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KATE: Good afternoon, everyone.
Welcome to Authors at Google New York, our special
Valentine's Day Poetry Workshop.
What we're going to do today is we have four fine poets
from Four Way Books who will give readings of their current
work, and then they will provide prompts for you to
take home a poem to someone you love today.
Change it up a little bit from what is expected.
So it is my great pleasure to introduce Victoria Lynn McCoy.
She works with Four Way Books, and has been integral in
bringing poetry to Google New York office, and she will
introduce the first poet.
Thank you.
VICTORIA MCCOY: Thank you, Kate, and to Google for having
us back, and thank you, all of you, for being here.
My name is Victoria McCoy.
I'm Assistant Editor and Publicist for Four Way Books.
We are a nonprofit literary press based out in Tribeca.
We publish 11 to 13 books of poetry and short
fiction each year.
And we are really excited to have this ongoing partnership
with Google to bring poetry to you guys.
So I'll just get started.
Our first reader is Alex Dimitrov, who was born in
Sofia, Bulgaria.
He is the recipient of the 2011 Stanley Kunitz Prize from
the American Poetry Review.
He is the founder of Wild Boys, a *** poetry salon in
New York City, works at the Academy of American Poets,
teaches creative writing at Rutgers University, and
frequently writes for "Poets & Writers Magazine."
Dimitrov is the author of "American Boys," an e-chapbook
from "Floating Wolf Quarterly." And his new book,
"Begging For It," is just out from Four Way Books.
He received his MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College,
and he lives in Manhattan.
Please welcome Alex Dimitrov.
ALEX DIMITROV: Hi.
So I'm going to read some poems.
I'm thinking maybe three or four.
And my writing prompt actually is on a piece of paper.
It's questions, so I guess I'll read them, but
I'll pass it down.
Is everyone excited that it's Valentine's Day?
Yes?
How you feel about Valentine's Day?
I have complicated feelings about that.
OK.
This first poem is called, "This Is a Personal Poem."
My self's self is thinking about itself, trying to sell
itself a new self.
Don't worry, reader, I'm not trying to
fool you with language.
I have eyes to do that with.
I have forgotten our history.
I have forgotten how we met.
Reader, are you upset at how fast we're moving?
I'm likely with you in your bed, between your hands,
somewhere in your mouth, before whatever it
is you'll say next.
Say yes, and now, and love to.
Say, what did Judith Butler say when saying, one is undone
in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by
the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the
memory of the feel.
I want to know you, reader.
I want to know a lot of things.
Can we ever truly forget about ourselves?
Is every self a self that makes itself available to
love, like death, and its kind availability?
Like language, reader.
Would we still be so unhappy if we could escape it?
To name the namelessness that is love in what we read and
what we see, and what are feelings, really?
Facts or flaws?
For something tells me now that I must leave you, reader.
It's not you, it's me.
We guess at why things end.
We ruin things.
We start and stall, and all, all, all we do is want.
So it's kind of a poem about love, but not really.
I was thinking what love poems to read from this book,
because it's all love poems, actually.
They're just very different love poems.
Some are to my father, some are to people that I've been
with, some are to women that I love.
How about--
this one's called "Uncomplicated Happiness."
Maybe I don't want uncomplicated happiness.
In the morning, one of us turns to dress away from the
other, although little has changed.
In a better world, memory would always
lead back to affection.
Who is that person on the edge of the bed looking back?
Nothing is uncomplicated, traveler.
Maybe I wanted you to stay for the wrong reasons.
Maybe it's the wrong reasons I love.
I, too, am somewhere over an ocean, writing you this as
fast as I can.
Now I'll read one that's kind of--
I don't know, really about love, or
apparently about love.
"Sensualism." Sensualism is not a word.
It's a word that Susan Sontag used in one
of her journal entries.
And I loved its use, and I love her.
So this poem's kind of thinking about that word, and
what it is, and a lot of other stuff.
While lying in bed, I think about sensualism.
A mosquito presses into my skin with such cruelty I
mistake it for love.
The stranger above my window decides to jump, and doesn't.
Where was I?
I was opening the door to your life and mine.
We have some words for each other, and then what?
We have some nights in a city next to an ocean filled with
more longing than we can describe.
