I can't see as well I used to be able to.
I can't hear and I can't see.
And I do think I know everything.
It's amazing.
Who has a question?
She has to do things.
Do them.
I have a statement, which is we can take--
I'm not sure if this is still on, so I'll just project.
We'll take questions for 15 minutes.
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you, Renee.
Just like the Garden of Eden.
That happened.
It is.
Except I have Renee, who is even more consistent and believable.
So any questions for 15 minutes.
And I will stand up here and I repeat the questions back
to you.
Because I know sometimes with Q and As it's frustrating
that not everyone can hear the questions.
And then Ms. Clifton will respond.
I'm not embarrassed.
Ask anything.
Little kids once said, how old are you?
[LAUGHTER]
I told them, I think I said I was 100.
Because they wanted me to be really old.
There are those generic [INAUDIBLE]..
Do you think that you'll ever have
a book of your untitled poetry?
Call the book Untitled.
The question is, do you think you'll
come out with a book of your untitled poetry?
I don't know.
Why?
[LAUGHTER]
But that would be cute.
And I've never been cute.
Except for my horse saying "neigh."
I don't think so.
If I have a title I will put it on there.
I won't put anything there that I know doesn't belong,
and that includes a title.
Al Poulin, who was the first editor at BOA,
said that he would put titles.
I was aghast.
I mean, will you name my children now?
I already-- you know, I mean.
Why?
Well, it makes it easier for the reader.
It never occurred to me that my job
was to make things easy for the reader.
I come-- people have said this to me lots of times--
I come to comfort the afflicted, and to afflict the comfortable.
[LAUGHTER]
And I have no interest in--
Everybody else know everything?
[LAUGHTER]
Somebody wonders something.
Bless you.
This lady.
I was curious about a comment you made about cleverness.
And I wondered if you could say a little more about that.
Because sometimes I think some of the things that I write
are really clever.
And I think like, well maybe that's ego.
Often--
The question is about cleverness.
She [INAUDIBLE] about cleverness and asked
you to expand on that.
Often I think that, cleverness, when
you're writing something clever, you're
thinking about the poet and not the poem.
You thinking about yourself as poet, quite often.
And I remember there's a line in Derek Walcott, who's
a heck of a poet.
And someone asked him where he was going.
And he said, I'm following the poem.
Going where the poem is going.
And sometimes, if we're clever, we
want our reader to think about how smart we are.
And poetry comes from a balance between intellect
and intuition.
And if you fall, and trying to balance, one does fall,
focus on the intuition side.
Fall on that side, not the intellect side.
Because the intellect can lead you astray.
Thus we have the newspapers every day.
Thus we have many things, many things.
But intuition, while it's not always right,
it can be righter than that.
If I write clever things, I want somebody to say gee,
she's clever.
And I don't care if they say that or not.
I've heard, she's so simple.
I've heard that a lot.
And I don't care about that either.
I do what I do, the way that I can do it.
If I didn't write--
I've said this a million times-- if I didn't write like me,
I'd want to write like him.
The first time we met, is that not what I said?
That was a lot of years ago.
What else?
I'm wondering about some of your favorite poems in particular.
And if you have had opportunity to see Sarah Jones?
I don't know Sarah Jones.
Sarah Jones is a contemporary poet,
and recently had a show off Broadway.
And--
She does spoken word?
Does spoken word, and has done different media.
And I would definitely encourage you-- and actually,
adding to that question, some maybe younger poets,
maybe, that you're interested in,
or that have crossed your path?
Some have.
Poetry is going in a certain direction now.
And I'm an oldie.
Have you heard of Cave Canem?
Cave Canem is an African-American writers
workshop.
And it tends-- a lot of the young poets now come
from Cave Canem.
My favorite spoken word writer died recently, Sekou Sundiata.
And Sekou was amazing.
He was amazing.
I think that rap is in poetry.
My students get all upset with me.
And I know a number of things that I think approach poetry.
But by and large, spoken word poetry
tends to depend on the rhyme.
And too many people write hip-hop
that can't spell the word.
Sometimes it's an interesting, eccentric use of language.
But sometimes it's because they can't spell it.
You know.
And I've often said the house of poetry is a big house,
has a lot of rooms.
There are rooms in there for everybody.
But a lot of spoken word poetry is very clever.
And that's all.
It seems to me there has to be something in there, something
that can allow the inside of me to touch the inside of Frances.
Don't you think?
And I've had a lot of translations.
Why would anybody in Czechoslovakia
want to hear anything I ever wrote?
I've had a lot of translations from around the world.
And something in it must, because I
want to write about being human, what
that's like, and tell the truth about it.
I don't believe in hiding the ugly parts.
I don't believe in pretending that some things don't happen.
And oftentimes, spoken word people
are showing off what they know.
Their intellect.
The sound.
I think that's wonderful that the sounds are sometimes
so well done.
Sekou-- do you know Sekou Sundiata's work?
Not well.
Oh, read him.
He's wonderful.
He has some CDs with Ani DiFranco's--
who's from Buffalo-- her company called Righteous Babe.
I think there's room in the thing for everybody.
You know.
But that includes lots of people.
I loved Yehuda Amichai from Israel.
What a fine poet, you know.
Yeah.
But there are a lot of poets that I think are just doing it
so they can be called poets.
And I don't know what happens when that happens.
At the Safeway market, if I'm a poet or not,
I better have some money.
You know, they're not interested in that.
But you don't do it for that.
You don't do it to be called a poet.
I was first published, I was in my 30s.
Because nobody was publishing somebody that looked like me.
And then I had a--
I didn't worry about it, because I had six children-- but people
thought I hadn't graduated from any program,
so how could I be good?
That's happened to me a lot.
I am not a college graduate, but I have honorary degrees.
And I have taught.
I taught at Duke for a while I was, last semester,
at Dartmouth.
Lots of places.
The University of California, seven years, in Santa Cruz.
And not by trying to do that, but by trying
to write the best that I could.
And I always thought that I might--
my children were first when they were young.
They are, to some degree now, first.
Because I always knew that I could get another poem.
But I can't get another child elsewhere.
And I'm willing to try, but--
[LAUGHTER]
I tell everybody, you got unmarried uncles--