WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.600 align:middle line:90% 00:00:00.600 --> 00:00:02.880 align:middle line:84% I ended up writing five lectures, which 00:00:02.880 --> 00:00:07.170 align:middle line:84% are about photography, confessional poetry, ethics, 00:00:07.170 --> 00:00:09.420 align:middle line:90% wrongness and motherhood. 00:00:09.420 --> 00:00:13.590 align:middle line:84% And I just finished a draft that's 00:00:13.590 --> 00:00:17.040 align:middle line:84% hopefully pretty close of the book of these lecture essays, 00:00:17.040 --> 00:00:18.000 align:middle line:90% as I now call them. 00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:22.650 align:middle line:84% And the book has 13 parts, so the five lectures 00:00:22.650 --> 00:00:25.350 align:middle line:84% and then some interstitial matter and three poems. 00:00:25.350 --> 00:00:28.350 align:middle line:84% And what I'm going to do now is I 00:00:28.350 --> 00:00:32.820 align:middle line:84% want you to pretend that you've got this beautiful big book 00:00:32.820 --> 00:00:33.870 align:middle line:90% of lecture essays. 00:00:33.870 --> 00:00:36.030 align:middle line:84% And you're just flipping through it. 00:00:36.030 --> 00:00:39.990 align:middle line:84% And you're just like reading a few paragraphs here and there. 00:00:39.990 --> 00:00:43.170 align:middle line:84% I wanted to read also a few lines from each poem. 00:00:43.170 --> 00:00:45.310 align:middle line:84% But I don't have time to do that. 00:00:45.310 --> 00:00:47.460 align:middle line:84% So I'm going to do this weird thing where 00:00:47.460 --> 00:00:50.555 align:middle line:84% when there's a new lecture or a new piece, 00:00:50.555 --> 00:00:52.680 align:middle line:84% I'm going to go like this because that's the title. 00:00:52.680 --> 00:00:55.620 align:middle line:84% And then if there's a poem, I'll do this. 00:00:55.620 --> 00:00:58.080 align:middle line:84% I don't know why it seems important to designate this. 00:00:58.080 --> 00:01:02.100 align:middle line:84% And so the table of contents is Antechamber, 00:01:02.100 --> 00:01:04.950 align:middle line:84% the Poetics of Wrongness, which is currently 00:01:04.950 --> 00:01:09.120 align:middle line:84% the title of the whole project, She Who Shall Not Be Named, 00:01:09.120 --> 00:01:11.160 align:middle line:84% or, There's Something I Need to Tell You, 00:01:11.160 --> 00:01:15.750 align:middle line:84% Taking Away, Taking Everything Away, Photo Poetics, Death 00:01:15.750 --> 00:01:19.440 align:middle line:84% Project, What We Talk About When We Talk About the Confessional 00:01:19.440 --> 00:01:25.650 align:middle line:84% and What We Should Be Talking About, Q and A 2016, She Who 00:01:25.650 --> 00:01:28.470 align:middle line:84% Shall Not Name, or, If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say, Why 00:01:28.470 --> 00:01:32.700 align:middle line:84% Are You Still Talking, A Very Large Charge, The Ethics of Say 00:01:32.700 --> 00:01:35.610 align:middle line:84% Everything Poetry, Why She Could Not 00:01:35.610 --> 00:01:38.130 align:middle line:84% Write Her Lecture on the Poetics of Motherhood, 00:01:38.130 --> 00:01:42.390 align:middle line:84% The Moon is in her Caul Tonight, and Q and A 2018, 00:01:42.390 --> 00:01:44.250 align:middle line:90% which I haven't written yet. 00:01:44.250 --> 00:01:47.520 align:middle line:84% For the Q and As, I'll read one question from the Q and A 00:01:47.520 --> 00:01:51.000 align:middle line:90% and I won't answer it. 00:01:51.000 --> 00:01:53.100 align:middle line:90% Antechamber. 00:01:53.100 --> 00:01:56.620 align:middle line:84% This gallery of thinking, reading, writing, speaking, 00:01:56.620 --> 00:02:00.300 align:middle line:84% and feeling has no beginning, or more accurately, 00:02:00.300 --> 00:02:02.910 align:middle line:90% has innumerable beginnings. 00:02:02.910 --> 00:02:05.640 align:middle line:84% These lecture essays were written across a period 00:02:05.640 --> 00:02:07.320 align:middle line:90% of almost six years. 00:02:07.320 --> 00:02:10.020 align:middle line:84% Each one had several beginnings and, at one point, 00:02:10.020 --> 00:02:11.400 align:middle line:90% stood on its own. 00:02:11.400 --> 00:02:15.210 align:middle line:84% Each lecture essay is as much about mapping its own changing 00:02:15.210 --> 00:02:18.630 align:middle line:84% beginning as it is about its apparent subject matter. 00:02:18.630 --> 00:02:20.820 align:middle line:84% Because the beginnings kept changing 00:02:20.820 --> 00:02:22.800 align:middle line:90% depending on where I ended up. 00:02:22.800 --> 00:02:27.030 align:middle line:84% And where I ended up was never where I set out to go. 00:02:27.030 --> 00:02:30.510 align:middle line:84% To freeze these pieces in time is a necessary part 00:02:30.510 --> 00:02:31.830 align:middle line:90% of bookmaking. 00:02:31.830 --> 00:02:34.080 align:middle line:84% But it makes it difficult to communicate 00:02:34.080 --> 00:02:38.280 align:middle line:84% how the essential considerations of these lecture essays, time, 00:02:38.280 --> 00:02:43.410 align:middle line:84% doubt, ambiguity, unknowingness, circularity, oppositionality 00:02:43.410 --> 00:02:48.630 align:middle line:84% are, by their nature, in motion, relative, and relational. 00:02:48.630 --> 00:02:49.620 align:middle line:90% Two. 00:02:49.620 --> 00:02:54.000 align:middle line:84% The poetics of wrongness, an un-apologia. 00:02:54.000 --> 00:02:57.450 align:middle line:84% A poet is one who feels wrong in a wrong world 00:02:57.450 --> 00:03:00.210 align:middle line:84% and is willing to speak, even when doing so 00:03:00.210 --> 00:03:04.980 align:middle line:84% proves her wrong, broken, ugly, and complicit. 00:03:04.980 --> 00:03:09.300 align:middle line:84% This is not the same as saying, I write poetry to feel better, 00:03:09.300 --> 00:03:12.780 align:middle line:84% or to be forgiven, or that the goal of poetry 00:03:12.780 --> 00:03:14.880 align:middle line:90% is to right wrongs. 00:03:14.880 --> 00:03:18.150 align:middle line:84% Perhaps, some people feel better when they write poetry. 00:03:18.150 --> 00:03:21.780 align:middle line:84% Perhaps, some poems make the world less wrong. 00:03:21.780 --> 00:03:23.790 align:middle line:84% But what I'm trying to explain is 00:03:23.790 --> 00:03:27.240 align:middle line:84% that a poet's athleticism lies in her ability 00:03:27.240 --> 00:03:30.900 align:middle line:84% to stay in and with wrongness, of being 00:03:30.900 --> 00:03:34.680 align:middle line:84% willing to be disliked for being too smart, too stupid, too 00:03:34.680 --> 00:03:38.130 align:middle line:84% direct or incomprehensible, elitist or the lowest 00:03:38.130 --> 00:03:41.010 align:middle line:84% of the low, and for what, for the privilege 00:03:41.010 --> 00:03:43.440 align:middle line:84% of pointing out that everything in the world 00:03:43.440 --> 00:03:46.230 align:middle line:90% is wrong, including me. 00:03:46.230 --> 00:03:48.840 align:middle line:84% Wrongness is intrinsic to poetry, 00:03:48.840 --> 00:03:51.570 align:middle line:84% which asserts with its most defining formal device, 00:03:51.570 --> 00:03:54.780 align:middle line:84% the line break, that the margins of prose are wrong. 