OK.
Well, I'm going to read some poems
from I Was Blown Back, which is a book that came out in 2005
from Singing Horse Press.
And it's got two main sections.
One is a series of untitled poems and the second section
is a long poem called--
it's called "Ask A Difficult Question"-- that's right--
"Variations on Rumi."
And I'll say more about that in a minute.
I'm going to start with the last several poems
in the first series.
I would say, probably, these poems
are written under the influence of Paul Celan, a really intense
reading encounter with the poetry of Paul Celan.
You know Paul Celan's poetry or who he is?
Yes?
So that probably accounts for a lot of what
these poems are thinking about.
[INAUDIBLE]
Excuse me, Norman, could you adjust the microphone?
Yes.
Sorry about that, yes.
Now, if I speak like this, it's good, right?
"Dreaming is the least part of prophecy.
And prophecy is revelations, never
shadow, which is why we see the back, the curling
clouds of vagueness, not the crisp anti-rooms
in which throne-like furniture is
stacked before the sideboard.
Waking to face the weighty days, we
carry on bravely within our structures,
forget entirely the contents--
the clues, the notes, the tones, the sheet music
despite the hints embedded in words, syllables, phrases,
metaphors in the scene heard, remembered, and despised.
Thus, we stir, stride on, stumble, trip, fall, and rise.
I can't help it anymore.
My horses deliberately canter across the road.
My armies march.
My fishes swim as I wait here for the bus.
Everything's hollow, is smoke, glows like skin,
like coal, or milk, like silk, like gloves, sex, or gunfire
towed along behind my heavier theories.
I've lined up my things by the names
of what I've got, against which I am humbled to gape.
I can say I've walked this stony path one
time, conversed with the worn things of my life.
Not one accurately named, not one emerging
from the heart of the sky.
My identity absorbed them all or they all hid.
My desire appears as a pillar of salt.
Out from the narrowness of my thinking
I break onto an unsuspecting world.
He who crosses God intentionally, as someone
crosses a street against the light, is stoned to death
or swallowed whole by the yawning earth, which happens
every time something falls after it has
been misplaced or forgotten.
Gently dropped, it falls without anyone speaking of it.
Gravity is God's chief notion--
a spinning world with a heavy heart.
A cup that is full will be drained, an empty cup filled,
in accordance with the time of season,
in accordance with weight and reason.
Gratuitous love-- how is that possible?
Lifting love of women and men that
travels faster and further than feeling and muster.
The one who feeds you figs.
Numbers shatter when the pieces of being
shower over water or dirt.
Words overheard, talking into my thinking.
What's my home?
Who asks?
Poetry is a way, not a topos in which something appears.
It's a sway among the swarm to be hurled from side to side
against the language walls that tunnels subversive through what
is, as far as it is known, occasioning
a gap in mind through which you could theoretically
drive a truck.
Meanwhile, dogs bark and canaries tweet,
monkeys propend opposable thumbs.
The covering sky won't shake out its stars
to cooperate with the head's coolness, the disaster that
is human life on earth.
That this can be said--
imagination blisters in the cauterized night--
is possible only in the reams of paper,
these hidden significant blotches of ink
we twiddle in the dark.
I know my fate rests with the embers.
Seeing music, hearing trees, walking the talk
back and forth.
In the meadows, fuzzy flowers bud, and the creamy peaks,
gray froth, and the demon soaring of a hawk,
knowing you can't dismiss a whole people's
bud as if it was produce you didn't
want to buy at the store.
So I go around cities, trying climb
out of the box I was born in, watching out
for a pace, or strategy, for tin-tin adulation,
and lingering where the vestibule
at the bottom of the stairs when the old drunk who
works for me in the tailor shop pisses the night away,
made oblivious by his sorrows.
Is there anything new in this?
It's what the rabbis have been muttering about--
of being born and dying at its nub.
I must do the same thing, after all.
Entering or leaving from or to--
the same spiral, all.