I want to place your hand close to the knife
and let it sit there.
I want more than the cut or how it will gently spill out.
The mosquito will drink for as long as I'll let it, and I do.
I hold still waiting for you.
The vein rises.
It is this flood of living that comes.
I'll read one more, and then I'll do the prompt.
This one's called "The Composer's Lover."
We had an hour without music, a nerve brightly turning in a
closed room of the mind, the heart's black pool, a word
that expired into the air and woke everything.
Your bed slid under an invisible knife.
What happened to us after meeting, when the right note
claimed Manhattan's May morning like an elegy already
moving through the living?
Today, we are among them, here to unsettle each other, to
undress beside the piano, elegant and unmistakably his.
Once it has you, there is a mouth that never releases, a
faint circle in a field of rust hanging on the wall.
We are not there.
We are in our bodies.
Like teeth marks in a shirt you once saw falling off him,
the delicate taste of blood that passed between us before
***, before anyone could forgive us.
So I did this project over the summer called Portraits of 13
People I Don't Know From the Internet.
And what it was was this questionnaire that I posted on
my Tumblr, and people could come and, if they wanted to
engage with it, they could answer the questions, but they
had to email me back.
So I sort of tailored it to be more about love, since it's
Valentine's Day.
So I'm going to just pass this out [INAUDIBLE].
So it's nine questions and one command.
This is called Love Poem, Nine Questions, One Command.
So I'll just read the questions.
And I also put my email on there, if you guys want to
email me your responses, if you feel like it.
So it's called Love Poem.
What was the happiest time in your life?
Do you think you'll ever be happier?
What wouldn't you do for love?
What do you want most while you're here?
What do you want that a poem can't give you?
What is the dish you always order at your favorite
restaurant?
Do you have a sweater that hugs you just right?
Who is the first person you thought of this morning?
Who is the last person you thought of
before bed last night?
And the command is, write a ten line love poem of
questions like this one for one of those people.
So if you guys feel like it, you can do it.
And if you feel like it, you can also send it to me.
So thank you.
Thanks for listening.
VICTORIA MCCOY: Our next reader will be Paul Lisicky,
who's the author of "Lawn Boy," "Famous Builder," "The
Burning House," and most recently, "Unbuilt Projects,"
from Four Way Books.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, he's the recipient
of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the
James Michener Copernicus Society, and the Fine Arts
Work Center in Provincetown.
He's currently the New Voices professor in the MFA program
at Rutgers Camden.
Please welcome Paul Lisicky.
PAUL LISICKY: Hi, everyone.
It's lovely to be here, and I'm excited
about reading for you.
I'm going to read some pieces that I don't usually
read from this book.
What's happened in the past few months since this book has
been out is that I get notes from people who identify the
pieces that--
the favorites seem to be the pieces that I don't pick.
So this is for all the people who like pieces that I have
neglected, I think.
So the first is called "The Physics of the Known World."
It's very short.
This book has a foot in poetry, it has a foot in
fiction, and it has a foot in the lyric essay.
It really wants to live in the cracks between genres.
So this one is rather short.
It's all of a paragraph, and I think of it as a theory of
love-- one of my theories of love.
"The Physics of the Known World."
That silly retriever.
He doesn't go to the two guys looking right at him, beaming
him awake with concentrated joy.
Not at all.
He goes straight to the man with his head turned to the
left who could care less about doggie behavior, and isn't the
least bit stirred by the snout parked in the knee and the
wagging hind parts.
And that's it--
the physics of the known world, which is why the trees
look better when they're left unwatered.
And the birds actually prefer it when you don't
sing back to them.
And the holy man crossing the street with the
black brimmed hat?
He knows better than to pick up what he's dropped and lift
his face to the mountains.
Take it from him, friend.
You probably wouldn't even want it if the light hit you
in your head.
The next piece is a bit longer--
a bit of a narrative.
This is about a life and death experience I had with my ex.
And my ex wrote a version of this-- a very well known poem
in which I appeared.
And I happened to be in an audience with him next to the
poet Brenda Hillman, who turned to me halfway through
the reading and said, Paul, you write
your version of that.
So this is my version of Mark's version of this story,
and it's called "In the Unlikely Event."
