I couldn't be more pleased by this kind of an event, bringing
poets from all over the country here,
and one from the other side of the world,
to come here to honor--
He's always lives in the other side of the world, Loren.
Don't we all?
Let's try this again to honor, our friend and teacher,
and a wonderful great poet, Jon Anderson.
I'd like to introduce the panelists first and begin
with Michael Collier, Bruce Cohen, oh, I
didn't see Debra down there, your head's in the way.
Debra Gregerman.
Sorry.
Debra Gregerman, Michael Collier, Bruce Cohen,
David Rivard, Steve Orlen, William Olsen, Nancy Eimers,
Richard Lyons, and Loren Goodman.
And thank you all for coming today.
I feel it's our mission here today to go out in the world,
and preach the Gospel of Jon, but all of us I think
were very influenced by him as a teacher and a friend,
and as a poet as well, but in the case of Jon,
because those three things are almost inextricable,
I feel some of the talk about Jon's poetry
gets neglected in the welter of remembrances and commentaries
about his teaching and his friendship with all of us.
I think all of us here agree that Jon was a great poet.
And I'm hoping today's panel will
be able to sort out some of the reasons
that we believe that this is so, and then to take this out
into the world and to try to make Jon's poetry better known.
Of course, those people who truly know poetry already
know it.
But I would like to hear Jon's poems more
on the lips of my fellow poets and students
across the country.
And with that in mind, I'd like to open it up
with the kind of broadest question of all, and something
that I've heard from a number of you yesterday,
and that question is why isn't Jon's poetry better known?
And I wonder if someone would like to pick up
on that to begin with?
I mean this is pure opinion.
I have nothing to--
Do you wants to take the microphone, Debra?
Sure.
This is pure opinion, because Jon was writing a lot more when
he was younger, and I don't really know,
I wasn't really aware of how poets
got known besides through their books at that time,
but he certainly wasn't in a scene of any kind and not
even--
Anymore.
He was local for a very long time and had an aversion to it.
I was thinking last night and I had
a couple of other people mentioned this, too.
The last time I heard--
Scott and I were talking about this--
the last time I heard Jon read at ML,
he so didn't want to read.
He played Bodi's band and was telling great stories
and read a few poems, but I don't
think he wanted to be a personality of his poetry
outside of the intimacy of a classroom or his friends,
maybe.
And went from maybe not wanting to do that a lot to really
having an aversion to it.
And how much of that was personal and how much of it was
aesthetic and it just wasn't--
I want to address some of those ideas
when I talk a little about the Eastern influence on him
that I see, but I think that's probably more than anything
else.
I mean, how do people get ahead of people's work get known now?
It's like through these conferences and awards
and publications and this professionalizing that isn't--
it's become more and more a part of all the arts, I think.
And as the influence of academia and these venues for celebrity
have developed.
In his times, in the 70s and 80s at the height of his career,
there were only a few camps in poetry
and they were most of the people who
lived in the middle who used all kinds of devices, surrealism,
all kinds of things were going on.
But not enough difference to really separate them,
and at other ends were important schools too,
like Charles Olson and the the Beats and I don't know,
I'm sure others.
But now in the last 20 years, it's
splintered so much that in a way we're all, every poet,
is marginalized in a way.
Every poet is marginalized, even the people
who work from the center.
And so younger people don't know his work,
I think partly for that reason.
And the other reason that he didn't have his face out there
on the scene for many, many years.
There's another aspect of this.
I mean, I agree totally with this.
The scene has changed to such a great degree.
And one of the things that drives people's reputations
in poetry now is personality and a certain kind of ability
to get out there, to make yourself
into a really public figure.
If you think of like some--
and even somebody like Robert Hass who is not,
by nature, you know, I mean he's a he's
a guy who you can talk to in a very intimate way,
but on the other hand, these are people
who are used to being in public and in some sense using
their personality to kind of establish a base.
And also, I mean the world of poetry is much more.
I mean reputations are estab--
I think when Jon was starting as a poet and-- maybe you could
say if this is true or not, Steve--
people's reputations rose and fell by themselves almost.
It seemed like a kind of organic process
as opposed to part of the marketing mechanism that,
even with poetry, governs publishing in such huge ways.
The other thing that I wanted to say about this
is that Jon's poetry does not fit neatly into any category.
And it's not, on the one hand, autobiographical.
It doesn't put the self on display in really obvious ways.
On the other hand, it's although it's radical in form
and in its variety of form, it's not experimental in the way
that some schools are.
So I think in that sense it's easy for him to be ignored,
you know?
And the other thing is, he just didn't, as Debra said,
he didn't want to put himself out there anymore.
I just want to say something very quickly
just because David brought it up, made me think of it.
His voice, really, it's a modest voice.
Yeah.
And if you write modestly, you do
have to have some other kind of presence.
You have to be out there somehow.
Otherwise you get ignored.
And I think that that's part of it as well.
Yeah.
"Number Seven" in the Little Blue Book
says, "Quiet steady voice may be most enduring."
And perhaps that's also our hope for today.
Both Debra and David used the word intimate or intimacy
in what they said, and I was just thinking that in response
to what David had just said that Jon's work is not confessional
but it is in fact intimate.
I think that's an important distinction to make.
Jon once said to me, when I was a kid poet,
I asked him why he wrote and he said
he wrote to make other people feel less lonely.
And that's part of that intimacy,
but not the giving forth.
Someone else want to answer this?
Nancy?
On the question of intimacy, I have a colleague
who teaches literature.
And he's much younger than me sort of a cutting edge scholar,
and I was enraged to hear that one of my MFA students
reported that in his class, he referred
to poetry as touchy feely, as if all poetry were touchy feely.
And in 2008, when you got into the realm of the emotions
you had to add a y or an ie to the word
lest you be suspected of being sentimental
in some way, but Jon's poetry, I've
always associated with authenticity.
Steve was just telling me that he, David Schloss, and Jon
were known as the Sincerists.
The conversation Bill and I've had all our lives--
we call sincerity to be a complicated thing that admits
irony and I was looking at Jon's--
I have a Xerox copy of the Little Blue Book, which
is somewhere in our house.
And I was just thinking about how on the one hand,
he says "Number two is explore different emotional attitudes,
resignation, self anger, social anger, irony, largeness, and 36
is cultivate that part of yourself that is most
unsure, tentative, delicate, self dangerous,
and expect to pay the price."
But on the other hand, he says, "Don't
be afraid of writing cold, detached poems.
They sometimes lead to new perceptions."
So authenticity or intimacy, whatever, I think these things
are connected.
It was a complicated thing, a composed thing,
and a crafty thing, as well as a tender and generous thing.
Yeah, because Jon is an extremely rhetorical poet
at times.
You know?
He's not speaking directly at all times.
There's a lot of indirection.
There's a lot of associativeness in the work.
You know, so.
Yeah.