I'm trying to say that's salt, stuttering."
And the last poem in that series--
there's about 75 poems, so I'm just reading just a few
of them.
So this is the last one.
I don't know that it makes any difference,
but it's the last one.
It might be just by chance that it's the last one.
I really don't remember, actually,
why it's the last one.
But in fact, it is.
I hear the sea washing the sky, combing out the cloud's hair
as your hair is combed by the beauty of your thinking.
If you are unsure, do not shear.
Leave the camp and in the desert,
ask the important questions.
And see who answers when the bitter flavor trickles
down the throat, dissolving in the stomach's darkness.
Forgive everything because nothing
prevents you from being a person.
They only aid the cause gathered together in the twilight
where, amid the ringing of bells,
you stopped what you thought you were doing and rolled forth.
So now I'm going to read a little bit from "Ask
A Difficult Question."
And this is kind of a funny poem.
The circumstances are that I grew up in a little town
in Pennsylvania and I haven't--
I don't go there.
I have no reason to go there.
So I don't go there.
Decades go by and I never went there.
And so I-- this one time, I went there.
The reason I went there is because a relative of mine
was dying.
And I went to see her for the last time.
And it's a very weird thing.
Maybe some of you live in the town you were born in.
Maybe you live in the same house you were born in, I don't know.
Maybe you see that house, but I never--
decades went by and I didn't see the places where I grew up.
So it's a very weird--
at the time of the death of someone in the family
to go to the place that you-- where you lived every day
and haven't been in 20, 30 years.
To be there-- it's just a very weird sensation.
I can't explain it, I guess.
If I could explain it, I wouldn't have written a poem,
right?
So-- and what-- the form of the poem is funny because I had
a friend at the time who--
his business was producing calendars and journals.
And he gave me a journal that was called the Rumi Journal.
And it would have--
it was like it-- you know-- you'd write your appointments
or maybe you'd write your-- about your life or something
in the journal.
So it had quotations from Rumi, and then
a whole lot of blank lines, several pages,
and then it had another quotation from Rumi,
and a whole lot of blank lines.
So I decided to fill up this notebook with this poem.
And it would be variations on whatever was suggested
to me by the lines of Rumi.
So you'll hear each section begins with Rumi,
and then goes downhill from there, so to speak.
OK, so this is the beginning-- it's going to be a little bit.
"One-- though we seem to be sleeping,
there is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream
and that will eventually startle us back
to the truth of who we are, though there's a block in time,
a blackness toward which the historical rock falls
in its direction of names and dates,
in the photographs that are identified.
They are of people in a state.
And in that dream of the possibility of now,
under hills that fall back against mirrors,
anyone remembering the dream hears this sound
as systems of identity laid out on a table
in the small town remembering.
The being which is a flourishing of a soft cloth which
is knotted in six places.
Opening the book, the place where one lived,
actually something flitting along
that I thought I had and came back here that was gone,
though there, it was exact.
Things changing, malls coming in, wide road or [INAUDIBLE]
of the same roads, and streets, fields
where there were hills, trees where there were trees, spaces
covered in grass where there were buildings, shops
and houses, ordinary skies.
Not connected to it in the place where the battle was fought
and the river, now a wide expanse of calm light
beside broken trees, the river demanded, or evoked,
this isn't some sort of dream.
This can't be any imitation.
There is resonance between the times in the book, which
is carried about the road drunkenly after sorrow
and someone's death, that slants me back to where I am,
stardust.
Two-- days full of wanting, let them
go by without worrying that they do.
Stay where you are inside, such a pure, hollow note.
Memory redactions are the mind's music.
In the mind's mirror, reflections of what's wanted,
what is, no images, only a smell of childhood,
no one's parents coming along behind them, black, round cars.
No one's photographs, old clothing
retrieved, wanting as longing, distance means what's close
appears far, as reaching up one's hand toward fruit
once their seeds disappears.