I don't know why I never read this.
There's something to be unpacked in that.
When I watched her teaching us the fundamentals of emergency
crash position, I thought, this woman likes
her movies too much.
How else to account for the way she
smiled through her tears?
Why turn her back on us and sob into her fist?
I looked over my shoulder.
Were we sure this wasn't being filmed?
Allen Funt.
Where on the plane was Allen Funt?
Nevertheless, I behaved as I was supposed to behave.
I tried not to fuss.
I tried not to make too much of the coiffed businesswoman
to our left, who reached into the seat pocket in front of
her, and with refinement and discretion, put her air
sickness bag to good use.
Surely we'd laugh and clap and laugh at the whole damn thing.
And it was only when Mark took my hand the way others around
us took their neighbors' hands that I felt the surge of
heartbreak, adrenaline, and embarrassment that lets us
know we're not asleep.
How, then, in the time that followed, did I become someone
I didn't know?
It wasn't wisdom.
I had as much wisdom in my head as there were pain pills
in my back pocket, which meant none.
And it certainly wasn't cool.
Even strapped in my seat and chastened, I felt my left hand
tapping out a warning code.
Maybe some of it had to do with the years I wouldn't get
to live out with Mark, the fun we'd miss,
our house, our dogs.
Who would watch over our dogs?
At least the two of us would go down at once, if that was
any kind of comfort.
But what did comfort mean when Mark looked so unguarded and
hurt, as if he were determined to take it personally, and
couldn't foresee that he'd one day get a poem out of the
experience?
And here's where another stepped in.
I wouldn't have believed it either, if you'd told me that
my mother leapt up from her house in Florida like some
superhero ready to save the day.
But there she was, standing at her sink, running hot water
over a jar she couldn't open.
And when I thought of her getting that phone call the
next morning, just as she wrenched
off the lid, I numbed.
Not because she loved me better than anyone, or because
I remotely approximated the son she'd wanted me to be, but
because she'd had enough for one life, and the thought of
making her suffer--
guilt--
even in my last minutes above Earth, was not something I
could take on right now.
So my two legs pushed into the floor as if it were possible
to pilot the plane myself, even as the damn thing wobbled
and swung and the silos of the Midwest
looked nearer and nearer.
That's when I went through the window.
The tiny square window to my right.
Pinned to my seat, squeezing Mark's hand, I thought myself
into that sky, taking myself out of the body that was sure
to be pummeled and burned.
I was aware of my ability to influence and not, and there
was a calm to the procedure like what must feel like to be
an addict on a good day, when you push your blood back and
forth through the works.
Was that why the treetops beneath us were greener than
mangrove, or why I could so readily think of each person
who mattered, and put a hand on each forehead and each face
as if I'd always been faithful to the god I'd prayed to as a
child, but hadn't known that until now?
I thought some of the light into the head of each person
on the plane--
to Mark, to the flight attendant, even to the pilot,
who must have been doing the best he could with the
creature that was trying and failing to hold us aloft.
Not to mention my mother.
Maybe that's why we landed as smoothly as we did, or I'm
kidding myself.
Because just when it was clear that we were
out of harm's way--
though I'm not telling you the whole story.
I'm leaving out firemen and ambulances and a line of
tornadoes too obscene to talk about--
I felt something like rage as we waited to be transported by
bus by members of the National Guard.
Rage to be back in a body after the high of
being out of it.
Rage to realize I'd never outsmart death.
Though a part of me had tricked myself into thinking
I'd passed some test.
And, I'm going to close with a short piece called "Two Guys."
Do any of you guys remember a discount
store called Two Guys?
It's very far from the world of Google 2013.
I guess it was a precursor to Target and the discount stores
we know today, and that's sort of the figure around which
this piece revolves.
That's all you gotta know. "Two Guys."
When you've lost what you remembered, New Jersey became
as tired as they said it was, and childhood sprang traps
ready to bite into the skin of our ankles.
Will we get it back?
Maybe it's a relief that we've left it behind, and we can
both give thanks for the this bout of forgetfulness.
I never really missed Two Guys as much as I missed you--
the automatic doors, the trading stamps, the blinding
interior, monstrous as a spaceship.