It's interesting because although Jon
was an intimate, that's the only way he could live in the world
was to have an intimate conversation.
And mostly he didn't live in the world for many years.
But he was also cold.
He also had a coldness in him and a distance and a kind
of chilliness inside.
Not towards you, who were with him, but a kind
of manipulativeness and--
He'd play with your mind.
Willful.
Not the same intimacy that you find in most of the poems.
It's very mixed.
It's very interesting.
With that coldness, do you think that in a way
he was trying to understand his emotions
and intimacy as he worked through the process
of his poems?
I think of that wonderful poem "to you
a commitment" in which it's almost about
how it is that one feels.
And a kind of learning that.
Yeah, I think that's true.
I mean, he was a friend who couldn't be a friend.
He was incapable of maintaining the friendship.
And the emotions in his poems I think
are discovered in the poem rather than in the self.
I just remember Jon, the thing that sticks in my mind
is that once you establish your voice, you're stuck with it.
And then he would give you that smile, that mischievous smile.
And that's always been important to me.
I think it has something to do with the--
we've been talking about intimacy and modesty,
but there's some kind of grandness to that, too.
I guess that's why I emailed that I want to say something
about a Buddhist idea, but I don't think
Jon saw himself as a Buddhist.
Oh, yes.
When we were in school together and then for some years
afterwards, he didn't read a lot.
I mean, he read poetry, but almost all his other reading,
aside from comic books, was in Asian literature.
And Ross McDonald novels.
And Ross MacDonald novels.
Chinese and Japanese poetry is what I mean.
He was a faux Buddhist.
Yeah, he was a faux Buddhist.
I don't think it's necessary.
I was thinking about these ideas,
too, because when I was reading, thinking
about what poem of his I wanted to read
and how much time I just spent with his poems
recently, that I kept thinking of it being
Chinese and Asian influence and his teaching of moments
translations.
I brought some Li Po and others.
The simplicity and formality of the surface
of so many of his early poems, they kind of
moved away from that later, and the not confessional
and rhetorical, but not often.
Sometimes, but not often primarily
about the rhetoric either, was this desire to awaken in a poem
through contrast of polar things.
The observation and then the moment and the idea
and all of those things that is at the center
of Chinese poetry, primarily.
That they call it jing--
I don't know how to say it.
But it is a Buddhist concept, too.
I'm not sure if it came through poets
who were court poets as well as poets who were aesthetes,
or whatever.
But that was very much there.
And so this morning I went oh, Rexroth.
And who writes a little bit about that influence
on a lot of poets that we can trace,
but how that was in the mainstream of poetry
by the 1940s, maybe.
So it was, then it was in the air, of course,
and your coming of age era, these ideas
as a counterbalance to Western civilization and post World
War II Western.
Yeah.
Consumerist culture.
Yeah.
Now we're, I mean to go back to where
we started this conversation, we're not in that place at all.
If you think about it, as a culture,
but also in the poetry culture, we're very far away from that.
One of the strange things about his interest in Li Po and Du
Fu, especially, was that we read together often
the poems they had written as old men as and as old friends.
All ambition is gone, which is a Buddhist concept.
And death was on their mind.
But we're talking about Jon's, really,
his final book, which is In Sepia,
and he speaks as an old man speaks.
And he's 30 something years old.
"We realize we can no longer begin again."
He says that often.
He would say to me often.
Which has to do with what Rich says.
You know, your voice.
You can never change your character.
And I finally convinced him one could by changing my own,
but because he didn't believe in changing one's character,
he defeated himself in life.
And I could see that he had no place else to go in the poetry.
So what he did was go into the playful unique and eccentric
postmodernism, which was a lot of fun.
It's a unique post-modern.
Doesn't fit into it, but, it--
[INAUDIBLE] less postmodern.
No, I mean, what you just said I have say it,
Kevin brought up the same idea the other night
when we were talking about his poems.
He said, "In some ways as a young man,
he wrote like an old man.
And as an old man, he wrote like a young one.
That's beautiful.
Because we were thinking about Day Moon and some of those
poems and how--
Richard touched on it last night, too,
but-- the connection through Bodi to life [? and the pull ?]
that was so intense.
And the Asian thing.
I was thinking about Bodi with that
too, but that he was kind of becoming young, becoming
alive through that.
And then and then of course everything in his life
changed after Bodi left.
You said no postmodern so tell me.
Right?
The poems don't feel post-modern at all.
They're just playful.
That's all.
Yeah.
I mean the way they're organized structurally,
they're not they're not postmodern.
But you also once told me, Steve, I
think I remember this correctly that when you looked
at some of those Du Fu poems about being older and aging
and coming to terms with death, he
wrote those when he was young.
Yeah.
So that's very interesting that there's at least the parallel.
How would you talk about the way they make sense and don't
make sense?
The Day Moon book, the way they play with nonsense.
That's why I guess I was thinking of postmodernism.
But if you read them on a tonal level,
actually there is, even with that
the broadside poem, that's an enormously playful
artificial construction, and yet there's
an enormous amount of this intimacy and sincerity coming
through the cracks of that.
And I was thinking when Debra read "Counting the days"
last night, there was a moment halfway through the poem--
I'm going to read the first half of the poem
because this is totally about what you just said--
that you suddenly realize one of the things
he was doing in his poems was a kind of intimacy of process
that was all about the now and it was so intricate, OK,
and like he changes time and place about four or five
times within two stanzas.
I'm just going to read this because I think it's very--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
163.
Yeah.
In the Bible.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
It's the poem, that section of the In Sepia
is prefaced by a quote from Rilke and in a way
the quote is an idea.
It is an expression of a thought.
What Jon's poem is the process of that thinking and feeling
actually enacted in front of you.
I mean, he really wants to get as close
as-- he's a little like Creeley in that sense.
You just feel him pushing through music
into consciousness of the moment.
The phrase that Olson uses is the poem under hand.
And you feel that in Jon, that it was very improvisational
and very directed out of this moment.
So the Rilke quote is this--
"And sometimes in those solemn hours
I felt my life already lived in over as in old journals
we come upon a story that seems our own
and speaks then passes."
This is "Counting the days."
"Just as we wake up, yawn, and lift a shade to explore,
always imperfectly amazed at subtle change
but limited by expectations in the windows frame
from which we gaze.
A yard of weeds and dogs and brown boughs,
though sometimes even the boughs are altered by falling snow.
So he is counting the days, the years,
back toward a serious initial thought that he was here,
was someone, was counting the days
toward when he would, today, count back an important deja
vu.
Accompany him, please, this journey into disillusion
as memories become events, become anticipations,
then dissolve.
Will empty us of our complex doubts.
You will certainly love yourselves
as history, potential which only took a certain lovely arbitrary
route.
As on a December afternoon, the stillness of which
engenders that image of falling snow.
We now begin again.
That art our lives become."
And when it gets to the deja vu thing, when you read it
last night I just went [GASP].
