(Jeffery Brown, Ted Kooser, Connie Wanek, Michael Wiegers) PBS correspondent Jeffrey Brown, Pulitzer Prize winner Ted Kooser, and Minnesota poet Connie Wanek are masters of narrative, image, and metaphor. Through their poetry they bring forth Ezra Pound’s famous statements: “Make it new” and “Poetry is news that stays news.” This reading and conversation is that rare arch from kitchen-window views to global news, from activities as common as sharing a sandwich and canoeing a remote lake to witnessing and reporting events that grip everyone’s attention.

Published Date: January 27, 2016

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2015 A W P conference in Minneapolis. The recording features Jeffrey Brown, Ted Coer, and Connie won. You will now hear a w p Board of trustees members Cheryl St. Germaine and Michael Uighurs, executive editor of Copper Canyon Press provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:33):

Welcome everybody. My name is Cheryl St. Germaine and I'm a member of the A W P Board and we are absolutely delighted to welcome Copper Canyon Press to a w p this year. I just have a couple of housekeeping items and then I'm going to turn it over to them. Please turn off your cell phones or we will escort you out the building. Remember that there is no flash photography allowed during this presentation, and I also want to remind folks that you can buy books immediately following this event near where the coffee shop is out there. And then the writers will be signing books right just outside here. Give them about 15 minutes after the presentation to get there to sign the books. And now it is my pleasure to introduce Michael Weger, the executive editor of Copper Canyon Press.

Speaker 3 (00:01:31):

Thank you for all coming out this afternoon and thank you to a w p for inviting these fantastic poets to read for us today. I'm going to get up and introduce each poet as they read. So we're going to start today with Ted Zer. Ted is the author of 20 books including 13 Poetry collections and a great book of advice on writing on poetry writing. And his works include his newly published splitting in order, which we published at Copper Canyon Press just this past year, two term poet laureate. He's also the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his book Delights and Shadows, also published by Copper Canyon. He was born in Ames, Iowa in 1939 and he's the former president of the Lincoln Benefit Life Company, which is an insurance company out of Nebraska, out of Lincoln, Nebraska. He currently lives near Lincoln in the small village of Garland, Nebraska and serves as the presidential professor of English at the University of Nebraska.

Speaker 3 (00:02:43):

And just a little anecdote I want to point out is that Ted drove all the way from Lincoln yesterday and so he's catching up on his sleep, but he managed to stop along the way at the rest area because of a woman who had written to him to tell him about this handmade book that she had made handwriting all of his poems into this personal copy that she had made. And I believe she made one for Ted as well. And so they met at a rest area just so she could show him this book that she had made specifically for herself. And I bring this up to give you an indication of just the type of warmth and generosity that Ted brings to every act. You see it evident in all of his poems as well as in the gestures, like stopping at a roadside rest stop in order to share some woman's enthusiasm for a book. And just like he caress for what that woman has done, I think he caress for all of us as readers and it's one of the things that I most love about his work and about him as a person. So please join me in welcoming Ted Zer.

Speaker 4 (00:04:04):

Thank you.

Speaker 4 (00:04:08):

I like to tell this story. I've told it too many times, but shortly after I was named poet laureate, the LA Times ran a story about it and there was a little mugshot of me and a friend of mine in LA showed it to the neighbor boy who at that time was like six or seven years old and told him all about what a poet laureate would do and what a poet laureate might do and what Ted Zer might do and this and that and the other. And at the end of this little session he said to this boy whose name was Bucky, he said, so Bucky, what do you think? And he said, I think he looks like a hobbit. So that'll give you something to look at while I'm standing up here and think about, I'm going to read a few poems from this new book that Copper Canyon has just published called Splitting an Order. The poems I'm going to read today are pretty important to me to this book. They're about the way people come together to help one another out. This is the title poem, splitting an Order

Speaker 4 (00:05:21):

I like to watch an old man cutting a sandwich in half, maybe an ordinary cold roast beef on whole wheat bread, no pickles or onion, keeping his shaky hands steady by placing his forearms firm on the edge of the table and using both hands, the left to hold the sandwich in place and the right to cut it surely corner to corner, observing his progress through glasses that moments before he wiped with his napkin, and then to see him lift half onto the extra plate that he asked the server to bring and then to wait, offering the plate to his wife while she slowly unrolls her napkin and places her spoon, her knife and her fork in their proper places. Then smooths the starch white napkin over her knees and meets his eyes and holds out both old hands to him, two men on an errand,

Speaker 4 (00:06:27):

The younger, a balloon of a man in his sixties with some of the life let out of him sags on the cheap couch in the car, repair shop's, waiting room scuff shoes, white socks, blue trousers, a nondescript gray winter jacket. His face is pale and his balding head nods with some kind of palsy. His fist stand like stones on the tops of his thighs. White boulders alabaster and the flesh sinks under the weight of everything those hands have squeezed. The other man is maybe 85 thin and bent over his center. One foot swollen into a foam rubber sandal the other tight in a hard black shoe, blue jeans, black jacket with a semi-tractor applicate on the back, white hair fine as a Sears cloud. He leans forward onto a cane with both hands at rest on its handle as if it were a steering wheel, the two sit hip to hip, a bony hip against a fleshy one talking of car repairs about the engine not hitting on all the cylinders. It seems the big man drove them here bringing the old man's car and now they're waiting now they have to wait or want to wait until the next thing happens and they can go at it together. The younger man nodding the older steering with his cane.

Speaker 4 (00:08:06):

This is something that everyone in this audience has observed changing drivers.

Speaker 4 (00:08:14):

Their nondescript late model car is pulled off on the windy shoulder, its doors flung wide and the driver gets out gripping the roof with a hand and lifting himself just as the woman gets out of her side. Both of them stiff, both kneading the small of their backs rolling, their heads on their necks, squinting into the midday sun. Then the driver starts out around the front bumper swinging his legs as if they weren't his thin hair lifting just as the woman straightens herself and sets out around the trunk holding her permanent white curls in with both hands, both man and woman calling a few words back and forth across the axis of the car's hot roof as they stoop and fit themselves inside. And the car springs settle a little and each of them reaches a long way out to pull the door. Shut her door first, then his and they rock and shift fastening their belts. Then both of them lean forward almost simultaneously and peer into their side view mirrors to see whatever is bearing down from wherever they've been and together they ease out over the crunching gravel onto the highway and move on.

Speaker 4 (00:09:45):

This one's about two people that didn't make it. This is called first marriage, an autobiographical poem. Neither of us would clean the aquarium, a green box under our troubled roof stuffed with meos nobody wanted. Sometimes it fluttered with a silvery light, the only sign of life for months on end, nor would either of us feed the fish but made them eat what they found in that murky weedy silence. At the end of the marriage when we divided our things, we gave the aquarium away and the woman who came for it dipped into the green and from a couple of dozen fish we'd had, there were only two left big silver dollars that had thrived on neglect and had eaten the others and grown as big as the palms of our hands, which hung not touching guilty at our sides.

Speaker 4 (00:10:52):

I live on a farm about 20 miles from Lincoln, Nebraska and it's an old when we bought it, the original farm buildings were there and I've continually found interesting old things in all these old buildings, and this is a lantern that I have in the pre-dawn. Cold and darkness. It was only a pinch of light, not more than a cup of warmth. As a farmer curated over the snow to the barn where his dozen cows stood stomping heavy with milk in the milky cloud of their lowing, but that was many years ago and his lantern has rusted. Its last fumes lost on the seasons like the breath of those cows. But at the last he thought to leave a fresh ribbon of wick coiled up in the chimney in case it was ever needed. Again, a dollar's worth of preparation and getting prepared for a later winter. A pregnant mouse was able to squeeze in through a vent and unravel that wick and make a cottony nest with dusty panoramic windows and there to raise her bald and mewing pissy brooded. And then for them to disappear the way we all one day move on, leaving a little sharp whiff of ourselves in the dirty bedding.

Speaker 4 (00:12:26):

One more from this book and then I'm going to read one more poem, two t w o

Speaker 4 (00:12:37):

On a parking lot staircase I met two fine looking men descending both in slacks and dress shirts, neck ties much alike. One of the men in his sixties, the other, a good 20 years older, unsteady on his polished shoes, A son and his father, I knew from their looks the son with his right hand on the handrail, the father left hand on the left and in the middle they were holding hands and when I neared, they opened the simple gate of their interwoven fingers to let me pass. Then reached out for each other and continued on. And this is a, it's another poem like those watching other people written and published since this book came out that I thought I would close with in the next booth at Village Inn. It seems that an online dating service has brought them together for breakfast, probably hungry by 10 in the morning from waiting so long, a man of maybe 70 wearing hearing aids and a thin and chatty horse faced woman of maybe 55. She's telling them everything about her life, her childhood, children, job, religion, and he is doing his best to catch the consonants as well as the vowels watching the blur of her lips and from the next booth I can see that this is one of those eHarmony moments

Speaker 4 (00:14:24):

Can tell by listening in that they find each other suitable if not attractive, and it seemed to be surprised by how happy they feel here face-to-face eating their senior special breakfasts, asking the server to bring more coffee, just maybe at the start of something good. Thank you.

Speaker 3 (00:14:55):

I'd like Ted Connie wanted shares the same sense of intimacy and generosity in her poems as if she didn't like Ted again, she's inviting you into her home, into her life, into the poem itself. Connie was born in nearby Madison, Wisconsin and grew up in New Mexico before returning to the Midwest where she's worked for about 20 years, I believe, as a librarian in Duluth, Minnesota. She's the author of five collections of poetry, including on speaking Terms, which Copper Canyon published and she co-edited a historical anthology of Minnesota women poets along the way. In 2006, she was awarded the Wiin Fellow from the US Library of Congress. Her forthcoming new and selected poems will be published in 2016. Please join me in welcoming Connie Wan.

Speaker 5 (00:16:00):

Thank you. This poem is actually for all of you. It's called audience,

Speaker 5 (00:16:09):

How kind people are, how Few in the Crowd truly hope the tightrope will break Rares the man who'll shoot the Pope or throw his shoe at a liar. Though joining in that's natural. An audience of St. Paul's sparrows is easily bored, easily frightened, one blasphemy and off they fly. Even a polite dog will snore through reprimands, though he'll rouse to follow the refreshments with the calculating eye. But people, especially Minnesotans, pulled their sleeves over their watches and want to find a way to like you. If they can sit through winter sermons, they can sit through you. This poem is called polygamy. It has to do with growing up on a farm. Well, a little bit of a farm, what was left of a farm after it was broken up, polygamy. Some men don't hate marriage or slavery for that matter, nor can they ever own enough land. When I was a girl back on the farm, I surprised a wild tomcat in the hay loft. He was eating a kitten. Its eyes still shut tight like apple buds. The shutter clicked as he looked at me, his expression fixed. I still think he knew what he was doing though, not why, which makes him almost human or makes us almost feline.

Speaker 5 (00:18:16):

I could hear the other kittens mewing softly, somewhere in the hay, deep in the hidden nest, established by our cat when she felt them coming. How many did he take? I wondered. And how can I punish him? My mother says she remembers that cat very well. This poem is called Walking Distance and it's for my father-in-law, Stanley Inger, who was born in 1922 and died in 2004 and he was a balter at Gunner in World War ii. He was a wonderful guy and as a young father, he grew up in Mankato and as a young dad, he lived in Iowa, walking distance, walking distance, used to be much farther miles and miles. Your grandfather as a young man with a wife and new baby son walked to and from his job, which was in the next town. That was Iowa 1946 and it was not a hardship, but an opportunity which is youth speaking and also a particular man of German descent walking on good legs, on white gravel roads, smoking cigarettes which were cheap though not free as they'd been during the war. Tobacco burned toward his fingers but never reached them. The fire was small and personal, almost intimate, glowing bright when he put the cigarette to his lips and breathed through it.

Speaker 5 (00:20:24):

So many cigarettes before bombing runs and none had been his last. A great surprise sometimes he passed a farmer burning field grass in the spring, the smoldering line, advancing toward the fence. He had to know what he was doing. So near the barn, you had to be close to see the way blades of dry grass pass the flame along at a truly individual level, very close to see how delicious a meal the field was to the fire on a damp, calm, almost English morning ideal for walking. When Stanley died, my husband Phil, he was at the hospital a great deal when Stanley was in hospice. He was just waiting there with him and Stanley wasn't conscious anymore, but my husband just waited day and night and then I wrote this poem about him coming home. It's called, I heard You come in.

Speaker 5 (00:21:50):

I heard you come in something like three and I knew what it meant. Your vigil was over. You'd stayed with your father day and night in case he woke in case he came once more to the surface, to the interface between worlds. The hospital room with its enormous window came like a whale to break the glass sea and take a deep breath and cast a living eye upon you and roll weedy and barnacled and go back down. Thanks to morphine, his face, betrayed nothing, not impatience, nor sorrow, nor gratitude, nor fear, none of the passions of a dying animal. His poor bony chest, his nose and fingers, half white, half blue, his cheeks, stubble like a light frost. We could stare all we wanted thanks to morphine. The door was easy to open as we arrived and left. It wasn't like someone being born, the groaning, the leaky bloody struggle that ended with sad whales from the baby and smiles elsewhere. This was quiet processional, an orderly cell by cell evacuation until the building stood empty and the fire burned it down. I had like to read just a couple of poems about Mrs. God, and I don't know why more people haven't written about Mrs. God, but I thought about it and I thought, actually she's a lot like my mother and God is quite a bit like my dad.

Speaker 5 (00:24:11):

I wrote a little group of 'em and this is the first Mrs. God, someone had to do the dirty work, spading the garden, moving mountains, keeping the darkness out of the light, and she took every imperfection personally, Mr. Big ideas, sure, but someone had to run the numbers. Then talk about babies. He never imagined so many. That was part of his charm. Of course, his frank amazement at consequences. The pretty songs he gave, the finches, those spoke to his innocence, his ability to regard every moment as fresh. Let's give them free will and see what happens. He said ever the optimist, this one is called Genesis, continued. Other days God seemed severe, but he was always hardest on himself. Curious. He watched Mrs. God the way she distanced herself from disasters, especially the ones he himself unintentionally set in motion. All God asked for was eternal work. Luckily something was always broken. A virus began to kill all its hosts or claws needed sharpening and afterwards he had to make them retractable. Weather was a challenge, finicky like those old carburetors, but gravity turned out perfectly humming. Birds could fly but people didn't float around and two legs worked fine. Mrs. God's radiance smile. Yes, he gave that to the son and all the stars and then to eve.

Speaker 5 (00:26:31):

This is called first love. After God created love, he felt himself swooning. What is this? He cried out to Mrs. God. What have I done? Is it a kind of music? It bears a strong resemblance. She said softly watching the warm sea begin to rise and fall as though longing for the moon. Take slow deep breaths. She advised and it will pass, but it didn't all day. God wandered in Eden on the verge of weeping. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was in full bloom. He'd made it self pollinating, but now he changed his mind and decided that to fruit, a second tree must be planted nearby. Close but not too close. Mrs. God, the horticulturalist advised the bees will find it another evening, glorious among the clouds. She was humming, mending something when God touched her shoulder. Yes, she said smiling. Yes, it was a good day. My last poem is a poem called Pumpkin, and it begins with the epigraph from Henry David Thoreau that goes, none is so poor that he needs sit on a pumpkin. It's a little collection really of lines that have to do with pumpkins and it really originated with a photograph I saw of a fall field where all the greenery had died back and blackened and there were just thousands of pumpkins in this field.

Speaker 5 (00:28:44):

Pumpkin to write as a field grows pumpkins to scribble page after page with an orange crayon to lose teeth and still smile to survive a frost that blackened acres to wake after surgery

Speaker 6 (00:29:11):

To

Speaker 5 (00:29:13):

Live without rotting from within, to ignore imperfections of the skin to be heavy and still be chosen to please a strict vegetarian to end the day full of light. Thank you.

Speaker 3 (00:29:49):

Thank you, Connie. Well, Ted and Connie are narrative poets who bring their homes and the homes of ordinary people into our worlds. Jeff Brown is probably best known for bringing the world into our homes. He's served as the anchor of the P B s NewsHour since 2005. He holds a bachelor's degree in classics from uc, Berkeley, a master's degree in journalism from Columbia and a law degree from uc, Berkeley. He has spearheaded arts and cultural programming on P B s and has won an Emmy award for his reporting throughout his distinguished career as a journalist. He's worked behind the scenes also as a poet. The news, which again Copper Canyon just published, is his first book of poetry and we're excited to be launching the book here at a w p. And what I love, just as I love that, the intimacy of Connie and Ted's poems, what I love about Jeff's work is the interplay between the global and the intimate. You get both sides of the screen, if you will, or both sides of the page, both the creation and the audience on the other side, the consideration of the audience on the other side. So please join me and welcoming Jeff to read his first book of poetry.

Speaker 6 (00:31:17):

Thank you.

Speaker 7 (00:31:25):

Thank you very much.

Speaker 7 (00:31:28):

Consider the camera it's gaze. As long as the cloudless night focused yet false, distorted, hear the story of the air, the voices straining to breathe the sound of sand sifting away. Ask yourself the questions, who, what, when, where and why is the sky suddenly ash? Why the laughter? Why the dead? What the child said when asked who and where and why. Clarity, cliche, polished package that wraps the unrapable. Here it is your day. So that is the first poem of my first book. We heard Ted with his 20 books and we heard Connie with her five I think. And now you get me at the end with my one. The first poem is called Nightly News and I wanted to read it first and I put it first because it addresses a number of themes that came up for me. I thought of this all as a kind of project.

Speaker 7 (00:32:56):

Of course it's a collection of poems, but in my mind it was always a project and hopefully and now a book. And the project was to look at the world that I live in, the daily news and not turn away from it, but to address it directly, but from a different angle to think about the things that are there, sometimes behind the camera, sometimes beyond the camera. To connect the world out there of the daily news with art, literature, poetry, which is what I try to do in my normal life as a journalist. I thought it would be interesting to try to do that through poetry as well. So there are a number of sections in the book. One of them is where I do go back to some places that I went to, people that I've met along the way, stories that I reported but reimagine them and retell them through poetry.

Speaker 7 (00:34:06):

So here's one example. It's called Beirut, a city that's known a lot of violence. And I think what you'll see here in some of the poems is that I do use direct quotes, sometimes direct quotes, sometimes I play with them a little bit, but they're based on actual people that I met. This one starts with a direct quote, Beirut. This is the family tradition my father killed by his bodyguards. His father killed, they chose sides, chose right and then wrong, and he who longs for the security of death in his bed must leave this country. My son knows this and his will too. Within the same frame, the eye deceives meanings hide when you stand outside this history, what I thought was construction, a building with views toward the sea on the rise was its opposite. Destruction. Pockmarked see-through gun wrecked Holiday Inn monument against forgetting restaurants filled kebabs on the grill and on this day, jets in Gaza, far to the south, in the south of this city.

Speaker 7 (00:35:29):

Craters from other jets left again unfilled while a billboard touts the party of God. Permission required to aim the camera granted by Hezbollah watching us, watching them, watching them watching us and all know who controls these streets. Later I walk the core niche in this Paris of the Middle East. Was it ever? So two decades of war from Little Mountain, we were looking for the sea. Look again, so close here and there. Can it be the familiar choice of chocolate or glazed, no wrong or right? Hezbollah by day, dunking Donuts at night odd and saw it in reel's. Icarus within the same frame, tragedy plus a girl eating ice cream strawberry. This is what we encounter too. Memories that encompass craters and bombed hotels, faces red with hate at the jets overhead, but also the sound of the ood, the light in the park, nervous fathers watching for falls

Speaker 7 (00:37:04):

Tries to get a little bit at what I see in my travels all the time, which is the drama of real life, but also the humanity of real life. One of the other things that I get to do often is see poetry out in the world. And I had an experience a few years ago in one of my most interesting experiences, certainly with poetry, but in a high security prison in Arizona with a poet, perhaps some of Richard Shelton who runs the program at the University of Arizona but goes into the prisons and runs poetry workshops and they put out a review called Rain Shadow Review. This is my poem for them. Rain shadow review, locked down, confined the latest lines by the poets of the Arizona prison system, high security ring con unit outside Tucson, orange jumpsuits. And number two, pencils. A writing workshop. The week's reward in a place not conducive to the truth, it can hurt you. Bad armed robbery, manslaughter, assault, murder, reciting their works, past and present. Rough men, bleak room kind words. One hour's refuge in a human garbage dump, roll call of wrongs under the influence of drugs, drink ideology, gangs, stupidity, fear and whatever. Wrong and wrong again still the teacher said if you can learn to use the language honestly, you can apply it to yourself. Honestly, he speaks, listens, gathers up the books, the desert descending outside, impossible to ignore when the review arrives that I was there for one day, five years before and there they remain.

Speaker 7 (00:39:16):

I also tried to look in this book at my own work from the inside, the making of the news, the truth of it. I don't want to say the dishonesty of it, but the, what's the right word? The half-truths of it. The stuff that we get right, that's right in front of us. But the stuff we don't tell, the stuff we can't always tell. Sometimes the absurdities of some of the news, I'll read one that you are all familiar with the local news and the line, if it bleeds, it leads you turn on your local news and inevitably there's the latest murder or I don't know, stabbing or something terrible that's happened in your neighborhood. So this is just a little riff off of that. I call it song lead story. If it bleeds, it leads and if it bleeds, it feeds the want of eyes.

Speaker 7 (00:40:16):

And I who bring you this festival of fear, if it bleeds, it leads and if it bleeds, it sees the devouring eyes and I who recite you this carnival of crime. If it bleeds, it leads and if it bleeds, it reads the hunger of eyes and I who offer you this parade of pain. If it bleeds, it leads and if it bleeds, it needs the sanction of eyes and I who perform you this theater of theft. If it bleeds, it leads and if it bleeds, it heeds the fickleness of eyes and I who play you this symphony of sin. If it bled, it led the broken, the dead, the aversion of eyes and I who sing you this lyric of loss.

Speaker 7 (00:41:19):

And then another one which is I call the art of the interview, which is sort of inside sitting in a television studio, which is part of where I spend my life in a very artificial setting. Talking to people sometimes just looking into a camera, talking to someone there. And all kinds of strange things happen through your mind while you're doing that. Only some of which is actually about the substance of the moment might be things about what time you're supposed to pick up your children or when is dinner or what's the next, sometimes it's what's the next question? And then there are often things that go wrong because it's live television in my life. So the art of the interview, one, engaged, open, curious firm prepared by all that's come before, no surprises, but ready to be surprised again. So much we don't know. We'll never know a voice inside your head ticking down the seconds. Ask the question, listen, ask again. Expect an answer, listen, then ask again. Listen for doubt. Resolve some truth as though one could climb inside another's brain so much we don't know. Tick, don't ask tick. Don't want to know. Tick

Speaker 7 (00:42:47):

To two. Once a man froze, unable to speak, I asked and answered every question myself then said, you agree, we could have gone on that way forever. Another night the lights went out, we understood we were still again always in the dark. Three, it was cooler than usual. In August when the heat here sticks to your gut, a question held in the air ready to burst, then pop, pop, pop and out. It was cooler than usual and the night air was still listening as the moon grew large, raised its white face and said, let me ask you this. I have another section here in which I wrote about some of the people that I've been very fortunate to interview. There's a number of them and a lot of them are very famous figures. I'll just read one for now,

Speaker 7 (00:44:04):

By the way, because I'm a journalist and because the facts have to be right. The poetry doesn't have to be right. By the way, I've had fun with that. But the facts have to be right. Michael, I didn't graduate. I don't have a law degree from uc, Berkeley. I went to uc, Berkeley Law School for two years, but I didn't graduate. So I don't want that getting around. I mean I just can't have the resume wrong, stricken from the record. Only my mother cares by the way at this point. But she does care. I meet a lot of interesting and very famous and important and leading artists and writers and it makes me think a lot about where art comes from and the influences. And I get to ask them a lot of those kinds of questions. One of them was Richard Avedon, the famous photographer who died a year or two ago, and I got to talk to him at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in the midst of one of his major retrospective exhibition.

