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I'm Jenny Gropp Hess, you've probably heard my name now ten times.
Um, I always like to start with a little spares so I can warm myself up but also to warm you
up to the experience of hearing poetry. So, this first piece is called "The Ornaments
of Providence and Welded Water" I drink a sunlit whiskey, a belt of coal right
through me. Instead of a hot air balloon, I have cardinals
in melted birdbath water, like a well-meaning professor saying morning.
The calm of giving in, I poke at the ice tray. Disrupt a cube.
Remembered names, like black holes folded into hand passed notes
Oh mail man, I've never offered you a drink Though I know your thousand boxes are spots
on a bush where berries grow. If someone dies or moves away, you'll find
another berry in the same place. A handful of snow would supernova in my whiskey
Somewhere the parrot and the aloe will outlive me beautifully
The mailman pulls away, and above the sky slow churns icily, crosses like freezer gin.
A cold pilot light lit. Okay, and the next poem I wanted to read is
actually is broken up all over the page, I was reading Emerson's Montaigne or the Skeptic,
I took a chuck of Emerson's language and broke it down and sort of tried to work my way into
my own words. And someone asked me to read this, so I was happy to have the suggestion.
And I'll read the Emerson quote first. This is called Heeding the Half Sentence.
The sincerity in marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. Cut these words and they
would bleed. They are vascular and alive. One has the same pleasure in it that he feels
in listening to the necessary speech of man about their work. When any unusual circumstance
gives momentary importance to the dialogue. For blacksmiths and teamsters do not trip
up in their speech. It is the shower of bullets. It is Cambridge men who correct themselves
and begin again at every half sentence. And, moreover, will pun and refine too much, and
swerve from the matter to the expression. The sincerity to begin again at every half
sentence marrow of the man, listening to the necessary speech of man tripped in their speech
is a shower of bullets reaches to these sentences, pleasure in it that he feels in listening.
Blacksmiths and teamsters at every half sentence. Any unusual circumstance cut these words and
lay about their work. Correct themselves, bleed, they are vascular, and alive in listening.
The Andes are stars and stars are guestwork and account for the dimming of lights, listen
harder, bleed. Hold off for the solar spool, vascular,(sound code?) the prisoner of the
end wild galaxy at the moment of fear, the beast is a main body, conditioned air is closed
air, like (steepened saying?) Order is a season, a surgeon's hand in their last days delete
the body's parts no more. Whispering order at the moment of fear bleed no unusual circumstance
at every half sentence a singing bridge thorough like the music is constant. Listen harder
it is hard to keep the boiling river, its banks, rivers, the canine cloud has no iris,
alive in listening to the necessary rivers, banks, river banks, sincerity a fluid utensil,
the silver and the soup, the hand grabbing for the sinking ring, blacksmiths bullets
silver served over rice, breath, the need to breathe, vascular and alive, toes reaching
for the stones in the lake, liquid silver spoon do not trip, speech of men about their
work, try the river as a diet of the road thin utensil, minimal aluminum momentary importance
is Cambridge men who correct themselves so Emerson like, begin again.
Okay, um (applause) Okay this is the poem that I gave to Meeches?