It was so astounding.
I just felt like he did something--it's a extremely
rhetorically intricate passage, and yet it completely dissolves
through the rhetoricity into the moment.
And I think that is so distinctive in American poetry.
I think it's just a really, really difficult thing.
Whether it comes out of Buddhism, whatever it was,
I think he was able to be in that moment of making the poem.
And making himself.
In making himself, yeah.
And he was he had a self revising consciousness,
so the poems are constantly doubling back on themselves
within a sentence.
But he looks ditzy.
One of the stunning things about that poem is he
looks ahead to the time when he'll be nothing but history.
Yeah.
I mean, when it all stops.
Yeah.
When it's stasis.
Yeah.
I'd like to let some of the folks to my left
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
That's fine.
Everything is wonderful.
Oh, yeah.
Sure.
Bill, I know you were about to say something.
Let's change places.
Something to do--
Bill, can't hear you.
Syl, take the mic please.
Something to do with what Steve said about Jon's conviction
that you can't change your character, and how that--
in my mind that was the one abstraction
that Jon held to dearly, and Jon was
a poet who created double abstractions really
well because he was never imprisoned by them,
except perhaps that one abstraction and what
that meant in Jon's case was a poetry--
and this goes back to what Dave Rivard just said, was
that sense that life is over.
A fadedness, an inevitability.
And then you think, what's your way out of that?
Right?
Company, I guess.
Keep me company.
That's the way.
That's the way out of that trap.
And I was also thinking about the question of sincerity,
which Nancy and I have talked about a number of times
through the years and how in many hands,
sincerity is just yet another manner of presentation,
a mask of sorts.
That's right.
Whereas in Jon's hands, or in his mind and his poetry,
whatever, as Mike Collier put it, the modesty of his poems
was by no means limited in whatever humility Jon reached
in his poetry and I believed he did, it was an active humility.
The kind of tranquility that I value in Jon's poetry immensely
is counteracted by something like an absolute alertness.
That's something of the mixture that makes Jon.
During poetry, [INAUDIBLE] I will continue.
Hey Bill, do you think--
I was just saying--
Michael.
The microphone.
Oh, I was just thinking as you were talking,
Eliot in that famous essay, Tradition and the Individual
Talent, he talks about the escape from personality.
Yes.
And in some ways I think that applies to Jon
and that's what the work was about.
Talk about objective correlative.
It really was and Eliot says in that, "only someone who
has a personality to escape from knows what it means
to want to escape from it."
And I think there's a--
Well there's only one poem, one of the most prominent poems
in the collection is marked by a specific autobiographical
event, and that's the title.
Who's next?
And that's whoo whoo.
The drinking.
Yeah and that's the title poem "The Milky Way"
in which it talks about Bodi's first diabetic coma.
Will you read that, Steve?
OK.
But what I wanted to say around that--
I don't need both--
is it the poems, you know is that a confessional
or personal, they are confessional and personal
but they're made up in a way.
And they're mythic.
I mean that's what we're all hoping for, the Universal.
They're mythic, and their events are really almost all made up
except for the one with Bodi.
Where is it?
Page 16.
Thank you.
Thank you, Pastor.
Little Black Book.
Part
of my love for this poem is a reflection
of my admiration for Jon's ability
to create patterns musically and by sound and then violate them.
So he love patterns.
He was a student of the conventional poetry
we had received, metered and rhyme poetry at that
point in graduate school, like everybody else was,
and then when he broke from it he still
was a formalist all the time, a formulist,
but a mischievous one.
I once worked in a class--
we had to connect all the like sounds in this poem.
I think, Boyer, were you part of that?
I can't remember.
But it was like a spider web.
There was so many repetitions in the poem.
He had a great natural ear.
I mean, really one of the great ones.
Yeah.
"The Milky Way."
"When I was a boy, the Milky Way floated just
over the city of Boston.
So I was lucky to live in that place, that house where
my father lathered his face and like the moon,
went out, came back, walking winter nights beneath the Milky
Way.
Few thoughts, few fears.
A way of sleeping through the night.
When my son lay sewn to the sheets, adrift
in his diabetic coma among the blown seductive stars,
I could not think of anything to say
for he was not anywhere nearby.
He said Papa and came back.
Tonight in his play he captains a sleek Starship
toward the Milky Way.
I was a boy, the city of Boston lay miles away
within our sight.
Evenings we set our chairs upon the lawn and talked.
Few thoughts, a way of watching until dark.
Then as our small wickers floated through the night,
I wished I might be taken away to live forever
in that distant city made wholly of light."
Escape.
Into eternity.
Blown seductive stars, indeed.
I don't think there's a poet other than Lowell
who uses adjectives better than Jon
does, both with restraint and with power.
What an interesting adjective pack there.
Blown seductive stars.
Who would put those words together other than Jon?
You see that in a lot of the people
that he influenced, like Levis, for instance, does it.
And Jorie.
Jorie Graham.
Yeah.
Do you want to get in on this, Loren?
Yeah.
I see transformations for modulations and changes
throughout his work as poetry.
And as a poet, just some things I remember
saying or just idea of himself as a poet,
I asked him one time.
I was reading a poet of the same generation
and thought they probably knew each other
and was very excited about his work and.
I said, did you know this person?
He said, yeah, I read with him.
But what did you what did you think of his work?
He said, well, back then I mistakenly
or stupidly I just thought I was better.
That seems to be something that changed later.
Yeah, his competition was fierce back then.
And combined with alcohol, he was a judgmental person
in normal ways.
Later, I mean, he taught me to stop being so judgmental.
But what's the essence of what you're saying, though?
OK.
So that's, I guess, his idea of himself as a poet
in some sense.
And an example of how he might change.
And another is in his formally, Michael mentioned earlier that
in the first book, which I think,
is that the only book that is not divided into sections?
Or is it divided?
I can't remember.
I think it is.
I think.
It is.
But Michael, you mentioned that if you look at the poems,
you can see how many of them were probably
exercises in workshops.
They were.
They were all worksheets from the forms class that we took.
Not all of them, but many of them.
And then how it progressed from that.
And also I talked with another poet from his generation
who he was really enamored of his poetry and saying, oh,
but it's a shame he hasn't written
anything for such a long time.
He said, well, you know he did just come out with a new book.
Oh, yeah, that's not Jon.
But it is Jon.
And I think people, it's hard, there's a reluctance
to accept a change in style.
That's right.
You know who I think the biggest influence on that book was?
Loren Goodman.
The playfulness
Of your poetry.
I mean, we talked about it once.
The playfulness of your poetry influenced that.
Jon treated students like absolute equals
and admitted that students could influence mentors.
What an amazing thing that was.
It takes me to a notion of influence
and how often that notion gets bandied about in workshops
and such.
How important influence is.
I'm getting older and more entrenched in the way I think
about poetry, to be sure, but I keep
thinking that it's not only that you're influenced,
but how you're influenced.