You deserve better than nostalgia.
There's always more to give our lives to, even if we
thought we'd landed at the end of the world.
May the stores be better where you are.
May you not waste a single second thinking about what you
should or shouldn't buy.
And if you should hear a boy calling for his mother by the
record department, walk on.
He's doing much better than you think, really.
He owes you that.
The songs are blue and glistening, even if he has a
hard time making sense of them from here.
So thank you.
My prompt.
My prompt.
Write about an object while you think the word goodbye
without using the word goodbye in the piece.
I'll say it again.
Write about an object, and think about the word goodbye
without using the word goodbye in the piece.
And that is it.
Thanks very much.
VICTORIA MCCOY: Victoria Redel is the author of three books
of poetry and three books of fiction, most recently "Woman
Without Umbrella," from Four Way Books.
Her novel "Loverboy" was awarded the 2001 S. Mariella
Gable Novel Award, and the 2002 Forward Silver Literary
Fiction Prize, chosen in 2001 as a "Los Angeles Times" Best
Book, and adapted for a feature film
directed by Kevin Bacon.
Redel is a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, and has
received fellowships from the National Endowment For the
Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center.
Please welcome Victoria Redel.
VICTORIA REDEL: I feel like I should be
running a board meeting.
That's what I was thinking.
Like Alex, I feel like most of my book is some version of a
love poem or the end of love, so I'm going to read four
poems, and this first one is a poem called "Upgrade."
I don't want to say it didn't fit, never worked, or worked
at first, then in fits and starts, the switches useless,
gears stripped.
No, I don't want customer service, a claims department,
complaint letters, an exchange or credit towards the latest
model, an upgrade, or lifetime parts replacement.
Even now, broken, chipped, in pieces, pieces lost, worn out,
the original gone, there are times still it
comes back to me whole.
And I am amazed by what is beyond fragile, by how
elaborately and generously wrecked and beyond repair we
made use of our hearts all those years, and then.
So this poem sort of, I guess, in a certain way, is a
Valentine, this next one.
I think of a Valentine as being some kind of direct
address to someone, you know?
Some little heart you're giving, in some version of it.
"Today We're This World's Darling."
All the trees on Broadway thrill white petals--
different time of year than Valentine's Day.
All the trees on Broadway thrill white petals.
Daffodils gather in bouquets to fling themselves at us like
schoolgirls.
Shopkeepers lean from doors, tip hats, toss candy and fish.
Sidewalks sparkle up to catch our eye.
Holy moly, even the incorrigible past has arrived,
pledging it will finally learn goodness and mercy.
Don't look up.
Don't wave back or wink.
Hurry off the avenue and bolt the door.
By tomorrow, snickering, showoff, fake, they'll croon
for Lindsay, or Nick's black eye, the publicist of
someone's rehabbed heart rumors.
Maples will turn gold for his comeback.
Ovid can tell you, give it 15 minutes, and if you're lucky,
you're banished to an island.
Or like Poe, your obit written by the enemy Griswold declares
in print, few will grieve.
There's Bessie Smith in her unmarked grave.
Let biographers flock to the clever and pretty, declare us
old, drab, utterly last season.
And when they're gone, chasing the next fabulous story, say
again just one of those things I can't repeat here--
those gorgeous, scandalous, tender words you say to me
each morning that would make them quiver that would change
their lives.
So this next one I'm going to read I've only ever read out
loud once before, and it's a poem called "Kissing." And how
I came to write it was that I had received an invitation to
be part of an anthology which was an anthology called "Dirty
Words," and each of the writers could choose a dirty
word and write a piece about it-- a
poem, a story, an essay.
Whatever they wanted.
I received my list of dirty words, and they were really
pretty dirty words.
And I kind of looked at it, and I thought,
oh, I'll choose later.
And I freaked out and put it away, and then didn't deal
with it for a while.
And then they came back and they said, well, it's great.
Everyone's chosen words.
There are two words left.
And one word was ***, and the other
word was a dirty Pierre.
I didn't know what dirty Pierre was.
Oh, look, someone knew what it--
I had no clue what it was, so I thought, well, I'm really
out of this anthology.
But I looked and looked at the list, and I realized that the
word kissing wasn't on the list of dirty words.
