We were asked to have a conversation.
So I was just going to ask Jean a question, which
I know a teeny bit about.
But I think I would like to hear more.
I'm sure you would, which is about Lucy If you don't mind,
and talking a little bit about the making of that sequence.
Thank you.
I was very astonished by Lucy.
Usually, I work like a dog and don't get lunch.
And this time, I saw a picture of her in a magazine,
and I wrote for a day and a half.
And I had nine poems.
I was about a foot off the ground,
and I went to the telephone.
I was staring at my dial calling where the [INAUDIBLE] and I
called up a friend.
And I said, I'm a little worried about myself.
I didn't know if the poems were any good for one thing.
But I never had a time when poems came to me like that,
although I've read about it, of course, but for other people.
So I called this friend because she's had that experience too.
And I said, what do you think?
I don't know if I'm OK or not.
And she said, isn't it funny when something good
happens to us, we, often, always think
we're doing something wrong?
So she said, it sounds like there might be more.
Why don't you go back and write them, and send them to me?
I'd be happy to see them.
So that's what happened.
I went back, and I wrote the rest of them,
which was six more.
So the whole thing happened in two days.
And I mean everything in it is true.
There was a spider--
everything.
And I was telling Catherine that, along with never
having had an experience like that before, I've never
had an experience like this before,
which was that since then, my friend told me,
why don't you send this to Sarabande?
They have a-- Sarabande books, they have a chapbook contest.
And so I did.
I called them up, on random, and I said, I got this thing.
And they said send it, and about a week later they said,
we'd like to publish that.
Nothing like that ever happens to me.
So then that happened.
And since then, I've hardly read it.
I've read it aloud twice now, but I've hardly read it.
Usually, I pour onto my own poetry
to see if it's any better today than it was yesterday.
I wouldn't read this, really.
It's like it's "other" to me.
And so it's a strange miracle.
Thank you for asking.
I'm going to ask you one more question.
Jean was helping me-- can you hear?
She was helping me with some poem, looking at my poems.
And one of them, she didn't like, and she said,
there are not enough holes in it.
It wasn't about-- no no.
And it was exactly right, but I didn't totally understand.
I, also, when she said it, I could, sort of, see,
but I thought would be interesting
if you could talk about the notion of holes
or whatever you meant by that.
Like what you're looking for.
The other thing is, if Jean reads poems,
the highest compliment you can get is, "oh, it's strange."
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah, I love strange.
So that is true.
I have a bias towards a certain kind of poem, which I shouldn't
admit because I'm a teacher.
But I try not to when I'm teaching, but with a friend,
I do say.
And I think by holes, I just meant very strange
for a poem of hers, this poem--
because, you see, her poems are really
poems of absolutely huge, huge, huge.
This particular poem went bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.
It was quite short.
And it was just, it's hard to say.
It didn't have any air in it.
It didn't have any leaps or strangeness there.
It was just like anybody might write.
It wasn't like Catherine writes.
That's what I was getting at.
And so it was exciting to me because you
might write something-- a lot of what I write
is just like what she just described--
but then trying to find, well, where
are the opportunities for the rupture or the interruption
or the being down into the void.
Bei Dao is a poet who we have both been
thinking and talking about.
But he was talking to his students,
and he said, he wants them to write into the void,
like he's writing toward the void.
And that was very moving to me to hear.
And so not having everything stitched up too tightly.
I forgot that he said-- did he say that when
you brought him over?
No, he said it to his students.
Yeah, he said that--
Catherine brought him over to see me when he was in New York.
And he said-- can I make a change of subject
here because we wanted to talk about this.
He said he's teaching in Hong Kong.
What he wants to teach his students most of all
is international culture.
He wants them to read international culture.
He said that's what we can do now,
and I got very excited to hear him talk about that.
I've been, like all of you, doing a little bit of that,
probably, along the way.
But when I started out, it was really
only scholars who for the most part,
were people who had traveled a lot, who knew
the poetry of other countries.
And that began to change.
And Robert Bly was one of the people
who allowed that to change, and different people.