Class and it was in best new poets 2012, so I thought I would go ahead and read this one
here tonight. It's called, well, I guess I should give you
a little background, I write these poems about people who have odd jobs and I kind of relate
their experience doing that work as the work becomes more acquainted with the work of doing
a poet, so I try to get more in touch with myself through writing about these strange
people, um, that I kind of get inside their brains, um, so this is called Months After
the Crash, the Blind Aerobatic Pilot Speaks
Black box my secret kin before the nose dive jammed my body into the hat I was no eel when
I hit the ocean's surface, now I am land with the brail, cattle under my fingers this summer
by body on the mattress sweat drying into pounds as blank a house inside and out. I
am suitcases in a tremendous sea the exterior part of a vehicle in this absurd custom of
missing myself like a radio program once recorded live. I met a young man who lost his leg in
battle and he said distinct from his substance his name saved him warned thing, blood cant
be stored for more than 42 days but my vision still wrets? out in rapid climbs inverted
spins Cuban ates in remembrance I get outside a bottle of whiskey back outside of the curve
amphitheater turned inside out no possibility of grabbing the door handle and feeling someone
turn it from the other side no possibility of translating flight dry and husky when the
side of the wing is align with the rest of the world, upper limit my face whitening a
breaker in air. In 1932 the royal airforce trained men to fly with a hood over the cockpit,
take off, turn over, spin, and dive straight in and out blind, a wave covered in mud, mud
covered in waves shells covered in mud must slide in pass visible for tenths of second
blindness begetting blindness, a jet passing open jawed making paste of birds at the speed
of men, gathering acres in a radar nest turning like a sparrow entering through a window mistaking
the space between floor and ceiling for sky. Okay, um and I thought I would also read a
little bit of prose. I also write prose. Um, so this is not a piece I have done much out
loud except to myself and it's about when I was living in this northern city in Japan
called Kushiro? And um it was foggy for 22 straight days and you couldn't see, you know
you'd look out and sometimes it was like you couldn't see your hand and sometimes you could
barely see but it never lifted and so I was trying to write about that experience a little
bit. So um this is called a Foreigner at the Threshold of Fog and um I have a couple of
quotes to begin. Kushiro is known as the city of mist and this
is certainly true a lot of the time, around a 100 days of the year when the city is blanketed
in mist, causing much of the city to disappear. This city has flourished as a port city and
is home to one of Japan's largest fishing fleets. It's from the all Japan guide. And
I have another quote from Thomas Carlisle's the hero's divinity. We call that fire of
black thunder cloud electricity and lectured learningly about it and grind the like of
it glass and silk but what is it. What made it. Whens comes it. Wither goes it. Science
has done much for us but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred
and finitude of meshiance? whether we can never penetrate un which all science swims
as a mere superficial film. Every object still verily a window through which we may look
into infinitude itself.
And so um this is the first section, fog on the 16th straight day.
Up against her 5th floor window is the fog white acreage of the city's backside. Her
gaze is pushed into it so hard that she can see her futures in the window pane . she is
the airplanes nose pressing into the space where white emerges from white pressing into
the shapes of the far distant. The distracted and cloudy embrolio? That mythological women
emerge from. She is distracted by it until she decides to open the window. Her hand is
below the window seal. She is lightly clutching a few tablespoons of saffron sent from abroad.
She does not crush it. It moistens. It is avian. Here, some of the history of aviation.
She is a puff , a ghost bird saying, spice sack give me your tongue, to be a compuscular
ray a bright saffron trail lashing through the fog and then in the arrival crushed red
and gold, a handful of rice spice falling five stories from her unclenched hand in the
wet street. Damped to spice paint on the sidewalks chilled palate, the scent and taste of saffron
in this marry time blindness stars where are gray and her hand stained floral pushes out
the open window and moves the cloud that touches the ground.
How fox situates her when she's frustrated The invisible venting machine dispenses and
dispenses at her cost as if she's made of snow she is an edge species wrestling with
another edge species, cars hizzing past nearby , the foil wrapper extends to bind them up
like wet eyeballs. They are shelved and the process repeats. Fog and the routine of cooking.
She knows that the fog's color matches the white of the flag so she expects only the
slight red circle in the center to appear when the fog thins a degree, offering the
slightest hand of visbility, and surely by mid afternoon the sunlight bathes off a layer
of the fog's body and she can see it, the circle a soft machines eye at the end of the
pier looking, the window a Cyclops, her cue for a late lunch. In the kitchen she picks
up a flat yellow box from the countertop, looks for numbers on the back. 350, 2, thinks
directions for curry, 350 milliliters of water, 2 cubes of curry, adds water to a saucepan
rips open one end of the box, slides out the brown plastic tray, pops out two cubes of
curry, and puts them in the pan. The safest bet she thinks is to heat over medium and
stir with a wooden spoon. How she equates fog with winter. During the colder months,
when visiting a cemetery, she cannot smell the people enturned beneath the marble headstones.