So I decided to try to write a poem called "Kissing," and try
to look at it as seriously as I could.
"Kissing."
The first surprise of your mouth and mine, on streets, on
staircases, in bathrooms, in the backs of cabs, in a field
against that wall and that wall and that wall.
Down on the floor, my hair caught in it, in hotel beds,
in a borrowed bed, and in the same bed, night after night
after year after night, through an open window, under
pines, underwater, on a raft, in rain, salty with ocean, a
peck at the door, a have a good day.
Our mouths, prepositional.
Eyes open, eyes closed, your face in transport.
Combustible.
At the sink doing dishes, and suddenly you're turning me,
saying, give me your mouth, and I'm giving you my mouth,
coming up out of it stunned, like there is another room
inside, and then another room.
Strawberries, sourness of coffee, a slight fizzy
sweetness of a clean grass taste as only you taste, your
face so close to mine.
A fluency accented, each vowel and consonant exactly formed.
Sudden native speakers.
Morning just wakened, still slow and thick and dreaming,
turning away from your reach.
Kissing like nobody's business, like something
windy, like good weather.
In winter, our mouths the warmest place in the city.
A lower lip flecked by teeth pulling back just a little to
breathe together.
Snuck, stolen, last, first, unbidden, forbidden, sloppy,
delicious, French, farewell, slippery, criminal.
A private syntax.
Pun and slang, slip of tongue, intentional.
Could I have known on the Harwood building's stairwell
with my first fast dry 12-year-old kiss that I'd
become a woman who'd drive across state lines for the
moment just before the kiss begins?
What I miss is the makeout.
That's what I go for if I had an night on the lam, the
married woman says, looking at a couple who have rolled off
their picnic blanket.
One of us might say, only this, and then it's the first
night all over again, tumble and wrestle, every mystical,
dirty, delicious thing two mouths manage.
Kiss me goodbye, you say, and on a street among strangers
and floppy hats and winter coats, we slip into one
another to say last apologies and promises.
In a bank line, or sitting at a table with
friends, I touch my mouth.
I am drifting, or you are drifting, and one pressed
against the other whispers, good night.
The last one.
The day's punctuation.
This is the last one.
"And Then."
What if, darling, tonight we tell only the best stories we
have of other loves?
Not just nights of pleasure, but the way he laughed from
the back of his throat, the truthful things she said that
made you cry.
What about that spring wind, and when there was a bicycle,
a downpour, and someone had or didn't have a poncho?
Someone said the very thing you longed to hear.
You told a secret, and were safe.
She had a fever.
He lost a father.
There were good meals.
To think of those fine shoes we scuffed about in, thinking
we were royalty.
And remember that plastic tiara, and the clumsy pavan?
Remember what you wished, and how he wished, too?
Look at us now drink coffee, talk about the day's
particulars and possibilities.
Morning light folds across the wood table.
Could we bear to look at one another knowing how full the
heart has already been?
How we come together as not just thankful refugees from
sorrow, but wild too, with easy days of mismatched socks?
This morning, we think we couldn't be happier.
That's courage.
We thought it before.
So my prompt to you guys is to think of objects--
socks, shoes, lights, tables, all the things in a life.
And think of them in relation to the sentence, when you
left, what I started to think about was.
So, when you left, what I started to think about was.
Thanks.
VICTORIA MCCOY: Our final reader today will be Jonathan
Wells, whose poems have appeared in "The New Yorker,"
"Poetry International," "Hayden's Ferry," and other
publications.
He's the author of "Train Dance" from Four Way Books,
and edited "Third Rail, The Poetry of Rock and Roll" from
MTV Books, which was published in 2007.
He lives and works in New York City.
Please welcome Jonathan Wells.
JONATHAN WELLS: Hello.
Thanks for coming.
I'm going to read a couple of poems from "Train Dance,"
although I didn't really think of it as a book of love poems
in any conventional or unconventional sense.
So I may have to read a couple which aren't in the book, just
because that's what the situation demands.
This is called "London Plane," and it's
not a plane to London.
It's a tree, which will become very clear.
"London Plane."
When I'm alone, the tree I love whispers and calls to me,
indifferent to the season.
