Dean has agreed to do a 15 minute Q&A
if you are interested.
Are you interested?
[WHISTLE AND CLAP]
If anybody needs to leave, you can do it now.
And then he'll come back up.
And then after, books are for sale in the lobby.
And he will be out there to sign after the reading.
Otherwise, we could just start calling out [INAUDIBLE]..
[LAUGHTER]
Hi.
What are the two places where you teach, and how is that?
I'm teaching the Warren Wilson Low Residency Program,
and I teach at Iowa.
[LAUGHTER]
One is in North Carolina, one is in--
where's Iowa?
Somewhere in the Midwest.
Seems that with the students at Iowa
are generally sort of very gosh, highly professionalized
kind of people and very strong writers.
We get about must have been around 460 applications
for 22 slots.
Warren Wilson, there in general students
we have are quite a bit older, or they generally
have lives and jobs.
So it's a very, very different student body.
My colleagues are very different too.
Part of it is that I have roles in each place that I occupy.
My role with Iowa has often done with a student staff.
Telling them [INAUDIBLE] go into this stuff
about debased nature of [INAUDIBLE]
in a crisis of referentiality.
[LAUGHTER]
I scratch my head, and, do you ever
get a desire to write about something that you feel?
[LAUGHTER]
[CHEERING]
[INAUDIBLE] didn't work for Warren Wilson.
I say things like, [INAUDIBLE] fascism.
And, just to stir stuff up.
One of the wonderful things about art
is that it tolerates contradiction.
All that finally matters in a work of art is its success.
And its success is related with where the person is making
the art, I think, to be committed to something-- to be
committed to some sort of idea, or some sort of procedure,
or some sort of relationship with the world,
be it in terms materials of the art,
if the wield of the materials of the art
are making so secondary to.
And when we abstract those things, when
you look at those things generally,
they're often contradictory.
But it doesn't matter.
Because if the art is successful,
the art is successful--
I don't believe you do have to choose.
I don't think that you have to choose between premier
and [INAUDIBLE] places.
I believe that you have to choose between [INAUDIBLE]..
Because I'm [INAUDIBLE] paid.
Theology [INAUDIBLE] was really beautiful.
Thanks.
And spoke to one mentor.
I'm really curious about who your mentors were?
If you want to talk a little more about Koch
and your relationship.
And maybe also who you come back to and read most frequently.
I want to--
I was in the first class that graduated in the MFA program
in Vienna.
And I didn't have any famous poets for teachers.
And nor did I particularly--
I have some dear friends who I'm still very close with.
But I didn't have any aesthetic agreements.
In other words, I didn't really have--
I mean, I had to do an argument, which
is more important than having people who
you can agree with, I think.
So for me, the first poets who really
seem to be writing what I wanted to write
were the New York school.
And the way I got to [INAUDIBLE] is from my friend
the poet Mark Halliday.
I knew him and had to get to know him.
And that infuriated me.
I was very jealous.
So he told me to write Kenneth.
And I wrote Kenneth a two-page letter in single leaf.
And he wrote me back a post-card.
Which was-- that's the right economy, actually.
[LAUGHTER]
I was so pleased by that.
And that led to me getting to see him more and more.
He proved to me-- which was incredibly important to me.
And so that's how I met him.
I got to meet Robert Hass, who's sort of my--
they're my kind of right and left in terms of my writing.
I feel his work I just think is a genius, a different kind
of genius than [INAUDIBLE].
I got to know him differently.
But he's a friend now too.
And I think of them as--
I still think of Ken as my mentor.
You get to choose your mentors.
You don't always get to choose your teachers.
Yeah, does that answer your question?
And in terms of--
that's work that I always go back to.
But I go back, I read Whitman.
I love the Prelude.
I read Prelude every other year.
It seems there is also a tremendous sort of strangeness
and audacity and youthfulness and vigor.
I love Tomaz Salamun.
He's someone I read all the time.
So I'm able to exhaust his work.
[INAUDIBLE]
Who are some of the younger poets
that you want to feed off of next?
Oh Jesus, there's really a lot of them.
Sarah Manguso wrote a wonderful book,
whose title I can't remember.
The captain's island?
The captain lands in paradise.
What is it?
The captain lands in paradise.
Yeah.
Peter Richards's new book is tricky.
But I think Matthew Rohrer.
Matthew is [INAUDIBLE].
Those guys are really good young poets.
There's a lot of good ones.
Matthea Harvey is terrific.
Let's see.
Who else.
Somebody else I just read a book,
it just knocked my socks off.
[INAUDIBLE]
Sorry, I can't remember.
But it seems like it's a really good time for young poets now.
A lot of young poets are doing not only just
publishing great work but also getting involved in publishing.
Verse Press I think just does a great job.
Alice James Books has garnered-- has had a rebirth or something
in the last [INAUDIBLE] years.
And the books they have been publishing
have just been terrific.
And they've been mostly, about 2/3 young poets.
And that's-- look, Verse and Alice James are--
when I go into the bookstore and to see a new book of poems
by somebody on that list, I just buy it and read it.
Because I feel like they're really doing stuff.
There's some good new magazines, like Jubilat, Conduit.
So I think it's a good time for poetry.
I hate not being young.
[LAUGHTER]
[INAUDIBLE]
You talked about how when you were in Indiana,
and you started figuring out if you
were interested in New York, and that was the thing that you
wanted to be writing.
How is it that you started figuring out what you
want to do, because [INAUDIBLE]
Well, it wasn't-- it's never it never existed before we get
there.
You just write and try to figure out what it is you're doing.
And then it starts--
it's not like I decided.
It's just that I felt, I felt permission.
And I think that's one of the things
that you look for in poets.