She feels memory bowed in the marble and cant release it. Does it want to fabricate its
stories. Yet the headstones are so close to one another that some of them seem to share
the space of one breath. She goes home and places a smooth clean stone at the bottom
of a glass of chilled, iceless gin. Other days, when it is very cold, she puts a pickled
plum, called immimoshi, in a glass of hot water, oyou, and Japanese liquor, shochu.
The Japanese term sound like warming, the soft process of a face in light. A face that
appears warm but is never touched. She drinks it. Immimoshi, oyou, shochu. In the morning,
she pulls up the blinds. Light fog emerging with each disappearing slat, a salty flower
blooming in her throat with each blink. A goal lands in the river and is seized by the
current, a cork on a line. Nearby, fishermen unpunctuate the river and pack their catch
into Styrofoam coolers. Silver commas, stopped commas, leftovers, she thinks, for us to eat.
Fog after exiting a window of this downtown bar at 3 AM. She's looking at what's still
open, one out of every few shops. The convenience stores submit a white light at the source,
extending out at its furthest reach the color of fog the hostess bars, windows shiny and
opaque as beetle backs, groups of salary men entering and exiting, the shapes of their
bodies the only difference between them. Their half unbuttoned white shirts thinned by wrinkles,
black slacks an atmosphere around their legs, pusteces encircle them on the sidewalk as
posts in a moving corral framing the group, fawning over them, their tight violet silver
obsidian dresses popping around the loose male-scented nucleus. Manilla folders wrapped
in smoke and copier ink. The pichinco parlors, lights dinging in time with bells a thousand
fish tails pounding against the sides of a great aluminum container, whipping, nothing
else left. More salary men passing with cans of beer, maybe going gambling, going to another
ones of the hundreds of hostess bars, going home to eat microwaved rice while their wives
move around in the background. Shes feeling like an orange, plucked, the stem releases,
her body gains density, packed inside herself, released bending over, rupturing into the
sewer, a fruit grown too quickly in the swarming tree of city fog.
Fog in communication. Breathing the city's air, the fog makes the air more local, taints
it with a false sense of companionship. She takes her mind to it, divides it into an infinitude
of breaths, she cant leave it alone, shes made air into something that can wait for
her, has made herself into a door. At any moment, she can shut herself, stop breathing.
Still whole oceans are traversable, building a hallway, shes a hallway down to a door,
and then a door, come knocking on herself several times a day, finding herself in a
rabatta with one counter and nine stools, six middle aged salary men on one side and
one elderly couple on the other. Shes staring at a plate of wood-skewered chicken and green
peppers with a conversation in her mouth, watching more skewers turning over charcoal;
charring, juicing, smoke poruing out of the vents and the crack in the sliding door, wondering
what everyone else is eating. What craggy shellfish is bubbling and firming on the grill.
Eventually, to be asked a question, to surface up from underneath a composition of Japanese
sounds, to enter it. Japanese clocks swinging on hooks, voices, the many syllables it takes
to thank someone. The cadence of buying liquor at the convenience store. Twilight, fog, on
a prickly covering of frost, a hundred variations on ticking white.
Fog and whiskey walking. She leaves her apartment after several glasses of whiskey, dusk born.
Coffee plants could grow from her body, push forth a harvest of dark beans, rich and oily.
She's the curl and snag of broken shingles cutting through the fog; mud a paste under
her boots. She's strong, laced with alcohol, taking diagonals across parks, heating stunted
buds on the trees. She turns inward toward the city center, passing a convenience store,
its long window. Inside its aisle of whiskey and shochu, the salary men staring at schoolgirl
naga near the magazine rack, their bodies limp against the half-erections in their dark
slacks, their constant coming and going, an entire phylem attracted in cycles to the light
under the sheet -- the convenience store in the fog. On the refrigerated shelves behind
the men, a diminishing quantity of onigiti, those throughout the day pulled like pixel
from a fluorescent screen, a proper measure of time in the consumption salmon roe and
pickled plum, nestled in sticky rice and wrapped in nori, stocked every morning for the taking.
