But as I was listening, you started by reading short poems
and then you read longer poems.
And I just thought, yes, I like the longer poems just so much
better than I was trying to think what that was about.
And it seems that you have a really tremendous talent
for being kind of incisive and that kind of being
incisive and epigrammatic.
And then in the longer poems that you kind of
forced to put the ball up in the air
again so you have to sort of fight
against your own incisiveness, and something
exploratory and poetic happens in that refusal
of being incisive.
Yes, that's a beautiful and profound perception.
And it's actually--
I mean, I'm grateful to hear about your preference.
I think there's many dimensions to that difference.
The lyric obviously is a very vexed form
particularly at the present moment in terms of brevity.
It's traditionally a brief form.
It's something that one would think of as a song.
And yet the precious to which the lyric
has been submitted in the last century and certainly
now have tended to walk questions of length, questions
of continuity.
And so the notion of sequences is something that
has really come to the fore.
Now, that's a fairly straightforward
aesthetic response, yes.
But the more interesting challenges for me
are, what are the psychological, spiritual, emotional
equivalents of this?
And one thing I find as I'm hearing you pose the question
is that my sense is the longer poems allow
a kind of relenting in which the immediacy of experience that
comes to me as a collision, the consequences of that in terms
of reflection in terms of a possibly more
benign perspective are allowed to occur.
It's as if oxygen comes back in, or the soil,
which is otherwise exhausted by the short bloom
of a small lyric, is allowed to yield something more
like a field so that one can start harvesting something
that is much more capacious, much more restorative,
something that you can even store for future food
and generations and so on.
So I think that there's enormous implications
as you move from what might otherwise
seem a fairly arbitrary thing-- short haul, long haul.
But in my work, I know that since much of it
emerges from an abrasion or a collision
as I say on the historical front,
something in which the sensibility rather naked,
innocent, trusting, wanting to love
is struck by something brutal or unfair and recoils.
Often shortness has to do with recoiling.
And can I get away with this one offering, get it done,
as opposed to is there more ample means available to us
civilizationally.
And I think that the interstices of these longer poems
allow for some of that, the possibility of largesse.
And I think it's the place where usually happens
in the latter parts of my books, a move towards being
able to arrive at that kind of largesse,
if I want to call it that, but respect relenting from defying.
These are large issues and they have
to do with growing in the way that the book has
made possible.
So I'm fascinated.
Each of my books is actually structured
by a movement from short poems to very long ones at the end.
And it's something that's only made possible
by the journey of the book itself.
So thanks.
[INAUDIBLE] question--
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah.