 everyone. Thank you for joining us for our program at Mechanics Institute online for Blizzard poems with Henri Cole and D.A. Powell. I'm Laura Shepherd, Director of Events at Mechanics Institute and we're very pleased to co-sponsor this event with City Lights Books and Publishing and we thank our friend and longtime collaborator Peter Maravellis, Events Director at City Lights who is with us tonight. Hello Peter and welcome. So for those of you who aren't new, Mechanics Institute was founded in 1854 and is one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. It features a general interest library, an international chess club ongoing author events and our Cinema Lip Film series so please check out the website for all of our online programs. All right we're very pleased to welcome back Henri Cole for his new book Blizzard which is a beautiful collection of daring tender truthful poems that build on his reputation for his quiet mastery and modern austerity of kawafi and bishop. Cole's lucid empathetic poems speak to the heart. The brightness is darkness with a lyrical beauty and also ethical depth and provides us with poems that both transform and heal us in this time of anxiety and time of unrest. So I'd like to now introduce our two guests, two poets of great acclaim. Henri Cole was born in Japan and he's published over a dozen previous collections of poetry including Touch and Pierce the Skin, A Memoir and also his wonderful book Orphic Paris which we love. That one received many awards including, he's also received many awards for all of his work including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingston Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize as well as the award of Merit Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and he is a teacher at the Claremont Mechanic College and our other guest will be our interviewer D. A. Powell a longtime member at Mechanics Institute is the author of five collections of poetry including Useless Landscape or a Guide for Boys which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and his honors include the Kingsley Tufts Prize in Poetry, the Shelley Memorial Prize and an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. So please welcome Henri Cole and D. A. Powell. Thank you. Thank you Laura and thank you Henri for asking me to join you for this event when we were planning it. It was all going to be you coming to the city and us being at the Mechanics Institute and you know having this virtually is literally the next best thing. Thank you for doing this Doug. I just wanted to say you know how much the Mechanics Institute means to the literary community in San Francisco not only are they a library and a chess room and they sponsor all of these amazing events but the building itself houses the offices for Lit Quake and for Sisyphe magazine so it really is sort of the literary heart of the city. Henri you did an event for Mechanics Institute previously so this is your second time around. Yes when Orphic Paris came out I guess about two years ago the first event was in San Francisco at the Institute. I wonder if we're having technical difficulties already. I just have a white screen like a zoom screen. Is someone fixing that? Can everybody... Is someone sharing their screen? Something seems to be amiss. Is Richard Syme seem Richard? What's going on? Something is amiss. If you're sharing your screen could you unshare your screen please? Yes somebody Richard it says Richard Symes is sharing his screen. Yeah we can go back to our regular view. Okay great we can also everyone you can go on speaker view or gallery view. Okay we're back. Thank you. Oh okay. Richard is my student. He's a wonderful poet. It wouldn't be a virtual event if we didn't have some sort of technical snafu. Better to have it right in the beginning and then we can move right past. I did want to talk a little bit about that book Orphic Paris because I remember when you were writing these pieces and publishing them and it was like a series of love poems to the city of Paris. What started you on that and when did you begin to conceive of it as a book? Well what really started me was that I had an editor who wanted me to write. She was then an editor at the New Yorkers. They had a literary blog the page turner which is still quite lively and I don't know I felt that blog writing was largely either I don't know like current events or gossip and I didn't really want to do either of those. So I asked her if I could do these little I actually thought of them as hyphoons as I began to write them because they were the hyphoon form is a Japanese form that goes from prose down to this lyric well to this haiku and so I by combining prose with photographs I was trying to replicate the hyphoon form and I don't know I wrote one for her and then another and a couple years had by and I had 16 or 17 of them and I realized I had a book. My mother had died and my mother was a French woman and I started going to France three or four times a year after her death probably just to be around the French language and that's really that's really what you know how that's was the genesis of the book. Yeah and I noticed that you you'll have elegy's in the book there's that beautiful piece that you wrote about James Lord. Yes yes and so it's a hybrid book it combines autobiography with kind of portraits of there are two sort of main figures in it one is my French translator