Shes become hungry; she walks towards the area in the middle of town with the crowded
rabatta, rows of them in warm unpaved allways, fog filled, a match for the nestled flux beyond
the sliding wood doors. The alleys absorb the voices and drinks splashed on the floor
during conversation, making a heart under the dirt. Her usual debate, a point of entrance,
contemplating the mostly illegible congie calligraphy on soft flags over the doors,
their colors, the fading bindings of books, the waving of wilted reds, stretched blues,
pearly greens. And beyond the doors, laughter that might be too intimate to approach. She
might not have a choice if she went inside. She might have to talk. In another case she
might ruin the conversation. Stopping in a door filtering mild mumbling, an old women-an
old woman and some men. The whiskey on her breath merges with the fog. She stands, breathes,
her breaths beating again and again in indecision, but then she pulls the door open on its runners.
The scooting of squat, wooden stools and the shifting of shoes on the concrete floor split
the alley air briefly before she closes the door behind her. Bumping the fog back outside,
making way for the sound of expensive charcoal burning like guitar strings popping inside
the charcoal itself. Muted, making the charcoal lighter, lifted, glass of stone, the smoke
curls, music out of the destruction of an instrument. She says good evening to the old
woman behind the counter (good evening in another language) and regards three men holding
chopsticks at separate levels of greeting, all in some midst of plucking fresh oysters
out of tall, unglazed, dark clay cups. Learning that those oysters are lightly coated in rice
vinegar, and called kaki soup.
Fog and the Boats in her Ears She waits for the sound of boats. The fog
is too thick for her to see the vessels as they approach and pass, vessel after vessel,
like notes in a player piano. After some time she notices that each note, once struck, enters
into its own length of rumble, strength, departure. In this way, in the way that the note of each
vessel acts as two fingertips pulling a thread from the spindle of the river, the way each
boat becomes bare, surviving, she must accept that the vigor of water behind the boat is
separate from the boat itself, and also that she must keep her ear tuned to the vigorous
part, so that the boat's body may be truly realized. After one of the boats passes, she
tries to hear the water beyond the cotton in her eyes, lets the river rise until there
is a blind flood, a cipher. Enough water makes holes appear all at once, she can hear where
the storm drains are, the window frames, can hear the river rushing through, over, and
then she can see it bursting into the grocery store, ripping across the surface of the all
weather rug, lifting cans of food from the shelves, raising dead fish from their beds
of shaved ice, organizing a herd that can run over a hill and take a man out weak as
a lone reed. She takes away the sound that can still see. Yellow price tags swirling
like grace notes and the river mining the lines of the body she wants, the body of powerful
extension, the body of myth. She thinks of botchalism, lids bulging on jars, jars full
of botchalism carried by the flooding river. There, to be overcome, to extend a sting into
a greater opening, to make real, the mirage. She thinks her body must be more alive now
that she can see the world a flood. Thinks about bees crawling out of a crack in the
wall, come from somewhere, when the weather is warm enough. Thinks about the golden marshin
near the river, flooding to a slick, a dancefloor upon which the body becomes a spector on its
way to becoming edible. The center of alonement, a body that fits inside the mouth in a single
bite.
Thank you. (cheers and clapping)
The World's Largest Poet Visits Rural Idaho. His 300 pounds om his 6 11 frame will not
fit into the dean's VW waiting at the bus station. He must wait again, while a forty
mile round trip brings another car. At the pinetree motel, the world's largest poet piles
baggage on the underlength bed, naps on blankets on the tile floor. That evening, a low table,
his only podium, he ducks, and squints to read his poems. Both he and his hosts are
aware of all of this. They have him in the glaciers with wild words that spring from
his giant fingers. He's there because the backward humming in his head will not stop.
Thank you Mischa for doing this, this is a wonderful thing,.
Um, the second most difficult audience to read for is a room full of writers. I read
this earlier in my career when I had the fortune and misfortune to read to a giant room full
of writers at the Writer's Conference. The toughest audience to read for is a room full
of your family. Um, we kind of have both here tonight. Um, and there's two ways you can
approach that family problem. Uh, you can pretend they're not here and just go forward
or you can kind of latch on to them. And I've decided that I would do the latter this evening.
