Thank you so much for being here.
It's wonderful to hear your words.
Question for you is, is your family
in the city, in Manhattan?
Do you have all of your children there?
And what has that been like as a family experience?
And how has that changed, maybe, your voice as a writer?
This reading is being underwritten
by the City of New York.
I will now give a commercial--
[LAUGHTER]
No, yes, in a way, I'm not a good person
to ask that question to because I grew up in New York,
and so I don't really know any different.
[CHUCKLES] I don't know better.
[SIGHS DEEPLY] Yeah, there are so many things I don't know
about, like what it's like to have daughters instead of sons,
or--
I will say that I think--
I really was so interested that Renee talked about
interruptibility, the interruptibility of mothers,
but the ways in which our technology and other parts
of our modern contemporary existence have caused us all
to be interruptible in ways that I think are new and troubling.
And I think that there are a lot of things for me as a mother,
but especially as a writer, that are very deeply influenced.
So much so that I can't even imagine
what it would be like if I weren't living in New York.
And in The Pedestrians, my most recent book--
I mean, New York has always been inextricable from my poems,
but I really wanted to try to write a high-density poetics,
not just write about New York, but write about what it feels
like to be, in good ways and not good ways,
in really close physical and emotional and spiritual and
political contact with a lot of other people.
And there is an isolation to it, but there's also
the opposite of that.
There's this feeling of real community that I think--
I have traveled outside of New York.
They do let me leave.
[LAUGHTER]
And it's both wonderful, and I think, oh, well, I
could have had a life where my brain is not assaulted
by all of this stimulus.
But there's also a really, for me, terrifying isolation
and disconnect that one really just
can't experience in New York unless you're a shut-in.
So my experience of being a mother,
I can't separate from my experience
of living in New York.
And I can't separate my experience
of living in New York with my experience of being a writer.
And they're all kind of just braided together.
OK, so everyone's saving their questions for next week.
[LAUGHS]
We'll do one more.
Sometimes it takes a second for people to--
I can be a little scary.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't know if you noticed.
It was also clear.
Oh, yeah, thank you.
Yeah, there's not a lot of mystery to me.
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you, Rachel.
Thanks.
I'm not quite scared, so sorry.
I just have one question.
You were talking about your lectures, and that this was a--
my word-- sort of a detour or diversion from that engagement.
I'm wondering, since you mentioned
the names of the lectures or topics,
but we haven't heard them, at least not here,
do they communicate?
Is there an interesting arrival between that communication?
Or do you not know what it is?
Is it intentional?
Oh--
[AUDIO OUT]
--someday, those are all horrible questions--
No, no, first I thought you meant do they
communicate with the audience.
And I was like, god, I hope so.
But you mean with each other.
You mean with each other.
Oh, yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
I first thought, oh, why don't I-- what are
the things I care most about?
What am I interested in?
What do I know about?
What do I want to know more about?
And it was a very open-ended question.
And I studied photography, and I was
interested in confessional poetry.
I'd been called a confessional poet,
and I didn't know whether that was good or bad.
I sensed it was bad, but--
[LAUGHTER]
--I wanted to kind of explore it.
And I knew that this issue of writing about real people
and using names had been something that had gotten me
into a lot of trouble.
And so I was interested in all those things.
And after I started writing drafts of the lecture,
at the lectures, it became very clear to me
that each lecture was the same lecture.
And I really--
I mean, I'll talk about this in the lectures.
But very, very briefly, my book Mothers, which Renee described,
my mother did not want me to publish that book,
and was very upset about it, and died in a very traumatic way.
And the publication of the book became very bound up
in her death.
And when she died, almost exactly three years ago,
I stopped writing.
I didn't write anything.
I wrote one poem that ended up in The Pedestrians.
But I had to write these lectures,
and so I had to write something.
And really, the lectures were all
about justifying my actions for publishing that book, in a way.
So when I was talking about photography, I was also saying,
well, look, all these photographers did this.
These photographers took portraits of people
with or without their knowledge, with or without their consent.
It's called street photography.
It's called documentary photography.
You're allowed to do that.
I mean, I was talking to my mother, who was no longer
having a conversation with me.
And I didn't realize that's what I was doing.
I thought I was just writing about photography.
And then when I was writing about confessional poetry,
I was like, what is this whole confessional poetry thing?
And then I realized after writing the lecture,
I was like, [EXHALES] Anne Sexton, come on.
Robert Lowell, he-- so I was, again, trying to--
not that I wanted to go the way of Sexton and Plath,
but I certainly wasn't the first person
to write about other people, or to upset
other people with writing.
And so I think I was trying to get to hook into--
I was trying to write myself out of a place of silence
that I thought I would never write in again.
And then once I realized, oh, I'm
basically writing the same lecture over and over
again in these weird ways.
Maybe I need to go at this a little more
directly, or indirectly, or I don't even know what.
So yes, the lectures definitely speak to each other.
And I would say that all of them, at their heart,
have to do with the ethical and aesthetic consequences
of writing about real people, and writing a kind of "clear"--
I liked that word that you used--
or transparent, or Sharon Olds calls it "apparently personal."
I don't even let--
it is-- for me, I'm not-- the word "apparently" just--
I mean, it's like if I were to call my poetry "apparently
personal," then I would write the next poem
and I'd say, well, now my poem is "apparently personal."
It just is what it is, but with problems--
[LAUGHTER]
--associated.
Well, we'll leave it there.
Please do come back next week for these teased lectures, two
or three or seven or 12.
And thank you so much, Rachel.
Thank you.
And there are books for sale over there.