 So I think we're going to get into our program. Thank you, Rick, for your help with the AV equipment here. And thank you, John, for Orga, for supplying us with this, would you call it, gaffer state? Gaffer state. More importantly, thank you all for coming tonight. Good evening. Welcome to Bear Pond Books. I'm Samantha, the events coordinator. It's great to see such a crowd here for poetry reading with Jodi Gladding and David Hinden. That's when we clap. They are both here celebrating the release of new books, The Spiders My Arms by Jodi Gladding. I've passed around copies because it's advantageous to follow along visually while Jodi does her reading. So if you'd like to purchase your copy after the reading, you may do that. Or please leave the copy at the front desk with us. Thank you. What are you going to clap? I just wanted to say a few things about the books and then a few things about the event. About Jodi's new book, the reviewer Darren Higgins says that each poem here is meticulously constructed to lead the reader's eye toward intersections of words and essential juxtapositions. What beautiful arrangements she makes. So if you can see visually, I'm sure you've all had a chance to look, they are beautiful arrangements. David will be reading from Desert. Every time I look at it, I want to say dessert. It's his first collection of original poetry in over a decade. He'll also read from The Wilds of Poetry, which shows how Chinese insights shaped innovative American poetry. And this new collection is an extension of those traditions, both fair and spacious, as vast and open as the desert itself. So don't forget to also buy your copy of Desert tonight. The register will be open all night. We will be doing a book signing after the reading. If you housekeeping items, please mute or turn off your cell phones. The front door is locked, and we'll reopen after the talk. If you need to exit during the reading, please use the back door. If you need the restroom, it's also located at the back of this door to the right of the back door. I'd like to thank the Vermont Arts Council for featuring tonight's event at the Vermont Arts 2018 program. And I'd also like to thank Orca Media. They're here filming tonight's event. If you're interested in seeing this video or if you would like to learn more about future events, please sign up for our newsletter. We're going to pass this around. You have a lucky one. Oh, you're clapping. I don't know. I'd like to tell you about our next event. It's called the Women Writers Showcase, part of our Rising Vermont Voices series with host Chris Bojelian. He will introduce authors Melanie Finn, Maria Hummel, Sarah Healy, and Robin MacArthur. Those are all Vermont authors. They will read and discuss their work next Tuesday, September 11th at 7 PM. So join us for that if you can. I'd like to introduce our poets. I'm sure many of you here know them already. David Hinton's many translations of classical Chinese poetry have earned wide acclaim and many national awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His recent books of essays are Hunger Mountain and Existence Story. He lives in East Calis and teaches in Columbia University's Graduate Writing Program. And Jody Gladding's work explores the places where language and landscape converge, which we'll see tonight. She has also translated 30 books from French. She directs the writing program at the Vermont Studio Center and also lives in East Calis. Please help me welcome Jody Gladding. Thank you, Samantha. Thank you, all of you, for coming. David and I live in East Calis together. Samantha was going to speak about that. That's not even bad. It's really nice for us to come back here. We worked at Bear Pond, starting in 87 through 93. So, and 25 years ago, I read my first book in this space with my baby daughter on my lap. So, this is kind of a homecoming for us. And it's actually my favorite place to read. I'm going to start with a few poems you don't need to look at. I'm actually, probably better if you don't. And I'll move to the other ones. It's like, right, drop me down. Yeah. It's sleeping across that. Yeah, that's good. I'm still here. You're still here with me, yeah. A letter box, inside it a womb, the matted furry thing crawling in. In, that seemed all wrong. So, I shook it free, tore the sack from its nose and mouth, asleep in my hand now, breathing. Your eyes, they're the strangest color she leaned right across the table to say so. I was taken aback, having always liked the color of my eyes. Still, I knew what she meant, my pupils convex, rectangular as it goats. I gazed at her salad through the wire fencing, a small fist stuffed clover and grass blades. It's wild, yet it lets me nuzzle, because it knew me as a young bear. What luck, my tongue along the rim of its mouth. A black bear's mouth isn't this black, its lips rolled back, teeth dangerous as cubs. My sister and I, laughing, whispered far into the night. One buck hanging, dressed upside down from a tree. That was OK, but when the hunters got closer, all the trees turned to deer. I tried elbowing them aside like winter coats on racks. The prongs kept tripping me. Their heads swaying heavy as hems. Well, what was I expecting, living where I do? Plushing low birds from trees, were they oak? Partridge? No, cedar, waxing, tips, lustrous, yellow, orange. But I'd stayed too long. My life had passed in anxious