who is now 95 and her name is Claire Malruh an excellent poet herself a book of hers is her selected poems is about to come out from the New York Review books with translated by Marilyn Hacker and so there's that dimension and then there's the little story of my mother's family my mother was from Marseille and then there's the story of my sort of I don't know my sort of days in Paris and a few friendships that I had there. I love following you around the city and following your mind and sense of inquiry. Thank you there's one poem in the book there's one poem in Blizzard which is my one Paris poem which is Paris is my Sarah Quelle. My mother took Sarah Quelle which was is a anti psychotic actually and so that's where that that title came from. When we get to the reading portion will you read that poem? With pleasure Doug. Absolutely good um yeah I mean I I I love following you around the graveyards in Montparnasse and visiting Susan Sontag's grave and just that sense of that sense of a flannure that sense of someone who um spends their days going from museum to cafe to graveyard to um hotel and um all of the sensory pleasure that you evoke in those essays is just marvelous. Thank you Doug. Thank you um it was a fun book to write it was a fun I'm trying to do another version of that now but I started well I guess we've been in confinement about six months now and I I didn't do anything really but clean drawers for three months but um but then I finally got to work and I started I started writing a prose in a similar style but about some poets that I that I knew and didn't know so um I don't quite know what I'm doing but I'm having fun fun. I trust implicitly an artist who admits that they don't know what they're doing. I think when we know what we're doing we're in danger. Yes I think writing for me in large part is um discovering subject matter you know the writing process itself leads me to leads me to content um and place is very important to um to move not just from Paris but um to other places Boston has been your home now for how long often I am speaking in my kitchen in Boston and I moved into this apartment 26 years ago I can hardly believe it this apartment we used to be sort of a borderline neighborhood but now it's all completely you know gentrified but I moved here I taught I was teaching at Harvard then I taught there six years and retrospectively I'm so glad I didn't get a home in Cambridge I really had loved being here in the south and um and um do you find that you write more there or do you write more when you're in transit like where where do where does the inspiration hit? Doug for the last years all of my writing has been in France um mostly at home here I just take care of life um and in California mostly I just am a teacher and so when I escaped to France is really when I've done most of my writing in the last years um almost everything um it there's something about the time difference and everyone being asleep behind me and um the language a different language swirling around me I just it frees me up and uh I feel the most sort of safe and consoled there so I I don't know that's where I do my most lately though as I say I did start this prose project here and I tried to replicate you know in France I sit on a sofa I sit on a sofa when I write you know I don't sit at a desk so I I I had to sort of recreate the sofa situation I think where you said is very important you know um since the since we've been teaching remotely I'm teaching from home you'll notice the very glamorous backdrop here of my light switch but this is the place where I can get the best internet service so this is where I teach from and where I do zoom and depends from and then when I just want to write or paint I have my desk in the front of the apartment so I'm constantly having to take this with me and um you have to know how long your battery will stay with you but you know you you have to get in the right chair the chair where the poems happen I like the kitchen for some reason the kitchen is the least cluttered room um in my house I because I've lived here so long the rooms are filling up but the kitchen I keep simple and I like sitting here in the morning and and at least thinking about writing poems so was the kitchen important to you as a child yes it was I think that might be a french thing you know because in France the dining room table is sort of in the middle of the living room you know so everybody is sitting around the table for these long meals so that might have something to do with it though though I I sit alone at my table here but still I I just love sitting in here I think the kitchen is usually the brightest room in any place that I've ever lived so being able to go there for the light and for the it's a good place to read it's a good place to pull together your thoughts in the morning have tea isn't this strange isn't this strange what we're doing I mean if you objectified at all it is so bizarre what we're doing right now it amuses me but yeah I have to remind myself that there are 50 people in this conversation and to remember that all of these people have for the moment been invited into your kitchen and my kitchen yes and we get to see into their libraries and offices and kitchens and bedrooms and yes I haven't I have maybe I'll adjust to see a few things this I spotted one of your former colleagues and one of mine Kyoko Mori with her cats I love Kyoko I've known