WEBVTT

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I guess if I had set out to do
a whole book about the epidemic,

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then I probably would
have felt that I

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had to go do some research.

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But I'm not a scholar.

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And I didn't have
in mind to do that.

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I just had a mind to write a
very short sequence of five

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or six poems, persona poems.

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And I didn't really
care about the epidemic.

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The epidemic was
just an occasion

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that they could all share.

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That interested me
for reasons that don't

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have to do with the epidemic.

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So I did about one or
seven or eight of those.

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And then I kept writing them.

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And after I'd done about 15,
then I started to get nervous.

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And I thought I don't really
know anything about this.

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And this was a real event
that actually happened.

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And my parents were
both of their age

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that they lived through it.

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So I'd heard their
stories about it.

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So I knew some of the things.

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So I did and--

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[WINDOWS ALERT SOUND]

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Oh!

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How did I make that happen?

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[LAUGHTER]

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Tell me how to do that.

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[LAUGHTER]

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Anyway, I went off to try
to do my scholarly work.

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And what I found out was
that there was nothing

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written on it.

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There's one really
fantastic book

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by this historian named
Alfred Crosby that's

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really quite wonderful.

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So I read that book.

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A couple of others sort
of articles here and there

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and those famous photographs
of the people in San Francisco

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wearing the gas masks
and that kind of stuff.

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And then after that, I wrote
some incredibly execrable

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bombs.

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They were just horrible.

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They were so horrible
because they were laboring

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under a burden of information.

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Things like 30 million dead
and now Black Jack Pershing

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crosses the sea.

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You know, it's like that.

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Just didn't work.

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So I figured that was probably
the end of the sequence.

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So I put the whole thing away.

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And then I started
writing them again.

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And I thought, OK,
this time, I'm not

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going to do research like that.

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But I tried to do sort of
indirect research, which

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is to say I read a lot of
fiction that had been written

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in the '20s by people
who had lived through it,

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who interestingly enough,
never wrote about it.

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Willa Cather did.

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William Maxwell did.

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That's pretty much it.

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Mary McArthur did not even
though both her parents

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died of it.

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Robert Graves did
not even though he

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was sent back from the front.

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So I read a lot of
whirlwind history.

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And you know, I read
fiction and tried

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to have some sense of the idiom.

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So it was really only
until the whole thing was

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done that then I got very
serious and responsible

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and read some of the
primary documents

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with the Vermont
Historical Society,

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things like letters and
journals and all that.

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But the poems were
essentially done by then.

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I was mainly looking to
see if I had anachronisms.

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I found one.

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I had plastic flowers.

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Do you know that plastic was
not invented until World War II?

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You probably all knew that.

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I didn't know that.

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So I had somebody put
plastic flowers in a grave.

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So that's the answer.

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I'm not a scholar.

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And I was very lucky because
not much was written about it.

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So it was not that there's
a body of knowledge

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out there that I had to refute.

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I mean I think what's
implicit in your question is,

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even if you do draw
on existing materials,

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I mean you have to
imagine that anyway.

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It's the same thing if you write
highly-autobiographical stuff.

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I think one of the problems
that beginning writers have is

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that they fail to imagine it.

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You think, well, I
don't have to imagine.

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It did happen to me.

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But you do.

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You have to re-enter it.

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You have to imagine
it as a writer would

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because that's what the
reader is going to have to do.

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Yeah.

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I'm a great fan of
Larry Levis's poetry and

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of your poem [INAUDIBLE].

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I don't have a
specific question,

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but I would love
to hear whatever

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you would like to say
about that poem or even

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about thinking about the poem.

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Well, that poem is of my homage.

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It's the most discursive
poem that I'll ever

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write in my entire life.

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There's no doubt about it.

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Because that is the
way I work, and that

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is the way my mind works.

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It's very much the
way his mind worked.

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But I think quite amazing
when many things amazing

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about Larry Levis's poems.

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But one is if you read the
first books, if you just

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start for the beginning and read
all the way through and read

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everything to see what happened
over a lifetime in terms

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of finding a mode or finding
a way of speaking that

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also was completely compatible
with how his mind worked.

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And it was an extremely
discursive and learned mind

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so that he would circle around
things and come back to it.

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And that's why his poems do that
so amazingly, so beautifully.

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So I thought, OK,
Larry, I'll see

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what I learned from you as
a kind of homage to you.

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But my mind doesn't
work like that.

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So that's why I say, it's
the most discursive poem

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that I will ever write.

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I'm sure.

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He is a wonderful
poet, ain't he?

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Yeah.

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Died too soon.

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