WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.870 align:middle line:90% 00:00:00.870 --> 00:00:04.380 align:middle line:84% I couldn't be more pleased by this kind of an event, bringing 00:00:04.380 --> 00:00:06.810 align:middle line:84% poets from all over the country here, 00:00:06.810 --> 00:00:10.110 align:middle line:84% and one from the other side of the world, 00:00:10.110 --> 00:00:11.760 align:middle line:90% to come here to honor-- 00:00:11.760 --> 00:00:16.190 align:middle line:84% He's always lives in the other side of the world, Loren. 00:00:16.190 --> 00:00:17.190 align:middle line:90% Don't we all? 00:00:17.190 --> 00:00:19.830 align:middle line:84% Let's try this again to honor, our friend and teacher, 00:00:19.830 --> 00:00:25.230 align:middle line:84% and a wonderful great poet, Jon Anderson. 00:00:25.230 --> 00:00:30.180 align:middle line:84% I'd like to introduce the panelists first and begin 00:00:30.180 --> 00:00:34.293 align:middle line:84% with Michael Collier, Bruce Cohen, oh, I 00:00:34.293 --> 00:00:36.460 align:middle line:84% didn't see Debra down there, your head's in the way. 00:00:36.460 --> 00:00:37.800 align:middle line:90% Debra Gregerman. 00:00:37.800 --> 00:00:39.510 align:middle line:90% Sorry. 00:00:39.510 --> 00:00:43.440 align:middle line:84% Debra Gregerman, Michael Collier, Bruce Cohen, 00:00:43.440 --> 00:00:48.360 align:middle line:84% David Rivard, Steve Orlen, William Olsen, Nancy Eimers, 00:00:48.360 --> 00:00:51.420 align:middle line:84% Richard Lyons, and Loren Goodman. 00:00:51.420 --> 00:00:53.655 align:middle line:84% And thank you all for coming today. 00:00:53.655 --> 00:00:56.780 align:middle line:90% 00:00:56.780 --> 00:01:02.360 align:middle line:84% I feel it's our mission here today to go out in the world, 00:01:02.360 --> 00:01:09.460 align:middle line:84% and preach the Gospel of Jon, but all of us I think 00:01:09.460 --> 00:01:13.450 align:middle line:84% were very influenced by him as a teacher and a friend, 00:01:13.450 --> 00:01:16.360 align:middle line:84% and as a poet as well, but in the case of Jon, 00:01:16.360 --> 00:01:19.990 align:middle line:84% because those three things are almost inextricable, 00:01:19.990 --> 00:01:23.290 align:middle line:84% I feel some of the talk about Jon's poetry 00:01:23.290 --> 00:01:28.300 align:middle line:84% gets neglected in the welter of remembrances and commentaries 00:01:28.300 --> 00:01:32.530 align:middle line:84% about his teaching and his friendship with all of us. 00:01:32.530 --> 00:01:36.320 align:middle line:84% I think all of us here agree that Jon was a great poet. 00:01:36.320 --> 00:01:39.070 align:middle line:84% And I'm hoping today's panel will 00:01:39.070 --> 00:01:43.150 align:middle line:84% be able to sort out some of the reasons 00:01:43.150 --> 00:01:47.560 align:middle line:84% that we believe that this is so, and then to take this out 00:01:47.560 --> 00:01:53.200 align:middle line:84% into the world and to try to make Jon's poetry better known. 00:01:53.200 --> 00:01:56.200 align:middle line:84% Of course, those people who truly know poetry already 00:01:56.200 --> 00:01:57.350 align:middle line:90% know it. 00:01:57.350 --> 00:01:59.740 align:middle line:84% But I would like to hear Jon's poems more 00:01:59.740 --> 00:02:03.790 align:middle line:84% on the lips of my fellow poets and students 00:02:03.790 --> 00:02:05.150 align:middle line:90% across the country. 00:02:05.150 --> 00:02:07.390 align:middle line:84% And with that in mind, I'd like to open it up 00:02:07.390 --> 00:02:10.840 align:middle line:84% with the kind of broadest question of all, and something 00:02:10.840 --> 00:02:14.170 align:middle line:84% that I've heard from a number of you yesterday, 00:02:14.170 --> 00:02:19.000 align:middle line:84% and that question is why isn't Jon's poetry better known? 00:02:19.000 --> 00:02:21.850 align:middle line:84% And I wonder if someone would like to pick up 00:02:21.850 --> 00:02:22.915 align:middle line:90% on that to begin with? 00:02:22.915 --> 00:02:28.700 align:middle line:90% 00:02:28.700 --> 00:02:29.970 align:middle line:90% I mean this is pure opinion. 00:02:29.970 --> 00:02:31.228 align:middle line:90% I have nothing to-- 00:02:31.228 --> 00:02:33.020 align:middle line:84% Do you wants to take the microphone, Debra? 00:02:33.020 --> 00:02:35.400 align:middle line:90% Sure. 00:02:35.400 --> 00:02:42.220 align:middle line:84% This is pure opinion, because Jon was writing a lot more when 00:02:42.220 --> 00:02:44.960 align:middle line:84% he was younger, and I don't really know, 00:02:44.960 --> 00:02:47.910 align:middle line:84% I wasn't really aware of how poets 00:02:47.910 --> 00:02:50.610 align:middle line:84% got known besides through their books at that time, 00:02:50.610 --> 00:02:54.630 align:middle line:84% but he certainly wasn't in a scene of any kind and not 00:02:54.630 --> 00:02:55.480 align:middle line:90% even-- 00:02:55.480 --> 00:02:55.980 align:middle line:90% Anymore. 00:02:55.980 --> 00:02:59.952 align:middle line:84% He was local for a very long time and had an aversion to it. 00:02:59.952 --> 00:03:01.410 align:middle line:84% I was thinking last night and I had 00:03:01.410 --> 00:03:03.285 align:middle line:84% a couple of other people mentioned this, too. 00:03:03.285 --> 00:03:04.458 align:middle line:90% The last time I heard-- 00:03:04.458 --> 00:03:06.000 align:middle line:84% Scott and I were talking about this-- 00:03:06.000 --> 00:03:08.970 align:middle line:84% the last time I heard Jon read at ML, 00:03:08.970 --> 00:03:10.500 align:middle line:90% he so didn't want to read. 00:03:10.500 --> 00:03:15.780 align:middle line:84% He played Bodi's band and was telling great stories 00:03:15.780 --> 00:03:18.720 align:middle line:84% and read a few poems, but I don't 00:03:18.720 --> 00:03:23.430 align:middle line:84% think he wanted to be a personality of his poetry 00:03:23.430 --> 00:03:28.920 align:middle line:84% outside of the intimacy of a classroom or his friends, 00:03:28.920 --> 00:03:30.300 align:middle line:90% maybe. 00:03:30.300 --> 00:03:33.750 align:middle line:84% And went from maybe not wanting to do that a lot to really 00:03:33.750 --> 00:03:35.930 align:middle line:90% having an aversion to it. 00:03:35.930 --> 00:03:38.890 align:middle line:84% And how much of that was personal and how much of it was 00:03:38.890 --> 00:03:42.210 align:middle line:90% aesthetic and it just wasn't-- 00:03:42.210 --> 00:03:43.890 align:middle line:84% I want to address some of those ideas 00:03:43.890 --> 00:03:48.630 align:middle line:84% when I talk a little about the Eastern influence on him 00:03:48.630 --> 00:03:51.070 align:middle line:84% that I see, but I think that's probably more than anything 00:03:51.070 --> 00:03:51.570 align:middle line:90% else. 00:03:51.570 --> 00:03:56.190 align:middle line:84% I mean, how do people get ahead of people's work get known now? 00:03:56.190 --> 00:04:01.620 align:middle line:84% It's like through these conferences and awards 00:04:01.620 --> 00:04:07.170 align:middle line:84% and publications and this professionalizing that isn't-- 00:04:07.170 --> 00:04:09.600 align:middle line:84% it's become more and more a part of all the arts, I think. 00:04:09.600 --> 00:04:14.610 align:middle line:84% And as the influence of academia and these venues for celebrity 00:04:14.610 --> 00:04:16.320 align:middle line:90% have developed. 00:04:16.320 --> 00:04:21.540 align:middle line:84% In his times, in the 70s and 80s at the height of his career, 00:04:21.540 --> 00:04:25.140 align:middle line:84% there were only a few camps in poetry 00:04:25.140 --> 00:04:28.140 align:middle line:84% and they were most of the people who 00:04:28.140 --> 00:04:32.370 align:middle line:84% lived in the middle who used all kinds of devices, surrealism, 00:04:32.370 --> 00:04:34.590 align:middle line:84% all kinds of things were going on. 00:04:34.590 --> 00:04:38.370 align:middle line:84% But not enough difference to really separate them, 00:04:38.370 --> 00:04:42.390 align:middle line:84% and at other ends were important schools too, 00:04:42.390 --> 00:04:49.500 align:middle line:84% like Charles Olson and the the Beats and I don't know, 00:04:49.500 --> 00:04:50.790 align:middle line:90% I'm sure others. 00:04:50.790 --> 00:04:52.890 align:middle line:84% But now in the last 20 years, it's 00:04:52.890 --> 00:04:57.360 align:middle line:84% splintered so much that in a way we're all, every poet, 00:04:57.360 --> 00:04:59.700 align:middle line:90% is marginalized in a way. 00:04:59.700 --> 00:05:02.100 align:middle line:84% Every poet is marginalized, even the people 00:05:02.100 --> 00:05:03.870 align:middle line:90% who work from the center. 00:05:03.870 --> 00:05:09.360 align:middle line:84% And so younger people don't know his work, 00:05:09.360 --> 00:05:10.960 align:middle line:90% I think partly for that reason. 00:05:10.960 --> 00:05:14.040 align:middle line:84% And the other reason that he didn't have his face out there 00:05:14.040 --> 00:05:16.290 align:middle line:84% on the scene for many, many years. 00:05:16.290 --> 00:05:19.080 align:middle line:90% 00:05:19.080 --> 00:05:21.060 align:middle line:90% There's another aspect of this. 00:05:21.060 --> 00:05:23.220 align:middle line:84% I mean, I agree totally with this. 00:05:23.220 --> 00:05:27.340 align:middle line:84% The scene has changed to such a great degree. 00:05:27.340 --> 00:05:31.350 align:middle line:84% And one of the things that drives people's reputations 00:05:31.350 --> 00:05:36.030 align:middle line:84% in poetry now is personality and a certain kind of ability 00:05:36.030 --> 00:05:38.700 align:middle line:84% to get out there, to make yourself 00:05:38.700 --> 00:05:40.800 align:middle line:90% into a really public figure. 00:05:40.800 --> 00:05:42.510 align:middle line:90% If you think of like some-- 00:05:42.510 --> 00:05:45.810 align:middle line:84% and even somebody like Robert Hass who is not, 00:05:45.810 --> 00:05:50.790 align:middle line:84% by nature, you know, I mean he's a he's 00:05:50.790 --> 00:05:55.630 align:middle line:84% a guy who you can talk to in a very intimate way, 00:05:55.630 --> 00:05:57.510 align:middle line:84% but on the other hand, these are people 00:05:57.510 --> 00:06:02.790 align:middle line:84% who are used to being in public and in some sense using 00:06:02.790 --> 00:06:06.810 align:middle line:84% their personality to kind of establish a base. 00:06:06.810 --> 00:06:10.800 align:middle line:84% And also, I mean the world of poetry is much more. 00:06:10.800 --> 00:06:12.270 align:middle line:90% I mean reputations are estab-- 00:06:12.270 --> 00:06:16.620 align:middle line:84% I think when Jon was starting as a poet and-- maybe you could 00:06:16.620 --> 00:06:19.170 align:middle line:84% say if this is true or not, Steve-- 00:06:19.170 --> 00:06:24.750 align:middle line:84% people's reputations rose and fell by themselves almost. 00:06:24.750 --> 00:06:26.760 align:middle line:84% It seemed like a kind of organic process 00:06:26.760 --> 00:06:29.730 align:middle line:84% as opposed to part of the marketing mechanism that, 00:06:29.730 --> 00:06:35.302 align:middle line:84% even with poetry, governs publishing in such huge ways. 00:06:35.302 --> 00:06:37.260 align:middle line:84% The other thing that I wanted to say about this 00:06:37.260 --> 00:06:42.720 align:middle line:84% is that Jon's poetry does not fit neatly into any category. 00:06:42.720 --> 00:06:48.000 align:middle line:84% And it's not, on the one hand, autobiographical. 00:06:48.000 --> 00:06:52.900 align:middle line:84% It doesn't put the self on display in really obvious ways. 00:06:52.900 --> 00:06:57.520 align:middle line:84% On the other hand, it's although it's radical in form 00:06:57.520 --> 00:07:03.330 align:middle line:84% and in its variety of form, it's not experimental in the way 00:07:03.330 --> 00:07:05.400 align:middle line:90% that some schools are. 00:07:05.400 --> 00:07:09.240 align:middle line:84% So I think in that sense it's easy for him to be ignored, 00:07:09.240 --> 00:07:10.560 align:middle line:90% you know? 00:07:10.560 --> 00:07:13.440 align:middle line:84% And the other thing is, he just didn't, as Debra said, 00:07:13.440 --> 00:07:16.320 align:middle line:84% he didn't want to put himself out there anymore. 00:07:16.320 --> 00:07:18.030 align:middle line:84% I just want to say something very quickly 00:07:18.030 --> 00:07:21.540 align:middle line:84% just because David brought it up, made me think of it. 00:07:21.540 --> 00:07:24.880 align:middle line:84% His voice, really, it's a modest voice. 00:07:24.880 --> 00:07:25.380 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:07:25.380 --> 00:07:31.650 align:middle line:84% And if you write modestly, you do 00:07:31.650 --> 00:07:34.470 align:middle line:84% have to have some other kind of presence. 00:07:34.470 --> 00:07:36.510 align:middle line:84% You have to be out there somehow. 00:07:36.510 --> 00:07:38.620 align:middle line:90% Otherwise you get ignored. 00:07:38.620 --> 00:07:40.740 align:middle line:84% And I think that that's part of it as well. 00:07:40.740 --> 00:07:41.580 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:07:41.580 --> 00:07:43.410 align:middle line:84% "Number Seven" in the Little Blue Book 00:07:43.410 --> 00:07:48.270 align:middle line:84% says, "Quiet steady voice may be most enduring." 00:07:48.270 --> 00:07:51.060 align:middle line:84% And perhaps that's also our hope for today. 00:07:51.060 --> 00:07:55.750 align:middle line:84% Both Debra and David used the word intimate or intimacy 00:07:55.750 --> 00:07:59.010 align:middle line:84% in what they said, and I was just thinking that in response 00:07:59.010 --> 00:08:02.730 align:middle line:84% to what David had just said that Jon's work is not confessional 00:08:02.730 --> 00:08:04.410 align:middle line:90% but it is in fact intimate. 00:08:04.410 --> 00:08:06.600 align:middle line:84% I think that's an important distinction to make. 00:08:06.600 --> 00:08:11.340 align:middle line:84% Jon once said to me, when I was a kid poet, 00:08:11.340 --> 00:08:12.930 align:middle line:84% I asked him why he wrote and he said 00:08:12.930 --> 00:08:15.990 align:middle line:84% he wrote to make other people feel less lonely. 00:08:15.990 --> 00:08:18.240 align:middle line:84% And that's part of that intimacy, 00:08:18.240 --> 00:08:19.540 align:middle line:90% but not the giving forth. 00:08:19.540 --> 00:08:21.020 align:middle line:84% Someone else want to answer this? 00:08:21.020 --> 00:08:22.170 align:middle line:90% Nancy? 00:08:22.170 --> 00:08:27.360 align:middle line:84% On the question of intimacy, I have a colleague 00:08:27.360 --> 00:08:28.390 align:middle line:90% who teaches literature. 00:08:28.390 --> 00:08:31.410 align:middle line:84% And he's much younger than me sort of a cutting edge scholar, 00:08:31.410 --> 00:08:35.700 align:middle line:84% and I was enraged to hear that one of my MFA students 00:08:35.700 --> 00:08:37.530 align:middle line:84% reported that in his class, he referred 00:08:37.530 --> 00:08:41.610 align:middle line:84% to poetry as touchy feely, as if all poetry were touchy feely. 00:08:41.610 --> 00:08:44.670 align:middle line:84% And in 2008, when you got into the realm of the emotions 00:08:44.670 --> 00:08:47.430 align:middle line:84% you had to add a y or an ie to the word 00:08:47.430 --> 00:08:50.040 align:middle line:84% lest you be suspected of being sentimental 00:08:50.040 --> 00:08:53.250 align:middle line:84% in some way, but Jon's poetry, I've 00:08:53.250 --> 00:08:55.380 align:middle line:84% always associated with authenticity. 00:08:55.380 --> 00:08:58.020 align:middle line:84% Steve was just telling me that he, David Schloss, and Jon 00:08:58.020 --> 00:09:01.487 align:middle line:90% were known as the Sincerists. 00:09:01.487 --> 00:09:03.570 align:middle line:84% The conversation Bill and I've had all our lives-- 00:09:03.570 --> 00:09:08.230 align:middle line:84% we call sincerity to be a complicated thing that admits 00:09:08.230 --> 00:09:10.210 align:middle line:84% irony and I was looking at Jon's-- 00:09:10.210 --> 00:09:12.520 align:middle line:84% I have a Xerox copy of the Little Blue Book, which 00:09:12.520 --> 00:09:13.870 align:middle line:90% is somewhere in our house. 00:09:13.870 --> 00:09:16.140 align:middle line:84% And I was just thinking about how on the one hand, 00:09:16.140 --> 00:09:19.900 align:middle line:84% he says "Number two is explore different emotional attitudes, 00:09:19.900 --> 00:09:26.850 align:middle line:84% resignation, self anger, social anger, irony, largeness, and 36 00:09:26.850 --> 00:09:29.170 align:middle line:84% is cultivate that part of yourself that is most 00:09:29.170 --> 00:09:32.350 align:middle line:84% unsure, tentative, delicate, self dangerous, 00:09:32.350 --> 00:09:33.800 align:middle line:90% and expect to pay the price." 00:09:33.800 --> 00:09:35.680 align:middle line:84% But on the other hand, he says, "Don't 00:09:35.680 --> 00:09:38.500 align:middle line:84% be afraid of writing cold, detached poems. 00:09:38.500 --> 00:09:40.330 align:middle line:84% They sometimes lead to new perceptions." 00:09:40.330 --> 00:09:44.937 align:middle line:84% So authenticity or intimacy, whatever, I think these things 00:09:44.937 --> 00:09:45.520 align:middle line:90% are connected. 00:09:45.520 --> 00:09:48.910 align:middle line:84% It was a complicated thing, a composed thing, 00:09:48.910 --> 00:09:51.670 align:middle line:84% and a crafty thing, as well as a tender and generous thing. 00:09:51.670 --> 00:09:54.940 align:middle line:84% Yeah, because Jon is an extremely rhetorical poet 00:09:54.940 --> 00:09:56.050 align:middle line:90% at times. 00:09:56.050 --> 00:09:56.680 align:middle line:90% You know? 00:09:56.680 --> 00:09:59.192 align:middle line:84% He's not speaking directly at all times. 00:09:59.192 --> 00:10:00.400 align:middle line:90% There's a lot of indirection. 00:10:00.400 --> 00:10:02.500 align:middle line:84% There's a lot of associativeness in the work. 00:10:02.500 --> 00:10:04.040 align:middle line:90% You know, so. 00:10:04.040 --> 00:10:04.540 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:10:04.540 --> 00:10:07.900 align:middle line:84% It's interesting because although Jon 00:10:07.900 --> 00:10:11.800 align:middle line:84% was an intimate, that's the only way he could live in the world 00:10:11.800 --> 00:10:13.870 align:middle line:84% was to have an intimate conversation. 00:10:13.870 --> 00:10:17.590 align:middle line:84% And mostly he didn't live in the world for many years. 00:10:17.590 --> 00:10:21.220 align:middle line:90% But he was also cold. 00:10:21.220 --> 00:10:25.990 align:middle line:84% He also had a coldness in him and a distance and a kind 00:10:25.990 --> 00:10:27.790 align:middle line:90% of chilliness inside. 00:10:27.790 --> 00:10:31.450 align:middle line:84% Not towards you, who were with him, but a kind 00:10:31.450 --> 00:10:32.605 align:middle line:90% of manipulativeness and-- 00:10:32.605 --> 00:10:35.448 align:middle line:90% 00:10:35.448 --> 00:10:36.490 align:middle line:90% He'd play with your mind. 00:10:36.490 --> 00:10:37.360 align:middle line:90% He'd play with your mind. 00:10:37.360 --> 00:10:37.860 align:middle line:90% Willful. 00:10:37.860 --> 00:10:40.570 align:middle line:90% 00:10:40.570 --> 00:10:43.840 align:middle line:84% Not the same intimacy that you find in most of the poems. 00:10:43.840 --> 00:10:45.250 align:middle line:90% It's very mixed. 00:10:45.250 --> 00:10:46.780 align:middle line:90% It's very interesting. 