So now that you threw that curveball at me--
Sorry.
--awesome and totally wild.
And I think it's ecological, but we could talk about that.
But I guess I just cut right to the chase
and ask you, is the pastoral--
is the past-- I want to get the words right.
That the picturesque-- do you hear?
Yeah.
How do I turn it off?
Green light?
No, well there it is.
Do you hear me now?
Yeah.
OK.
So--
There's an outside?
Yes, there is an outside.
Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah.
There's this interesting situation where there's glass--
there's glass and there are people outside of the glass
and there are people inside of the glass.
So for the people outside of the glass,
I was thanking Gail, once again, for putting Juliana
and me together.
And I was saying now that Juliana
threw that curveball at me, which I think
is totally wild and wonderful ecological curveball.
I thought I'd ask you, is the picturesque story
about the small plot of land immoral?
Oh, I don't, yeah--
Is that an indictment of the picturesque story--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[INAUDIBLE] has talked about this--
I have this moment where I tried to inflect it as being a jerk
where I talk about nature poetry.
I talk about how I'm in the bar, and I'm drunk
talking about nature poetry being immoral, as like,
as an idiot.
But also as a--
maybe as a thought experiment at the same time.
I'm interested in what are the moments when
things don't move us to change?
What are the boundaries around that?
And I feel like it's an impossible to answer.
We kept going around and around about the question
and it became like it's impossible to answer.
And I actually think that the--
yesterday we were saying this thing about when
you edit ecopoetics and you're like,
there's a poem that I maybe--
it's not doing the work that I want poetry to do.
And I might put it next to a poem that's
doing a different sort of work to see it
as a conversation in some way.
And I think the problem is when you only get one part of it
and you don't get the whole conversation in some sense.
And so the problem would be if there was.
And maybe there are at moments-- and maybe there
aren't at moments which I think we could probably argue about.
And I'm not even sure what side I would come down
on most of the time.
A dominant tradition of how you write a nature poem,
and that dominant tradition was to do something that--
but the things that I-- the things that--
I'm less interested in nature poetry
when it does things when it becomes epiphanic about humans.
When the human sees the geese fly by
and has that moment where they're like,
and I realized how much I love my lover or whatever it is.
And then that moment that also like
the march of the penguins moment or the bird not the bulldozer
moment or the celebratory of the invasive flower
that came with colonialism that completely
changed the eating habits and starved many people which
happened with the destruction of the bunch grasses
in California.
If you only have that, then I think
that's when that poetry isn't doing the work that poetry
can possibly do.
However, there are moments where I
feel like that work in a spread of poetry
might have a certain--
might build empathy in some way.
Like maybe that poem about the epiphanic poem
might be the moment where someone says like,
oh, I actually have a relationship to something
that I'm going to go out and think about more.
So it's like I'm always interested in asking
the question, but I'm not really interested
in the necessarily in the dogmatic answer.
But I think to not ask the question is
the problem potentially.
If you don't pursue the dialogue then you sell it short.
I was to ask you about to move to dialogue precisely.
And it was a question I had formulated earlier
is one about collaboration.
That you've almost always collaborated.
So is collaboration central for you to getting the both sides
of the picture.
And I mean, is it--
maybe is it problematic in ways and then how has this piece?
I don't know.
It helps me because it's really close
thinking with other humans.
So it's like, I mean, that's what's actually great about it.
And that's what-- I mean, even this piece in which I keep
joking about, I'm always like David Buuck, do your writing,
do your writing.
And it's been-- his resistance to doing it has been actually
really, really productive in a way because a lot of his
resistance has challenged me to rethink a lot of the terms
of a certain--
it's a piece in dialogue in which I'm--
I keep producing something out of his resistance to doing it.
Which has actually been really interesting.
Because a lot of his resistance has been to some of the things
that I tend to do like some of my tics and so
it's been good to have to think about them in some way.
Like he's like, stop listing names of plants.
[LAUGHTER]
Why are you doing that?
I'm like you're right, I got to stop.
And so, I mean, I would say that would
be the collaborative-- the kind of impulse
around collaboration.
So this shift to prose which you keep talking about--
I'm interested in this Bouvard and Pécuchet moment.
Here you've got the dialogue maybe as part of that.
It's like you've got these characters on a bench
and I'm interested--
is that a response to this need to get
out away from the list and another way
to get information into prose.
Maybe, maybe.
Yeah, maybe it is.
I don't know.
I think it's sad--
Is it a more dialogical than the lyric which
is traditionally monological?
Yeah.
Although there's all this, I mean,
there's all these moments when the lyric gets dialogical also.
I don't quite know what it is.