You can hear people behind his poetry.
You know?
No need to list.
But the influence was a matter of ease for him.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
It wasn't a matter of competition or worship
or agony.
It was a matter, seemingly to me, it was a matter of ease.
Something about that gave the poetry
a way out of one of its subject matters' intense isolation.
Right.
Well I wish, actually, I mean I think
we've isolated already so far of the influence of formal poetry
on Jon's work.
The influence-- the [? Chinoiserie ?]
in Jon's work.
But I would be interested to hear
some enumeration, really, of those poets who
did influence Jon's work.
I would like to hear some of those names.
James Dickey, in that kind of dreamy quality
of the heaven of animals.
Is that what it's called?
Yeah.
He was influenced by that.
He was influenced by Gary Snyder,
but I could never figure out how.
I never was able to see it.
Jon Logan.
Logan.
Yeah.
Yeah, Jon Logan's Rilkean sensitivity.
Whereas other poets, I was talking to Michael Ryan
and he was sort of joking about Logan's sweetness,
you know preciousness.
Yeah.
I forgot about Logan.
Yeah.
Who else?
Ashbery.
Ashbery, definitely.
Yeah.
If you look at the Double Dream of Spring and Death
and Friends, which came out in the same year,
there are all these crosscurrents in the book.
And I think you were saying last night, the beginnings of poems
are extraordinarily--
Yeah.
You really do.
The other, I think there's some Creeley
in the sort of improvisational, also
the rhythmic variations that sometimes come
in to Jon's short line poems.
And then I think in the late, I think in Day Moon,
Berryman is there.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
All the way.
""[INAUDIBLE] Paul, how could I fail for Paul."
I mean the music and intensity of syntax and relationships
of where they arise is very, very--
That's Boyer Rickel speaking from the floor.
Do you think the Lives of the Saints
is a kind of Berryman project?
Oh.
Yeah.
Sure.
He intended it.
He could just never get it finished.
That's right.
He intended it to go on longer.
And early John Clare.
Yeah, the simplicity.
Oh, yeah.
John Clare.
Yeah.
And the funny thing about the Ashbery thing
is that Ashbery has, in Double Dream of Spring,
a poem I think it's called "for John Clare."
Right.
He's written a lot about John Clare, as well.
Ashbery did?
Yeah.
I didn't know that.
In other traditions.
Yeah, when he writes about John Clare
he coins the term that he applies also
to Robert Lowell and Ginsberg, "instant intimacy."
Yeah.
Which I think Jon certainly had.
Yeah.
So was that Ashbery thing influenced John?
I don't know.
Well, you know, I think that Jorie Graham suggested that
once in a conversation.
I don't know if it was a conversation I had with her.
Would it be all right if I made a quick--
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Sure.
I was a student of Jon's my first year, for two days.
And then I got offended and I asked Jane Miller
for an independent study.
I took it too seriously for my own good.
Years later, we were neighbors.
I didn't even know it until one day I was walking to the post
office and he pulled over and he looked very different than when
he was my teacher.
I probably looked a little different.
He gave me a ride to the post office
and I told him I was now a documentary filmmaker
and I was submitting my film.
He asked if he could see a copy.
I thought he was just being kind of polite.
So I put it in his mailbox because we
were on very different schedules, as you--
The very next day, when I checked my mail,
there was a long letter about how he liked my movie.
And it was very--
I bring this up because people were
talking about his love of film.
Then the next day, I checked my mail.
There was a copy of every single book that he gave to me.
Wow.
And I thought, well, why did he do that?
We weren't friends.
We had that student teacher basis.
I personally think that he felt like we were doing something
or we were interested in something
that was very similar that could cross between film and poetry.
And I've been wondering for years what that is.
Many of you brought up his movie love.
I think, personally, I think it's
that ability in film to change time
and place in a single instant.
And that's what I like about his poetry.
That for me is what a lyric poem can do, is turning on a dime.
There's an image at the end of McCabe and Mrs. Miller,
which is the movie I talked about going
to see with Jon last night, in which Julie Christie is--
Warren Beatty died out in the snow.
He's been shot by these thugs, and Julie Christie
is smoking opium in this opium den
and the camera does this intricate thing
where she's looking at this ceramic egg, OK.
It frames the ceramic egg and then
it shows you the ceramic egg in her pupil,
and it just kind of goes closer and closer to that
and it completely dissolves into this kind of abstract movement
and it's a beautiful lyric resolution of this film.
It feels like it's the only possible resolution of it.
And I feel that way about Jon's poems.
At the end of them, oftentimes, you just
feel like he's gotten to that place
that he couldn't have anticipated
and yet at the same time, it's the perfect place.
And they resolve, I think, oftentimes
in intricate musical ways that are really
quite beautiful and distinct.
Didn't someone, Stuart or somebody, talk about cinematic?
David, did, actually.
David's notes.
David?
And was there anything else?
About the cinematic quality?
I think in that passage that I read from Counting the Days,
that although that's not an extremely image-- in fact
it's not imagistic hardly at all.
And yet it is, to me, cinematic in the kind of fluidity of it
and these really quick changes that you were talking
about in perspective and time.
You know?
And the way the arc of that sentence,
to the long first sentence that goes over 2 stanzas,
enacts itself is really pretty astounding.
It creates a kind of abstraction,
an overall abstraction that is, I think,
Jon was really interesting.
I mean the thing, it was kind of a joke, this thing
that I said last night.
When we went into the movie theater,
he said, let's sit in the first row.
I really like it when the images get abstract.
And he wasn't kidding.
He did, and it was a way of perceiving.
It's a way of being in the film I think.
It's hallucinogenic, almost.
Yeah.
Jon's poems, I think, have a hallucinogenic quality to them
that's really quite astounding, and yet they're
also very formal and decorous at the same time.
So all of these contradictions that we've been talking about
are really part of their power.
Are their power.
I'd liken this back to what we said at the outset of Jon
not being of one camp, that his poetry merges
many of these tendencies that we've all been talking about.
Nancy, Rich?
Well, it's interesting.
And I knew that Jon was into films,
but I never feel like he's depended
on the narrative of the image for the poem to be executed.
That's right.
I almost feel like he probably wanted
to ground himself in the image by going to movies.
Because I'm always jealous of the fact
that his poems just take off immediately.
There's no narrative runway or any of the stuff
that James Wright or any of the the big dudes at the time
were doing.
I always step back and go, I don't know how he does it.
One other poet I want to bring up
who was an influence on Jon's poems,
for good and bad reasons, I think.
And that was Mark Strand.
And it's really Mark Strand's solipsism--
what does that mean?
Selfishness.
What is it?
When you-- it's almost, you create your own universe?
Self-referential.
Yeah.
but it's, the world does not exist
as a real place for Strand.
It's a projection.
It's a projection of everything.
The real world only exists because you do.
That's what.
The word for that?