Speaker 7 (00:45:08):

So we had to do it after the museum closes. So it's about 11 at night or midnight and dark and sort of mysterious in the museum at that point. And you have to imagine we're surrounded by huge photographs of the kind. He took portraits, so very large portraits of individuals, Richard Avedon, look around you all gone, all dead. The heavy litted, snake, charmed, sun baked, the poets and actors capote with the blotched face. Marilyn in sequence, Beckett and one of his drifters, the powerful and the pretenders, they stood before a white screen as close to me as you are now, a confrontation that will last. Eyes close, tight and eyes alert, eyes ahead and eyes askew as though they knew not to stare at the viewer. Click forever, all gone. All dead forever. This is why I call the taking of portraits a sad art. He said the camera lies all the time. It's all it does is lie. But this is no lie over there. My father, Sarasota, August 25th, 1973, staring at me forever. He does not age, but he will not return.

Speaker 7 (00:46:53):

And there are some poems in here that are more personal to me and I'll just read one and then perhaps one more and finish up on the subject of fathers because this is one is for my father who died in the last year. It's called succession. One morning state police escort us to your grave. The next my flight is canceled. Maintenance issues breaking out all over. You would speak of a grand theory, something tying all this together, but you had none yourself, none that reached me. Then were now, as I drive your car slowly into the tranquil streets of my youth, here is where I learned to ride a bike on this high hill that is no hill at all. And still I fell. And now you descend and still I fall. And here is where I learned to doubt in the chapel where we dawned black skull caps that meant nothing. I tell you, if God speaks, it is elsewhere. And here are my own children rooted and uncertain watching me speak to you. You watched the news every night worried if I did not make air traveling, sick, useless, lost. Now that you are gone, traffic parted by the state police, can I to disappear?

Speaker 7 (00:48:46):

I will just finish with one more. It's actually the last poem in the book goes a little bit, I hope to the mystery that I feel in what I do so often of entering people's lives in strange ways for one moment could be a very, very dramatic moment. And then their lives go on, my life goes on. Something continues from it. But there's also the interesting exchange of camera interceding in life. The camera's on something's happening in front of that camera. This was in a small village in Haiti called cae, where we were shooting a story about cholera that had claimed many, many lives. But this is a very small moment that wasn't captured in the story we did. But with a woman, just a local woman who was sweeping the dust off her steps and what we call B-roll. When we go to a place we just have to shoot, we just shoot to get images of the place, which is what you see in the television story. So we asked if she would just continue on about her work and we could shoot her doing it. This is called Haiti. We Who Lie, who cannot Say For There is no good way to put this. We are here to show the horror of your life. In cae, they passed out purification tablets displayed with pride, their new latrine, A woman sweeping her dusty steps, asked to act naturally for the camera to act as though we're not here more honest and aware than us replied. How can I pretend that you are not here? Was that not you who spoke? Just now, thank you very much.

Speaker 3 (00:51:05):

So we're going to have a brief question and answer. And I should say I feel a little intimidated asking Jeffrey questions, but I'll give it a go here. So each of you, Ted, you were an insurance agent, Connie, you were a librarian and are a librarian. And Jeff, you're a journalist. So none of you have gone through an M F A program. And yet here we are at a W p, an organization that celebrates writing programs and celebrates poetry. Knowing what you know about your careers in other professions, do you ever wish that you had gone through and completed an M F A? And what would you say to young students in particular who are looking forward to potential careers, either in or out of the world of literature? Ted, maybe start with you. You wrote a book Encouraging People and the M F A that can be carried in a pocket.

Speaker 4 (00:52:08):

Yeah, I have a book. Is my mic on? Yes, I have a book about trying to teach writing that poetry home or pyramid. I don't have an M F A because I'm an old guy. And when I graduated as an undergraduate at Iowa State, there were only a couple of M F A programs anywhere in the country. I did go down to Iowa U in the summer of 1962. They had admitted me to the writer's workshop, but I sat in on a session and didn't like it and went home and never went back. But I think the real, something that I may have missed out on was that I did not have a community of other writers with whom to talk and socialize and work and so on. And I don't know how that shaped my work when you're in working in an insurance company. I wasn't an agent, by the way.

Speaker 3 (00:53:16):

I'm sorry.

Speaker 4 (00:53:17):

Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:53:20):

Facts.

Speaker 4 (00:53:22):

The only other person in my insurance company who was reading poems was my secretary who was reading mine, and I still thank her for that. But I think the M F A is a marvelous institution and I'm glad to be a part of teaching some and so on.

