sort of my own concern, but you started
with a poem called "Meditation"
So there's a bit of that exploration in the book,
and I think it's probably one of the important strands
in thinking about what animals have meant to us
and have meant to the human imagination
from the very, very, very beginning of art,
because all of the earliest art is all animal imagery.
The carvings, the cave paintings,
so there's some speculation and Clayton Eshleman
has written about this in Juniper Fuse
that art came about at that time when the human mind began
to perceive itself as separating from the animal world.
And it needed to project something
back out because it understood what this loss was,
that it was so profound that without some reciprocating
act of the inner life reconnecting
with the outer world, we just couldn't go on.
Or our ancestors couldn't go.
So anyway I am glad that you raised it
and obviously, I mean, the other way I do research on that
is a seeing a Jungian analyst and reading
a lot of Carl Jung and James Hillman
and trying to understand the ways that the science
of the mind have tried to give us a language for talking
about the inner world.
Yeah, when I was writing some of the stock market
poems, I was reading Buddhist text and also writers
on Buddhism, and also some consciousness texts.
And I keep thinking about this Oppen quote from a poem.
I'm going to paraphrase, so don't mark me off,
don't detract from my recitation.
But he says a man stands on a beach, goes to a beach,
sits next to a rock.
And then he says, two, we find ourselves in two.
And it's interesting, right?
Because we normally think like we
find ourselves with someone else.
But in the Oppen poem, when there's no one else there,
you sit by a rock, too.
And I think that for me sometimes,
putting me up, or trying to situate myself
within a system is also, it's about figuring out that system.
It's about resistance to the system.
But you also learn, I think, any time we put ourselves up
in the context or frame what we do, with something else,
we learn about ourselves.
I don't know if that helps in answering your question,
but I think that's part of my interest in not
simply regurgitating my life on the page,
but figuring out how if I can situate myself on a larger map,
is that helpful to other folks as well?
And we have to figure out those cartographies.
Great.
Thank you both, so much.
[APPLAUSE]