(Erin Belieu, Deborah Landau, Camille Rankine, Brenda Shaughnessy, Tonaya Thompson) A reading and discussion by a group of female authors who have published with Copper Canyon Press over the past decade. Hear these acclaimed poets read new work and share their insights on writing, teaching, and crafting a book. Audiences will listen to a brief reading from the authors before they participate in a discussion with the managing editor of Copper Canyon.

Published Date: September 30, 2015

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2015 A W P conference in Minneapolis. The recording features Erin Ballou, Deborah Landau, Camille Rankin, and Brenda Shaughnessy. You will now hear Tenaya Kraft, managing editor at Copper Canyon Press provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:33):

Good afternoon everybody. Thanks for coming to our reading and discussion titled The Women of Copper Canyon Press. My name's Tenaya Kraft, I'm the managing editor at Copper Canyon, and what we have for you here today are four incredible powerhouses of poetry. Erin Ballou, Deborah Landell, Camille Rankin, and Brenda Shaughnessy. Yeah, keep that going. So we're going to start with a 20 minute reading, meaning each author reads for five minutes and then we'll follow that with the discussion and q and a session.

Speaker 2 (01:18):

One of the reasons we're all here in this room together is that poetry is vital to language and living. Copper Canyon Press publishes poetry from around the world to engage the imaginations and intellects of readers. Since the first letterpress editions handmade by Sam Hamill and Tree Swenson 40 years ago, copper Canyon has been committed to publishing a truly representative range of poetic voices. Those voices over the years have included many powerful women, Lucille Clifton, Ruth Stone, June Jordan, CD Wright, Lucia Perillo, and Ellen Bass, just to name a few. And of course these women who sit before you today. Each of these poets has a distinctive voice of course, and you'll hear that in the reading, but there's at least one quality they all share besides being part of Copper Canyon and I know this from working with them, they all work like fiends. To prove my point, I'll present first Aaron Ballou. In addition to authoring four books of poetry, co-founding and co-directing with Kate Marvin Vida and teaching and directing the creative writing program at Florida State, she's also the artistic director of the Port Townsend Writers Conference and is working on a memoir

Speaker 2 (02:45):

Deborah's third book. The Uses of the Body is Hot Off the Presses. Please come by our booth at 10 0 1 if you haven't yet and pick up a copy. Also, Vita's Booth is right next door. Vogue has compared this collection to Richard Linklater's boyhood, but for girls and women and O Magazine calls it a thrilling meditation on the passages of a woman's life. Debra teaches in and directs the creative writing program at N Y U Camille's first book, incorrect Merciful Impulses will be Out fall 2015. So we're really pretty excited about that. She has served on the staff of the Kave KA Foundation and now teaches at N Directs the Manhattanville College m F A program. She serves as editorial director for the online literary journal, Manhattanville Review and sings with the band Miro Mirror.

Speaker 2 (03:44):

Brenda has published three books and her most recent are Andromeda was honored by a Cosmopolitan as the one poetry title on their list of best books of the year for Women by Women. It's pretty impressive to even get a poetry book on there at all. It was Library Journal's book of the year was on the international shortlist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and was honored as a New York Times book review, a hundred notable books of 2013. In addition to teaching at Rutgers University, Brenda is also a poetry editor at large at Tenhouse Magazine. So as I mentioned, we're going to have a 20 minute reading. We're going to go in alphabetical order and they're going to go for five minutes or so a piece. So we will start with Aaron.

Speaker 3 (04:39):

Hi. Thank you all for coming. It's a good crowd in the cavernous ballroom.

Speaker 3 (04:45):

Yeah, I'm just going to read a couple poems. The time limit saves you from my nervous chatter, which is nice. So I'm going to start with a poem. A friend of mine, a wonderful poet named Ashley Caps, has a poem that's now called Kindly, which I think is one of the most beautiful poems ever written, and you should Google it when you get home, and that's not an exaggeration. I really think it's one of the most beautiful poems ever written. It was originally called Love is an Emergency, and so I wrote a poem in response to her called Love is Not an Emergency More like Weather.