Speaker 5 (00:53:46):

I think I did work on my master's, but down in New Mexico, they did not have an M F A. They had a master's in English. And I met my husband there working on my master's, and then I had a baby and I had to get some money to be a grownup and I missed out on the chance to have more fun. I just think it's fantastic to have a MFAs and to prolong the active fun years as long as possible before you settle down and have to get serious about life. And so I just didn't have that. I had to buckle down and balance the checkbook. And so I think my whole life has really been based on that. But as far as the library work, I think that there's no finer mission in any occupation than the free information for everyone. So I was in love with the library mission and I have no regrets about years I spent there. I think they were very good years. I'm retired now, so it was a wonderful thing and I wish I'd have known about it a little earlier, but such is life.

Speaker 7 (00:55:26):

Well, I feel least qualified I guess, to talk about this because not really my world, although it is in a way, because of all the writers that I've gotten to know. I did write when I was quite young and wrote in college, and in fact I was telling Michael earlier, I think the last poetry reading I did was probably at the age of 21 or so. So it's been many years. So here we are. But it never occurred to me that I was to, I'm not sure why. I'm not sure there was a lot of M F A programs, not that I was aware of. It never really occurred to me. I was just trying a lot of different things when I got real serious. It was actually in classics and I imagined myself as a scholar, I was going to go on as for PhD, but I decided at the very last minute I didn't want to do that.

Speaker 7 (00:56:16):

I didn't want to live in the fifth century bc I want to do something right now. And that now became journalism, not writing. So I think now if I had just started writing, I mean kept writing and written in a more serious focused way, I guess I'd have many more books, but I would've had far less experiences of the kind I've had. And I don't know what it would've meant for my writing at this point, whether it would be better or worse. But the question more is connected to my mind because I get asked this a lot by young people in journalism.

Speaker 7 (00:56:52):

In journalism, the question is, should I go to journalism school? It's a sort of version of the M F A. There are kinds of things where you don't necessarily have to go to school, you can just do it. You can sit and write or you can actually start working as a journalist. So it's somewhat similar and there's no answer to this in journalism or in the M F A or in writing. I mean it can work both ways for people. But the most important thing I say because I say it to myself is learn something. Do something right along the way. This is what I say to young people anyway. If you want to be a journalist, that's great, be a journalist, but learn something in school. You might want to go to journalism school for a master's, but as an undergraduate, certainly take some history and some philosophy or science, whatever it is, and learn something, go out into the world and learn to do things, whatever it is. For us, it was clearly professional, it was a profession far away from writing. It doesn't have to be that way, but so there are many ways in, but I guess that's my one advice to my own kids and to younger people, was sort of grab the world as much as you can and then find your way as a writer.

Speaker 3 (00:58:07):

So I want to pick up a little bit on that, the notion of journalistic writing and writing poetry and maybe talk about poetic language and journalistic language, particularly in how it involves and approaches the truth. I heard the truth mentioned several times this afternoon, including earlier today. I've known Connie I think for about eight years, and today was the first time that we met face-to-face. I also met her husband, Phil, and I said that I felt like I knew him from the poems. And they both said, oh, that's all lies. And so certainly you can have lies in poetry and you can have lies in journalism as another three lettered news corporation has shown us or Rolling Stone for that matter. So I'm wondering what are the truths that you think you can get at in poetry that you can't get at in journalism or in all three of you? What are the truths that you think you can get to in poetry?

Speaker 4 (00:59:16):

Lemme preface this a little bit by telling you a little story. I have a dear friend who is an Episcopal priest, and I talked to him about spiritual matters and so on, and we were talking one day about the persistent disagreements between advocates of science and advocates of religion. And he said, ever since the age of reason, Ted, we have felt that we had to explain everything, which means that we have lost the value of mystery. And I think that poetry can sort of encircle and present mystery in a way that perhaps other forms of writing can't. That in a poem I can suggest a kind of mystery to you that you can feel and that neither of us could completely articulate, but it's there. It's a package for a kind of charm and mystery and magic in a way, I think,

Speaker 5 (01:00:22):

Well, I'm kind of a muddled person generally, and I do think that, but I've given a lot of thought to truth, to what's true, and that the problem it seems to me is that there's a temporal aspect to truth. So what's true now might not be true very soon. So I would be happy to tell the truth and be perfectly honest if I knew what the truth was. So that is my problem. I would have a hard time doing your job too. Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:01:02):

Well, this is obviously interesting and fraught question for me and a couple ways into it. One, just technically in these poems, there are moments of actual quotation truth, and I had to think a little bit even about how to signal that use quotation. Sometimes I'm paraphrasing, sometimes I put things in italics of all the revising that I did, it was probably more on those lines about how do I tell the people? It's not just telling you or any readers, it's telling myself, being honest with myself, what is real here and what is not. But to the larger question, I don't set poetic truth as something higher than journalistic truth. I take enormous pride and responsibility for trying to tell the truth every night.

