Images, coming in these images, they're just so right on.
And how do you do it?
[LAUGHTER]
How do you do it?
Share your magic.
It's great.
Yeah, yeah.
Fuck.
Yeah, I like it.
Hi, Jackie.
[LAUGHTER]
Jackie picked me up from the airport
and we had this really cool conversation.
How do I do it?
I don't know, I honestly have no idea.
We talked about this a little bit today,
and I said I just kind of try to be like an insect
and have antenna open at all time, and just be a sponge
and absorb what I hear.
And also, just be wary of my own confidences about my own work,
and be the worst critic of my own work and stuff
and constantly give myself guff about everything.
Yeah.
But we talked about a little bit about film too.
I think we both write--
I don't want to speak on your behalf,
but I think we maybe both write in a way
that we isolate stills that we find sort
of evocative of something and then sort of maybe
build around that.
That's the best answer I got for that.
Yeah.
What's that's that Chekhov quote that I'm going to butcher
that's about don't tell me "war,"
show me the light glinting on the broken glass or something.
[INAUDIBLE]
Thank you.
That's it.
Do you--
Show me how reflects a small glint of glass on the beach.
I liked that the moon became war in my memory.
[LAUGHTER]
But exactly, right?
So trying to-- like in my head, I'm
always trying to find the smallest thing.
That's what I'm obsessed with.
The actual literally physically smallest object in a scene,
and I do visualize scenes a lot.
I think that's the filmic thing.
But I also think that it's not so much about the images
that you pick but the attention that one brings to the images,
and the kind of gaze that's behind whatever it
is that you're writing about.
And so I think a lot, I think often
about a story I heard about Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist
monk who was holding a session with people
and he had everyone turn around to the person next to them
and hug and meet each other and say hello.
And then they turn back around and then
he said, OK, now do it again but knowing
you both will die, right?
And so what happens?
It's the same action, right, but the quality of attention
is kind of different.
And I find that tuning in with that quality of attention
helps those images come.
Yeah.
I had a question that I'll ask as I'm making my way to Sam.
This is kind of a process question for you, Solmaz.
If you think about how much textual matter you're
working with, and some of it, I mean,
you spoke a little bit about reading the New York Times
article and the way that became the imaginative research
possibility for you.
But is there a kind of physical aspect
of that also like are you carrying around any of this?
Do you take it around with you on your day, are you
living with it?
How do you, how do you do that?
With a lot of bags.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah, I do.
I mean, not anymore.
I haven't touched this--
It was, I don't like saying it but it was really
taxing to deal with that material for as long as I did.
And so I haven't touched it in about a year.
The last poem I wrote that dealt with any kind of material
like that was the Senate report on torture
that came out in 2014, at the end of 2014.
But no, I also need to have the thing itself.
I can't look at screens so I have to print things out
and actually lay them out and weigh them down with stones,
and just keep visually like changing my relationship
to them and enact all my- the visual artist envy,
and try to find more tactile ways of being a poet.
Yeah.
I love what you said about scenes of the small object.
But I also heard, and I'd love both of you
to talk about the long poem.
Because I hear all these long forms in what you're doing,
and I love that.
Do people talk about that?
For me as a writer and editor and a publisher,
it's the thing I'm sort of most interested
in is poets writing long poems.
I love short poems too but I'm always up for a long poem.
And I want to qualify what I mean by that.
I don't-- like the Iliad is a long poem but that's like
a book, you know what I mean?
I mean a poem that's maybe 30 pages long or something or 50
or whatever.
Something that you really have to invest time in
and doesn't have that instant gratification that poetry
sometimes is associated with.
And for me, what I love about long poems is
the way the turns inside them, like
how a long poem sustains itself or the endurance
within a long poem and the shifts that happen.
One of my favorite long poem writers is Frank Bidart,
and he just has these incredible tonal shifts
that occur within the sections in his long poems.
Alice Notley also comes to mind.
She almost has eight voices in the room at all times,
so it's almost--
it's easier for her to sustain a column that
goes on for pages and pages.
But yeah, as someone who tries to write long
poems and writes long poems that publishers often
won't publish because they're longer than a page
or whatever, I pay specific attention to where
the poem needs its energy to come from,
and how it needs to stay floating and sort of in the air
and things like that.