As the street curves, as the old brick school
next to the white church, the children entering in a freeze
frame along the code.
Just remaining in that zone as if it welled.
The present not disturbing the past,
settling into it like something falling into dust.
The feeling of the ending included in the beginning.
Everything mechanical approaching distance
like a bell--
pure tone, water tone.
Road rises up behind the house, car
climbs against the flat road of the hill, journey movement,
but no characters in the story, no forgiving framework,
no persons, no personalities, only struggle
in the red tide of desperately losing
what one built up like the water that rises, falls back,
crashing against the thrusting up of the land,
taking the town and the buildings with it.
Streets buckling, leaving debris and mud
and breakage in its wake.
This be my way to a feeling.
Not images, only the feeling of the road
climbing, humming sound of the tires,
feeling what was incomplete.
My hand reached out for it, but it was dim, churned up,
bloated fish floating in it.
And I could not advance, only reach.
But there's something in it.
The past isn't behind.
Rather it is mixed in like a color of paint.
A hump in the street next to the railroad track.
Beyond it, the hill covered with trees.
Some of the places I remember are gone,
encoded only in the body that was the ghost they were.
So that breathing the shadow, those places
grew brighter, reemerged.
But the person speaking to me is gone as if she never were,
also the dream.
Her voice and mumble can't make up words,
but sense the speech as true.
In the book, those are the same words
in the note, words we call or were embedded there.
Black letters flaming the white page, indecipherable, sweet.
Farmland and gentle hills, code.
The square fields in colors a code, the dividing trees
enforcing a code.
The only place to be in the words, as if the black lines,
crawling deliberately across the page, were place enough.
Persons whose passions are a code, remember this.
Subtly flaps, a linen sheet or a cloth,
covering it so it's only a shape that
makes a motion unrecognizable.
Only one knows it is there beneath all what we speak of.
Cleaning the table and the floor again.
So many words again, bodies and feelings again,
making something out of the world.
The battle to defend the river, the fort.
It's been two years, guns blazing, and finally burns.
A stone marks that place, erected
1900, as memory in a wedged corner of a front yard
by the house up the river.
And you go by there, but do not know what this means."
Ah, that's quite a read.
Anyway, this poem goes on for quite some time.
And that's all I'll be able to read.
I tend to write in a lot of different modes.
So-- this-- so whenever I do a book,
I usually put together work that's more or less
in one mode and then another, but might
be a totally different mood and mode and way of writing,
and different vocabulary, and everything.
And so I have one way of writing that I really enjoy,
which is very pleasant for me, which is writing--
the lines in these poems are relatively short,
but they're-- they're going on, as you can hear.
But sometimes, I like to write little, tiny, little lines--
little, tiny, little phrases that
are kind of cute and nice and pleasant, make me feel happy,
you know?
So-- so I guess the moral of the story
is don't give me a notebook [LAUGHTER] because now that I'm
thinking about it, this next poem I'm going to read from,
somebody else gave me a notebook.
This notebook was this big, which
is why the lines in the poem are so short and small.
This big-- and it was a notebook of the seasons--
winter-- a lot of blank pages.
Spring-- a lot of blank pages.
Summer-- a lot of blank pages.
Fall-- a lot of blank pages.
So this is a poem called "Seasons."
"Erupts fall slant-wise, right to left,
as in Hebrew or Arabic script, often enlisting gusts.
Though drops drip in even lines, from roof edge drops totality,
drumming on solid objects like a roof or filigree things,
like trees.
Make sounds.
I'm learning sounds whose intenses thrill,
occupying much emotional space.
Sound of rain, isn't that--
that is rain's kiss or brutal shove.
Drops batter or caress, according to whom,
an objects yearning for existence.
Now there is less or there may be more.
It rains strong, falling.
Absorption of rain in rain without stint or [INAUDIBLE]."."
Oh, and I forgot to say--
this is from this book called Questions/Places/Voices/Seasons,
which was published in 2009.
