 Yesterday was a rare day in June. It was a good day to be in Wyver. And I collected the works of the panelists and just sat and read aimlessly and purposelessly. And I was just immersed in their worlds, realizing that all three of them write about beauty. They're deeply enmeshed in questions of aesthetics. But they also address questions of pain and trauma and suffering. They all remake plain the terrible things of human life. That's what Trilling said about Robert Frost's poetry. He tells us the terrible things of human life. And there's a certain comfort in that. So I will begin by introducing Jane, Jane Hirschfeld. And we are so lucky to have you here today. I know that you're on your way to Krakow. And is it truly a reading to the coal miners? Yes, in a coal mine and no doubt to the coal miners and many others. She travels all over the world preaching the gospel of poetry. And when I read your poetry yesterday, as it says, you should all rush out, go to the Harvard bookstore and buy a volume of her poetry. I read through the beauty last night. And it's just stunning. I will quote just one line. And evidently, she's going to read this poem. But it's so beautiful. And I repeated it many times to myself and to friends. Old shoes, old roads. The questions keep being new ones, like two negative numbers multiplied by rain into oranges and olives. My favorite is the poem Entanglement, which contains the Panchdine Turtles All the Way Down, which of course anthropologists and folklorists and mythographers love. And you can ask her about that. I think about 20 minutes or so for discussion. Jane studied at Princeton. And you were in the first class of women to graduate from Princeton. And she immediately went a natural white to the Zen Institute in San Francisco to recover. But Princeton and Zen, I love the startling combination. You are a master of paradox of oxymoron. And she has served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, something that I'd like to learn more about. And in addition to her many collections of poetry, The Beauty, Given Sugar, Given Salt, Come Thief, After. She's also the author of critical studies of poetry. 10 windows, how great poems transformed the world. And nine gates entering the world, entering the mind of poetry. So 10 is at 10 windows, nine gates. She's also at home in the world of numbers. And please welcome Jane Herschfield. Well, it is an enormous honor to be part of this celebration and to be here with Jamaica and Elaine and all of you. So I am mostly going to be reading poems, as Barry and Gretchen asked me to. And some of the poems will have numbers in them. And some will allude to other things that I think all of us who are here today care about and share this interdisciplinary day in honor of an adjective transcending human being. Although you did a pretty good job, the effervescence lifting weights. But before I read the poems, I thought I would read one quote, which shows the recognition from the other side, I mean your side, of the confluence between mathematics and poetry, which has something to do, I think, with symbolic smallness and largeness being inextricable, beauty, elegance, usefulness. And so here are a few words taken out of a lecture by the field's mathematician Michael Atia on the subject. In mathematics, beauty is a very important ingredient. Beauty in mathematics, as in architecture and other things, is a difficult thing to define. But it's something you recognize when you see it. It certainly has to have elegant simplicity structure form. The aim of the mathematician is to capture as much as you possibly can in small packages a high density of truth unit per word. And beauty is a criteria for that. If you've got a high density of beauty, it means you've got an awful lot identified in a very small compass. I'm using this quote in an essay about very short poems that's about to come out. A large, waffly, woolly result is rather dilute. In the absence of experimental science, the mathematician has to test his result by some other criteria. And one of the criteria is simplicity, beauty, and elegance. That shows he's on the right track toward truth and thought. Its appeal is more than just liking a pretty picture. Beauty has significance over and above its immediate attraction. And I know these are very old fashioned terms, truth and beauty, and yet we human beings seem really kind of stuck on them. So I'm going to begin with a relatively early poem titled Mathematics. And some of you may recognize in its description of a building, the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. Mathematics. I have envied those who make something useful, sturdy, a chair, a pair of boots, even a soup rich with potatoes and cream, or those who fix perhaps a leaking window, strip out the old cracked buddy, lay down cleanly the line of the new. You could learn, the mirror tells me, late at night, but lacks conviction. One reflected eyebrow quivers a little. I look at this borrowed apartment, everywhere I question it, the wallpaper's pattern matches. Yesterday a woman showed me a building shaped like the overturned hull of a ship. Its roof trusses under the plaster, lashed with soaked roll hide. The Collins marble painted to seem like wood, though possibly it was the other way around. I look at my unhandy hand, innocent, shaped as the hands of others are shaped. Even the pen it holds is a mystery, really. Raw hide, it writes, and chair, and marble, eyebrow. Later the woman asked me. I recognized her then, my sister, my own young self. Does a poem enlarge the world or only are an idea of the world? How do you take one from the other I lied or did not lie in answer, like two negative numbers multiplied by rain? Lie down, you are horizontal. Stand up, you are not. I wanted my fate to be human, like a perfume that does not choose the direction it travels that cannot be straight or crooked, kept out or kept. Yes, no, or a day a life slips through them, taking off the third skin, taking off the fourth. The logic of shoes still comes at last simple, an animal question scuffling. Old shoes, old roads, the questions keep being nuanced, like two negative numbers multiplied by rain into oranges and olives, like the small hole by the pathside something lives in. Like the small hole by the pathside something lives in, in me are lives I do not know the names of, nor the fates of, nor the hungers of, or what they eat. They eat of me, of small and blemished apples in low fields of me whose rocky streams and droughts I do not drink. And in my streets, the narrow ones, unlabeled on the self map, they follow stairs down music here's can't follow. And in my town, borrowed by darkness, in hours uncounted by the self clock, they speak in restless syllables of other losses, other loss. There, too, have been the hard extinctions, missing birds once feasted on and feasting. There, too, must be ideas like loud machines with tungsten bits that grind the day. A few escape a mercy. They leave behind small holes that something unwaid by the self scale lives in. So I'm going to read also, Maria didn't know I was going to read either of these poems, but the entanglement poem, which I suppose is a little wicked of me because it, it begins set in an academic conference in the David Lodge universe of small worlds where everybody is sleeping with one another. But it is, of course, the entanglement of physics as well, entanglement. A librarian in Calcutta and an entomologist in Prague signed their moon-faced illicit emails. Tom on Tom Glee. No one can explain it. The strange charm between border collie and sheep, leaf and wind, the two distant electrons. There is, too, the matter of a horse race. Each person shouts for his own horse louder, confident in the rising dim past mud. The horse will hear his own name in his own quickened ear. Desire is different. Desire is the moment before the race is run. Has an electron never refused the invitation to change direction, sent in no