Solipsism.
Oh.
The world exists only for you.
I mean, it's a kind of narcissism
if you want to talk pathologically about.
It's the thinking man's narcissism.
But part of where their characters met.
This is not an influence.
Sometimes influence is because you meet yourself
in another poet and you suddenly realize
that you can make poetry from that meeting place.
You didn't realize you could do that and now you do.
It's a kind of fatalism in Strand and a fatalism in Jon.
I think they met.
There's nothing you can do about it.
That's the way life goes.
Let's put on a good suit.
Let's put out a good suit.
Yeah, Jon had a greater collection of clothes
than Mark Strand.
Would it make sense then, that--
I mean, even though I don't see this much in Day Moon,
would it make sense that the formal,
or what some people have said, abstract,
I think that means the formal, not
necessarily the image, abstraction,
would be a kind of natural place for escape of an opening kind,
not of a self-destructive kind.
Not of a not of a fatalistic?
Because if it was only a fatalistic, it would have--
how he was fatalistic in his life
maybe prevented him from being able to work at some point.
But in his work, it seems like that is a reason to do it.
And the reason to--
the way that gave us so much that
being the risk to engage with it, to trust formalism
in a way.
To transcend and be a purpose for poetry in and of itself.
Yeah.
And I just, I know I'm obsessed with this Asian influence
thing, but because I had to--
It's the yoga.
Meditation.
I thought of that.
Well I actually think that Little Blue Book is Sutras,
is Jon's Sutras.
Wow.
That's nice.
But that's a whole different thing.
This is a definition that I got from--
I forget.
Some publication from NYU or something.
I don't know.
I didn't even print out the whole thing.
"Traits of classical Chinese poetry.
Usually the Chinese poem is fairly simple on the surface.
Western culture, which was influenced by Shakespeare,
Milton, and the romantic poets, had pronounced a tendency
to think of poems as ornate."
If you take this back, this is something we've all integrated,
but if you take this back half a century.
"Tendency to think of poems as ornate elaborate creations made
by a few men of genius.
Chinese culture influenced by the anonymity
of the Shih Ching."
I'm not sure I'm saying that right.
"Had a tendency to think of poems as something
written by common humanity for the eyes of other humans" OK.
And then "the imagery, usually agrarian, courtship, marriage,
dynasty."
I don't think-- unless you guys created a dynasty, which
you kind of did.
Yeah.
But then the simplicity of the formality
of Slavic verse, which I'm not sure how much that
applies, but this one was the one that I just
kept coming back to it.
"The poetic principle.
Organizing the poem is often one of contrast.
Often, Chinese poetry will juxtapose-"
So maybe this speaks to the time shift.
Quick shifts in time and place in location.
"Often Chinese poetry will juxtapose a natural scene
with a social, personal situation."
And then this definition of "the idea of Chinese poetry
embodying fu, bi, and xing, fu, a straightforward narrative
with a beginning, middle and conclusion.
Bi, against, implies a comparison or contrast.
And the result being this enlightenment."
And I just think that's so--
I think it's a sensibility that carries.
It's like a philosophy that I'm not
sure Jon could embrace in his life.
Well, he embraced it in his intellectual,
in his meditative life.
We talk about his--
I mean in his practice.
Those things really--
Poetry is a practice.
And it fits what you're saying.
If you stop practicing, then you lose the connection
that is between the heart, the body, and the mind.
The mind.
Jon was an anti-intellectual, and the only essays
that I remember his reading because we were reading them
together as young guys, it was Auden's book The Dyer's Hand,
the Richard Hugo book and the Stafford book
which are both practical essays about poetry.
But first, I have two things to say.
First, in the Auden, both of our copies
were ragged and underlined.
And Auden says that he thought of poetry as one person sitting
in a room writing poems for another person alone
sitting in another room who he doesn't know.
Which is that wonderful intimacy.
And then Yeats said something about-- what's the Yeats one?
As if in a letter to an intimate friend,
that poems should be written as if in a letter
to an intimate friend.
And we talked about those things.
So Jon was mistrustful of the intellect because he was lazy.
He was also, he was very, very smart.
Marvin Bell said, although I didn't see it quite this way,
I knew he was smart.
Marvin Bell said he was the smartest student he'd ever had.
Before he started teaching, when we were there,
but in the last 40 years or so.
But Jon practiced it as intuition.
So when you're talking about him,
and he had a really keen intuition, someone here--
I spoke about it last night.
Yeah.
I thought that was this.
As a student, you can never walk out
and repeat what Jon taught you, except
in that little blue book.
You had to wait to see Jon.
You know?
Yeah.
Because I remember him saying once to me,
you should rough up the surface of your poems.
Yeah.
And I've been thinking about that for 30 years.
And it means so many different things.
You know, I discover something about it
every year that I didn't understand before.
Perfection is a bad thing.
Yeah.
But when we talk about-- so I was leading from that sense
of intuition--
that Jon was a terrific formal poet, played the game
by his own rules.
Loved to violate rules, because that's fun.
And pattern and variation.
But he didn't know an iamb from a caesura.
What is that?
But I think he pretended he didn't know that.
I think intuition is accumulation of attention.
I don't think it's really--
Of attention?
Of attention.
I mean, I think his attention was so intense
in his observation, he didn't have to name it
but it got internalized.
We call that intuition, but it collects over time.
Well it's trained.
It's a training to receive that awareness.
Because you can't hold on to that awareness, either.
So it's a kind of training to do that.
I think it's funny, if Jon were here now,
he'd be rolling on the floor.
Wait!
Is that?
I bet you, though,
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
--room alone, hearing this poem, he would take it in.
All of it.
But I wanted to ask Bruce something
because, just, something in passing just now about the--
I always thought Jon as sort of having
an obsessiveness about games at times, like the whole baseball
thing, you know?
And the poems, in a certain way, had that aspect.
I mean it was an important part to play for him.
And you didn't have to win the game.
There was no goal.
It was in all aspects of his life.
We were living together, four of us, Jon and I and our two wives
were living in Portland, Oregon.
And we decided, well, let's go to the movies tonight.
Well, what do you want to see?
So we got all the movies.
Jon wrote the names down and made a graph
and allowed each one would say yes, but, no,
but, and the joke is obvious.
By the time we finished, it was too late to go to any movie.
And baseball.
Baseball, his favorite sport, is a game of very precise logic
and rules.
And that was one of the reasons he loved it.
Because everything is predictable
except the unexpected that happens all the time.
But basketball, it mattered who won.
Well, Red Sox, too.
I mean that mattered who won.
But in the game games we played among ourselves,
it wasn't a matter of winning.
It was a matter, really, of self-discovery.
One game he set up for us all was those questions.
Kind of a teenage thing, you know,
who would play you in the movie.
What kind of animal are you?
And there were six.
Mark Halperin and Bobby were there and Henry Carlyle
and Sandra McPherson.
And we played it several times.
