Among the things that I love about poetry
are its compression and its economy.
Among the things that are extremely frustrating,
I think, in the making of poems are its compression
and economy.
[LAUGHTER]
And very often, there's something that happens--
I don't know.
It's like throwing pots or something.
The way that the form of it emerges.
And it is what it's going to be.
And you can make little small changes.
But unless you just want to hose it all down and start over,
it is what it's going to be.
Or if any of you make bread, you know
it's like when you're kneading in the flour.
And you get to the place where it just won't take anymore
and kind of sheets off from the dough that you have.
So a lot sort of ends up on the cutting room floor as it were--
it's what would not fit into the palm.
I discovered very late in life.
Particularly, if you're a person who writes quite slowly
and if you're a person who has a dread of the blank piece
of paper for the next poem, is take the finished poem
and put up there next to the title number one.
And then take a new piece of paper and put number two.
And start with whatever it was that you left on the floor
or whatever it was that wouldn't fit into that particular poem
but probably is something that you need to look at,
you need to think about again.
And that's how you start a sequence.
The seven pieces of this particular sequence,
they're not any more in chronological order,
except for the first two.
And the first two are.
So this is the "Art of Distance 2."
"My father was an earth son and a stoic and eldest child,
a steward who took dominion over the given world,
at least it seemed his 100 acres of it.
Pets we ate, rabbits minced and the combined.
Inchling molds, torched in the crunch of the tree
to save the peaches.
Scorned excess and complaint.
In poor tune, it said no, not, can't, never will.
What didn't fit was seeing him cry.
He'd stand alone in the field, like a rogue pine
that had escaped the side.
As he would stand beside the family graves,
a short important distance from the car,
where we were hushed until the white flag had been unpocketed.
And he dangled his keys and got back in,
not ever looking at us, not looking
at the brisk instructive face my mother used
on clerks, on amputees.
This all happened long before my mother,
in charge of cheerfulness and world morale,
had lost a body part and given up.
So it was never in response to her the way he wept
or equally the way he moved through life.
One hoof after another, a sentimental man is singular.
Still the boy whose mother's gone away.
The last full day of our last ritual visit,
he'd taken a turn already into the field.
What set him off was hearing the neighbor's gun.
She merely wanted the turtle out of her beans.
He hauled the carcass home, two-feet wide,
a rock from the creek.
And also, elderly, if the shell's whirls
correspond to xylem and phloem, rings we
count on the trunk of a tree.
Tastes like chicken, he actually said.
Gathering the saw them all, chiseled pliers, hatchet.
He'd need to unhouse the body and chop it up.
No one wanted to help or even watch
that set the child intent on the raw of knives.
And the child changing her mind with a webbed foot wave, dinner
was not quite dead.
But shudders and tears were weakness and wouldn't work.
Jokes wouldn't work on temper alchemized from noun
into verb, as my father pried the armored plates apart,
pale and sweating and silent.
And never did he, sun long gone down,
once quit the bloody porch.
The bowl of the upper shell and shards, the entrails bejeweled
with flies, the beat head, feet, and tail
cast off into wet grass.
Until at the screen, holding a platter of meat,
he might have been the Queen's woodsman bringing back
the heart.
I heated the oil until it spit at me.
Dredged the pieces in flour, as I would chicken.
Flung them chunk by chunk into the pan.
When chewed, undefeated lumps ringed even his dish.
He said, I'd done the best I knew, not naming the skill,
deflecting sorrow and terror into a steady fierceness
and aiming that."