So I was really struck by your engagement with history,
and not only that, your commitment to fact, the parrot.
We talk about poetic license.
Obviously, you have a pretty strict one.
So I was wondering about a lot of things that were in my head.
One was did this come as a part of excavating
your own personal ancestry?
In that with Beethoven, or that has no relationship at all?
Just how did that happen?
How did it happen?
Well [AUDIO OUT].
Everything, I think almost everything
that these characters in my poems think,
is of course, poetic license.
How do we know what someone is really thinking?
We can perhaps hazard a guess.
But how do we know?
But the facts surrounding it, I guess
I am pretty strict about that.
I think that if someone is reading a poem,
and they know that irises don't grow at a certain altitude,
and I've stuck irises in there, I've lost that reader.
That's it.
They're not going to go there, because they're not
going to believe me.
There are enough moments in life that
are a mystery to all of us, even as we're
walking through the world, to explore as a poet,
that the facts can certainly stay there,
as far as I'm concerned.
Now when I was growing up, I was very hyper aware of the fact
that the world that I saw, and the way that I view the world,
was radically different from the mainstream.
The history that they were talking about
was not the history that I was seeing being made around me.
And so that, I think, also made me very,
very, I don't know, fascinated by the idea of excavating
all of those lost moments, those moments which don't make it
into the history book.
I don't try to second guess why something intrigues me,
because I figure it will tell me soon enough,
I'll figure it out.
And in the case of Sonata Mulattica,
in the case of the musician, I was just haunted.
I couldn't let him go.
I grew up playing the cello, and so I knew classical music.
And I speak German, and so it seems like a great fit.
But he was a male in a male-oriented society,
and that was the hardest part, trying
to be a male in that time.
And there were times when I would kind of stomp out
of my study, and go to Fred, and say, you guys are just, ooh.
You know?
And then I'd walk back in and write the seduction scene
that I had to write.
But that feeling of entitlement, the comfort in one's body,
was something that I got from inhabiting those characters.
And it sounds mysterious, and to me, it is mysterious.
I do not know what happens if I slip into someone's character.
I don't know.
I'm not going to question it.
Do not mess with the muse.
If she wants you to do it, you do it.
I'm wondering what if any social or personal responsibility
you think a poet has?
OK.
The question is what [MUTED] responsibility
does a poet have?
Well, the first responsibility the poet has is to their craft,
and that is you write the best damn poem you can,
because otherwise that poem is not going
to do anything for anyone.
Having said that, I think if you open your eyes
and you live in the world, you have a social responsibility.
And I cannot understand an artist who does not feel
the pressure of some social responsibility.
Now, whether that appears in the work or not
is another question, because one can be a good citizen,
and the work may not be about the thing
that you're going to canvas.
The main thing is to be aware and alive in the world.
I find that if I just walk down any street I cannot ignore what
I see.
And I need to speak about it.
But that's the way I go.
That's the way I roll.
OK?
Yeah.
Oh, right here.
Right here.
Hi.
So as I from this question, I realize something you just
said that made you say that you don't know, or you don't care.
But I was curious in how often I heard
birds mentioned in your poetry, if the metaphor means something
to you intentionally, or if it's one of those things
that you were saying you don't question the magic [INAUDIBLE]??
Really good question about whether birds mean something
to me or not, because I--
well, obviously, my name is Dove.
And you know, when you're a child, you sit there.
I remember, like I was just studying my name,
and trying to be whoever these words were.
And I think that did make an impression on me,
that I was aware of birds.
And so, and then I do try to put a dove in every book,
just for the heck of it.
Sometimes it's a dove.
You know, someone dove into something.
But it's a-- now you can look for it.
I'm always going to do it.
But when I was working on the Collected Poems,
and putting it together, and particularly doing all the copy
editing, where you have to--
that, there were several things where I thought, whoa,
I didn't realize that that appeared all the time.
There were several things that appeared.
There are a lot of birds.
I did not know that there were that many birds.
Thank you.
Do you have a particular work or series
of work that you still have not finished and [INAUDIBLE]??
Oh, good one, Bill.
Do I have a work or series of works
that I've been working on for a long time
that I have not yet finished?
Yes.
In fact, a couple of them.
You can't say you've given up on them.
But at least three chunks that have not been finished.
And one of them I don't think will ever be finished.
I don't know.
I don't think so.
And sometimes you grow out of something.
You know?
That's the weird thing.
And I think I kind of grew out of one of them.
And another one that it's just too ephemeral.
I just can't-- though they are poems.
I tend to work on many things at once,
and I tend to work in fragments, so that there
are many drafts of, like, one stanza in it,
in the middle of the page, and I don't know where the rest of it
is yet.
So much is floating that it's hard to tell.
But there are serious chunks which
could have been put together in a book,
and they may never make it.
Archipelagos.
Yeah.
That's OK.
Great.
Thank you so much.
Another round of applause.
Thank you.
Thank you all.