It was wonderful to discover who I thought
should play you in the movie and what animal you represent,
as opposed to what-- anyways, it was a silly game
but it was a very interesting one
because it was about perception of self and identity
and other people's perceptions of you.
I mean I remembered--
I'm sorry.
No, please go ahead and then I'll say something.
I mean--
Take the mic, please.
Oh, sorry.
Sorry.
It's, I mean, Jon obviously, it's
no secret he was an escapist in a lot of different ways
and a lot of the things he did were diversions.
Because there was something, clearly, about life that he
wasn't very comfortable with.
And on some level, to be honest, I
think his poems were the only time in his life
that he was serious.
His poems are so much more brilliant
than he ever seemed to be, so much more mature.
I mean, he was the most immature adult I know other than Steve.
Seriously.
That's some good company.
The oldest teenager in the world, right?
The secret of poetry is immaturity.
These poems were incredibly mature.
When you read them, you felt very grown up
and you really felt that you had this precise insight
into how to be alive.
You know, and we would do the baseball things.
We were, for a lot of different reasons,
really, really horrible at the game.
But not because of the lack of effort.
Like he made these intricate, esoteric charts
and all these things which you couldn't understand.
You know, we sent it to a nuclear physicist that I knew.
I said explain this because it's too complicated.
If you could figure this out you'd know how to create life.
And then you try to draft people [INAUDIBLE] but you know,
it's like what you said.
Like he didn't want to do his reading.
He didn't want to teach.
Like when I talked--
He once-- I mean, I knew him later but not as late
as a lot of people here and he very much,
didn't he want to teach?
He was still, he was totally--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
When Jon was there.
He also cancelled the basketball games.
I mean the thing is, when Jon was there he was great.
The thing that was really cool about Jon
was when he was with you, you felt like you
were his favorite person.
That's right.
But then when he was away, he couldn't do that.
But listen.
This is the inscription to the [INAUDIBLE]..
For Dave and Michaela.
Friends to the end.
Around noon tomorrow.
But that was the end for him.
It was totally.
And he made it clear, so it's perfectly OK.
Well, he was still asleep by then.
Nancy?
What were you going to say, [INAUDIBLE]??
I'm sorry.
No, no.
I was just I was thinking about what
you said about being comical in life and serious in his poems.
That's a bad paraphrase of what you said.
But I only I know more about the poetry side of him, really,
and I was just thinking about his premise
that the first line of the poem tells you
everything that's going to happen later on and how
frightening that is if you're trying to begin a poem,
that it seems true to the way he wrote.
I was also thinking in other words,
in the poem he just seems like he went for broke
and that it was utterly serious, even if there
were moments of amazing comedy and he was incredibly witty.
The other thing I was thinking was
that I learned so much from him about the sentence.
We haven't talked much about that,
but he talks in his little helpful hints book
about juggling the sentence and the line
and the negotiation between the sentence of the line.
I was thinking about, Steve you're
saying that he didn't think on the level of iambs and trochees
and so on, but his poems really did
seem based on formal rhetorical structures
and on the negotiations between the sentence and the line.
The poet I think of who does that,
who was struggling with that and playing with it,
interested in it, is would be Larry Levis.
Lots of poets do it, but it's something
that I remain really interested in
and that's one of the many things that makes
his poems seem always relevant.
How can the sentence not remain important?
Can I address that?
Yes please.
It may be in the helpful hints, but he
said that in metrical verse, the line
is the unit, in free verse it's the sentence.
And Jon worked with both.
But Larry Levis, in a lecture at Warren Wilson,
said he had come to the end of his period
as a younger fellow, of the kind of deep image poem,
the explosive five line poem a la Bly and James Wright
and Merwin and other people of that time.
John Haines.
And he was looking around, reading around to see
who can he take on as a new model.
And it was Jon and it was exactly the reason
that you're talking about and he brought to it
the endless invention of syntax that allows you to--
especially since Jon worked with sound markers in his poems--
the sentence could proceed almost on its own
because it was going towards a rhyme in part.
And you could inject things in the middle
because there's all these, what do you call them?
Subordinate clauses and, they're not insubordinate,
what are the other ones?
Dependent.
Dependent clauses.
And for Larry it was a way of lengthening his poems.
But he also caught from Jon that sense
of discovery of the self in the process of writing the poem.
As Levis is a process poet.
That's what you're talking about before.
He brought a more worldly imagination to his poetry
than Jon did, but he really felt.
I thought he would go the way of his mentors, Larry,
which was Phil Levine mostly.
But it was interesting to see.
They're all thoughtful.
I don't wanna call him a great--
but very important, almost every important poet
has a collection of words that belongs only to her or him.
And Jon had, I wrote him down somewhere.
Countenance, where'd you put them?
David did you play around with them?
Solace, countenance, evocation, consolation, passage,
journeying, afterthought.
They become mythic words in his vocabulary.
And for a while, nobody else could use those words
because they were Jon's alone.
But Larry would use them.
And I think in a way it was just a simple homage
to Jon's influence.
Can I say something about this sentence thing
that Nance was bringing up?
Because I think it is really important.
When Michael was reading "Rosebud" last night,
I mean, I felt like, oh, that's a proto Levis poem, isn't it,
in a way.
And one of the things about it is that weird periodicity
of the sentence parts and the way the marking out
time and turning back on themselves
into the story and then the echo effects
in these kind of slant rhymes.
Then little images that come back, recycle,
and phrases that will--
and he was able to kind of juggle all this stuff
in the sentence as it was evolving
and not try to resolve it immediately.
I mean, this thing that you're talking about
is like he just knew it was going somewhere
and he had this faith that it was going to the right place.
And as a consequence, there's an expansiveness in his sentence.
In Levis and Jon's work, you know,
that is really, really singular, I think.
Yeah.
What else?
What's the next question?
Well, it's not a question so much.
I thought that there might be.
I do have some other questions, but I
thought that there might be some people who have already
prepared some other issues about Jon's work.
I think, Rich, you had suggested you have some thoughts.
I just want to read a little bit from a poem called
"Each Day Does That."
To the microphone, please.
What page is it?
Oh you don't know.
No I don't have the page number.
"Each Day Does That" Jon writes, "but the truth
is getting older.
Most of my definitions turn out to have been early promises,
now more and more forgettable."
The self derision of it.
What I wanted to get back to is what
I think people were getting at is Jon's ability
to want to change himself.
I always use in my class Miles Davis's line,
"but it takes a long time to sound like yourself."
And it seems to me that even in Jon's most intimate moments,
there's something larger at stake than just, I'm here,
this is my autobiography.
I guess that's what Steve is talking about.
That mythic ability.
Without being a student of Elliot's footnote
kind of intellectual.
I mean, you would say he's anti intellectual.
I think he was anti elitist in the wonderfulest ways,
at the same time being a very smart man.
Also had broad taste.
