She said in the poem about abortion,
why did I say at the end, "dear thing, dear thing"?
For two reasons.
Because I wanted to express an affection for what
had happened to her.
And I actually consciously used the phrase "thing"
to make clear that for people who are anti-abortion,
women are basically things.
And so I wanted it to be a pun in a sense
saying, "dear thing," which is an expression of endearment.
And I use that way of saying it to catch because the whole poem
is about that, of course.
I think that when a man reaches a certain age--
[LAUGHTER]
--his acuity, his sensitivity to music rises.
I think that his desire to move beyond what he's already
accomplished is keen.
And so he's reaching through music to heights
that he couldn't have imagined when he was a younger person.
[APPLAUSE]
[LAUGHS]
Thank you.
You're welcome.
We've got one more.
This is for either or both of you.
When you put together a collection of poetry,
how do the poems come together?
Do you choose a title poem and then build the collection
around that?
Do all the poems come from the same era of your writing?
You can answer that one too.
I'll just tell you that many poets use different techniques.
Some people write in sequence and they
know that their writing, particularly, a narrative,
and that the poems have to fit into a sequence.
I've never done that.
There are other poets who are absolutely compulsive,
like Norman Dubie.
I used to have an office near his
and he'd slip a poem under the door.
And it would say on top, this will
be the second poem in the third section of my new book.
He absolutely knew where things went.
My mind doesn't work that way, either.
With the new book that I've just put together
that will be coming out next year that's
called Gnawed Bones, it deals a lot
with mortality, many kinds of mortality.
And there's a section that just deals with things
that get away from us.
A section that deals literally with my father's
last days and his death.
A part that deals with the desert.
And then a part that deals with Alaska, so it's geographical
as well as thematic.
But there are many different ways.
I have one friend who just put her poems alphabetically.
So you can organize it in a variety of ways.
I have another friend who made his go from dawn to dusk.
And he organized it by light.
Yeah.
I agree.
There's no real particular way.
It's different.
I just sort of gather mine.
I once had a book that had a lot of poems in it,
Flesh and Blood, about 130 poems.
And I had a lot of trouble organizing it.
And at one point, I had a friend of mine,
who's a scientist generate, a sequence of random numbers.
And I numbered the poems and put them in that order,
but it didn't work either.
[LAUGHTER]
But we will try anything.
Each of you, when did you write your first poem?
I wrote mine one week after my last required English course
in college.
Seriously.
Yeah, at the end of my sophomore year.
I don't know what the connection between those two things is,
but that's when I wrote it.
And I'm sorry, Gail, we forgot to repeat the questions.
But this one is when did you write your first poem?
And I said poems from the time I was really little
and then wrote them as soon as I could get attention for it.
[LAUGHTER]
OK, thank you.
Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]