Speaker 3 (05:25):

Love is not an emergency, more like weather that is ubiquitous, true or false. Spring, the ambivalence we have for any picnic flies ass up in the jello, the soft bulge of thunderheads. Right now, the man in the booth next to me at the Nautilus Diner, Madison New Jersey is crying but looks up to order their famous disco fries. So the world's saddest thing shakes you like a magic eight. And before him, the minstrel who smeared on love's blackface rattling his damage like a tambourine. I have been the deadest nag limping circles around the paddock have flown to BD pieces sick as the tongue of mercury at the thermometers tip. But let's admit there's a pleasure too in living as we do like three strike felons who smile for the security cameras like love's first responders, stuffing our kits with enhancement pills, zigzags and Powerball cards I read to greet is the cognate for regret to weep, but welcome our weeping because we grant the name of love to something less than love because we all have to eat.

Speaker 3 (06:53):

This is a poem. There was that anthologies called Starting Today that Rachel Zucker and Ariel Greenberg put together, which I thought was really interesting where President Obama's first hundred days in office in his first term a hundred poets were asked to write sort of a poem in real time to what was happening in that moment for those first a hundred days. And I just love that project. It's wonderful anthology if you ever get a chance to look at it. But this was my version and I guess it must've been the 21st day of his presidency and it's about the honeymoon ending house resolution 21 1 proposing the ban of pushup bras, et cetera. So it goes, the foundation drops and the ladies are busted. Those old carpet bagger slouching south, oh America, we don't mean to disappoint, but every lover comes with a fulsome, jiggle, some pudding packed in the U-Haul A mole we want to believe could be viewed as a beauty mark, but honestly isn't the honeymoon the boring part, all that lying about and what is beauty, but the absence of symmetry better to forget perfection. To remember we were born a nation of blemishes, a posse of strays with cellulite. If Benjamin Franklin were alive today, you know he'd be working a thong and rollerblades on Venice Beach flying his freak flag just beneath Old Glory America. It's time to uns, suck those bellies and show our ugly asses. We must learn to want each other in direct sunlight, no more or less than what we really are. You know what? I'm just going to stop there. Thank you very much.

Speaker 4 (08:51):

Last week Aaron read at N Y U and the reading was so fiery that alarm went off and firemen came. That's the kind of power she has. So this is my very first time reading from this new book and I want to thank Tenaya and Michael and everyone at Copper Canyon for making it with me. It's so shiny. I like it. And I'm going to start with the first poem in the book which I wrote because Michael Uighurs told me I needed a first poem to start the book. So grateful to him for that too.

Speaker 4 (09:20):

And I lost my voice and I was feeling really bad about having to read with no voice and I realized the book is about the vulnerabilities and frailties of the body. So it's appropriate that I'm failing. I don't have a pill for that. It scares me to watch a woman hobble along the sidewalk, hunched, agio, leaning on. There's so much fear. I could draw you a diagram of the great reduction. All of us will soon be way back when the wedding is over. Summer is over life. Please explain. This book is nearly halfway read. I don't have a pill for that. The doctor said

Speaker 4 (10:09):

The book is all linked lyric sequences. It's like almost one poem. So it's hard to separate out individual poems to read from or to publish. So what I had to do was to combine sections. So this next one is two sections combined, which the New Yorker carried under the title solitaire solitaire. One summer there was no girl left in me. It gradually became clear, it suddenly became in the pool. I was more heavy than light pockmarked and flabby in a floppy hat. What will my body be when parked all night in the earth? Midsummer, breathe in, breathe out. I'm not on the oxygen tank. Twice a week we have sex. The live girls poolside. I see them at their weddings. I see them with babies, their hips thickening. I see them middle aged. I can't see past the point where I am like you. I'm just passing through.

Speaker 4 (11:15):

I want to hold on a while, don't want to not or forsake. Don't want to be laid gently or wracked raw. If I retinol, if I marathon, if I vitamin C, if I crims in my lips and freakish my hair, if I wax exfoliate, copulate beside the fish, slick the sea. Fill me. I'm cold. Fill me. I'm halfway gone. Would you crush me in the stairwell? Could we just lie down? If the brakes don't work, if the pesticides won't wash off, if the seventh floor pushes a brick out the window and it lands on my head, if a tremor menopause cancer a l s. These are the ABCs of my fear. The doctor says, I don't have a pill for that dear. Well, what would be a cure? All ladies gin and tonics on a summer night? See you in the immoralities. Oh, blurred o tumble. Rush of days we cannot catch. And finally, since this is a panel of women, I'm going to break out a poem about motherhood and Tin house. I combined two sections and it was published under the title, the Uses of the Body.

Speaker 4 (12:40):

In my opinion, handsome Dr. Randy, you are brown haired and Roman swift with your hands. Babies are big this year, so way less smoking and drinking. So way more eating cheese. I have someone to give birth to and he has all the credentials, heartbeat, feet. His father helped out. We decided to make him standing in the bathroom one night. We made him with things we had around the house. We made 'em with our own pots and pans. I still have the pantry, the pocket, the mandate, it looms there. A child we set out and then he went out the right way headfirst and we made it to the clearing. We made it out. Then he and I were in a blinking, in a fuzz down lare, the uses of the body, nursing lightning, the clear warm sea. I don't cook but I could make a baby and he was warm and plump as pie. I dreamed him and there he was, miniature, vast and unhygienic. He was my homework and I took him home. The baby was pathetic. All he could do was not a blink, cry and open his eyes. The two of us were nocturnal mostly in exile. We've regressed to a prostrate luxury as if now would never be thirsty or die. Not ever. And look at me, all my guilt peeling off.

Speaker 4 (14:14):

Thank you.

Speaker 5 (14:25):

It's really great to be here with you guys reading and feeling like I'm joining this press with all these incredible women writers that I really admire. So yeah, it's very exciting. So I'm going to read a few poems from the forthcoming book and correct Merciful Impulses. Can you hear me? Can you hear me now? Better? Is that better? Okay, great. I'm short. What's the name of your forthcoming book? Incorrect Merciful Impulses Coming in the Fall. So the first one, this a poem I've been thinking a lot about. I'm Jamaican of Jamaican parentage and I've been thinking a lot about the place of the immigrant in America lately. And this is kind of my love letter to America sort of. It's called the Free World. I bind my old grievances to a helium balloon balloon. A long memory I have been warned is a curse. Everywhere I go, someone has something they must say about you. Nobody knows who we are. Wouldn't you say nobody agonizes like we do elsewhere is a promise and a threat. I have been prescribed compassion of the wrong sort and so I am alone. I am invisible within you seeking companionship. I spend my afternoons before the windows of pet shops and strangers trying to decide. After all I was told I could have everything.

Speaker 5 (16:08):

I thought this was meant to be a romance. I was delivered here in order to love you. I was delivered here and ordered to love you If we could be friends. I wore this new dress for you. So the next one I wrote about the Big Bang. I'm always thinking about that as one does and how I kind of was thinking about how after the Big Bang, all the particles in space are moving away from each other and that continuous process matter. In retreat,

Speaker 5 (16:58):

The stars drift away from one another. Tonight as every moment you and I breathing so thoughtless, a living we make as we are made to as I make another promise to myself to try to mean more to you, to call out across a great distance. But I am not loud enough. I suspect I have not enough protest in me. The arc of my throat awaits a tenderness or brutality. And what are we to one another, but a means to a meaning we haven't yet discovered. Two points of light on the inky dark sky. Two paper boats on a black lake floating further away. Every day I awake, I roll over, I hide my head. We get our living. It's pathetic. I mean it makes you sad. I'm going to close with this possession. I want to give you everything. This is called a sickness by way of remedy. I am decorum bound, swept up and hushed. I forget myself. I lay my goods down, lay my arms down in the dust. Then it's a heaviness I borrow and I'm taught to own what's mine is mine. What's ours is the stake, the hangman's rope, then the cargo of dead unclaimed that I can contain.

Speaker 5 (18:45):

I cast my doubt upon the ground. I let the arrows of my longing fly toward the other shore. I want to save you. This condition is a viper's poison. I am bitten my limbless sweet sliding under the brush. I arrived in the first world, heavy faded with this vision. I lay hold of everything in sight. My arms are full. The other shore besieged by longing. I am a sickness. I want to give you more. Thank you.

Speaker 6 (19:42):

I'm going to read one from my most recent book and then I'm going to read two from a forthcoming book. So the two I'll read last are in manuscript form because that's really important to know. Now this is a poem inside a poem, which I didn't realize until too late that that's cheesy. The student said, oh, you can't do the poem inside a poem. And I'm like, really? I did it.

Speaker 6 (20:15):

Why should only cheaters and liars get double lives? That is why should they get two stabs at it while the virtuous trudge along at half speed? If an ordinary human can pull the fattest cash wad out of the slimmest slit and the fullest pudding out of the skimm milk, then it might be possible to insert a meager life in Andromeda into at the very least, our wide pit of sleep. Duplicity, after all, takes many, not merely two forms. And the very idea of doubleness twin or even simple simpering regret or nostalgia implies a kind of Andromeda, a secret world. The hidden draft, the tumor sibling. There are no accidents. Plane we could learn to fly. There's always that irreducible something extra to life on earth the way some men won't talk that way in front of women not wanting to astonish us with their secret madness as if there's another world bisecting ours, living among us like an unspeakable mold.

Speaker 6 (21:29):

The recent invention of the double decker pill equally effective on sunny and rainy days on the wall, A plural mural, a diptic of poll and wies. What fallopian and what fellatio like a nan. Golden oldie, but an imposter. Okay, why not try to offer more squalor? No matter who the photographer, when someone's called a lifer, it means that person is trapped. A lifer has no life. But what do we call the rest of us? How terrifying it is to try trying which frying pan will best kill the loved one, which will make the best omelet? The books on the bookshelves are touching themselves like virgins. But I've had them alright in this economy. And you love that phrase when people start saying things like, well, in this economy, you know something bad will come.

Speaker 6 (22:27):

In this economy, the economical ichibana of the lesser octopus is disarming a octopus, holding its intelligence and ink in a concentrate, not some sloppy octopus who suddenly freaks. So princessy rich, driven to abstraction, not unlike flowers dropping their petals because petals are garbage off the bloom, not expensive anymore, thus going inside to find meaning cut the eyes. Then from the cruel ichibana of the racehorse, if a leg breaks, she can't bear her own weight. Long blossomed head turns to glue and the fortune zooms off like flies from a carcass. When shooed, the tripod fell. So I had to cast about for my crutch to walk over my bad left knee buckling to write it. I want to take a picture of the flowers I arranged after Ana class. Just one. I quit quickly, but still hope to learn to arrange beauty. Classically, maybe I'm lazy or don't apply the rules to myself. Or maybe laze is just zeal, rearranged as in my case, even the clock we need to punch out on is too far away to plug in. So power collects in its hands and I'll finish with, I have a time machine. I have a time machine, but unfortunately it can only travel into the future at the rate of one second per second,

Speaker 6 (24:11):

Which seems slow to the physicists and to the grant committees and even to me. But I managed to get there time after time to the next moment. And the next thing is I can't turn it off. I keep zipping ahead while not zipping. And if I try to get out of this time machine, open the latch, I'll fall into space unconscious, then desiccated, and I'm pretty sure I'm afraid of that. So I stay inside. There is a window though, it shows the past. It's like television or fish tank, but it's never live. It's always over. The fish swim in backward circles. Sometimes it's like a rear view mirror, another chance to see what I'm leaving behind and sometimes blackout. All that time wasted sleeping myself. Age eight, whole head burnt with embarrassment at having lost a library book myself, lurking in a candled corner expecting to be found, charming myself. Holding a rose though I want to put it down so I can smoke me exploding at my mother who explodes at me because the explosion of some dark star all the way back struck hard at mother's, mother's mother. I turned away from the window anticipating a blow. I thought I'd find myself an old woman by now traveling. So light in time, but I haven't gotten far at all. Strange not to be able to pick up the pace as I'd like. The past is so horribly fast. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (25:55):

Thank you so much. That was wonderful. I'm remiss in not addressing the fact that Natalie Diaz isn't here. She wasn't able to make it at the last minute and she does send her apologies. At this time, we'll open up for discussion and I'll get us started with a couple of questions, but those of you in the audience do please feel free to raise your hand and jump in with questions at any time. So you have all, as I intimated before, achieved a lot and are very busy. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what drives you, how your writerly ambition was born and how you maintain it. Aaron, would you like to start us off?

