Maybe.
Any questions?
I have questions.
I have no answers.
Could you say a little bit about your creative process?
I found your images and material very exciting,
and I'm looking around--
Thank you for the question.
Say a little.
I was talking to Janice's students
about this a little bit today.
The big thing about writing poems
is getting out of the way.
Getting yourself out of the way so
you can see what you don't already know, because that's
what the poem is going to be.
Hopefully, if you're lucky, it will show you something
that you didn't know.
So, for me, the page is like, not a blank,
but a space into which I look.
And as I look, I'm very attentive to what's
going on there.
And it happens.
And somehow, that attention and the creation are simultaneous.
But it seems like something given.
It feels that way.
So the various ways in which we develop a practice and craft,
these are ways in which the form frees us from ourselves,
and to see and to move in ways we haven't before,
and to get rid of the filters and the ego that
keeps us trying to look good and not seeing much.
And as I told the students, it's something
you can describe but you can't explain.
Any other questions?
I don't know if this is really a question, about how you come
across colors through living and how you
can put them into your work.
Different hues?
Like, I have "the red edge of the universe."
I've never heard of that.
So it's like, that's one more red.
That's from being married to a physicist.
I see red sometimes, but not usually that way.
It will take Higgs instruments and a lot of knowledge
to see invisible light.
Actually, when you write you're not writing with the words
because words are abstracted.
What you're writing with are images, essentially.
And all the senses are engaged.
And, of course, one of the most appealing things
to bees and to us are the visible color spectrum
of light, and the way different material
is reflected and give us this incredible range.
And aren't we lucky that we're made in such a way
that we find that beautiful.
I don't know what's built into nature.
It's not just us.
Because the peacock wouldn't work so hard at doing that
stuff if it wasn't attractive to the peahen.
So aesthetic stuff isn't necessarily just ours.
And someone had--
I think Julie and I were talking about this.
The scientists who now put these probes in your brain
to show you which part of your brain
lights up when certain things happen,
when you get mad or whatever, but what they've discovered
is that the word--
like the word "scratchy" or "fuzzy"
lights up the same place in your brain as when
you touch something scratchy or something soft and fuzzy.
So they have discovered what poets and writers always
knew, that when you use sensual language,
it has an effect on you as if that just happened to you.
It's wonderful.
They've also discovered something we always knew,
which is they find out that the part of the brain that responds
to sound is also the same part of the brain in which memories
are stored.
Well, hey, why do you rhyme, you know?
And then "I have promises to keep
and miles to go before I sleep, and miles
to go before I sleep."
You can't forget those lines, even if you want to.
Right?
So, yes, sound and memory come together.
And for years before there was written language,
all the great stories had rhymes built
in because that's how you kept the history of your people
going, you rhymed them.
So it's kind of nice to have this proof because people
want it to be scientific.
Because, you know, poets just make shit up, right?
We have time for one more question.
So, we saw from your poetry that you draw a lot of inspiration
from events.
Are there any people that particularly
inspire you to write?
Everybody.
No, I'm serious.
Because the people, some of them are figures from our stories,
but those are figures who have traveled with us through time.
And so everybody's in them.
If there's a figure like, oh, I don't
know, like a madonna who's been around for so long.
I had a Japanese student.
When she was going back home from America, I said,
what are you going to take with you?
And she said, Mary.
And she had gone to a church where
they had brought a figure of Mary who
had been in the Philippines, and she cries, the figure.
So when she came back from there, I said, well,
did the figure cry?
And she said, no, Mary didn't cry, but I did.
And I said, why?
And she said, because of all the people who believed in her.
There's this kind of communal memory
that these figures carry.
And so, I'm drawn to them.
And I'm also drawn to those individuals
who are in some way connected to communal memory.
Because it's everybody.
Because we're all very much the same.
We have the same experience.
But it's always different.
And when these figures come back,
they come back differently because we're
living in a different time.
And we have to change the story.
So we have to use the power of those long memories.
But we used to use that power in order
to free ourselves from the oppressive parts of the past
or the parts that no longer describe the reality as we
know it and understand it, or as we have injured it.
So that's kind of everybody.
That's how I feel about it.
Also, I-- I don't know.
I was just going to say thank you.
OK.
Thank you.