So I got a lot of gender imagery connected
with water and bodies of water.
And I'm getting a lot of, like, fluidity with that.
But I was wondering if you could expand upon that a little bit
more--
about why you connected gender to water, and water to memory.
I just finished this poem.
[LAUGHTER]
This is the kind of question I could answer, like,
three months from now when I've had time
to think about-- well, I mean, as you noticed
from all of the poems I read, water is central to this book.
The first poem in the book is actually about two oil spills--
one that I witnessed in the San Francisco Bay, the Cosco Busan
oil spill in 2007, and then the Deep Water Horizon spill.
Because I'm from Alabama, and so it
affected a lot of people that I know, and relatives.
So the book starts in a place of kind of water in a crisis,
and then I think I've stayed with that.
I mean, we don't exist without water, period.
I mean, that, to me, is so crucial.
And many industries also don't exist without water, either.
And life doesn't exist without water, I mean, period.
So it's the thing that fills all of it--
all of us.
And also, I think on, like, some other elements that
also fill many things, it's also the thing
that spills over between us pretty readily
and can travel from body to body,
and industry to body, and back again in these ways
that again follow capital, but also follow
the logic of watersheds.
And I feel like it's this sort of combination
of how capital takes advantage, sometimes, of the systems that
were already.
And pollutions or toxins sort of hook into that, but also hook
into our bodies because of our connection to both industry.
Like, we're a node in between, sort of,
a watershed system and industrial systems--
especially where I live, which is like a huge sort
of industrial corridor.
And I also think for me I guess I'm
thinking through this idea of engendering,
or generativity, and sort of, like,
what it means to flourish and engender life, and generate
life, which again is impossible without water.
And for most life it's not even possible without fucking.
And so there's that, too.
I mean, obviously the poem started with that line--
today's gender is rain.
Do I know what that means?
Absolutely not, except that I love that line,
and I love that idea, and it guided the poem.
Like, the idea of water being a gender.
And I think to me, I tried ultimately,
and in maybe an overly intellectually way,
to connect it to the in which I do think all of us
have developed genders and relationship
to the anthropocene.
That it's impossible, given how medicalized,
let's say, women's reproductive health is, and how, let's say,
the rise of plastics and the rise of pharmaceuticals
is then tied to the great acceleration, right?
Like, post-war great acceleration,
which is when the birth control pill was developed.
So one of the things I'm super interested in
is the rise of sort of, like, gay rights,
women's lib in the wake of the great acceleration
of the great war.
That's not something I wanted to rhetoricize in that poem,
but I think it's impossible to think through,
let's say, for me, like being a gay man without thinking
about anti-retrovirals and many gay men's dependence
on the pharmaceutical industry for a healthy body,
a healthy sex life, et cetera.
And the way that that's very typical of the anthropocene,
actually.
That, to me, is an anthropocenic gender in the same way
that someone who does idea, or does-- and this is no judgment.
This is, like, how our genders work, you know?
You take birth control, and you do
things to exercise choice, which is one
of the great things we have.
You know, I'm grateful for my boyfriend who
can take anti-retrovirals and be alive, you know?
But at the same time, we're dependent on these systems that
are brutally capital, and also do a lot of sort
of environmental harm.
So I'm interested in that relation,
and that sexuality is one of those places-- like water--
where these things sort of meet and articulate the anthropocene
in a really visible way.
Does that make sense?
Just to answer?
Yeah.
I don't think you need six months.
I think you got it now.
Thanks for asking that, because maybe now I feel like, oh yeah,
I know.
I can finish this book.
I'm great.
But yeah, no.
OK, but thank you.
Yeah.
I'm glad that was helpful.
So I've also lived in a number of states and biomes,
and something I've run into on a personal spot
is I remember plants and the soil types
in places they don't exist.
I remember going up to the top of the hill and finding clay.
No, it wasn't there, because the Ozarks don't
have clay-- not where I was.
How did that factor into your writing
on this, living in so many different places?
You know, the thing that helps is that I write on foot.
And so that when I'm writing the details,
or even if I don't know what that is, like,
I'll smear soil into the notebook.
Or I'll do things that, like--
I try not to pull up plants because that's mean,
especially because you don't know whether it's rare or not.
So I try to identify plants with guidebooks and things.
But yeah, it helps with drafting on foot.
Is that, you know, those details are there.
Or they're places I can return.
So I'm like, what was that thing?
What was that tree?
Like, I try not to just say, tree, you know?
Like, I try to be--
even though they're empirical names that that organism does
not give two shits about.
It's not going to be like, I'm a maple.
I still try to understand through the technical tools
we have.
Like, what is that being?
How does it reproduce?
How does it function?
What is its role in this biome, or ecotone, or wherever I am.
So yeah, writing on foot is what helps,
and keeping the notebook with me,
and being able to record the data while it happens.
And you'll notice they're very-- like,
these poems are very present.
There's no past.
There's not a lot of past tense in them.