But it's changed so wonderfully now.
And Catherine and I were talking in the plane about how, now,
there's nothing you can't read.
Really nothing because it's all on the internet.
It's wonderful.
It's a miracle, and it's all translated.
So it's a miraculous time to be a poet, I think.
So we wanted to say something about that.
Excuse me for interrupting.
No, that's perfect.
I should ask you something.
[LAUGHTER]
That would be nice.
That would be polite.
How do you shape a book?
How do you decide when a poem or book is finished?
We both made lists of questions.
[LAUGHTER]
That was also my first question to her was,
how do you know when a poem is finished.
So I, usually, know when I have cut off the last 12 lines.
That's when it's finished.
However far up I can cut is when it's finished.
But about a shape of a book, I think,
is something that Jean and I differ on because I labor
a long time trying to figure out as if-- if I could think hard
enough--
I'll be able to figure out, with this collection of poems,
how they could be ordered.
And if the daughter, Frances, will
be happy to hear this, and the daughter of a lawyer.
And it's like, if you think hard enough,
you should be able to figure things out.
And it's a lot, to keep in the air, all those poems.
But I do try to, I think, work mostly in sequence,
and that allows me not to have every poem make sense
by itself.
But then it also means that how they get
ordered matters because they really would just
flop right over by themselves.
So I seem stuck thinking a lot about it.
And the other problem is that, let's say, I
think there's an order.
Then it requires revision of certain poems
to make that order make sense, and then I
decide that's not the right order.
So then it's like you un-revised and you revised back.
And Valéry says, Paul Valéry says, you don't finish,
you just abandon the poem.
So--
[LAUGHTER]
--that may be closer.
But I do think a lot about--
I do try to think about it.
And Jean was, actually, helping me a little bit
today with that.
It just occurred to me, Catherine said earlier.
We've been talking for about 40 hours,
so forgive us if we forget you're here.
[LAUGHTER]
We don't, really.
But one of the things that she said
is that she hasn't sent many poems out to magazines.
And I didn't think, until this moment, that, of course,
if you're doing sequences-- and not
every poem stands on its own because I've
done some like that too.
Not nearly as much-- but then you
don't send them out because they're
foolish unless they have the whole sequence around them.
So that just explained to me part of that.
I was also thinking, something else
you might not know about Jean is that she recently edited--
what do you call an issue?
I was going to say a draft, a version,
an issue of Ploughshares.
And I thought you might talk a little bit
because it was very interesting to hear you talk about it.
You actually asked for poems from people
who just had one book or--
Is that right?
And then--
One book or none.
And you want to talk a little bit about what that was like.
Yeah, they get guest editors, either fiction writers
or nonfiction or poets to do their issues.
And so, I thought I would like to have, as Catherine said,
just people who are, one way or another, starting out,
who might have one book, that might have nothing.
And so I asked the people I knew if they would send me
those people that they knew who were in that stage of things.
If they would send me poems.
But they had to be people I didn't know
and people I never touched because I
couldn't get into that.
That would be terrible to choose one person over another.
And also, I wanted to be seeing new poems, which
is what happened.
And so I just gave myself the month of May,
and all these boxes came to my house.
It was very exciting.
And so I just went through the boxes.
And the only problem was that I got a little lonely because it
was just me and the boxes.
So I invited friends like Catherine and other poet
friends to come in and help me.
And that was wonderful.
The best thing about it was it gave me
such a huge sense of hope.
I hope you look out for this issue.
They say it's going to come in December,
but I think it'll be more like March, probably,
because they're behind.
But I felt such a huge sense of hope
because there are all these wonderful poets
all over the country just writing their poems.
And many, many, many of them, I never had known their work.
And so many wonderful poems.
So it made me feel better about our country.
You know what I'm saying?
[LAUGHTER]
But it really did.
I feel very, very excited and happy.
I don't know where Gail-- oh, there she is.
Should we--
You can ask a question or two, three--
Yeah.
I think, if you guys have questions,
you're welcome to ask.
So Jean, there was a line in one of your--
towards the end of your Lucy sequence.