Kyoko since I was 22 did you go to school together yes we went to Wisconsin together and we we started out together I I love her I don't know where she is but well hopefully she's hopefully she's still in DC the last I saw her we'll have to find out after the reading I want to talk about this new book Blizzard first of all the title your your editor had some trepidation about it um well there was a lot of discussion about the title but I always wanted a one word title and I was thinking I wasn't really thinking of a weather event I was thinking of a deluge of emotion that was really what I felt the book was represented so oh I should say too that the cover image was done by Charlie Gross who was a neurologist who died about 18 months ago now and he I hope he would have been happy to see his picture on the cover I'm very pleased with the way it looks it's beautiful um how long did it take you to compile this book did it go it's about five years yeah it's been about five years I'm not really a uh a book project person I write one poem at a time and I finish a poem and then I write another one um sometimes uh sometimes they come to me and you know and you know two or three at a time but um um I suppose it'll be five years before I have another so well depending I mean I feel like one of the things that that strikes me about this collection is how timely it is in relation to political events uh climate science um the state of the world do you feel like that's one of the energies that shakes you loose and and makes you want to sit down and say something well yes I feel certainly that's one of the functions of the lyric um I think of myself as a lyric poet which which means that most often I'm presenting myself in a a moment of being and feeling um but I think it's important that the camera not always be inward that it be outward as well and um the whole middle section of this book is has the more public poems in it um um so yes I think that's one of the one of the functions of the poet and I don't know I feel often when I'm pushing against something that's the energy that brings a poem you know it can be unhappiness it can be anger it can be joy it can be affection but it can also be uh power you know power uh writing against power I think that's trying to redistribute power when it seems out of balance if possible if possible um will you uh will you read some poems um and um then we'll have time for questions afterward but um I just feel like okay why don't I why don't I read it yes why don't I read a few of the public ones or or maybe that's the wrong word public um I don't know what the right word is civic I guess political you could say political I I always feel a little shy of claiming that word for myself because I feel others are so much stronger in that regard um a writing is political yes it is yes it is um this poem maybe I'll read this poem called gross national unhappiness um which has a silly title but it's a serious poem no I am not afraid of you descending the long white marble steps from a white hawk helicopter to a state sponsored spectacle of mansplaining and lies if you divide the sea you will wind up in a ditch the she goat will mount the he goat good deeds will cut out our tongues no tree will penetrate a radiant sky why can't you see our tens cannot be separated can't you see your 1000 dogs are not greater than our 1000 gazelles maybe I'll read this one called haiku which is uh which isn't a haiku it's more of a haipun I suppose it's like a sauna that turns into a uh a sauna that turns into a haipun maybe or a haiku I don't know haiku after the sewage flowed into the sea and took the oxygen away the fishes fled but the jellies didn't mind they stayed and ate up the food the fishes left behind I sat on the beach in my red pajamas and listened to the sparkling foam like feelings being frustrated nearby a crayfish tugged on a string in the distance a man waved it unnatural cycles seemed to be establishing themselves without regard to our lives deep inside I could feel a needle skip autumn dark murmur of the saw poor humans let's see maybe I'll read one more from this depart this part of the book called doves doves um the first this well I'll just read this poem I was going to try and say that I I want to I guess I want to say that I think the book has a lot of pleasure in it and joy and that there isn't just a preoccupation with this elegiac voice that that's important to me that um the book include that this however isn't one of those poems but I'll read it nonetheless because of it has it has a slight it has a voice of resistance in it um though the title is called doves gray and white as if with age for some preserving of the past as in beowulf our hoary ancestor hoary as in a bat or a willow for the venerable hoary dove that flew straight into my picture window today and then lay dead on the front porch we buried it in some distorted version of its normal self folded in a white cloth napkin in the backyard still soft enough to be cut into like a cabbage I thought I'm glad I'm not dead but listen to the now higher up in the trees biting and scratching with their unmistakable twitch of life don't fear nothing their twittering voices cry the true spirit of living isn't eating greedily or reflection or even love but dissidence like an axe of stone should we talk a little more on rate I I want you to read as many poems as we can squeeze in okay I'll read it I'll