00:10:46.780 --> 00:10:48.910 align:middle line:84% With that coldness, do you think that in a way 00:10:48.910 --> 00:10:52.420 align:middle line:84% he was trying to understand his emotions 00:10:52.420 --> 00:10:55.210 align:middle line:84% and intimacy as he worked through the process 00:10:55.210 --> 00:10:56.230 align:middle line:90% of his poems? 00:10:56.230 --> 00:10:58.180 align:middle line:84% I think of that wonderful poem "to you 00:10:58.180 --> 00:11:01.570 align:middle line:84% a commitment" in which it's almost about 00:11:01.570 --> 00:11:04.180 align:middle line:90% how it is that one feels. 00:11:04.180 --> 00:11:06.070 align:middle line:90% And a kind of learning that. 00:11:06.070 --> 00:11:07.280 align:middle line:90% Yeah, I think that's true. 00:11:07.280 --> 00:11:10.270 align:middle line:84% I mean, he was a friend who couldn't be a friend. 00:11:10.270 --> 00:11:14.050 align:middle line:84% He was incapable of maintaining the friendship. 00:11:14.050 --> 00:11:18.430 align:middle line:84% And the emotions in his poems I think 00:11:18.430 --> 00:11:22.805 align:middle line:84% are discovered in the poem rather than in the self. 00:11:22.805 --> 00:11:28.590 align:middle line:90% 00:11:28.590 --> 00:11:31.400 align:middle line:84% I just remember Jon, the thing that sticks in my mind 00:11:31.400 --> 00:11:35.410 align:middle line:84% is that once you establish your voice, you're stuck with it. 00:11:35.410 --> 00:11:38.700 align:middle line:84% And then he would give you that smile, that mischievous smile. 00:11:38.700 --> 00:11:43.020 align:middle line:84% And that's always been important to me. 00:11:43.020 --> 00:11:46.650 align:middle line:84% I think it has something to do with the-- 00:11:46.650 --> 00:11:49.920 align:middle line:84% we've been talking about intimacy and modesty, 00:11:49.920 --> 00:11:53.760 align:middle line:84% but there's some kind of grandness to that, too. 00:11:53.760 --> 00:11:57.240 align:middle line:84% I guess that's why I emailed that I want to say something 00:11:57.240 --> 00:11:58.920 align:middle line:84% about a Buddhist idea, but I don't think 00:11:58.920 --> 00:12:00.640 align:middle line:90% Jon saw himself as a Buddhist. 00:12:00.640 --> 00:12:02.178 align:middle line:90% Oh, yes. 00:12:02.178 --> 00:12:04.470 align:middle line:84% When we were in school together and then for some years 00:12:04.470 --> 00:12:06.780 align:middle line:84% afterwards, he didn't read a lot. 00:12:06.780 --> 00:12:10.230 align:middle line:84% I mean, he read poetry, but almost all his other reading, 00:12:10.230 --> 00:12:16.950 align:middle line:84% aside from comic books, was in Asian literature. 00:12:16.950 --> 00:12:18.330 align:middle line:90% And Ross McDonald novels. 00:12:18.330 --> 00:12:19.860 align:middle line:90% And Ross MacDonald novels. 00:12:19.860 --> 00:12:22.710 align:middle line:84% Chinese and Japanese poetry is what I mean. 00:12:22.710 --> 00:12:24.450 align:middle line:90% He was a faux Buddhist. 00:12:24.450 --> 00:12:26.880 align:middle line:90% Yeah, he was a faux Buddhist. 00:12:26.880 --> 00:12:28.235 align:middle line:90% I don't think it's necessary. 00:12:28.235 --> 00:12:29.610 align:middle line:84% I was thinking about these ideas, 00:12:29.610 --> 00:12:31.860 align:middle line:84% too, because when I was reading, thinking 00:12:31.860 --> 00:12:33.690 align:middle line:84% about what poem of his I wanted to read 00:12:33.690 --> 00:12:38.040 align:middle line:84% and how much time I just spent with his poems 00:12:38.040 --> 00:12:42.210 align:middle line:84% recently, that I kept thinking of it being 00:12:42.210 --> 00:12:46.080 align:middle line:84% Chinese and Asian influence and his teaching of moments 00:12:46.080 --> 00:12:46.650 align:middle line:90% translations. 00:12:46.650 --> 00:12:49.140 align:middle line:90% I brought some Li Po and others. 00:12:49.140 --> 00:12:53.930 align:middle line:90% 00:12:53.930 --> 00:12:59.480 align:middle line:84% The simplicity and formality of the surface 00:12:59.480 --> 00:13:01.490 align:middle line:84% of so many of his early poems, they kind of 00:13:01.490 --> 00:13:10.220 align:middle line:84% moved away from that later, and the not confessional 00:13:10.220 --> 00:13:12.380 align:middle line:90% and rhetorical, but not often. 00:13:12.380 --> 00:13:15.110 align:middle line:84% Sometimes, but not often primarily 00:13:15.110 --> 00:13:21.590 align:middle line:84% about the rhetoric either, was this desire to awaken in a poem 00:13:21.590 --> 00:13:26.570 align:middle line:84% through contrast of polar things. 00:13:26.570 --> 00:13:30.890 align:middle line:84% The observation and then the moment and the idea 00:13:30.890 --> 00:13:33.830 align:middle line:84% and all of those things that is at the center 00:13:33.830 --> 00:13:37.100 align:middle line:90% of Chinese poetry, primarily. 00:13:37.100 --> 00:13:40.265 align:middle line:90% That they call it jing-- 00:13:40.265 --> 00:13:41.390 align:middle line:90% I don't know how to say it. 00:13:41.390 --> 00:13:45.950 align:middle line:84% But it is a Buddhist concept, too. 00:13:45.950 --> 00:13:50.570 align:middle line:84% I'm not sure if it came through poets 00:13:50.570 --> 00:13:55.670 align:middle line:84% who were court poets as well as poets who were aesthetes, 00:13:55.670 --> 00:13:56.360 align:middle line:90% or whatever. 00:13:56.360 --> 00:13:58.360 align:middle line:90% But that was very much there. 00:13:58.360 --> 00:14:00.890 align:middle line:84% And so this morning I went oh, Rexroth. 00:14:00.890 --> 00:14:04.820 align:middle line:84% And who writes a little bit about that influence 00:14:04.820 --> 00:14:08.420 align:middle line:84% on a lot of poets that we can trace, 00:14:08.420 --> 00:14:14.480 align:middle line:84% but how that was in the mainstream of poetry 00:14:14.480 --> 00:14:16.790 align:middle line:90% by the 1940s, maybe. 00:14:16.790 --> 00:14:20.060 align:middle line:84% So it was, then it was in the air, of course, 00:14:20.060 --> 00:14:23.900 align:middle line:84% and your coming of age era, these ideas 00:14:23.900 --> 00:14:31.940 align:middle line:84% as a counterbalance to Western civilization and post World 00:14:31.940 --> 00:14:34.520 align:middle line:90% War II Western. 00:14:34.520 --> 00:14:35.630 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:14:35.630 --> 00:14:36.470 align:middle line:90% Consumerist culture. 00:14:36.470 --> 00:14:36.970 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:14:36.970 --> 00:14:39.110 align:middle line:84% Now we're, I mean to go back to where 00:14:39.110 --> 00:14:42.170 align:middle line:84% we started this conversation, we're not in that place at all. 00:14:42.170 --> 00:14:45.405 align:middle line:90% 00:14:45.405 --> 00:14:47.510 align:middle line:84% If you think about it, as a culture, 00:14:47.510 --> 00:14:50.870 align:middle line:84% but also in the poetry culture, we're very far away from that. 00:14:50.870 --> 00:14:54.650 align:middle line:84% One of the strange things about his interest in Li Po and Du 00:14:54.650 --> 00:14:58.970 align:middle line:84% Fu, especially, was that we read together often 00:14:58.970 --> 00:15:04.160 align:middle line:84% the poems they had written as old men as and as old friends. 00:15:04.160 --> 00:15:08.930 align:middle line:84% All ambition is gone, which is a Buddhist concept. 00:15:08.930 --> 00:15:11.870 align:middle line:90% And death was on their mind. 00:15:11.870 --> 00:15:13.970 align:middle line:84% But we're talking about Jon's, really, 00:15:13.970 --> 00:15:17.750 align:middle line:84% his final book, which is In Sepia, 00:15:17.750 --> 00:15:20.510 align:middle line:84% and he speaks as an old man speaks. 00:15:20.510 --> 00:15:22.730 align:middle line:90% And he's 30 something years old. 00:15:22.730 --> 00:15:25.430 align:middle line:84% "We realize we can no longer begin again." 00:15:25.430 --> 00:15:26.840 align:middle line:90% He says that often. 00:15:26.840 --> 00:15:28.730 align:middle line:90% He would say to me often. 00:15:28.730 --> 00:15:30.290 align:middle line:84% Which has to do with what Rich says. 00:15:30.290 --> 00:15:32.185 align:middle line:90% You know, your voice. 00:15:32.185 --> 00:15:35.090 align:middle line:84% You can never change your character. 00:15:35.090 --> 00:15:39.170 align:middle line:84% And I finally convinced him one could by changing my own, 00:15:39.170 --> 00:15:42.710 align:middle line:84% but because he didn't believe in changing one's character, 00:15:42.710 --> 00:15:46.760 align:middle line:90% he defeated himself in life. 00:15:46.760 --> 00:15:53.040 align:middle line:84% And I could see that he had no place else to go in the poetry. 00:15:53.040 --> 00:15:59.060 align:middle line:84% So what he did was go into the playful unique and eccentric 00:15:59.060 --> 00:16:02.360 align:middle line:84% postmodernism, which was a lot of fun. 00:16:02.360 --> 00:16:04.280 align:middle line:90% It's a unique post-modern. 00:16:04.280 --> 00:16:07.640 align:middle line:90% Doesn't fit into it, but, it-- 00:16:07.640 --> 00:16:09.510 align:middle line:90% [INAUDIBLE] less postmodern. 00:16:09.510 --> 00:16:12.630 align:middle line:84% No, I mean, what you just said I have say it, 00:16:12.630 --> 00:16:14.780 align:middle line:84% Kevin brought up the same idea the other night 00:16:14.780 --> 00:16:16.910 align:middle line:84% when we were talking about his poems. 00:16:16.910 --> 00:16:19.400 align:middle line:84% He said, "In some ways as a young man, 00:16:19.400 --> 00:16:20.720 align:middle line:90% he wrote like an old man. 00:16:20.720 --> 00:16:23.930 align:middle line:84% And as an old man, he wrote like a young one. 00:16:23.930 --> 00:16:25.160 align:middle line:90% That's beautiful. 00:16:25.160 --> 00:16:28.370 align:middle line:84% Because we were thinking about Day Moon and some of those 00:16:28.370 --> 00:16:29.555 align:middle line:90% poems and how-- 00:16:29.555 --> 00:16:32.487 align:middle line:90% 00:16:32.487 --> 00:16:34.070 align:middle line:84% Richard touched on it last night, too, 00:16:34.070 --> 00:16:38.720 align:middle line:84% but-- the connection through Bodi to life [? and the pull ?] 00:16:38.720 --> 00:16:39.807 align:middle line:90% that was so intense. 00:16:39.807 --> 00:16:40.640 align:middle line:90% And the Asian thing. 00:16:40.640 --> 00:16:42.098 align:middle line:84% I was thinking about Bodi with that 00:16:42.098 --> 00:16:46.520 align:middle line:84% too, but that he was kind of becoming young, becoming 00:16:46.520 --> 00:16:50.660 align:middle line:90% alive through that. 00:16:50.660 --> 00:16:53.060 align:middle line:84% And then and then of course everything in his life 00:16:53.060 --> 00:16:54.440 align:middle line:90% changed after Bodi left. 00:16:54.440 --> 00:16:57.320 align:middle line:84% You said no postmodern so tell me. 00:16:57.320 --> 00:16:58.170 align:middle line:90% Right? 00:16:58.170 --> 00:17:00.835 align:middle line:84% The poems don't feel post-modern at all. 00:17:00.835 --> 00:17:01.710 align:middle line:90% They're just playful. 00:17:01.710 --> 00:17:02.090 align:middle line:90% That's all. 00:17:02.090 --> 00:17:02.590 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:17:02.590 --> 00:17:06.800 align:middle line:84% I mean the way they're organized structurally, 00:17:06.800 --> 00:17:09.020 align:middle line:84% they're not they're not postmodern. 00:17:09.020 --> 00:17:10.579 align:middle line:84% But you also once told me, Steve, I 00:17:10.579 --> 00:17:13.099 align:middle line:84% think I remember this correctly that when you looked 00:17:13.099 --> 00:17:18.619 align:middle line:84% at some of those Du Fu poems about being older and aging 00:17:18.619 --> 00:17:20.280 align:middle line:84% and coming to terms with death, he 00:17:20.280 --> 00:17:21.530 align:middle line:90% wrote those when he was young. 00:17:21.530 --> 00:17:22.530 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:17:22.530 --> 00:17:27.319 align:middle line:84% So that's very interesting that there's at least the parallel. 00:17:27.319 --> 00:17:30.890 align:middle line:84% How would you talk about the way they make sense and don't 00:17:30.890 --> 00:17:32.130 align:middle line:90% make sense? 00:17:32.130 --> 00:17:36.985 align:middle line:84% The Day Moon book, the way they play with nonsense. 00:17:36.985 --> 00:17:39.110 align:middle line:84% That's why I guess I was thinking of postmodernism. 00:17:39.110 --> 00:17:41.840 align:middle line:84% But if you read them on a tonal level, 00:17:41.840 --> 00:17:44.480 align:middle line:84% actually there is, even with that 00:17:44.480 --> 00:17:48.710 align:middle line:84% the broadside poem, that's an enormously playful 00:17:48.710 --> 00:17:51.530 align:middle line:84% artificial construction, and yet there's 00:17:51.530 --> 00:17:56.630 align:middle line:84% an enormous amount of this intimacy and sincerity coming 00:17:56.630 --> 00:17:59.480 align:middle line:90% through the cracks of that. 00:17:59.480 --> 00:18:03.290 align:middle line:84% And I was thinking when Debra read "Counting the days" 00:18:03.290 --> 00:18:08.237 align:middle line:84% last night, there was a moment halfway through the poem-- 00:18:08.237 --> 00:18:10.070 align:middle line:84% I'm going to read the first half of the poem 00:18:10.070 --> 00:18:12.860 align:middle line:84% because this is totally about what you just said-- 00:18:12.860 --> 00:18:16.220 align:middle line:84% that you suddenly realize one of the things 00:18:16.220 --> 00:18:19.550 align:middle line:84% he was doing in his poems was a kind of intimacy of process 00:18:19.550 --> 00:18:23.570 align:middle line:84% that was all about the now and it was so intricate, OK, 00:18:23.570 --> 00:18:27.560 align:middle line:84% and like he changes time and place about four or five 00:18:27.560 --> 00:18:30.068 align:middle line:90% times within two stanzas. 00:18:30.068 --> 00:18:32.360 align:middle line:84% I'm just going to read this because I think it's very-- 00:18:32.360 --> 00:18:35.120 align:middle line:90% [INTERPOSING VOICES] 00:18:35.120 --> 00:18:35.980 align:middle line:90% 163. 00:18:35.980 --> 00:18:36.950 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:18:36.950 --> 00:18:38.840 align:middle line:90% In the Bible. 00:18:38.840 --> 00:18:42.800 align:middle line:90% [INTERPOSING VOICES] 00:18:42.800 --> 00:18:45.320 align:middle line:84% It's the poem, that section of the In Sepia 00:18:45.320 --> 00:18:48.710 align:middle line:84% is prefaced by a quote from Rilke and in a way 00:18:48.710 --> 00:18:52.520 align:middle line:90% the quote is an idea. 00:18:52.520 --> 00:18:55.100 align:middle line:84% It is an expression of a thought. 00:18:55.100 --> 00:19:00.470 align:middle line:84% What Jon's poem is the process of that thinking and feeling 00:19:00.470 --> 00:19:02.325 align:middle line:84% actually enacted in front of you. 00:19:02.325 --> 00:19:03.950 align:middle line:84% I mean, he really wants to get as close 00:19:03.950 --> 00:19:06.200 align:middle line:84% as-- he's a little like Creeley in that sense. 00:19:06.200 --> 00:19:09.320 align:middle line:84% You just feel him pushing through music 00:19:09.320 --> 00:19:11.810 align:middle line:84% into consciousness of the moment. 00:19:11.810 --> 00:19:15.170 align:middle line:84% The phrase that Olson uses is the poem under hand. 00:19:15.170 --> 00:19:19.430 align:middle line:84% And you feel that in Jon, that it was very improvisational 00:19:19.430 --> 00:19:22.260 align:middle line:84% and very directed out of this moment. 00:19:22.260 --> 00:19:24.020 align:middle line:90% So the Rilke quote is this-- 00:19:24.020 --> 00:19:26.540 align:middle line:84% "And sometimes in those solemn hours 00:19:26.540 --> 00:19:30.450 align:middle line:84% I felt my life already lived in over as in old journals 00:19:30.450 --> 00:19:32.760 align:middle line:84% we come upon a story that seems our own 00:19:32.760 --> 00:19:35.620 align:middle line:90% and speaks then passes." 00:19:35.620 --> 00:19:36.960 align:middle line:90% This is "Counting the days." 00:19:36.960 --> 00:19:41.730 align:middle line:84% "Just as we wake up, yawn, and lift a shade to explore, 00:19:41.730 --> 00:19:44.520 align:middle line:84% always imperfectly amazed at subtle change 00:19:44.520 --> 00:19:48.240 align:middle line:84% but limited by expectations in the windows frame 00:19:48.240 --> 00:19:49.890 align:middle line:90% from which we gaze. 00:19:49.890 --> 00:19:54.300 align:middle line:84% A yard of weeds and dogs and brown boughs, 00:19:54.300 --> 00:19:59.850 align:middle line:84% though sometimes even the boughs are altered by falling snow. 00:19:59.850 --> 00:20:03.300 align:middle line:84% So he is counting the days, the years, 00:20:03.300 --> 00:20:07.590 align:middle line:84% back toward a serious initial thought that he was here, 00:20:07.590 --> 00:20:10.290 align:middle line:84% was someone, was counting the days 00:20:10.290 --> 00:20:14.880 align:middle line:84% toward when he would, today, count back an important deja 00:20:14.880 --> 00:20:16.290 align:middle line:90% vu. 00:20:16.290 --> 00:20:20.310 align:middle line:84% Accompany him, please, this journey into disillusion 00:20:20.310 --> 00:20:24.030 align:middle line:84% as memories become events, become anticipations, 00:20:24.030 --> 00:20:25.140 align:middle line:90% then dissolve. 00:20:25.140 --> 00:20:28.320 align:middle line:84% Will empty us of our complex doubts. 00:20:28.320 --> 00:20:29.880 align:middle line:84% You will certainly love yourselves 00:20:29.880 --> 00:20:35.640 align:middle line:84% as history, potential which only took a certain lovely arbitrary 00:20:35.640 --> 00:20:36.840 align:middle line:90% route. 00:20:36.840 --> 00:20:39.990 align:middle line:84% As on a December afternoon, the stillness of which 00:20:39.990 --> 00:20:43.050 align:middle line:84% engenders that image of falling snow. 00:20:43.050 --> 00:20:45.690 align:middle line:90% We now begin again. 00:20:45.690 --> 00:20:48.510 align:middle line:90% That art our lives become." 00:20:48.510 --> 00:20:52.260 align:middle line:84% And when it gets to the deja vu thing, when you read it 00:20:52.260 --> 00:20:54.840 align:middle line:90% last night I just went [GASP]. 00:20:54.840 --> 00:20:56.790 align:middle line:90% It was so astounding. 00:20:56.790 --> 00:21:00.660 align:middle line:84% I just felt like he did something--it's a extremely 00:21:00.660 --> 00:21:04.890 align:middle line:84% rhetorically intricate passage, and yet it completely dissolves 00:21:04.890 --> 00:21:08.710 align:middle line:84% through the rhetoricity into the moment. 00:21:08.710 --> 00:21:12.875 align:middle line:84% And I think that is so distinctive in American poetry. 00:21:12.875 --> 00:21:15.000 align:middle line:84% I think it's just a really, really difficult thing. 00:21:15.000 --> 00:21:17.083 align:middle line:84% Whether it comes out of Buddhism, whatever it was, 00:21:17.083 --> 00:21:20.460 align:middle line:84% I think he was able to be in that moment of making the poem. 00:21:20.460 --> 00:21:21.360 align:middle line:90% And making himself. 00:21:21.360 --> 00:21:22.950 align:middle line:90% In making himself, yeah. 00:21:22.950 --> 00:21:26.010 align:middle line:84% And he was he had a self revising consciousness, 00:21:26.010 --> 00:21:29.760 align:middle line:84% so the poems are constantly doubling back on themselves 00:21:29.760 --> 00:21:31.530 align:middle line:90% within a sentence. 00:21:31.530 --> 00:21:32.860 align:middle line:90% But he looks ditzy. 