00:03:54.780 --> 00:03:57.000 align:middle line:84% Or with its attention to diction, 00:03:57.000 --> 00:03:59.700 align:middle line:84% that the ways in which we've come to understand and use 00:03:59.700 --> 00:04:02.220 align:middle line:90% words are wrong. 00:04:02.220 --> 00:04:05.880 align:middle line:84% I write to talk back, sometimes, to myself, 00:04:05.880 --> 00:04:09.210 align:middle line:84% not to tell you what I think but to figure out what I think, 00:04:09.210 --> 00:04:11.340 align:middle line:84% which is always a process of proving 00:04:11.340 --> 00:04:14.320 align:middle line:90% myself and others wrong. 00:04:14.320 --> 00:04:17.920 align:middle line:84% It is the job of poems to undermine, refute, retort, 00:04:17.920 --> 00:04:22.120 align:middle line:84% recede, disrupt, to tell you nicely or aggressively that you 00:04:22.120 --> 00:04:24.520 align:middle line:84% are wrong, that the world is fucked up, 00:04:24.520 --> 00:04:27.010 align:middle line:84% that all our modes of understanding and expressing 00:04:27.010 --> 00:04:29.080 align:middle line:84% our suspect, and that there is nothing 00:04:29.080 --> 00:04:32.440 align:middle line:84% and no one above reproach or scrutiny. 00:04:32.440 --> 00:04:35.890 align:middle line:84% Poets speak even when it is excruciating, 00:04:35.890 --> 00:04:38.140 align:middle line:90% even when no one is listening. 00:04:38.140 --> 00:04:41.320 align:middle line:84% Often, when the poet believes despite Audre Lord's 00:04:41.320 --> 00:04:43.360 align:middle line:84% admonition, your silence will not 00:04:43.360 --> 00:04:48.130 align:middle line:84% protect you, that she would be better off staying silent. 00:04:48.130 --> 00:04:51.790 align:middle line:84% That's what a poem is, the breaking of silence, 00:04:51.790 --> 00:04:56.170 align:middle line:84% a form that makes and then breaks silence over and over. 00:04:56.170 --> 00:05:00.640 align:middle line:84% Poetry is the language of pain and grief and hurt and love. 00:05:00.640 --> 00:05:02.770 align:middle line:84% And most people in our country hate it. 00:05:02.770 --> 00:05:04.120 align:middle line:90% But often need it. 00:05:04.120 --> 00:05:08.060 align:middle line:84% Sometimes find solace and pleasure in it. 00:05:08.060 --> 00:05:10.460 align:middle line:84% I've learned from being a daughter and a mother 00:05:10.460 --> 00:05:14.240 align:middle line:84% that finding your parent wrong or being told how wrong you are 00:05:14.240 --> 00:05:17.390 align:middle line:84% is a complicated act of attachment, separation, 00:05:17.390 --> 00:05:20.210 align:middle line:90% individuation, and love. 00:05:20.210 --> 00:05:23.420 align:middle line:84% A parasitic kind of love perhaps. 00:05:23.420 --> 00:05:24.620 align:middle line:90% But love. 00:05:24.620 --> 00:05:28.220 align:middle line:84% A way of paying attention, of giving a shit. 00:05:28.220 --> 00:05:31.025 align:middle line:84% The alternative to being wrong is being ignored. 00:05:31.025 --> 00:05:33.760 align:middle line:90% 00:05:33.760 --> 00:05:35.140 align:middle line:90% Three. 00:05:35.140 --> 00:05:38.140 align:middle line:84% She Who Shall Not Name or There's Something 00:05:38.140 --> 00:05:40.000 align:middle line:90% I Need To Tell You. 00:05:40.000 --> 00:05:42.760 align:middle line:84% I just want to say I never chose the beginning of any 00:05:42.760 --> 00:05:43.870 align:middle line:90% of these essays. 00:05:43.870 --> 00:05:48.910 align:middle line:84% And only once did I choose the end to excerpt. 00:05:48.910 --> 00:05:51.490 align:middle line:84% I keenly believe in the poetics of wrongness. 00:05:51.490 --> 00:05:55.780 align:middle line:84% But it would be dishonest not to enlarge the frame of that essay 00:05:55.780 --> 00:05:58.900 align:middle line:84% to include the fact that on that particular night, 00:05:58.900 --> 00:06:01.840 align:middle line:84% in my particular life, I had and have 00:06:01.840 --> 00:06:04.900 align:middle line:84% a strong psychological stake in believing 00:06:04.900 --> 00:06:07.690 align:middle line:84% that I could be wrong and survive the guilt 00:06:07.690 --> 00:06:09.880 align:middle line:90% and shame of writing. 00:06:09.880 --> 00:06:13.630 align:middle line:84% I needed to believe that even if I was wrong, in this case, 00:06:13.630 --> 00:06:16.030 align:middle line:84% to have wanted to publish my book Mothers 00:06:16.030 --> 00:06:17.980 align:middle line:84% and to have published it, perhaps, 00:06:17.980 --> 00:06:19.780 align:middle line:84% even to have written it and to have written 00:06:19.780 --> 00:06:22.870 align:middle line:84% all the other things I have written that have hurt others, 00:06:22.870 --> 00:06:25.690 align:middle line:84% I needed to believe I would survive my mother's 00:06:25.690 --> 00:06:30.070 align:middle line:84% curse in part, because there was a value in having been wrong. 00:06:30.070 --> 00:06:32.350 align:middle line:84% To leave this out would be to include 00:06:32.350 --> 00:06:34.690 align:middle line:84% the ways in which the poetics of wrongness 00:06:34.690 --> 00:06:37.840 align:middle line:84% if you know who wrote it and when and why 00:06:37.840 --> 00:06:42.400 align:middle line:84% is also a manifesto of self-righteousness and self 00:06:42.400 --> 00:06:43.690 align:middle line:90% survival. 00:06:43.690 --> 00:06:47.170 align:middle line:84% A desperate attempt to imagine that if being a poet 00:06:47.170 --> 00:06:49.720 align:middle line:84% means saying, I am wrong, and you are wrong, 00:06:49.720 --> 00:06:53.770 align:middle line:84% and I'm willing to say it, then I was right to write Mothers. 00:06:53.770 --> 00:06:56.050 align:middle line:90% I had the right to do it. 00:06:56.050 --> 00:06:59.530 align:middle line:84% I needed to believe in the value of exposing and exploring 00:06:59.530 --> 00:07:02.050 align:middle line:84% the wrongness of self, others, and world, 00:07:02.050 --> 00:07:04.540 align:middle line:84% the value of putting wrongness on display 00:07:04.540 --> 00:07:08.110 align:middle line:84% even if my mother had not wanted me to do so. 00:07:08.110 --> 00:07:11.530 align:middle line:84% I needed to believe in wrongness in order to keep writing, 00:07:11.530 --> 00:07:14.620 align:middle line:84% in order to survive the possibility that I had, 00:07:14.620 --> 00:07:16.540 align:middle line:84% through my writing, been responsible 00:07:16.540 --> 00:07:19.160 align:middle line:90% for my mother's death. 00:07:19.160 --> 00:07:21.650 align:middle line:84% These lecture essays ostensibly written 00:07:21.650 --> 00:07:23.900 align:middle line:84% to explore how I became a poet, and what 00:07:23.900 --> 00:07:26.330 align:middle line:84% I think about poetry, how I understand 00:07:26.330 --> 00:07:28.490 align:middle line:84% the differences between prose and poetry, 00:07:28.490 --> 00:07:31.400 align:middle line:84% story, and experience provocation and offense, 00:07:31.400 --> 00:07:34.460 align:middle line:84% hurt and harm spectacle and witness, 00:07:34.460 --> 00:07:36.590 align:middle line:84% how I became the kind of person who 00:07:36.590 --> 00:07:38.630 align:middle line:84% would upset my mother in this way, 00:07:38.630 --> 00:07:42.660 align:middle line:84% and whether I require or deserve forgiveness. 