read it I'll read another one from this department I'll read this uh we're not department from this um section of the book will be consistent I'll read these two sort of Armenian poems which I think of as Armenian poems my mother was born in Marseille but her ancestors were Armenian um her brought her parents for immigrants and uh and this poem really uh this poem called weeping cherry really tells the story of her people who arrived in in in Marseille with the with the help of um who really a ship captain that brought them from Asia Minor um during uh you know during a time of of great violence um so it's called weeping cherry on a plateau with little volcanic mountains a muddy river dangerous when the snow melts a fertile valley cattle breeders and the music academy a tall handsome agile people with straight black hair and an enterprising spirit lived peaceably though there had never been hatred between the races after a quarrel over local matters massacres came men women and children robbed and deported an evacuation they called it heads impaled on branches mounds of corpses like grim flowers knotted together a passing ship transported a few to a distant port where mother was born though now she too has vanished into the universe and the cold browns the weeping cherry fifted red mixed with blue so beautiful thank you thank you and and the poem thereafter is that the the other one that you're gonna yes i've read this one at the cathedral in san francisco with with uh with you and the people in the little box right next to you on my screen i've been friend i see i see them um so uh but do you mind if i read it again i would love to hear it the genesis of this poem really a friend of mine works in an archive art archive and she sent me a photograph of armenians um starving armenians eating a horse and at the same time that my friend sent me that picture uh you know every day on the tv news there were pictures of uh migrants you know uh crossing borders and uh starved looking and that was really the genesis of this this poem two things conflated in my mind migrants devouring the flesh of a dead horse since there's no time for grinding or cooking it's best not to drag the parts too far as the solitary knife goes in and out the mama is exhausted but also rather mild in her expression and the baby resembles a seahorse compelled to know something painful no one appears left out stabbing licking or chewing or sees the texture of the animals insides mirrored in the fluttering of cloth not lightness or delicacy but something more basic related to the moist earth once this horse ornamented a field with its flexible limbs and nuzzling head eat me it nays now the tree of life is greater than all the helicopters of death the tree of life is more powerful than all the helicopters of death yes that was that was a hard line the endings are the hardest part of my poems you know i sort of write towards an ending i don't know what it is it comes long after sometimes well endings i think are hard in general yes yeah i like the i'm drawn to aphorisms and i suppose that's what i'm trying to do there is be aphoristic do ever just come up with lines that you feel are endings and put them on a file together um that happens more with titles in the beginnings than the ending because as i say really the writing leads me to leads me to a surprise usually i'm trying to think the last thing i changed in the book was an ending uh the last thing the last thing i changed this this poem called rice pudding uh the very last thing i changed was the last line of that poem but that happened sort of because of i think because of life you know something happened in life that had to be in the poem rather than the ending that was there before um but well i love the ending of this poem so now you're going to have to read it for all the people who don't have it in front of them okay okay i won't say what the old ending was because i want this one to be better it's called rice pudding and i have to say i love rice pudding um i really do it's one of my favorite things in fact i've said to myself many times in confinement that i was going to cook myself rice pudding and i haven't done that not yet let's see this i think what occasion this poem to begin with was i went to see an opera with my friend claire who was 95 as i mentioned she was probably about 91 or two then and we went to see Hansel and Gretel in paris together and that was really the genesis of this the beginning of the setting um rice pudding Hansel and Gretel were picking strawberries and listening to a bronze cacoo as the forest mist thickened Hansel snuggled up to his little sister admitting they were lost they were the children of a broom maker who drank too much they did not understand that a wife is to a husband what the husband makes her or that even in our misery life goes on squirrels play bees forage hemlocks bow sitting at the kitchen table i eat yesterday's meat peas and carrots with a bowl of rice pudding now that you are dead my stubborn heart lives i've never read that at a kitchen table it feels like the perfect setting doesn't it that was unexpected that was an unprogrammed so well that's uh not at all where i uh thought the poem was going when it opened and i think that that's one of the pleasures of reading your work is thank you the surprise of um i think i think that's something that the sort of free verse solid form encourages is this kind of