WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.810 align:middle line:90% 00:00:00.810 --> 00:00:04.110 align:middle line:84% But as I was listening, you started by reading short poems 00:00:04.110 --> 00:00:06.030 align:middle line:90% and then you read longer poems. 00:00:06.030 --> 00:00:08.760 align:middle line:84% And I just thought, yes, I like the longer poems just so much 00:00:08.760 --> 00:00:11.010 align:middle line:84% better than I was trying to think what that was about. 00:00:11.010 --> 00:00:14.490 align:middle line:84% And it seems that you have a really tremendous talent 00:00:14.490 --> 00:00:17.580 align:middle line:84% for being kind of incisive and that kind of being 00:00:17.580 --> 00:00:19.500 align:middle line:90% incisive and epigrammatic. 00:00:19.500 --> 00:00:21.780 align:middle line:84% And then in the longer poems that you kind of 00:00:21.780 --> 00:00:23.393 align:middle line:84% forced to put the ball up in the air 00:00:23.393 --> 00:00:24.810 align:middle line:84% again so you have to sort of fight 00:00:24.810 --> 00:00:27.300 align:middle line:84% against your own incisiveness, and something 00:00:27.300 --> 00:00:31.380 align:middle line:84% exploratory and poetic happens in that refusal 00:00:31.380 --> 00:00:32.790 align:middle line:90% of being incisive. 00:00:32.790 --> 00:00:36.780 align:middle line:84% Yes, that's a beautiful and profound perception. 00:00:36.780 --> 00:00:39.780 align:middle line:90% And it's actually-- 00:00:39.780 --> 00:00:44.250 align:middle line:84% I mean, I'm grateful to hear about your preference. 00:00:44.250 --> 00:00:49.350 align:middle line:84% I think there's many dimensions to that difference. 00:00:49.350 --> 00:00:53.160 align:middle line:84% The lyric obviously is a very vexed form 00:00:53.160 --> 00:00:57.420 align:middle line:84% particularly at the present moment in terms of brevity. 00:00:57.420 --> 00:00:59.580 align:middle line:90% It's traditionally a brief form. 00:00:59.580 --> 00:01:03.060 align:middle line:84% It's something that one would think of as a song. 00:01:03.060 --> 00:01:06.120 align:middle line:84% And yet the precious to which the lyric 00:01:06.120 --> 00:01:09.690 align:middle line:84% has been submitted in the last century and certainly 00:01:09.690 --> 00:01:13.620 align:middle line:84% now have tended to walk questions of length, questions 00:01:13.620 --> 00:01:14.940 align:middle line:90% of continuity. 00:01:14.940 --> 00:01:17.970 align:middle line:84% And so the notion of sequences is something that 00:01:17.970 --> 00:01:20.130 align:middle line:90% has really come to the fore. 00:01:20.130 --> 00:01:23.250 align:middle line:84% Now, that's a fairly straightforward 00:01:23.250 --> 00:01:25.050 align:middle line:90% aesthetic response, yes. 00:01:25.050 --> 00:01:29.220 align:middle line:84% But the more interesting challenges for me 00:01:29.220 --> 00:01:32.490 align:middle line:84% are, what are the psychological, spiritual, emotional 00:01:32.490 --> 00:01:34.210 align:middle line:90% equivalents of this? 00:01:34.210 --> 00:01:39.030 align:middle line:84% And one thing I find as I'm hearing you pose the question 00:01:39.030 --> 00:01:43.260 align:middle line:84% is that my sense is the longer poems allow 00:01:43.260 --> 00:01:49.530 align:middle line:84% a kind of relenting in which the immediacy of experience that 00:01:49.530 --> 00:01:54.720 align:middle line:84% comes to me as a collision, the consequences of that in terms 00:01:54.720 --> 00:01:57.930 align:middle line:84% of reflection in terms of a possibly more 00:01:57.930 --> 00:02:03.940 align:middle line:84% benign perspective are allowed to occur. 