WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.830 align:middle line:90% 00:00:00.830 --> 00:00:04.790 align:middle line:84% And just a bit from the memoir, thank you again for listening, 00:00:04.790 --> 00:00:06.530 align:middle line:90% for being here. 00:00:06.530 --> 00:00:09.080 align:middle line:84% This little passage-- it's not too long-- 00:00:09.080 --> 00:00:12.530 align:middle line:84% starts with a quote from the French poet Paul Valéry, 00:00:12.530 --> 00:00:14.240 align:middle line:84% which is a little bit hard to follow. 00:00:14.240 --> 00:00:18.500 align:middle line:84% But it's like him trying to describe where lines of poetry 00:00:18.500 --> 00:00:19.280 align:middle line:90% come from. 00:00:19.280 --> 00:00:22.670 align:middle line:84% And he has this theory that there's this tree 00:00:22.670 --> 00:00:26.570 align:middle line:84% of the imagination, that's like, we can't-- and it's a fruit 00:00:26.570 --> 00:00:28.520 align:middle line:90% falls from it into our world. 00:00:28.520 --> 00:00:31.250 align:middle line:84% And then our job as poets is to make the tree 00:00:31.250 --> 00:00:33.800 align:middle line:90% that the fruit could be on. 00:00:33.800 --> 00:00:37.490 align:middle line:84% And that's what a poem is that tree, the fruit of the line 00:00:37.490 --> 00:00:39.212 align:middle line:90% can hang on. 00:00:39.212 --> 00:00:40.670 align:middle line:84% You're looking at me like I'm nuts. 00:00:40.670 --> 00:00:42.087 align:middle line:84% I'm just telling you what he said. 00:00:42.087 --> 00:00:44.450 align:middle line:90% OK, like don't-- 00:00:44.450 --> 00:00:46.010 align:middle line:90% So I'm going to read his words. 00:00:46.010 --> 00:00:49.550 align:middle line:84% But it helps sometimes to think about it first because it's-- 00:00:49.550 --> 00:00:53.030 align:middle line:90% Paul Valéry wrote the following. 00:00:53.030 --> 00:00:57.110 align:middle line:84% A fine line of poetry is a fruit plucked from the tree. 00:00:57.110 --> 00:00:58.970 align:middle line:90% But which tree? 00:00:58.970 --> 00:01:01.430 align:middle line:84% This leads to the curious point of trying 00:01:01.430 --> 00:01:05.300 align:middle line:84% to make the tree whose fruit would be this fruit. 00:01:05.300 --> 00:01:10.280 align:middle line:84% Finally then, it is the fruit of two trees, one hidden, 00:01:10.280 --> 00:01:13.470 align:middle line:84% unknowable, which produced the fruit. 00:01:13.470 --> 00:01:17.150 align:middle line:84% The other, the work in which the fruit takes 00:01:17.150 --> 00:01:19.205 align:middle line:90% a more or less necessary place. 00:01:19.205 --> 00:01:22.070 align:middle line:90% 00:01:22.070 --> 00:01:25.820 align:middle line:84% According to Wikipedia, to form a fruit, 00:01:25.820 --> 00:01:28.340 align:middle line:90% one tree sends the pollen out. 00:01:28.340 --> 00:01:31.400 align:middle line:84% It drifts until it finds the other. 00:01:31.400 --> 00:01:34.370 align:middle line:84% Some trees do self-pollinate, it is true, 00:01:34.370 --> 00:01:37.100 align:middle line:90% but those trees grow less fruit. 00:01:37.100 --> 00:01:40.940 align:middle line:84% Sometimes Wikipedia is as beautiful as any poem. 00:01:40.940 --> 00:01:42.290 align:middle line:90% Wikipedia. 00:01:42.290 --> 00:01:46.070 align:middle line:84% The pollination process requires a carrier for the pollen, 00:01:46.070 --> 00:01:50.680 align:middle line:84% Which can be animal, wind, or human intervention. 00:01:50.680 --> 00:01:54.130 align:middle line:84% You've been given the line, the image, the idea. 00:01:54.130 --> 00:01:56.350 align:middle line:90% Like a child or a new love, 00:01:56.350 --> 00:01:58.390 align:middle line:90% It is never what you expected. 00:01:58.390 --> 00:02:01.190 align:middle line:84% It wants you to change your life. 00:02:01.190 --> 00:02:04.390 align:middle line:84% You hear the line that comes from somewhere. 