adolescence. Still, a student maybe I could teach. I'd yet to amount to anything, speckled, oversize, invasive, honeysuckle laden with berries. I needed to keep heading north. When her cry woke me, I knew to take it in, though why? Porcupine quills barbed like fish hooks rose from my haunches. I had birthed and raised my child, the winter diet of bark expanding to whimper, to howl, to moan. From below, we looked up into one bright fissure. No question of backing down now. No question of not getting through. Only how to wedge my body so small, the others behind me, all gentle creatures urging my legs, useless as fish on land, but angling my shoulders just so they fit another dimension. This one can't contain time to go first. Time to show you I love the way. So those are from the central section of this book. And if you look at them, you'll see they're just kind of flat, horizon lines, I think, of the mask. But if you look at the other sections of the book, they're all over the page. And with the other poems, what I think of them as doing is creating, let me start this way, my work has moved over the years from being kind of normal and left-hand margin and taking a little space on the page to like in my second and third books, sort of moving across the page and spreading out and then actually in the last, moving off the page and onto objects and so forth. So in this book, I was trying to figure out how I could keep experimenting with how a poem works in space, but do it using the space of the page. So making the space of the page kind of three-dimensional and a sort of field where words can move around. So each of these poems has a through line which gets you started, gets you into the page. And then from there, you're pretty much allowed to move as you will. So the reader is very much a maker of these poems. And there's no one way to read them. Every time you enter, a new poem is kind of created or can be creative in the experience. So I will read them one way, but don't feel like it's definitive at all. So I'm going to start with the first one. You all have it. One. Although there is no one on the page. So actually, it's page three. But that's not on there either. It's the first poem in the book. OK. Excuse me? It says first, right in the middle of the page. Yes, OK. Good, thanks. The Hawthorne came into flower. The Hawthorne in flower was my first alphabet. The Hawthorne came into flower. A first white flame turning the alphabet to kindling. So I think of that one as sort of working like a double helix. Like there's the through line. And then twisting around it is the other line. The next one I'm going to read is on pages six and seven. And it goes across that whole field. And there's two parts. And you can see the through line is light, ice, water, ice, light. One, the icebergs, calving. What I heard caving in, like whales. And the light breaking off, blue, enormous pods disappearing. Too small to reproduce. Though we tried the women to tend them, their enormity so fully changed any question of saving. Ice, blue, that sang. It's going to, although how can it be too? The library of water houses snowmelt. Core samples you can read through the history of glaciers. There are words or weather all over the floor. In Berlin, when it rains, plastic tubs like clints catch what drips through the library roof or skull, since the library was designed to resemble the human brain. I forget most of what I read. A library in Alexandria and then a daughter library. These columns are what's left of the glaciers pulled from the shelves, the ice receding. What can be recollected, the sheer volume of each glacier, how they encase the earth, how they are crossed by the light. The second of those is based on a actual library of water, which is in Iceland. The insulation artist Ronnie Horne set it up, and it is very much like I described it there. It's really worth looking at her website. There's also a pod in residence at the library of water, which I think I hope I get to be someday. OK, the next one is page nine. She's changing our shelters to open work. Unhinging the open from the in, outdoors, she's changing. Nest cavities, hypernacular. Sky blue, her simple open work, blue. It is 18 and 19. So 18 is there are a few of these throughout where it's a kind of condensed version. I think it would just like the Haiku version of these poems in that there's a title in bold, and then there's a word or two in bold going through it. So that becomes the through line. So it's hi there, hi trees, hi there. Almost 30 years walking these woods, just now starting to wave back. Next one is field study. White, yellow, sweet, red, hop. Well, we learned the summer clovers, white, sweet. Why not early, large, leafed, bog, rough stemmed, the golden rod? Why not tall, yellow-romped, common, yellow-throat, yellow, the confusing, fall warblers? Now we're going to skip to the last section, page 48. Finest grasses support the most wonderful burdens of ice. That line comes from Thoreau's journals, and actually most of the through lines in this book come from other sources. They're mostly not mine, which I acknowledge at the back. Usually. The finest grasses will whistle held taut to the lips. Redwing, the last note held. Grasses support nests, wonderful facets of whorefrost. Grasses will whistle held to the lips by bending. Until she could walk, I carried her, bending the light at my hip, 50 and 51. 