WEBVTT

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Oh, well that's an
interesting question.

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The question is that since I use
these personal experiences that

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are often painful, what their
connection is to poetry.

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Poetry explains nothing really.

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I mean, it really
doesn't explain anything.

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For me, one of the
challenges of poetry

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is to be there in
that particular moment

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with whatever has
happened and to be

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able to speak in
a way that resists

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all of the means of evasion that
we have all cultivated so well.

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And speech of course,
is also an evasion.

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So I really don't feel that
the poetry explains anything.

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I mean, but I do see poetry as
a deeply human art in that--

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for me, it's about
becoming a human being.

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And so naturally since
these sorts of things

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do happen, I neither obey them
nor really go toward them.

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I mean the-- first
time that I really

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decided that I wanted to be a
poet was I was nine years old

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and I had an English assignment
and we were supposed to write

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three quatrains with rhyme and
meter about our favorite place

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and at that time we
lived in Vermont.

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And my favorite place
was a meadow by a stream

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so I went there
and you know, I've

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got my notepad and everything.

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And I was so frustrated
because I couldn't say anything

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about how I felt
about that place

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or express my own sense
of it or the place itself.

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And it was that frustration
that made me a poet.

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Basically, I mean, I think
these things are there any way.

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I mean for instance,
my brother's death.

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I would have had to
confront that in any case,

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whether I wrote poetry or not.

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And-- no.

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I don't know.

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Poetry it's not for me
in any way therapeutic.

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It's not a kind of--

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it's not-- I know people
for whom it is but for me,

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it's not.

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And that's because it's
so much something else.

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I mean, it's a kind of--

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for me, it comes
out of this ground

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of being where you
do not have to be

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where you don't need therapy.

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In other words, where
you don't need--

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you don't need the consolation.

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You have the
existence of what is.

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So it has a kind
of spiritual value

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to me that I can't really put
into any of the other readily

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available forms that there are.

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If for instance,
if I were looking.

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There's no reason really
to write poetry in order

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to find something therapeutic.

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