Speaker 7 (26:39):

Sure.

Speaker 3 (26:40):

It was about, what was the question? Seriously, say it one more time. Okay.

Speaker 2 (26:46):

You've all achieved a lot. You're super busy.

Speaker 3 (26:49):

We're very busy.

Speaker 2 (26:50):

What drives you and how do you maintain that drive?

Speaker 3 (26:55):

No, it's a really good question. I just am like fear. No, I mean, I guess, yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, I just have this idea that I'm going to die very soon and that I need to do a lot of stuff before I lose the opportunity to be a person in the world anymore and do all the things that we get to do. I mean, it is a little, when you read out loud the things that I'm doing, what everybody else is doing, I thought we're all nuts. But there is this kind of way in which for me personally, I really want to make our community better, want to be a good citizen in certain ways too. That really matters to me. What about you, Brenda?

Speaker 6 (27:47):

I was just watching you answer that in awe. I know I was

Speaker 3 (27:50):

Watching,

Speaker 6 (27:52):

You were watching me watch. You put it really starkly that idea that we're just going to die and that's why we do stuff. I don't know what on earth to say after that, but I do think that it's not so much that I would not be able to live without writing, but that I don't really know how to process the little or the big questions without trying to write something. I'm not saying that I write through in order to process any of those questions. But if I don't write something, even if it's addressing something seemingly irrelevant, like Ichibana for example, having that get stuck in your head, even if it's something like that, I feel like that's how it stands in or sort of metaphorically represents the bigger questions that I'm too afraid to ask. I mean, I don't know about you, but there was, I stay awake all night thinking dumb, dumb things. I think Roz Chast had a really great cartoon about it that was the woman was up with a barrage of questions. How do you make a magnet at one o'clock in the morning? Suddenly, I have to know. And I feel like poetry at least allows me to get some sleep eventually.

Speaker 5 (29:08):

I feel like this is a question that I'm always asking myself when I've taken on way too many projects and I'm just like, why did I do this? But I think that it starts with the fact that, like Brenda was saying about writing, for me, it's a part of what makes my life make sense and helps me kind of know why I exist in a way for me in this at least my own personal existence. And I think that all the things that I do around that are a part of making that life possible for me and making it possible for writing to be the center of my life. So I think that's one of the reasons why I take on as much as I do, and that's one of the reasons that I keep pushing forward.

Speaker 4 (29:55):

I do a lot, but I don't experience it as overwhelming or painful. Actually. I always love poetry since as early as I can remember. And I just follow about love through college, grad school, always reading, always writing. And this is a life. I wanted to wake up every day and read poems and write poems and talk with people about poems and teach poems and run a program which people are writing poems and stories and run a reading series in which people are reading poems and stories. And I think I just feel fortunate to be able to get up every day and do this.

Speaker 2 (30:28):

Thank you. So I had formulated, this is a much longer question, but we kind of addressed a lot of it. How do you do stuff that doesn't have anything to do? Riding having a family or having hobbies going camping? How do you fit that in? Or are you ever not on the clock as a writer?

Speaker 3 (30:51):

No, I think and probably everyone in the room as a writer. I mean, I think we're always on the clock. And the thing is, I've been asked that question before and it doesn't always work As a mom, I try all the time to do all the things that I need to do, but I blow it a lot. I try to prioritize what I'm going to screw up. So Jude is, I don't screw up Jude, but I'm always not getting things done, not finishing what needs to be finished and just sort of scrambling around. And I sort of feel it's important to tell other people that because I think sometimes women walk around feeling like everybody else is doing it right. But I think the secret thing is that it's really hard. It's really hard. That's why they have those articles in Working Mother Magazine every month telling us how

Speaker 4 (31:46):

You read that.

Speaker 3 (31:47):

Yeah, well no, it's in the doctor's office, but they have those articles telling you you can have it all and the next month it's like you can't have it all. So I just feel like you do the best you can until you pass out at night. You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (32:06):

But you do make it to the doctor's office. So that's a apriority.

Speaker 3 (32:09):

Yes, I do make it to the doctor's office.

Speaker 6 (32:11):

I mean, the thing is, there is no knock clock, right?