00:21:32.860 --> 00:21:34.860 align:middle line:84% One of the stunning things about that poem is he 00:21:34.860 --> 00:21:40.270 align:middle line:84% looks ahead to the time when he'll be nothing but history. 00:21:40.270 --> 00:21:40.770 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:21:40.770 --> 00:21:41.940 align:middle line:90% I mean, when it all stops. 00:21:41.940 --> 00:21:42.810 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:21:42.810 --> 00:21:43.860 align:middle line:90% When it's stasis. 00:21:43.860 --> 00:21:44.500 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:21:44.500 --> 00:21:45.000 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:21:45.000 --> 00:21:46.297 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:21:46.297 --> 00:21:48.130 align:middle line:84% I'd like to let some of the folks to my left 00:21:48.130 --> 00:21:49.050 align:middle line:90% [INTERPOSING VOICES] 00:21:49.050 --> 00:21:49.560 align:middle line:90% That's fine. 00:21:49.560 --> 00:21:50.310 align:middle line:90% Everything is wonderful. 00:21:50.310 --> 00:21:50.730 align:middle line:90% Oh, yeah. 00:21:50.730 --> 00:21:51.230 align:middle line:90% Sure. 00:21:51.230 --> 00:21:53.865 align:middle line:90% 00:21:53.865 --> 00:21:55.740 align:middle line:84% Bill, I know you were about to say something. 00:21:55.740 --> 00:21:56.573 align:middle line:90% Let's change places. 00:21:56.573 --> 00:21:59.490 align:middle line:90% 00:21:59.490 --> 00:22:01.075 align:middle line:90% Something to do-- 00:22:01.075 --> 00:22:01.950 align:middle line:90% Bill, can't hear you. 00:22:01.950 --> 00:22:03.090 align:middle line:90% Syl, take the mic please. 00:22:03.090 --> 00:22:06.450 align:middle line:84% Something to do with what Steve said about Jon's conviction 00:22:06.450 --> 00:22:11.070 align:middle line:84% that you can't change your character, and how that-- 00:22:11.070 --> 00:22:15.780 align:middle line:84% in my mind that was the one abstraction 00:22:15.780 --> 00:22:18.930 align:middle line:84% that Jon held to dearly, and Jon was 00:22:18.930 --> 00:22:24.720 align:middle line:84% a poet who created double abstractions really 00:22:24.720 --> 00:22:29.040 align:middle line:84% well because he was never imprisoned by them, 00:22:29.040 --> 00:22:32.220 align:middle line:84% except perhaps that one abstraction and what 00:22:32.220 --> 00:22:35.370 align:middle line:84% that meant in Jon's case was a poetry-- 00:22:35.370 --> 00:22:39.450 align:middle line:84% and this goes back to what Dave Rivard just said, was 00:22:39.450 --> 00:22:41.430 align:middle line:90% that sense that life is over. 00:22:41.430 --> 00:22:44.190 align:middle line:90% A fadedness, an inevitability. 00:22:44.190 --> 00:22:47.220 align:middle line:84% And then you think, what's your way out of that? 00:22:47.220 --> 00:22:48.240 align:middle line:90% Right? 00:22:48.240 --> 00:22:50.865 align:middle line:90% Company, I guess. 00:22:50.865 --> 00:22:52.440 align:middle line:90% Keep me company. 00:22:52.440 --> 00:22:54.150 align:middle line:90% That's the way. 00:22:54.150 --> 00:22:57.120 align:middle line:90% That's the way out of that trap. 00:22:57.120 --> 00:23:00.870 align:middle line:84% And I was also thinking about the question of sincerity, 00:23:00.870 --> 00:23:05.220 align:middle line:84% which Nancy and I have talked about a number of times 00:23:05.220 --> 00:23:10.050 align:middle line:84% through the years and how in many hands, 00:23:10.050 --> 00:23:15.960 align:middle line:84% sincerity is just yet another manner of presentation, 00:23:15.960 --> 00:23:18.010 align:middle line:90% a mask of sorts. 00:23:18.010 --> 00:23:18.780 align:middle line:90% That's right. 00:23:18.780 --> 00:23:25.950 align:middle line:84% Whereas in Jon's hands, or in his mind and his poetry, 00:23:25.950 --> 00:23:31.950 align:middle line:84% whatever, as Mike Collier put it, the modesty of his poems 00:23:31.950 --> 00:23:36.870 align:middle line:84% was by no means limited in whatever humility Jon reached 00:23:36.870 --> 00:23:42.660 align:middle line:84% in his poetry and I believed he did, it was an active humility. 00:23:42.660 --> 00:23:45.310 align:middle line:90% 00:23:45.310 --> 00:23:51.540 align:middle line:84% The kind of tranquility that I value in Jon's poetry immensely 00:23:51.540 --> 00:23:59.460 align:middle line:84% is counteracted by something like an absolute alertness. 00:23:59.460 --> 00:24:03.940 align:middle line:84% That's something of the mixture that makes Jon. 00:24:03.940 --> 00:24:07.810 align:middle line:84% During poetry, [INAUDIBLE] I will continue. 00:24:07.810 --> 00:24:09.208 align:middle line:90% Hey Bill, do you think-- 00:24:09.208 --> 00:24:10.000 align:middle line:90% I was just saying-- 00:24:10.000 --> 00:24:10.400 align:middle line:90% Michael. 00:24:10.400 --> 00:24:11.025 align:middle line:90% The microphone. 00:24:11.025 --> 00:24:12.890 align:middle line:84% Oh, I was just thinking as you were talking, 00:24:12.890 --> 00:24:17.110 align:middle line:84% Eliot in that famous essay, Tradition and the Individual 00:24:17.110 --> 00:24:21.610 align:middle line:84% Talent, he talks about the escape from personality. 00:24:21.610 --> 00:24:22.300 align:middle line:90% Yes. 00:24:22.300 --> 00:24:26.290 align:middle line:84% And in some ways I think that applies to Jon 00:24:26.290 --> 00:24:28.600 align:middle line:84% and that's what the work was about. 00:24:28.600 --> 00:24:31.470 align:middle line:84% Talk about objective correlative. 00:24:31.470 --> 00:24:36.550 align:middle line:84% It really was and Eliot says in that, "only someone who 00:24:36.550 --> 00:24:40.150 align:middle line:84% has a personality to escape from knows what it means 00:24:40.150 --> 00:24:42.650 align:middle line:90% to want to escape from it." 00:24:42.650 --> 00:24:44.680 align:middle line:90% And I think there's a-- 00:24:44.680 --> 00:24:48.670 align:middle line:84% Well there's only one poem, one of the most prominent poems 00:24:48.670 --> 00:24:56.410 align:middle line:84% in the collection is marked by a specific autobiographical 00:24:56.410 --> 00:24:58.810 align:middle line:90% event, and that's the title. 00:24:58.810 --> 00:24:59.710 align:middle line:90% Who's next? 00:24:59.710 --> 00:25:02.650 align:middle line:90% And that's whoo whoo. 00:25:02.650 --> 00:25:05.150 align:middle line:90% The drinking. 00:25:05.150 --> 00:25:09.370 align:middle line:84% Yeah and that's the title poem "The Milky Way" 00:25:09.370 --> 00:25:12.940 align:middle line:84% in which it talks about Bodi's first diabetic coma. 00:25:12.940 --> 00:25:15.790 align:middle line:90% Will you read that, Steve? 00:25:15.790 --> 00:25:17.380 align:middle line:90% OK. 00:25:17.380 --> 00:25:20.440 align:middle line:84% But what I wanted to say around that-- 00:25:20.440 --> 00:25:24.190 align:middle line:90% I don't need both-- 00:25:24.190 --> 00:25:27.160 align:middle line:84% is it the poems, you know is that a confessional 00:25:27.160 --> 00:25:30.400 align:middle line:84% or personal, they are confessional and personal 00:25:30.400 --> 00:25:32.980 align:middle line:90% but they're made up in a way. 00:25:32.980 --> 00:25:34.870 align:middle line:90% And they're mythic. 00:25:34.870 --> 00:25:37.750 align:middle line:84% I mean that's what we're all hoping for, the Universal. 00:25:37.750 --> 00:25:42.670 align:middle line:84% They're mythic, and their events are really almost all made up 00:25:42.670 --> 00:25:45.190 align:middle line:90% except for the one with Bodi. 00:25:45.190 --> 00:25:45.880 align:middle line:90% Where is it? 00:25:45.880 --> 00:25:47.140 align:middle line:90% Page 16. 00:25:47.140 --> 00:25:49.420 align:middle line:90% Thank you. 00:25:49.420 --> 00:25:50.170 align:middle line:90% Thank you, Pastor. 00:25:50.170 --> 00:25:54.730 align:middle line:90% 00:25:54.730 --> 00:25:56.210 align:middle line:90% Little Black Book. 00:25:56.210 --> 00:25:56.710 align:middle line:90% Part 00:25:56.710 --> 00:26:00.850 align:middle line:84% of my love for this poem is a reflection 00:26:00.850 --> 00:26:03.880 align:middle line:84% of my admiration for Jon's ability 00:26:03.880 --> 00:26:11.890 align:middle line:84% to create patterns musically and by sound and then violate them. 00:26:11.890 --> 00:26:13.780 align:middle line:90% So he love patterns. 00:26:13.780 --> 00:26:18.130 align:middle line:84% He was a student of the conventional poetry 00:26:18.130 --> 00:26:21.490 align:middle line:84% we had received, metered and rhyme poetry at that 00:26:21.490 --> 00:26:25.360 align:middle line:84% point in graduate school, like everybody else was, 00:26:25.360 --> 00:26:27.370 align:middle line:84% and then when he broke from it he still 00:26:27.370 --> 00:26:29.890 align:middle line:84% was a formalist all the time, a formulist, 00:26:29.890 --> 00:26:32.050 align:middle line:90% but a mischievous one. 00:26:32.050 --> 00:26:34.270 align:middle line:90% I once worked in a class-- 00:26:34.270 --> 00:26:39.760 align:middle line:84% we had to connect all the like sounds in this poem. 00:26:39.760 --> 00:26:41.422 align:middle line:84% I think, Boyer, were you part of that? 00:26:41.422 --> 00:26:42.130 align:middle line:90% I can't remember. 00:26:42.130 --> 00:26:44.020 align:middle line:90% But it was like a spider web. 00:26:44.020 --> 00:26:46.450 align:middle line:84% There was so many repetitions in the poem. 00:26:46.450 --> 00:26:48.310 align:middle line:90% He had a great natural ear. 00:26:48.310 --> 00:26:50.710 align:middle line:84% I mean, really one of the great ones. 00:26:50.710 --> 00:26:51.880 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:26:51.880 --> 00:26:53.470 align:middle line:90% "The Milky Way." 00:26:53.470 --> 00:26:56.440 align:middle line:84% "When I was a boy, the Milky Way floated just 00:26:56.440 --> 00:26:58.330 align:middle line:90% over the city of Boston. 00:26:58.330 --> 00:27:02.560 align:middle line:84% So I was lucky to live in that place, that house where 00:27:02.560 --> 00:27:06.190 align:middle line:84% my father lathered his face and like the moon, 00:27:06.190 --> 00:27:10.450 align:middle line:84% went out, came back, walking winter nights beneath the Milky 00:27:10.450 --> 00:27:11.470 align:middle line:90% Way. 00:27:11.470 --> 00:27:13.810 align:middle line:90% Few thoughts, few fears. 00:27:13.810 --> 00:27:16.510 align:middle line:84% A way of sleeping through the night. 00:27:16.510 --> 00:27:19.840 align:middle line:84% When my son lay sewn to the sheets, adrift 00:27:19.840 --> 00:27:24.790 align:middle line:84% in his diabetic coma among the blown seductive stars, 00:27:24.790 --> 00:27:27.280 align:middle line:84% I could not think of anything to say 00:27:27.280 --> 00:27:30.550 align:middle line:90% for he was not anywhere nearby. 00:27:30.550 --> 00:27:33.400 align:middle line:90% He said Papa and came back. 00:27:33.400 --> 00:27:37.420 align:middle line:84% Tonight in his play he captains a sleek Starship 00:27:37.420 --> 00:27:39.880 align:middle line:90% toward the Milky Way. 00:27:39.880 --> 00:27:43.000 align:middle line:84% I was a boy, the city of Boston lay miles away 00:27:43.000 --> 00:27:44.980 align:middle line:90% within our sight. 00:27:44.980 --> 00:27:49.000 align:middle line:84% Evenings we set our chairs upon the lawn and talked. 00:27:49.000 --> 00:27:52.480 align:middle line:84% Few thoughts, a way of watching until dark. 00:27:52.480 --> 00:27:56.260 align:middle line:84% Then as our small wickers floated through the night, 00:27:56.260 --> 00:27:59.830 align:middle line:84% I wished I might be taken away to live forever 00:27:59.830 --> 00:28:02.890 align:middle line:84% in that distant city made wholly of light." 00:28:02.890 --> 00:28:06.490 align:middle line:90% 00:28:06.490 --> 00:28:08.260 align:middle line:90% Escape. 00:28:08.260 --> 00:28:09.370 align:middle line:90% Into eternity. 00:28:09.370 --> 00:28:11.200 align:middle line:90% Blown seductive stars, indeed. 00:28:11.200 --> 00:28:13.330 align:middle line:84% I don't think there's a poet other than Lowell 00:28:13.330 --> 00:28:15.370 align:middle line:84% who uses adjectives better than Jon 00:28:15.370 --> 00:28:19.330 align:middle line:84% does, both with restraint and with power. 00:28:19.330 --> 00:28:22.060 align:middle line:84% What an interesting adjective pack there. 00:28:22.060 --> 00:28:23.710 align:middle line:90% Blown seductive stars. 00:28:23.710 --> 00:28:26.152 align:middle line:84% Who would put those words together other than Jon? 00:28:26.152 --> 00:28:27.610 align:middle line:84% You see that in a lot of the people 00:28:27.610 --> 00:28:31.130 align:middle line:84% that he influenced, like Levis, for instance, does it. 00:28:31.130 --> 00:28:31.630 align:middle line:90% And Jorie. 00:28:31.630 --> 00:28:33.630 align:middle line:90% Jorie Graham. 00:28:33.630 --> 00:28:34.630 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:28:34.630 --> 00:28:36.850 align:middle line:84% Do you want to get in on this, Loren? 00:28:36.850 --> 00:28:37.660 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:28:37.660 --> 00:28:42.640 align:middle line:84% I see transformations for modulations and changes 00:28:42.640 --> 00:28:46.430 align:middle line:90% throughout his work as poetry. 00:28:46.430 --> 00:28:49.120 align:middle line:84% And as a poet, just some things I remember 00:28:49.120 --> 00:28:54.190 align:middle line:84% saying or just idea of himself as a poet, 00:28:54.190 --> 00:28:55.420 align:middle line:90% I asked him one time. 00:28:55.420 --> 00:28:59.230 align:middle line:84% I was reading a poet of the same generation 00:28:59.230 --> 00:29:01.330 align:middle line:84% and thought they probably knew each other 00:29:01.330 --> 00:29:03.010 align:middle line:84% and was very excited about his work and. 00:29:03.010 --> 00:29:06.100 align:middle line:84% I said, did you know this person? 00:29:06.100 --> 00:29:07.870 align:middle line:90% He said, yeah, I read with him. 00:29:07.870 --> 00:29:09.870 align:middle line:84% But what did you what did you think of his work? 00:29:09.870 --> 00:29:15.130 align:middle line:84% He said, well, back then I mistakenly 00:29:15.130 --> 00:29:20.080 align:middle line:84% or stupidly I just thought I was better. 00:29:20.080 --> 00:29:23.350 align:middle line:84% That seems to be something that changed later. 00:29:23.350 --> 00:29:26.260 align:middle line:84% Yeah, his competition was fierce back then. 00:29:26.260 --> 00:29:29.700 align:middle line:84% And combined with alcohol, he was a judgmental person 00:29:29.700 --> 00:29:31.120 align:middle line:90% in normal ways. 00:29:31.120 --> 00:29:36.630 align:middle line:84% Later, I mean, he taught me to stop being so judgmental. 00:29:36.630 --> 00:29:39.200 align:middle line:84% But what's the essence of what you're saying, though? 00:29:39.200 --> 00:29:39.700 align:middle line:90% OK. 00:29:39.700 --> 00:29:42.640 align:middle line:84% So that's, I guess, his idea of himself as a poet 00:29:42.640 --> 00:29:44.380 align:middle line:90% in some sense. 00:29:44.380 --> 00:29:48.350 align:middle line:84% And an example of how he might change. 00:29:48.350 --> 00:29:54.250 align:middle line:84% And another is in his formally, Michael mentioned earlier that 00:29:54.250 --> 00:29:55.900 align:middle line:84% in the first book, which I think, 00:29:55.900 --> 00:29:59.620 align:middle line:84% is that the only book that is not divided into sections? 00:29:59.620 --> 00:30:01.540 align:middle line:90% Or is it divided? 00:30:01.540 --> 00:30:03.687 align:middle line:90% I can't remember. 00:30:03.687 --> 00:30:04.270 align:middle line:90% I think it is. 00:30:04.270 --> 00:30:05.020 align:middle line:90% I think. 00:30:05.020 --> 00:30:06.430 align:middle line:90% It is. 00:30:06.430 --> 00:30:09.250 align:middle line:84% But Michael, you mentioned that if you look at the poems, 00:30:09.250 --> 00:30:12.550 align:middle line:84% you can see how many of them were probably 00:30:12.550 --> 00:30:14.300 align:middle line:90% exercises in workshops. 00:30:14.300 --> 00:30:16.630 align:middle line:90% They were. 00:30:16.630 --> 00:30:19.960 align:middle line:84% They were all worksheets from the forms class that we took. 00:30:19.960 --> 00:30:22.020 align:middle line:84% Not all of them, but many of them. 00:30:22.020 --> 00:30:25.690 align:middle line:84% And then how it progressed from that. 00:30:25.690 --> 00:30:28.870 align:middle line:84% And also I talked with another poet from his generation 00:30:28.870 --> 00:30:34.360 align:middle line:84% who he was really enamored of his poetry and saying, oh, 00:30:34.360 --> 00:30:36.820 align:middle line:84% but it's a shame he hasn't written 00:30:36.820 --> 00:30:38.570 align:middle line:90% anything for such a long time. 00:30:38.570 --> 00:30:42.160 align:middle line:84% He said, well, you know he did just come out with a new book. 00:30:42.160 --> 00:30:44.740 align:middle line:90% Oh, yeah, that's not Jon. 00:30:44.740 --> 00:30:47.020 align:middle line:90% But it is Jon. 00:30:47.020 --> 00:30:51.670 align:middle line:84% And I think people, it's hard, there's a reluctance 00:30:51.670 --> 00:30:55.990 align:middle line:90% to accept a change in style. 00:30:55.990 --> 00:30:56.740 align:middle line:90% That's right. 00:30:56.740 --> 00:30:59.590 align:middle line:84% You know who I think the biggest influence on that book was? 00:30:59.590 --> 00:31:00.340 align:middle line:90% Loren Goodman. 00:31:00.340 --> 00:31:04.120 align:middle line:90% 00:31:04.120 --> 00:31:04.990 align:middle line:90% The playfulness 00:31:04.990 --> 00:31:05.980 align:middle line:90% Of your poetry. 00:31:05.980 --> 00:31:07.960 align:middle line:90% I mean, we talked about it once. 00:31:07.960 --> 00:31:11.500 align:middle line:84% The playfulness of your poetry influenced that. 00:31:11.500 --> 00:31:14.260 align:middle line:90% 00:31:14.260 --> 00:31:18.250 align:middle line:84% Jon treated students like absolute equals 00:31:18.250 --> 00:31:24.490 align:middle line:84% and admitted that students could influence mentors. 00:31:24.490 --> 00:31:29.790 align:middle line:90% What an amazing thing that was. 00:31:29.790 --> 00:31:33.300 align:middle line:84% It takes me to a notion of influence 00:31:33.300 --> 00:31:37.350 align:middle line:84% and how often that notion gets bandied about in workshops 00:31:37.350 --> 00:31:37.950 align:middle line:90% and such. 00:31:37.950 --> 00:31:40.170 align:middle line:90% How important influence is. 00:31:40.170 --> 00:31:42.960 align:middle line:84% I'm getting older and more entrenched in the way I think 00:31:42.960 --> 00:31:45.900 align:middle line:84% about poetry, to be sure, but I keep 00:31:45.900 --> 00:31:51.240 align:middle line:84% thinking that it's not only that you're influenced, 00:31:51.240 --> 00:31:53.340 align:middle line:90% but how you're influenced. 00:31:53.340 --> 00:31:56.280 align:middle line:90% 00:31:56.280 --> 00:31:59.220 align:middle line:84% You can hear people behind his poetry. 00:31:59.220 --> 00:32:00.240 align:middle line:90% You know? 00:32:00.240 --> 00:32:02.130 align:middle line:90% No need to list. 00:32:02.130 --> 00:32:05.600 align:middle line:84% But the influence was a matter of ease for him. 00:32:05.600 --> 00:32:07.200 align:middle line:90% [INTERPOSING VOICES] 00:32:07.200 --> 00:32:10.620 align:middle line:84% It wasn't a matter of competition or worship 00:32:10.620 --> 00:32:12.300 align:middle line:90% or agony. 