00:02:03.940 --> 00:02:08.250 align:middle line:84% It's as if oxygen comes back in, or the soil, 00:02:08.250 --> 00:02:11.280 align:middle line:84% which is otherwise exhausted by the short bloom 00:02:11.280 --> 00:02:14.580 align:middle line:84% of a small lyric, is allowed to yield something more 00:02:14.580 --> 00:02:17.910 align:middle line:84% like a field so that one can start harvesting something 00:02:17.910 --> 00:02:20.820 align:middle line:84% that is much more capacious, much more restorative, 00:02:20.820 --> 00:02:23.860 align:middle line:84% something that you can even store for future food 00:02:23.860 --> 00:02:25.240 align:middle line:90% and generations and so on. 00:02:25.240 --> 00:02:28.128 align:middle line:84% So I think that there's enormous implications 00:02:28.128 --> 00:02:29.670 align:middle line:84% as you move from what might otherwise 00:02:29.670 --> 00:02:32.880 align:middle line:84% seem a fairly arbitrary thing-- short haul, long haul. 00:02:32.880 --> 00:02:36.210 align:middle line:84% But in my work, I know that since much of it 00:02:36.210 --> 00:02:40.050 align:middle line:84% emerges from an abrasion or a collision 00:02:40.050 --> 00:02:42.300 align:middle line:84% as I say on the historical front, 00:02:42.300 --> 00:02:45.900 align:middle line:84% something in which the sensibility rather naked, 00:02:45.900 --> 00:02:49.380 align:middle line:84% innocent, trusting, wanting to love 00:02:49.380 --> 00:02:54.420 align:middle line:84% is struck by something brutal or unfair and recoils. 00:02:54.420 --> 00:02:57.720 align:middle line:84% Often shortness has to do with recoiling. 00:02:57.720 --> 00:03:05.070 align:middle line:84% And can I get away with this one offering, get it done, 00:03:05.070 --> 00:03:10.170 align:middle line:84% as opposed to is there more ample means available to us 00:03:10.170 --> 00:03:11.530 align:middle line:90% civilizationally. 00:03:11.530 --> 00:03:15.030 align:middle line:84% And I think that the interstices of these longer poems 00:03:15.030 --> 00:03:18.630 align:middle line:84% allow for some of that, the possibility of largesse. 00:03:18.630 --> 00:03:21.000 align:middle line:84% And I think it's the place where usually happens 00:03:21.000 --> 00:03:24.300 align:middle line:84% in the latter parts of my books, a move towards being 00:03:24.300 --> 00:03:27.330 align:middle line:84% able to arrive at that kind of largesse, 00:03:27.330 --> 00:03:34.740 align:middle line:84% if I want to call it that, but respect relenting from defying. 00:03:34.740 --> 00:03:36.900 align:middle line:84% These are large issues and they have 00:03:36.900 --> 00:03:39.780 align:middle line:84% to do with growing in the way that the book has 00:03:39.780 --> 00:03:41.920 align:middle line:90% made possible. 00:03:41.920 --> 00:03:44.100 align:middle line:90% So I'm fascinated. 00:03:44.100 --> 00:03:46.860 align:middle line:84% Each of my books is actually structured 00:03:46.860 --> 00:03:50.580 align:middle line:84% by a movement from short poems to very long ones at the end. 00:03:50.580 --> 00:03:53.220 align:middle line:84% And it's something that's only made possible 00:03:53.220 --> 00:03:54.870 align:middle line:84% by the journey of the book itself. 00:03:54.870 --> 00:03:58.650 align:middle line:90% 00:03:58.650 --> 00:03:59.150 align:middle line:90% So thanks. 00:03:59.150 --> 00:04:00.067 align:middle line:90% [INAUDIBLE] question-- 00:04:00.067 --> 00:04:00.590 align:middle line:90% [INAUDIBLE] 00:04:00.590 --> 00:04:02.140 align:middle line:90% Yeah.