And just a bit from the memoir, thank you again for listening,
for being here.
This little passage-- it's not too long--
starts with a quote from the French poet Paul Valéry,
which is a little bit hard to follow.
But it's like him trying to describe where lines of poetry
come from.
And he has this theory that there's this tree
of the imagination, that's like, we can't-- and it's a fruit
falls from it into our world.
And then our job as poets is to make the tree
that the fruit could be on.
And that's what a poem is that tree, the fruit of the line
can hang on.
You're looking at me like I'm nuts.
I'm just telling you what he said.
OK, like don't--
So I'm going to read his words.
But it helps sometimes to think about it first because it's--
Paul Valéry wrote the following.
A fine line of poetry is a fruit plucked from the tree.
But which tree?
This leads to the curious point of trying
to make the tree whose fruit would be this fruit.
Finally then, it is the fruit of two trees, one hidden,
unknowable, which produced the fruit.
The other, the work in which the fruit takes
a more or less necessary place.
According to Wikipedia, to form a fruit,
one tree sends the pollen out.
It drifts until it finds the other.
Some trees do self-pollinate, it is true,
but those trees grow less fruit.
Sometimes Wikipedia is as beautiful as any poem.
Wikipedia.
The pollination process requires a carrier for the pollen,
Which can be animal, wind, or human intervention.
You've been given the line, the image, the idea.
Like a child or a new love,
It is never what you expected.
It wants you to change your life.
You hear the line that comes from somewhere.
You've gathered or maybe fathered it.
It comes to you or you to it.
No one can tell you how it happens.
Sometimes you write for a while feeling nothing,
Until almost unnoticed, something
starts with mysterious life to glow.
You feel yourself resist its strangeness.
What does it mean?
Is that what I meant to say?
What do you do with it then?
You cannot turn away.
Make somewhere for it to live and belong.
It is your job to imagine and invent that tree
On which the treasured fruit could happily thrive.
The strange treasure of a line, or image, or symbol, or word,
or thought, or moment needs the poem
So that it can be more than itself in isolation.
So that it can be truly perceived.
And now I'm talking to myself here.
Try to remember the whole point of writing that first draft is
just to hear the music.
And then once you hear the music,
you look for what could contain it.
Reverse engineering.
Farewell old tree.
Hello something else from which can
hang the music you have found.
Try to be quiet for once, to listen for something you love.
Let it come to you.
Then build a structure in which what you love,
a line, an image, a word can exist.
A situation, a scene, a sonnet, a puzzle, an ode,
An abandoned palace, a happy graveyard,
A breeze, a ghost ship's wake,
A map in winter, a rose factory.
Someone crossing the ocean in a fabulously unseaworthy craft.
A, marriage, a meal, a crucial childhood memory
that never occurred.
A radio being endlessly, impatiently tuned so on and so
on and so on,
Until the line can live there.
You hear them,
Then the poem can begin.
Thank you.
Thanks, everyone, for being here.
Thank you.