50, the line, blandness is this experience of transcendence reconciled with nature and divested of faith. Comes from a translation I did of a book. No, actually, I didn't translate that book, did I? It's a book. I translated the author. But I translated a different book. It's François Julien, and he's a French synologist who writes about French culture and Chinese culture, a Western culture and Chinese culture. And I did translate another book of his called The Book of Beginnings. But this comes from a book which is called In Praise of Landness. And in the book, he describes how blandness is in the Chinese system, something to aspire to, that it's aesthetically the most refined taste or value because there's no drama in it. It's free of anything but itself. So the line is that blandness is this experience of transcendence. That is, it's above everything else, reconciled with nature. It's not trying to escape nature and divested of faith. There's no supernatural involved in it, which is kind of a difficult idea to get your mind around. But once you do it makes things a lot easier to deal with. In Praise of Blandness. Blandness is this common elder, white flower, white pit, so familiar as scarcely to require description, white hair, carte blanche. After losing his sense of taste, all those colorful ITs, my father still preferred white peaches. Her skirt wafts as she runs downstairs. My mother's summer dress yellow with small black dots. How, years later, her skirt wafts, light steps, a birthday present as she runs downstairs. My mother's father, my mother's brother gave my father this umbrella. Both wives dead, small black dots opening. One spoke, bent now against the rain, age 53. Libraries come up a lot in this book. They have a kind of nostalgic feeling about them. And this one was partly inspired by the New York Public Library for a while was under threat of becoming something other than that, like cafes. And it was luckily saved, but this was while it seemed as though it was not going to be. So many remained silently sleeping in the libraries. Many were left unshelved or leaned a little in their dark stacks, remained sleeping like horses, standing like horses silently browsing against one another, old books after the library's close. I'll read a couple more, and then shall I read one of yours? No, OK. I don't know what they read for their sound phones. Page 55, she pieces together her joy. She is one who looks knowingly upon complex, modern machinery as a joyous substitute. She is one who looks to remnants species, to patch together blue sky. An artist starts from the salvage of wetland, old growth. She threads through an artist. She is an artist. She don't look back. And I'll end with the title poem of the book, which is on page 59. What I mean by rooted is wet. The spiders have been revising my lines. My arms full of laundry at the end of the day. What I mean by rooted is not taproot, but old stumps, clean wet, wet, all. Sounds loud. Is that too loud? Somewhere deep inside the blazing cascade of star generations, it's early spring, morning air cool, sun warm. I linger out breakfast, walk, mirror sky, the usual things. Life seems so simple sometimes. Who'd suspect this is how it happens? How that cascade of fire rips day by day through me, licking its wounds. Yellow sky parts grasses and sky. The less this desert is, the more I want to live my life over again. Ideas confuse me. They leave everything out. I am riding Earth's horizon edge, twisting toward morning sun. I am riding Earth's horizon edge through darkness, light, years deep. The desert stars are here with me. They must know where we're going, the desert stars. And they are here with me. Days go on like this. Sky parched, grass and desert sky. Hummingbird, mesquite seed fluff, tight in its cracked sun scoured packet, spills out on the wind. Sometimes I try to remember that distinction between what I am and whatever occurs next. It's the least possible hope. Food, water, shelter. Human history begins there. And I never leave those beginnings really. Wander at home there, touching the possibilities of less. This mountain seems somehow lonely as I am. People come and go through its empty distances, and those distances remain empty. I'm getting old now, but this mountain's been here almost forever. No wonder it understands loneliness so much better than I ever will. Every time I come here, we both promise never to leave and mountains always keep their promises. The eye, the mirror, deep eye is magic. Things seem go all the way inside me and vanish there. It seems impossible, I know, but everything heals from inside out. I guess you could call it a pilgrimage. I feel lost anywhere I go, though it's true the way is always clearly marked. Earth care, sky care, fire care, water care. So it's daunting to read after Jody. I just think those poems she's invented are amazing. I have to tell you, she said that you can read it any way you want, but a few weeks ago we were sitting around and we read each other's home streets to each other, and she didn't really like the way I read hers. She complained for days. The cosmos must be lonely. It's always somewhere else watching itself through my eyes. It keeps touching ochre desert with my fingers, touching river water, her sun-worn skin. And listen, hear in these words. Why else would it be talking to you like this? This one's a little longer. Traveling today, I