knowable envelope with no knowable ring? A story told often. After the lecture, the widow insisting the universe rests on the back of a turtle. And what the physicist asks, does the turtle rest on? Very clever young man, she replies. Very clever, but it's turtles all the way down. And so a woman in Beijing lies for her love who practices turtle geometry in Boston, a metal trinket from a night market street stall. On the back of a turtle, at rest on its shell, a turtle. Inside that green-painted shell, another, still smaller. This continues for many turtles until finally too small to see or to lift up by its curious preacherly head, a single ungreen electron waits the width of a world for some weightless message sent into the dim existence for it alone. Murmur of all that is claspable, clumberable, clamberable against all that is not. You are there. I am here. I remember. Zero plus anything is a world. I wrote this poem after most of my nuclear family had vanished. Four less one is three. Three less two is one. One less three is what is who remains. The first cell that learned to divide learned to subtract. Recipe, add salt to hunger. Recipe, add time to trees. Zero plus anything is a world. This one and no other unhidden by each breath changed. Recipe, add death to life. Recipe, love without swerve what this will bring. Sister, father, mother, husband, daughter, like a cello forgiving one note as it goes than another. This next poem does have numbers in it, rather large numbers. But I chose it in celebration of Barry and Gretchen and love because it's a little hard to hear the word in the title, Cirrus the Clouds. And I just want to say that the part of the poem, which is fact checkable, I had guessed the numbers just out of the blue and then was absolutely astonished when my friend the astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter told me they were correct. I always fact check my poems with the best of fact checkers. First light edging, Cirrus. 10 to the 25th molecules are enough to call woodthrush or apple. A hummingbird, fewer, a wristwatch, 10 to the 24th. An alphabet's molecules, tasting of honey, iron, and salt, cannot be counted as some strings untouched sound when a near one is speaking. As it was when both slipped inside us, it looked out face to face in every direction than it was inside the tree, the rock, the cloud. I have more recently, since the most recent book, there is an ever increasing number of poems dealing with the crisis of the biosphere. So these are poems that speak to that and also, at least, the first couple have numbers in them. As if hearing heavy furniture moved on the floor above us, as things grow rarer, they enter the range as a counten. Remain this many Siberian tigers, that many African elephants, 300 dead egrets. We scrape from the world its tilt and meander of wonder as if eating the last burned onions and carrots from a cast iron pan. Closing eyes to taste better, the charm of ordinary sweetness. This next one is going to sound a little different. It is not a perfectly rhyming poem, but it has a lot of sound calling to sound in it. I wrote it when I was able to stay for a month at work at the painter Robert Rauschenberg's old place on Captiva Island. This was in 2016, which was the rainiest January into February ever recorded in Florida. Captiva will be one of the first places to vanish with sea level rise. Ledger. Tchaikovsky's Eugene O'Negan is 3,592 measures. A voice kept far from feeling is heard as measured. What's wanted in desperate times are desperate measures. Pushkin's unfinished O'Negan, 5,446 lines. No visible tears measure the pilot's grief as she lied ours the height of an island, 5 feet. 50, it's high asleep. She logs the years, the weathers the tree has left. A million fired clay bones, animal, human, sat down in a field as protest measure 400 yards long, 60 yards wide, with 112 tons. The length and weight and silence of the bereft. Bees do not question the sweetness of what sways beneath them. One measure of distance is meters, another is lee. 10,000 lee can be translated far, for the exiled home can be translated then translated scarred. One liter of Polish vodka holds 12 pounds of potatoes. What we care about most we call beyond measure. What matters most we say counts. Height now is treasure. On this scale of 1 to 10, where is 11? Ask all you wish, no 25th hour will be given. Measuring mounts, like some Western bars, mounted elk head are cataloged, vanishing, unfinished heaven. This next one begins referencing a rather well-known to biologists essay. Ant's Nest. On being the right size, Haldane's short essay is titled, an ant's nest can be found at the top of a redwood, no bird that weighs less than, no insect more than, the minimum mass for a whale, for a language, an ice cap. In a human-sized room, someone is setting a human-sized table with yellow napkins. Someone is calling her children to come in from a day whose losses as yet remain child-sized. On the fifth day, the scientists who studied the rivers were forbidden to speak or to study the rivers. The scientists who studied the air were told not to speak of the air. And the ones who worked for the farmers were silenced, and the ones who worked for the bees. Someone from deep in the Badlands began posting facts. The facts were told not to speak and were taken away. The facts surprised to be taken were silent. Now it was only the rivers that spoke of the rivers and only the wind that spoke of its bees, while the unpausing factual buds of the fruit trees continued to move toward their fruit. The silence spoke loudly of silence, and the rivers kept speaking of rivers of boulders and air. And to gravity, earless and toneless, the untested rivers kept speaking. Bus drivers, shelf stockers, code writers, machinists, accountants, lab techs, cellists kept speaking. They spoke the fifth day of silence. What it actually refers to is the fifth day of the current administration, which I'm sure many of you will remember was the day that all references to climate change were taken down from the White House website. And all scientists who worked for the government were told not to speak to anyone. And I did not want to leave you too sad. And so I thought I would close with the poem, which certainly reflects Barry's character and way of being in the world. I wrote it at a time when I, myself, personally needed the quality it talks about, but also very much in awareness of ecological disaster. The spill in the Gulf, the Deepwater Horizon, had happened. And I think most of you probably know what was surprising about that was the extent and the speed to which, yes, irreparable damage, but the recovery surprised those who were looking by how quickly it actually went. And they realized that this was partly because of nothing that human beings were doing, but because the very tiny creatures of the waters themselves were working towards the repair of the spill. Optimism. More and more, I have come to admire resilience, not the simple resistance of a pillow whose phone returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree. Finding the light newly blocked on one side, it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true, but out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs. All this resonance on a retractable earth. Thank you. Hello, my name is Jamaica Kinkague. All of our panelists are poets. And Jamaica Kinkague understands the sorcery of words better than almost anyone I know. Her many works of fiction include Annie John, Mr. Potter, See Now Then, and The Wonderful Lucy, which I started yesterday, and then stayed up reading, extraordinary. And I did stay up late. My York and fairy tales begin not with once upon a time, but with it was and it was not. And when I read Jamaica's, this is part of an interview, Jamaica's words about her writing. Everything I say is true, and everything I say is not true. I was reminded of it was and it was not. She's won many