00:32:12.300 --> 00:32:16.365 align:middle line:84% It was a matter, seemingly to me, it was a matter of ease. 00:32:16.365 --> 00:32:18.940 align:middle line:90% 00:32:18.940 --> 00:32:22.960 align:middle line:84% Something about that gave the poetry 00:32:22.960 --> 00:32:28.890 align:middle line:84% a way out of one of its subject matters' intense isolation. 00:32:28.890 --> 00:32:29.390 align:middle line:90% Right. 00:32:29.390 --> 00:32:31.780 align:middle line:84% Well I wish, actually, I mean I think 00:32:31.780 --> 00:32:35.380 align:middle line:84% we've isolated already so far of the influence of formal poetry 00:32:35.380 --> 00:32:37.000 align:middle line:90% on Jon's work. 00:32:37.000 --> 00:32:38.620 align:middle line:84% The influence-- the [? Chinoiserie ?] 00:32:38.620 --> 00:32:40.120 align:middle line:90% in Jon's work. 00:32:40.120 --> 00:32:41.620 align:middle line:84% But I would be interested to hear 00:32:41.620 --> 00:32:44.590 align:middle line:84% some enumeration, really, of those poets who 00:32:44.590 --> 00:32:46.750 align:middle line:90% did influence Jon's work. 00:32:46.750 --> 00:32:50.020 align:middle line:84% I would like to hear some of those names. 00:32:50.020 --> 00:32:53.710 align:middle line:84% James Dickey, in that kind of dreamy quality 00:32:53.710 --> 00:32:55.548 align:middle line:90% of the heaven of animals. 00:32:55.548 --> 00:32:56.590 align:middle line:90% Is that what it's called? 00:32:56.590 --> 00:32:58.330 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:32:58.330 --> 00:33:00.460 align:middle line:90% He was influenced by that. 00:33:00.460 --> 00:33:02.050 align:middle line:84% He was influenced by Gary Snyder, 00:33:02.050 --> 00:33:04.120 align:middle line:84% but I could never figure out how. 00:33:04.120 --> 00:33:05.800 align:middle line:90% I never was able to see it. 00:33:05.800 --> 00:33:08.530 align:middle line:90% 00:33:08.530 --> 00:33:09.910 align:middle line:90% Jon Logan. 00:33:09.910 --> 00:33:10.460 align:middle line:90% Logan. 00:33:10.460 --> 00:33:10.960 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:33:10.960 --> 00:33:15.580 align:middle line:84% Yeah, Jon Logan's Rilkean sensitivity. 00:33:15.580 --> 00:33:19.390 align:middle line:84% Whereas other poets, I was talking to Michael Ryan 00:33:19.390 --> 00:33:23.800 align:middle line:84% and he was sort of joking about Logan's sweetness, 00:33:23.800 --> 00:33:26.000 align:middle line:90% you know preciousness. 00:33:26.000 --> 00:33:26.500 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:33:26.500 --> 00:33:28.180 align:middle line:90% I forgot about Logan. 00:33:28.180 --> 00:33:28.810 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:33:28.810 --> 00:33:29.820 align:middle line:90% Who else? 00:33:29.820 --> 00:33:30.770 align:middle line:90% Ashbery. 00:33:30.770 --> 00:33:31.800 align:middle line:90% Ashbery, definitely. 00:33:31.800 --> 00:33:32.300 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:33:32.300 --> 00:33:35.260 align:middle line:84% If you look at the Double Dream of Spring and Death 00:33:35.260 --> 00:33:37.790 align:middle line:84% and Friends, which came out in the same year, 00:33:37.790 --> 00:33:39.760 align:middle line:84% there are all these crosscurrents in the book. 00:33:39.760 --> 00:33:43.210 align:middle line:84% And I think you were saying last night, the beginnings of poems 00:33:43.210 --> 00:33:45.050 align:middle line:90% are extraordinarily-- 00:33:45.050 --> 00:33:45.550 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:33:45.550 --> 00:33:46.200 align:middle line:90% You really do. 00:33:46.200 --> 00:33:47.950 align:middle line:84% The other, I think there's some Creeley 00:33:47.950 --> 00:33:50.410 align:middle line:84% in the sort of improvisational, also 00:33:50.410 --> 00:33:52.870 align:middle line:84% the rhythmic variations that sometimes come 00:33:52.870 --> 00:33:55.420 align:middle line:90% in to Jon's short line poems. 00:33:55.420 --> 00:33:58.840 align:middle line:84% And then I think in the late, I think in Day Moon, 00:33:58.840 --> 00:34:00.160 align:middle line:90% Berryman is there. 00:34:00.160 --> 00:34:01.180 align:middle line:90% Absolutely. 00:34:01.180 --> 00:34:02.060 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:34:02.060 --> 00:34:02.560 align:middle line:90% All the way. 00:34:02.560 --> 00:34:04.518 align:middle line:84% ""[INAUDIBLE] Paul, how could I fail for Paul." 00:34:04.518 --> 00:34:07.330 align:middle line:84% I mean the music and intensity of syntax and relationships 00:34:07.330 --> 00:34:11.500 align:middle line:84% of where they arise is very, very-- 00:34:11.500 --> 00:34:14.620 align:middle line:84% That's Boyer Rickel speaking from the floor. 00:34:14.620 --> 00:34:16.480 align:middle line:84% Do you think the Lives of the Saints 00:34:16.480 --> 00:34:18.980 align:middle line:90% is a kind of Berryman project? 00:34:18.980 --> 00:34:19.480 align:middle line:90% Oh. 00:34:19.480 --> 00:34:20.000 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:34:20.000 --> 00:34:20.739 align:middle line:90% Sure. 00:34:20.739 --> 00:34:21.730 align:middle line:90% He intended it. 00:34:21.730 --> 00:34:23.230 align:middle line:84% He could just never get it finished. 00:34:23.230 --> 00:34:23.830 align:middle line:90% That's right. 00:34:23.830 --> 00:34:26.363 align:middle line:90% He intended it to go on longer. 00:34:26.363 --> 00:34:28.179 align:middle line:90% And early John Clare. 00:34:28.179 --> 00:34:29.230 align:middle line:90% Yeah, the simplicity. 00:34:29.230 --> 00:34:29.730 align:middle line:90% Oh, yeah. 00:34:29.730 --> 00:34:30.230 align:middle line:90% John Clare. 00:34:30.230 --> 00:34:31.239 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:34:31.239 --> 00:34:33.130 align:middle line:84% And the funny thing about the Ashbery thing 00:34:33.130 --> 00:34:37.510 align:middle line:84% is that Ashbery has, in Double Dream of Spring, 00:34:37.510 --> 00:34:40.270 align:middle line:84% a poem I think it's called "for John Clare." 00:34:40.270 --> 00:34:41.020 align:middle line:90% Right. 00:34:41.020 --> 00:34:43.989 align:middle line:84% He's written a lot about John Clare, as well. 00:34:43.989 --> 00:34:44.730 align:middle line:90% Ashbery did? 00:34:44.730 --> 00:34:45.230 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:34:45.230 --> 00:34:46.022 align:middle line:90% I didn't know that. 00:34:46.022 --> 00:34:46.880 align:middle line:90% In other traditions. 00:34:46.880 --> 00:34:49.156 align:middle line:84% Yeah, when he writes about John Clare 00:34:49.156 --> 00:34:51.820 align:middle line:84% he coins the term that he applies also 00:34:51.820 --> 00:34:55.780 align:middle line:84% to Robert Lowell and Ginsberg, "instant intimacy." 00:34:55.780 --> 00:34:57.610 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:34:57.610 --> 00:34:59.510 align:middle line:90% Which I think Jon certainly had. 00:34:59.510 --> 00:35:00.440 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:35:00.440 --> 00:35:04.530 align:middle line:84% So was that Ashbery thing influenced John? 00:35:04.530 --> 00:35:05.950 align:middle line:90% I don't know. 00:35:05.950 --> 00:35:08.800 align:middle line:84% Well, you know, I think that Jorie Graham suggested that 00:35:08.800 --> 00:35:10.712 align:middle line:90% once in a conversation. 00:35:10.712 --> 00:35:12.920 align:middle line:84% I don't know if it was a conversation I had with her. 00:35:12.920 --> 00:35:15.230 align:middle line:84% Would it be all right if I made a quick-- 00:35:15.230 --> 00:35:16.580 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:35:16.580 --> 00:35:17.080 align:middle line:90% Yeah, yeah. 00:35:17.080 --> 00:35:18.040 align:middle line:90% Sure. 00:35:18.040 --> 00:35:22.910 align:middle line:84% I was a student of Jon's my first year, for two days. 00:35:22.910 --> 00:35:26.530 align:middle line:84% And then I got offended and I asked Jane Miller 00:35:26.530 --> 00:35:27.940 align:middle line:90% for an independent study. 00:35:27.940 --> 00:35:31.360 align:middle line:84% I took it too seriously for my own good. 00:35:31.360 --> 00:35:34.720 align:middle line:90% Years later, we were neighbors. 00:35:34.720 --> 00:35:37.300 align:middle line:84% I didn't even know it until one day I was walking to the post 00:35:37.300 --> 00:35:42.160 align:middle line:84% office and he pulled over and he looked very different than when 00:35:42.160 --> 00:35:43.150 align:middle line:90% he was my teacher. 00:35:43.150 --> 00:35:45.670 align:middle line:84% I probably looked a little different. 00:35:45.670 --> 00:35:47.350 align:middle line:84% He gave me a ride to the post office 00:35:47.350 --> 00:35:49.780 align:middle line:84% and I told him I was now a documentary filmmaker 00:35:49.780 --> 00:35:52.420 align:middle line:90% and I was submitting my film. 00:35:52.420 --> 00:35:54.280 align:middle line:90% He asked if he could see a copy. 00:35:54.280 --> 00:35:56.290 align:middle line:84% I thought he was just being kind of polite. 00:35:56.290 --> 00:35:58.210 align:middle line:84% So I put it in his mailbox because we 00:35:58.210 --> 00:36:02.620 align:middle line:84% were on very different schedules, as you-- 00:36:02.620 --> 00:36:04.840 align:middle line:84% The very next day, when I checked my mail, 00:36:04.840 --> 00:36:09.670 align:middle line:84% there was a long letter about how he liked my movie. 00:36:09.670 --> 00:36:11.650 align:middle line:90% And it was very-- 00:36:11.650 --> 00:36:13.450 align:middle line:84% I bring this up because people were 00:36:13.450 --> 00:36:16.750 align:middle line:90% talking about his love of film. 00:36:16.750 --> 00:36:19.030 align:middle line:84% Then the next day, I checked my mail. 00:36:19.030 --> 00:36:23.570 align:middle line:84% There was a copy of every single book that he gave to me. 00:36:23.570 --> 00:36:24.070 align:middle line:90% Wow. 00:36:24.070 --> 00:36:27.490 align:middle line:84% And I thought, well, why did he do that? 00:36:27.490 --> 00:36:29.440 align:middle line:90% We weren't friends. 00:36:29.440 --> 00:36:33.020 align:middle line:84% We had that student teacher basis. 00:36:33.020 --> 00:36:37.600 align:middle line:84% I personally think that he felt like we were doing something 00:36:37.600 --> 00:36:39.160 align:middle line:84% or we were interested in something 00:36:39.160 --> 00:36:44.410 align:middle line:84% that was very similar that could cross between film and poetry. 00:36:44.410 --> 00:36:48.040 align:middle line:84% And I've been wondering for years what that is. 00:36:48.040 --> 00:36:51.450 align:middle line:84% Many of you brought up his movie love. 00:36:51.450 --> 00:36:53.230 align:middle line:84% I think, personally, I think it's 00:36:53.230 --> 00:36:56.620 align:middle line:84% that ability in film to change time 00:36:56.620 --> 00:36:59.170 align:middle line:90% and place in a single instant. 00:36:59.170 --> 00:37:02.290 align:middle line:84% And that's what I like about his poetry. 00:37:02.290 --> 00:37:07.180 align:middle line:84% That for me is what a lyric poem can do, is turning on a dime. 00:37:07.180 --> 00:37:09.760 align:middle line:84% There's an image at the end of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 00:37:09.760 --> 00:37:11.590 align:middle line:84% which is the movie I talked about going 00:37:11.590 --> 00:37:18.010 align:middle line:84% to see with Jon last night, in which Julie Christie is-- 00:37:18.010 --> 00:37:21.590 align:middle line:84% Warren Beatty died out in the snow. 00:37:21.590 --> 00:37:25.210 align:middle line:84% He's been shot by these thugs, and Julie Christie 00:37:25.210 --> 00:37:28.530 align:middle line:84% is smoking opium in this opium den 00:37:28.530 --> 00:37:31.140 align:middle line:84% and the camera does this intricate thing 00:37:31.140 --> 00:37:36.030 align:middle line:84% where she's looking at this ceramic egg, OK. 00:37:36.030 --> 00:37:39.000 align:middle line:84% It frames the ceramic egg and then 00:37:39.000 --> 00:37:44.850 align:middle line:84% it shows you the ceramic egg in her pupil, 00:37:44.850 --> 00:37:48.270 align:middle line:84% and it just kind of goes closer and closer to that 00:37:48.270 --> 00:37:51.990 align:middle line:84% and it completely dissolves into this kind of abstract movement 00:37:51.990 --> 00:37:56.910 align:middle line:84% and it's a beautiful lyric resolution of this film. 00:37:56.910 --> 00:38:00.540 align:middle line:84% It feels like it's the only possible resolution of it. 00:38:00.540 --> 00:38:02.250 align:middle line:84% And I feel that way about Jon's poems. 00:38:02.250 --> 00:38:04.410 align:middle line:84% At the end of them, oftentimes, you just 00:38:04.410 --> 00:38:06.750 align:middle line:84% feel like he's gotten to that place 00:38:06.750 --> 00:38:09.690 align:middle line:84% that he couldn't have anticipated 00:38:09.690 --> 00:38:12.210 align:middle line:84% and yet at the same time, it's the perfect place. 00:38:12.210 --> 00:38:14.850 align:middle line:84% And they resolve, I think, oftentimes 00:38:14.850 --> 00:38:17.460 align:middle line:84% in intricate musical ways that are really 00:38:17.460 --> 00:38:20.010 align:middle line:90% quite beautiful and distinct. 00:38:20.010 --> 00:38:23.730 align:middle line:84% Didn't someone, Stuart or somebody, talk about cinematic? 00:38:23.730 --> 00:38:25.170 align:middle line:90% David, did, actually. 00:38:25.170 --> 00:38:25.900 align:middle line:90% David's notes. 00:38:25.900 --> 00:38:26.400 align:middle line:90% David? 00:38:26.400 --> 00:38:27.780 align:middle line:90% And was there anything else? 00:38:27.780 --> 00:38:28.947 align:middle line:90% About the cinematic quality? 00:38:28.947 --> 00:38:32.910 align:middle line:84% I think in that passage that I read from Counting the Days, 00:38:32.910 --> 00:38:35.790 align:middle line:84% that although that's not an extremely image-- in fact 00:38:35.790 --> 00:38:38.250 align:middle line:84% it's not imagistic hardly at all. 00:38:38.250 --> 00:38:43.350 align:middle line:84% And yet it is, to me, cinematic in the kind of fluidity of it 00:38:43.350 --> 00:38:47.010 align:middle line:84% and these really quick changes that you were talking 00:38:47.010 --> 00:38:49.560 align:middle line:90% about in perspective and time. 00:38:49.560 --> 00:38:50.220 align:middle line:90% You know? 00:38:50.220 --> 00:38:55.170 align:middle line:84% And the way the arc of that sentence, 00:38:55.170 --> 00:39:00.090 align:middle line:84% to the long first sentence that goes over 2 stanzas, 00:39:00.090 --> 00:39:04.200 align:middle line:84% enacts itself is really pretty astounding. 00:39:04.200 --> 00:39:06.030 align:middle line:84% It creates a kind of abstraction, 00:39:06.030 --> 00:39:08.655 align:middle line:84% an overall abstraction that is, I think, 00:39:08.655 --> 00:39:09.780 align:middle line:90% Jon was really interesting. 00:39:09.780 --> 00:39:12.270 align:middle line:84% I mean the thing, it was kind of a joke, this thing 00:39:12.270 --> 00:39:13.950 align:middle line:90% that I said last night. 00:39:13.950 --> 00:39:15.450 align:middle line:84% When we went into the movie theater, 00:39:15.450 --> 00:39:17.160 align:middle line:84% he said, let's sit in the first row. 00:39:17.160 --> 00:39:20.520 align:middle line:84% I really like it when the images get abstract. 00:39:20.520 --> 00:39:22.530 align:middle line:90% And he wasn't kidding. 00:39:22.530 --> 00:39:25.380 align:middle line:84% He did, and it was a way of perceiving. 00:39:25.380 --> 00:39:28.350 align:middle line:84% It's a way of being in the film I think. 00:39:28.350 --> 00:39:29.730 align:middle line:90% It's hallucinogenic, almost. 00:39:29.730 --> 00:39:29.940 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:39:29.940 --> 00:39:30.440 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:39:30.440 --> 00:39:31.050 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:39:31.050 --> 00:39:34.252 align:middle line:84% Jon's poems, I think, have a hallucinogenic quality to them 00:39:34.252 --> 00:39:36.210 align:middle line:84% that's really quite astounding, and yet they're 00:39:36.210 --> 00:39:39.850 align:middle line:84% also very formal and decorous at the same time. 00:39:39.850 --> 00:39:42.780 align:middle line:84% So all of these contradictions that we've been talking about 00:39:42.780 --> 00:39:44.550 align:middle line:90% are really part of their power. 00:39:44.550 --> 00:39:46.380 align:middle line:90% Are their power. 00:39:46.380 --> 00:39:49.140 align:middle line:84% I'd liken this back to what we said at the outset of Jon 00:39:49.140 --> 00:39:52.410 align:middle line:84% not being of one camp, that his poetry merges 00:39:52.410 --> 00:39:57.330 align:middle line:84% many of these tendencies that we've all been talking about. 00:39:57.330 --> 00:39:58.170 align:middle line:90% Nancy, Rich? 00:39:58.170 --> 00:40:00.600 align:middle line:90% Well, it's interesting. 00:40:00.600 --> 00:40:02.520 align:middle line:84% And I knew that Jon was into films, 00:40:02.520 --> 00:40:04.080 align:middle line:84% but I never feel like he's depended 00:40:04.080 --> 00:40:07.470 align:middle line:84% on the narrative of the image for the poem to be executed. 00:40:07.470 --> 00:40:08.280 align:middle line:90% That's right. 00:40:08.280 --> 00:40:11.490 align:middle line:84% I almost feel like he probably wanted 00:40:11.490 --> 00:40:15.780 align:middle line:84% to ground himself in the image by going to movies. 00:40:15.780 --> 00:40:17.730 align:middle line:84% Because I'm always jealous of the fact 00:40:17.730 --> 00:40:20.790 align:middle line:84% that his poems just take off immediately. 00:40:20.790 --> 00:40:24.600 align:middle line:84% There's no narrative runway or any of the stuff 00:40:24.600 --> 00:40:27.150 align:middle line:84% that James Wright or any of the the big dudes at the time 00:40:27.150 --> 00:40:30.000 align:middle line:90% were doing. 00:40:30.000 --> 00:40:32.810 align:middle line:84% I always step back and go, I don't know how he does it. 00:40:32.810 --> 00:40:35.640 align:middle line:84% One other poet I want to bring up 00:40:35.640 --> 00:40:38.550 align:middle line:84% who was an influence on Jon's poems, 00:40:38.550 --> 00:40:41.400 align:middle line:84% for good and bad reasons, I think. 00:40:41.400 --> 00:40:43.110 align:middle line:90% And that was Mark Strand. 00:40:43.110 --> 00:40:45.840 align:middle line:84% And it's really Mark Strand's solipsism-- 00:40:45.840 --> 00:40:48.502 align:middle line:90% what does that mean? 00:40:48.502 --> 00:40:50.420 align:middle line:90% Selfishness. 00:40:50.420 --> 00:40:51.660 align:middle line:90% What is it? 00:40:51.660 --> 00:40:57.870 align:middle line:84% When you-- it's almost, you create your own universe? 00:40:57.870 --> 00:40:58.890 align:middle line:90% Self-referential. 00:40:58.890 --> 00:40:59.580 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:40:59.580 --> 00:41:01.230 align:middle line:84% but it's, the world does not exist 00:41:01.230 --> 00:41:03.390 align:middle line:90% as a real place for Strand. 00:41:03.390 --> 00:41:04.620 align:middle line:90% It's a projection. 00:41:04.620 --> 00:41:08.610 align:middle line:90% It's a projection of everything. 00:41:08.610 --> 00:41:10.395 align:middle line:84% The real world only exists because you do. 00:41:10.395 --> 00:41:11.280 align:middle line:90% That's what. 00:41:11.280 --> 00:41:12.030 align:middle line:90% The word for that? 00:41:12.030 --> 00:41:12.550 align:middle line:90% Solipsism. 00:41:12.550 --> 00:41:13.050 align:middle line:90% Oh. 00:41:13.050 --> 00:41:15.095 align:middle line:90% The world exists only for you. 00:41:15.095 --> 00:41:16.470 align:middle line:84% I mean, it's a kind of narcissism 00:41:16.470 --> 00:41:19.660 align:middle line:84% if you want to talk pathologically about. 