It was, "when writing came back to me, I prayed."
I was wondering if you could talk about that.
Sure.
--right around that area.
Sure, yeah.
I had five years, when I was--
I don't know, 50 or something-- when I didn't write at all.
I just stopped writing completely.
And I didn't know if I'd ever write again.
Writer friends said that must have been terrible,
but it wasn't so terrible.
Because what I found was it was terrible in some ways
because I wasn't doing what I usually do.
But I found out that I was still there, and that was wonderful.
I wasn't going with any man.
I wasn't writing poetry.
I wasn't doing this.
I wasn't doing that, but I was still there.
So I didn't have my usual identities.
So that was very good.
But then, I was driving the car, and a poem came to me.
And, literally, I couldn't stop.
I couldn't get off the road.
I was so afraid I'd lose it that I took out my lipstick
and wrote it on the--
what do you call it?
The dash?
What do you call it-- the windshield.
[LAUGHTER]
So that literally happened.
(FAINTLY) It was a frosty night, though.
Excuse me?
It was a frosty night?
No it wasn't, but it would be nice to say
it was a frosty night.
It was, so let's make it that.
[LAUGHTER]
--and dark.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm going to ask Catherine who her favorite writers are.
I didn't tell you about that question.
You know who they are, but--
I know, but I want to ask you to tell them.
We share a love for a poet, Kathleen Peirce, and Paul Celan
and Hopkins and Bishop and a young up-- well,
she's a contemporary mind.
So she's not young, but she's a contemporary mind--
Miranda Field, I think, is a terrific poet.
So those are some of them I always carry around.
I carry Jean around a lot with me,
and then I carry around Dickinson's letters.
I find them just an enormous, not even an inspiration.
It's like a drive towards something.
She says she's afraid, so she sings in the orchard.
Is that how it goes?
Like something is in this fearless singing against death
that she does that I find very hopeful.
And Frances asked me at dinner about,
she was asking me about my poems.
And then she said, well, who have you been reading?
Because I said they were filled with dread, which is usually
what they're filled with.
And so we started talking about Beckett
who is absolutely one of my favorite writers.
And she asked, was that making me feel dread?
But I actually feel very accompanied
by these dark, dread-filled, luminous voices.
They fill them as company, so that's what I'm drawn to.
There's so much I was saying also.
There's so much I miss in the world,
like you could spend a long time on a poem still
not even begin to have it.
But, meanwhile, there's all these other amazing things
being written.
So I haven't been reading very much fiction
because I have a child.
And I realized, when he was young,
I kept getting interrupted.
And it was horrible because I wanted to read,
but he's interrupting me.
So I just decided poems, you can read them
and be interrupted more easily.
So, I think-- he's 12.
[LAUGHTER]
So in another--
(CHUCKLING) 12.
--another few years--
Another 12.
[LAUGHTER]
--in that case, I can go back to fiction.
You think that's any reason why you write poetry as well?
You mean--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
--interruption.
Well it's interesting that--
I don't think you know this one.
I told someone in workshop--
I think, yesterday, or someone-- when I was pregnant,
the night before he was born, I was still
thinking about would I go back to school in social work,
because I would like to work in psychology,
or should I keep writing?
I was already a prose writer.
I was a journalist and an editor for years.
And then I realized, as soon as he was born,
that I would not survive the loss that is just part of--
I mean, if you're lucky, it's a natural loss
where the child just grows up.
And at that point, that's what I was thinking of.
I wouldn't even survive that if I weren't writing.
Then there's other kinds of more devastating, real losses
that I had no idea about.
And I think I didn't write poetry until he was born,
and I think there was something about the lyric, time,
of that experience that poetry made more sense for me.
And I loved language, and I never could make a story that--
I never cared like, why did a character do that?
Or how do they get them from one room to the other.
I know.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah.
I tried to write a novel once, and I got about 70 pages,
but nothing happened.
[LAUGHTER]
Absolutely nothing.
So I thought, I better write poetry.
We should probably let you all go, don't you think?
OK, thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]