prizes, received many honorary doctorates at Tufts, Brandeis, other prizes. I will not recite them all. You can read them on Wikipedia. There's a long, long list. I will just tell you about one of her great claims to fame. I discovered this on Wikipedia as well. It happened in 1996 when she resigned from the New Yorker. After Tina Brown, the editor, chose actress Roseanne Barr to guest edit an issue as an original feminist voice. Well, Jamaica, I think you're going to read from your work this morning and maybe tell us about your adventures at the New Yorker and other places all over the world. Thank you very much for action and merit for having me here. I say to Elaine, I can't understand why they have dinner with me every week. I try to tell them that they should have it with someone else, but they insist. And it's a great thing for me. And I'll tell you, they put up with me saying things like a saint to Barry, for instance. Well, if you took the earth and put a large pin right through it, where would it come out? And they tried to explain to me about how the planets were really anyway. Or, for instance, when I said to him, well, you know, I just don't like numbers. And he winced because if someone said to me, they didn't like words. You can't say to me, you don't like the alphabet because I learned to read without knowing that there was such a thing called the alphabet. So if you say you don't like letters, it's OK because I'm already interested in words. So when I said that, and I tried to explain to him that the thing about numbers is that they actually stay still as zero is zero, apparently. And will never be anything but zero. And I like things that I can modify and can make is and not is. But he's still, they love me anyway. I love them. I'm very honored to be here, even if I'll never know why. They both, I can't separate them. They both are Barry and Richard. And I have a, I call them the Bee Gees. They have an enormous interest in me, for instance, the way I am a parent. They are such loving people that I just said, oh, look to them. And said, oh, this is how you do it. And it made me into a better parent. They could give you lessons on this. And if they did, your children would just love you forever, even if you don't want them to. So there's that. But I can see that, I wrote this book, and I can see the influence that speaking to Barry, the numbers thing, would have had with me. I'm always very interested in time, which I think a lot of people have interpreted as interested in autobiography and memory and so on, which is also true, but it's essentially, I'm interested in how you make sense of time. I think I once asked Elaine this other question. This question, you might not remember. But I was reading about the Earth's atmosphere, and it said it rained for 100 million years of some poisonous gas, and then at the end of it, we ended up with the atmosphere we were in. And so I said to Elaine, well, when do you see 100 million years? Is it like 100 million, 365, 24? Do you remember this? No, OK. And she said, well, I think so, because it's just a sort of question I think about all the time. And every once in a while, I allow myself to tell someone this is what I'm thinking. But then yesterday, I think it was, I was reading that the days were getting longer because the moon was doing something. The moon moves away from the Earth. And I thought, oh, well, that question of the hours of days and so on wasn't so silly after all. I still don't understand it. But I suppose what I was trying to do and Marry and Cretchen are responsible for this, I think trying to understand what it is, how we, as human beings, capture time, how we make an hour, for instance, why is it 60 something old? Anyway. So this book, this passage from which I'm going to read to you, it's called See Now Then. And if you think about the title, a little bit of See that it has to do with the, because you can, well, what is now? This is now, but then in a little bit, it will be then. It's always now and then is what I was trying to see how to think about a life. So I took a family and put them in England. And they are falling apart. They live in a house called the Shirley Jackson House. And they don't live in a house called the Robert Frost House because in a house in New England, Robert Frost's son, Carol, killed himself. And this family is not that kind of family. They are a Shirley Jackson kind of family. So and then they, it's a mother and a father. They're named Mr. and Mrs. Sweet. And if you were to read the book, you'd see they were not at all sweet people. And they have two children whose named a boy named Hercules and a girl named Persephone. And the children have characteristics that would reflect if you are a polydorus. You'll see that. So I'll just read you a little bit of it as a tribute to Barry, and therefore, I love you both. I don't think I tell him enough. So the family is all the great parts that I was going to read. So Mrs. Sweet's husband has said goodbye to her. And because he finds her an abomination, she knits him an orchestra, but she forgets to nick the hand that would play the instruments. She's incompetent. So he has to leave her. And it upsets the children. So here it is. But she, Mrs. Sweet, could see the young Hercules sitting on a couch in the children's room watching Michael Jordan and Scotty Pippin and Dennis Rodman defeat Carl Malone and John Stockton and Michael Jordan, who then had a very bad cold. And each time he made a score, he almost fell down. But his fellow teammate, Scotty Pippin, was always there to hold him up. And the young Hercules, who worshipped Michael Jordan, held his opponents in high disregard and said they were lame. And Mrs. Sweet knitted and purled all the while, listening to her son whoop and shout and moan and cry out in agony at the very deep idea that his beloved Michael Jordan's team would lose. But then they won. And the young Hercules said to his mother, hey, mom, I know you're going to say this is just like Homer. This is just like the Iliad. And there is a feminine. And there is Achilles coming up to save everything. Admit it, mom. You're going to say it's just like Homer in that funny little voice of yours. As if you are on the radio, because you talk like someone on the radio, your voice is official, but you're just my mom and you're so ridiculous. I don't know what I'm going to do with you. You are so embarrassing. And Mrs. Sweet knitted away, for she was right then making the entire orchestra that would perform Mr. Sweet's, that would perform Mr. Sweet's suite of nocturnes. But much to her surprise when this chore was completed, the performers were all missing one of the arms they needed to play the instruments. So inevitable, so inevitable are the series of events seen over your shoulder as you glance back from the series of events that stand before you. And in your own mind, you can see the series of events that are to come, that are arrayed before you. And they appear as if they are in the rear view mirror, but only in reverse, only as if the rear view mirror could make visible the thing that has not happened yet for perhaps time said Mrs. Sweet to herself as she knitted away those garments with one sleeve missing was a father, not a mother, and Mrs. Sweet had no father. That is, she had not been offered, she had been created by a very malicious woman. Oh mom, oh mom, can't you see, said the young boy to his mother. And he was jumping up and down running this way and that through the assembled crowds of shy murmidons, ninja turtles, power rangers, super Mario Batman, various figurines from Star Wars, various stuffed animals, stuffed animals, some resembling the domesticated, some resembling wild ones who are now extinct, and they all lay before him, and also they all lay before him in his memory, so fresh, so fresh and so clean, Mrs. Jackson, that they still inhabited his now, and the boy, young Heracles, is now involved in the sadness of worrying about