And it's got a section called "Questions," a section called
"Places," a section called "Voices,"
and this is from "Seasons."
"April, bright, bright, bright cloud
whose etched edges against sky's blue,
rounded softly over hills in billows, unmoving and calm.
Water and light dazzles.
Spring clocks tick this time's last hours.
Ah, the garden's mounds of receding plants--
thyme, lavender-- where bees suck, when sun--
so far away from here--
warms all things new.
Round red cars, tail lamps before me on highway.
One of these two, and there are many, as brakes apply.
Brakes of lights under bright sky
touching down to the water's surface.
Birds soar by the hospital or bridge's stature
on the wet ground.
Still parrots, all quite where grounds gleam.
Stand, raft, waiting for nothing at all.
This happens each Spring day.
Frogs peep in pond at Green Gulch, below zendo deck,
a unison or cars rumble--
whoosh-- I haven't used going by.
What to pretend to be true or go.
That's Spring, all over again.
Sad, cruel, April month.
Where has the world been or going?
Can you step off even for a moment
so as to see what can be seen only outside the picture?
What can't be spoken of?
Of that, one must remain silent."
So then, in the "Voices" part of this book,
I got into pretending I was other people writing poems.
Did you ever do this?
I recommend it.
It tells you something [INAUDIBLE]
just write a poem as if you were that person.
So that's what I was doing here.
And then I-- I got a whole bunch of a--
I became-- I became a early-19th century rabbi from, like,
Lithuania--
someplace like that, a place I've never been,
who was a very pious, simple man, uneducated, simple man.
And so he would write--
he didn't write poems, but he wrote prayers.
So here's a few prayers written by this rabbi, whose
name is Reb Yosl of Kemenetz.
"Prayer to Remove Fear and See the World's Beauty."
Why is the world--
sorry, I missed that word-- why is the wind--
"why is the wind so startling when, in autumn, it
stirs the grasses growing on the planes.
It's so terrifying in winter when it groups the trees,
making me afraid the trees will uproot and fall upon my house,
God forbid, oh God.
You who aren't afraid of winds, or trees, or night, or of me,
please grant--
though I am unworthy of your graciousness,
given the meagerness of my acts, the weakness of my love,
and the distraction I feel each day in the prayer house
where my mind wanders to common unexalted thoughts--
that my heart be purified, that my deeds
and the words I utter from this day
forth work the roughness from my soul,
to cleanse and polish my eyes so that your world will
shine in them, startlingly, in the spirit of you."
"Prayer for My Wife."
"This is a prayer for my wife, dear God,
who moves no matter where she moves, whether in air,
on earth, or under water, God forbid,
at the precise center of my life,
where I know you should live-- forgive me--
in the fullness of every good thought,
every worthwhile and kind deed I do.
Oh God, praise her, protect her so she won't get sick
or be seriously hurt by anything.
And since I know that because of my sins and the weakness
of the flesh so poor it is always in your eyes,
this is impossible, I am asking you to do it anyway
because you are the God who turned back the seas, fed us
in the wilderness, leading us by a pillar of fire,
and such things for you are surely possible
should you wish to grant them.
Or if you are offended by my asking,
please instead grant that her falls not be from high places--
[LAUGHTER]
--and her scrapes and bruises not so rough and painful,
and that the heavy pots she lifts, the pails of milk,
be made slightly less weighty in her arms.
May her soul's sufferings be likewise
lightened, lifted up gently toward heaven
by your ministering angels, so that she will become
used to them and not complain.
[LAUGHTER]
And when, dear God, I am gone away and cannot help her,
please do your best to be her support so that she be well
and safe and happy and satisfied in a world that is well enough
and sufficient.
And I bless you God in advance for granting these things
and perform providing me with such a radiant bride."
[LAUGHTER]
OK.
Now, I will conclude with three shortish poems.
And so let's see.
Will I do that?
No, I'll-- I'll make it a little shorter.