um um navigating um you know i think that's to me is what keeps the sonnet interesting to me is that i mean of course there's the idea of the seed of change within it so i want i do want something to happen i don't want it to just be description um that would be a much easier poem to write and probably pleasurable but i want to be led to some fresh idea um if i can put it that way and i want there to be some fractures uh and leaps along the way even though it's just 14 lines um that's important to me the non-linearity is important to me i feel that i feel that in your work um it's it's not simply uh serving up a story um but um finding the underlying meanings and motivations behind what it is that people do um thank you thank you i think you know i love describing it's such a pleasurable thing to describe um well it's sort of like eating rice pudding in a way but that's not that you know that's not enough for a poem for me i mean i want the poem to do something else um i have a personal favorite in this collection you do yes uh the poem on page 49 uh which is written um at that point in the uh the aids pandemic i mean speaking of pandemics uh no better time than now to revisit the pandemics that we're already in um 49 i see epivir d4t and crick saban um yes the title there's sort of three first generation hiv drugs it's a cocktail i'm sorry it's a cocktail and it's a cocktail there you go um i was just gonna say oh i have chronic here on my stove but not cocktail but um shall i read this one yeah and if you want to say anything about the genesis of it that would be great too i'm always well there are these three poems in the book keep me the one that comes before it and they're they're they look back i lived in new york in the eighties i moved there in 1980 um i was a graduate student at columbia and i stayed there a dozen years and they were such uh you know such um oh they're for such dark years really in many ways um but and so i don't know what what it was in the last the last years that has i've been thinking a lot about that time and i wanted to write about it it's funny i didn't write it all about it at the time um i think i was probably too frightened um there's nothing much more to say about this poem um it actually conflates several things um but one person uh epivir d4t and crick saban the new disease came but not without warning the drugs were a toxic combo that kept the sick going another year i loved how you talked in your sleep about free will your clothes smelled but the blood levels were normal now i have seen the sun god this is what i thought when i first saw you the face the bearing but perfection of form meant nothing to you and we were all just souls carrying around a corpse i smoked cannabis while the government slept drug companies held parties in arizona and florida the profit motive always thrives to those who didn't sell well in the bars it felt like revenge of the nerds goaded by your hand i wrote poems an essence squeezed out of this matter memory now i think that first line the new disease came but not without warning um is so timely given what we're experiencing right now i mean the whole reason that we're doing this virtually is because there's another pandemic that we it's extraordinary isn't it you know doug nobody was rushing for a vaccine you know they're still not yeah you know um the drug companies are getting fat off of the um expensive therapy that will keep you going interminably yes that's obviously the other thing i was going to say was that people didn't die in six weeks they you know they lived they lived you know they suffered for a lot longer a cautionary tale yes yeah um we have questions from the audience and i think um ham are you sure reading that part of it yes i'll be um reading questions from the uh from the chat okay so are you ready now would you like to take some you can say the name if you want oh i definitely i will i will give the name excuse me we'll give people a chance to ask questions and on re maybe read one more poem while people are formulating their questions of course um one more poem we'll just see which one should maybe i'll read what a poem of pleasure um a poem of pleasure uh i'll read that poem about the uh the jam lingonberry jam um i was just looking to see if this person that sent me this jam is on here but i i don't see i don't see her name but um lingonberry jam what a wondrous thing to suddenly be alive eating Natalie's lingonberry jam from Alaska where she picked the fruit herself with one seeing eye in this tumultuous world we're living in with the one hour news loop my thoughts linger more and more on the darkest side as i sit at the table with mr and mrs for who still asked me are you married yet but Natalie's lingonberry jam pierces right through into some deep essential place where i am my own master and no sodomy laws exist and where like a snowflake or a bee lost amid the posies i feel autonomous blissed out and real should i look in the chat or someone else thank you thank you um i'm going to i'm going to be reading them from out loud from the chat okay thank you so um hold on let me set up my video i'm Pam Troy i'm the events assistant uh one of the first questions is from jennifer groats oh i'm pronouncing the name correctly um maybe maybe regarding the open ending lines andry i'd love to hear you talk about your relationship to the sonnet which feels so crucial and ever present and or if you