Ken Griffey, whose father had been a legend of baseball lore, and so the young Heracles told his mother, and the young Heracles loved the young Griffey, and was so involved in his fate, which might not be so full of glory, as was his Michael Jordan, and Scotty Pippen, and Dennis Rodman, but just then, as he was sitting in his chair in the children's room, his father, Mr. Seed, said to him, I must tell you something, and Mr. Seed said, I don't love your mother anymore. I love another woman who comes from somewhere else, another woman with whom I have been taking ballroom dancing lessons, and we talk about Mozart, for she plays the piano forte excellently, and she could be the next extraordinary piano genius of the century. The century is long because centuries are long, though in your life you might, ha, ha, ha, find them, not as long as I have found them, but I love her and nothing can change that, and I don't love your mother. You know, we were always so incompatible, for she did emerge from a boat whose main cargo was bananas, and she is strange, and she would live in the attic of a house that burns down, though I don't want her to be in it when that happens, but if she was in it when the house burned down, I wouldn't be surprised. She is that kind of person. I've been hearing all this, oh, no, it was a long howl of pain that came out of the bowels through the darkness of the mouth of the young heritages, and unfurled and unfurled again and again like the petals of a flower, as it comes into bloom and then fades rapidly, so did the young heritages, who had only been sitting in his chair in the children's room, watching on television, the young ball player Ken Griffey, in the process of being or never being the great baseball player all the baseball world thought he would be, in the corner of that room in which the young heritages heard the indictment against his sacred mother, he loved her so. He thought her ridiculous, her obsession with plants and flowers and fruits that they bear, her wanted to wear jumpers made of denim, a uniform of workmen in some far-away country, to parents night at his school, so all the other parents could see that she wasn't at all like them, her love of cooking food that took a long time to prepare, duck with plum sauce, that took days before it was ready to be eaten, the other mothers didn't know that she could sing all the words to Stan and that she loved Dr. Dre. She once went off to China and spent weeks there collecting the seeds as plants she could grow in her garden. That time she told a man who's taking his family on a shopping, on his family on, a shopping outing to Manchester and he took her parking spot before she had a chance to position her car properly and he took her parking spot before she had a chance to position her car properly. Maybe your dick will fall off and the man who had never been spoken to like that before in front of his treasured family came in rage, so much so that it filled him with shame and he almost laughed from it but he soon recovered and did not yield at the parking spot and he proceeded to the Ralph Lauren outlet and was never seen again by the young heritage. And mom is so ridiculous and she is so ridiculous and mom is so ridiculous. He thought of the time and she had taught him to make her a martin so he could bring it to her at half past five in the afternoon while she was in the garden doing something that nobody in the rest of the family cared about and there was this day when Mr. Sweet came into the house and said to the young Heracles, have you seen my beautiful wife and Heracles answered, no, but if you're looking for mom, she's in the garden. And mom loved the garden as if it were a person or something like that. So caught the young Heracles and none of the other mothers were like that. None of them thought the garden was like a person and had an individual need and then called for attention and care and could enrich your inner life. So thought the young Heracles. None of my friends and mothers were like mom and it is so embarrassing, mom is so embarrassing. If she wasn't my own mom, I would have gone out and found a mom who wasn't like her at all. A mom who was just like the other moms for mom is so embarrassing. And just outside the room in which poorly the shy Mermidorns and the Ninja Tatls and the Power Rangers and Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, though never at all, Princess Leia and Batman, though never at all, Robin, just outside the room was the tree house that Rob had built with wood. Mr. Sweet had ordered to measure from the Greenberg slumber store and Rob had nailed the wood into the evergreens that had been planted in the yard just outside. The Shirley Jackson house. And Mr. Sweet said, I love your mother. I will always love your mother. She is dear to me. The damage this week, but she is so awful. Did you hear the way she talked to the waiters? She's so objectionable. I would never tell you this because I really couldn't. In our house we celebrated Christmas and Easter and we were never rude to people who waited on us and your mother would be of the people who waited on us but she, your mother, was so interesting when I first knew of her. She was interested in the arrangement of the firmament and I bought her a telescope for her birthday and she loved insects, butterflies especially, and I gave her a net to catch them for I knew of Nabokov and she didn't know of Nabokov. And it was such a pleasure to see her delight in all that I could show her. She really rewarded my efforts but then she broke into a monster and one day I noticed that she was rude to waiters and I could have been rude to waiters but I knew that such a thing was wrong but one day she went to all days in Dunions to get special papers and she saw the waitress speaking kindly to a man, an ugly man, and the waitress said to that ugly man, hello handsome, what can I get for you today? And after the transaction, your mother said to the waitress, how can you speak to such an ugly man? And the waitress said, that was my husband. And your mother returned to me and she was filled with a description of fields of pink flowers that were shaped like fists and it was to see this, the fields of pink flowers like fists that made her take that route to the old days in Dunions and it was there she started the waitress and her husband and that was the firmament straw. It was then I wanted to be with someone who wouldn't instinctively be unkind to people who waited on me and my mother and my father and my brother and his familiar and your mother was someone who couldn't make such a distinction. I wish she minced words, I wish she would bite off her tongue, I wish she would simply become dead. Oh young hercules, oh young hercules, where are you? Are you under the blanket of my despair that that is your mother, that truly abominable woman, your mother, Mrs. Sweet? Listen to this right now, Mr. Sweet will say, I love you but I don't love you in the way I love someone so superior to you than myself. Someone I shouldn't be allowed to even speak to. She's so wonderful and outside any realm I have ever known and Mrs. Sweet heard all these words but couldn't understand them really and could only see Mr. Sweet as he could one day be covered in small worms crawling and crawling through going only from his head to his toes and no further than that and then his whole body was like a lacework, beautiful and useless, waiting to be turned into something the bodice of a dress or the top border of curtains. Something seen in passing and in the end annoying. He listened Mr. Sweet was saying and now Mrs. Sweet turned into not stone but a mound of mud and sorrow became her middle name as if she could possess one but she did not then and not now and she sank into her ancient landscape and that would be memory and that would be her mother and that landscape had a horizon and she longed again and again to see the end of it, to see the horizon and