Hi, thanks for that awesome reading.
I'm Ariel, I'm an undergrad, and I'm double majoring
in creative writing and law.
Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit
about where you see those two fields overlap
for you in the little middle part of the Venn diagram,
because I'm always curious to know?
Yeah, that's a great question.
I think they overlap in a lot of ways.
I mean, just at a very--
kind of at the level of language,
I think both creative writing and law,
as we were talking about in the linguistics course today,
are interested in those moments of ambiguity and possibility
of multiple meanings, and thinking about how the way
we use language in one context might differ in other contexts.
It might mean something profoundly different
and have profound consequences.
And I also think, at a larger level,
there's a lot of similarity between the two fields in terms
of how we tell ourselves stories about ourselves,
and how we organize the ways in which we live,
and what we believe in.
So for me, it's many of the same inquiries,
just branching out into different texts
and different directions.
So I'm excited to hear that you're doing both.
Hi, I'm also Natalie.
I did a project on Hard Child in my 209 intro to poetry class,
so I'm excited to see you.
Oh, that's awesome.
And I had a question, because when I was reading your book,
I really loved the way that you convey humor,
because it didn't seem like you were--
at least, I know when I write, I struggle to write humor,
because I feel like I'm either coming across too strong,
or it's not enough and I'm just kind of
left lacking a punch line.
How do you write humor?
Do you just find that it comes easily,
or do you feel like you're trying to push it sometimes?
But either way, I think yours comes across very well.
I love your sense of humor.
Thanks.
Yeah, so a lot of the jokes that are in my poems,
they're jokes that I tried to make in conversation
and they were flops.
So there's actually a poem in Hard Child
that's called "Person's Ocean," that was like this joke--
I hadn't written it for a poem, I just
wrote it because I thought it'd be hugely entertaining
for my friends.
And this is-- do you want to hear the joke?
OK.
So it's like, Oh, you know how when
you're walking on the beach and you pick up a seashell
you can hear the ocean?
Well if you are walking on the beach
and there's a person there, and you go close to them,
you also can hear the ocean, but only the parts of the ocean
that humanity destroyed.
[LAUGHTER]
And everyone was like, what?
[LAUGHTER]
And so, I feel like I try to find jokes
for the poem that are--
for poems that are-- there's something off about them,
because I think if all the moving parts work,
and the joke totally makes sense,
it doesn't have that kind of element of disquiet
that's behind it.
So I am always interested in those jokes that almost miss.
What's a Staten Island divorce?
Oh, it's when one spouse kills the other one.
[LAUGHTER]
That was a great question.
[LAUGHTER]
OK well, thank you so much for your questions,
and thank you so much Natalie for a great reading.
And we have some books here for you to buy, and for--
[LAUGHTER]
I'll take them, sold.
Yes, thank you very much.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]