OK, I mean, that was really awesome.
I really personally really connect to your poetry.
I love how overt you are in writing about sex.
I love that aspect.
So some of the things you read tonight show the opposite.
Sex is kind of what's so beautiful in life,
and then there's atrocities.
And they sort of stagger your mind kind of in similar ways.
I just want to ask you a little bit about that first poem
you read, "Inscription on the Tombstone
of the Homeless Spirits," and I think it's wonderful.
Are you finished with it?
You said you've been working on it for two years.
Yeah.
Awesome.
Yeah, I'm finished with it.
OK, I am also very obsessed with the rape of Nanjing,
and I think it came to me in a similar way through my mother
who, through her anger at Japanese people,
she tells this memory from the womb where she
was in her mother's stomach.
And her mother was running into a bomb shelter in China,
near Shanghai.
So it's a very interesting poem about this huge atrocity
but also your mother, and it seems
to be about a personal wound within the family
and then also just global wounds.
And it's wonderful, but could you just
talk a little bit about your process
and where it started for you?
Well, I think any time we're dealing
with historical awfulness--
and that's whether it's happening presently,
which there's plenty happening, right?
And I don't just mean over there.
I mean right here, right?
When writing about it, it's like you have to find, well,
what's your angle?
How can you tell the story?
History's already telling it.
There's professors writing dissertations and publishing
books far more informed than the research I've done.
In fact, I've had to rely on their work.
So I think what poetry is is it becomes
a meditation on the fact that we're alive,
and we have a consciousness and a psyche.
And we're trying to deal with the most simple things like how
to talk to Siri, how to get a bottle of water
when we're flying, how to pee when you're in a window seat,
and getting laid.
We're hungry and also reading about atrocities
while the planet is collapsing, right?
So I think that is the task of consciousness,
not just of poetry, just to be alive.
We're only alive for a really short time.
How do we juggle?
How do we juxtapose?
How do we take in?
And so I felt like in this particular poem,
I had to write about it because my mother was dead.
She was paranoid schizophrenic for 20 years,
and she said a lot of stuff that I never put together.
But when I started thinking about it,
I thought, hmm, she was more affected by this thing that
happened to her family than I had thought about previously.
And let's face it.
It's hard to think about our parents
as people separate from those that gave us life,
and one of the things that we do, I think, as we get older
is there's that aha moment where you see them
as separate people.
You can imagine them, the part of them that has nothing
to do with you, right?
And that's a really wonderful moment
to start separating yourself from all your affection,
adoration, and resentment, what did and didn't happen.
And here's a person, and in my case, she was dead.
And I grew up with a crazy, scary lady,
but there's also some part of me that
felt like what made her like this, right?
And I think part of the poem is it
doesn't draw easy cause and effects, because I don't know.
She was only one year old when this happened,
and part of what the poem is trying to point out
is she's an unreliable witness, right?
Half the things that she says, my father refutes.
And so I think that that also makes
me wonder how we're all unreliable as witnesses,
as writers, as poets, as artists,
and we have to take that into consideration.
I mean, we make up stuff, right?
And this isn't just in our art.
This is like when you tell someone a story about what
you did last night, right?
We embellish.
It's the tendency.
And so I was kind of interested in trying to locate this poem
not to tell history because the history has already been told.
Documentaries-- you can watch them online, right?
But I wanted to try to bring in, constellate it
with this weird family that I grew up with
and the weird ideas they had about Japanese people
that I did not understand the entire time I was growing up
in California.
Thank you.
Here's a question.
Tell us about the bowl, the bell.
Oh, oh, the Tibetan bowl.
My husband makes fun of me because that's
the word I can't pronounce.
No, "ball," I can, like a rice ball,
but the sort of male cow with horns, I say "bowl."
Bull, bull.
I say "bowl shit," like a bowl full of shit.
But tonight, actually, I was going
to use a bunch of other soundtracks,
and I chickened out.
I just couldn't because I haven't had enough practice,
and I mean, I worked on this for two hours.
I had like five samples 40 seconds long
of what I was going to play between some poems
to kind of create some really weird juxtapositions.
I mean, do you want to know if the songs are,
just even though I failed?
And then I'll talk about the bowl.
Yes.
OK, so the-- whoops.
OK, so the songs were Enrique Iglesias's
"Turn Up the Night," War's "Low Rider,"
Notorious BIG's "Hypnotize," Ebn Ozn's "AEIOU Sometimes Y"--
what are they called--
Saint Etienne's "Only Love Can Break
Your Heart," the Neil Young song, and then
Goldfrapp's "Slide In."
Between those poems, I was going to--
and then I couldn't do it.
You know what I mean?
Because you're in the flow.
It's sort of like if you have a great date planned,
and you have all the sex toys hidden under the bed
and in the drawer.
And then everything's going so well.
You say, next time.
I know what you mean.
The singing bowl, I have had practice,
and my husband's a really good critic.
So when I gave a reading before, he's like,
you hit the bowl funny.
Hit it like this.
And so I've practiced, and I've given
a bunch of readings using it.
I like the sound of it because I think too many poetry
readings-- the poems are read too fast,
or there's not enough space between poems.
And the bowl's really nice because, just sonically, it
allows us to come down, right?
And one of the things I've had to learn
the hard way in the last 10 years
is to slow down in order to feel more.
And this is happening anyway physically,
so I'm not giving myself too much credit.
But I do think in poetry, it's better to read less
and to let things sort of have its space.
I feel the same way about conversations.
And so for tonight, I only read 2/3 of what
I thought I was going to read.
I looked down, and I thought, that feels like that's enough.
Let's just stop, right?