00:02:04.390 --> 00:02:08.240 align:middle line:84% You've gathered or maybe fathered it. 00:02:08.240 --> 00:02:10.370 align:middle line:90% It comes to you or you to it. 00:02:10.370 --> 00:02:12.710 align:middle line:84% No one can tell you how it happens. 00:02:12.710 --> 00:02:15.800 align:middle line:84% Sometimes you write for a while feeling nothing, 00:02:15.800 --> 00:02:18.860 align:middle line:84% Until almost unnoticed, something 00:02:18.860 --> 00:02:22.170 align:middle line:84% starts with mysterious life to glow. 00:02:22.170 --> 00:02:24.770 align:middle line:84% You feel yourself resist its strangeness. 00:02:24.770 --> 00:02:26.210 align:middle line:90% What does it mean? 00:02:26.210 --> 00:02:28.100 align:middle line:90% Is that what I meant to say? 00:02:28.100 --> 00:02:29.720 align:middle line:90% What do you do with it then? 00:02:29.720 --> 00:02:31.920 align:middle line:90% You cannot turn away. 00:02:31.920 --> 00:02:34.800 align:middle line:84% Make somewhere for it to live and belong. 00:02:34.800 --> 00:02:38.520 align:middle line:84% It is your job to imagine and invent that tree 00:02:38.520 --> 00:02:41.760 align:middle line:84% On which the treasured fruit could happily thrive. 00:02:41.760 --> 00:02:46.560 align:middle line:84% The strange treasure of a line, or image, or symbol, or word, 00:02:46.560 --> 00:02:50.220 align:middle line:84% or thought, or moment needs the poem 00:02:50.220 --> 00:02:53.700 align:middle line:84% So that it can be more than itself in isolation. 00:02:53.700 --> 00:02:57.060 align:middle line:84% So that it can be truly perceived. 00:02:57.060 --> 00:02:59.090 align:middle line:84% And now I'm talking to myself here. 00:02:59.090 --> 00:03:03.800 align:middle line:84% Try to remember the whole point of writing that first draft is 00:03:03.800 --> 00:03:05.330 align:middle line:90% just to hear the music. 00:03:05.330 --> 00:03:07.790 align:middle line:84% And then once you hear the music, 00:03:07.790 --> 00:03:10.190 align:middle line:84% you look for what could contain it. 00:03:10.190 --> 00:03:12.080 align:middle line:90% Reverse engineering. 00:03:12.080 --> 00:03:14.360 align:middle line:90% Farewell old tree. 00:03:14.360 --> 00:03:17.240 align:middle line:84% Hello something else from which can 00:03:17.240 --> 00:03:19.490 align:middle line:90% hang the music you have found. 00:03:19.490 --> 00:03:24.590 align:middle line:84% Try to be quiet for once, to listen for something you love. 00:03:24.590 --> 00:03:26.810 align:middle line:90% Let it come to you. 00:03:26.810 --> 00:03:30.200 align:middle line:84% Then build a structure in which what you love, 00:03:30.200 --> 00:03:33.440 align:middle line:84% a line, an image, a word can exist. 00:03:33.440 --> 00:03:38.750 align:middle line:84% A situation, a scene, a sonnet, a puzzle, an ode, 00:03:38.750 --> 00:03:42.620 align:middle line:84% An abandoned palace, a happy graveyard, 00:03:42.620 --> 00:03:46.160 align:middle line:90% A breeze, a ghost ship's wake, 00:03:46.160 --> 00:03:50.360 align:middle line:90% A map in winter, a rose factory. 00:03:50.360 --> 00:03:55.010 align:middle line:84% Someone crossing the ocean in a fabulously unseaworthy craft. 00:03:55.010 --> 00:03:59.540 align:middle line:84% A, marriage, a meal, a crucial childhood memory 00:03:59.540 --> 00:04:01.160 align:middle line:90% that never occurred. 00:04:01.160 --> 00:04:06.050 align:middle line:84% A radio being endlessly, impatiently tuned so on and so 00:04:06.050 --> 00:04:07.400 align:middle line:90% on and so on, 00:04:07.400 --> 00:04:10.160 align:middle line:90% Until the line can live there. 00:04:10.160 --> 00:04:11.630 align:middle line:90% You hear them, 00:04:11.630 --> 00:04:13.340 align:middle line:90% Then the poem can begin. 00:04:13.340 --> 00:04:16.688 align:middle line:90% 00:04:16.688 --> 00:04:19.105 align:middle line:90% Thank you. 00:04:19.105 --> 00:04:20.480 align:middle line:84% Thanks, everyone, for being here. 00:04:20.480 --> 00:04:22.330 align:middle line:90% Thank you. 00:04:22.330 --> 00:04:29.000 align:middle line:90%