stand on it and see the thing it held or the nothing within it. My mother was very beautiful and I was ashamed of this. I was so ashamed of my mother's beauty. Things change Mr. Sweet was saying to Mrs. Sweet, things change but that was the harsh version for he was in a state of rage. His voice was like a Wilkinson razor, was like a Wilkinson razor blade, newly merged from that iron mongers factory his arms jabbed at her but stopped short of making contact with the inconsolable mass of flesh heaving with sorrow and then resting from that. Things change sweetie, things change and he twitched his hips and shook his head universally dancing to a music that was heard only by him or so Mrs. Sweet said to herself on seeing him then and then he began to hum out loud, parts out, the right of spring, the sea, the cat, the spider's web, the rat, the dog, the child's bed and after he was done with that he said to his wife, now shorn of her former dignity, Mrs. Sweet, and she was wearing a lovely brown dress made by Hillard. I never loved you, you know, I never loved you. Not because you were unlovable, though rarely you are. No one could love you, not even me who knew nothing about love then but now I do and I see that I never love you for you are like walking into barbed wire in the dark. You are like an invitation to a tea party in an ant nest. You are like, you are like, I can't really longer right now think of what you were like. So said Mr. Sweet, to Mrs. Sweet and just then, right then, she was so beside herself with grief and she went and her tears watered the Crimmula Capitata which she had planted under the giant white pine tree and so her tears were most welcomed by that delicate plant, native as it is the moist regions of the Himalayas and she wept and Mr. Sweet spoke to her as she was bent over the parched primoses themselves wilting and prostrate on the ground suffering from the harsh conditions on which they were forcibly being cultivated in the crotch of the roots of an every native to Canada though they came from the Himalayan region of the world and Mrs. Sweet wept and wept and wept some more for Mr. Sweet said then to her he had just cried because you know the children and I will never forgive or forget the terrible things who have said and done and that made her die a death in which she was still alive not dead at all but still alive and yet dead or he showed her life as she had been living in it the moment when the beautiful Persephone had to be put to bed at dusk but she resisted it always because she wanted to be with her parents they did things that were mysterious to her and she would delay that moment when she would be placed in her crib for she had not yet overgrown it and her thickly woven cotton blanket would be drawn up and carefully arranged under her chin for her arms were folded up into her body like a bird if you were baking it as a delicious dish to be served for dinner Mrs. Sweet died and died in this way for she lived for a long time dying over and over again never coming to her rest a state of not then, not to come not to have been only now, only die and die and die and Mrs. Sweet died, she did die and never again were the denim jogger purse that had been given to her by her friend Rebecca who had seen them linger on buying municipal workers in Japan when she was on a visit there each day has 24 hours each week has seven of those years of those days each year has 52 weeks and it is so and the age of the earth is made up of more than four billion years of those years and weeks and days and hours then, now and then again forcibly enclosed in it and it was and is and will be so Mrs. Sweet said to herself over and over again as if for a song that had been carried on the wind and she had heard it and taken it to heart a song heard while walking along the baths of the Battenkill River for 28 miles and she stood still then seeing in her mind's eye the winding course the river would take ending with it emptying itself into the Hudson River some distance away from that place where the seas tides influence the river all that is to come will change the way right now is seen right now is so certain right now is forever what is to come we may distort and even erase right now right now will be replaced by another right now and right now is all there is and all there is over and over again and no well enough of the fluids and of the individual stomach a universal metaphor for the unstableness of the whole human enterprise as it is experienced by the person making breakfast for the litter of domesticated mammals before her or him and the boy and girl with Game Boy or Super Mario in hand as the case may be no matter how it is heard no matter how it is felt and it is such a disappointment right now for right now is always so incomplete or so we feel and that is a blessing for it transforms then into what will come all that will come even though all that will come must contain right now and your father belonging for the then that time to come after the earth was pre-Cambrian Hadean, Proto-Zooie, Peidu-Zooie, Cambrian Audubitian, Silurian, Devonian, Cretaceous and lower this and lower that and then upper that too and then Sin-Azuic and Rifting and Volcanic that time to come after the earth was itself that time to come was the time that had been before for beyond the earth's boundaries was all that had made it was all that had been and is and the future was the past and the past which is then, it is always then could be found in the periodic table and Mrs. Sweet looked up and saw that pen to the doors of the boundary was a map illustrating the principles of that thing itself the periodic table the beautiful Persephone showed an interest in chemistry and her mother had purchased it and placed it there and then Mrs. Sweet looked out the window through the panes of grass that separated and shielded her from all that lay outside the Shirley Jackson house the house in which she lived with her children and her husband and she could see a landscape so different from the one in which she was formed that paradise of persistent sunshine and pleasant weather a paradise so complete it immediately rendered itself as hell outside now there was spring and in it on the banks of the river Paran and stretching out onto the flanks of the Teconic and the Green Mountain ranges were large trees and some of them some of them evergreen some of them deciduous and right there in Bard thank you I'm being an academic from I think this is from the New York Times magazine there's a wonderful article about you from what is it about 2009 or so maybe anyway you can look it up there's nothing about being an English professor that exempts you from the normal obligations of citizenship she says firmly in fact you have an increased obligation because you know how to do research and that is Elaine who does research and carries out the cultural work of linking aesthetics and ethics of understanding the connection her writings take us to the intersection of beauty and trauma as I mentioned before first with the body and pain her landmark study of violence and torture it's a book that instantly became authoritative became part of the canon and then more recently the body in more pain with her extraordinary thermonuclear monarchy which explores the consequences of placing control of nuclear weapons and the authority to launch them in the hands of our president in 2014 we're now at the other end of the spectrum and there is hope actually I think am I giving the right date for beauty and I'm being just that was earlier wasn't it? Yeah in any, well we don't have to worry about dates this is a book that defends beauty as a moral resource it's also a book that changed the life of many of my students who read it, read it and then develop brain crushes on Professor Scarey and they also read parts of Dreaming by the Book Nerd Heaven for those of us who are passionate readers as children is a book that tells us many things but among