Speaker 6 (32:16):

I mean, we all have the same, I often think about you read a poem after the a hundred days after Obama's, I always think, how the hell does he do everything? And he just triple, everything happens all at once. So many things happen at once. I mean, I feel like many of us are doing many things at once and in many ways for me the answer to this question answers the previous question. That poetry actually is one of the very few times I get to only do that. It may happen rarely, but at least I'm not on the phone with a pediatrician and trying to type an email and trying to, I dunno, stir something with my foot, with my foot, I guess on my foot stove. But you know what I mean, there's a sense of simultaneity always, and it's very, very busy. But I mean, we all have the same amount of time. We all have 24 hours in a day. It's not like someone who does less has more time, they don't get more hours.

Speaker 4 (33:13):

My temperament is frenetic and I just like to be super, super busy. And the good things is that poems are short so they can fit into the interstices. And for me, I have three kids and I have a job, but I save an hour every morning for poems and I try not to do email or make a dentist appointment or talk on the phone. And I've written three books that way. So just kind of guarding that time.

Speaker 5 (33:36):

I think my answer basically is I don't have kids like that. And that's pretty much it. I haven't gone to the dentist for too long.

Speaker 6 (33:47):

So

Speaker 2 (33:48):

Who in your opinion are the great American poets who's inspired you? Female or otherwise, or even writer or otherwise? Who's inspired your writing? Debra, do you want to speak to that?

Speaker 4 (34:02):

So when I was 13 years old, my mother gave me N Sexton's love poems and I was totally hooked. It was a really heady book for a 13 year old. And then from then I went on to read a lot of different things like Wallace Stevens and Keets and John Berryman and Frank O'Hara and these two for sure, Erin Blue and Brenda. Very big influences. And among my very favorites, and I'm looking forward to Camille.

Speaker 5 (34:24):

Oh,

Speaker 5 (34:27):

This is one of the questions that I always have a really hard time answering. I think especially thinking about in terms of the great American poets, it frightens me to try to make that kind of pronouncement, especially because I feel like when those kinds of pronouncements are made, so many people are always left out and I don't want to be responsible for that. But I will say that I also read Anne Sexton as a teenager and was like, this is amazing. She gets me except for the part where she killed herself. And that's definitely somebody who's formative. But I think that for me, I'm always reading and finding a poem that I am in love with that I admire. She's one person, Yusef aka is another person, toy deco, Mary Jo Bang, Claudia Rankin. There's a whole list of people that I'm encountering every day that I'm in love with and who are great to me, but I wouldn't put that on anybody else. These are who you should be reading as just who've spoken to me in the past.

Speaker 6 (35:33):

I guess

Speaker 3 (35:37):

There was a moment as a very young woman where I discovered Plath and Rich around the same time. And it seemed to me that those were two really, especially because of the way their lives touched and the very different outcomes for them. But I always felt like those were two really good balances for me in terms of women writers that have been huge influences. And Frank O'Hara for me was one of those people that meant a lot to me when I was very, very young, just in terms of the way that he could translate his consciousness. So absolutely so indelibly and such and such a sense of pleasure and pathos. And so I guess those were and den I always wanted to be den. I want to be a very old, pithy gay British man is what I want. Yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 6 (36:39):

I have a similar issue as Camille. I feel like every time I'm asked that question, it's a different list of people. But right now I am particularly, I'm excited about this new sort of lyric or memoir, partly researched essay essays that are happening. I mean, I just think that what's happening with Maggie Nelson and BU and the sort of more overtly political essayists like Roxanne Gay, I just think there's this whole new crop of really powerful women coming up with new ways of doing essays. I'm so excited about it. That does stem from my earlier, I used to love reading Roland Barth. He just seemed so, I want to write just a weird random paragraph that seems obliquely related to the thing I think I'm talking about, but somehow makes much deeper sense than any straightforward description. I really always fell in love with fiction. I didn't become a fiction writer. I'm just not that good at it. It's not easy. I mean, I love something I can't possibly do. And it was Jeanette Winterson and Tony Morrison, just those big beautiful stories of love and terror and loss that were just always captured my imagination. There are so many amazing poets. There's so many great poets that I love and that I'm reading, and they're all mushing together right now.