I come to her in spring, when she's in bud, and winter when
she's naked, only one side warm.
In fall, she forgets herself and dreams.
I come to her for learning and read her bark like Braille.
Her arms are twisted, lifted for attention, glassed in rain
or wrapped in mist, or grey.
She speaks from her own wisdom, not always
prompted by the wind.
I come without ideas of love, for she is already rough and
rounded, cankered, tall, and we are not alone.
Finches listen from her branches, and plastic bags
luff, confiding my desires in the wind.
The tree I love lowers me from my window ledge,
equal to her height.
She says, sit close to me.
When I call to you, what loneliness makes you listen?
The next poem is "Untitled," which is its title.
You taught me the river, its slender hands, fugitive smile,
and phosphorescence.
The river became my blood, my voice.
Some mornings, when the earth smells of earthworms and mist,
a guitar will steal the river's chords from the
underneath of leaves.
A violin will take its deeper wood, the cat
gut strings its notes.
We walk the river, rock to rock, the river's shape a
fossil snake and a million miles of rock.
The ears, the mouth, the neck, the bitten palm of rock.
Watch it go.
Oh, never let me go.
As you'll see from my prompt, I think I specialize in
indirectness.
And so this is a poem called "Squirrel Watching."
The leash is taut, her doleful eyes transfixed as she lifts
her snout to heaven, every imaginable taste
almost in her mouth.
Tickling tail boa, crunchy bones, and haunch.
The squirrel freezes his body spread eagled on the bark,
terrified alert, condescending to a love that smells so much
like blood.
Each feature is profound.
Wide black eyes stunned open, many paws circling a nut in a
blur, a dash of rust splashed on his back, peaky ears, and a
white throat scarf.
Her love is the devouring of the whole in parts.
She waits, measuring his speed against her strike, and leaps,
believing it was true.
But if it were, the world would be bare of squirrels
that looked away.
And my poems are short.
I guess I've got time for one or two more.
This is called "The Second Book of Love."
He read aloud to her from "The Second Book of Love," and all
the other books.
She listened without listening, as if it were a
mist that drifted through her.
He read, not noticing she slept.
He didn't know these words would one day shape his lips.
The old feelings would slip away and disappear.
The trees would shine in an amber light that the once
fresh light had turned into.
Some pages would be as bright as sun spots on the surface.
Others would be torn or torched under a magnifying
glass without remorse.
Crossed out words could still be glimpsed.
It was a work still circling, a story that lay open on the
lectern of crowded rooms and distracted nights, written by
two unlinked hands.
It was made from the five senses, and the sense of
hovering above the air.
It was the book of hours, the strip of days.
In its line was the confusion between what was unsayable and
what can't be said.
Last poem that I'll read is--
we moved into a new district recently, which has a lot of
shops which sell wigs.
So I always imagined which one I'd like.
And so I actually never went into the wig shops, and wrote
the poem instead.
"House of Wigs."
The sky was low.
His head was a vase of sorrows he wanted
to fill with blossoms.
He stepped into the house of wigs.
The sales lady said, try this one on.
It's called the mind of fire.
It turns ashes into flame.
Prometheus was wearing it, they say, when he was punished
by the gods for his compassion.
And he barely felt the eagle's claws landing on his stomach.
This one is known as the parable of spring for its
rhythm and its pageant.
The fresh grass and forsythia will carry you towards summer,
your body lithe and unencumbered, your hunger fed
by fields of daisies.
I'm wearing love's crown, she said, because love shouldn't
be a neon idol shining on a shelf.
It must be worn and worn through, and not just the love
you bring, but what you can accept, especially when the
days are short and brooding.
Go ahead, she said.
Put it on.
Stand next to the light.
So I guess when I was trying to think of a prompt, and what
might be helpful, I couldn't really think about what I do,
because I don't know what I do.
But based on what I've done, I tried to figure out what I do.
And so what I think that would be helpful is to think about
someone or something you love, and think of something as
specific, as particular as you can get about the person.
A look, an expression, a gesture.
And don't think about naming the emotion.
Think about the thing, and then the emotion itself will
come through it.
And so that's not as specific a prompt as one could get, but
that's the best I can do.
Good luck.
Thank you.