00:07:42.660 --> 00:07:44.990 align:middle line:84% One way to read this book then is 00:07:44.990 --> 00:07:47.150 align:middle line:84% that it begins by embracing wrongness 00:07:47.150 --> 00:07:50.240 align:middle line:84% and continues with my looking to the history of photographers 00:07:50.240 --> 00:07:53.420 align:middle line:84% and poets who have written about themselves and others 00:07:53.420 --> 00:07:56.570 align:middle line:84% in a documentary mode in order to justify 00:07:56.570 --> 00:08:00.320 align:middle line:84% my practice about writing about real people. 00:08:00.320 --> 00:08:02.570 align:middle line:84% In She Who Shall Not Name, I will 00:08:02.570 --> 00:08:04.910 align:middle line:84% tell the story of the conflict with my mother 00:08:04.910 --> 00:08:06.650 align:middle line:84% and of her death in much more detail 00:08:06.650 --> 00:08:08.570 align:middle line:84% than I have just told it, which is not 00:08:08.570 --> 00:08:12.470 align:middle line:84% to say objectively because such a thing is impossible. 00:08:12.470 --> 00:08:15.890 align:middle line:84% As I will discuss in greater depth in A Very Large Charge, 00:08:15.890 --> 00:08:18.560 align:middle line:84% I cannot tell the story of these lectures without telling 00:08:18.560 --> 00:08:20.240 align:middle line:90% the story of my mother's death. 00:08:20.240 --> 00:08:22.520 align:middle line:84% But telling that story, how I tell it, 00:08:22.520 --> 00:08:25.730 align:middle line:84% when I tell it, to whom I tell it, how I benefit from, 00:08:25.730 --> 00:08:27.500 align:middle line:84% or I'm harmed by the telling of it, 00:08:27.500 --> 00:08:30.170 align:middle line:84% and how it benefits or harms my mother 00:08:30.170 --> 00:08:33.200 align:middle line:84% and my children is both intrinsic to these lecture 00:08:33.200 --> 00:08:35.720 align:middle line:90% essays and part of the problem. 00:08:35.720 --> 00:08:37.940 align:middle line:84% Because telling it is a reenactment 00:08:37.940 --> 00:08:41.120 align:middle line:90% of violence against my mother. 00:08:41.120 --> 00:08:45.590 align:middle line:84% Taking away, taking everything away. 00:08:45.590 --> 00:08:49.460 align:middle line:90% That poem is in The Pedestrians. 00:08:49.460 --> 00:08:50.120 align:middle line:90% Five. 00:08:50.120 --> 00:08:52.940 align:middle line:84% Photo poetics, or, one poet's obsession 00:08:52.940 --> 00:08:55.880 align:middle line:84% with authenticity, sentimentality, activism, 00:08:55.880 --> 00:08:59.600 align:middle line:84% and the ethics of representation. 00:08:59.600 --> 00:09:02.210 align:middle line:84% Robert Frank was aware of the pressure on him 00:09:02.210 --> 00:09:05.900 align:middle line:84% and other photographers of his generation to use photography 00:09:05.900 --> 00:09:08.900 align:middle line:84% to tell a certain kind of story for a certain kind of audience 00:09:08.900 --> 00:09:10.380 align:middle line:90% in a certain kind of way. 00:09:10.380 --> 00:09:12.800 align:middle line:90% And he didn't want to. 00:09:12.800 --> 00:09:15.380 align:middle line:84% I developed a tremendous contempt for Life, 00:09:15.380 --> 00:09:17.510 align:middle line:90% which helped me, said Frank. 00:09:17.510 --> 00:09:19.550 align:middle line:84% He's talking about Life magazine, 00:09:19.550 --> 00:09:22.220 align:middle line:84% which was the prominent venue for photojournalists 00:09:22.220 --> 00:09:23.930 align:middle line:90% of that time. 00:09:23.930 --> 00:09:26.690 align:middle line:84% Frank said, you have to be enraged. 00:09:26.690 --> 00:09:29.990 align:middle line:84% I wanted to follow my intuition to do it my way, 00:09:29.990 --> 00:09:31.730 align:middle line:90% not to make a life story. 00:09:31.730 --> 00:09:33.200 align:middle line:90% That was another thing I hated. 00:09:33.200 --> 00:09:35.870 align:middle line:84% Those goddamn stories with a beginning and an end. 00:09:35.870 --> 00:09:38.162 align:middle line:84% And if I hate those stories with a beginning, a middle, 00:09:38.162 --> 00:09:40.203 align:middle line:84% and an end, then obviously, I will make an effort 00:09:40.203 --> 00:09:42.620 align:middle line:84% to produce something that will stand up to those stories 00:09:42.620 --> 00:09:45.560 align:middle line:90% but not be like them. 00:09:45.560 --> 00:09:47.510 align:middle line:90% This resonated with me. 00:09:47.510 --> 00:09:51.020 align:middle line:84% I love stories but distrust the narrative expectations 00:09:51.020 --> 00:09:53.810 align:middle line:84% of those goddamned stories with a beginning and an end. 00:09:53.810 --> 00:09:56.660 align:middle line:84% And the way that those formal expectations of stories 00:09:56.660 --> 00:10:00.020 align:middle line:84% make it difficult to abide in the complexity of thoughts, 00:10:00.020 --> 00:10:04.940 align:middle line:84% sensation, and experience, which is, I believe, a poet's job. 00:10:04.940 --> 00:10:08.960 align:middle line:84% In all the major life experiences I have experienced, 00:10:08.960 --> 00:10:12.380 align:middle line:90% I felt lied to by stories. 00:10:12.380 --> 00:10:14.690 align:middle line:84% The experience of being married does not 00:10:14.690 --> 00:10:17.870 align:middle line:84% feel like any romcom I've ever seen. 00:10:17.870 --> 00:10:21.260 align:middle line:84% My everyday thoughts seldom have a beginning, middle, and end. 00:10:21.260 --> 00:10:23.780 align:middle line:84% And instead, have a jumbled simultaneity 00:10:23.780 --> 00:10:26.150 align:middle line:84% that would seem to tell the story of mental illness 00:10:26.150 --> 00:10:28.340 align:middle line:84% if one believed that sane people only think 00:10:28.340 --> 00:10:30.590 align:middle line:90% the way they do in novels. 00:10:30.590 --> 00:10:33.530 align:middle line:84% And one of the most significant and defining experiences 00:10:33.530 --> 00:10:36.500 align:middle line:84% of my life, the births of my three children, 00:10:36.500 --> 00:10:40.130 align:middle line:84% were characterized by colliding atemporal states of physical 00:10:40.130 --> 00:10:42.410 align:middle line:90% and emotional sensation. 00:10:42.410 --> 00:10:46.310 align:middle line:84% To feel out of time, to feel both completely inside 00:10:46.310 --> 00:10:49.100 align:middle line:84% and outside one's body, to lose awareness 00:10:49.100 --> 00:10:51.770 align:middle line:84% of the story of the experience, and to need 00:10:51.770 --> 00:10:54.500 align:middle line:84% to be reminded that one is having a baby, 00:10:54.500 --> 00:10:58.280 align:middle line:84% these are common, not universal, experiences of childbirth. 