Yeah.
You mentioned leaving a trail of crumbs
in the point of reference.
And I'm wondering if, in your poems, using often these
intersects if for us, you're offering
familiarity in that way?
In the tercets?
Tercets.
That's a nice way of thinking about them.
The question is about the trail of crumbs
and whether form, whether a repeating pattern in the poems
that I tend to write in a kind of asymmetrical three line
stanza with a sort of two longer lines
and separated by a short pivot line.
And yes, I think that's it.
They're, sort of, here's something stable.
But another way that comes in, I think is, it--
it has to do also with deployments
of autobiographic reference.
That is, I think I used to be very alarmed at the prospect
of reference to my own life.
I mean, it just seems to me a soppy and stupid thing
for poems to do, which was, of course, a soppy and stupid
thing to think.
But I think that's one place where
we can offer a reader a certain kind of foothold
and the experience of recognition,
not that it, oh, I get, it's all about her relationship
with her father, or I get it, it is
it's all about her relationship to her kids, or I get it,
she had a fight with her husband that morning.
But that those-- and they can be clues.
We all leave them.
It might be clues in a dedication or in an epigraph.
A dedication might have initials and birth and death dates,
which makes you know that something is functioning
as elegy in a certain way.
And those are all ways of--
God knows if they explain a poem, that's not good enough.
I mean, no poem should be able to be explained away that way.
But if they give a certain now and then, sense to a reader
that the speaker of the poem is voicing her proximity
to the subject matter.
Reader, here are my stakes in this.
That's a kind of legibility, that's
a kind of I'm an open book.
Again, if there's enough going--
nothing else going on, that can be an act
I think of social courtesy.
And that was to discover that was actually
a real change for me.
I'm a slow learner.
I'm especially slow on some of the things that
ought to be obvious to any functioning human being.
But that one I was especially slow on.
Yeah.
I was just wondering how--
I was hearing elements of Shakespeare and stuff,
and I was wondering how it was mentioned.
That was going to focus on how Renaissance,
and so forth thought or really spoke to you to conjure--
I thought, Linda, you got to get organ and shape up,
consolidate, write a dissertation
on 20th century poetry.
And I couldn't stay away from the Renaissance.
I'd done Renaissance, and I couldn't.
It's just too gorgeous.
I mean, I can't.
I mean, it's too gorgeous.
I'm glad other people are drawn to other fields
because there would be nobody in them otherwise.
I mean, if everybody-- but I can't imagine doing another,
spending a whole scholarly life in any other field
of literary and cultural study.
It's just to me, it's completely,
really fascinating-- I mean, for me intellectually,
a lot of what drives a lot of the questions I have about
the period is it has to do with the Reformation,
has to do with that split in what was supposed to be whole
the one true Catholic church.
And because of that split-- it's fascinating for people
who do words as their life because the split was actually
about representation, it was about the way
in which one thing can be said to stand for another,
is this the body of God or is this
remind us of the body of God.
And it's both incredibly moving intellectually.
But it also is a stirring vista of human commitment.
I mean, people, these were questions people didn't-- they
weren't just theoretical.
People got burned at the stake over them.
And people felt-- and maybe even more remarkable and sobering.
People felt obliged to burn others at the stake,
felt it their --
But I mean, and it's there's a rich--
I mean, I have all of these kinds of theories.
I also think that one of the reasons it's such a gorgeous,
I think it's a really gorgeous messy period for literature
and thinking.
And one of the reasons is that the Renaissance moved North
slowly.
And it was very late in coming.
England was really late in getting the news
and having a Renaissance.
And so only there, only in the North
did you have the Renaissance and the Reformation in many ways
very much at odds completely intersecting with one another.
So you had a whole lot of dissonance.
And that I just think it's delicious fun.
I'd go on but--
Yeah.
One more.
We've addressed the Renaissance and you've
expressed some wonder at what it would be like to write poems
in the years.
What's it like to write poems now?
Well, I mean, it is salvific.
I think it's a life raft.
I also think it's, I'm so--
I feel incredibly lucky to be working
in this period in this country, because I think there's
just fabulous writing all over.
There is so much gorgeous poetry being written
and of so many different kinds.
I just can't think of a period comparable.
They're wonderful, vital, very distinct aesthetics,
pitches of voice, and it's thrilling to me,
it's thrilling.
I will say, I mean, part of what I write,
and this is slightly embarrassing,
but I write poems to get the world to hold still
for just that much.
I mean, it's a world that does not hold still,
a world that's going to throw us out of it any minute.
And the particular-- the compression of poetry
is extremely precious to me because of the attention
one can and must lavish on its local alignments.
And it's surely mad delusion to imagine
one can achieve certain kinds of articulateness.
But it's quite a seductive delusion.
It's consolation for mortality.
I mean, on the one hand, it's driven
by this gorgeous ephemeral fleeting world
and yet it seems just, again, surely falsely
but seems to hold it still for just a second of contemplation
and praise.
I think that's what it's like to write poetry.
I think it's like saying, thank you.
Yeah, so thank you.
[APPLAUSE]