Thank you.
I wonder if you could tell us what you've
been reading while you've been doing this,
because I hear so many other things.
But I'm more interested in hearing what
you say than harvesting them.
Yeah, so obviously, I was reading
a lot of stuff about hell and the different kinds
of underworlds that different cultures imagine.
And interestingly, not just different cultures,
but different cultures at different times.
So there's this really interesting thing
that happens in the Chinese underworld in the 17th century
when bureaucracy becomes a big part of Chinese daily life.
And so then, all of a sudden, hell
looks like a big bureaucracy, where
you need to have your papers.
And so when you die, the nightmare of dying
is that you don't have your papers in order.
And then you have to go to this other place.
And then they send you to this other place.
And it's just as bad as any other hell.
And then the Mayan underworld is like a big ball game.
And it's a bloody one that ends with human sacrifice.
But it's a very different one than the Chinese.
And so working on this book, I found myself just fascinated
by these differences and try to figure out
what the story-- what the differences were
and the similarities between, say,
what the ancient Egyptians thought happened to us.
So yeah, that was one side of things.
Then I was reading a lot of novels
because I was really interested in just storytelling.
And so that's a start to an answer, that.
Did you hear anything that I should read or--
[LAUGHTER]
This is in process.
I'm trying to figure out how to make it work.
You've heard of Haruki Murakami?
Yeah, I've never read Murakami.
But my wife is a big Murakami fan.
And then I just look over her shoulder.
And she's like, oh my god, this amazing thing happened.
And I'm just absorbing him second-hand.
Do you know [INAUDIBLE]?
Yeah, but that's also just like being alive right now, yeah.
Did Tyler mention that you do erasures?
I don't know, Tyler.
Did you mention that I do--
[LAUGHTER]
Could you help the understand the appeal of erasures?
Because they seem to be quite popular.
Yeah, it's hard for me to understand
the appeal of erasures because I never,
ever want to have anything to do with it again after spending
seven years doing it.
But for me, it was--
and I've spoken to some classes today about this.
It came out of a, just, dissatisfaction
with my own writing and with just--
I felt unable to even just think about writing
in any way that made me anything but extremely
anxious and depressed.
And so when you feel like you have no way of moving forward
as a writer, sometimes maybe doing the opposite,
instead of writing, erasing, felt
like a way of trying to get out of the corner
that I was in, in this creative crisis.
And so that's why I came to it.
And my guess is that a lot of people
who do it or have done it recently
may have felt like there are political reasons why it's
hard for them to feel like the writing of poetry
is justifiable to themselves or--
But actually, people have been doing erasures for a while.
And there's some really exuberant erasures too
and really ecstatic ones.
The poet Ronald Johnson, in the '70s,
did a really, almost, mystical erasure of Paradise Lost.
So I think every writer has their own motivation
for undertaking any form and--
does that--
Yes, thank you.
I have a related question, which is about the translation
section, specifically, but maybe more broadly as a process
question.
If you found yourself going at those specific poems
in a single go, or if you had waves,
or what the process is like for you?
The translation that's in the book?
Yeah.
So there are these classical Chinese tales.
And the genre is called strange tales.
And it's a venerable Chinese genre.
And then that's to be distinguished
from the other venerable Chinese genre of weird tales.
[LAUGHTER]
So that tells you something about,
we're missing something if we don't
have a distinction between strange and weird tales.
They've got it.
And so these strange tales were collected
by this Chinese writer Pu Songling, who
wrote the most classic, classically beautiful Mandarin
in the 16th century, I think.
And so they're full of stories of people
going into the underworld or having affairs
with fairies, and ghost stories, and things
like-- they're great.
It's like the Twilight Zone, but in ancient China.
And so I came across one that's only two pages long.
It was about this guy named Chen who
has to go to the underworld, because he's
mortified to learn that he committed war crimes 200
years before he was born.
And the only translation of it is by this French sinologist
named Léon Wieger.
And so I began translating this Chinese--
I don't speak or know any Chinese.
I barely, with Google Translate, can do some French translation.
So I started translating the Chinese tale
from the French translation.
And then there were words like satellite
that were popping up that I didn't know what to do with.
And then when I looked it up, I found motorized airport
staircase.
[LAUGHTER]
And so I thought, well, that's great.
Why not put a motorized airport staircase
into this ancient Chinese story and have
Chen ride around on one?
And then from there, it just got cra-- yeah, it was like, well,
let's send him to ancient Egypt.
And so really, it's just a two-page story in the original.
But I've built it out to this 20, 30 page adventure.
Thank you.
There's probably time for one more.
I can't take the last question, so.
Excellent.
Thank you.
Excellent.
Thank you.
[LAUGHTER]
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah.
[INAUDIBLE]
[APPLAUSE]