00:10:58.280 --> 00:11:00.350 align:middle line:84% And yet nothing in art or literature 00:11:00.350 --> 00:11:02.270 align:middle line:90% prepared me for this. 00:11:02.270 --> 00:11:04.010 align:middle line:84% If there was something I wanted to be 00:11:04.010 --> 00:11:06.230 align:middle line:84% able to do in my poems, something 00:11:06.230 --> 00:11:09.890 align:middle line:84% I imagined only poetry of all the literary arts could do, 00:11:09.890 --> 00:11:11.480 align:middle line:90% it was this. 00:11:11.480 --> 00:11:14.000 align:middle line:84% It was to describe and enact experience 00:11:14.000 --> 00:11:16.160 align:middle line:84% in the most accurate way possible, 00:11:16.160 --> 00:11:19.520 align:middle line:84% to produce something that would stand up to those stories, 00:11:19.520 --> 00:11:22.460 align:middle line:84% but not be like them, as Frank said. 00:11:22.460 --> 00:11:26.360 align:middle line:84% The fragmented, weird, broken, messiness of a poem, 00:11:26.360 --> 00:11:29.510 align:middle line:84% like the blurriness and sloppiness of Frank's images, 00:11:29.510 --> 00:11:33.500 align:middle line:84% is not a stylistic affectation, but the clearest, most direct, 00:11:33.500 --> 00:11:36.470 align:middle line:84% most accurate way to apprehend the real world that 00:11:36.470 --> 00:11:39.680 align:middle line:84% did not and would never conform to any reproducible or 00:11:39.680 --> 00:11:40.790 align:middle line:90% summarizable trope. 00:11:40.790 --> 00:11:44.870 align:middle line:90% 00:11:44.870 --> 00:11:47.210 align:middle line:84% Even though I am a native English speaker, 00:11:47.210 --> 00:11:51.290 align:middle line:84% my own language feels more often than not foreign to me. 00:11:51.290 --> 00:11:54.260 align:middle line:84% I hear the language through the Yiddish inflected syntax 00:11:54.260 --> 00:11:58.580 align:middle line:84% of my grandparents even though they died so long ago. 00:11:58.580 --> 00:12:01.100 align:middle line:84% Learning to read was a painstaking process, 00:12:01.100 --> 00:12:04.490 align:middle line:84% and my illegible handwriting and impossible to decipher spelling 00:12:04.490 --> 00:12:06.380 align:middle line:90% were a source of shame. 00:12:06.380 --> 00:12:08.450 align:middle line:84% Even after publishing nine books, 00:12:08.450 --> 00:12:10.310 align:middle line:84% I have never felt myself an expert 00:12:10.310 --> 00:12:12.680 align:middle line:90% in writing or in anything. 00:12:12.680 --> 00:12:14.000 align:middle line:90% And why would I? 00:12:14.000 --> 00:12:18.110 align:middle line:84% My children and marriage keep changing rather dramatically. 00:12:18.110 --> 00:12:21.420 align:middle line:84% And despite having chosen stability over and over again, 00:12:21.420 --> 00:12:25.370 align:middle line:84% I've never become accustomed to any part of my life. 00:12:25.370 --> 00:12:28.730 align:middle line:84% At the end of my poem, the window is one-sided. 00:12:28.730 --> 00:12:31.610 align:middle line:90% I will not admit I write. 00:12:31.610 --> 00:12:35.600 align:middle line:84% One day, I will gather a story to tell you 00:12:35.600 --> 00:12:40.520 align:middle line:84% what night looked like, what every city vista told day, 00:12:40.520 --> 00:12:43.820 align:middle line:84% and day heat and time was not were no. 00:12:43.820 --> 00:12:45.680 align:middle line:90% I knew you were. 00:12:45.680 --> 00:12:52.340 align:middle line:84% I knew there was you and summer, and never any other season. 00:12:52.340 --> 00:12:56.300 align:middle line:84% It felt true in that moment, truer than anything. 00:12:56.300 --> 00:12:58.770 align:middle line:90% But it is also not true. 00:12:58.770 --> 00:13:01.820 align:middle line:84% There were, as it turned out, many other seasons, 00:13:01.820 --> 00:13:04.460 align:middle line:84% many other stories, not to mention three more 00:13:04.460 --> 00:13:06.950 align:middle line:90% pregnancies and two more sons. 00:13:06.950 --> 00:13:09.350 align:middle line:84% It is not possible that the preverbal 00:13:09.350 --> 00:13:11.690 align:middle line:84% simian being that I address in this poem 00:13:11.690 --> 00:13:15.290 align:middle line:84% as you is now 18 years old, bearded, 00:13:15.290 --> 00:13:17.570 align:middle line:84% having just moved to Miami for five months 00:13:17.570 --> 00:13:19.910 align:middle line:90% to work for the ACLU. 00:13:19.910 --> 00:13:22.100 align:middle line:90% And am I the same I? 00:13:22.100 --> 00:13:24.660 align:middle line:90% 00:13:24.660 --> 00:13:25.320 align:middle line:90% Six. 00:13:25.320 --> 00:13:27.550 align:middle line:90% Death project poem. 00:13:27.550 --> 00:13:31.320 align:middle line:84% That poem is in my new manuscript of poems. 00:13:31.320 --> 00:13:32.490 align:middle line:90% Seven. 00:13:32.490 --> 00:13:35.880 align:middle line:84% What we talk about when we talk about the confessional 00:13:35.880 --> 00:13:37.920 align:middle line:84% and what we should be talking about. 00:13:37.920 --> 00:13:41.470 align:middle line:90% And I wrote that lecture here. 00:13:41.470 --> 00:13:44.140 align:middle line:84% It is a mistake to think that M. L. Rosenthal's 00:13:44.140 --> 00:13:48.130 align:middle line:84% "poetry as confession" review discerned or created a school 00:13:48.130 --> 00:13:49.120 align:middle line:90% or movement. 00:13:49.120 --> 00:13:51.250 align:middle line:84% But I do think Rosenthal astutely 00:13:51.250 --> 00:13:55.060 align:middle line:84% noticed a moment in the history of poetry in the United States 00:13:55.060 --> 00:13:57.250 align:middle line:84% in which poets started to sound different, 00:13:57.250 --> 00:13:59.290 align:middle line:84% started to use poems differently, 00:13:59.290 --> 00:14:02.780 align:middle line:84% started to want something different from poems. 00:14:02.780 --> 00:14:04.970 align:middle line:84% But what if instead of spotlighting 00:14:04.970 --> 00:14:08.210 align:middle line:84% the publication of Life Studies as this pivotal moment, 00:14:08.210 --> 00:14:13.790 align:middle line:84% Rosenthal or someone else had chosen October 7, 1955, 00:14:13.790 --> 00:14:18.260 align:middle line:84% the date Ginsberg read Howl aloud for the first time? 00:14:18.260 --> 00:14:21.410 align:middle line:84% What if instead of testifying at the obscenity trial as to 00:14:21.410 --> 00:14:24.800 align:middle line:84% whether or not Howl was literature, obscene, original, 00:14:24.800 --> 00:14:26.990 align:middle line:84% all the big deal professors spent their time, 00:14:26.990 --> 00:14:29.060 align:middle line:84% instead writing and talking about the influence 00:14:29.060 --> 00:14:33.650 align:middle line:84% of jazz on Howl, or the work of Black beat poet Bob Kaufman? 00:14:33.650 --> 00:14:36.860 align:middle line:84% What if Kaufman's Abomunist Manifesto 00:14:36.860 --> 00:14:38.810 align:middle line:84% had become more popular than Howl, 00:14:38.810 --> 00:14:40.790 align:middle line:84% and Kaufman had been the most famous beat 00:14:40.790 --> 00:14:44.940 align:middle line:84% poet instead of taking a vow of silence for 10 years? 