00:41:19.660 --> 00:41:21.832 align:middle line:84% It's the thinking man's narcissism. 00:41:21.832 --> 00:41:26.670 align:middle line:90% 00:41:26.670 --> 00:41:31.118 align:middle line:84% But part of where their characters met. 00:41:31.118 --> 00:41:32.160 align:middle line:90% This is not an influence. 00:41:32.160 --> 00:41:35.640 align:middle line:84% Sometimes influence is because you meet yourself 00:41:35.640 --> 00:41:39.720 align:middle line:84% in another poet and you suddenly realize 00:41:39.720 --> 00:41:43.740 align:middle line:84% that you can make poetry from that meeting place. 00:41:43.740 --> 00:41:46.740 align:middle line:84% You didn't realize you could do that and now you do. 00:41:46.740 --> 00:41:52.482 align:middle line:84% It's a kind of fatalism in Strand and a fatalism in Jon. 00:41:52.482 --> 00:41:53.190 align:middle line:90% I think they met. 00:41:53.190 --> 00:41:56.630 align:middle line:84% There's nothing you can do about it. 00:41:56.630 --> 00:41:58.560 align:middle line:90% That's the way life goes. 00:41:58.560 --> 00:42:00.300 align:middle line:90% Let's put on a good suit. 00:42:00.300 --> 00:42:01.560 align:middle line:90% Let's put out a good suit. 00:42:01.560 --> 00:42:05.850 align:middle line:84% Yeah, Jon had a greater collection of clothes 00:42:05.850 --> 00:42:07.200 align:middle line:90% than Mark Strand. 00:42:07.200 --> 00:42:09.120 align:middle line:90% Would it make sense then, that-- 00:42:09.120 --> 00:42:12.450 align:middle line:84% I mean, even though I don't see this much in Day Moon, 00:42:12.450 --> 00:42:16.020 align:middle line:84% would it make sense that the formal, 00:42:16.020 --> 00:42:19.150 align:middle line:84% or what some people have said, abstract, 00:42:19.150 --> 00:42:20.790 align:middle line:84% I think that means the formal, not 00:42:20.790 --> 00:42:24.330 align:middle line:84% necessarily the image, abstraction, 00:42:24.330 --> 00:42:30.170 align:middle line:84% would be a kind of natural place for escape of an opening kind, 00:42:30.170 --> 00:42:31.750 align:middle line:90% not of a self-destructive kind. 00:42:31.750 --> 00:42:35.510 align:middle line:90% Not of a not of a fatalistic? 00:42:35.510 --> 00:42:38.720 align:middle line:84% Because if it was only a fatalistic, it would have-- 00:42:38.720 --> 00:42:40.370 align:middle line:84% how he was fatalistic in his life 00:42:40.370 --> 00:42:45.280 align:middle line:84% maybe prevented him from being able to work at some point. 00:42:45.280 --> 00:42:55.860 align:middle line:84% But in his work, it seems like that is a reason to do it. 00:42:55.860 --> 00:42:58.040 align:middle line:90% And the reason to-- 00:42:58.040 --> 00:43:00.890 align:middle line:84% the way that gave us so much that 00:43:00.890 --> 00:43:05.760 align:middle line:84% being the risk to engage with it, to trust formalism 00:43:05.760 --> 00:43:06.260 align:middle line:90% in a way. 00:43:06.260 --> 00:43:10.380 align:middle line:84% To transcend and be a purpose for poetry in and of itself. 00:43:10.380 --> 00:43:10.880 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:43:10.880 --> 00:43:14.660 align:middle line:84% And I just, I know I'm obsessed with this Asian influence 00:43:14.660 --> 00:43:16.400 align:middle line:90% thing, but because I had to-- 00:43:16.400 --> 00:43:19.160 align:middle line:90% It's the yoga. 00:43:19.160 --> 00:43:19.760 align:middle line:90% Meditation. 00:43:19.760 --> 00:43:20.510 align:middle line:90% I thought of that. 00:43:20.510 --> 00:43:23.600 align:middle line:84% Well I actually think that Little Blue Book is Sutras, 00:43:23.600 --> 00:43:24.600 align:middle line:90% is Jon's Sutras. 00:43:24.600 --> 00:43:25.100 align:middle line:90% Wow. 00:43:25.100 --> 00:43:26.410 align:middle line:90% That's nice. 00:43:26.410 --> 00:43:30.030 align:middle line:84% But that's a whole different thing. 00:43:30.030 --> 00:43:31.980 align:middle line:84% This is a definition that I got from-- 00:43:31.980 --> 00:43:32.480 align:middle line:90% I forget. 00:43:32.480 --> 00:43:35.150 align:middle line:84% Some publication from NYU or something. 00:43:35.150 --> 00:43:35.960 align:middle line:90% I don't know. 00:43:35.960 --> 00:43:38.630 align:middle line:84% I didn't even print out the whole thing. 00:43:38.630 --> 00:43:41.450 align:middle line:84% "Traits of classical Chinese poetry. 00:43:41.450 --> 00:43:44.390 align:middle line:84% Usually the Chinese poem is fairly simple on the surface. 00:43:44.390 --> 00:43:46.730 align:middle line:84% Western culture, which was influenced by Shakespeare, 00:43:46.730 --> 00:43:49.370 align:middle line:84% Milton, and the romantic poets, had pronounced a tendency 00:43:49.370 --> 00:43:51.050 align:middle line:90% to think of poems as ornate." 00:43:51.050 --> 00:43:54.530 align:middle line:84% If you take this back, this is something we've all integrated, 00:43:54.530 --> 00:43:59.150 align:middle line:84% but if you take this back half a century. 00:43:59.150 --> 00:44:01.760 align:middle line:84% "Tendency to think of poems as ornate elaborate creations made 00:44:01.760 --> 00:44:03.740 align:middle line:90% by a few men of genius. 00:44:03.740 --> 00:44:06.200 align:middle line:84% Chinese culture influenced by the anonymity 00:44:06.200 --> 00:44:07.150 align:middle line:90% of the Shih Ching." 00:44:07.150 --> 00:44:08.700 align:middle line:84% I'm not sure I'm saying that right. 00:44:08.700 --> 00:44:10.820 align:middle line:84% "Had a tendency to think of poems as something 00:44:10.820 --> 00:44:16.790 align:middle line:84% written by common humanity for the eyes of other humans" OK. 00:44:16.790 --> 00:44:21.500 align:middle line:84% And then "the imagery, usually agrarian, courtship, marriage, 00:44:21.500 --> 00:44:22.290 align:middle line:90% dynasty." 00:44:22.290 --> 00:44:24.733 align:middle line:84% I don't think-- unless you guys created a dynasty, which 00:44:24.733 --> 00:44:25.400 align:middle line:90% you kind of did. 00:44:25.400 --> 00:44:25.900 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:44:25.900 --> 00:44:28.430 align:middle line:90% 00:44:28.430 --> 00:44:32.720 align:middle line:84% But then the simplicity of the formality 00:44:32.720 --> 00:44:35.360 align:middle line:84% of Slavic verse, which I'm not sure how much that 00:44:35.360 --> 00:44:37.972 align:middle line:84% applies, but this one was the one that I just 00:44:37.972 --> 00:44:38.930 align:middle line:90% kept coming back to it. 00:44:38.930 --> 00:44:40.340 align:middle line:90% "The poetic principle. 00:44:40.340 --> 00:44:43.370 align:middle line:84% Organizing the poem is often one of contrast. 00:44:43.370 --> 00:44:45.050 align:middle line:84% Often, Chinese poetry will juxtapose-" 00:44:45.050 --> 00:44:47.780 align:middle line:84% So maybe this speaks to the time shift. 00:44:47.780 --> 00:44:51.673 align:middle line:84% Quick shifts in time and place in location. 00:44:51.673 --> 00:44:53.840 align:middle line:84% "Often Chinese poetry will juxtapose a natural scene 00:44:53.840 --> 00:44:56.570 align:middle line:84% with a social, personal situation." 00:44:56.570 --> 00:45:03.110 align:middle line:84% And then this definition of "the idea of Chinese poetry 00:45:03.110 --> 00:45:08.180 align:middle line:84% embodying fu, bi, and xing, fu, a straightforward narrative 00:45:08.180 --> 00:45:10.250 align:middle line:84% with a beginning, middle and conclusion. 00:45:10.250 --> 00:45:13.830 align:middle line:84% Bi, against, implies a comparison or contrast. 00:45:13.830 --> 00:45:19.260 align:middle line:84% And the result being this enlightenment." 00:45:19.260 --> 00:45:21.960 align:middle line:90% And I just think that's so-- 00:45:21.960 --> 00:45:26.520 align:middle line:84% I think it's a sensibility that carries. 00:45:26.520 --> 00:45:29.400 align:middle line:84% It's like a philosophy that I'm not 00:45:29.400 --> 00:45:32.160 align:middle line:84% sure Jon could embrace in his life. 00:45:32.160 --> 00:45:34.050 align:middle line:84% Well, he embraced it in his intellectual, 00:45:34.050 --> 00:45:36.180 align:middle line:90% in his meditative life. 00:45:36.180 --> 00:45:37.082 align:middle line:90% We talk about his-- 00:45:37.082 --> 00:45:38.040 align:middle line:90% I mean in his practice. 00:45:38.040 --> 00:45:39.090 align:middle line:90% Those things really-- 00:45:39.090 --> 00:45:40.650 align:middle line:90% Poetry is a practice. 00:45:40.650 --> 00:45:42.322 align:middle line:90% And it fits what you're saying. 00:45:42.322 --> 00:45:45.390 align:middle line:84% If you stop practicing, then you lose the connection 00:45:45.390 --> 00:45:49.840 align:middle line:84% that is between the heart, the body, and the mind. 00:45:49.840 --> 00:45:51.240 align:middle line:90% The mind. 00:45:51.240 --> 00:45:54.900 align:middle line:84% Jon was an anti-intellectual, and the only essays 00:45:54.900 --> 00:45:57.930 align:middle line:84% that I remember his reading because we were reading them 00:45:57.930 --> 00:46:03.150 align:middle line:84% together as young guys, it was Auden's book The Dyer's Hand, 00:46:03.150 --> 00:46:05.340 align:middle line:84% the Richard Hugo book and the Stafford book 00:46:05.340 --> 00:46:09.780 align:middle line:84% which are both practical essays about poetry. 00:46:09.780 --> 00:46:12.300 align:middle line:90% 00:46:12.300 --> 00:46:16.320 align:middle line:84% But first, I have two things to say. 00:46:16.320 --> 00:46:20.250 align:middle line:84% First, in the Auden, both of our copies 00:46:20.250 --> 00:46:22.170 align:middle line:90% were ragged and underlined. 00:46:22.170 --> 00:46:27.030 align:middle line:84% And Auden says that he thought of poetry as one person sitting 00:46:27.030 --> 00:46:31.680 align:middle line:84% in a room writing poems for another person alone 00:46:31.680 --> 00:46:34.860 align:middle line:84% sitting in another room who he doesn't know. 00:46:34.860 --> 00:46:37.290 align:middle line:84% Which is that wonderful intimacy. 00:46:37.290 --> 00:46:41.910 align:middle line:84% And then Yeats said something about-- what's the Yeats one? 00:46:41.910 --> 00:46:44.520 align:middle line:84% As if in a letter to an intimate friend, 00:46:44.520 --> 00:46:46.963 align:middle line:84% that poems should be written as if in a letter 00:46:46.963 --> 00:46:47.880 align:middle line:90% to an intimate friend. 00:46:47.880 --> 00:46:50.490 align:middle line:84% And we talked about those things. 00:46:50.490 --> 00:46:54.480 align:middle line:84% So Jon was mistrustful of the intellect because he was lazy. 00:46:54.480 --> 00:46:56.910 align:middle line:84% He was also, he was very, very smart. 00:46:56.910 --> 00:47:00.600 align:middle line:84% Marvin Bell said, although I didn't see it quite this way, 00:47:00.600 --> 00:47:01.980 align:middle line:90% I knew he was smart. 00:47:01.980 --> 00:47:05.310 align:middle line:84% Marvin Bell said he was the smartest student he'd ever had. 00:47:05.310 --> 00:47:07.860 align:middle line:84% Before he started teaching, when we were there, 00:47:07.860 --> 00:47:10.860 align:middle line:90% but in the last 40 years or so. 00:47:10.860 --> 00:47:16.890 align:middle line:84% But Jon practiced it as intuition. 00:47:16.890 --> 00:47:18.360 align:middle line:84% So when you're talking about him, 00:47:18.360 --> 00:47:21.187 align:middle line:84% and he had a really keen intuition, someone here-- 00:47:21.187 --> 00:47:22.380 align:middle line:90% I spoke about it last night. 00:47:22.380 --> 00:47:22.880 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:47:22.880 --> 00:47:25.740 align:middle line:90% I thought that was this. 00:47:25.740 --> 00:47:27.240 align:middle line:84% As a student, you can never walk out 00:47:27.240 --> 00:47:29.220 align:middle line:84% and repeat what Jon taught you, except 00:47:29.220 --> 00:47:30.390 align:middle line:90% in that little blue book. 00:47:30.390 --> 00:47:32.000 align:middle line:90% You had to wait to see Jon. 00:47:32.000 --> 00:47:32.640 align:middle line:90% You know? 00:47:32.640 --> 00:47:33.270 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:47:33.270 --> 00:47:35.790 align:middle line:84% Because I remember him saying once to me, 00:47:35.790 --> 00:47:37.840 align:middle line:84% you should rough up the surface of your poems. 00:47:37.840 --> 00:47:38.340 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:47:38.340 --> 00:47:41.290 align:middle line:84% And I've been thinking about that for 30 years. 00:47:41.290 --> 00:47:43.105 align:middle line:84% And it means so many different things. 00:47:43.105 --> 00:47:44.730 align:middle line:84% You know, I discover something about it 00:47:44.730 --> 00:47:47.700 align:middle line:84% every year that I didn't understand before. 00:47:47.700 --> 00:47:49.370 align:middle line:90% Perfection is a bad thing. 00:47:49.370 --> 00:47:50.160 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:47:50.160 --> 00:47:54.360 align:middle line:84% But when we talk about-- so I was leading from that sense 00:47:54.360 --> 00:47:55.590 align:middle line:90% of intuition-- 00:47:55.590 --> 00:47:59.130 align:middle line:84% that Jon was a terrific formal poet, played the game 00:47:59.130 --> 00:48:00.510 align:middle line:90% by his own rules. 00:48:00.510 --> 00:48:03.060 align:middle line:84% Loved to violate rules, because that's fun. 00:48:03.060 --> 00:48:04.860 align:middle line:90% And pattern and variation. 00:48:04.860 --> 00:48:09.130 align:middle line:84% But he didn't know an iamb from a caesura. 00:48:09.130 --> 00:48:10.800 align:middle line:90% What is that? 00:48:10.800 --> 00:48:14.250 align:middle line:84% But I think he pretended he didn't know that. 00:48:14.250 --> 00:48:16.660 align:middle line:84% I think intuition is accumulation of attention. 00:48:16.660 --> 00:48:17.938 align:middle line:90% I don't think it's really-- 00:48:17.938 --> 00:48:18.480 align:middle line:90% Of attention? 00:48:18.480 --> 00:48:19.300 align:middle line:90% Of attention. 00:48:19.300 --> 00:48:21.960 align:middle line:84% I mean, I think his attention was so intense 00:48:21.960 --> 00:48:25.000 align:middle line:84% in his observation, he didn't have to name it 00:48:25.000 --> 00:48:26.160 align:middle line:90% but it got internalized. 00:48:26.160 --> 00:48:28.920 align:middle line:84% We call that intuition, but it collects over time. 00:48:28.920 --> 00:48:29.670 align:middle line:90% Well it's trained. 00:48:29.670 --> 00:48:33.300 align:middle line:84% It's a training to receive that awareness. 00:48:33.300 --> 00:48:36.720 align:middle line:84% Because you can't hold on to that awareness, either. 00:48:36.720 --> 00:48:40.202 align:middle line:84% So it's a kind of training to do that. 00:48:40.202 --> 00:48:41.910 align:middle line:84% I think it's funny, if Jon were here now, 00:48:41.910 --> 00:48:45.010 align:middle line:90% he'd be rolling on the floor. 00:48:45.010 --> 00:48:45.510 align:middle line:90% Wait! 00:48:45.510 --> 00:48:47.410 align:middle line:90% Is that? 00:48:47.410 --> 00:48:48.240 align:middle line:90% I bet you, though, 00:48:48.240 --> 00:48:49.073 align:middle line:90% [INTERPOSING VOICES] 00:48:49.073 --> 00:48:52.620 align:middle line:84% --room alone, hearing this poem, he would take it in. 00:48:52.620 --> 00:48:53.240 align:middle line:90% All of it. 00:48:53.240 --> 00:48:54.698 align:middle line:84% But I wanted to ask Bruce something 00:48:54.698 --> 00:49:00.427 align:middle line:84% because, just, something in passing just now about the-- 00:49:00.427 --> 00:49:02.010 align:middle line:84% I always thought Jon as sort of having 00:49:02.010 --> 00:49:06.540 align:middle line:84% an obsessiveness about games at times, like the whole baseball 00:49:06.540 --> 00:49:07.320 align:middle line:90% thing, you know? 00:49:07.320 --> 00:49:12.220 align:middle line:84% And the poems, in a certain way, had that aspect. 00:49:12.220 --> 00:49:15.270 align:middle line:84% I mean it was an important part to play for him. 00:49:15.270 --> 00:49:17.400 align:middle line:84% And you didn't have to win the game. 00:49:17.400 --> 00:49:19.290 align:middle line:90% There was no goal. 00:49:19.290 --> 00:49:21.310 align:middle line:84% It was in all aspects of his life. 00:49:21.310 --> 00:49:26.190 align:middle line:84% We were living together, four of us, Jon and I and our two wives 00:49:26.190 --> 00:49:27.900 align:middle line:90% were living in Portland, Oregon. 00:49:27.900 --> 00:49:30.750 align:middle line:84% And we decided, well, let's go to the movies tonight. 00:49:30.750 --> 00:49:32.160 align:middle line:90% Well, what do you want to see? 00:49:32.160 --> 00:49:34.650 align:middle line:90% So we got all the movies. 00:49:34.650 --> 00:49:39.090 align:middle line:84% Jon wrote the names down and made a graph 00:49:39.090 --> 00:49:41.940 align:middle line:84% and allowed each one would say yes, but, no, 00:49:41.940 --> 00:49:45.330 align:middle line:90% but, and the joke is obvious. 00:49:45.330 --> 00:49:49.170 align:middle line:84% By the time we finished, it was too late to go to any movie. 00:49:49.170 --> 00:49:50.370 align:middle line:90% And baseball. 00:49:50.370 --> 00:49:55.110 align:middle line:84% Baseball, his favorite sport, is a game of very precise logic 00:49:55.110 --> 00:49:56.400 align:middle line:90% and rules. 00:49:56.400 --> 00:49:59.640 align:middle line:84% And that was one of the reasons he loved it. 00:49:59.640 --> 00:50:01.770 align:middle line:84% Because everything is predictable 00:50:01.770 --> 00:50:05.370 align:middle line:84% except the unexpected that happens all the time. 00:50:05.370 --> 00:50:07.410 align:middle line:84% But basketball, it mattered who won. 00:50:07.410 --> 00:50:10.080 align:middle line:90% 00:50:10.080 --> 00:50:11.160 align:middle line:90% Well, Red Sox, too. 00:50:11.160 --> 00:50:12.810 align:middle line:90% I mean that mattered who won. 00:50:12.810 --> 00:50:15.500 align:middle line:84% But in the game games we played among ourselves, 00:50:15.500 --> 00:50:16.750 align:middle line:90% it wasn't a matter of winning. 00:50:16.750 --> 00:50:20.080 align:middle line:84% It was a matter, really, of self-discovery. 00:50:20.080 --> 00:50:25.360 align:middle line:84% One game he set up for us all was those questions. 00:50:25.360 --> 00:50:27.010 align:middle line:84% Kind of a teenage thing, you know, 00:50:27.010 --> 00:50:29.590 align:middle line:90% who would play you in the movie. 00:50:29.590 --> 00:50:31.120 align:middle line:90% What kind of animal are you? 00:50:31.120 --> 00:50:32.650 align:middle line:90% And there were six. 00:50:32.650 --> 00:50:36.250 align:middle line:84% Mark Halperin and Bobby were there and Henry Carlyle 00:50:36.250 --> 00:50:37.870 align:middle line:90% and Sandra McPherson. 00:50:37.870 --> 00:50:40.270 align:middle line:90% And we played it several times. 00:50:40.270 --> 00:50:45.190 align:middle line:84% It was wonderful to discover who I thought 00:50:45.190 --> 00:50:49.930 align:middle line:84% should play you in the movie and what animal you represent, 00:50:49.930 --> 00:50:53.110 align:middle line:84% as opposed to what-- anyways, it was a silly game 00:50:53.110 --> 00:50:55.690 align:middle line:84% but it was a very interesting one 00:50:55.690 --> 00:50:59.290 align:middle line:84% because it was about perception of self and identity 00:50:59.290 --> 00:51:01.480 align:middle line:84% and other people's perceptions of you. 00:51:01.480 --> 00:51:03.935 align:middle line:90% 00:51:03.935 --> 00:51:04.810 align:middle line:90% I mean I remembered-- 00:51:04.810 --> 00:51:05.600 align:middle line:90% I'm sorry. 