And so the bowl also helps me to bring in some breathing.
I take a bunch of breaths and that kind of thing.
Some poets like to use all sorts of different of the five
senses.
They like to light candles and incense and do stuff,
I mean, anything we think about in a ritual, a religious rite,
right?
I mean, I remember when I was in Russia
at these orthodox services.
I didn't understand a thing they were saying,
but I was feeling it and smelling it and hearing it,
right?
And I think poetry can partake of that,
and technology has gotten so good now.
You can just jack in an iPhone, and you can really do things.
So I did fail you, but I had to go with how
it felt like it was going.
And it just felt like it would--
sorry.
It was great.
We loved it.
I want to use the bell all the time now.
There's three questions, and they're all about suffering.
And you weren't all in communication with Timothy
as I was over the past 24 hours as he
was stuck in the most horrendous travel trauma
and didn't complain once and was laughing.
But OK, so I'll just go ahead and ask one of these suffering
questions, and if you have any other thoughts about suffering,
please feel free to share.
Could you say a little bit about the role
of suffering in your work, your own suffering and that
of others?
Well, I mean, suffering is unavoidable.
Our mortality, sickness, debilitation-- all of that's
unavoidable in ourselves and in all those people around us,
right?
That's different from suffering that we need not
go through but we bring upon ourselves unconsciously or not.
And so one of the tricks in life, I think,
is the 12-step serenity prayer, right?
I mean, there's that sense of we don't
want to suffer needlessly, and that takes a lot of work.
So in terms of writing, I mean, there
are a lot of writers who are just really abusing themselves,
their bodies, their minds, addictions, numbing themselves
out in the sake of being the artist, right?
And that's not the suffering that I'm talking about,
although I'm not excluding it.
I mean, we all know, I mean, the 27-year-old musicians who
croaked--
Janis, Jimi, Kurt, right?
Two Jimmys, right?
Hendrix and the other Doors one, Morrison.
I've been to his grave.
But I think suffering and beauty go together,
so I'll just say one simple thing.
There are so many poems I really can't
stand because the beauty is not accompanied with suffering,
and that's not how life works.
So in order to exalt, exalt, we also need the shadow,
and we need the debasement, right?
And likewise, if a poem is just a rant about how awful
your booze-ridden grandmother is or something--
you've got to tell us some good news in that poem
if it's going to--
the level of poems can rise, right?
And the other thing I'll just say is, a lot of us
are inured to suffering as people who like poetry,
and so you also got to look for where's the real joy.
You got to find it, right?
Carl Jung always said that we create our best work
by going to the weak parts of our psyche,
so if you're like a wrist-slashing,
suffering junkie, then your job is to find your joy, right?
And likewise if you think everything is great
and nothing's bad in your life, I mean--
I'll give you something bad.
[LAUGHTER]
OK, one last question--
if you could be any type of bird, what bird would you be,
and what color would your plumage be?
[LAUGHTER]
OK.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm going to tell you a story that I would not normally
share publicly, so this is a serious way
to answer a fun question.
But I did work with a couple of shamans
in Peru a couple of summers ago, one in the jungle
and then in the mountains of Cusco with the Q'eros Indians,
and so I've had a shamanic practice
for about four or five years.
And when I went home from my dad's 85th birthday
a year later--
and this was this last summer in August--
I was in my hometown.
And I bet there are some of you out here
who haven't gone back to your hometown in years,
if not decades, right?
And that's me.
There's no poetry for me in the town that I grew up in.
Childhood was not poetry, and I think all of us,
when we go back to our hometowns,
no matter what your upbringing was, we revert, right?
It's kind of wonderful, the mysterious thing,
but we do, right?
And so this is the first time I enjoyed being home as an adult
because what I did is I had two days alone,
and I went up into the mountain, Mount Umunhum, behind our house
that I saw every day of my life growing up.
And I got in touch with the spirits up there,
so with the creatures and the flora and fauna
and whatever, all that dead Indian blood.
And on my way back to the car on the second day,
I was greeted by three golden eagles,
and they were flying really low.
They were probably--
I'm going to say, what--
30 feet above my head, three of them in a row,
one after the other.
And as each one approached me, the first one
circled counterclockwise.
The second one circled clockwise,
and then the third one flew right over my head very slow.
And as they did that, I did a little dance with them, right?
And I was just like, damn.
It's like, thank you, golden eagle spirits.
And then on the drive down the mountain, about five minutes
into the drive, two golden eagles
swooped right in front of my windshield.
They were just kind of saying goodbye.
I was like, bye.
And my dad is a fundamentalist Christian.
He didn't come to my wedding.
Why, I asked.
And he said, God does not recognize your marriage.
And he said on the last day, you and Chris will stand condemned.
That's why I'm not coming to your wedding.
It's like, fuck you and the horse you rode in on, right?
So I was pretty pissed off for a year,
and I act out by not going home.
But this was his 85th birthday, and my therapist was saying,
Tim, your dad is 85.
Go the fuck home, so I did.
But I told him the story about the golden eagles
and the shamanic stuff, and at first, he goes,
what's shamanism?
He says, is that like a witch doctor?
I said, Dad, it's more like a medicine man,
like a spiritual leader.
It's less like voodoo, right?
And so I'm telling you this story
because I shared it with him not thinking
he was really going to appreciate it,
but I just wanted to.
You know sometimes you just do that with someone you
love, like a parent especially?
You're like, this is what I do.
Take it or leave it, but I just want to share.
And I went home, and a week later, we talked on the phone.
And he said, I'm still thinking about those golden eagles,
and that like really got me.
So that's the bird I would like to be.
Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]