find had any observations to share about how you structured this wonderful new book thank you for the question um when i i am about to turn 65 i can probably believe it um but when i was 45 um i went to live in japan again and um while i was born there as was mentioned uh i lived maybe there are 18 months and my little brother was born in germany after me two years later uh but when i was 45 i went to live in japan and you know i was reading a lot of uh well i was reading a lot of japanese novels i was reading kawabata a lot of kawabata away um and i was trying to think of what kind of poem i would write and i just didn't feel i could uh you know write haikus and tonkas so i i thought what is the what is the form that my language has the the shortest lyric form that my language has a tradition in and what if i brought to it tried to bring to it some of the some of the qualities that i admired most in japanese literature and that's really how the i started writing sonnet i wanted to make the speech the language cleaner and i wanted there to be lots of uh similarly uh rather than um direct statements of feeling uh letting the image speak for feeling and that's really was the genesis and um it seems to me that i in a sonnet you have just enough room to take a real deep breath and then exhale and um uh and that's about what i'm happy doing in uh in a lyric poem um is that a good enough answer do i have any more that's enough yeah okay well but one of the first questions was from someone named toluwani roberts and the question is when you talk about your thoughts and feeling process of choosing the quotes that open parts one two and three yes toluwani is a very good student of mine and claire malmakenna thank you for that question um um there was a lot of discussion as to whether or not the book needed these quotes um from maryl heaney and from uh a supreme court case and i guess i decided in the end that i thought that it in a way it directs the readings um that the poems were various enough you know since it wasn't a project book i wanted people to have some idea of the spirit behind them and maryl and heaney were poets i loved most in my you know in my 20s and 30s so that was sort of i wanted them to be sort of presiding spirits i guess um i have to say toluwani i wanted i feel that i very much stand on the shoulders of the well neither men were my teachers but both were mentors of a sort um one couldn't be more different from the other but yes somebody somebody needs to mute themselves we're getting some ambient noise um the next question i'm going to ask you is from carlo sarat and you may have already answered it love to hear which of the older poets you feel most affinity with could you repeat the beginning part of your question um it's from carlo sarat yes and i it's love to hear and again you may have already you may have just answered this but it's love to hear which of the older poets you feel the most affinity with well um when i was first starting out i read a lot of gay poets um um uh i really really love tom gun um he seemed to me like in the middle ground between like ginsburg and meryl he could be formal and he could be totally Dionysian and i loved his work um and uh that's kind of a model to me is to find a place somewhere between these the most apollonian and the most Dionysian uh that's where i'd like to be so probably the poets that i've liked like bishop um elizabeth bishop are in that range um i think maybe that's that um i loved rich adrian rich when i was very young um i loved class so we apply you know i i uh i loved poems with raw feeling in them um even if it's really suppressed i i was drawn to that um okay well the next question is from connor bracken i love hearing you speak about the free verse sonnet and its fractures and lyrmets i'm curious if you have a similar relationship with the guy or does it offer different possibilities pleasures in your experience actually or hi brood i may have mispronounced that i'm not even sure how how do we say that is that hi boon or hey boon or how do you pronounce it oh dog you do know i hear it always says hi boon hi boon yeah that's how i've said it but i have a feeling i'm saying it wrong um i don't know well i don't uh i think if you're a poet it's sort of an ideal form because it allows you well i like the idea of in the body of a poem expanding and contracting and i don't mean that just in terms of language i mean it in terms of emotion as well and that seems to me a form that is you know that that embodies it in the most clear pure way i'm very drawn to the model of coming down to a kind of pinpoint in the just a moment i don't know why that is probably all i can say about that um i haven't ever actually written a proper hi boon um i need to i just in the last days i i i bought from a book dealer there's some pros of departures it was james merrill's hi boon i don't know you know this poem where he goes to japan he's just found out that he's entirely positive and he goes to japan and he's spreading about numerous things and at the same time experiencing japan for the first time and um so i've just been reading his hi boon and um you know it's 25 30 years old but it's very interesting um carla sarah it has another question she says does the fact that you're bilingual affect your writing in english well i'm not really bilingual um i speak french like i don't know like a smart eight-year-old um you could say um