found a river somewhere inside me. Wondered how far it wanders there, and how much sky it mirrors. All day long, wind and desert light, I followed that river's distances, shedding histories, until I was nothing but river. Nearing mountains, I grew cold with snowmelt, and evening wolves drank from my currents, tasting the clarity of water rinsing through every cell alive, always changing, always its own transparent self. The desert sees itself through many brilliant eyes, whole histories of eyes, antelope eyes, hummingbird, fox, lizard, vulture. It knows itself so perfectly by now. I wonder why it keeps talking like this. Maybe I'll stop there, and read a few poems from this book from last year, which is, well, I'll just, I'll just, so it's American poets, and it's, I don't want to talk about what it really tries to do, but so they're sort of predecessors for me in a way. So in a sense, this is a kind of tradition, ancient China, and then the people in America who are at some deep level shaped by ancient Chinese ideas. So I'll just read a few of these for fun. This is William Carlos Williams poem. As the cat climbed over the top of the jam closet first the right forefoot, carefully then the hind step down into the pit of the empty flower pot. Every time I read that I remember, I always think of it as just the action of the cat, but there's the as at the beginning. It's like as the cat climbed over, it's like something else is going on while the cat does it and but you don't know what. I always just made me want a jam closet. Robinson Jeffers, grey weather. It is true that older than man and ages to outlast him, the Pacific surf still cheerfully pounds the worn granite drum, but there's no storm and the birds are still, no song, no kind of excess, nothing that shines, nothing is dark. There's neither joy nor grief nor a person, the sun's tooth she then cloud, and life has no more desires than a stone. The stormy conditions of time and change are all abrogated. The essential violences of survival, pleasure, love, wrath, and pain, and the curious desire of knowing, all perfectly suspended. In the cloudy light, in the timeless quietness, one explores deeper than the nerves of heart, the nerves or heart of nature, the womb or soul, to the bone, the careless white bone, the excellence. A couple of short ones by Gary Snyder. It was really the beginning of poetry for me. That's when he soon got me started. Created all the assumptions about what poetry was for me, like that it was about ecology, primal culture, Asian culture, Asian wisdom or deep wisdom. Burning the small dead. Branches broke from beneath, thick-spreading whitebark pine. A hundred summers, snow-melt, rock and air hissed in a twisted bow, Sierra granite, Mount Ritter, Black Rock twice as old, Deneb, Altair, Windy Fire. Oh, yeah, this is a favorite of mine. Anasazi. Anasazi, Anasazi, tucked up in clefts in the cliffs, growing strict fields of corn and beans, sinking deeper and deeper in earth, up to your hips in gods, you had all turned to eagle down and lightning for knees and elbows, your eyes full of pollen, the smell of bats, the flavor of sandstone grit on the tongue, women birthing at the foot of ladders in the dark, trickling streams and hidden canyons under the cold, rolling desert, corn baskets, wide-eyed, red baby, rock-clip poem, Anasazi. I meant to, I was going to start this with somebody else, because this is since Jody and I are reading together, so I was going to do a little autobiography, no, not really autobiography, but anyway, the first, when we met, we were at Cornell in the graduate school, and our teacher was A.R. Ammons, so I just thought I'd read a couple of his. Attention. Down by the bay I kept in mind at once the tips of all the bowl rushes, oops, the tips of all the rush leaves, and so came to know balances, cost and true. Somewhere, though, in the whole field is the one tip I will someday lose out of mind and fall through, and then a funny little one, reflective. I found a weed that had a mirror in it, and that mirror looked in at a mirror in me that had a weed in it. Maybe a few poems by W.S. Merwin in his late 60s, kind of surreal phase. Kin. Up the west slope before dark, shadow of my smoke, old man, climbing the old man's mountain. At the end, birds lead something down to me. It is silence. They leave it with me in the dark. It is from them that I am descended, night wind. All through the dark, the wind looks for the grief it belongs to, but there was no place for that anymore. I have looked too and seen only the nameless hunger watching us out of the stars, ancestor and the black fields. I am going upstream, taking to the water from time to time. My marks dry off the stones before morning. The dark surface strokes the night above its way. There are no stars. There is no grief. I will never arrive. I stumble when I remember how it was with one foot, one foot still in a name. A few poems really stripped down by Larry Eidner. Some I admire a lot, but not that many people are big fans, I think. Things stirring together. The wind. Fly objects. Birds shove out thermals. The winds tune how constructed things are. The instrument. Now we know, listen, light comes through it and water shakes, clouds rain down trees, fog, the rain and the stars, in the head, in the head, beaches, slow clouds, the dark. Okay, and then one more that I don't usually try to read because I