Speaker 6 (38:12):

I apologize in my mind, did not able to be articulated.

Speaker 2 (38:17):

But you mentioned political writing and I wanted to quote something that Margaret Atwood wrote in 1976 essay called On being a woman writer. She was describing an inversion. She had to actually writing that article because someone had asked her to do that for an anthology and she wrote, some of my reservations have to do with the questionable value of writers, male or female becoming directly involved in political movements of any sort. Their involvement may be good for the movement, but it's yet to be demonstrated that it's good for the writer. She changed her tunes

Speaker 3 (38:54):

Radically too. I

Speaker 6 (38:55):

I don't think she goes away at all anymore,

Speaker 3 (38:57):

But we love her. But no,

Speaker 2 (39:01):

76 was a while ago. She's

Speaker 6 (39:04):

So overtly political now. I mean she, I'm shocked. Where

Speaker 3 (39:08):

Is she? She here.

Speaker 2 (39:12):

So I mean, that did make me think about your work with Vita Aaron and I mean certainly your writing hasn't suffered. I think we can all agree that. So what are the ways that activism may have affected your writing life, if at all?

Speaker 3 (39:29):

Well, I had the experience, the very lucky experience of getting to know Audrey and Rich a little bit. And I had sort of this tough love moment with her where she read my first book when it came out. And she said many nice things about it, but she said, is this who you are? Is this, I mean, I still have the letter somewhere, but she was basically saying, is this your consciousness? Is this who you are? Because this isn't my real strong sense of you, the person that I've been talking to. And I think one of the things that she was challenging me about a little bit in a very gentle and sort of teacherly way, well, it wasn't actually that gentle now that I think about it, but it was pretty direct was okay. There was still a disconnect for me between being able to find a way to express, I mean, I'm an innately political person.

Speaker 3 (40:26):

I've always been that way. I mean, at least I think all people are. But that's always been something that matters a lot to me. And I come from a family where political activism of one sort or another was something we were taught and doing something for your community. And so she really made me think about what it was that I actually believed. Because I think at the time I was still think I was 28 when my first book came out and I was still very much trying to please, I was trying to please the literary establishment. I wanted to do things and I was taught all of the sort of canonical men and whose of course work that I love and admire very much. But she challenged me to put my money where my mouth was in a certain way. And then I've spent years trying to figure out how can I serve of what I believe about poetry as an art and a craft, and how can I also capture something about that political consciousness that is actually my own.

Speaker 3 (41:34):

And so especially with this book, I worked really, really hard to try to find a way to honor both things at the same time, if that makes sense. Does anybody else want to talk about, oh, and I do want to say something about Vita, which is that Vita Vita is, I don't think it any way undermines, I mean in any way undermines the idea that what we're talking about is art. It's women in literary arts, and what we care about is literature and we don't care about quotas. I was just talking about this because the Vida Count just came out the other day, and it's like we're not trying to assign quotas to anything. We're trying to open up people to multiple pleasures in art that they're missing the opportunity by only staying in their own little identity box to not reach out and see what other pleasures are out there. And I don't think that's antithetical, that's encouraging people toward art and not encouraging people toward a sort of empty political position. I guess I would say. Anybody else?

Speaker 5 (42:37):

Well, I guess I think that listening to that quote, I wonder if she means it's not good for the writers and it's not good for what they're writing or if it's not good for the writers and it's not good for the perception that the public and readership has of the writer. Because I do think that there has been a sort of ghettoizing of artists and writers who are engaged politically, especially if they engage politically in their work. And I find that especially looking at marginalized populations being a woman and a woman of color, when you choose to engage in your work in issues that connect to the identity, people tend to kind of want to push you to the side and not look at your work in the context of the greater American world of literature, but rather, oh yes, this black woman's going off about her black woman issues.

Speaker 5 (43:31):

So I think that that does happen, but I think that what Erin is saying and the idea of opening up that question, that's what I want to do. What I'm writing about those issues is not necessarily just be in some empty political stance, but to really open up and unpack that, unpack those questions. And I think that to me, that's I guess how my activist thinking that thought process is involved in how my work is changed by that. I think it changes all of the work, not just the work that is overtly engaging with those issues, but everything, the way that I'm thinking and the way that I'm writing and expressing myself. But I do wonder about how that work is received by the public and by critics. I think that I feel like it, it's spoken about and approached differently a lot of the time. So I think that is an issue that exists.