I mean, when I talk about it being annoying
it's because I'm socially a poet and so it
feels like that's where I talk.
Like I talk, I hang out with poets.
And so I'm scared that I don't write with fiction writers
and so there's--
I don't have an expertise in it in some way.
But it feels like it's letting--
I think it might be letting me do some work with ideas that I
can't necessarily get into the poem in the same way.
Right now I don't totally understand it plainly.
Well, that's good I think.
I think it's great.
I'll shift gears a little bit and actually
just go to the question I had prepared which was--
and I asked it to you-- asked you this question yesterday
about geography and it's as close as I'll
get to a biographical question.
When your work-- go from the Midwest
to islands, West and East, and then
I asked you where you find yourself now geographically
speaking and how that's affecting your work
and you said you didn't really know
or that you didn't get a sense of the Bay Area.
And yet here you've written this piece--
It's about the border between Berkeley and Oakland.
I guess what I'm asking is, what is the kind of sequence
between geography and writing?
I mean do you have to live in a place for a long time
to start to write about it or do you only start figuring out
what you're writing about a place when you've left it
or how--
I had to live on it for a while.
And I often-- it's often that I have questions about the place
and the writing about it helps me to understand it.
But I don't-- I don't actually hold that as an ethical
practice.
I don't actually-- I actually think
that people can come in from outside
and write about a place.
And I support all insane speech acts around theory.
I don't like the restrictions.
I actually think you can sometimes learn something
from someone who doesn't live in a place
from writing about it at the same time.
But I mean, the thing about the Bay Area
is it feels like the traditions of the Bay
Area so large I can't quite figure out
how to work through it.
And it's got-- it's got a lot of the same things that felt
so interesting to me about Hawaii,
which was that great natural beauty, ,
combined with military combined with environmental destruction.
But they inflect so differently.
I can't quite figure out how to work through them plainly.
I don't know.
I mean, this piece is obviously an attempt
to try and start to do that.
And then it seems to me like what I've tried--
that's why it's like writing about a median strip.
It's like that kind of--
I'm going to try to start by trying
to understand the median strip and then see if I can
get somewhere else from that.
I mean, is it so fascinating that you have these 200
pages of works that have been self-published but not yet
collected into one volume where they've been there now.
And it's fascinating to see the work that
was done when you were on the island, and then the work
when you leave the island, and then
it achieves this kind of, one could say,
more cooked or finished form and this connection
everyone with lungs, but I guess that's my process wondering
about that.
But you asked me the question about research last night
and I think my answer was probably
lame so I'm just going to throw it back to you.
Which was, how does that work for you the role
of research in writing?
Actually, I almost start entirely
from an idea I'm going to research in some way.
And I mean, a huge amount of language
in both of those pieces was found or stolen or from--
and actually, that question that we
were talking about when you were like, what's
the role of the conceptual in the ecopoetry sphere,
in some way, and that hard to answer question which--
I don't know.
But I mean, that fig tree language
is all from invasive plants of California in some ways.
So it seems like, I mean, I think there's actually
a lot of interesting questions.
There's a woman in the Bay Area who's
doing a really interesting--
I'm answering this sideways--
but who does this really interesting conceptual piece
where she's been reading some of the planet, some of the failed
Kyoto accords in a kind of Kenny G style,
which is actually an interesting moment where the politics come
into that conceptual work in a different way.
Although, she's an artist.
She's not a-- she doesn't identify as a poet, finally.
So the research question.
I do a huge amount of researching
of things, of taking of notes, printing things out.
There's often a box of materials that I end up using or not
using in various ways.
But I can't imagine writing otherwise now.
I almost never--
I've never written from emotion, finally,
I've almost always written from--
starting from like this idea.
Like I want to write something about the alien abductions
and then going in reading all the literature around it
and writing something out of it.
But it's very emotional sometimes.
I mean, I was thinking about that today.
It's very-- can be moving, not emotional.
But it's-- but there's a song to the--
Well, I'm interested in how do you build that question then.
I think, is that question that goes back to that first one.
Which is I'm interested in how do you people use writing
to try and build empathy?
And one of the ways that you do that is through the conventions
because the conventions are--
they've evolved around the inducing
of the emotions in some way.
And I mean, that's what's interesting about the lyric
and the love poem, finally.
Is like there are very old poetic forms that we are--
in our culture where we're schooled
and having reactions to them and/or having them having them
and do so of a heart feeling.
And that's why they're interesting.
"Don't add to the heartache, circle our heart."
Well, I think this could go on for a long time.
But maybe--
Thank you.
Continue it.
Be more informally.
Thank you Juliana.
Yeah.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]