I hope I'm doing that work, but I'm conscious of it
all the time.
And I want there to be space for the voices
to break from their own form and sort of, I
want it to be sort of chaos sustained chaos
for a long time.
There's that the Kizer quote about a poem
is not the bringing together of things
so much is not allowing things to be torn apart.
And that's how I feel.
So shorter poems feel a little cruel to me often,
because I want-- there's so many other things I kind of want
to let in.
So, I'm not sure I'm answering the question anymore,
but that's--
What's that?
That's all I want to hear you talk about.
OK, great.
Yeah, yeah.
It's like, where is it?
This is a question for Solmaz.
I believe it was in--
Oh.
I believe it was in "Drone," the line that began "una a ana."
I understand that was a reference to another poet that
I wasn't--
I think in our class we were a little confused by it.
Would you mind elaborating on the intention
behind that reference?
Yeah.
It's a poem by Leonel Rugama who was a Sandinista poet who
was killed when he was 20 by some of his forces.
And he wrote two poems that are both
called Epitaphio or epitaph.
One of them apparently he wrote--
he died in a shootout.
And one of them he wrote within, like in the middle
of the shootout, like right before he was killed.
This is not that one.
But I've always-- I am an admirer of his work
and his self and his spirit, and there
are a number of similar like revolutionary figures that
appear in that poem.
And since I was writing epitaphs,
it was again, another one of those moments
of like, how do I not allow this actually to be torn apart,
right?
Don't these things somehow belong next to each other?
Shouldn't they be speaking with each other?
And shouldn't his words remain alive for us
too, and what can I do as a poet to make sure
that happens in my way?
Yeah, thank you.
All right.
We'll do this one last question.
I saw a hand on this side I want that left,
the north side of the room.
Thanks so much for sharing your words.
This was my first exposure to both of you's work
and I found it really moving.
So thank you.
I found your poems in both cases to be violent and disruptive.
You're talking about torture and you're
throwing a brick through the window of the White House.
And I couldn't help but feel there
was a dissonance between that and between the formal setting
in which you're presenting it.
We're sitting here quietly and we're listening for 20 minutes,
and then we're clapping.
And I wonder, I wonder if you're satisfied
with that if you feel like there's
another venue in which you feel like your work could be
more in line with the content.
Or if that dissonance you're happy with it?
I'd be curious to hear reflect on that.
That's a great question.
Do you want to answer it?
I'll try to answer it.
Yeah.
I mean, if you want to trash this place right now.
OK, I didn't, Hannah, I didn't advise that.
Yeah, no.
I mean, that's a great question.
And I think that for me specifically, I
think that's part of what I'm sort of railing against
is our sort of norms within poetry culture and publishing
culture and polite culture and proprietary culture.
It's weird to do it within that setting
and be wearing a button up shirt and you know
and all this stuff.
And I often say I think it's great to be inside to critique
your way outward and stuff like that.
And I think if there's anything I
want my poems to do it's to raise that exact question
and get that question in people's heads,
and sort of get the energy in the room
to a spot where people are like, well, why are we just sitting
here in chairs?
And yeah, that's-- I mean, I'm so glad you asked that
because that's exactly what I want.
I feel that way constantly.
Just like, what am I doing here?
Why do I write poems?
Why don't I play music or something like that?
And being able to write poems and work with language
in a way that gets people a little prickly and a little
salty, I think is like what that's my M.O., kind of.
And yeah.
So I would never encourage you to throw a chair at me
while I'm reading.
But if you did it, I would be so proud of you.
If someone George Bushed me while I was reading
and hit me with a shoe in the face or something,
I would be like, I've made it as a poet
or I've done my work or something.
So, Yeah.
Yeah, let's hang out after.
Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah.
I too find that moment really thrilling, of questioning well,
what does it mean to just be a passive participant
at this moment, and what does it mean to just hear stories.
And how am I, how often in my life
am I doing that also, not just within this room.
And for me it's just always been important to make
sure that the conversation includes the narratives that
maybe don't belong in the room as neatly as well.
But what happens with it from there
and what you do with it when you leave
remains a question for me that I'm still wrestling with.
Yeah.
Oh.
Thank you.
Thank you audience.
Thank you both [INAUDIBLE].
[APPLAUSE]