Let me just say it's good that's in absentia because if Nora was
here she would never forgive me for the embarrassment
that she would feel when her father, and particularly
of his friends and people he knows,
pays any attention to her work.
It's a pleasure for me to be here.
And it's also a pleasure for me to be here with Liz.
And maybe it's just a good excuse for me
to tell something about two experiences with insects.
The first of which occurred in the summer
after I graduated from college.
And probably the first summer I ever took myself very seriously
as a poet too.
And I came back skipping out on a program in England for love
really but my girlfriend at the time
was a biology graduate student working at the Rocky Mountain
Biological Laboratory outside of Crested Butte, Colorado.
And so I got to spend a part of that summer doing things
like teasing tongues out of bees and taking pollen samples.
And it was absolutely delightful.
And so maybe that colored my interest in poetry
as objects, and things, and attention to the real world.
The other being the summer before I moved to Tucson,
I moved here on August, 1, 1984.
And I had been working for the last three
or four years after starting to learn
bookmaking and traditional bookmaking processes, often put
to non-traditional uses.
I knew it was the last access I had to a hand paper
mill for a long time.
And so I spent the summer, I must
have made about 2000 sheets of paper
in a dank basement paper mill.
And there was a visiting artist came through.
And he was part of some art fair.
And I'll never forget his name because his name was
Tom Cool, which was such [INAUDIBLE]
And he came, somehow, I befriended him.
And he came and visited me while I was making paper.
And I pulled up the sheet on this mold and deckled wet paper
pulp and right in the center of it, which had never
happened to me before.
Although in the space we were in, it could have.
There was a great big cockroach.
And Tom cool loved that idea so much
that he traded me a painting for this piece of paper
with the cockroach.
And I'm kind of glad to get rid of it.
But-- but I wonder sometimes.
When talking to Jason about what I had to say here
has to do with a feeling that my work
as a poet, and my work in books, and bookmaking,
and in designing things are two things that I
don't particularly think of as separate.
People sometimes want to define you.
Are you a printer?
are you a publisher?
are you a poet?
And poet pretty much covers it because I
feel like to do the work in the way I most like to do it,
you work from inside the poem.
You work from inside the poem to imagine
what the book or printed piece might be from the inside out.
And I think I first started working out
some different ideas for design and book
in two dimensional form.
In pieces like this.
And this is a poem that was by Lyn Hejinian that
was sent to me.
And it didn't actually look exactly
like this when she sent it to me.
It looked quite a bit more standard, if you will,
on the page.
And I asked her for some permission
to work out a kind of a visual representation of this piece.
And I want to read the piece it's not too long.
And then if you think about some of the things in it,
and why this poem is spread out, why it's loose,
why it wants to find meaning in all of its spaces.
And have you consider how form relates to function here.
It's called "The Guard."
"Leopardlike loose.
Spider, spider in the light that guards the gate.
The buzzing is unrecipelike though it
makes the social sound of thought
in train accelerating between, stages of a recognition.
Or really any collection which isn't
what's called for its own sake.
Hunger and thirst very different, and different
yet again from their ineluctable peppiness,
the twitching of number in what would have been vacancy,
like a net though almost a marble.
Heaven leaning onion open, we admire
it so, we're very much at home.
The concave sentence one shaped like a dish
with a dip in the middle.
Poem turn the face of your words just
as water melts in the fire, the object of epiphany.
While the ordinary child goes wild with education,
with selective ecstasy, I'm dancing on the inside,
don't show off.
My head is a shelf and holds encyclopedias wanting rocks
in a lifetime to drop by thinking well, hoping,
trusting, expecting you to feel it too,
to share the anticipation, and advocate pantheism
if you want to."
So there is a kind of a pantheistic explosion
of meaning in a poem like this.
And it seemed to me, you know, I had just
begun I think starting to think that whenever
I think about poems I think about the space they occupy.
And that space can be a physical space,
but it's kind of a virtual and metaphorical space too and all
of that comes into account.
So in a way the act of occupying whether, it's
my poems or someone else's poems,
is what helps shape what you then do with them.
And what I love to do with them.
Charles, can we pass that around?
Sure you can pass that around and I'll
pass a few other things around too.
I would be the last to argue that every piece of literature
needs that kind of imagination in its treatment of how
it is physically.
I make straight books too but what
I brought in here kind of emphasize some of the works
that I feel like have been lucky enough to come my way
that I could relate to as a poet, and maker.
And probably one of the first in book form
was this book Five Kwaidan in sleeve pages by a Wisconsin
poet and writer, Karl Young.
And Karl had sort of reworked versions
of Japanese ghost stories which took into account
particularly dualities of meaning, such as things being
hidden, things being revealed, things being in light, things
being in darkness, things being open, things being closed.
And together we worked out a form
of these so-called sleeve pages where these dualities could
be represented by writing if you will on the outside
and writing if you will on the inside, which, you know.
And what I love about this, too, is the broadside
being passed trying you just look at it and appreciate it.
But to read this book, the person
who reads it has to experience something different from what
they usually do in reading.
And it's plenty readable even at this distance
but still you have to handle it.
You have to do something to it.
I'll pass that this way.