but i did grow up with other languages around me my grandmother only spoke Armenian and my mother spoke Armenian with her and then my mother only spoke french with her family so um but we weren't raised my mother really wanted us to be american children and my parents didn't have college educations and you know we weren't raised with this you know uh sort of forward thinking thinking bilingual uh my parents wanted me to be an american boy you know so all the french i know i've learned on my own um and and yet i feel so imprinted by french i have to say in particular french culture and well french poetry too i mean i think when you know another language and you all and you think of another kind of mirror word for it when you're writing it is a great gift to an artist to a writer to to have that knowledge um it presents more opportunities for you it's like another tool so i can't you know i can't say enough what how important it is i think uh the little bit of french i have is and it's a it's a great exercise i do translate as an exercise though i'm not good at it at all um it's a it's hard work i think translation is you know kind of god's work it's heroic work um and much undervalued you know under rewarded um who have you tried to translate on me well i try and do claire uh claire and i have done um some different french poets together uh um not really successfully she's so she's pretty tough you know i have to say um but with her help i can do it but i've never published any of them i mean i published a couple of players that's all um i have more confidence of them because they're her poem and i can go over it with her and i know her english is impeccable so i can go over it with her but i don't feel confident with um this other word but nevertheless i do it i often do it every morning when i'm in France um i have a question from Chelsea Hopper Henry would you be able to talk about promoting your book that was conceived of and created in a separate paradigm from the covid directed one we exist in now and as a side question do you happen to collect shells and if so how many do you have i do collect shells i would show you my collection but i don't want to stand up because you'd see what i'm wearing so i don't i do have a shell on my shelf here i do have this on my kitchen shelf i do have this very beautiful conk shell here um but i have a i have a tray of them in the living room but i won't bring them in to show them to you yeah shells represent to me the single voice the single voice of poetry really um i want my poems to seem like they're speaking to someone um someone listening alone i want them to seem like a single voice speaking do the shells ever give you poems i don't think i have any shells in my poems maybe i should i'm trying to think um yeah i don't think i have any you know i didn't i thought the book would get canceled the you know with the confinement and the summer went on and i thought my publication day it was september first i half expected for the publisher to fold you know i actually half expect that still you know i mean i just think because everything is changing so fast um i don't know what to expect i don't know you know people the harvard bookstore has opened up people are going in and buying books there uh one at a time but i mean i just don't know what to expect um i never expected to be doing this not in the farthest stretch of my imagination and yet i'm deeply grateful that i can't be able to do this um you know and um peace i i thought like you on ray that um books were just going to implode during this quarantine and pandemic and i find quite the opposite that publicly books are really it's what people need and they are supporting their local bookstores they're supporting their independent publishers and um i see more poetry books being read than any other kinds of books yes well i think you know i think there's a side of poetry that is like food you know it nurtures us and in confinement we need you know we need special food and um poetry in a way is the perfect you know it's the perfect solution to confinement um i'm not a big tv watcher i i watch almost no tv um if i turn it on it's usually for 30 minutes or to watch a movie a dvd so um you know i'm i'm not plugged into the world a lot that way so reading is um i'm grateful for it um okay we have a question from patrick davis you spoke earlier of the attraction to fractures gaps and leaps it seems to me similarly helps encourage and achieve that more than metaphor might do you see it this way and did that idea the similarly perhaps encouraging a big leap informed the title well i think similarly is important um um i think similarly really original similarly can reveal the greatness of your imagination you know i mean i think i think that's one of in aerosols poetics simile is one of the things he names i recall um but i but that's kind of for just for the last 20 or 30 years i didn't really some people are annoyed by my similes or some people are annoyed by similes something being like something one of my teachers was derrick walkard in graduate school and walkard i mean he has amazing similes my god i learned a lot from his similes um i mean very often they're describing the ocean but nevertheless um um he is really great if similes are a measure of greatness um in my view well it looks to me like we don't really have any questions left we have some comments um weston m says y'all are correct