I think most of cleverness comes from the intellect.
And you have to balance it all, you know?
The reason why Shakespeare works in the bush
is because it touches the heart-- it touches something
more than the intellect.
We come out of what-- you know, we come out of a wondering.
And poetry is not about answering questions.
It's about asking them.
I try to write poems trying to understand the world I live in
and the other live creatures who inhabit it.
So I've got a poem about a raccoon--
one of the raccoons' prayers.
He calls his God, He Who Finds and Cleans and Eats.
Those could be clever.
That one isn't as much as the horse saying neigh.
Yes?
Oh.
I see that in a lot of your poems,
you don't use punctuation or capitalization.
I was wondering what the intention behind that is?
I like the way it looks.
I like to see the poem as a whole thing, an organic thing.
And I'm not writing essays.
I'm not writing, you know, prose stuff.
I mean, sure, I write children's books as well.
And in children's books poetry, I
write iambic pentameter verse.
I think I just do it to show I know about that.
At one school, I was saying the class this afternoon
that a teacher let a student--
this was a little student, a young kid--
wanted to know why I didn't capitalize.
And I do sometimes, but mostly not.
And the teacher said, well this is her style.
And the kid said, no, she didn't graduate from college,
you know.
And I assured him that I learned about that long before I
didn't graduate from college.
We have time for one more question.
Who's got the question they've been wanting
to ask somebody forever?
Oh.
Christine, you scared me.
Christine, do you have a question to go with that flash?
[INAUDIBLE] Someone over here had one.
Here we go.
How did you start writing poetry?
My mother wrote--
How did she start writing poetry.
--my mother wrote poetry.
My mother didn't graduate from eighth grade.
And she wrote very iambic pentameter verse.
And she read poetry to us, and all of that.
And my mother was from Rome, Georgia.
And we-- and also, you know the poet Coleman Barks?
His mother was from Rome, Georgia.
And Rome is about the size of this place here.
And we always say-- our mothers, of course,
didn't know each other.
Somebody asked Coleman that, and he started laughing.
But we like to say that our mothers met across the railroad
track one day.
And they said, yes, but one day our children--
and, indeed, one day, their children are good friends.
I started writing when I was very young,
and I didn't start writing to publish.
I didn't know you could publish, and in fact,
someone who looked like me couldn't.
It's been very segregated, you know.
But I wrote, because I had to.
I had no choice.
I would have written anything, any way.
If I can say-- my mother once--
my mother died when she was 44 years old, a girl.
And when she would see me writing poetry as a young girl,
she would look at it and say, oh, baby, that ain't no poem.
Let me show you how to write a poem.
And then she would write, like, iambic pentameter rhymed verse.
And I would [INAUDIBLE].
I have a poem called "Fury".
Which, I don't think it's in any of these books, but--
it's about my mother got a letter one day
from someplace that wanted to publish some of her poems.
I don't know how this could have happened, really, but it did.
And she asked my father if she could do it.
I always tell men, don't try this now.
Because my-- but my father said no.
He said, no wife of mine going to be a poetry writer.
And so she burned her poems in the coal stove.
She does not know that I was watching
from the steps of the cellar, the basement.
And I saw her hand as she was putting the poems in the stove.
And after that, even when I had several surgeries,
I knew that I would be OK.
Because my mother would not allow me to not finish my work.
She didn't finish hers, and she wouldn't
let me not finish mine.
So-- and so far, so good.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.