think it's really difficult, but this is the end of autobiography because this is called Luba Ronis by Gustav Silvin and Luba Ronis is the name of the mountains where we've lived three times in France and Gustav lived there too. So, Luba Ron, only there in the hills deepest creases would you grow at last legible. Hear yourself happen in each dark, spark-hearted foliation. Weren't you, after all, your very own antecedent, the organs you'd bring mumbling into that arena of leaves, thistles, ledges. There, that is, where your breath at last might encounter mass, a wed, then the interval of each articulated instant, the acorn that glows as if epiphanous. The acorn that glows as if epiphanous at its own according for only the pleat finally speaks and in the name of the neither, resonant echoes. Sometimes I need someone to be. It's another kind of refuge. I wander open rich lines, sky stretching vast away to childhood, heat waves ripple above ochre talus, a black-tailed kite circles out into blue distances. Memories float past like clouds. It's a difficult proposition, a life story. Things happen, keep happening year after year, and they define who I am as they vanish into earth and sky. I woke early this morning, earth and sky, still that one original dark wind, quiet. It's beautiful. I am someone else. I'll read this one. This is a little hard, but I'm going to read it because my friend Bill Jensen is here from New York, and he's a really great painter, and he gave me this thing as after a piece that he gave me. Thought gone, dark needs, nothing more of itself needs dark, alone, woven ink black through blackened light. It's an ancient tool, this gathering basket of shadow, and it glistens still with youth. Hummingbirds quick clint, crow's winged fleck of night. These last few things slip banishing through, leaving again this dark harvest of origins. That's probably too hard. I shouldn't read poems like that. I wouldn't understand it. Should I read it again? Yeah, sure. Okay. I'm going to decide if I should try to describe what I'm going to say. What does it matter? Drawing, actually. Thought gone, dark needs, nothing more of itself needs dark, alone, woven ink black through blackened light. It's an ancient tool, this gathering basket of shadow, and it glistens still with youth. Hummingbirds quick clint, crow's winged fleck of night. These last few things slip banishing through, leaving again this dark harvest of origins. Stories define us. It's true. And they matter, though they always leave so much out. I like it that way. Keep telling them to desert, and desert keeps filling in whatever it is we're missing. The desert never mentions a rival. Solar, heat, sky, dust light, a few parched colors. They rinse so far through me. There's nowhere else to go. I set out. Every time I read, I discover something. I think I discovered... I had two poems at the same ending. That's alright. I can't... You can tell me if it's true. I'll read this. I can't think through these distances or how perfectly alone I am. Wind feels the same way it seems and this mid-morning moon. Meanwhile, clouds drift past like words. Can I do that? No. Good. Molecular air brings distances between furl's breath and its least breeze stars rustle, gravity sighs. What else could I do? Here, everywhere on this mountain summit it unclothes light and who could stop looking further and further in at all that naked abandon? Couldn't we simply forget what we wanted of these words we breathe out? Forgive me. I don't care much what words say. What I want is a way we can touch the same place in air. What? Fine. Just a couple of alters through this and maybe two more. Water rinses stone steadily away. A promise it never stops perfecting. I'm made of stone dust it long ago scoured loose and it keeps rinsing through my every glistening cell with its elemental promise. By now there's nothing to it. I can return so easily to stream water thin across bedrock weighed there through mirrored origins. Actually maybe I'll, okay I'll read that's a stream poem just accidentally I was going to read this from my last poem which is another stream poem. But this is the, this is all desert landscape from the southwest where I've been going a fair amount lately and I grew up, grew up there. So this is the poem I wrote a few weeks ago and that's more from this landscape. How restless early morning light is rock strewn, sun scald, lights blinding in wild stream water. It must be restless for home it's setting out here and where else could it be going? I weighed in further and further in so thanks. I guess we'll answer questions if people have questions? Both of us? Your poems about the desert I was really impressed with your sense of spaciousness and almost as a vertigo full time and space. Do you find that that environment comforting? Do you find it uncomfortable? I know you grew up there so does it feel homey to you or does it feel sort of dizzying with how spacious it is? It just feels like me. No, I don't really feel, I don't think I feel comfortable and I was glad to leave there and come to the northeast where it's green and it does feel kind of comforting but now I'm longing for that. I heard that you can't go home again so good luck with that. Desert's always there. David, I'm really appreciated that you read that drawing poem a second time and it reminded me that I heard Kay Ryan read once down at Storm King Art Center