I'll read one of my own short poems.
And then I'm going to read a--
I'll conclude with a poem by somebody else.
This is a poem called "After Robert Desnos."
or if you're French, I guess it's Robert Desnos
in French-- surrealist poet.
This is basically me stealing his poem.
[LAUGHTER]
"A frightening stillness will announce the voice,
slashing into the dockyard, crates in the shadows of street
lights.
The stillness will exhaust the light.
All things will be dark and silent,
all weight fall and melt, all time
rewound and marching in place.
Feathers, feathers, mothers, fathers, trucks, toboggans, tug
boats, airplanes.
The wind will silently growl an unheard growl.
A beastly noise the bend in the waterfront.
And we will hear the great voice coming from far away,
passing over the city, the vine, the treetop, the knoll.
We will have waited long, too long.
We will wait long and longer, waiting
without knowing we are waiting, longer and longer.
All thought absorbed in the hum, the great voice
will sound at the rich man's time of day
when the dust, the stones, the factories, the women's tears
cover the sun with anxious horror.
And we shall hear the voice.
It will batter towers and trade centers.
It will hurl desks and workstations,
shattering statistics and window panes, torturing flags.
We will hear it.
What silence before it, but still greater the silence
of guilt and denunciation.
All promises broken, all hope dissolved.
The jar of humanness filled and everywhere spilling.
Love, my love, will expand with refurbished logic and feeling,
personal at last.
We will see it in a seagull soaring overhead,
feathers, feathers, wafting down, white and easily floating
in the clear sky watched by wind in which three
round white clouds hover, soft on the song of the determined
revolt of the world."
So I'll end with--
a short poem by my friend, Rodney Koeneke,
who's a really good poet.
I wish I could write as good as Rodney Koeneke.
I'm jealous, mad at him.
[LAUGHTER]
So this poem is called "Billet-don't."
You know, like billet-doux?
What is a Billet-doux?
It's a love letter.
A love letter?
So this is "Billet-don't."
"You and your schoolmarm grammar.
Me and my fake Greek.
To court me in this language of a of a Finnish peasant fucked
improperly at the equinox--
Mieleni Minun Tekevi--
I am driven by my longing, languid
as-- languid as East Kansas, my teeth grown
soft like Chiclets, sad casualties of night.
Moon, I think you're cooling.
Dreams get more terse, your exegeses of them
obscurer and, on the coast where misprision swats at foam,
each word deliquesces with morning into its opposite--
"Come hithers" to "Vale, fratres," "Venetian"
to "Venusian," logic to lyric, cherry to choke.
Dinosaurs escape the barns of slumber and slither
into the remoter villages of my feelings
to join its dark stories: brother
consumes sister, sister marries father, crone boils babies,
druids bone crones, and niceties like plot and conclusion
and bourgeoisie time are as out of place
as ostriches in a Finnish national epic,
or scruples in our hot friendship,
or snowmen half-assembled on the lawns of spring's pavilions,
where everything cold is exposed as excuses for melting,
then quickime for burning, then rugs for your Cossack boots.
My Sibyl of leaves and longing, I was once
have sane mind and stallions used
to pull me drunk through evening.
Now, just closing eyes takes a giant effort
and I am a sleepless fan of nearly everything you do."
So that's the great Rodney Koeneke, poet.
So I thank you very much for being here.
Wonderful.
[APPLAUSE]
I had the distinct illusion that you were listening.
[LAUGHTER]
I thought that was brave.
And only one person got fed up and walked out,
that's pretty good.
[LAUGHTER]
And if there's anything--
I think we can take 5 or 10 more minutes if anybody has anything
they want to say, or bring up, or talk about, or ask
a question, or make a comment.
They told me that this would be a good idea,
if you want to do that.
I'll give you the microphone, you can be seen and speak.
So I'm happy to talk to you if you want to.
Hi.
So for one, fantastic reading, thank you for coming tonight.