them how writers animate their universes how they create vivacity and how they enable us to see and feel when they have nothing but words and Elaine Anderson is going to talk about Plato and you will get to see vivacity in action Conduct of the understanding John Locke says that the surest way to stop thinking is to read writings only in one field and to speak to people only in one field so I think that means that even if math and poetry had nothing to do with one another John Locke would probably say that practitioners of math should read or write poetry and poets and readers of poetry should become more conversant with math but as it happens and as we've already heard math and poetry do have something to do with one another even if the continuity isn't quite as immediate and profound as that between music and math for one thing poetry is almost impossible to describe the formal properties of poetry are almost impossible to talk about without using counting words like couplets, quatrains, terceryma, octaves, sestes, sestina octavarina, iambipentameter, iambitexameter, treolets and so forth they're all counting words second as again as you've heard from very eloquent people today both realms have a great deal to do with beauty probably all of you have heard Barry Mazer say as I've heard him say many times that there's no necessary reason as far as he can see why a math and light article proof has to be beautiful it just happens to be the case that they always are and I won't try to point out the beauty of poetry third and again this is something that's already been eloquently described today that both of them have to do, require of us a kind of mental, a work of mental picturing mental picturing in numbers that are hard to picture or imagine like those that can't be expressed by a fraction of which one number is put over the other number or the kind of work that that Jamaica or Jane require of us in the kind of mental picture making and Barry as you all know has written an incredible book called imagining numbers particularly the square root of minus 15 where he pivots back and forth continuously between the feet or trying to bring about the feet of picturing numbers and the way in which somebody like Yates or Oscar Wilde or Virginia Wolf or Wallace Stevens or Novaka or Melville or Coleridge or John Ashbury or many others and he calls on all of these people to perform their work of image making and as extraordinary as the poems that that Barry himself writes love poems for Gretchen or poems to Zeke or poems to a reading to Naya are his own, is his own knowledge and as well as Gretchen's knowledge of poetry. Now poetry shares another feature with math, this conference is titled The Long Conversation and imagining numbers ends by Barry saying that mathematics is one of the longest conversations that mankind has and that its most treasured conclusions are always a springboard for future questions and answers and when we reconvene on Barry's 100th birthday I'll remind for you the analogy this has with poetry but for today I'm just gonna talk about one brief chapter of the account of poetry that can be given and that's the account given by Plato and the probably you've heard it said that Plato dismisses poetry because he does banish them from the Republic in the 10th book but as it happens Plato's works are saturated with love and respect for poetry and it's a mystery to me how this sense that he dismisses poetry gets said so many times a week on the ground of this university and the ground of every other university and I wanna just take one brief instance of his commitment to poetry in the works he wrote describing the accusation against Socrates and the actual death of Socrates. So those four works are the Euthyphal in which Socrates is, we're made acquainted with the accusation against Socrates and that dialogue happens as you'll remember right outside the law courts. Then comes the Apology which is the actual trial of Socrates where we hear him making several speeches trying to defend himself. Then comes the Crito where he's in prison and his friends try to help him escape but he refuses to accept their help and then comes the Crito, not to be confused with the Fidris, the Crito which is again in prison but this time on the evening of the morning on which he will die. And unlike many of his works like the, let's say the Aeon or the Symposium or the Fidris or the Epius or the Laws, this is not a work that overtly deals centrally with poetry. The matters in these four dialogues are things like the duty to justice argument. For example in the Crito Socrates says in war and in the port of justice and everywhere you must do whatever your country tells you to do or you must persuade them that they're being unjust. And that argument has a much more current articulation in John Rawls's duty to justice argument which is a re-statement of it. You have an obligation to uphold just arrangements where they already exist and you have an obligation to try and bring them about where they don't already exist, at least if you can do that without harming yourself. But then there's also another idea which is the tacit consent through wrestling with the citizens that you can send to a country by residing in it. The idea that the nature of justice doesn't change depending on how far you are from death. The requirements of justice are the same whether it's the night before you die or whether as will happen in the Fido or whether you're 10 years away. And then there is the famous statement that reappeared for many centuries afterward, the definition of philosophy, philosophy is learning how to die which is the statement made in the Fido. Now in each of these, in a brief time that I've remaining he makes clear, Plato makes clear the continuity between the aspirations of Socrates and the work of poetry. For example, in the Euthepho, and I should say that in all four of them we're gonna see the unstoppable ability of Socrates. He's accused not only of blaspheming against the gods by his own daemon but by transmitting, by teaching and that is really what he is on trial for. And yet in each of them he's gonna replace law with education essentially starting on the steps of the law courts and then moving into the law courts and we're gonna see that kind of him going on talking endlessly the whole time. But one of the things that Euthepho and Socrates see is that Socrates says that his father is Daedalus. Daedalus was the great artificer, the great sculptor and Euthepho and Socrates agree that what made Daedalus the famous artificer was the fact that his sculptors, his artifacts were so lifelike they appeared to move. And again, both Euthepho and Socrates agree that what Daedalus did with material sculpture, Socrates can do with verbal arguments. And in fact, Socrates says, I think that I might even be a bigger genius than Daedalus because he could only make his own artworks move whereas I can make not only my own verbal statements move but I can make other people's verbal statements move. And then in the apology where he is going to at first defend himself against 501 jurors and then after they convict him, he goes on to address the fact that they're now gonna have a second trial on what his punishment should be. And then, by the way, more people vote for him to be exited than a voter for him to be guilty so it shows that his talking is not winning and any friends. But then the third speech he makes is addressed specifically to those people who voted against execution. Now, he's relentlessly told us that he's not gonna stop talking and teaching. He says at the moment when he's being invited to offer up an alternative punishment, he says, I'm not gonna recommend that you banish me. Although by the way, if you banish me, I would delight in having conversations with all the young foreign students. He says instead that they should give him a stipend so he can go on talking. They reject that alternative. But then after they