00:14:44.940 --> 00:14:46.550 align:middle line:84% What if the pivotal moment had come 00:14:46.550 --> 00:14:48.530 align:middle line:90% before the end of the 1950s? 00:14:48.530 --> 00:14:50.540 align:middle line:84% What if Langston Hughes's poem Let 00:14:50.540 --> 00:14:53.390 align:middle line:84% America Be America, written in 1935, 00:14:53.390 --> 00:14:55.280 align:middle line:84% had been taken up as a rallying cry 00:14:55.280 --> 00:14:57.890 align:middle line:84% by all the people who felt America was never 00:14:57.890 --> 00:14:59.180 align:middle line:90% America to me? 00:14:59.180 --> 00:15:02.540 align:middle line:84% Black people, Native people, immigrants, poor, white people, 00:15:02.540 --> 00:15:04.940 align:middle line:84% just to name those mentioned in Hughes's poem. 00:15:04.940 --> 00:15:07.640 align:middle line:84% What if the swell of that poem's power 00:15:07.640 --> 00:15:10.940 align:middle line:84% had made the 1950s less tranquilized? 00:15:10.940 --> 00:15:15.350 align:middle line:84% Or what if in 1958, after Hughes recorded his poem with Charles 00:15:15.350 --> 00:15:18.110 align:middle line:84% Mingus on the album Weary Blues, no one ever 00:15:18.110 --> 00:15:21.950 align:middle line:84% wanted to hear poetry again without music? 00:15:21.950 --> 00:15:24.440 align:middle line:84% Ginsberg wrote Howl for Carl Solomon who 00:15:24.440 --> 00:15:28.610 align:middle line:84% he met in 1949 in the waiting room of a psychiatric hospital, 00:15:28.610 --> 00:15:31.400 align:middle line:84% where Ginsberg would spend the next eight months not receiving 00:15:31.400 --> 00:15:32.900 align:middle line:90% treatment. 00:15:32.900 --> 00:15:34.910 align:middle line:84% With the help of two Columbia professors, 00:15:34.910 --> 00:15:38.810 align:middle line:84% Ginsberg used the insanity plea as a way of avoiding jail time. 00:15:38.810 --> 00:15:42.170 align:middle line:84% He'd been arrested as an accomplice to robbery. 00:15:42.170 --> 00:15:44.810 align:middle line:84% Because he was caught in a stolen car and discovered to 00:15:44.810 --> 00:15:47.270 align:middle line:84% have stolen goods in his apartment. 00:15:47.270 --> 00:15:50.240 align:middle line:84% Meanwhile, Etheridge Knight-- a Black poet who had served 00:15:50.240 --> 00:15:53.030 align:middle line:84% in Korea for three years and returned home traumatized, 00:15:53.030 --> 00:15:54.950 align:middle line:84% wounded, and addicted to opiates-- 00:15:54.950 --> 00:15:57.740 align:middle line:84% was not offered an insanity plea when he was arrested 00:15:57.740 --> 00:16:00.820 align:middle line:90% for armed robbery in 1960. 00:16:00.820 --> 00:16:04.240 align:middle line:84% Ginsberg openly advocated the use of LSD and marijuana, 00:16:04.240 --> 00:16:05.320 align:middle line:90% used both himself. 00:16:05.320 --> 00:16:08.110 align:middle line:84% And although he was hassled by the police arrested many times 00:16:08.110 --> 00:16:11.680 align:middle line:84% for protesting, he was not incarcerated. 00:16:11.680 --> 00:16:13.900 align:middle line:84% In the eight years that Knight spent in prison, 00:16:13.900 --> 00:16:15.910 align:middle line:90% Ginsberg became famous. 00:16:15.910 --> 00:16:19.210 align:middle line:84% While Knight was in prison, Ginsberg and his life partner, 00:16:19.210 --> 00:16:23.290 align:middle line:84% Peter Orlovsky, lived off the royalties of Howl and off 00:16:23.290 --> 00:16:25.750 align:middle line:84% of Orlovsky's disability checks that he 00:16:25.750 --> 00:16:29.620 align:middle line:84% received for his service in the Korean War. 00:16:29.620 --> 00:16:32.140 align:middle line:84% In the 1960s, Lowell's breakdown was 00:16:32.140 --> 00:16:34.750 align:middle line:84% seen by the literary establishment as emblematic 00:16:34.750 --> 00:16:36.550 align:middle line:90% of America's breakdown. 00:16:36.550 --> 00:16:39.850 align:middle line:84% Ginsberg's breaking away was seen as annoying fringe 00:16:39.850 --> 00:16:41.650 align:middle line:90% subculture nonsense. 00:16:41.650 --> 00:16:44.230 align:middle line:84% Langston Hughes's shorter, less threatening poems 00:16:44.230 --> 00:16:46.210 align:middle line:84% were given a few pages in otherwise all 00:16:46.210 --> 00:16:47.470 align:middle line:90% white anthologies. 00:16:47.470 --> 00:16:52.870 align:middle line:84% And as I said, Bob Kaufman was silent, basically, from 1963. 00:16:52.870 --> 00:16:55.150 align:middle line:84% And Etheridge Knight was in prison. 00:16:55.150 --> 00:16:58.540 align:middle line:84% Despite winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for Annie Allen, 00:16:58.540 --> 00:17:00.760 align:middle line:84% Gwendolyn Brooks was not seen by literary critics 00:17:00.760 --> 00:17:04.270 align:middle line:84% as a figure who would disrupt their lives or American poetry. 00:17:04.270 --> 00:17:06.130 align:middle line:84% I think this was in part, because Brooks 00:17:06.130 --> 00:17:07.960 align:middle line:84% was writing about life on the street, which 00:17:07.960 --> 00:17:10.780 align:middle line:84% was as foreign to straight white male critics as someone writing 00:17:10.780 --> 00:17:12.790 align:middle line:90% about another country. 00:17:12.790 --> 00:17:16.839 align:middle line:84% In the late '60s and early '70s, Plath and Sexton's popularity 00:17:16.839 --> 00:17:19.030 align:middle line:84% was considered evidence of the poor reading 00:17:19.030 --> 00:17:22.359 align:middle line:84% taste of hysterical girls and strident feminists. 00:17:22.359 --> 00:17:25.000 align:middle line:84% The rising tide of poets of the women's movements 00:17:25.000 --> 00:17:30.250 align:middle line:84% were dismissed as political and, therefore, aliterary. 00:17:30.250 --> 00:17:32.080 align:middle line:84% The what if game gets increasingly 00:17:32.080 --> 00:17:34.570 align:middle line:84% harrowing the further we stray from the privileges 00:17:34.570 --> 00:17:37.930 align:middle line:84% and protections that kept someone as ill as Lowell 00:17:37.930 --> 00:17:41.650 align:middle line:84% able to survive, and often thrive, able to keep writing, 00:17:41.650 --> 00:17:45.070 align:middle line:84% keep being published, widely read, discussed, appreciated, 00:17:45.070 --> 00:17:48.400 align:middle line:84% and able to change the course of American poetry. 00:17:48.400 --> 00:17:51.190 align:middle line:84% Without money, whiteness, maleness, straightness, 00:17:51.190 --> 00:17:53.500 align:middle line:84% educational privilege, without the wives, 00:17:53.500 --> 00:17:55.270 align:middle line:84% and close literary friends who were 00:17:55.270 --> 00:17:57.760 align:middle line:84% able to care for Lowell and for his legacy, 00:17:57.760 --> 00:17:59.470 align:middle line:84% such a breakdown would not have been 00:17:59.470 --> 00:18:03.070 align:middle line:84% seen as representational or deeply significant. 00:18:03.070 --> 00:18:05.410 align:middle line:84% Most poets who strayed from the mainstream 00:18:05.410 --> 00:18:07.930 align:middle line:84% because of who they were or because of their radical use 00:18:07.930 --> 00:18:11.080 align:middle line:84% of form or inclusion of previously taboo content 00:18:11.080 --> 00:18:13.210 align:middle line:90% were neither seen nor heard. 