I was wondering with your poetry, specifically your zen
poetry, is there anything in particular
that you strive to do through it?
Or is every poem--
every poem kind of an individual mission that you strive for?
Is there anything that you aim to do with your poetry?
No, I think that's right, what you said.
Every poem is an individual something.
Yeah.
I don't have too many intentions.
No.
Thank you.
So, just to follow up on that--
what's your writing process, if you have one?
Well, I-- when I'm writing poetry--
poems-- it's all, entirely long hand and journals.
I've got lots and lots and lots of journals.
And I probably have lots of poems that I've forgotten about
and that were abandoned in journals.
I'm always trying to make sure I don't lose any of them
when I come to the [INAUDIBLE]
So I write in the journals whenever I can.
I-- I write a lot on the fly, on the road, and on the airplane,
on the bus.
That's a great place to write because then you
really know you're en route.
You're en route the whole time anyway, but in the airport
you really get it.
The airport, I was thinking today,
it's kind of like purgatory, in the airport.
Everybody is kind of going one way or the other.
And some of them are going to hell and some are going home--
[LAUGHTER]
But they're all en route in the airport.
But I also, of course, am writing anywhere
and everywhere-- at home and-- so, but I like to--
I don't like to sit at a desk.
I'm usually sitting in a chair and have my notebook in my lap,
and I'm kind of doodling and doodling into thinking.
But now, in the last years, I discovered this great thing
which has changed my process quite a bit,
which is that you can type a poem-- because then you have
to type, right?
You write it in your notebook.
Once in a while, you're writing a poem and you think,
boy, is this stupid?
But most of the time, no.
Most of the time, you're thinking-- this is so great.
[LAUGHTER]
This is so great.
And then you type it up.
And that's when you think-- this is so stupid.
[LAUGHTER]
So-- and then you put it in a file and forget about it
and it's gone forever.
Sometimes-- sometimes there's something interesting
that keeps you going.
So-- oh, here's the thing I just discovered--
that you can type a poem on your iPad
and it then appears on the cloud, so that you can--
it will reappear on any device that you have, any time, right?
So this means that you can be sitting around anywhere,
you know, doing-- having nothing to do.
And instead of going on Facebook,
you can pull out your iPad and look at one of your 50 poems
that you're working on and fool around with.
So it's really helped me to do a lot of revision,
and messing around, and doing things with poems,
and polishing them.
And sometimes you polish it up and you polish it
into oblivion--
it's finished-- [INAUDIBLE] it's no good anymore.
And sometimes-- so for me, it's very unfortunate.
I wish I was more organized.
But it's pretty unsystematic.
I have a bunch of poems.
I don't know where they are, exactly
what file they're in now.
But maybe I submit some to a magazine
and I totally forget about it, you know.
And the magazine forgets about it.
And that's the end of that.
[LAUGHTER]
Sometimes, I'm surprised.
I get an email-- oh, we're going to publish your poem.
Oh, great.
I forgot I sent it to you.
So it's kind of like that.
Yeah?
I can't see you.
You?
So if someone asks you to delve more into one of your poems,
or explain it, you want to know more about it, is that--
not is that an insult, but does that take all the magic out
of it-- that--
Uh-huh--
Each person should get out of it what
they want to get out of it?
Well, if you and I sat down with one of my poems,
you know, like on a piece of paper between us on a desk,
we could say, I wonder what this is about?
What do you think?
And then you would say something.
And I'd say, that's so interesting.
I never thought of that.
And I think maybe it could be this.
You see what I'm saying?
In other words, I don't mind doing that.
But it's not like I have a better idea about it
than you do.
Because I have no-- as I said, no, I wrote it.
But that doesn't mean I know what I'm doing.
[LAUGHTER]
No, exactly the point is that for me,
if I knew what I was doing, I wouldn't want to write it.
The interesting thing is that I don't
know what's going to happen.
The poems are improvised, right?
I have some kind of vague parameters maybe, or feeling.