00:51:05.600 --> 00:51:07.600 align:middle line:84% No, please go ahead and then I'll say something. 00:51:07.600 --> 00:51:08.555 align:middle line:90% I mean-- 00:51:08.555 --> 00:51:09.430 align:middle line:90% Take the mic, please. 00:51:09.430 --> 00:51:10.040 align:middle line:90% Oh, sorry. 00:51:10.040 --> 00:51:11.150 align:middle line:90% Sorry. 00:51:11.150 --> 00:51:14.620 align:middle line:84% It's, I mean, Jon obviously, it's 00:51:14.620 --> 00:51:19.240 align:middle line:84% no secret he was an escapist in a lot of different ways 00:51:19.240 --> 00:51:22.240 align:middle line:84% and a lot of the things he did were diversions. 00:51:22.240 --> 00:51:24.820 align:middle line:90% 00:51:24.820 --> 00:51:28.360 align:middle line:84% Because there was something, clearly, about life that he 00:51:28.360 --> 00:51:31.000 align:middle line:90% wasn't very comfortable with. 00:51:31.000 --> 00:51:32.893 align:middle line:84% And on some level, to be honest, I 00:51:32.893 --> 00:51:34.810 align:middle line:84% think his poems were the only time in his life 00:51:34.810 --> 00:51:35.900 align:middle line:90% that he was serious. 00:51:35.900 --> 00:51:38.110 align:middle line:84% His poems are so much more brilliant 00:51:38.110 --> 00:51:41.230 align:middle line:84% than he ever seemed to be, so much more mature. 00:51:41.230 --> 00:51:44.455 align:middle line:84% I mean, he was the most immature adult I know other than Steve. 00:51:44.455 --> 00:51:47.370 align:middle line:90% 00:51:47.370 --> 00:51:47.888 align:middle line:90% Seriously. 00:51:47.888 --> 00:51:48.930 align:middle line:90% That's some good company. 00:51:48.930 --> 00:51:54.060 align:middle line:90% 00:51:54.060 --> 00:51:55.980 align:middle line:84% The oldest teenager in the world, right? 00:51:55.980 --> 00:51:59.460 align:middle line:84% The secret of poetry is immaturity. 00:51:59.460 --> 00:52:01.620 align:middle line:84% These poems were incredibly mature. 00:52:01.620 --> 00:52:03.900 align:middle line:84% When you read them, you felt very grown up 00:52:03.900 --> 00:52:06.630 align:middle line:84% and you really felt that you had this precise insight 00:52:06.630 --> 00:52:08.700 align:middle line:90% into how to be alive. 00:52:08.700 --> 00:52:12.450 align:middle line:84% You know, and we would do the baseball things. 00:52:12.450 --> 00:52:15.240 align:middle line:84% We were, for a lot of different reasons, 00:52:15.240 --> 00:52:17.260 align:middle line:84% really, really horrible at the game. 00:52:17.260 --> 00:52:19.500 align:middle line:84% But not because of the lack of effort. 00:52:19.500 --> 00:52:23.310 align:middle line:84% Like he made these intricate, esoteric charts 00:52:23.310 --> 00:52:29.130 align:middle line:84% and all these things which you couldn't understand. 00:52:29.130 --> 00:52:31.860 align:middle line:84% You know, we sent it to a nuclear physicist that I knew. 00:52:31.860 --> 00:52:35.110 align:middle line:84% I said explain this because it's too complicated. 00:52:35.110 --> 00:52:39.380 align:middle line:84% If you could figure this out you'd know how to create life. 00:52:39.380 --> 00:52:45.480 align:middle line:84% And then you try to draft people [INAUDIBLE] but you know, 00:52:45.480 --> 00:52:47.010 align:middle line:90% it's like what you said. 00:52:47.010 --> 00:52:50.070 align:middle line:84% Like he didn't want to do his reading. 00:52:50.070 --> 00:52:51.300 align:middle line:90% He didn't want to teach. 00:52:51.300 --> 00:52:53.010 align:middle line:90% Like when I talked-- 00:52:53.010 --> 00:52:55.860 align:middle line:84% He once-- I mean, I knew him later but not as late 00:52:55.860 --> 00:52:58.500 align:middle line:84% as a lot of people here and he very much, 00:52:58.500 --> 00:53:00.160 align:middle line:90% didn't he want to teach? 00:53:00.160 --> 00:53:02.220 align:middle line:90% He was still, he was totally-- 00:53:02.220 --> 00:53:05.400 align:middle line:90% [INTERPOSING VOICES] 00:53:05.400 --> 00:53:06.475 align:middle line:90% When Jon was there. 00:53:06.475 --> 00:53:08.100 align:middle line:84% He also cancelled the basketball games. 00:53:08.100 --> 00:53:11.473 align:middle line:84% I mean the thing is, when Jon was there he was great. 00:53:11.473 --> 00:53:13.140 align:middle line:84% The thing that was really cool about Jon 00:53:13.140 --> 00:53:15.900 align:middle line:84% was when he was with you, you felt like you 00:53:15.900 --> 00:53:17.038 align:middle line:90% were his favorite person. 00:53:17.038 --> 00:53:17.580 align:middle line:90% That's right. 00:53:17.580 --> 00:53:20.920 align:middle line:84% But then when he was away, he couldn't do that. 00:53:20.920 --> 00:53:21.480 align:middle line:90% But listen. 00:53:21.480 --> 00:53:23.970 align:middle line:84% This is the inscription to the [INAUDIBLE].. 00:53:23.970 --> 00:53:25.170 align:middle line:90% For Dave and Michaela. 00:53:25.170 --> 00:53:26.610 align:middle line:90% Friends to the end. 00:53:26.610 --> 00:53:27.495 align:middle line:90% Around noon tomorrow. 00:53:27.495 --> 00:53:31.030 align:middle line:90% 00:53:31.030 --> 00:53:32.420 align:middle line:90% But that was the end for him. 00:53:32.420 --> 00:53:33.770 align:middle line:90% It was totally. 00:53:33.770 --> 00:53:36.700 align:middle line:84% And he made it clear, so it's perfectly OK. 00:53:36.700 --> 00:53:39.200 align:middle line:84% Well, he was still asleep by then. 00:53:39.200 --> 00:53:40.062 align:middle line:90% Nancy? 00:53:40.062 --> 00:53:41.770 align:middle line:84% What were you going to say, [INAUDIBLE]?? 00:53:41.770 --> 00:53:42.610 align:middle line:90% I'm sorry. 00:53:42.610 --> 00:53:43.460 align:middle line:90% No, no. 00:53:43.460 --> 00:53:45.130 align:middle line:84% I was just I was thinking about what 00:53:45.130 --> 00:53:49.750 align:middle line:84% you said about being comical in life and serious in his poems. 00:53:49.750 --> 00:53:51.700 align:middle line:84% That's a bad paraphrase of what you said. 00:53:51.700 --> 00:53:55.060 align:middle line:84% But I only I know more about the poetry side of him, really, 00:53:55.060 --> 00:53:58.812 align:middle line:84% and I was just thinking about his premise 00:53:58.812 --> 00:54:00.520 align:middle line:84% that the first line of the poem tells you 00:54:00.520 --> 00:54:02.620 align:middle line:84% everything that's going to happen later on and how 00:54:02.620 --> 00:54:05.230 align:middle line:84% frightening that is if you're trying to begin a poem, 00:54:05.230 --> 00:54:08.770 align:middle line:84% that it seems true to the way he wrote. 00:54:08.770 --> 00:54:11.240 align:middle line:84% I was also thinking in other words, 00:54:11.240 --> 00:54:13.240 align:middle line:84% in the poem he just seems like he went for broke 00:54:13.240 --> 00:54:15.370 align:middle line:84% and that it was utterly serious, even if there 00:54:15.370 --> 00:54:18.940 align:middle line:84% were moments of amazing comedy and he was incredibly witty. 00:54:18.940 --> 00:54:21.550 align:middle line:84% The other thing I was thinking was 00:54:21.550 --> 00:54:25.940 align:middle line:84% that I learned so much from him about the sentence. 00:54:25.940 --> 00:54:27.370 align:middle line:84% We haven't talked much about that, 00:54:27.370 --> 00:54:31.390 align:middle line:84% but he talks in his little helpful hints book 00:54:31.390 --> 00:54:33.700 align:middle line:84% about juggling the sentence and the line 00:54:33.700 --> 00:54:36.063 align:middle line:84% and the negotiation between the sentence of the line. 00:54:36.063 --> 00:54:37.480 align:middle line:84% I was thinking about, Steve you're 00:54:37.480 --> 00:54:42.130 align:middle line:84% saying that he didn't think on the level of iambs and trochees 00:54:42.130 --> 00:54:44.740 align:middle line:84% and so on, but his poems really did 00:54:44.740 --> 00:54:47.620 align:middle line:84% seem based on formal rhetorical structures 00:54:47.620 --> 00:54:51.370 align:middle line:84% and on the negotiations between the sentence and the line. 00:54:51.370 --> 00:54:53.680 align:middle line:84% The poet I think of who does that, 00:54:53.680 --> 00:54:56.290 align:middle line:84% who was struggling with that and playing with it, 00:54:56.290 --> 00:54:58.895 align:middle line:84% interested in it, is would be Larry Levis. 00:54:58.895 --> 00:55:00.520 align:middle line:84% Lots of poets do it, but it's something 00:55:00.520 --> 00:55:03.010 align:middle line:84% that I remain really interested in 00:55:03.010 --> 00:55:06.640 align:middle line:84% and that's one of the many things that makes 00:55:06.640 --> 00:55:09.870 align:middle line:90% his poems seem always relevant. 00:55:09.870 --> 00:55:13.310 align:middle line:84% How can the sentence not remain important? 00:55:13.310 --> 00:55:14.390 align:middle line:90% Can I address that? 00:55:14.390 --> 00:55:16.340 align:middle line:90% Yes please. 00:55:16.340 --> 00:55:18.800 align:middle line:84% It may be in the helpful hints, but he 00:55:18.800 --> 00:55:22.460 align:middle line:84% said that in metrical verse, the line 00:55:22.460 --> 00:55:25.170 align:middle line:84% is the unit, in free verse it's the sentence. 00:55:25.170 --> 00:55:28.310 align:middle line:90% And Jon worked with both. 00:55:28.310 --> 00:55:34.620 align:middle line:84% But Larry Levis, in a lecture at Warren Wilson, 00:55:34.620 --> 00:55:39.510 align:middle line:84% said he had come to the end of his period 00:55:39.510 --> 00:55:42.990 align:middle line:84% as a younger fellow, of the kind of deep image poem, 00:55:42.990 --> 00:55:47.910 align:middle line:84% the explosive five line poem a la Bly and James Wright 00:55:47.910 --> 00:55:50.850 align:middle line:84% and Merwin and other people of that time. 00:55:50.850 --> 00:55:51.840 align:middle line:90% John Haines. 00:55:51.840 --> 00:55:57.090 align:middle line:84% And he was looking around, reading around to see 00:55:57.090 --> 00:55:59.760 align:middle line:84% who can he take on as a new model. 00:55:59.760 --> 00:56:02.130 align:middle line:84% And it was Jon and it was exactly the reason 00:56:02.130 --> 00:56:07.050 align:middle line:84% that you're talking about and he brought to it 00:56:07.050 --> 00:56:11.880 align:middle line:84% the endless invention of syntax that allows you to-- 00:56:11.880 --> 00:56:16.380 align:middle line:84% especially since Jon worked with sound markers in his poems-- 00:56:16.380 --> 00:56:19.590 align:middle line:90% 00:56:19.590 --> 00:56:22.320 align:middle line:84% the sentence could proceed almost on its own 00:56:22.320 --> 00:56:25.810 align:middle line:84% because it was going towards a rhyme in part. 00:56:25.810 --> 00:56:28.080 align:middle line:84% And you could inject things in the middle 00:56:28.080 --> 00:56:30.540 align:middle line:84% because there's all these, what do you call them? 00:56:30.540 --> 00:56:32.845 align:middle line:84% Subordinate clauses and, they're not insubordinate, 00:56:32.845 --> 00:56:33.845 align:middle line:90% what are the other ones? 00:56:33.845 --> 00:56:34.345 align:middle line:90% Dependent. 00:56:34.345 --> 00:56:35.120 align:middle line:90% Dependent clauses. 00:56:35.120 --> 00:56:38.730 align:middle line:90% 00:56:38.730 --> 00:56:42.060 align:middle line:84% And for Larry it was a way of lengthening his poems. 00:56:42.060 --> 00:56:48.110 align:middle line:84% But he also caught from Jon that sense 00:56:48.110 --> 00:56:52.400 align:middle line:84% of discovery of the self in the process of writing the poem. 00:56:52.400 --> 00:56:54.350 align:middle line:90% As Levis is a process poet. 00:56:54.350 --> 00:56:58.010 align:middle line:84% That's what you're talking about before. 00:56:58.010 --> 00:57:03.740 align:middle line:84% He brought a more worldly imagination to his poetry 00:57:03.740 --> 00:57:07.190 align:middle line:84% than Jon did, but he really felt. 00:57:07.190 --> 00:57:10.070 align:middle line:84% I thought he would go the way of his mentors, Larry, 00:57:10.070 --> 00:57:14.120 align:middle line:90% which was Phil Levine mostly. 00:57:14.120 --> 00:57:15.440 align:middle line:90% But it was interesting to see. 00:57:15.440 --> 00:57:16.580 align:middle line:90% They're all thoughtful. 00:57:16.580 --> 00:57:19.567 align:middle line:90% 00:57:19.567 --> 00:57:20.900 align:middle line:90% I don't wanna call him a great-- 00:57:20.900 --> 00:57:23.660 align:middle line:84% but very important, almost every important poet 00:57:23.660 --> 00:57:28.610 align:middle line:84% has a collection of words that belongs only to her or him. 00:57:28.610 --> 00:57:31.880 align:middle line:84% And Jon had, I wrote him down somewhere. 00:57:31.880 --> 00:57:36.890 align:middle line:84% Countenance, where'd you put them? 00:57:36.890 --> 00:57:38.840 align:middle line:84% David did you play around with them? 00:57:38.840 --> 00:57:41.540 align:middle line:90% 00:57:41.540 --> 00:57:45.890 align:middle line:84% Solace, countenance, evocation, consolation, passage, 00:57:45.890 --> 00:57:47.720 align:middle line:90% journeying, afterthought. 00:57:47.720 --> 00:57:50.210 align:middle line:84% They become mythic words in his vocabulary. 00:57:50.210 --> 00:57:53.180 align:middle line:84% And for a while, nobody else could use those words 00:57:53.180 --> 00:57:54.620 align:middle line:90% because they were Jon's alone. 00:57:54.620 --> 00:57:56.030 align:middle line:90% But Larry would use them. 00:57:56.030 --> 00:57:59.510 align:middle line:84% And I think in a way it was just a simple homage 00:57:59.510 --> 00:58:00.905 align:middle line:90% to Jon's influence. 00:58:00.905 --> 00:58:02.780 align:middle line:84% Can I say something about this sentence thing 00:58:02.780 --> 00:58:04.430 align:middle line:90% that Nance was bringing up? 00:58:04.430 --> 00:58:07.100 align:middle line:84% Because I think it is really important. 00:58:07.100 --> 00:58:10.970 align:middle line:84% When Michael was reading "Rosebud" last night, 00:58:10.970 --> 00:58:15.870 align:middle line:84% I mean, I felt like, oh, that's a proto Levis poem, isn't it, 00:58:15.870 --> 00:58:17.040 align:middle line:90% in a way. 00:58:17.040 --> 00:58:20.240 align:middle line:84% And one of the things about it is that weird periodicity 00:58:20.240 --> 00:58:22.970 align:middle line:84% of the sentence parts and the way the marking out 00:58:22.970 --> 00:58:25.340 align:middle line:84% time and turning back on themselves 00:58:25.340 --> 00:58:27.830 align:middle line:84% into the story and then the echo effects 00:58:27.830 --> 00:58:30.110 align:middle line:90% in these kind of slant rhymes. 00:58:30.110 --> 00:58:35.030 align:middle line:84% Then little images that come back, recycle, 00:58:35.030 --> 00:58:37.280 align:middle line:90% and phrases that will-- 00:58:37.280 --> 00:58:40.220 align:middle line:84% and he was able to kind of juggle all this stuff 00:58:40.220 --> 00:58:43.490 align:middle line:84% in the sentence as it was evolving 00:58:43.490 --> 00:58:45.700 align:middle line:84% and not try to resolve it immediately. 00:58:45.700 --> 00:58:47.533 align:middle line:84% I mean, this thing that you're talking about 00:58:47.533 --> 00:58:50.870 align:middle line:84% is like he just knew it was going somewhere 00:58:50.870 --> 00:58:54.150 align:middle line:84% and he had this faith that it was going to the right place. 00:58:54.150 --> 00:58:57.980 align:middle line:84% And as a consequence, there's an expansiveness in his sentence. 00:58:57.980 --> 00:59:00.980 align:middle line:84% In Levis and Jon's work, you know, 00:59:00.980 --> 00:59:03.570 align:middle line:84% that is really, really singular, I think. 00:59:03.570 --> 00:59:05.990 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:59:05.990 --> 00:59:07.190 align:middle line:90% What else? 00:59:07.190 --> 00:59:08.960 align:middle line:90% What's the next question? 00:59:08.960 --> 00:59:10.377 align:middle line:84% Well, it's not a question so much. 00:59:10.377 --> 00:59:11.627 align:middle line:90% I thought that there might be. 00:59:11.627 --> 00:59:13.220 align:middle line:84% I do have some other questions, but I 00:59:13.220 --> 00:59:16.220 align:middle line:84% thought that there might be some people who have already 00:59:16.220 --> 00:59:18.440 align:middle line:84% prepared some other issues about Jon's work. 00:59:18.440 --> 00:59:23.300 align:middle line:84% I think, Rich, you had suggested you have some thoughts. 00:59:23.300 --> 00:59:28.010 align:middle line:84% I just want to read a little bit from a poem called 00:59:28.010 --> 00:59:29.480 align:middle line:90% "Each Day Does That." 00:59:29.480 --> 00:59:30.780 align:middle line:90% To the microphone, please. 00:59:30.780 --> 00:59:31.700 align:middle line:90% What page is it? 00:59:31.700 --> 00:59:34.670 align:middle line:90% Oh you don't know. 00:59:34.670 --> 00:59:37.285 align:middle line:90% No I don't have the page number. 00:59:37.285 --> 00:59:40.040 align:middle line:84% "Each Day Does That" Jon writes, "but the truth 00:59:40.040 --> 00:59:41.450 align:middle line:90% is getting older. 00:59:41.450 --> 00:59:44.450 align:middle line:84% Most of my definitions turn out to have been early promises, 00:59:44.450 --> 00:59:48.980 align:middle line:90% now more and more forgettable." 00:59:48.980 --> 00:59:50.470 align:middle line:90% The self derision of it. 00:59:50.470 --> 00:59:52.360 align:middle line:84% What I wanted to get back to is what 00:59:52.360 --> 00:59:54.340 align:middle line:84% I think people were getting at is Jon's ability 00:59:54.340 --> 00:59:57.980 align:middle line:90% to want to change himself. 00:59:57.980 --> 01:00:00.860 align:middle line:84% I always use in my class Miles Davis's line, 01:00:00.860 --> 01:00:05.800 align:middle line:84% "but it takes a long time to sound like yourself." 01:00:05.800 --> 01:00:15.550 align:middle line:84% And it seems to me that even in Jon's most intimate moments, 01:00:15.550 --> 01:00:21.520 align:middle line:84% there's something larger at stake than just, I'm here, 01:00:21.520 --> 01:00:22.968 align:middle line:90% this is my autobiography. 01:00:22.968 --> 01:00:24.760 align:middle line:84% I guess that's what Steve is talking about. 01:00:24.760 --> 01:00:26.620 align:middle line:90% That mythic ability. 01:00:26.620 --> 01:00:34.750 align:middle line:84% Without being a student of Elliot's footnote 01:00:34.750 --> 01:00:36.760 align:middle line:90% kind of intellectual. 01:00:36.760 --> 01:00:39.220 align:middle line:84% I mean, you would say he's anti intellectual. 01:00:39.220 --> 01:00:45.250 align:middle line:84% I think he was anti elitist in the wonderfulest ways, 01:00:45.250 --> 01:00:47.350 align:middle line:84% at the same time being a very smart man. 01:00:47.350 --> 01:00:49.060 align:middle line:90% Also had broad taste. 01:00:49.060 --> 01:00:53.440 align:middle line:84% As my taste was narrowing for a while in our early years, 01:00:53.440 --> 01:00:55.460 align:middle line:90% his kept broadening. 01:00:55.460 --> 01:00:57.267 align:middle line:84% And then shrinking and broadening. 01:00:57.267 --> 01:00:59.890 align:middle line:90% 01:00:59.890 --> 01:01:03.010 align:middle line:84% Well, I had written down that he seemed protean to me. 01:01:03.010 --> 01:01:06.000 align:middle line:90% But that's not the right word. 01:01:06.000 --> 01:01:08.680 align:middle line:84% It didn't seem like he was just jumping around. 01:01:08.680 --> 01:01:12.020 align:middle line:90% He was always open to change. 