vote to execute him, he addresses himself only to those people who have voted against execution and he's talking to them to try and make them feel more at ease with the fact that he's about to die. And he says you shouldn't feel bad because one of two things is true. Either there's no consciousness after death in which case it's just like asleep and it'll be fine or we do have consciousness and if we have consciousness that means that I'm gonna be able to talk to all the people who have died before me. But you might ask yourself how can this statement that Plato dismisses the Poets continue and be reiterated day after day when just for example, you have him saying that he wants to talk to Orpheus Musaeus as he had in Homer. Well, I'm gonna tell you how. He says that if you look at the actual addition, one of the best translations of the apology that was published by Pan Winslow, a leading publisher between 1954 and 1994 had superscripts in that sentence where he lists Orpheus Musaeus, Hesse and Homer and then gives footnotes. So the footnote for Orpheus says Orpheus is no doubt mentioned not as a singer and a poet but as the founder of Orpheus. I'm sorry, she's thinking about Orpheus. But if you go into this believe that Plato and Socrates rejected the Poets then you have to work very hard to account for all these other things he says. He says something similar about Musaeus. Musaeus was a bard like Orpheus but his benefactions consisted in giving Orpheus and Hesse is being quoted because he is very didactic. Now if you can actually get rid of proper nouns that easily think how easy it is to get rid of ordinary nouns or ordinary adjectives. For example, in the Ion the word callus recurs at least eight times in connection with poetry and yet rather than translating that beauty it's usually translated at least in the translations I've looked at by the word splendid and fine which are legitimate synonyms and translations but it severs poetry from what everyone agrees is a great matter for Plato, the nature of beauty. In fact, so true is that one very famous reader of Plato, Christopher Janoway says there's little reason to think that this beauty itself has much to do with the arts as such on the basis of and he's talking about the Ion. Now again in the Crito, so the third of them when now Socrates is in jail and I'm losing track of time, am I okay with time? Okay, so in the Crito the Socrates is saying look I'm not going to take the escape route I don't want to dress up in a costume and put on some theatrical play and pretend to be someone else and yet he himself generates a miniature play or dialogue by suddenly imagining and making us believe that a woman not named the laws is there and it is the laws who give the explanations for why you're not allowed to escape why you have to accept the state's right to punish even if the state has made a mistake in that. And at the time in the classical period Plato's dialogues were seen as a great poetic invention. For example, someone named Diogenes Laertes says that of all the practitioners of dialogue the perfect, the most perfect instance of it and the one who deserves the prize for both invention and beauty and again I'm quoting using my own vocabulary is Plato. And we know that Aristotle in his work that we only have a fragment of called on poets says that Plato's dialogues fall between poetry and prose and then Cicero also said that Plato's is a greater poet than the comic poets and that continues forever afterwards. So here's somebody who let's just exaggerate and say he invents or at least he perfects and that's not an exaggeration, the dialogue form. Inside this dialogue we've watched Socrates create a dialogue and it's not a dialogue based on some historical reporting. It's a dialogue based on imitating a divine truth the nature of law, the true nature of law and justice and enacting it. So we're getting a miniature and this is important because Socrates and Plato will say in the Theotetus that what differentiates my opinion from knowledge is the ability to have a form that's cognate with the content that the form has to recreate the content of an idea and that is what we watch him doing at every moment. Now finally when you get to the Fido as you remember the friends come to the prison and say, Socrates what are you doing? Someone told us that you've been trying to write a hymn to Apollo and that you're trying to translate Esau in the verse. What can you be thinking of? And Socrates says, well you know throughout my whole life I've heard a boy saying cultivate and practice the arts and I thought I was doing this by doing philosophy because I've always thought philosophy was the highest art but now that I'm getting close to death I'm beginning to worry that maybe they were talking literally and using the word the way the popular word world uses it and they really mean poetry so just to cover myself I'm going to try to write a hymn and he finds out I'm not very good and he says, and also I'm not really good at invention so I'm gonna take one of Esau's fables and try and turn it into verse. Not very inventive, before that passage has even begun we've watched Socrates create a fable when the executioner takes the fetters off his limbs and so he suddenly feels the cessation of pain. He creates a little story about the kinship of pain and pleasure and says that was actually as good as Esau. So he is foregrounded not only his own invention but the place of imagining, the place of invention in all of this. And then finally, as you may remember at the end of this or near the end of this as the night's going on and he's talking away and away and remember the executioner says to him Socrates you've got to stop talking because the hemlock is not gonna work if you're aerating your whole body by talking so much. And I think Socrates says you're not gonna have to give me more than that. But they say to him, you know Socrates even after you give us lots of rational arguments about why we shouldn't be afraid of death and of course many of the dialogues give explanations about why we shouldn't be afraid of death but this one has a special obvious gravity in pregnancy because he's about to die. Some of you may know this statement by the 19th century novice George Eliot about the difference between the general proposition all men must die and the particular knowledge I must die soon. And that's the situation we're in in the veto. I'm gonna say, they say to him how even after you give us all these rational arguments about why we shouldn't be afraid of death there remains a child in us that is afraid as though of a hobgoblin of dying. And what can we do about that? And Socrates says, let the words of the charmer be applied daily until they have charmed away your fears. And the friends say, but where will we find such a charmer, Socrates, when you are gone? And Socrates says, well, you must look all over for him. It's the most important thing you can do. You should search all of Greece and all of Asia Minor. So again, knowing that the importance that philosophy is learning how to die and that's the reason why he felt that someone with a philosophic frame of mind had the greatest possibility of courage because they had, if they'd done their work probably had learned how to die. You can see the importance of this, which is validated in many of us other writings as well. Thank you. I was going to talk about negative capability. And maybe as I look at Elaine, I think of the trilling quotation that I said at the beginning, poets make plain the terrible things and that there is a sort of consolation in that, in that beauty. So I guess I won't ask you that because it will require you just to repeat your talk, but keeping that in mind. And maybe you could say a few words about what he's called negative capability, the capacity to remain in mystery and certainty and doubt. Well, while people are thinking, I'll just say that in reading various poems, which as I said, are