Speaker 7 (01:02:03):

There's no fudging that thank you, but I'm just, I'm not making a big claim. I'm just trying to tell you how I think about the, I mean, that's important. The news should be the truth, but the point is it's not the only truth. And I'm a subjective person, so I'm very open about this. One of the reasons why I wrote an afterward essay, which was Michael's suggestion, thank you, was to try to think through this thing for potential readers as well is what's the difference here? So it's acknowledging that it's sort of the obvious, I am a man in an American white man of the 21st century with a certain background, and I'm a father and I'm a husband and I'm a this and that. And so I bring all of that to the stories I do. But I do strive for objectivity and I actually, it's a goal I believe in.

Speaker 7 (01:03:08):

It's just that I believe you can never be totally objective in that sense and get it right. So there's that. For what I do every day, the poetry is a different kind of truth. I don't think you should read it and say, oh, now he's telling the truth. That's not right either. I've made up a lot of stuff. It's the truth of my imagination. It's a different kind of truth. And one of the metaphors that is, so my obvious way in, and I used and I read the Richard Avedon piece specifically for it is because the camera is the camera. Is that truth is that picture you just took? True? Well, yes it is. But what if you shift the camera? That's what Avedon was saying. What if I just shift the camera to the right or to the left or pull out? Well, that's the stuff we do every day. And I know that there's a lot going on behind the camera. I know that television news is kind of fake, and I don't mean fake as in we're lying, but in the sense that because the camera's there, things might be happening that wouldn't be happening. That's the basis of that last poem. So there's all kinds of interesting truths that one can tell, not one better or worse, but all to be taken quite seriously, I think. Great.

Speaker 3 (01:04:31):

We're running low on time here, but I'm going to ask one more question of you all. One of my favorite poems is by the Spanish Nobel Prize winner, and it's called Who I Write for. And Ted, you talked about your I'm Spanish Nobel Prize winner, Vicente Alexandre, sorry. And the poems called Who I Write for. And you talked about your secretary being one of the only two people who read poetry at the insurance company. And in the past you've told me that the reason she read the poetry often was because you would walk your poems out to her freshly of a morning and ask her to read it. And if she got it, you felt like you were hitting your mark. And so I'm imagining that each of you have an imagined reader or a real reader who you write for. And I'm just wondering if you can talk to that. Who do you write for?

Speaker 4 (01:05:31):

I do have an imaginary reader that shifts a little bit sometimes, but generally it's my mother who has been dead for 17 years, had a couple of years of college liked books. And I think the reason she's my imaginary reader, because all the little creative things I did as a child, I took to her and showed them to her. And where she alive today, I would take poems to her and show those to her. So it's a person with not with a great deal of education, but somebody who loves books and loves words and so on. And I would like to imagine this whole group among my imaginary readers. I want readers. I'm very interested in having a broad, popular audience. I am not interested in a very sophisticated literary audience. It's nice to get that, but I want people on the street to stop me and say they read a poem I liked.

Speaker 5 (01:06:46):

No problem there.

Speaker 4 (01:06:49):

Thank you.

Speaker 5 (01:06:50):

Thank you.

Speaker 5 (01:06:57):

Well, I guess my single reader is my husband Phil, who is a great reader. He's extremely hard on me and I don't blame him, but I'm with Ted there. I would love to think that my poems are not puzzling and something that you can't make head nor tail of. I want them to express clearly what I think and feel, and I think that they help me know what I think and feel, I think and feel better because I write poems. They're my way of trying to figure things out. But every poem that I think is at all worth reading goes first to my husband and then often to a big pile of stuff in the closet that we'll never see the light of day. But he's a great reader. I'm lucky

Speaker 7 (01:08:13):

I don't have a specific person in mind, I think, or reader, I guess I think of it as a continuum from what I do in my journalism work, which is to connect to individuals, but hopefully with a large, and I very much care about reaching a large general audience, whether it's for journalism or for poetry. I don't mean my poetry necessarily because one of the joys of my life really is to bring poetry to television. But who gets to do that? So to bring it to a fairly large, not mass audience, but to do that. And so I think of my own poetry the same way, hopefully reaching to a general audience of interested people who just as I do the journalism, they're not experts, they're not the masters of this particular area in this scenario. They're not the poetry aficionados, but they're smart, open to the world, just interested in the world.

Speaker 7 (01:09:23):

When I first went on to television, actually, one of the interesting things you have to think about, you're looking into a camera and you have to at least, I had to think about who am I talking to? You were thinking of, you couldn't think about your mother or your wife because then, oh my God, that's way too personal. And if it's my wife, she's probably saying, straighten your tire or something. So it's not that. But in my case, I thought of a favorite uncle or aunt who I just know loves being in touch with the world, but has a day job and it doesn't have a lot of time and is just sort of interested, but might be interested in this story. And if I say, uncle so-and-so, here's this writer I met. He'd never heard of 'em. He doesn't read books like that, but he's going to listen and be interested. And I think of the poetry the same way as trying to reach that kind of reader as well. Well, thank you all for coming and

Speaker 6 (01:10:25):

Great job.

Speaker 8 (01:10:35):

Thank you for tuning into the AWP podcast series. For other podcasts. Please visit our website@www.awpwriter.org.

 


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