And so I'm also trying to keep it in present relation,
because I associate that sort of past tense, dreamy, imaginative
space with a kind of beautiful romanticism
that I'm maybe trying to encounter in myself--
you know, my own tendency toward beauty and idealization,
and sort of trying to keep things there.
Does that makes sense?
Yes.
Hi, Brian.
Hi.
I'm glad to be here.
Hi, thank you for the reading.
This is kind of a follow-up to that question.
You started to sort of answer my question
as I got the microphone.
But I am interested in this process
of walking poems, or writing on foot.
So is there-- like, do you have a procedure to it?
Do you follow one particular route thinking of that
as being a poem, or is it much more free-form than that?
If you could just speak a little bit.
That's great.
It really depends on the space, on the site itself.
So in Companion Grasses, like, a lot of those poems
are places that I could return to again and again.
Though Tall Flatsedge Notebook, which your class read, like,
that was one hike, period.
And so I wrote in one draft.
But largely how it goes is that the draft is more skeletal.
Like, I don't know everything about a site while I'm there,
you know?
So that if I can't go back and try and do
research that explains what some of my notes say, I'm like,
what was that thing?
And then, I'm like, oh, because California still
fetishizes itself.
You go to some dinky place, and they're like,
here's the 400-page, color-plated, beautiful thing.
And there are like, 10 species that live there.
So you can totally find whatever it
was that you saw, because it's so well documented.
Whereas in Pennsylvania, they're like, it's a fox,
or it's a hound.
Like, don't get excited.
So I was able to retro-fill some species
identification that way.
But a lot of places I was able to visit multiple times,
or hike in many--
so the penultimate poem in that book,
the really long one, "To Begin With Desire," that is like,
it pretends like it's one hike but it's actually,
like, 10, all kind of palimpsested
on top of each other.
So it really depends on my access to it,
whether I feel like the walk was complete--
the poem walk was complete.
Often, it isn't.
So often there are sort of, like, several
walks inside of one, though sometimes it's just one.
And it felt like whenever that--
it's like an open parentheses, and then it closes.
And sometimes that parentheses remains open for reasons
I don't understand and I have to go back.
But other times it's very--
you know, I hear the-- what does Jorie Graham say?
The click of beauty.
You know, beauty clicks shut, and they hear it enough.
And then I sometimes try to not do that.
But obviously, I like closure in some ways.
But yeah, no sort of set.
It's kind of like, I mean, I have general procedure,
But it's super variable.
Hi.
Thanks for the reading.
I was wondering, you were saying you were sick for so long.
What was your biggest takeaway from that?
What did you learn the most?
I mean, I'm sure a lot.
There's more poems written on that.
But, I mean, being sick for so long must
have been so life-changing.
I can't even comprehend that.
Well, there's a book over there that I
wrote that's, like, 100 pages.
That would be the takeaway.
But actually, no.
That's a good--
I mean, I could probably have a bullet pointed list.
But I think the sense is really that things
that disability activists and Buddhists know
is that health is temporary.
You know, we're all temporarily able-bodied.
And we're lucky to be able-bodied for as long
as we are, but that all of us are only on borrowed time,
both in terms of mortality, but also in terms of health.
And I don't say it in one of the poems,
but the doctors appointment I had where they're like,
you still have some cartilage left.
You know, like, it is true that I
won't be able to walk at some point,
or that I will need a wheelchair.
And I didn't want that to be the poem, because again,
that's my own personal drama that I felt like would--
like, the bats are dying.
I just will not be comfortable, and then I'll die.
But so to me I think it has to do with that sense of kind
of coming both to a sense of impermanence in a very
real sense, but also I think this
is the key of kind of not taking it personally.
It's one of the things I really admire
about Robinson Jeffers, especially the later work,
is this sort of--
I mean, he sees it as a kind of impersonal, slightly
cruel process.
But he's super Judeo-Christian.
And I see him from a less Judeo-Christian point of view,
is that like, aging and mortality
and the body's infirmities--
they actually really aren't personal.
We experience them as personal.
But it's a process everything goes through.
So again, one of the things that we share with other creatures.
And that's where our deepest creaturliness is,
is in our vulnerability that way, physically.
So that's, I think, my biggest takeaway is
like, I have to enjoy the connection with my body
and the connections I can experience with the world
through my body, and the knowledge I can
gain through that, while I can.
Does that make sense?
So I feel like that pressure is in these poems,
even if I'm not narrativizing it through,
necessarily, that lens.
I feel like it's what I return to this work
with an intensified sense of a commitment to recording
the somatic life, and what that enabled--
the connections, and again, the intercorporeality
that that allows us to have.
And again, I think it's an overlooked knowledge
that empiricism does not value what comes in through those.
And again, we find that a highly gendered position.
And so I'm trying undo that in my own way.
But I think that's what illness- I think I was already
think about those things, but I think it made it
a higher priority maybe.
Does that answer your question?
Absolutely.
That's probably about as good a place as any to pause it.
And thank you so much for writing us a poem
and for being here.
[APPLAUSE]
And thank you all for coming.
And there are books for sale, and Brian.