01:01:12.020 --> 01:01:13.630 align:middle line:84% That's the only way I can phrase it. 01:01:13.630 --> 01:01:16.320 align:middle line:90% 01:01:16.320 --> 01:01:17.820 align:middle line:84% I don't want to sound like Dr. Phil, 01:01:17.820 --> 01:01:22.050 align:middle line:84% but I think it's aesthetic before it's psychological. 01:01:22.050 --> 01:01:23.550 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 01:01:23.550 --> 01:01:26.550 align:middle line:84% You know, Loren, you're his most recent. 01:01:26.550 --> 01:01:28.860 align:middle line:84% You were his most recent project. 01:01:28.860 --> 01:01:30.900 align:middle line:90% Successful project. 01:01:30.900 --> 01:01:34.770 align:middle line:84% And you know, your poems live in another universe. 01:01:34.770 --> 01:01:35.520 align:middle line:90% They're wonderful. 01:01:35.520 --> 01:01:37.980 align:middle line:90% They're full of surprises. 01:01:37.980 --> 01:01:41.880 align:middle line:84% Did Jon teach you something about that? 01:01:41.880 --> 01:01:44.100 align:middle line:90% Or did he encourage it? 01:01:44.100 --> 01:01:45.240 align:middle line:90% Or both? 01:01:45.240 --> 01:01:47.460 align:middle line:90% Yeah, well, I was thinking. 01:01:47.460 --> 01:01:49.680 align:middle line:84% And someone mentioned about the games and the play 01:01:49.680 --> 01:01:56.750 align:middle line:84% that most of the content of our interactions and conversations 01:01:56.750 --> 01:02:02.070 align:middle line:90% were jokes and play. 01:02:02.070 --> 01:02:06.990 align:middle line:84% Like a flow of redirecting and disarming, 01:02:06.990 --> 01:02:12.000 align:middle line:84% unexpectedly, flow of what would be expected conversation. 01:02:12.000 --> 01:02:15.660 align:middle line:90% And things started out. 01:02:15.660 --> 01:02:21.540 align:middle line:84% That continued, but also led to these other things 01:02:21.540 --> 01:02:26.280 align:middle line:84% that were almost like happenings or little art projects. 01:02:26.280 --> 01:02:29.160 align:middle line:90% We would write each other. 01:02:29.160 --> 01:02:31.470 align:middle line:84% He would leave messages on my answering machines 01:02:31.470 --> 01:02:35.340 align:middle line:90% in these character crazy voices. 01:02:35.340 --> 01:02:38.470 align:middle line:84% He would write the return address 01:02:38.470 --> 01:02:43.020 align:middle line:84% to these letters would be aliases. 01:02:43.020 --> 01:02:48.160 align:middle line:84% Doctor No and different characters. 01:02:48.160 --> 01:02:50.100 align:middle line:84% So was that an influence on your poems? 01:02:50.100 --> 01:02:55.728 align:middle line:84% It was an influence and it was just an openness to possibility 01:02:55.728 --> 01:02:56.895 align:middle line:90% and trying different things. 01:02:56.895 --> 01:03:03.640 align:middle line:90% 01:03:03.640 --> 01:03:05.560 align:middle line:84% Outside his office, there was a passageway 01:03:05.560 --> 01:03:08.450 align:middle line:90% between two buildings. 01:03:08.450 --> 01:03:11.090 align:middle line:84% When people would walk through that and go to classes, 01:03:11.090 --> 01:03:13.670 align:middle line:84% we could see them very well, but they could not see us. 01:03:13.670 --> 01:03:15.570 align:middle line:84% We stood in a certain place by the window 01:03:15.570 --> 01:03:21.570 align:middle line:90% and we developed this thing. 01:03:21.570 --> 01:03:26.330 align:middle line:84% Bodi gave it a name later called verbal sniping. 01:03:26.330 --> 01:03:29.910 align:middle line:84% It wasn't really aggressive or dangerous. 01:03:29.910 --> 01:03:32.810 align:middle line:84% But we started off, he brought this book of poems 01:03:32.810 --> 01:03:33.680 align:middle line:90% by Leonard Nimoy. 01:03:33.680 --> 01:03:36.590 align:middle line:90% 01:03:36.590 --> 01:03:39.290 align:middle line:84% We were just playing and one thing led to another. 01:03:39.290 --> 01:03:41.870 align:middle line:84% We were reading Leonard Nimoy's poems 01:03:41.870 --> 01:03:44.090 align:middle line:84% out the window to people walking to class. 01:03:44.090 --> 01:03:46.375 align:middle line:90% 01:03:46.375 --> 01:03:47.750 align:middle line:84% But they couldn't see you, right? 01:03:47.750 --> 01:03:48.811 align:middle line:90% They couldn't see us. 01:03:48.811 --> 01:03:52.040 align:middle line:90% 01:03:52.040 --> 01:03:53.133 align:middle line:90% [INTERPOSING VOICES] 01:03:53.133 --> 01:03:54.800 align:middle line:84% What I remember along those lines, like, 01:03:54.800 --> 01:03:57.200 align:middle line:84% going swimming with Jon at the pool 01:03:57.200 --> 01:04:00.140 align:middle line:84% and then you'd be laying on the concrete 01:04:00.140 --> 01:04:02.090 align:middle line:90% after the swim in the sun. 01:04:02.090 --> 01:04:04.220 align:middle line:84% And then he'd kind of yell something 01:04:04.220 --> 01:04:06.960 align:middle line:84% but sort of like in a way that nobody could actually tell, 01:04:06.960 --> 01:04:07.460 align:middle line:90% you know? 01:04:07.460 --> 01:04:08.360 align:middle line:90% Something obscene. 01:04:08.360 --> 01:04:12.830 align:middle line:84% You know what his favorite thing is a young guy? 01:04:12.830 --> 01:04:15.320 align:middle line:84% Going all the way back to high school and college, 01:04:15.320 --> 01:04:20.000 align:middle line:84% when I didn't know him, was, Mayakovsky! 01:04:20.000 --> 01:04:23.120 align:middle line:84% He and his friend at the time, a guy named Al Anderson, 01:04:23.120 --> 01:04:27.320 align:middle line:84% would be at the Red Sox game, way up in the bleachers. 01:04:27.320 --> 01:04:30.380 align:middle line:84% And all of a sudden Jon would get up and yell "Mayakovsky!" 01:04:30.380 --> 01:04:36.050 align:middle line:84% And he loved Mayakovsky's wonderfully crazy poems. 01:04:36.050 --> 01:04:39.500 align:middle line:84% Again, Jon's obsessive sense of humor here. 01:04:39.500 --> 01:04:41.090 align:middle line:90% I remember one other thing. 01:04:41.090 --> 01:04:42.590 align:middle line:84% Just more of a particular instance, 01:04:42.590 --> 01:04:44.720 align:middle line:90% I guess, of influence. 01:04:44.720 --> 01:04:46.500 align:middle line:90% I was trying to write a novel. 01:04:46.500 --> 01:04:50.060 align:middle line:84% And I had written just a couple of lines of it. 01:04:50.060 --> 01:04:50.730 align:middle line:90% No, no. 01:04:50.730 --> 01:04:51.230 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 01:04:51.230 --> 01:04:53.300 align:middle line:84% Just a couple of lines and I was talking with Jon 01:04:53.300 --> 01:04:57.470 align:middle line:84% to see how do I have these other ideas. 01:04:57.470 --> 01:04:58.280 align:middle line:90% Go this way. 01:04:58.280 --> 01:05:00.080 align:middle line:84% And maybe I had written a little more. 01:05:00.080 --> 01:05:02.990 align:middle line:84% But he looked at it and just said, oh, that's it. 01:05:02.990 --> 01:05:04.190 align:middle line:90% The first two lines. 01:05:04.190 --> 01:05:06.890 align:middle line:90% 01:05:06.890 --> 01:05:08.180 align:middle line:90% That's wonderful. 01:05:08.180 --> 01:05:11.480 align:middle line:90% 01:05:11.480 --> 01:05:12.930 align:middle line:84% A lot of friends are always, well, 01:05:12.930 --> 01:05:14.390 align:middle line:84% how come he doesn't write anymore? 01:05:14.390 --> 01:05:16.970 align:middle line:84% And I would say, come on, Jon, you got a semester off. 01:05:16.970 --> 01:05:18.348 align:middle line:90% You got nothing to do. 01:05:18.348 --> 01:05:19.640 align:middle line:90% Why don't you write some poems? 01:05:19.640 --> 01:05:21.740 align:middle line:90% And pretty early on, he told me. 01:05:21.740 --> 01:05:25.370 align:middle line:90% He said it's too hard. 01:05:25.370 --> 01:05:26.690 align:middle line:90% And the process that-- 01:05:26.690 --> 01:05:28.280 align:middle line:84% It's the only thing he took seriously. 01:05:28.280 --> 01:05:29.060 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 01:05:29.060 --> 01:05:31.940 align:middle line:84% And the process, I think, someone talked about last night 01:05:31.940 --> 01:05:36.830 align:middle line:84% where he would not continue with the next line 01:05:36.830 --> 01:05:39.740 align:middle line:84% until he had gotten this line or a line and a half, 01:05:39.740 --> 01:05:43.615 align:middle line:84% a sentence, as perfect as he wanted it, musically. 01:05:43.615 --> 01:05:44.240 align:middle line:90% He didn't care. 01:05:44.240 --> 01:05:46.550 align:middle line:84% Wasn't caring yet about sense or theme, 01:05:46.550 --> 01:05:49.160 align:middle line:84% hoping that his subconscious would take care of that. 01:05:49.160 --> 01:05:52.370 align:middle line:84% And he would lock himself up in his office for two or three 01:05:52.370 --> 01:05:53.390 align:middle line:90% days, sober. 01:05:53.390 --> 01:05:54.200 align:middle line:90% He would smoke. 01:05:54.200 --> 01:05:55.670 align:middle line:90% He wasn't a smoker. 01:05:55.670 --> 01:05:56.577 align:middle line:90% Two or three nights. 01:05:56.577 --> 01:05:57.410 align:middle line:90% Two or three nights. 01:05:57.410 --> 01:05:57.910 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 01:05:57.910 --> 01:05:59.750 align:middle line:84% There were no days in Jon's life. 01:05:59.750 --> 01:06:03.620 align:middle line:84% And we're sitting around a table in Pittsburgh 01:06:03.620 --> 01:06:06.470 align:middle line:84% and he was drunk it was the first time I realized 01:06:06.470 --> 01:06:09.440 align:middle line:84% that he was an alcoholic because of the amount he 01:06:09.440 --> 01:06:10.340 align:middle line:90% drank all night. 01:06:10.340 --> 01:06:13.890 align:middle line:90% And he said it's just too hard. 01:06:13.890 --> 01:06:16.500 align:middle line:90% I can't do it anymore. 01:06:16.500 --> 01:06:17.390 align:middle line:90% And it is. 01:06:17.390 --> 01:06:21.650 align:middle line:84% Anyway, if you're a hard worker in poetry, it is too hard. 01:06:21.650 --> 01:06:22.220 align:middle line:90% You know? 01:06:22.220 --> 01:06:25.700 align:middle line:84% And he is, was, by nature, an extremely 01:06:25.700 --> 01:06:28.610 align:middle line:90% undisciplined and lazy man. 01:06:28.610 --> 01:06:32.660 align:middle line:84% Steve, do you feel like Jon's early fame, you know, 01:06:32.660 --> 01:06:38.810 align:middle line:84% because he and Tate and Glück were really the most famous 01:06:38.810 --> 01:06:42.260 align:middle line:84% poets of their generation as they left their 20s. 01:06:42.260 --> 01:06:46.010 align:middle line:84% And you know, Jon's second book was nominated for the National 01:06:46.010 --> 01:06:50.030 align:middle line:84% Book Award, and he was a really important figure 01:06:50.030 --> 01:06:52.760 align:middle line:90% in your generation. 01:06:52.760 --> 01:06:55.190 align:middle line:84% Do you think it, I don't want to say it ruined him, 01:06:55.190 --> 01:06:59.300 align:middle line:84% you know, but in some way he had this thing. 01:06:59.300 --> 01:07:02.120 align:middle line:84% The things that everyone kind of dreams of when they start out 01:07:02.120 --> 01:07:03.390 align:middle line:90% and he had them pretty early. 01:07:03.390 --> 01:07:03.890 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 01:07:03.890 --> 01:07:06.920 align:middle line:84% I think, you know, those kind of things 01:07:06.920 --> 01:07:10.940 align:middle line:84% that all of us, no matter how much we might deny it 01:07:10.940 --> 01:07:14.510 align:middle line:90% have as kind of rewards. 01:07:14.510 --> 01:07:15.740 align:middle line:90% He had gotten them. 01:07:15.740 --> 01:07:17.180 align:middle line:90% And, you know, so. 01:07:17.180 --> 01:07:19.370 align:middle line:84% I was thinking about that this morning. 01:07:19.370 --> 01:07:21.140 align:middle line:90% There's a poem by Frost. 01:07:21.140 --> 01:07:26.230 align:middle line:84% It's maybe a sonnet about, "I can out walk the furthest--" 01:07:26.230 --> 01:07:27.488 align:middle line:90% Remember that? 01:07:27.488 --> 01:07:28.280 align:middle line:90% It's about walking. 01:07:28.280 --> 01:07:34.222 align:middle line:90% 01:07:34.222 --> 01:07:35.170 align:middle line:90% It's a night. 01:07:35.170 --> 01:07:38.020 align:middle line:90% Insomnia, walking around. 01:07:38.020 --> 01:07:39.335 align:middle line:90% Somebody who would remember. 01:07:39.335 --> 01:07:39.860 align:middle line:90% I am one accustomed to night. 01:07:39.860 --> 01:07:40.570 align:middle line:90% Is that the poem? 01:07:40.570 --> 01:07:43.870 align:middle line:84% I am one accustomed to the night. 01:07:43.870 --> 01:07:46.180 align:middle line:84% Jon, I think he wrote this in a poem. 01:07:46.180 --> 01:07:47.050 align:middle line:90% I didn't find it. 01:07:47.050 --> 01:07:50.350 align:middle line:84% "Whatever I want, I can out walk." 01:07:50.350 --> 01:07:50.980 align:middle line:90% Who says that? 01:07:50.980 --> 01:07:51.790 align:middle line:90% Jon? 01:07:51.790 --> 01:07:55.000 align:middle line:84% "Whatever I want, I can out walk" I don't know why, 01:07:55.000 --> 01:07:58.480 align:middle line:84% but in my mind maybe other lines in that poem, is, 01:07:58.480 --> 01:08:01.450 align:middle line:90% if I can do it, why bother? 01:08:01.450 --> 01:08:03.730 align:middle line:84% If I've already done it, why bother? 01:08:03.730 --> 01:08:08.890 align:middle line:84% You reach he-- won the Shelley Memorial Award, which 01:08:08.890 --> 01:08:11.720 align:middle line:84% I think Mark Strand might have judged for career achievement. 01:08:11.720 --> 01:08:14.770 align:middle line:84% He's only 37 years old when he did it. 01:08:14.770 --> 01:08:16.689 align:middle line:84% And I think, yeah, that was part of it. 01:08:16.689 --> 01:08:18.380 align:middle line:90% I did it. 01:08:18.380 --> 01:08:21.460 align:middle line:84% And then he lost his sense of a lot of his natural sense 01:08:21.460 --> 01:08:23.630 align:middle line:90% of competition in the world. 01:08:23.630 --> 01:08:25.330 align:middle line:90% Was he afraid of that success? 01:08:25.330 --> 01:08:28.540 align:middle line:84% Did that like freak him out that he couldn't match it? 01:08:28.540 --> 01:08:30.590 align:middle line:90% I didn't see that. 01:08:30.590 --> 01:08:31.960 align:middle line:90% I think he liked it, you know? 01:08:31.960 --> 01:08:34.000 align:middle line:84% But the thing, I just one of the things 01:08:34.000 --> 01:08:37.600 align:middle line:84% that didn't change until later in Jon's work, Day Moon, 01:08:37.600 --> 01:08:39.040 align:middle line:90% was the diction. 01:08:39.040 --> 01:08:40.960 align:middle line:84% This thing that you were talking about. 01:08:40.960 --> 01:08:46.210 align:middle line:84% Those words that he had and that transferred into Levis. 01:08:46.210 --> 01:08:50.260 align:middle line:84% And I felt like, I mean Williams says 01:08:50.260 --> 01:08:52.630 align:middle line:84% that if you can change your vocabulary, 01:08:52.630 --> 01:08:54.340 align:middle line:84% you change your diction, then you can 01:08:54.340 --> 01:08:56.050 align:middle line:90% change feeling and thinking. 01:08:56.050 --> 01:09:02.500 align:middle line:84% And Jon was locked in, I think, to the thing that had evolved 01:09:02.500 --> 01:09:03.710 align:middle line:90% over the first three books. 01:09:03.710 --> 01:09:04.210 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 01:09:04.210 --> 01:09:04.710 align:middle line:90% That's true. 01:09:04.710 --> 01:09:07.140 align:middle line:90% 01:09:07.140 --> 01:09:08.890 align:middle line:84% It just made me think of the Day Moon poem 01:09:08.890 --> 01:09:13.450 align:middle line:84% and how the rhetoric is the same, 01:09:13.450 --> 01:09:16.274 align:middle line:84% but he doesn't push it to the conclusion with the end. 01:09:16.274 --> 01:09:17.649 align:middle line:84% I mean, it's a beautiful passage. 01:09:17.649 --> 01:09:20.200 align:middle line:84% "If our love is a passing affection that the mountains 01:09:20.200 --> 01:09:21.700 align:middle line:90% might be a boat. 01:09:21.700 --> 01:09:23.479 align:middle line:90% All day the moon the suggestion. 01:09:23.479 --> 01:09:25.210 align:middle line:90% A luminous journey by night." 01:09:25.210 --> 01:09:26.800 align:middle line:84% And that's the same rhetoric to me. 01:09:26.800 --> 01:09:28.090 align:middle line:84% But he does something different with it. 01:09:28.090 --> 01:09:29.632 align:middle line:84% He doesn't push it forward into that. 01:09:29.632 --> 01:09:31.390 align:middle line:84% I believe in its terrible progression. 01:09:31.390 --> 01:09:35.029 align:middle line:90% [INTERPOSING VOICES] 01:09:35.029 --> 01:09:36.279 align:middle line:90% What Steve was saying you're-- 01:09:36.279 --> 01:09:38.380 align:middle line:90% [INTERPOSING VOICES] 01:09:38.380 --> 01:09:40.240 align:middle line:84% Working on one line so hard, I started 01:09:40.240 --> 01:09:44.399 align:middle line:84% to think, why did that last book come out? 01:09:44.399 --> 01:09:46.240 align:middle line:84% And I'm wondering if he just didn't want 01:09:46.240 --> 01:09:48.020 align:middle line:90% to make it into a commodity. 01:09:48.020 --> 01:09:48.520 align:middle line:90% No. 01:09:48.520 --> 01:09:51.100 align:middle line:84% He wrote it because he wanted to prove to his new girlfriend 01:09:51.100 --> 01:09:53.080 align:middle line:90% that he could still do it. 01:09:53.080 --> 01:09:58.000 align:middle line:84% That's exactly why he said he wrote that book. 01:09:58.000 --> 01:09:59.830 align:middle line:84% That has nothing to do with poetry. 01:09:59.830 --> 01:10:03.700 align:middle line:84% That gets back to first principles, though. 01:10:03.700 --> 01:10:07.430 align:middle line:84% But he plays with commodity more in Day Moon than he does-- 01:10:07.430 --> 01:10:10.330 align:middle line:90% The world's commodity. 01:10:10.330 --> 01:10:12.670 align:middle line:90% The ugliness of the world, more. 01:10:12.670 --> 01:10:16.810 align:middle line:84% What you said about, someone said about Bodi 01:10:16.810 --> 01:10:18.950 align:middle line:84% giving him that new subject matter. 01:10:18.950 --> 01:10:20.740 align:middle line:84% You know, punk rock or whatever it is. 01:10:20.740 --> 01:10:21.880 align:middle line:90% That's absolutely true. 01:10:21.880 --> 01:10:23.697 align:middle line:90% I never, never thought of that. 01:10:23.697 --> 01:10:24.280 align:middle line:90% But it's true. 01:10:24.280 --> 01:10:25.900 align:middle line:90% It gave him a sensibility. 01:10:25.900 --> 01:10:29.090 align:middle line:84% A new sensibility, too, as much as the subject matter. 01:10:29.090 --> 01:10:30.330 align:middle line:90% It just-- Oh I'm sorry. 01:10:30.330 --> 01:10:30.830 align:middle line:90% Go ahead. 01:10:30.830 --> 01:10:31.630 align:middle line:90% I just want to-- 01:10:31.630 --> 01:10:33.310 align:middle line:84% I just keep coming back to this idea. 01:10:33.310 --> 01:10:35.830 align:middle line:90% 01:10:35.830 --> 01:10:37.960 align:middle line:84% I'm curious about it, for all the rest of you, 01:10:37.960 --> 01:10:40.480 align:middle line:90% as somebody who is not-- 01:10:40.480 --> 01:10:42.160 align:middle line:84% I mean I don't know if I consider myself 01:10:42.160 --> 01:10:43.540 align:middle line:90% a poet these days or not-- 01:10:43.540 --> 01:10:44.650 align:middle line:90% but I write. 01:10:44.650 --> 01:10:45.970 align:middle line:90% I don't finish things. 01:10:45.970 --> 01:10:49.750 align:middle line:84% I don't send them out for publication anymore. 