But I don't really know what's going to happen.
And so I hope to be surprised and mystified by my own poems.
That's what makes them fun.
And so-- but we could probably--
I mean, you know let's get together and try that sometime.
I'm very interested.
I don't ever do that, but I think
it would be fun to do that and see what we can think of.
And so I think you could have a lot of associations
and get a lot out of it.
And maybe talking with another person about it,
you could get even more.
But then you wouldn't-- you wouldn't come to the place
where we'd say--
and this is what he's saying.
I don't think you'd get to that place.
Well, when you read the poem of the Lithuanian rabbi--
Yeah.
And he was praying that his wife would have it easy
so she wouldn't complain, I thought
that was totally hilarious.
Yeah.
But maybe you were thinking it was guilt--
wants you to have a nice, pleasant life.
Yeah.
No, I thought it was kind of funny.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah, I was--
But it just came out that way.
You know what I mean?
I wasn't-- I wasn't thinking-- now,
I'm going to make this funny in this way.
It just came out that way.
Part of the thing that, probably, you--
that would be a secret thing that you wouldn't know is
a line in that poem about how wherever she is-- on land,
or air, or underwater, God forbid--
my wife is a scuba diver.
Oh.
[LAUGHTER]
I mean, it's my wife.
It's Rabbi Yosl's wife that we're talking about,
not my wife.
But it just so happens that my wife's a scuba diver.
[LAUGHTER]
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah.
[INAUDIBLE] Yeah.
When you were talking about messing around
with poems on your iPad, or whatever you use,
you call it polishing?
Yeah.
And I wonder if you messing around with poems usually
to you feels like polishing, or if there
are other ways you describe it?
Well, thanks, because polishing isn't a very good word.
Yeah, it's not polishing.
But sometimes, I'm reading the poem and I see--
reading it and many, many, many, many times--
sometimes I can see where it doesn't work.
So that's it's not necessarily polishing.
It's like surgery or something.
[LAUGHTER]
And-- and-- but there is--
like just today, I saw--
this poem, I said, oh, yeah, look at this.
How did I not notice this boo-boo before?
This is not-- this is terrible.
I'm so embarrassed.
All these versions of this poem were out there
and I missed this.
So I-- that happens.
You know how that is.
You read it 100 times and you don't
see something that's there.
But a lot of it is just reading.
And it's a whole thing to read it again and again
and again and again, even if you don't do anything to it.
Just to read it again and again is-- changes the whole--
your whole relationship to it.
So it's just been fun for me to-- do you do that, too?
Yeah.
It's fun.
So maybe one more question?
I thought I saw somebody--
yes?
So I just noticed in your poetry some dictional similarities
to Gary Snyder's poetry.
And I just wonder if you think you were influenced in some way
by Gary Snyder's poetry?
And would you comment on that?
Well, I don't know if this is just me or--
probably it's not just me, probably
it's anybody who's writing poetry a lot.
When you are reading a poet who becomes important to you,
of primary importance, it goes beyond reading.
Something else is going on.
And you totally transform by that reading.
Everything is different because of the reading.
Usually, it's a kind of obsession.
You know, you're reading, and reading, and reading,
and re-reading, and so on, and so on.
And so I've been through that with many, many writers
that I've thought were--
you know, like you get to the point where you think--
this is the only way anybody could write a poem.
This is-- any poem that isn't like this, forget about it.
It's got to be-- it's like that.
You get to that place.
And so-- so Gary Snyder is someone
that has been important in my life on a lot of levels.
He's been a friend, and a mentor, and person that I know,
and a person who, before I ever met him,
his writing completely changed my whole idea of what
I was doing in my life.
So probably, nobody-- with the exception of Philip Whalen,
who was even more important to me,
with whom I was much closer than I am to Gary--
but Gary's still going--
he-- yes, his work is very, very important to me.
However, that was a long, long time ago.
Right?
So now, I don't read Gary anymore.
