I thought I would pause here.
If there are any questions, or something
like that, or anything, and then I could read a little bit more.
Thanks so much for reading.
So I'm noticing in your work that there's
a lot of attention to the layers of representation.
It's really obvious that you're writing
about an article that you've read
or in the poem, "The Dream of A Raindrop,"
you talk about seeing the raindrop in search engine
images.
And so can you talk about what leads you to make that choice?
Why is it important to show--
rather than just imagining the raindrop,
why show the search engine?
I'm not sure.
But again, that's never stopped me
from trying to answer a question.
[LAUGHTER]
I do it professionally.
[LAUGHS]
Sensory work is very important to me.
And from what I understand, in the west,
we are particularly visual-minded.
And I come from a family of visual artists.
So I think there's a lot of that.
But I also try very hard to bring
in other sensory elements.
So I don't know, maybe, intuitively,
I thought bringing in a search engine
where you could actually imagine seeing
it, as opposed to me translating what I see, bring
that image to you, would add to the sensory work, actually.
That sounds pretty good.
[LAUGHTER]
Did you mean something else, though, or no?
OK.
Thank you.
So we're actually in--
a couple of the students who are in the honors poetry class.
So we looked at your book this week, and we're reading it.
And we wanted to know what was your stance
on post-confessionalism?
Would you consider yourself a poet
that will change the derogatory meaning into something
that's powerful?
A couple of decades ago, or at least one decade ago,
someone said that I'm a postmodern confessional poet.
And I thought, yes, that sounds right.
So that's fine.
I mean, people are going to say whatever they want.
And I have no problem with that.
I have no, yeah.
It's-- my work is--
I have to say that some of that when I was starting out writing
poetry, I didn't--
I wasn't keen on some of the confessional poets.
But the early ones, like Sylvia Plath, although now,
I love her bee poems.
But then, there's also Louise Gluck, or Sharon Olds,
completely different, and yet, I believe
they have that strong vein in their work.
Apparently, I haven't-- I wasn't able to look at the paper
today.
Or, oh, no, Harold was telling me--
he's here somewhere-- he was telling me, he was, oh, I know.
He was reading a book on Homo sapiens,
and he was telling me that one thing that distinguishes Homo
sapiens from other potential human beings that would
take over the world was gossip.
And I love that.
I love that the word gossip is associated with women,
like intuition.
And you know, I'll take it.
I'll take that.
I'll take confessionalism, I'll take women's intuition.
I'll take all those things, because that's really
a part of these very important, deep areas to explore.
So, yeah, bring on the word confessionalism,
capital C and small c.
I think that's great.
But thank you for that question.
When I read your work it seems to me,
and this might be wrong, so feel free to correct me,
that if you've ever done paper cut outs, when
I read your work, I notice instead of laying off an image,
it's like removal of something, so what's left behind.
And I noticed that sometimes, at the end of your work,
that it's like, there's quite a sharpness and a subtlety,
like an economy that builds and then removes and leaves
something.
And so that the path of your poetry
isn't always a straight line.
It kind of curves back at itself,
but it doesn't allow for a full circle,
it sort of means something missing or unsaid
that you have to arrive at with that cut out.
So I wonder if you could maybe comment on that?
Well, I hadn't thought about the progression of my poems
in quite that way.
But I will say when it comes to closure,
I'm like a demonic person about closure.
I actually teach a graduate craft seminar
just on poetic closure.
I read a book in my graduate school days,
I was studying Japanese literature.
And it was so pathetic, my Japanese was so bad.
But anyway, I got out of there alive.
And anyway, sorry, I'm going off into a memory lane here.
We did read this amazing book called Poetic Closure
by Barbara Herrnstein Smith.
And that book influences the way I read, the way I revise,
and the way I teach.
The basic idea is the way--
is you can see all-- when you're revising,
you can see all the different kinds of repetition,
whether it's an image, a sound, what-have-you.
And through that repetition, we psychologically and emotionally
feel those repetitions.
We may be very unconscious, usually unconscious,
especially in a first reading, or as one's revising.
And then, when you get to the closure,
you can go in one direction or another, or well,
a lot of different directions, depending
on what kind of repetition has been set up.
And it's so-- it makes me crazy that so often people
take the soft landing in a poem, as opposed
to really seeing how far you can go to have the end resonate.
So that's what I try and do, that maybe that resonating.
So what is compelling, what is moving the poem forward,
and then, what do you do with the end?
It doesn't mean you can't have a very quiet or anti-closural
kind of ending.
But it needs to resonate, not just this sort of ah ending,
it makes me nervous.
Although, you're welcome to say ah at the end of my readings,
so.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah.
So closure is very important to me.
And so I appreciate you noticing that.
Thank you very much.
I wonder in the secret to what you just said,
what does your poetry do to change the world?
If I may quote myself, which is pretty crummy--
[LAUGHTER]
Go ahead.
I have a poem in Volatile, where I write--
it's a politically-informed poem.
Its subject matter is political and social change.
And I write that I know poetry cannot change--
now I can't remember my own poem--
but I know poetry cannot change the world.
But it fuels the gut that is able.
And that's what I hope my poetry can do,
even if the poem is not directly about a political or social
issue.
So when I was coming up and in my more radical days,
I would be invited to go to read at benefits
for, say, a homeless shelter or what-have-you.
And a lot of poets would want to read poems about homelessness,
or so on, and the particular subject
of whatever the benefit was for.
And I felt that it's more interesting, in a way,
to just read your most powerful poem
and try and integrate it into the context of that reading.
So if I read a love poem, for example,
at a benefit for homeless people,
well, there's not a whole lot of privacy
when you don't have a home, or when
you're living in a shelter.
So reading a love poem, you could
see that might be a radical move, a radical contribution.
So that's what I hope for.
There's not just one way to be a part of social change.
And I hope that in my small way I can do that for people.
Thank you.