Speaker 6 (44:26):

I think that the query about the quotation is of useful because I do think I always heard and believed the personal is political, and I've always gone into my writing practice with that feminist notion. And yet I know that Atwood certainly very much is all about that. And so I can't help but wonder if maybe one of the things she's talking about is something if indeed she did say that is something like when you write something political, the backlash you might get or the criticism you might get might actually shut you down from trying to, and it might actually torque or change what you feel brave enough to write or it might actually affect that and all the more reason two, to be brave about that.

Speaker 4 (45:11):

I think one of the things that's so great about your poems, Brenda, is that the language is always so alive and vital and sometimes a poem is a fragile thing and too much pressure, it can collapse and become flat. So yeah, that's what, it's hard. You don't want to dissolve into Emmic, right?

Speaker 6 (45:29):

I mean it's definitely, and the other thing too is that when you're talking about politics, you're talking about people and larger groups and that is us, but also some people feel like not entirely entitled to speak for other people. And so there you have a kind of silencing at the level of composition and a fear of reprisals if you sort of go outside of your comfort zone. But also how do you write without generalizing if that's the vein you're going into. So there's all kinds of, you see, there's all kinds of traps and obstacles there that I could see how it might shut you down.

Speaker 4 (46:10):

I remember reading that, and sorry to bring up Van Sexton again, but that she was at a Vietnam War protest and asked to read a poem. In the poem she read was my little girl, my stringing my lovely woman about her daughter. And that was her protest. And it wasn't overtly political or it certainly wasn't Al, but she was making her statement.

Speaker 5 (46:28):

I mean, I think one of you was saying how everything all writing is political. And I think that in a way, what maybe people don't always realize is that whatever place, wherever your role is in life, whatever privilege you have or don't have is a reflection of your context. And that context is political. So it's not necessarily about putting yourself in somebody else's shoes always, but rather just looking at where you are and how you are, where you are, and what are the systems that work that place you there. So I think that one of the struggles that people have is how do I approach this issue and what's my place in it? And that can be one of the reasons why people, instead of having that buoyancy and that openness, they have a flat line and that's what can kill. I think that kind of work.

Speaker 6 (47:19):

It is also kind of,

Speaker 3 (47:22):

It's strange to me because you see this in some of the panels here too. I mean, I think we're all still having this big new critical that's been going on for, yeah, Elliot's still got a grip on us, and that's great because Elliot's a great poet. I just don't listen to anything he had to say about poetry because I don't agree with it most of the time. But the whole verbal icon and this thing that always makes me think of Superman two, where the bad guys are stuck in those CD jewel boxes and space, and somehow you guys know what I'm talking about. You've seen, remember Neil Bazad or whatever it is. Anyway, so it's like this idea that somehow art is going to be disconnected from any aspect of culture and we still seem to be wrestling with this. And I sort of feel like it's not just from 1976, I just had a PhD student who was talking about how he hates political poetry because literature should be this thing outside of, I guess life culture. I mean, I don't know. So we argued a bit. Anyway,

Speaker 2 (48:35):

Any questions or comments from you guys

Speaker 8 (48:40):

In a world that doesn't take women very seriously in general, how do you continue to take yourself seriously on a day by day basis?

Speaker 3 (48:52):

Wow, that's a profound question,

Speaker 3 (48:56):

Honestly. And I don't know why, but I never got the memo about not taking myself seriously. I probably take myself too seriously sometimes, but I mean, it was also having real role models and coming from a family where I was raised to speak my mind and I was expected to put myself out there and I just never, and I can be sort of a blunt instrument sometimes too as a human being. I mean, there's also my secret poet ouchie inside self. But I'm not saying I never have fear. It's just my fear is less than my need to occupy the space that I think I deserve. I mean, that doesn't mean I get a bigger space than somebody else, but I certainly don't get a less space because of whatever genitals I have. So many friends are here and you can say how many vices I have, you know them all, but I'm not, I've never been particularly afraid, and maybe I've had the privilege of not being afraid, maybe nothing bad enough ever happened to me to create that.