00:18:13.210 --> 00:18:15.730 align:middle line:84% These voices were silenced by incarceration, 00:18:15.730 --> 00:18:18.950 align:middle line:90% illness, poverty, and violence. 00:18:18.950 --> 00:18:21.610 align:middle line:90% Q and A 2016. 00:18:21.610 --> 00:18:23.290 align:middle line:90% Christine Larusso. 00:18:23.290 --> 00:18:25.060 align:middle line:84% Rachel, you recently mentioned to me 00:18:25.060 --> 00:18:27.670 align:middle line:84% that the lectures have changed your thinking, particularly 00:18:27.670 --> 00:18:30.910 align:middle line:84% with regards to feminism and the social function of poetry. 00:18:30.910 --> 00:18:32.680 align:middle line:90% Can you elaborate? 00:18:32.680 --> 00:18:35.320 align:middle line:84% My answer is online, at the Bagley White-- 00:18:35.320 --> 00:18:38.530 align:middle line:90% Wright website. 00:18:38.530 --> 00:18:39.310 align:middle line:90% Nine. 00:18:39.310 --> 00:18:41.620 align:middle line:90% She who shall not name. 00:18:41.620 --> 00:18:43.390 align:middle line:90% Not read from that. 00:18:43.390 --> 00:18:44.590 align:middle line:90% Ten. 00:18:44.590 --> 00:18:49.540 align:middle line:84% A very large charge, the ethics of say everything poetry. 00:18:49.540 --> 00:18:52.000 align:middle line:84% Let us imagine a kind of poetry that 00:18:52.000 --> 00:18:55.720 align:middle line:84% must abide by the following ethical standards. 00:18:55.720 --> 00:18:58.150 align:middle line:90% One, it tells the truth. 00:18:58.150 --> 00:19:00.910 align:middle line:84% Two, it offers the opinion of the poet, 00:19:00.910 --> 00:19:03.880 align:middle line:84% and as such, the poet assumes responsibility 00:19:03.880 --> 00:19:07.180 align:middle line:84% for both the content and the form of speech. 00:19:07.180 --> 00:19:10.840 align:middle line:84% Three, it punches up and not down. 00:19:10.840 --> 00:19:15.730 align:middle line:84% Four, it has a purpose to ensure the well-being of the citizens 00:19:15.730 --> 00:19:18.160 align:middle line:84% and the community and to prevent or overthrow 00:19:18.160 --> 00:19:20.350 align:middle line:90% tyranny and oppression. 00:19:20.350 --> 00:19:23.980 align:middle line:84% Five, its content engenders significant risk 00:19:23.980 --> 00:19:26.430 align:middle line:90% to the speaker. 00:19:26.430 --> 00:19:29.190 align:middle line:84% Whereas, confessionalism traffics in shame, 00:19:29.190 --> 00:19:32.700 align:middle line:84% say everything poetry is speaking truth to power. 00:19:32.700 --> 00:19:35.490 align:middle line:84% Say everything poetry requires personal risk, 00:19:35.490 --> 00:19:38.100 align:middle line:84% but risk is not the same as shame. 00:19:38.100 --> 00:19:40.320 align:middle line:84% Whereas, confessionalism is inexorably 00:19:40.320 --> 00:19:43.830 align:middle line:84% connected to original sin and the fallen nature of man, 00:19:43.830 --> 00:19:47.580 align:middle line:84% say everything poetry is predicated on understanding 00:19:47.580 --> 00:19:49.710 align:middle line:84% and wisdom, on living the way one believes 00:19:49.710 --> 00:19:52.390 align:middle line:90% is right and rational. 00:19:52.390 --> 00:19:54.160 align:middle line:84% The task of writing these lectures 00:19:54.160 --> 00:19:57.430 align:middle line:84% forced me to write into the silence that descended upon me 00:19:57.430 --> 00:20:01.780 align:middle line:84% or that I imposed upon myself after my mother's death. 00:20:01.780 --> 00:20:03.970 align:middle line:84% I've recently composed some of the most 00:20:03.970 --> 00:20:08.350 align:middle line:84% boldly or problematically confessional poems of my life. 00:20:08.350 --> 00:20:10.300 align:middle line:84% I still don't know whether my decision 00:20:10.300 --> 00:20:13.780 align:middle line:84% to publish Mothers and my many confessional narrative poems 00:20:13.780 --> 00:20:16.480 align:middle line:84% are acts of say everything poetry or not. 00:20:16.480 --> 00:20:18.340 align:middle line:84% But I'm grateful to have worked my way 00:20:18.340 --> 00:20:20.230 align:middle line:84% towards a set of ethical guidelines 00:20:20.230 --> 00:20:22.660 align:middle line:90% that feels useful for me. 00:20:22.660 --> 00:20:25.330 align:middle line:84% I am no longer interested in writing that is only 00:20:25.330 --> 00:20:27.700 align:middle line:84% about the self, nor am I interested 00:20:27.700 --> 00:20:30.850 align:middle line:84% in writing that attempts to exist without self. 00:20:30.850 --> 00:20:33.760 align:middle line:84% To write with no self is irresponsible. 00:20:33.760 --> 00:20:38.210 align:middle line:84% To write with only self is irrelevant. 00:20:38.210 --> 00:20:39.560 align:middle line:90% Eleven. 00:20:39.560 --> 00:20:41.210 align:middle line:84% Why she could not write a lecture 00:20:41.210 --> 00:20:45.230 align:middle line:90% on the poetics of motherhood. 00:20:45.230 --> 00:20:48.150 align:middle line:84% Also, she told James, she was afraid. 00:20:48.150 --> 00:20:49.640 align:middle line:84% She was afraid to write the lecture 00:20:49.640 --> 00:20:51.710 align:middle line:84% on the poetics of motherhood because too 00:20:51.710 --> 00:20:54.450 align:middle line:84% many of the women she was talking about were white. 00:20:54.450 --> 00:20:57.590 align:middle line:84% The Black mother poets except Toi Derricotte, Lucille 00:20:57.590 --> 00:21:00.350 align:middle line:84% Clifton, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Rita Dove 00:21:00.350 --> 00:21:02.840 align:middle line:84% seemed to be doing something else in their poems. 00:21:02.840 --> 00:21:05.480 align:middle line:84% Their poems were shorter, more direct, urgent 00:21:05.480 --> 00:21:08.240 align:middle line:84% in ways that made Bernadette Mayer and Alice 00:21:08.240 --> 00:21:10.910 align:middle line:84% Notley with their long, rambling, domestic, epic, 00:21:10.910 --> 00:21:14.060 align:middle line:84% anti-epic shadiness seem like she was not actually observing 00:21:14.060 --> 00:21:15.950 align:middle line:84% a poetics of motherhood, but was, 00:21:15.950 --> 00:21:20.210 align:middle line:84% perhaps, observing a poetics of white hetero motherhood. 00:21:20.210 --> 00:21:23.240 align:middle line:84% Was the poetics of excess actually a poetics 00:21:23.240 --> 00:21:24.560 align:middle line:90% of privilege? 00:21:24.560 --> 00:21:27.260 align:middle line:84% She had come to a similar conclusion about the whiteness 00:21:27.260 --> 00:21:28.640 align:middle line:90% of confessional poetry. 00:21:28.640 --> 00:21:31.520 align:middle line:84% Was she going to inscribe racism and homophobia 00:21:31.520 --> 00:21:33.110 align:middle line:84% like the straight white feminists had 00:21:33.110 --> 00:21:36.320 align:middle line:84% done when they tried and failed to invite Black women 00:21:36.320 --> 00:21:38.750 align:middle line:84% and lesbians into their movement? 