As my taste was narrowing for a while in our early years,
his kept broadening.
And then shrinking and broadening.
Well, I had written down that he seemed protean to me.
But that's not the right word.
It didn't seem like he was just jumping around.
He was always open to change.
That's the only way I can phrase it.
I don't want to sound like Dr. Phil,
but I think it's aesthetic before it's psychological.
Yeah.
You know, Loren, you're his most recent.
You were his most recent project.
Successful project.
And you know, your poems live in another universe.
They're wonderful.
They're full of surprises.
Did Jon teach you something about that?
Or did he encourage it?
Or both?
Yeah, well, I was thinking.
And someone mentioned about the games and the play
that most of the content of our interactions and conversations
were jokes and play.
Like a flow of redirecting and disarming,
unexpectedly, flow of what would be expected conversation.
And things started out.
That continued, but also led to these other things
that were almost like happenings or little art projects.
We would write each other.
He would leave messages on my answering machines
in these character crazy voices.
He would write the return address
to these letters would be aliases.
Doctor No and different characters.
So was that an influence on your poems?
It was an influence and it was just an openness to possibility
and trying different things.
Outside his office, there was a passageway
between two buildings.
When people would walk through that and go to classes,
we could see them very well, but they could not see us.
We stood in a certain place by the window
and we developed this thing.
Bodi gave it a name later called verbal sniping.
It wasn't really aggressive or dangerous.
But we started off, he brought this book of poems
by Leonard Nimoy.
We were just playing and one thing led to another.
We were reading Leonard Nimoy's poems
out the window to people walking to class.
But they couldn't see you, right?
They couldn't see us.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
What I remember along those lines, like,
going swimming with Jon at the pool
and then you'd be laying on the concrete
after the swim in the sun.
And then he'd kind of yell something
but sort of like in a way that nobody could actually tell,
you know?
Something obscene.
You know what his favorite thing is a young guy?
Going all the way back to high school and college,
when I didn't know him, was, Mayakovsky!
He and his friend at the time, a guy named Al Anderson,
would be at the Red Sox game, way up in the bleachers.
And all of a sudden Jon would get up and yell "Mayakovsky!"
And he loved Mayakovsky's wonderfully crazy poems.
Again, Jon's obsessive sense of humor here.
I remember one other thing.
Just more of a particular instance,
I guess, of influence.
I was trying to write a novel.
And I had written just a couple of lines of it.
No, no.
Yeah.
Just a couple of lines and I was talking with Jon
to see how do I have these other ideas.
Go this way.
And maybe I had written a little more.
But he looked at it and just said, oh, that's it.
The first two lines.
That's wonderful.
A lot of friends are always, well,
how come he doesn't write anymore?
And I would say, come on, Jon, you got a semester off.
You got nothing to do.
Why don't you write some poems?
And pretty early on, he told me.
He said it's too hard.
And the process that--
It's the only thing he took seriously.
Yeah.
And the process, I think, someone talked about last night
where he would not continue with the next line
until he had gotten this line or a line and a half,
a sentence, as perfect as he wanted it, musically.
He didn't care.
Wasn't caring yet about sense or theme,
hoping that his subconscious would take care of that.
And he would lock himself up in his office for two or three
days, sober.
He would smoke.
He wasn't a smoker.
Two or three nights.
Yeah.
There were no days in Jon's life.
And we're sitting around a table in Pittsburgh
and he was drunk it was the first time I realized
that he was an alcoholic because of the amount he
drank all night.
And he said it's just too hard.
I can't do it anymore.
And it is.
Anyway, if you're a hard worker in poetry, it is too hard.
You know?
And he is, was, by nature, an extremely
undisciplined and lazy man.
Steve, do you feel like Jon's early fame, you know,
because he and Tate and Glück were really the most famous
poets of their generation as they left their 20s.
And you know, Jon's second book was nominated for the National
Book Award, and he was a really important figure
in your generation.
Do you think it, I don't want to say it ruined him,
you know, but in some way he had this thing.
The things that everyone kind of dreams of when they start out
and he had them pretty early.
Yeah.
I think, you know, those kind of things
that all of us, no matter how much we might deny it
have as kind of rewards.
He had gotten them.
And, you know, so.
I was thinking about that this morning.
There's a poem by Frost.
It's maybe a sonnet about, "I can out walk the furthest--"
Remember that?
It's about walking.
It's a night.
Insomnia, walking around.
Somebody who would remember.
I am one accustomed to night.
Is that the poem?
I am one accustomed to the night.
Jon, I think he wrote this in a poem.
I didn't find it.
"Whatever I want, I can out walk."
Who says that?
Jon?
"Whatever I want, I can out walk" I don't know why,
but in my mind maybe other lines in that poem, is,
if I can do it, why bother?
If I've already done it, why bother?
You reach he-- won the Shelley Memorial Award, which
I think Mark Strand might have judged for career achievement.
He's only 37 years old when he did it.
And I think, yeah, that was part of it.
I did it.
And then he lost his sense of a lot of his natural sense
of competition in the world.
Was he afraid of that success?
Did that like freak him out that he couldn't match it?
I didn't see that.
I think he liked it, you know?
But the thing, I just one of the things
that didn't change until later in Jon's work, Day Moon,
was the diction.
This thing that you were talking about.
Those words that he had and that transferred into Levis.
And I felt like, I mean Williams says
that if you can change your vocabulary,
you change your diction, then you can
change feeling and thinking.
And Jon was locked in, I think, to the thing that had evolved
over the first three books.
Yeah.
That's true.
It just made me think of the Day Moon poem
and how the rhetoric is the same,
but he doesn't push it to the conclusion with the end.
I mean, it's a beautiful passage.
"If our love is a passing affection that the mountains
might be a boat.
All day the moon the suggestion.
A luminous journey by night."
And that's the same rhetoric to me.
But he does something different with it.
He doesn't push it forward into that.
I believe in its terrible progression.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
What Steve was saying you're--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Working on one line so hard, I started
to think, why did that last book come out?
And I'm wondering if he just didn't want
to make it into a commodity.
No.
He wrote it because he wanted to prove to his new girlfriend
that he could still do it.
That's exactly why he said he wrote that book.
That has nothing to do with poetry.
That gets back to first principles, though.
But he plays with commodity more in Day Moon than he does--
The world's commodity.
The ugliness of the world, more.
What you said about, someone said about Bodi
giving him that new subject matter.
You know, punk rock or whatever it is.
That's absolutely true.
I never, never thought of that.
But it's true.
It gave him a sensibility.
A new sensibility, too, as much as the subject matter.
It just-- Oh I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
I just want to--
I just keep coming back to this idea.
I'm curious about it, for all the rest of you,
as somebody who is not--
I mean I don't know if I consider myself
a poet these days or not--
but I write.
I don't finish things.
I don't send them out for publication anymore.
There's a kind of inertia in that but there's also kind of--
The practice of writing is not something
that I know what I'm I kind of hope
to have that professional whatever again.