wonderful, love poems to Gretchen and descriptions, love of the world. There was one poem that struck me as sounding a false note. It was about being annoyed by the sounds of the Fourth of July. And I thought to myself, you know, I see this person every, at least once a week for several hours. I've never seen him be annoyed. Have any of you ever seen Barry Mesa be annoyed? I mean, in a universe, in the university universe where often people are indignant, I agree, I've actually never seen Barry Mesa be annoyed. So I knew it was just a kind of what we call in poetry and now I'm an excuse for describing the different sounds as it happens the Fourth of July. So he had to say he was annoyed in order to give us a wonderful description. I'm just telling that as a mind of horrible things. And I ran about the culture of outrage and Barry is the exception. It's extraordinary to make. If you have anything to add on negative capability or autobiography, tell it, can you respond to? I remember reading a critic who was outraged, indignant that he writing is autobiographical. As if all writing were not autobiographical. Yes, it's autobiographical or I'm angry or I'm, or all sorts of things that you would apply to description and person's character, not the piece of writing. But I only, I mean, I just can see that that has to do with my physical appearance and the things I write about are not what people expect someone who looks like they should write about. And so instead of just saying, oh, why would this black woman write about black woman things in a way that is so familiar? They say, oh, she's angry. But so I don't, I dismiss it. But I don't, I don't, I mean, negative, I can't, I don't really answer question, negative capability, no, I don't know how to answer. What a back. Or do we have a, I'll lower it. I have too much to say about negative capability. And the end of that good is without any irrigable reaching for reasons and facts, our facts and reasons. Luckily for you, I don't memorize my poems, so I can't recite for you my poem against certainty. But I think that this, so an idea I've felt for quite a long time is that the most dangerous thing in the world is a person who is sure they are right. This is what allows tyrants, dictatorship, fundamentalism, the absolute certainty that you know the correct thing allows you to do terrible things to other human beings. A teaching in Buddhism, which I much have long had great affection for, is that all Buddhism rests on a tripod, great effort, great faith and great doubt. And so the practice of Zen, which is the school of Buddhism which I have been part of for some decades, it is very much about maintaining your doubt of all your ideas, all your perceptions, at the same time as you embrace your ideas. And it's not nihilism. It is the embrace of the particular, the treasuring of the feeling of being alive in this world. That final passage of your reading was so gorgeous to me. It was, I just fell into a complete swoon for its love of the world. But I think it is some testament to the peculiarity of our current times that I as a poet was reading you a poem in defense of facts. How can we have come to such a past that I have to write a poem on the fifth day in defense of facts? I believe that the work of poetry is so greatly the work of abiding in the unanswerable mystery of our lives. We will never really know about death. We only speculate from this side of death. And yet it is the job of poetry to extend a hand into the terror and hope and despair of the fact that our lives will end and say it's all right. Feel all those things. It is all right to feel all those things. It is what makes us human. And that's probably enough for me to say. That's a wonderful note on which to end things, but we do have one minute and I don't want to deprive us of another minute with the panelists. Could you just introduce something about the cult of the writer today? And the way in which writing is a form of self-actualization is we see this in Hollywood all the time. What do young women aspire to to becoming a writer? And what writing and words have meant for you? I'm just struck by the immensity of that subject because in English department at Harvard and I think in many, many schools and no doubt in other language departments the emphasis on writing, on creative writing and both of you can speak much more about that is becoming more and more emphasized and more and more of the coursework is migrating over to people actually learning to write creatively. And it's something that is like all those things needs to really be tested and examined and one thing that our faculty all the time recognizes both the creative writers in the department and the critical writers in the department is that it's very important for the two not to be severed because great poets, TS Eliot, James Heaney, et cetera they knew the other poets. They didn't just know their own poetry. So the danger is whether people begin to only write, write, do their own writing and forget to read the metaphysical poets and forget to read poets from many different countries. Thank you, make a few words of all the people who want to take your classes. Well, I think very of a very unpleasant reputation. So. But I really, with Elaine, I actually, I teach creative, something called creative writing but I don't really think you can teach anyone to write. So I don't, I think it should never be severed. And I think someone wanting to write if you're 20 or so, should probably not read a book while you are trying to write. Should probably not read a book that was published after the 19th century. So there goes my royalties. But I think you should just read the people who came here who you should just read the people who came before. I'm sorry that so many of the people who wrote before were all dead white men. But I find it forgivable because it's not entirely their fault that they're dead. I would say that, yes, I have my students read things like catalogs, plant catalogs because they don't know how to describe anything. And they don't really, they all want to write some stupid thing. And they should take, yes, I send all my students to the. So I think behind this question of, you know the cult of the writer. So I will say with almost certainty kind of against cults of all kinds. The very idea of a cult is the idea of blindfolding oneself to the breadth of the world. The current engagement with the expressive, perhaps that is one of the tasks of art in cultures is always to move towards what is under recognized. And however faultily this is being currently embraced and it is often cliche and imitation. But I think we are living in a world in which the individual particularized self is being stamped by certain ideas of theologies of all kinds. The sort of mechanistic world of economics as it is experienced by so many. The stamping out of one's own experience by this tsunami of given and offered templates of being. And so perhaps we can forgive this desire for everybody having a blog, everybody aspiring, everybody. I mean this is a counterweight to the stamping out of the self. The underside of it is the raising of ego. Look at me, look at me, look at me. Whereas the only reason to be expressive is to look at the world through the self that this is an instrument of knowing. And we want to know more than our own narrowly circumferenced biography. And yet we know the world only through our own eyes, ears, taste, tongue, experience. And part of that experience for me has always been the great writings of the past of people in translation from all times, all places. How will we ever know what the human is if we don't go looking for it in every vocabulary of being which is made available to us? Including our own, including others. There's no separation for me between these things. So it is this desperate impulse for a living engagement. And that I think we must honor. Thank you to our wonderful panelists. Thank you. Thank you.