I could be wrong about this, if I am you check with me afterwards, don't shout it out now.
I don't think very many bankers go and visit the graves of other bankers. But it's a thing
that artists do. It's a thing that writers do. And I was um visiting Emily Dickinson's
grave in Amherst, Massachusetts and I'll bet a lot of money that there's at least one other
person in this room that's done that. And her markers says simply call back, um, and
at a time after I was there, iw as just thinking stangely that in occurred to me that the span
of Emily dickinsons and the lifespan of my father are almost exactly a centery apart
and that led to this. Call forward. Dale b quary 1925 to 1985. Emily
Dickinson 1830 to 1886. Other poets to my father's grave most certainly have never come.
The Dickenson's Amherst kingdom iron fenced they have trudged in iambic waves and so I
owe my poem to him yet pay it now to her most fierce in genius, cold and warm and sparse
who speaks above his silent den. She saw his face and songs? Born and gone century and
century beyond her. She spoke his love, his chill, his stupor, she taught me grief is
toneless gave me song. The grief is toneless is Dickenson's words. I have four daughters.
Um, one actually , other in spirit. I wrote this poem some time ago and uh after the fact
it became part of a ridiculous project I have going on and having to do Shakespeare, I wanted
to read this one. If you're, um, I assume if you have a general familiarity with the
play if you happen to know the play well, you will know that I catch a few things here
and there. Uh, this is for my daughter Miranda, this is called the tempest.
If you name your daughter vision, or wondrous to be hold you should not be surprised if
she comes to you in anger or in shame wishing to be known as mary or ann that will be the
moment to carry her out to the things of the world she is not speaking of her sounds that
were almost hers. Aspen, lilly wipe, cumulonimbus glow, soon enough she will realize the world
is too often gets named in hope of profit or deceit or the scientist exact to but on
the greening island of the family testing its voice in the month of waiting, the sought
after words are music and the past, grandparent, aunt, child, and deceased, spirits of fashion
and monsters of commerce lurk bedfellows eager to keep us from our own vested inventions
in songs. Some days it seems we grow from wimbling's silence and speech only that we
might curse the coming return to silence but if you've named your daughter wondrous to
be hold, she'll someday learn she heard those words before all others and then again, again,
where you belong beyond all roaring she'll know should you ever brave return which words
are the first you'll speak. Applause. Any of you who have written know or I trust
that you know what you write comes from who knows where, it can come from anywhere, that
first poem about that big poet came from looking at the Guinness book of world records sometimes
my poems come out of my life in direct ways and sometimes they come out indirectly and
sometimes they have nothing to do with it except spiritually or emotionally. This is
one of those poems that was born of an actual experience, uh, but it got created actually
partly because of the experience and partly because it was a time in my wedding life and
it was much after the experience that I had been somehow writing longer and longer poems
and decided that that wasn't necessarily such a good idea so I was going to make myself
write some small poems and I got this notion when I was uh in a hotel room and looking
at those little pads of paper that they leave you in the hotel rooms, some of them are square
and some of hotels give you those long and skinny and I decided that I would try and
write some poems that couldn't be any longer than what I could type on one of those little
pieces of paper. I didn't have to keep the shape but uh, in this particular poem it became
after the fact kind of the titled poem for this group of poems and it's called poems
of this size. In poems of this size so little like happen
when wonders of such brevity can matter is when I strolled thirty years ago with my wife
a year before she was my wife in our first neighborhood and we heard that familiar horrible
squealing of tires down the block and because she was a young nurse no doctor in sight when
we reached the small boy lying on the red brick street with many people gathered round
she had to step forward and kneel had to be the one cradling him and wondering most closely
how quick and full an end can be. Applause Um, this next one I'm going to read for you
um nobodys seen it or read it or heard it or knows of it um except um a few people in
this room uhh because it was a piece that I wrote uhh sort of deciding that it would
just remain not a prior piece but one that I wasn't going to be trying to send off out
into the world the way I do most of my poems um and uh this is a poem for uh one of my
granddaughters um she doesn't know about it yet and she's only three now or almost three
um so I thought I would uh I have read this out loud or anywhere and im hoping I can do
it and uh I was looking at it and thinking well maybe we can do that uh so uh it's called
Sierra and uh it's for my daughter Miranda who is Sierra's momma and her daddy Travis
and eventually for Sierra and it starts with uh dictionary definition renown Spanish son
of the latin Sarah a soft a range of hills or mountains having a soft tooth appearance
from a distance, and smart listeners that you are you'll pick up some threads from the
tempest poem. And so again as always we must make our own truths believing more in music
than hard definition or history when we've wanted for so long that want becomes a fear
becomes what we've lost by never having it so at first we fear the getting the having
the know we must name a right to claim to hold on minute by minute but the word made
love saw toothed hardly in truth at first toothless no appearance just soft reality
and certainly no distance is involved in this closest, most constant of looking at what
was one's self hidden. Is oneself now fully in the open of that want with her habitation,
her name, Sierra. No range, no plurals, just the one. Sierra. That made me cry. Thanks.