And I don't really pay attention to what he writes.
And his writing, now, doesn't have that magic for me
that it had at that time.
So in a way, if you had asked me is my work influenced
by Gary Snyder, I would say no.
And I could list a whole bunch of other writers
that my work is much more influenced by.
However, because of that, that I just told you,
in the early part of my life, there's
no way that Gary's poetry is not in my DNA.
So it comes out somehow.
And if you heard it, I guess, I mean,
I wouldn't have thought that anybody would hear
any Gary Snyder in my poetry.
But if you heard it, I suppose it's there.
I'm not that surprised if it is.
Yeah, I mean, Gary Snyder is enormously important
not only as a poet, but as a cultural figure of our time,
you know?
He's a-- He's a wonderful, amazing person.
All right?
So I'm glad it sounds like Gary Snyder--
[LAUGHTER]
I-- I would ask--
one last question, since I--
[LAUGHTER]
What I heard was a lot of influence from the psalms.
And I wonder-- and it'd been a long time since I think I
read--
I had been--
I read one back, pretty much [INAUDIBLE] now.
And I'm wondering at what stage--
what's the publication relationship
between that and your translations of the psalms?
But I guess more broadly, if--
at what point you came to the psalms and--
and really studied them as poetry?
You know, you see what I'm getting at?
Yeah, well, you know-- you know, were there
when I first got hooked on the psalms, right?
It was '96 into 7.
Remember that thing when I got up at the podium and said--
remember that?
I said-- I threw away my speech, my polite--
what do you call it-- ecumenical speech.
And I said my practice is sitting in silence.
Your practice is reciting psalms seven times
a day-- is that what it is-- seven times a day.
And so I'm going there, practicing with you.
And today, I'm reading Psalm 137, which has a line in it
like, oh God, we hate them so much,
we hope that you will take the heads of their babies,
and bash them out against the rocks,
and make their brains spill all over the rocks.
And I said-- and this is your practice?
[LAUGHTER]
[INAUDIBLE] I said-- you guys are pretty holy people.
And I really respect what you're doing, but I do not get this.
Can somebody please explain it?
And then I sat down.
Remember that?
Yes.
That's when I got into the psalms.
Because I thought to myself--
this is weird.
[LAUGHTER]
You know?
I mean, I didn't quite, actually,
understand at the time that the psalms are also
the backbone of the entire Jewish liturgy, as well.
You'd think I would have known that,
but I didn't quite get that.
But not the way they are in the Catholic monastic [INAUDIBLE],,
where they recite them every single day, seven times a day.
So that's made me think-- and I-- like, I really did.
I was really very moved by the practice [INAUDIBLE]
by the brothers.
So I wanted to find out what are these guys--
how does that-- this figure for them?
So that's why I got into the psalms.
So that was 1996.
That book was published in 2002, this one in 2005,
which means that it was written several years
before those dates.
But I think you're right.
I think the same sort of tone of voice, the same sensibility,
is in I Was Blown Back.
I think that's right.
Because when I was doing the psalms,
I realized that I went to the Hebrew.
And the Hebrew is really different from King James'
version, which was not translated from Hebrew.
It wasn't-- it was translated from Greek or Latin.
So in Hebrew, you get a very different sense--
a feeling for what these poems sound like
and what the relationship that they're talking about is.
And there's-- there's simplicity, intimacy,
and tremendous darkness and mystery which I think
you'd find in both psalms--
that I might [INAUDIBLE] Celan in this book.
So yeah, and Paul-- so you could see where Paul Celan is also
mixed up in that.
Paul Celan was also a great reader of psalms
and refurbished the psalms in his [INAUDIBLE] in his poems.
I-- I really-- it was wonderful to be in that space.
It was years that I was going along in that way.
But then I got over it.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, thank you very much for coming.
Thanks to the audience.
[APPLAUSE]
They're both for sale and I'm sure Norman
would be happy to sign them.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]