on pronunciation hi boom in the sense of an english sentence hi my name is boon well that's that's good i was thinking maybe it was hey boom or something um that's one of my students oh good i'm glad if there are students on i see some students names i see people you know the amazing thing about this is that i see people from all across my life on the screen their names and that's very moving it's one of the the pleasant signed effects of this pandemic is that suddenly you know it used to be that we would go and do a poetry reading in a small place and whoever showed up showed up and now you don't have to be in real time you can watch the recording or you can i i've attended readings that are in london and um georgia and you know all of these far-fung places that i would never get to attend otherwise yes it would be nice though to go out for uh you know supper okay i have i have one more question and it's kind of a request it's from richard sign i love the poems in this book i wonder if you might read the 10 couplet poem departure how did it feel to shift out of the form of the other poems to this one um do we have time um i think we have about we're supposed to be closing this at seven ten would you have would you have time to read that poem sure sure that that poem ends on a good note to end the reading on i just have to that's uh you know in my regular life i'm on a plane a lot uh kind of going from boston to southern california both places i love so much and this is an airport a sort of an airport runway poem um uh many of my poems focused on a creature or that's something in nature that leads me to something um something about human nature as in the case here departure during the minutes when a truck sprays frost off the small plane's wings two deer graze beyond the tarmac barrier their limbs flexible their rib cages pumping air the buck's head is adorned with a forest that renews itself each year we came down from the mountain for a ramble the doe announces wearing an ice frog sniffing his coarse hair the bottoms of their hooves listening to the frozen landscape she seems to be only partially certain he cares for her as she cares for him turning their elegance toward the runway they face me as i face them then the plane taxis onward and mounts gray bulbous clouds and a slow dissolve opening a newspaper i can feel the altitude against my face but something deeper what was that back there time is short if tenderness approaches run to it it's a marvelous closing line um and so peter could you unmute yourself and maybe say a few words thank you pam uh that was an excellent poem i think to close the evening it's always a pleasure to be part of a mechanics institute library event and i think you know pam what you and laura have done um it's such a delight to work with you uh we've collaborated on some wonderful wonderful events together in the past and mechanics institute is such an important resource and and cultural hub and for those of you who are like visiting if you're in the area please do support them um get a membership uh you know they've got as was mentioned earlier by dug uh this is a blip quaker in the building i mean it's a it's a really important center so we appreciate being asked back especially to celebrate the work of two poets we know and love and of course there there are no strangers to city lights we featured dug at the store many times uh on recalls work we greatly respect and we've been happy to be part of uh actually henry's last event here in san francisco which was incidentally also at the mechanics institute so i'd like to remind you all um books by both authors are available via the link that pam has posted in the chat function it will take you to the city lights poetry page if you scroll down to the bottom of that page we have titles by both dug and henry of course you may also purchase the books directly from the store i'm happy to announce the city lights is finally reopened at stores to the public of course following san francisco health department guidelines we're ready to do business once again so please do come and visit us you'll be able to safely browse our stacks our business hours are going to be seven days a week from eight um from 12 noon until 8 p.m so we've worked very hard to transform the store for the age of kovat the entrance is now actually on the Broadway side of the building at 271 columbus the original entrance is now an exit only so of course we encourage you all to please wear facial covering while visiting we're making our efforts to keep everything safe so uh as many of you know city lights also a publishing house as well as a bookstore we continue to publish in the grand tradition of laurence furlingetti's seminal pocket poet series to learn more about our books uh and um also the just the books that we carry on our shelves and our events calendar visit us at www city lights dot com um pam thank you so much thank you all for being here tonight thank you on recall Doug Powell uh everyone at mechanics institute of course you the members of the audience uh we hope to see you again soon please be safe be well and take care okay i'm going to close the doors in just a minute if everyone wants to unmute and just say goodbye i can say hello my beautiful cat okay i'm gonna have to close the doors all right you don't have to go home but you can't stay here i thank you very much thanks for bringing you home on me you're welcome richard