You're welcome. It's good for you. Uh, my daughter who is most not here is in
Africa. She's also my lighter daughter.
So I'm going to read this poem. This is for Rebecca.
It's called "My daughter playing Beethoven on my chest."
She was nine. On the absolute edge between her dying childhood and that confusing ecstasy
to come and go in another decade's rush. We were simply chattering.
I, seated, and she, standing before me. She, spinning those silly child's nonsense
tales still lingering, circular repeating jabberings.
A part of me laughs then loves to hear though often I am quickly bored.
Annoyed. Wishing to escape the wishing.
Her fantasy of words and voices means when suddenly her hands came forward and up.
Spread like claws or the reach of a smaller child playing ghosts or monsters. Her fingers
kept coming and lit upon my chest, ever so briefly still, then launched into a spidery
dance of side-to-side, of up and down. Beethoven's Ode to Joy.
Thrummed above my lungs. As if she were typing out a secret, well-known
message. No, I could not decipher that music's motion,
upside down and silent. She hummed as well, her fully childish voice
releasing that long ago tale of maturity. As if it were the simplest thing of all, to
offer up the musings of a genius. What she played, I could not play. My hands
from earliest days, fat hands, stuck to the platter of my thinking.
Music's flags and circles, a Russian I could not read.
But I'd had ear enough to follow the lead of her growing fingers at seven, then eight,
then nine. On the keys, which led to hammers and wires
and board. Which had lifted sound through our every room
and wall. This, daughter's not here, I kind of thought
she would be but then we found that we all screwed up and she didn't even know what was
happening. But I'm going to read this anyway because
her old English teacher from high school is here.
So this is a way-back poem from my oldest daughter, Heather.
And, um, it grew as things sometimes do from something she said to me.
It's called "My daughter's night." Think about lying in bed, a little kid.
My daughter's night. Bees in the ceiling's corners.
Tree shadows on your fingers and sheet. You lie awake from evening to dawn.
Your little sister sleeps beside you while streams of black air push through the window
screen, to tangle with voices from walls and drop quivering in a dark mass on the dresser
across the room. Though you are nearly seven you won't believe
you sleep. How do I explain, but I cannot show you?
What if you are right? Perhaps while my nights are elsewhere, you
know the dark as being here. Your pillow rushes against your ear like the
ocean shell in your closet, you lie in though until the daylight brings us to you from our
vast waste of sleep. When you're old, what will matter?
That you were always awake? Or that you could never dream?
And I will finish by coming back around to the poets.
And I won't mind if you want to buy a book from me.
You can check with me later. This is called "How Poets Would Have Us Know
Them." As we read calligraphy, where pressure, angle
and nib free beauty from sense. As we shiver to the voice of a certain singer
always wanting more. Never mind the words.
As we rise to a lover's hand, as it nears. Though we do not know what the stroke this
time will be. Though the lover may be gone, the hand in
our dreams alone. Thank you.
(applause) We have gifts.
We come bearing gifts. No cash, don't get too excited.
