Hannah.
[INAUDIBLE]
Thank you both so much.
You both read from or talked about writing long sequences.
And we just wondered if you could each talk about maybe
one or all of the sequences.
How do you go about writing them?
For you, what's the process of sustaining a long form?
[LAUGHTER]
No, tell us.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, I'm very much--
Real quick, do you mind talking into the microphone?
Thank you.
That feels very formal.
I'm very much a one-page poet, so it's very, very recent
that I've even started attempting
to go beyond one page.
And basically, what had happened was someone told me,
what if I did let the Word document be
the end of the poem?
And it seems to just be a very good unit
to work in, the Word document.
And so I've been trying to kind of push against that
and ignore the Word document's page limitations
and actually write in longhand on paper, which
I'm not very accustomed to.
So I don't know-- very practical,
but maybe don't use a Word document.
[LAUGHING]
Yeah, I had made the semi-joke earlier in the evening
that I don't have time to write a poem that's not very short.
I write poems on my lunch break or whatever.
So in one sense, that's not entirely true.
But it's also entirely true.
But also, I don't know it's just a different reference.
I like the long, elegiac poem.
That's very nice.
But there's something about the short series that is--
I don't know.
It feels so like a chamber, chamber music or something.
It feels very tight, intimate.
And sometimes, I want that reference.
Not always-- sometimes, you want the public oration.
But by and large I don't like that, so I don't do that.
Yeah I guess that's--
I don't know.
So I'm interested in just the self-discovery about the inner
music that--
I mean, only heard the last poet.
But it just seemed like there was
this music in the just kind of slowness to it.
And it just is very different in my view than American culture.
And so I'm just wondering about the nurturing of that energy
in a day-by-day kind of experience and if it needed
to be, or if it's always been there or--
does that make sense?
Yeah.
I often get this feeling.
Sometimes, it's on-- no one here, of course, no one here.
It's always another.
Sometimes, you get the feeling that someone's
talking because they like to hear themselves talk.
And sometimes, I get that feeling too with writing.
Someone's writing because they like their words,
and they like words.
And there's nothing wrong with that I
don't mean to disparage it.
Words are beautiful.
That's cool.
But I also find words are very difficult. They're very hard.
And finding the right ones is very difficult.
I'm probably choosing all the wrong words now.
And that's what's so great about a poem,
in part, is that I can spend years going back and fixing.
It's like, no, no, no, that's not what I meant.
And I guess in some ways I can't speak
too much to the particular views of American culture, I guess.
But I think it's tied in with that perhaps,
of the difference between being distrustful
of this thing that you are given whether that's
your language, your body, your land, or what have you
and the pace at which one takes it
because if you assume that you're entitled to it, then
I guess rapid consumption for the pleasure of the consuming.
But I don't know.
That's my impulse to say that.
It's something.
I like these guys.
Not to be a riddle or anything, but if each of you
could say something about where your voice is rooted
and where you started to feel and really understand
your own voice.
So the question was understanding of our own voice.
Is that right?
Where was it rooted?
Where do you feel it started?
OK, well, I mean, I'm a fairly new poet.
And I would say-- and it's only very recently
that I really started thinking really
deliberately about the voice of the speaker
and what that might mean.
And so I think that--
yeah, I think that a lot of the times it's very intuitive,
and that works for a lot of people.
But I've had to really think about really carefully
and deliberately separate me, Noah,
from the speakers in my poem.
And so I do a lot of right now persona poems,
where I have to very, very carefully
think, OK, what is the type of diction?
What is the type of syntax?
What kind of vocabulary would be available to this person that
maybe isn't in my vocabulary?
And oftentimes, the poems that I'm writing right now
require a lot of research.
And the research ends up leading me to the voice.
So right now I don't think-- and that's not always true.
But right now it's not that it comes from me necessarily,
but that I absorb the research and the reading
and then it intermingles with whatever voice might be me.
And then that kind of makes it happen.
Does that make any sense?
Maybe not.
[LAUGHING]
Yeah, my first response was to say my lungs,
but I don't know if that's very good or not.
Yeah, I think like with all three of the things
I read from, there are certainly things that
are consistent across them.
But there's also the differences.
And I think for me, the voice for each particular project
emerged out of, as the project came together, what I found
the limits allowed me to do.
It's like-- I don't know--
minimalist music or something.
You remove so much, so then you can pay attention much more
to a smaller subset of things.
And I feel like all of this creation is sort of like that.
There are these very formal rules or not very formal rules
or whatever kind of things get imposed on it.
I mean, at the very least you're writing in English,
you're writing now, you're writing for a book,
and whatever, but then more and more particular.
And within that, you find oh, these things suddenly
seem very surprising in this poem that maybe in another poem
would not seem very surprising.
And that gives me a lot of pleasure,
so then I pursue that and try and figure out
how to work that in more.
And I think that's where I find a particular voice
for each project.
And then whatever is consistent across that
is the limitations that are this fleshy thing
and what I find broader, I guess.
It's good thinking about more like your voice
as it appears in almost every thing
because I can see what we have in both of you.
And probably do you think that your voice is in flux still?
Do you feel that you're really playing
with a whole lot of different voices
and that you're able just to whip them out?
Yeah, I think we all are.
That's kind of a cop out, I know.
But I go into a job interview.
I talk and act a certain way.
I sit down with friends.
I talk and act a certain way.
And I sit down with other friends,
and I definitely talk and act another way.
And I talked to my mom a certain way.
I might stop hanging out with my mom.
And I call a friend, and I'm like, ugh, my--
and whatever.
And there's all these different aspects.
That wasn't me flipping off my mom.
I love my mother.
But I would never do that in her presence is the point.
[LAUGHING]
But you know what I mean?
There are all these different constrictions
that I'm operating within.
And it's not like they're constricting
on the true me or something.
At times maybe I want to say something that I can say.
But also, I find the pleasure within those conversations.
I find the jokes that are funny when I'm with my mom,
and I laugh because I enjoy these mom jokes.
And then when I'm with my dad, I enjoy his dad jokes.
So I think that also applies to the work as much
as it applies to my life.
And the limitations of each project
are going to be much more specific than my whole life.
But they also apply to my life, my identity, my location,
my language.
Thank you.
Thank you both so much.
Maybe another round of applause for Jos and Noah.
[APPLAUSE]