and she was the loosest reader I've ever heard and she would say I didn't read that very well I'm going to read that one again and I really think that You're saying you should have done that more? No, but I think when I'm reading poetry I will read a poem two or three times I don't just read it once and turn the page and I've got the words in front of me so it can kind of sink in so I'm really glad I was thinking about Kay Ryan doing that and you said should I read that again? I can't take things in orally so poetry readings don't mean that much to me except for just the feeling of the event and I guess I sometimes think about just reading poems a couple of times but then I think well everybody here is smarter than me so they'll just be insulted How do you go about formatting one of these poems? Are you writing by hand? Do you have a special program? Are you getting a space bar? What are you doing? They start out by hand and they start out usually with the through line and I have two different, I have a pencil and an eraser so I'll do the dark line and then I'll start putting the other words around that with the lighter pencil and I go I like, well here comes Perry I'll do probably 10 or 20 just sketches of them by hand before I go to my screen and then it pretty much has to be already shaped by the time I get to the screen and then it's pretty easy I'm just, you know, it's a bold line I'm spacing and tabbing over, it's just a word program at that point So, kind of with that, I know one thing I'm going to do I think more than once but definitely on 53 there's the little line that's standing like courses and at one point it was sleeping like courses and I wonder how much of that comes from you constantly revising or just, that's how freely you want them read where the standalone things can actually just walk you over Yeah I probably want that to happen Yeah, like I mean my sense, when I'm moving things around I'm often moving things a little closer like spacing up or moving it in so that the eye will find that whole constellation and start playing with it and then the bowl, you know, will hit you first but then you can see the other and like the side, from the side of your eye so they're kind of happening at the same time and because courses stand sleeping you want, I wanted that, yeah So poems often make a leap in a way that prose does and prose tends to not trust the reader to have to like jump and land somewhere how much did you count on us like being willing to leap? Are there anyone who inspired you to test how far we can leap before we don't land on the other side? It's kind of an odd question Our basement is full of dead guinea I think for me that the linear nature of language has always been problematic I don't think that way I start a thought and then it's going in five directions and I have to trace it out when I'm talking in a linear pattern but that's not reflecting how my mind is working and I think that's a fairly common experience You're looking at me right now but you're thinking, oh I'm kind of hungry and I wonder what that book is behind me like there's a whole spatial quality to how a mind works and I think that jumping in writing we talk about jumping as something we are pushing our readers to do and it's a big expectation but I think that's because we've set up this linear pattern which really is a kind of imposition on how our minds work so I think here what I'm trying to do is not so much get you to jump as a reader but let you recognize how language can more closely resemble how your thought might work anyway Is that fantastic? No, that's great Thanks It's really beautiful the way these poems work, I love it You have one thing which is the backbone of the bolding so you've got a skeleton and the skeleton as you say is given to you often by some other text so will you ever think about playing with more than two systems there's the bold and there's the unboldened will you ever do something like play with font size or play with do you think that would ever be coming that you could do two or three systems? I've got it so I'm doing italics occasionally now too in the field study that happened so the names of the plant the flowers and the warblers and so forth are in italics so that becomes like a little background that's a little different from what goes through it as far as making the font is really different or using color or something I don't think so I still think I'm committed to text in some way and I want them to be red I don't want them to just be a visual feel like artists do that all the time like Paul plays word home I don't think I am artistically inclined that way I don't have to read more as texts than as a visual feel with words for now I know but for now good question when you read groups like this do you tend to read these poems in the same way or do you make yourself a completely spontaneous just your choices how does that work this is what David was me feeling I have to say that they do fall into patterns when I'm reading them and when I get stuck it's because I go oh I'm going a different way and then I have to find my way back and I am like invested in the reading having meaning that is connecting parts grammatically or syntactically hold in some way not just scavenging which is why I was getting upset when David was doing it he was like breaking that up for me and that's the other way I want to go so I mean I'm