WEBVTT

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Let me just say it's good that's
in absentia because if Nora was

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here she would never forgive
me for the embarrassment

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that she would feel when
her father, and particularly

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of his friends and
people he knows,

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pays any attention to her work.

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It's a pleasure
for me to be here.

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And it's also a pleasure
for me to be here with Liz.

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And maybe it's just
a good excuse for me

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to tell something about two
experiences with insects.

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The first of which
occurred in the summer

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after I graduated from college.

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And probably the first summer I
ever took myself very seriously

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as a poet too.

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And I came back skipping out on
a program in England for love

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really but my
girlfriend at the time

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was a biology graduate student
working at the Rocky Mountain

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Biological Laboratory outside
of Crested Butte, Colorado.

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And so I got to spend a part
of that summer doing things

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like teasing tongues out of
bees and taking pollen samples.

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And it was absolutely
delightful.

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And so maybe that colored
my interest in poetry

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as objects, and things, and
attention to the real world.

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The other being the summer
before I moved to Tucson,

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I moved here on August, 1, 1984.

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And I had been working
for the last three

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or four years after
starting to learn

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bookmaking and traditional
bookmaking processes, often put

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to non-traditional uses.

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I knew it was the last
access I had to a hand paper

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mill for a long time.

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And so I spent
the summer, I must

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have made about
2000 sheets of paper

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in a dank basement paper mill.

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And there was a visiting
artist came through.

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And he was part
of some art fair.

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And I'll never forget his
name because his name was

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Tom Cool, which was
such [INAUDIBLE]

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And he came, somehow,
I befriended him.

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And he came and visited me
while I was making paper.

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And I pulled up the sheet on
this mold and deckled wet paper

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pulp and right in the center
of it, which had never

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happened to me before.

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Although in the space we
were in, it could have.

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There was a great big cockroach.

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And Tom cool loved
that idea so much

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that he traded me a painting
for this piece of paper

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with the cockroach.

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And I'm kind of glad
to get rid of it.

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But-- but I wonder sometimes.

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When talking to Jason about
what I had to say here

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has to do with a
feeling that my work

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as a poet, and my work
in books, and bookmaking,

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and in designing things
are two things that I

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don't particularly
think of as separate.

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People sometimes
want to define you.

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Are you a printer?

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are you a publisher?

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are you a poet?

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And poet pretty much
covers it because I

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feel like to do the work in
the way I most like to do it,

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you work from inside the poem.

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You work from inside
the poem to imagine

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what the book or printed piece
might be from the inside out.

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And I think I first
started working out

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some different ideas
for design and book

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in two dimensional form.

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In pieces like this.

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And this is a poem that
was by Lyn Hejinian that

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was sent to me.

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And it didn't
actually look exactly

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like this when
she sent it to me.

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It looked quite a bit more
standard, if you will,

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on the page.

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And I asked her
for some permission

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to work out a kind of a visual
representation of this piece.

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And I want to read the
piece it's not too long.

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And then if you think about
some of the things in it,

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and why this poem is
spread out, why it's loose,

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why it wants to find meaning
in all of its spaces.

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And have you consider how
form relates to function here.

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It's called "The Guard."

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"Leopardlike loose.

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Spider, spider in the
light that guards the gate.

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The buzzing is
unrecipelike though it

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makes the social
sound of thought

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in train accelerating between,
stages of a recognition.

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Or really any
collection which isn't

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what's called for its own sake.

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Hunger and thirst very
different, and different

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yet again from their
ineluctable peppiness,

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the twitching of number in
what would have been vacancy,

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like a net though
almost a marble.

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Heaven leaning onion
open, we admire

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it so, we're very much at home.

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The concave sentence
one shaped like a dish

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with a dip in the middle.

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Poem turn the face
of your words just

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as water melts in the fire,
the object of epiphany.

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While the ordinary child
goes wild with education,

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with selective ecstasy,
I'm dancing on the inside,

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don't show off.

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My head is a shelf and holds
encyclopedias wanting rocks

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in a lifetime to drop by
thinking well, hoping,

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trusting, expecting
you to feel it too,

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to share the anticipation,
and advocate pantheism

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if you want to."

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So there is a kind of
a pantheistic explosion

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of meaning in a poem like this.

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And it seemed to me,
you know, I had just

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begun I think starting
to think that whenever

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I think about poems I think
about the space they occupy.

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And that space can
be a physical space,

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but it's kind of a virtual and
metaphorical space too and all

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of that comes into account.

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So in a way the act of
occupying whether, it's

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my poems or someone
else's poems,

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is what helps shape what
you then do with them.

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And what I love to do with them.

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Charles, can we
pass that around?

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Sure you can pass
that around and I'll

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pass a few other
things around too.

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I would be the last to argue
that every piece of literature

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needs that kind of imagination
in its treatment of how

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it is physically.

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I make straight
books too but what

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I brought in here kind of
emphasize some of the works

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that I feel like have been
lucky enough to come my way

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that I could relate to
as a poet, and maker.

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And probably one of
the first in book form

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was this book Five Kwaidan in
sleeve pages by a Wisconsin

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poet and writer, Karl Young.

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And Karl had sort
of reworked versions

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of Japanese ghost stories
which took into account

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particularly dualities of
meaning, such as things being

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hidden, things being revealed,
things being in light, things

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being in darkness, things being
open, things being closed.

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And together we
worked out a form

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of these so-called sleeve pages
where these dualities could

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be represented by writing
if you will on the outside

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and writing if you will on
the inside, which, you know.

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And what I love about
this, too, is the broadside

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being passed trying you just
look at it and appreciate it.

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But to read this
book, the person

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who reads it has to experience
something different from what

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they usually do in reading.

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And it's plenty readable
even at this distance

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but still you have to handle it.

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You have to do something to it.

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I'll pass that this way.

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