01:10:49.750 --> 01:10:54.040 align:middle line:84% There's a kind of inertia in that but there's also kind of-- 01:10:54.040 --> 01:10:56.260 align:middle line:84% The practice of writing is not something 01:10:56.260 --> 01:11:00.280 align:middle line:84% that I know what I'm I kind of hope 01:11:00.280 --> 01:11:03.610 align:middle line:84% to have that professional whatever again. 01:11:03.610 --> 01:11:06.130 align:middle line:90% But I kind of also don't know. 01:11:06.130 --> 01:11:07.913 align:middle line:84% And if you're not driven toward that-- 01:11:07.913 --> 01:11:10.330 align:middle line:84% and maybe that's what you were talking about, David, too-- 01:11:10.330 --> 01:11:13.090 align:middle line:90% 01:11:13.090 --> 01:11:16.270 align:middle line:84% just to be in this community of so many writers and so many 01:11:16.270 --> 01:11:19.660 align:middle line:90% people I've known for so long. 01:11:19.660 --> 01:11:24.010 align:middle line:84% To have this conversation is what it's all about. 01:11:24.010 --> 01:11:27.940 align:middle line:84% If you don't invite yourself into it 01:11:27.940 --> 01:11:30.010 align:middle line:84% and/or you're not invited into it, 01:11:30.010 --> 01:11:32.930 align:middle line:84% in a way, which Jon had through his students, 01:11:32.930 --> 01:11:34.330 align:middle line:90% but that's different. 01:11:34.330 --> 01:11:37.120 align:middle line:84% It's really different to be amongst your peers. 01:11:37.120 --> 01:11:40.520 align:middle line:90% 01:11:40.520 --> 01:11:42.740 align:middle line:90% The inward gets a lot bigger. 01:11:42.740 --> 01:11:46.030 align:middle line:84% And if you're the kind of person who says, 01:11:46.030 --> 01:11:48.780 align:middle line:84% I'm only going to do this for the maximum, 01:11:48.780 --> 01:11:51.420 align:middle line:84% I think that was what Nancy was saying. 01:11:51.420 --> 01:11:52.980 align:middle line:90% I'm only going to. 01:11:52.980 --> 01:11:55.650 align:middle line:84% I am playing, but the stakes are really high. 01:11:55.650 --> 01:11:58.230 align:middle line:84% I don't want to repeat myself and have somebody go, 01:11:58.230 --> 01:11:59.370 align:middle line:90% oh that was a great poem. 01:11:59.370 --> 01:12:00.690 align:middle line:90% And I'm going to publish it. 01:12:00.690 --> 01:12:02.357 align:middle line:84% Or you're going to be the poet laureate. 01:12:02.357 --> 01:12:05.190 align:middle line:90% Or it's on First Daily today. 01:12:05.190 --> 01:12:06.540 align:middle line:90% He didn't care about that. 01:12:06.540 --> 01:12:07.387 align:middle line:90% That wasn't-- 01:12:07.387 --> 01:12:08.970 align:middle line:84% Well as a young person he did, though. 01:12:08.970 --> 01:12:13.320 align:middle line:90% Right, but less and less. 01:12:13.320 --> 01:12:15.960 align:middle line:90% Almost as an anti stance. 01:12:15.960 --> 01:12:18.720 align:middle line:84% Well, that last book was disinvested 01:12:18.720 --> 01:12:21.450 align:middle line:90% of I want to be popular. 01:12:21.450 --> 01:12:22.410 align:middle line:90% Right. 01:12:22.410 --> 01:12:24.637 align:middle line:90% and that is an extreme maturity. 01:12:24.637 --> 01:12:26.970 align:middle line:84% I mean, I was thinking about the maturity and immaturity 01:12:26.970 --> 01:12:28.920 align:middle line:84% thing and Gibb's comment, and I thought, well, 01:12:28.920 --> 01:12:32.550 align:middle line:84% that's a kind of spiritual, you know? 01:12:32.550 --> 01:12:37.770 align:middle line:84% It's like a huge maturity that I think 01:12:37.770 --> 01:12:42.840 align:middle line:84% is why art by somebody besides celebrity or repeating oneself 01:12:42.840 --> 01:12:45.070 align:middle line:84% or pats on the back would keep doing it. 01:12:45.070 --> 01:12:49.650 align:middle line:84% So I guess he did really achieve that in a way, and I'm so glad. 01:12:49.650 --> 01:12:54.960 align:middle line:84% I've not laughed this much with Jon in 10 years 01:12:54.960 --> 01:12:59.370 align:middle line:84% as I have remembering Jon in the past. 01:12:59.370 --> 01:13:00.000 align:middle line:90% So great. 01:13:00.000 --> 01:13:04.453 align:middle line:84% And I think I'm glad he was word sniping at the end. 01:13:04.453 --> 01:13:06.120 align:middle line:84% You know, that's the immaturity you want 01:13:06.120 --> 01:13:08.610 align:middle line:90% to keep that most people lose. 01:13:08.610 --> 01:13:10.110 align:middle line:90% It's a great playfulness. 01:13:10.110 --> 01:13:10.710 align:middle line:90% Oh, God. 01:13:10.710 --> 01:13:12.450 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 01:13:12.450 --> 01:13:15.420 align:middle line:84% Well actually, what I was going to say, 01:13:15.420 --> 01:13:19.660 align:middle line:84% I think it plays into what you're talking about. 01:13:19.660 --> 01:13:25.710 align:middle line:84% We're all trying to find a reason for why Jon didn't keep 01:13:25.710 --> 01:13:28.830 align:middle line:84% writing in a way that was more connected 01:13:28.830 --> 01:13:35.170 align:middle line:84% to the career he created for himself in these early books. 01:13:35.170 --> 01:13:38.070 align:middle line:84% And one of the things I've always felt about it 01:13:38.070 --> 01:13:40.660 align:middle line:84% is that there isn't a reason for it. 01:13:40.660 --> 01:13:41.730 align:middle line:90% It's mysterious. 01:13:41.730 --> 01:13:44.490 align:middle line:90% And he was such a lyric poet. 01:13:44.490 --> 01:13:48.810 align:middle line:84% And his intuitions and his ear was so great 01:13:48.810 --> 01:13:53.070 align:middle line:90% that it stopped in a way. 01:13:53.070 --> 01:13:54.900 align:middle line:90% And it's a mystery. 01:13:54.900 --> 01:13:56.760 align:middle line:90% The poems are a gift. 01:13:56.760 --> 01:13:59.100 align:middle line:84% And that's the kind of consolation 01:13:59.100 --> 01:14:01.920 align:middle line:84% I always told myself is that we're just 01:14:01.920 --> 01:14:03.450 align:middle line:90% lucky to have these poems. 01:14:03.450 --> 01:14:04.560 align:middle line:90% That might be true. 01:14:04.560 --> 01:14:06.720 align:middle line:90% And maybe that's all he had. 01:14:06.720 --> 01:14:10.710 align:middle line:84% But the other side of that, it's the kind of terror 01:14:10.710 --> 01:14:12.270 align:middle line:90% that I feel as a writer. 01:14:12.270 --> 01:14:14.010 align:middle line:84% That at any moment, it could stop. 01:14:14.010 --> 01:14:18.090 align:middle line:84% That the last poem you wrote is your last poem. 01:14:18.090 --> 01:14:21.240 align:middle line:84% That's what Randall Jarrell talked about that. 01:14:21.240 --> 01:14:24.510 align:middle line:84% So it's interesting that we're talking about this as is 01:14:24.510 --> 01:14:27.000 align:middle line:90% if it's a reasonable subject. 01:14:27.000 --> 01:14:29.175 align:middle line:84% And in some ways, it's not a reasonable subject. 01:14:29.175 --> 01:14:31.050 align:middle line:84% And the other thing is, the history of poetry 01:14:31.050 --> 01:14:33.370 align:middle line:84% is filled with examples of people who, 01:14:33.370 --> 01:14:36.840 align:middle line:84% when they reach 50 or 60, and continue writing, 01:14:36.840 --> 01:14:39.030 align:middle line:84% just to basically repeating themselves. 01:14:39.030 --> 01:14:40.140 align:middle line:90% Or degrading. 01:14:40.140 --> 01:14:41.820 align:middle line:90% Their talents are degrading. 01:14:41.820 --> 01:14:43.720 align:middle line:84% So, you know, Jon was pretty aware of that. 01:14:43.720 --> 01:14:46.500 align:middle line:84% I think he didn't feel any urge to kind of enact 01:14:46.500 --> 01:14:50.010 align:middle line:90% that biography. 01:14:50.010 --> 01:14:51.870 align:middle line:84% Well, but back to reasonableness, 01:14:51.870 --> 01:14:55.770 align:middle line:84% that in conjunction with certain personality traits 01:14:55.770 --> 01:14:57.840 align:middle line:84% made it more abrupt than it would 01:14:57.840 --> 01:14:59.280 align:middle line:90% have been in somebody else. 01:14:59.280 --> 01:15:02.250 align:middle line:84% But you know, yet again I just think 01:15:02.250 --> 01:15:04.920 align:middle line:84% that the power in the work is that it comes 01:15:04.920 --> 01:15:06.180 align:middle line:90% from this mysterious place. 01:15:06.180 --> 01:15:08.910 align:middle line:90% 01:15:08.910 --> 01:15:10.920 align:middle line:90% We all feel that, as writers. 01:15:10.920 --> 01:15:13.800 align:middle line:84% And we also feel how tentative it is 01:15:13.800 --> 01:15:17.010 align:middle line:90% and how fleeting it can be. 01:15:17.010 --> 01:15:18.360 align:middle line:90% And what is it all for? 01:15:18.360 --> 01:15:23.100 align:middle line:84% I mean, if it's not for your students, your career, 01:15:23.100 --> 01:15:27.160 align:middle line:84% or yourself, then it's for something else. 01:15:27.160 --> 01:15:30.780 align:middle line:84% And I think that something else is harder. 01:15:30.780 --> 01:15:33.978 align:middle line:90% 01:15:33.978 --> 01:15:37.980 align:middle line:84% It requires some kind of faith in that process. 01:15:37.980 --> 01:15:40.310 align:middle line:84% And again, if you're not in that. 01:15:40.310 --> 01:15:43.040 align:middle line:90% 01:15:43.040 --> 01:15:46.340 align:middle line:84% Those other reasons don't sustain, ultimately. 01:15:46.340 --> 01:15:50.660 align:middle line:84% So I want to ask a question to the panelists and anybody 01:15:50.660 --> 01:15:55.040 align:middle line:90% else who wants to entertain it. 01:15:55.040 --> 01:16:01.400 align:middle line:84% One of my difficulties when Jon stopped writing 01:16:01.400 --> 01:16:07.610 align:middle line:84% was to then try and reconcile, you know, 01:16:07.610 --> 01:16:09.140 align:middle line:90% how to go on yourself. 01:16:09.140 --> 01:16:15.410 align:middle line:84% When someone who has taught you so much, who's a mentor, 01:16:15.410 --> 01:16:22.220 align:middle line:84% decides not to do it for whatever reason, no judgment, 01:16:22.220 --> 01:16:24.860 align:middle line:90% then how do you go on? 01:16:24.860 --> 01:16:27.830 align:middle line:84% It was difficult for me, because I 01:16:27.830 --> 01:16:31.010 align:middle line:84% had to think about what it was I really believed in, 01:16:31.010 --> 01:16:34.490 align:middle line:90% because I believed in him. 01:16:34.490 --> 01:16:39.620 align:middle line:84% And it it's still something I think about constantly. 01:16:39.620 --> 01:16:42.800 align:middle line:84% You're getting a response to the question. 01:16:42.800 --> 01:16:45.890 align:middle line:84% By the time I was a student, Jon really wasn't writing. 01:16:45.890 --> 01:16:48.210 align:middle line:90% This was 20 years ago. 01:16:48.210 --> 01:16:51.350 align:middle line:84% And I think rather than look at the fact 01:16:51.350 --> 01:16:54.410 align:middle line:84% that he stopped writing, it's important to acknowledge 01:16:54.410 --> 01:16:59.300 align:middle line:84% that his influence on writing is expanding to this day. 01:16:59.300 --> 01:17:02.000 align:middle line:84% I mean, look at all the people in this room 01:17:02.000 --> 01:17:04.220 align:middle line:90% who were taught by him. 01:17:04.220 --> 01:17:07.130 align:middle line:84% He had a tremendous influence on me as a writer, 01:17:07.130 --> 01:17:10.130 align:middle line:84% whether he was writing at the time or not. 01:17:10.130 --> 01:17:15.980 align:middle line:84% And I think he taught me more simple things about writing 01:17:15.980 --> 01:17:18.500 align:middle line:90% that helped me go forward. 01:17:18.500 --> 01:17:23.840 align:middle line:84% I mean, I think you have to look at him as not just his writing, 01:17:23.840 --> 01:17:28.150 align:middle line:84% but hundreds of people's writing influenced by him. 01:17:28.150 --> 01:17:31.790 align:middle line:84% And it's not a failure, by no means. 01:17:31.790 --> 01:17:32.705 align:middle line:90% But I'm not talking-- 01:17:32.705 --> 01:17:34.580 align:middle line:84% I'm not really-- I agree with you completely. 01:17:34.580 --> 01:17:39.860 align:middle line:84% I mean, that's the whole premise of why we're here, 01:17:39.860 --> 01:17:42.290 align:middle line:90% acknowledging that fact. 01:17:42.290 --> 01:17:50.130 align:middle line:84% But you can't help but want to follow. 01:17:50.130 --> 01:17:51.230 align:middle line:90% He's a step ahead. 01:17:51.230 --> 01:17:53.720 align:middle line:84% And you want to learn from what the next step is. 01:17:53.720 --> 01:17:56.810 align:middle line:84% The other reason I'm keenly aware of this 01:17:56.810 --> 01:17:59.090 align:middle line:84% was another mentor of mine, William Meredith, 01:17:59.090 --> 01:18:01.410 align:middle line:90% had a stroke in 1983. 01:18:01.410 --> 01:18:05.280 align:middle line:84% And he went silent, but he stayed alive for 28 more years. 01:18:05.280 --> 01:18:09.740 align:middle line:84% And so I constantly wondered what kinds of poems 01:18:09.740 --> 01:18:10.730 align:middle line:90% could have come. 01:18:10.730 --> 01:18:14.780 align:middle line:84% You can't help but wonder and want them. 01:18:14.780 --> 01:18:15.290 align:middle line:90% Don't you? 01:18:15.290 --> 01:18:17.930 align:middle line:84% I mean because even though I understand 01:18:17.930 --> 01:18:20.700 align:middle line:84% completely what you mean, if this is all you have, 01:18:20.700 --> 01:18:22.010 align:middle line:90% that's great. 01:18:22.010 --> 01:18:23.660 align:middle line:90% You should be thankful for it. 01:18:23.660 --> 01:18:24.300 align:middle line:90% What's that? 01:18:24.300 --> 01:18:24.800 align:middle line:90% Keats. 01:18:24.800 --> 01:18:26.465 align:middle line:84% It happens, although you can't help-- 01:18:26.465 --> 01:18:28.670 align:middle line:84% If only he'd lived longer, what would have have written? 01:18:28.670 --> 01:18:30.170 align:middle line:84% There's a person in the audience who 01:18:30.170 --> 01:18:32.010 align:middle line:84% had a response to your question, Michael. 01:18:32.010 --> 01:18:34.218 align:middle line:84% And then I think we're going to have to wrap this up, 01:18:34.218 --> 01:18:35.270 align:middle line:90% unfortunately. 01:18:35.270 --> 01:18:42.640 align:middle line:84% I think when you know too much too soon, like [INAUDIBLE],, 01:18:42.640 --> 01:18:45.490 align:middle line:84% you write yourself out of your life, which 01:18:45.490 --> 01:18:49.840 align:middle line:84% is to write yourself out of you poetry, hence 01:18:49.840 --> 01:18:52.476 align:middle line:84% why he stopped writing, and I think 01:18:52.476 --> 01:18:55.300 align:middle line:84% he was egged on to write the last book. 01:18:55.300 --> 01:18:57.310 align:middle line:84% And everything I'm saying isn't connected 01:18:57.310 --> 01:19:00.050 align:middle line:84% I suppose, but doesn't really answer your question. 01:19:00.050 --> 01:19:03.970 align:middle line:84% But what I got from Jon was this ability. 01:19:03.970 --> 01:19:06.160 align:middle line:84% I can't say what he taught me either, 01:19:06.160 --> 01:19:09.490 align:middle line:84% but it was wonderful and urgent, and it 01:19:09.490 --> 01:19:13.180 align:middle line:84% was like learning to paint by numbers with your eyes closed. 01:19:13.180 --> 01:19:16.450 align:middle line:84% And then when you open your eyes you think, oh my God. 01:19:16.450 --> 01:19:17.140 align:middle line:90% Is that bad? 01:19:17.140 --> 01:19:20.902 align:middle line:90% 01:19:20.902 --> 01:19:22.360 align:middle line:84% There are three reasons, I suppose, 01:19:22.360 --> 01:19:24.040 align:middle line:90% why I'm not an atheist. 01:19:24.040 --> 01:19:28.000 align:middle line:84% The invention of the Mr Coffee machine, Ted [INAUDIBLE]'s's 01:19:28.000 --> 01:19:30.700 align:middle line:90% hair, and Jon Anderson. 01:19:30.700 --> 01:19:33.670 align:middle line:90% What he gave me. 01:19:33.670 --> 01:19:36.936 align:middle line:90% He grounded magic or something. 01:19:36.936 --> 01:19:42.680 align:middle line:90% 01:19:42.680 --> 01:19:44.720 align:middle line:84% I forgot the last thing I was going to say. 01:19:44.720 --> 01:19:50.370 align:middle line:84% But I'm thankful that I got to interact with him. 01:19:50.370 --> 01:19:52.500 align:middle line:84% And coming back here now, being around all of you, 01:19:52.500 --> 01:19:54.720 align:middle line:84% and I don't even know some of you. 01:19:54.720 --> 01:19:59.810 align:middle line:84% I realize that I haven't been reading since I've been gone. 01:19:59.810 --> 01:20:03.560 align:middle line:84% I want to thank everybody and thank Jon. 01:20:03.560 --> 01:20:04.520 align:middle line:90% I think we all do. 01:20:04.520 --> 01:20:08.810 align:middle line:84% I think also, I think Michael's last comment 01:20:08.810 --> 01:20:12.290 align:middle line:84% about the deep mysteriousness is really a good place 01:20:12.290 --> 01:20:15.500 align:middle line:84% to leave this, because there is a sense of mystery, 01:20:15.500 --> 01:20:16.670 align:middle line:90% I think, in the work. 01:20:16.670 --> 01:20:22.430 align:middle line:84% And both curiosity and mystery within it, and the kinds of 01:20:22.430 --> 01:20:24.320 align:middle line:84% poems that Jon might have written 01:20:24.320 --> 01:20:26.690 align:middle line:84% or not will remain that kind of mystery. 01:20:26.690 --> 01:20:30.740 align:middle line:84% I'd like to close with a little mysterious poem, 01:20:30.740 --> 01:20:33.590 align:middle line:90% A Bridge In Fog. 01:20:33.590 --> 01:20:36.530 align:middle line:84% "Cars at a distance crossed in a line. 01:20:36.530 --> 01:20:39.980 align:middle line:84% Below, the boats went forward towing their lights. 01:20:39.980 --> 01:20:44.540 align:middle line:84% When I came to myself, I was divided within myself. 01:20:44.540 --> 01:20:48.740 align:middle line:84% Merely for solace, I had been watching a long time. 01:20:48.740 --> 01:20:52.370 align:middle line:84% I was still troubled as I turned toward home. 01:20:52.370 --> 01:20:56.550 align:middle line:84% In its dark windows I could see myself approach. 01:20:56.550 --> 01:21:00.170 align:middle line:84% So suffered my strangeness in reflection. 01:21:00.170 --> 01:21:01.910 align:middle line:90% My wife was asleep. 01:21:01.910 --> 01:21:04.340 align:middle line:90% I was glad to be alone. 01:21:04.340 --> 01:21:08.000 align:middle line:84% It was not for the scene I'd stood transfixed. 01:21:08.000 --> 01:21:11.720 align:middle line:84% Only its lights methodical passage by water. 01:21:11.720 --> 01:21:16.660 align:middle line:84% And above, where the car's beams flickered in mist. 01:21:16.660 --> 01:21:20.395 align:middle line:84% Just before sleep, I've traveled a while like this." 01:21:20.395 --> 01:21:23.290 align:middle line:90% 01:21:23.290 --> 01:21:26.740 align:middle line:84% May I just invoke seniority just to have the last word? 01:21:26.740 --> 01:21:27.290 align:middle line:90% Please. 01:21:27.290 --> 01:21:30.310 align:middle line:84% If we're all looking outside and wondering 01:21:30.310 --> 01:21:33.880 align:middle line:84% where Jon is, in my book, as in David's book, 01:21:33.880 --> 01:21:35.140 align:middle line:90% there's an inscription. 01:21:35.140 --> 01:21:36.730 align:middle line:90% My nickname was Softie. 01:21:36.730 --> 01:21:40.000 align:middle line:84% "Softie and Gail love seven days a week. 01:21:40.000 --> 01:21:43.600 align:middle line:84% Whoever reaches the afterlife first has to make coffee." 01:21:43.600 --> 01:21:49.950 align:middle line:90% [APPLAUSE] 01:21:49.950 --> 01:21:56.000 align:middle line:90%