always really interested to hear other people read them because there are things I don't see in them but you would seem that when you make a choice when you're reading them aloud that's one way to come can be experienced but I sitting here listening to you I'm not only hearing you but I'm having peripheral vision on the page so it's an incredible kind of attack of the whole size it's really pretty terrific yeah so you can go back and not hear me you know I have a question for David so you American poets you write the influence of ancient Chinese wisdom and poetry on American poets and you looked into other countries and cultures and how they have that same influence and how it's different or how it's similar not really I know France just a little bit not very much I don't think it's been as influential I've never heard of it being as influential anywhere else it was a big deal the influence that this book traces really starts with pound and his images and and that's essentially him using haiku and they were very conscious and it was like a fad everybody wrote haiku really the whole revolution was really just him writing the metro poem or writing a haiku of his own and calling it not a haiku but his own poem that's almost the whole revolution and I know haiku was even bigger in Europe I don't know maybe on some of the French well Ron did I'm sorry never really looking at Joey's book I'm sorry you were being assaulted anyway one page is that reading them here readers can approach things in a way that they can hold several poems rather than rather than just reading one one path through and then I guess related to that the poems seem to relate to each other so in a way is considering well let me answer the first one first I think that you know this from music or from visual art the experience of a piece of music or a visual art looking at a painting or whatever changes each time you do it but it it accumulates so when you go back you hear different things in the music so it's not like a different one each time it's just the experience of it is the art is the piece of art and they build on each other so I would want it to work kind of badly not excluding what came before or omitting what could follow can I break in my experience of that is you just keep reading you just keep reading you can keep reading it forever and it just keeps building and building and shifting and changing it's not so much reading once I mean that's another way to do it and I don't think I was in putting the book together aware of it I like the idea that there are larger constellations there were definitely themes that kept coming back to like the library and that she figured that it appears throughout I mean I think of her as sort of the woman on the cover who just sort of keeps reappearing in different ways and and then of course like just the natural world and sort of like I don't know re-establishing some vital connection with that in different ways but yeah I I like that I'll take it David you write about Gary Snyder Sid Corwin come in oh yeah he's not in this book but I thought about putting him in because he seems so related to exactly what you're about yeah he lived as most of his life in Japan yeah he's the one that could have been a lot he meant a lot to me a lot of people think there's nothing to have that's substantial but I think if you read all of his little poems as one giant giant long poem it starts adding up to something yeah you seen those books of his the collected he writes little tiny poems Sid Corwin but then he just writes millions of them and they're actually I have one that's two volumes a two-volume box set there are five of those actually in existence but the other four were published pre even further on the margins what was working with A.R. Ammons like he was he was great he was like the least teacherly person I've ever met like he never read a poem ahead of time for a workshop he just come in you know cold and like read it and say something smart or not so smart you know he never like he never put comments written comments on anything and I think but like what he said I can remember things he said 35 years later and I think the thing that really stayed with me with Ammons is he refused authority in every way like he refused to be an authority as a teacher and he refused any authority over him and that kind of the need as a as a poet or as an artist to refuse both being an authority like taking on authority and listening to authority you know in his quiet way he just refused that and I think that model for me I couldn't have learned that in any way not in any classroom but there was a cafe in the basement of the humanities building and he was always there twice a day in the morning and afternoon and you just go hang out and talk about nothing so that's when the teaching happened David went to India one summer no this is a good story he was supposed to be he was supposed to be Ammons graduate assistant for a writing workshop for undergrad and he decided to go to India and said so I got the gig and at the end of it at the end he said to our chairman I'm really glad David went he said yeah I am too I just have this urge that I want to read this last one this is a quiet ending I don't know what it's nice when things are perfect the day is light now presence inescapable in its vast presence I can't say much less than this I'm awake it's nice when things are