I'll tell you my very best moment in a Q and A.
I was reading with CK Williams because of Gail Browne.
Where are you Gail?
Over here.
OK.
Because Gail arranged it-- and of course at the Q and A
all the questions were for CK Williams because he's famous.
And somebody said, why did it take you 30 years to write
about your lover's abortion?
And he turned to me and said, would you like to answer that?
Great.
So I did.
You did?
Good for you.
It's so exciting to have you both here.
And you're both here behind these new books
that are selected poems.
And I wonder if you could talk a little bit
about a lifetime of work that condenses into selected poems
and how you think about that process of creating those books
and what stays and what doesn't stay and how that might happen.
That's a hard question.
I'm not taking it.
You start.
I'll let you answer.
Go ahead.
I'll just say that it was a really interesting process
to revisit all that work from the time.
The oldest poem in that book I wrote
when I was an undergraduate here in the '70s.
And the newest one was brand new.
And it was really fun to go back and see which ones still
seemed to me to bear consequence in a reader's life
and to see which ones fit together to make a reasonably
cohesive volume because those were the two things I wanted
one of the poems to matter to the reader.
But I also wanted the book to make some kind of sense.
And then I had it just about done,
and my publisher said, well, let's include some selections
from the prose as well.
I said, OK.
So the book got fatter.
And then they said, can we put in Kesler's conversation
with you?
So the book got fatter.
And so it's really nice after having
years and years of skinny books to have a fat book.
I'm not going to say anything.
I think Peggy really answered that question
the same way I would.
But I do want to say that one thing that's
distinctive about both of our new and selected poems
is that they both are ekphrastic.
They both contain a series of ekphrastic poems.
So for those of you who don't know what that is,
that's poems based on visual works of art.
And as you know, because Peggy's mentioned that,
she worked with an artist in Alaska
and had this dialogue and this conversation.
Teresa, will you hold up my book a second?
Or it's right there.
That's a painting by my mother, artist Baila Goldenthal.
And she did a series of paintings called Weavers.
And I wrote a series of poems based on my mother's Weavers
paintings.
They're very medieval looking.
They're very interesting paintings.
And, Joshua, do you have any of those?
You have a couple of them, my nephew.
So I think that's something interesting
for us both is to have included visual art in our books
as well.
And so that made the whole process
more interesting in some ways because we
brought in another voice, really the artist's voice.
So there's a whole different consideration.
Actually, I'm glad you mentioned the--
Yeah, I can project that's right.
I'm glad you mentioned the dialogue between the visual
and the poetic because it really is
for both of your books a stunning part,
beautifully produced and very, very striking.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about where that
took you and what it enabled you to say that you might not
have said or to think what you might not have thought.
No.
You go first.
I like your response too.
We could be sisters the way we do the sibling thing.
Yes.
When I approached my mother and asked her
if she minded if I could write poems in response
to her paintings, she said absolutely fine.
But I don't want to discuss them with you at all.
So it's going to be completely your response to them.
And I will respect that.
And that was kind of daunting to me
because I would have preferred some kind of dialogue,
like tell me kind of what you think.
No, she did not want to have anything to do with my response
to them.
So in a way, I felt like as any writer or poet will.
And I hope some of you who are here
will be in my workshop on Saturday
because it's about acrostic poetry.
It's about what happens when you look at a work of art
and respond to it in poetry.
And it becomes very personal.
And I think what you're doing, or what I was doing--
not only are you interpreting that work of art,
but you're dancing with it.
You're interacting with it.
And you're in a way trying to read the mind of the--
I mean, trying to get into the mind of the artist in some way.
You bring yourself to that work.
But I think you're also trying to draw out of that work what
the artist is trying to say.
So it's a really interesting process, I think.
I don't know if I'm answering your question, Cynthia.
But that's what it was for me.
For me and Kes, a large part of it
was play and just looking at what someone had done.
And we didn't either one of us see the whole thing
together until the exhibit happened at the very end.
And I printed up the poems--
And you can do this --printed the poems on metal.
And they were hanging beside the painting.
OK.
But most of the time when we were working together,
I was looking at all these images on an 11-inch MacBook
Air.
And the paintings are like 4 feet
by 5 feet and highly textured.
And so I'm getting just a glimpse of them.
But then when I saw them in person in the had a show,
and I got to go sit-in front of some of the paintings,
I was working at that point with the whole body
of what we were doing.
And he was working with the whole body
of what we were doing.
It's great fun.
So I just recommend that you do this when you get a chance
or create the opportunity for yourselves
because your imagination and your mind
goes places it wouldn't usually.
Absolutely.
Thank you for the wonderful reading.
I know you're friends.
And you've been giving readings together
now for over a year, maybe even longer.
And I just wondered if you would have anything
to say about this process of reading together
because it seems rather unusual for two wonderful poets
to spend a sustained amount of time
doing this kind of process.
I have to speak my gratitude because when these books were
coming out at the same time, Maurya and I set up
many, many, many events together.
And then I couldn't come.
My husband got sick.
And Maurya valiantly went to all of them solo.
And she read some of my poems as well as her own.
So thanks, Maurya.
This is the first time we've gotten to read together.
And I have to add--
I so missed Peggy.
I mean, we had spent a lot of time setting up these readings.
And you know that, Wendy, right?
And so I brought along that industrial strength selected
poems of Peggy's that I carried very
heavy in my little suitcase going to Seattle.
And I read her poem.
So I would read as if Peggy were with me
because I loved the book.
And I so hated that Peggy wasn't there.
And what's interesting is I always started with "Kiss."
And I always ended with "Parenthood Unplanned."
And I didn't know that.
And I'm just telling her that now because it's true.
Oh, I know.
So there you go.
So Wendy it was almost like having Peggy with me.
But she wasn't.
But I had read my favorite poems, the most powerful poems.
It's funny that I actually thought Peggy had been there
all this time.
Yeah, so this is the first time in a year,
almost a year since the books came out.
Anyway you guys have been sitting here a long time.
You must be tired, I think.
So thank you.
Thank you.