I'll just, um, I don't want to stay too long but I wanted to tell you we brought, um, for
each poet- Katie, could you help me with getting the other one?
That would be awesome. Um- the college of education supports this
event with a mug. Dean Marshall really is supportive in many
ways by allowing me to do this, which is so wonderful, and a pen which actually has written
on it "College of Education." We present them to you.
Bravo! (applause)
And each poet. I don't know if thirty years in Athens at
the Georgia Review counts as a new term in the south, but I think that the poems do and
certainly our newest member to the Georgia Review maybe you're the newest to the family
of the Georgia Review? Yes.
So we've also purchased for them this delicious cookbook by Hugh Atchison which reads like
poetry so I hope that you'll do some cooking. And this was the time for Q and A if you have
a burning question now's the time to let me know.
I happen to have three. So I'll start.
But signal, wave me down if you have this mmmmh! I need to ask something, I want to
ask something. I'm looking around the room and I've started.
So I'm going to just get out of the way after I ask these questions.
But wanted to ask you, I think that it's a really difficult balancing act that you do.
I'm not sure if I'm, this is not good theater. Three quarters out.
And move the mic back, there's only one mic, this isn't hard.
Being an editor and being a writer seem like that could be antithetical.
Being a teacher and being a writer seem like they could be antithetical.
There's hardly any time. You're putting so much into other peoples
words and care and teaching others that- I'm interested in how, of course in the context
of our course educators navigating time for their own artistic practice and nurturance
of their own literacy and how that might parallel with how you as editors also nurture your
writing and what the relationship is between your writing and your work as editors.
Now I'm going to give you back the mic. Okay well, I think for me it's partly that
if I have a bad day editing a piece, um, which would mean that I can't get my brain into
it but I need to do and I need to tune up that voice and I need to do the correcting
for that author's work, like it's such a heavy responsibility to be offered somebody's work
to make it streamlined and make it the very best that it can be. Um, I get stuck on a
sentence for sometimes embarrassingly like an hour and try to make that happen and at
the end of that process sometimes I find that I can, I'm totally inspired to write, which
is then hard because then I have to keep working. But other times I can't, you now I'm stuck
in the place with that piece, so I think that that just speaks to sort of the power of writing
itself, that you never know what's going to turn out the backside of the task that you're
doing. You just have to be very careful and also
I think as an editor, you know I can't remember the little tiny palm that (name that I can't
understand) and she writes about being a condensary, like the act is always to bring the word down
to that place and I think that whether you're editing or writing you're in that condensary
and that's like where the two come together. Um, so that would be my answer to that.
Okay, well I have, uh, two things. There's the time thing which is fairly simple, which
is the job along with everything else in your life. There's something you can do other than
directly writing and so yeah, to me it gets in the way because it seems, its sort of (ambulates?)
You need lots of time to write and you don't have that. The other part it has to do with
writing itself and in that regard I have myself convinced that the editorial group I do is
very good for my writing because it (Kirk Jay's?) kind of referring to working on something
that you're getting ready to publish. My mind is flashing to all of those things that were
very definitely not getting ready to publish. And telling myself day after day after day
that I want to make my work be such that no other editor looks at it and has some of the
reactions that I have to some of the things that I look at that come into our office.
Keeping the bar and the stakes very high for myself, so.
So speaking of the bar high and what you look for and what you don't want to appear ever
in the journal, we have a group here of writers. The class, but probably other people in the
back around the room who are writing, so all right. We want to know what you want to print,
what do you want to publish, what makes for a good poem, please? What's the secret recipe?