00:21:38.750 --> 00:21:41.900 align:middle line:84% If she did not do the real work of entangling race and gender, 00:21:41.900 --> 00:21:43.880 align:middle line:84% and maybe even if she did, she was 00:21:43.880 --> 00:21:46.250 align:middle line:84% going to inscribe racism and the damage done 00:21:46.250 --> 00:21:48.080 align:middle line:84% by white feminists to Black feminists, 00:21:48.080 --> 00:21:50.420 align:middle line:84% and by straight feminists to lesbian feminists. 00:21:50.420 --> 00:21:53.200 align:middle line:90% And this she did not want. 00:21:53.200 --> 00:21:55.210 align:middle line:84% She felt that part of this problem 00:21:55.210 --> 00:21:56.800 align:middle line:84% could be solved if she asked Isaac 00:21:56.800 --> 00:21:58.730 align:middle line:84% what he thought, and more importantly, 00:21:58.730 --> 00:22:00.790 align:middle line:90% if she re-read Sonia Sanchez. 00:22:00.790 --> 00:22:02.980 align:middle line:84% She suspected that in the work of Sanchez 00:22:02.980 --> 00:22:05.200 align:middle line:84% was the key to an observation of motherhood 00:22:05.200 --> 00:22:07.690 align:middle line:84% that was as diverse and inclusive and complex and 00:22:07.690 --> 00:22:08.380 align:middle line:90% beautiful. 00:22:08.380 --> 00:22:09.880 align:middle line:90% But she had not had the time. 00:22:09.880 --> 00:22:12.580 align:middle line:84% And what about the Latina and Asian-American and Indigenous 00:22:12.580 --> 00:22:13.150 align:middle line:90% mothers? 00:22:13.150 --> 00:22:16.270 align:middle line:84% Not having the time was no excuse at all. 00:22:16.270 --> 00:22:18.040 align:middle line:84% At the same time, not having time 00:22:18.040 --> 00:22:20.620 align:middle line:84% was perhaps the most single unifying aspect 00:22:20.620 --> 00:22:23.080 align:middle line:90% of the poetics of motherhood. 00:22:23.080 --> 00:22:24.700 align:middle line:84% But when she had tried to explain this 00:22:24.700 --> 00:22:28.180 align:middle line:84% to Isaac, this thing about the most unifying aspect 00:22:28.180 --> 00:22:31.430 align:middle line:84% of the poetics of motherhood being a lack of time, Isaac, 00:22:31.430 --> 00:22:33.280 align:middle line:84% who was also her student and who was now 00:22:33.280 --> 00:22:35.020 align:middle line:84% becoming a great scholar and poet, 00:22:35.020 --> 00:22:37.360 align:middle line:84% and had a very kind way of chastising her, 00:22:37.360 --> 00:22:41.260 align:middle line:84% Isaac replied, it might be useful to think through 00:22:41.260 --> 00:22:44.020 align:middle line:84% how the experience of not having enough time 00:22:44.020 --> 00:22:47.110 align:middle line:84% is not evenly distributed across all mothers, 00:22:47.110 --> 00:22:49.960 align:middle line:84% and how historically, the labor of women of color, 00:22:49.960 --> 00:22:53.020 align:middle line:84% denial of their role as mothers, especially Black women, 00:22:53.020 --> 00:22:55.510 align:middle line:84% has made possible the ability of white mothers 00:22:55.510 --> 00:22:57.700 align:middle line:84% to inhabit the category of motherhood 00:22:57.700 --> 00:23:02.740 align:middle line:84% even as inhabiting that category is itself exploitative. 00:23:02.740 --> 00:23:04.270 align:middle line:90% Yes, she thought. 00:23:04.270 --> 00:23:05.080 align:middle line:90% Yes. 00:23:05.080 --> 00:23:06.940 align:middle line:84% How much of what she thought might 00:23:06.940 --> 00:23:08.770 align:middle line:84% be a poetics of motherhood was just 00:23:08.770 --> 00:23:11.450 align:middle line:84% another codification of the protection of white women, 00:23:11.450 --> 00:23:14.380 align:middle line:84% which was one of the greatest weapons of white supremacy. 00:23:14.380 --> 00:23:17.530 align:middle line:84% She had been planning to talk about Rich's use of the word 00:23:17.530 --> 00:23:18.700 align:middle line:90% "unifying." 00:23:18.700 --> 00:23:21.670 align:middle line:84% The fact that Adrienne Rich had not written universal. 00:23:21.670 --> 00:23:24.550 align:middle line:84% Motherhood, she was planning to say, is not universal. 00:23:24.550 --> 00:23:26.560 align:middle line:84% And one of the greatest things about motherhood 00:23:26.560 --> 00:23:28.268 align:middle line:84% is that it accomplishes, if one is paying 00:23:28.268 --> 00:23:31.030 align:middle line:84% attention and speaking with a mother mind and a mother voice, 00:23:31.030 --> 00:23:34.090 align:middle line:84% the way in which motherhood subverts the entire concept 00:23:34.090 --> 00:23:35.230 align:middle line:90% of universality. 00:23:35.230 --> 00:23:38.020 align:middle line:84% The pregnant body, for example, is not a machine and not 00:23:38.020 --> 00:23:39.130 align:middle line:90% a broken machine. 00:23:39.130 --> 00:23:41.650 align:middle line:84% It is not a deviant variation of the male form. 00:23:41.650 --> 00:23:44.260 align:middle line:84% But how could she even write "the pregnant body" 00:23:44.260 --> 00:23:46.150 align:middle line:90% as if that meant any one thing? 00:23:46.150 --> 00:23:48.310 align:middle line:84% How could she talk about the unifying experience 00:23:48.310 --> 00:23:50.320 align:middle line:84% of motherhood when her experience of it 00:23:50.320 --> 00:23:52.990 align:middle line:84% and the institution of it was so vastly different for her 00:23:52.990 --> 00:23:56.120 align:middle line:90% as it was for other mothers? 00:23:56.120 --> 00:23:58.220 align:middle line:84% The poetics of motherhood is always 00:23:58.220 --> 00:24:02.000 align:middle line:84% what is knowable and unknowable, she wrote on her phone 00:24:02.000 --> 00:24:03.180 align:middle line:90% in the dark. 00:24:03.180 --> 00:24:05.510 align:middle line:84% It's like the Academy Awards was like, you're done now. 00:24:05.510 --> 00:24:08.780 align:middle line:90% 00:24:08.780 --> 00:24:10.430 align:middle line:84% She wrote on her phone in the dark 00:24:10.430 --> 00:24:12.350 align:middle line:84% when she was wide awake, trying not 00:24:12.350 --> 00:24:15.330 align:middle line:84% to write her lecture because, really, it was not safe. 00:24:15.330 --> 00:24:17.660 align:middle line:84% It was not safe at all to be so tired 00:24:17.660 --> 00:24:20.480 align:middle line:84% and have to drive her son to soccer in the morning. 00:24:20.480 --> 00:24:23.630 align:middle line:84% She tried listening to a podcast instead of making notes 00:24:23.630 --> 00:24:24.950 align:middle line:90% on her phone. 00:24:24.950 --> 00:24:28.190 align:middle line:84% On the podcast, Marina Abramovic said, 00:24:28.190 --> 00:24:31.250 align:middle line:84% if you make the bread in a bakery, you're baker. 00:24:31.250 --> 00:24:35.090 align:middle line:84% If you make the bread in the gallery, you're artist. 