But I kind of also don't know.
And if you're not driven toward that--
and maybe that's what you were talking about, David, too--
just to be in this community of so many writers and so many
people I've known for so long.
To have this conversation is what it's all about.
If you don't invite yourself into it
and/or you're not invited into it,
in a way, which Jon had through his students,
but that's different.
It's really different to be amongst your peers.
The inward gets a lot bigger.
And if you're the kind of person who says,
I'm only going to do this for the maximum,
I think that was what Nancy was saying.
I'm only going to.
I am playing, but the stakes are really high.
I don't want to repeat myself and have somebody go,
oh that was a great poem.
And I'm going to publish it.
Or you're going to be the poet laureate.
Or it's on First Daily today.
He didn't care about that.
That wasn't--
Well as a young person he did, though.
Right, but less and less.
Almost as an anti stance.
Well, that last book was disinvested
of I want to be popular.
Right.
and that is an extreme maturity.
I mean, I was thinking about the maturity and immaturity
thing and Gibb's comment, and I thought, well,
that's a kind of spiritual, you know?
It's like a huge maturity that I think
is why art by somebody besides celebrity or repeating oneself
or pats on the back would keep doing it.
So I guess he did really achieve that in a way, and I'm so glad.
I've not laughed this much with Jon in 10 years
as I have remembering Jon in the past.
So great.
And I think I'm glad he was word sniping at the end.
You know, that's the immaturity you want
to keep that most people lose.
It's a great playfulness.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
Well actually, what I was going to say,
I think it plays into what you're talking about.
We're all trying to find a reason for why Jon didn't keep
writing in a way that was more connected
to the career he created for himself in these early books.
And one of the things I've always felt about it
is that there isn't a reason for it.
It's mysterious.
And he was such a lyric poet.
And his intuitions and his ear was so great
that it stopped in a way.
And it's a mystery.
The poems are a gift.
And that's the kind of consolation
I always told myself is that we're just
lucky to have these poems.
That might be true.
And maybe that's all he had.
But the other side of that, it's the kind of terror
that I feel as a writer.
That at any moment, it could stop.
That the last poem you wrote is your last poem.
That's what Randall Jarrell talked about that.
So it's interesting that we're talking about this as is
if it's a reasonable subject.
And in some ways, it's not a reasonable subject.
And the other thing is, the history of poetry
is filled with examples of people who,
when they reach 50 or 60, and continue writing,
just to basically repeating themselves.
Or degrading.
Their talents are degrading.
So, you know, Jon was pretty aware of that.
I think he didn't feel any urge to kind of enact
that biography.
Well, but back to reasonableness,
that in conjunction with certain personality traits
made it more abrupt than it would
have been in somebody else.
But you know, yet again I just think
that the power in the work is that it comes
from this mysterious place.
We all feel that, as writers.
And we also feel how tentative it is
and how fleeting it can be.
And what is it all for?
I mean, if it's not for your students, your career,
or yourself, then it's for something else.
And I think that something else is harder.
It requires some kind of faith in that process.
And again, if you're not in that.
Those other reasons don't sustain, ultimately.
So I want to ask a question to the panelists and anybody
else who wants to entertain it.
One of my difficulties when Jon stopped writing
was to then try and reconcile, you know,
how to go on yourself.
When someone who has taught you so much, who's a mentor,
decides not to do it for whatever reason, no judgment,
then how do you go on?
It was difficult for me, because I
had to think about what it was I really believed in,
because I believed in him.
And it it's still something I think about constantly.
You're getting a response to the question.
By the time I was a student, Jon really wasn't writing.
This was 20 years ago.
And I think rather than look at the fact
that he stopped writing, it's important to acknowledge
that his influence on writing is expanding to this day.
I mean, look at all the people in this room
who were taught by him.
He had a tremendous influence on me as a writer,
whether he was writing at the time or not.
And I think he taught me more simple things about writing
that helped me go forward.
I mean, I think you have to look at him as not just his writing,
but hundreds of people's writing influenced by him.
And it's not a failure, by no means.
But I'm not talking--
I'm not really-- I agree with you completely.
I mean, that's the whole premise of why we're here,
acknowledging that fact.
But you can't help but want to follow.
He's a step ahead.
And you want to learn from what the next step is.
The other reason I'm keenly aware of this
was another mentor of mine, William Meredith,
had a stroke in 1983.
And he went silent, but he stayed alive for 28 more years.
And so I constantly wondered what kinds of poems
could have come.
You can't help but wonder and want them.
Don't you?
I mean because even though I understand
completely what you mean, if this is all you have,
that's great.
You should be thankful for it.
What's that?
Keats.
It happens, although you can't help--
If only he'd lived longer, what would have have written?
There's a person in the audience who
had a response to your question, Michael.
And then I think we're going to have to wrap this up,
unfortunately.
I think when you know too much too soon, like [INAUDIBLE],,
you write yourself out of your life, which
is to write yourself out of you poetry, hence
why he stopped writing, and I think
he was egged on to write the last book.
And everything I'm saying isn't connected
I suppose, but doesn't really answer your question.
But what I got from Jon was this ability.
I can't say what he taught me either,
but it was wonderful and urgent, and it
was like learning to paint by numbers with your eyes closed.
And then when you open your eyes you think, oh my God.
Is that bad?
There are three reasons, I suppose,
why I'm not an atheist.
The invention of the Mr Coffee machine, Ted [INAUDIBLE]'s's
hair, and Jon Anderson.
What he gave me.
He grounded magic or something.
I forgot the last thing I was going to say.
But I'm thankful that I got to interact with him.
And coming back here now, being around all of you,
and I don't even know some of you.
I realize that I haven't been reading since I've been gone.
I want to thank everybody and thank Jon.
I think we all do.
I think also, I think Michael's last comment
about the deep mysteriousness is really a good place
to leave this, because there is a sense of mystery,
I think, in the work.
And both curiosity and mystery within it, and the kinds of
poems that Jon might have written
or not will remain that kind of mystery.
I'd like to close with a little mysterious poem,
A Bridge In Fog.
"Cars at a distance crossed in a line.
Below, the boats went forward towing their lights.
When I came to myself, I was divided within myself.
Merely for solace, I had been watching a long time.
I was still troubled as I turned toward home.
In its dark windows I could see myself approach.
So suffered my strangeness in reflection.
My wife was asleep.
I was glad to be alone.
It was not for the scene I'd stood transfixed.
Only its lights methodical passage by water.
And above, where the car's beams flickered in mist.
Just before sleep, I've traveled a while like this."
May I just invoke seniority just to have the last word?
Please.
If we're all looking outside and wondering
where Jon is, in my book, as in David's book,
there's an inscription.
My nickname was Softie.
"Softie and Gail love seven days a week.
Whoever reaches the afterlife first has to make coffee."
[APPLAUSE]