And those poets, I suppose, the poets that I return to
again and again--
Ashbery is another one-- where I feel
permission being given that other poets make
me feel like that how I want to put language together
is not poetry.
So it wasn't-- there was a lot of poetry that I knew that I
couldn't write.
And there was-- and that usually had to do with sensibility.
And it's thinking about art.
I'm very suspicious about sensibility that obviously
bases itself upon suffering.
The notion of the authenticity of the work of art
is based upon a kind of back body count.
And I remember, when I was in graduate school,
trying to write poems that were based upon suffering
and feeling bogus about it.
And so it was hard to figure out what
could be a justifiable and inspiring source of poetry
for me then.
And then it was through the New York School
that I discovered comedy.
And I don't necessarily mean comedy as telling jokes.
I mean comedy as a sense of lightness, and levity,
and inventiveness.
And an open spiritness.
And it allows for a lot of strange things
to happen [INAUDIBLE].
And when I was in Indiana, there wasn't anybody who was--
when I was in Indiana, nobody knew who Frank O'Hara was and I
mean, who John Ashbery was.
I feel like I discovered Frank O'Hara.
[INAUDIBLE]
[LAUGHS]
Do you still feel when you write,
there are certain things that you don't feel
like you have permission to do?
[INAUDIBLE] feel the writing things.
And that's a huge one.
It meant a lot.
It was very different.
And obviously you need some kind of sanction
to be confident to do.
Is there still stuff that you don't feel confident in doing?
I'm still very aware of failing.
I mean, one of the things is, when
I was younger I needed authentication.
When you haven't published anything
and you haven't finished any books, it's a little--
you really do need that.
It's hard.
You feel doubts.
And feel doubts about what you're writing,
you know, maybe it's not poetry.
Now I don't worry about whether or not
I'm writing poetry or not.
I'm just worrying about, I have a sense
of failing all the time.
So I think that's the problem.
That's the problem that it presents
a way of trying to discover permission.
I think they're probably related.
They just have different kinds of different [INAUDIBLE] fears
of that.
And you always have a sense of failing when we're writing.
If you write a poem, it's a page long,
you think, "Oh my God, I can't write a short poem."
[LAUGHTER]
A short poem, I think, what's the matter with me?
I don't even have an attention span.
I have a question.
Do you consider your audience or readers at all when you write,
or is it mostly just for your own personal pleasure of sense
of making art.
I hate this question.
[LAUGHTER]
The reason I hate this question is because I have to be honest
and I don't worry about audience at all.
OK.
Because I'm the only one who knows.
And I don't [INAUDIBLE]
[LAUGHTER]
It's got to get by me.
And then if it interests me, then it's just a matter of,
is it lousy and I throw it away, or does it work.
But in terms of the audience, I did worry about audience
when I was young.
And I think of my first book, which if I ever published it,
a selected poems, I wouldn't publish
any poems from that book.
[LAUGHTER]
Because I felt like it was all about trying to write
poems that appeals to the audience.
And basically, audience is a conservative phenomenon.
Theory, criticism, audience-- it's always behind the art.
And we always-- it's always two days late at least.
And so it's important just sort of keep trying to push things.
And it doesn't really matter if any of us read any more poems.
It doesn't.
It only matters to me.
[LAUGHTER]
[INAUDIBLE]
With such an eclectic tapestry of images,
I'm wondering what your guilty non-literary pleasures are.
Reading Popular Mechanics, or--
[LAUGHTER]
You know, I've got some old issues of Popular Mechanics
that I just love.
And I've stolen lines of this stuff.
You know I-- a guilty pleasure-- man.
[INAUDIBLE] that's a problem of me
that I don't feel guilty about pleasures.
[LAUGHTER]
Oh, my favorite show on television right
now is Extreme Makeover.
Oh!
[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]
It's very [INAUDIBLE] I have a lot of--
personally, well, I explained the big idea
before I explain the personal.
But for the most part, most of the shows we watch
are built upon pursuit and attainment.
And they're usually built around either some sort of either
they're a half-hour thing, and they're
built with that around some sort of silly familial
misunderstanding.
Which is the notion of somehow
it's the family drama.
But most of the shows that are in our lives
are built around violence.
And they come to a solution as if somehow or another
that absolves us of the violence that
occurred to create the whole damn show to begin with.
Radical makeover is entirely about the achievement
of beauty.
[LAUGHTER]
We can critique the meetings and the kind of beauty.
But it is-- as far as I can tell--
the only show that's based upon attaining beauty.
[INAUDIBLE]
[LAUGHTER]
As I said, I was originally going to be a doctor.
And then I realized, I didn't like sick people.
[LAUGHTER]
Then I was going to become a psychiatrist.
And then I realized, I didn't like depressed people.
OK.
Become a plastic surgeon.
You get to see a lot of people naked.
[LAUGHTER]
You get to do some fascinating procedures.
If you do reconstructive procedures,
all kinds of interesting stuff.
There's a lot of pro bono work you can do.
So I'm interested in that.
Also the notion of ---
I'm very interested in transformation science fiction.
There's Werewolf, Frankenstein, and it's sort of that too.
With Dr. Frankenstein's moves.
And the thing they could do with teeth now.
My God, these people come out, they
have teeth you could cut wire with.
Time for one more question.
Yeah.
On that topic, What is one thing you have never
pursued that you would like to?
[LAUGHTER]
Well, [LAUGHS] a lot of women in my life.
[LAUGHTER]
But there are things that--
what am I not doing?
I wish I would spend more time working on visual art.
I wish I would have committed to that a little bit more.
And I still have time, but I get taken away from it.
And I have absolutely no skill.
And a lot of the times, I do in fact wish
that I would have stayed on the course for med school.
Because the knowledge is a wonderful thing.
Actually pursuing-- that was something.
That's a good question.
Yes, I need to read Proust too.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]