00:24:35.090 --> 00:24:37.400 align:middle line:84% She was lying awake in her bedroom listening 00:24:37.400 --> 00:24:40.670 align:middle line:84% to her 17-year-old son sob as the results came in. 00:24:40.670 --> 00:24:42.650 align:middle line:84% She was not looking her sons in the eye. 00:24:42.650 --> 00:24:43.490 align:middle line:90% How could she? 00:24:43.490 --> 00:24:45.920 align:middle line:84% She was crying on the subway on the way to teach, 00:24:45.920 --> 00:24:48.050 align:middle line:84% watching the other white women on the New York City 00:24:48.050 --> 00:24:51.080 align:middle line:84% subway crying and loving them and hating them. 00:24:51.080 --> 00:24:53.570 align:middle line:84% She was crying through her undergraduate workshop, 00:24:53.570 --> 00:24:55.610 align:middle line:84% crying her white woman white fragility 00:24:55.610 --> 00:24:57.800 align:middle line:84% tears as her female undergraduates 00:24:57.800 --> 00:24:59.720 align:middle line:84% cried occasionally running from the room 00:24:59.720 --> 00:25:02.360 align:middle line:84% to take calls from their mothers, one sobbing 00:25:02.360 --> 00:25:04.610 align:middle line:84% and speaking in Farsi, a Black student 00:25:04.610 --> 00:25:06.230 align:middle line:90% refusing to take out a pen. 00:25:06.230 --> 00:25:07.760 align:middle line:90% She was trying to stop crying. 00:25:07.760 --> 00:25:08.930 align:middle line:90% She could not stop crying. 00:25:08.930 --> 00:25:12.290 align:middle line:84% And she could not stop apologizing. 00:25:12.290 --> 00:25:14.210 align:middle line:90% People were tweeting poems. 00:25:14.210 --> 00:25:16.910 align:middle line:84% People of color were saying that her shock and despair 00:25:16.910 --> 00:25:17.930 align:middle line:90% were offensive. 00:25:17.930 --> 00:25:20.640 align:middle line:84% And that they were a mark of her privilege and her whiteness. 00:25:20.640 --> 00:25:22.640 align:middle line:84% And that she had failed to recognize that things 00:25:22.640 --> 00:25:25.160 align:middle line:84% had always been this bad for marginalized people 00:25:25.160 --> 00:25:27.180 align:middle line:90% and for people of color. 00:25:27.180 --> 00:25:29.120 align:middle line:84% People were tweeting facts and maps. 00:25:29.120 --> 00:25:31.790 align:middle line:84% And there was no way to look away from what she had never 00:25:31.790 --> 00:25:32.600 align:middle line:90% imagined. 00:25:32.600 --> 00:25:34.430 align:middle line:84% The majority of white women had not 00:25:34.430 --> 00:25:36.140 align:middle line:84% voted for the first woman president, 00:25:36.140 --> 00:25:37.760 align:middle line:90% for the first mother president. 00:25:37.760 --> 00:25:40.490 align:middle line:84% They had, instead, voted for a racist, misogynist, 00:25:40.490 --> 00:25:43.440 align:middle line:84% anti-intellectual, rapist, lunatic. 00:25:43.440 --> 00:25:46.130 align:middle line:84% She felt a precipitous hatred for white women 00:25:46.130 --> 00:25:47.360 align:middle line:90% of which she was one. 00:25:47.360 --> 00:25:50.240 align:middle line:84% She felt hatred for white people of which she was one. 00:25:50.240 --> 00:25:52.460 align:middle line:84% She felt hatred particularly, but not only, 00:25:52.460 --> 00:25:55.370 align:middle line:84% for white men of which her husband and her beautiful sons. 00:25:55.370 --> 00:25:58.100 align:middle line:84% Oh, how would she ever untangle this hatred of hatred 00:25:58.100 --> 00:26:01.010 align:middle line:90% with anything other than hatred? 00:26:01.010 --> 00:26:02.150 align:middle line:90% It was two days. 00:26:02.150 --> 00:26:03.290 align:middle line:90% It was one day. 00:26:03.290 --> 00:26:04.130 align:middle line:90% It was the day. 00:26:04.130 --> 00:26:04.970 align:middle line:90% It was the next day. 00:26:04.970 --> 00:26:06.020 align:middle line:90% It was no day. 00:26:06.020 --> 00:26:06.770 align:middle line:90% It was night. 00:26:06.770 --> 00:26:07.640 align:middle line:90% It was not night. 00:26:07.640 --> 00:26:09.260 align:middle line:84% It was not the same night the night 00:26:09.260 --> 00:26:11.750 align:middle line:84% that she had nursed the first, the second, the third, 00:26:11.750 --> 00:26:13.850 align:middle line:84% or the night nights that she had lost the baby 00:26:13.850 --> 00:26:15.350 align:middle line:90% between the second and third. 00:26:15.350 --> 00:26:18.080 align:middle line:84% The night nights of bleeding and waiting. 00:26:18.080 --> 00:26:19.883 align:middle line:84% It was not the night or nights that she 00:26:19.883 --> 00:26:21.800 align:middle line:84% had laid in bed with the husband, or the night 00:26:21.800 --> 00:26:24.290 align:middle line:84% nights that she had stayed awake writing or worrying, 00:26:24.290 --> 00:26:26.000 align:middle line:84% or the night the doctors in Taiwan 00:26:26.000 --> 00:26:27.890 align:middle line:84% had turned off the heart lung machine. 00:26:27.890 --> 00:26:29.300 align:middle line:84% And she had listened to the sound 00:26:29.300 --> 00:26:31.550 align:middle line:84% of the sound of the change of the room 00:26:31.550 --> 00:26:33.290 align:middle line:84% without the heart lung machine that 00:26:33.290 --> 00:26:35.180 align:middle line:84% had been forcing the blood and oxygen 00:26:35.180 --> 00:26:37.160 align:middle line:84% into and through her mother's body. 00:26:37.160 --> 00:26:40.560 align:middle line:84% And then the long single sound and no sound. 00:26:40.560 --> 00:26:42.590 align:middle line:84% It was not the night of her mother's death. 00:26:42.590 --> 00:26:45.170 align:middle line:84% It was not the night of her baby's first cries. 00:26:45.170 --> 00:26:47.600 align:middle line:84% It was not the night that she had conceived new life. 00:26:47.600 --> 00:26:48.830 align:middle line:90% But it was that night. 00:26:48.830 --> 00:26:51.020 align:middle line:84% It's that night, all those nights. 00:26:51.020 --> 00:26:53.420 align:middle line:84% For the poetics of motherhood, if there is one, 00:26:53.420 --> 00:26:55.820 align:middle line:84% and she believed there was one, began 00:26:55.820 --> 00:27:00.110 align:middle line:84% before recorded time is larger than our human understanding 00:27:00.110 --> 00:27:01.160 align:middle line:90% of time. 00:27:01.160 --> 00:27:03.380 align:middle line:84% The poetics of motherhood may be the birth 00:27:03.380 --> 00:27:07.100 align:middle line:84% of what we call a theory of mind, intercept activity, 00:27:07.100 --> 00:27:08.330 align:middle line:90% and empathy. 00:27:08.330 --> 00:27:10.580 align:middle line:84% The poetics of motherhood may very well 00:27:10.580 --> 00:27:13.970 align:middle line:84% be what makes us human, not our use of tools, 00:27:13.970 --> 00:27:18.020 align:middle line:84% not our walking on two legs, not the ability to use language. 00:27:18.020 --> 00:27:21.380 align:middle line:84% It is the song of being born, of caring for another 00:27:21.380 --> 00:27:25.310 align:middle line:84% over oneself, of needing help, of a lost goddess, 00:27:25.310 --> 00:27:29.150 align:middle line:84% of the long night of love and pain. 00:27:29.150 --> 00:27:29.960 align:middle line:90% Twelve. 00:27:29.960 --> 00:27:33.230 align:middle line:90% The moon is in her caul tonight. 00:27:33.230 --> 00:27:34.400 align:middle line:90% Thirteen. 00:27:34.400 --> 00:27:36.680 align:middle line:84% Matthew Zapruder asks, what do you 00:27:36.680 --> 00:27:40.590 align:middle line:84% think this will mean for you as a poet going forward? 00:27:40.590 --> 00:27:42.370 align:middle line:90% Thank you.