I think Daphne has that one. Nope, you answer that (laughter)
Okay, I don't know what I want to publish because you haven't given it to me yet. And
I know what I have wanted to publish. And one of the critical things about anything
that you end up loving is that it is in some way or ways different than what you've seen
before. And as far as getting ready to try and write that thing, we're all going to be
obviously part of that traces of following all the back to things you couldn't do anything
about. Like, when you're bored and then there's the education part of it, which actually this
was back to what I was saying at the end of my first response about having the bar for
yourself high enough where I think there's where mistakes are and if you're not sounding
well educated and don't want to be sounding well educated, and you're passionate about
whatever writing you want to do, then there's a sign that you're gifted, crazy, analogies
that are like, well I don't do it anymore, but a whole lot of my life we spend part of
my days playing basketball, right? I loved to do that. I was, you know, I was kind of
a scholar and mediocre and had fun. It never would have occurred to me that trying to get
a bus and driving to New York or Chicago or some place and walk out on the court during
the Bulls or the Knicks practice and say "Hi, could I try out?" You know, I mean, if you
want to be willing to be good then you've got to get yourself ready to be there and
you've got to recognize how many levels there are and how many possibilities, and I can
guarantee that there are a whole lot of people who just sort of, this isn't being nasty this
is just being realistic, there's a whole lot of people who just sort of think like if they
write something down then okay that's going to work, they don't know what everyone else
is doing, they write something down and think it's it the rarest and the most talented hard
work. Well I mean I guess just to add to that really
briefly, I think there's something else too, and just to say that there's this Russian
poet Victor Schlausky (?) he says art exists to make the stones stony again. And so I think
when something happens for me when a stone is suddenly stony. But everybody has that,
like we wear different outfits, and we all like different things and sometimes you know
you just have to trust in yourself that you do have an independent vision, there's a graphic
designer down in Miami. His name is Evan Hecocks, I don't know about his formal training or
what he's looked up but he does blind drawings and things like, he'll take a dilapidated
van or like an underpass on a highway and just something that would be typically ugly
and his thing is to, if you can't see any beauty here then, a large string of expletives,
you, you know, like you need to be able to sort of try that and also to trust yourself
to make the steps necessary to get the writing done, to try to do it.
I'm glad you've figured out that this moves and (inaudible because of audience) you're
useful, next week we will be here Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday for more business
please come back. Okay, last question guys, scanning does anyone have any to proceed or
I will proceed. So this teachers, uh, poetry, um, well, my first thought was "how do we
as poets, publishers of good writing, as writers keep it current and necessary for other people
to keep writing to keep subscribing to the Georgia Review?" What are you doing here (interrupted)
Pardon? Good job.
Subscribe to the Georgia Review, now yours for- No I you know really, we, as I said last
night you've just learned poetry has been ousted from the state's standards so teachers
no longer have requirements to teach writing poetry. If it's in the curriculum, it's to
teach a haiku, or an acrostic and a marginal activity maybe that's done in April after
testing has been completed you know what I mean? So, in essence your business, so, I
just want to, I'm interested in your response on what you would say to the teachers K-12
and beyond and literacy teachers about poetry? Want to go first? No? Okay.
Um well first of all I was totally pissed off, I didn't realize that that had happened.
You know but I also read a recent account about a charter school, of course I cannot
remember what city it was in, but the arts would have been cut from that school and they
had replaced the funding and got security guards and metal detectors and all those supposedly
necessary things. The principal switched that school and they took out all the, well the
principal made the decision to take out all the security guards and all the metal detectors
and reinstitute the arts and the violence in the school disappeared. That would be my
answer to why it's necessary if you want just to see results of what kids are like when
they're able to learn how to express themselves and find their individuality that you can't
often find through finding the right answer, because there is no right answer and so I
think that the basic question is that we need to be teaching those sorts of things.
Um I think I was probably the answer that it occurs to me that one of my favorite books
that I, had in the library is a book that is an anthology that was published about 40
years or so ago by the University of Chicago. It's called "Most Ancient Verse" and it is
translations of what are these called poems in the book from ancient Egypt and Sumerians
and going back several thousand years as sort of this closest it seems as anybody can get
to the beginning of language and it would appear that one of the, somehow, one of the
first things that begin to diverge from the earliest language was this thing that we now
call poetry, which I guess you might for the moment define as compressed thought for attention
in any language and I would suspect that if it's been around for all that time it's gonna
take a little bit more than a legislative boot to knock it off. That doesn't mean that
it gets any easier. (inaudible)
And on that note, give it up for these two fine poets! (applause)