Don't buy.
Don't sell.
Anyway.
I never really understand what these Q and As are supposed
to yield.
They should yield something unexpected.
So I'd be happy to answer any questions that might come.
Oh, here's a question.
I know this is unfair.
But what color is the chip on your shoulder?
I don't know.
I can't see it.
Will you read another poem?
What?
Will you read another poem?
Oh, I think I've read enough.
Thank you.
Thank you, Deborah.
I'm quite curious.
Who is your favorite philosopher?
Who is my favorite philosopher?
Yeah.
I don't really have a respectable answer for that.
So I think that poets are amateurs.
And so, in a way, being untutored and acquiring
our information and sort of our construct, I mean,
is just what happens with anyone,
that there's a kind of random kind
of collage and amateurish kind of way that we put it together.
So it's quirky.
And it's not systematic.
You know?
Poets don't usually have systematic.
Wallace Stevens, I suppose, he had a systematic.
You know?
So I can't really answer the question.
I'm sorry.
Who's your favorite philosopher?
My favorite philosopher is Benedict Espinoza.
Uh-huh.
I see you're on a first name basis with him.
And that's got to feel good.
But thank you for the question.
I wish I had a--
I probably will think of something
in the middle of the night.
When you're writing, are you conscious of the humor
and use it as a distance to help you stay connected
to the underlying emotions and the harder-hitting emotions
in the poem?
Well, you know, I think when I'm writing,
which is a really, really, also a really quirky, amateurish
process, I think I'm looking for little terms.
And humor is-- both humor and seriousness is, in a way,
angular.
It's about constructing an angle with the preceding moment.
And what you want in the poem or what I sort of want,
took me decades for somebody to say, oh,
you're interested in tone.
In some ways, that is what I'm interested in.
But what you want is for the process to--
a poem stays alive by continuing to change its mind.
That's true whether you're a dignified poet
or a sort of humorous poet.
So I think that I write a lot of poems that are merely funny
and sort of don't have a good emotional timbre
or base in them.
And those are just second-rate poems.
And the good ones are the ones that are sort of
lived in by the whole self.
I mean, this is what you want if you're
a poet is you want a poem that seems
like a credible product of an entire human being,
some approximation of that.
And I think I was always attracted
to speakers that were alive.
You look at anybody, the poems that they
know from their memory, and you see
how they were constructing a self
or trying to recognize a future self.
So lots of angles is really what I look for.
You mentioned AA and the opposite of AA.
And I hope it's not too personal.
But--
Did I say that?
Did your voice or creative process
change as a result of that?
Did you have any trouble with the transition?
I'd say that my life became more consistent as a result
of growing up a little bit.
Very, very ordinary story.
If I told it, I would only lie while telling it.