 I'm Betsy Peckler, Dean of University Library Services, and I'd like to welcome you all to our final Talking in the Library event for this semester. The Talking in the Library series is generously supported by an alumna of the university, the late Mary Teft-White, and her donation also made possible this programming space that we're in right now, which is really high-tech and wonderful. This evening, we are delighted to present the voice of poetry in poems and prose featuring poet and memoirist Michael Klein, who will read from some of his works and then will be available for questions afterwards. So please stay and ask lots of questions. Adam Braver, Professor of Creative Writing and our Library Program Director, will introduce our speaker in just a moment. I'd like to briefly mention a couple of our events planned for this spring semester. In March, we'll present a panel of scholars on Zoom as part of the library's annual John Howard Burst Jr. Program to discuss this year's selection, Carson McCuller's novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. That event will be accompanied by both digital and physical exhibitions prepared by our library staff. In April, we will host the novelist, Sigrid Nunes, in person as part of the Vermont Fellowship in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction. We will be sending out information about these events soon, and I do hope all of you will join us. And now, Professor Braver will introduce our speaker. Thank you. In thinking of the writer, Michael Klein, one's first thought comes to Michael Klein, and why not? As early as his teenage years, he studied with the important and influential poet, Adrian Rich. As he began writing and publishing, it was his poetry that garnered attention. It was exemplified by a Huffington Post Review, in which the writer, reviewer writes, quote, one looks to Michael Klein, not for intricacies of craft or starburst of poetic form, but simply, and to put it directly, damn good poetry. Klein's approachable verse is deceptively unimposing, unadorned and understated. I'm still quoting from the review. In fact, the poet says much in demotic terminology that can only be emotionally possessed, processed at the level of the sublime. Michael has published three books of poems, edited in numerous anthologies, and published countless poems and journals as magazines, as well as being considered a first rate teacher of poetry in the classroom. So it stands to reason. But that only tells part of the story. What about the memoirs? Most notably, Michael's first track conditions, in which he recounts the period of his life when he worked at a racetrack as a groom, as groomed to a Kentucky Derby winning horse, while also taking the reader through his own path towards sobriety. What about the essays? The criticism, all equal in focus, intellect and artfulness. To appreciate the full scope of this writer, one might look to Michael's 2015 collection, which is in his hand, when I was a twin, a book that includes poetry, essays and criticism. One that Philip Clark, writing for Lambda Literary, noted is, quote, more than poetry, though even the prose pieces and essays are filled with it. You cannot tell where the prose ends or the poetry begins. Michael Klein writes every sentence with such attention as if every word were a particular person he was addressing. So yes, no doubt that Michael Klein's literary reputation may reside in the body of the poet. But perhaps it is best to think of Michael Klein as someone beyond genre, instead as someone engaged in the art of language. Please welcome Michael Klein. It's all lies. Thank you. That was a really lovely introduction, which is a rare thing these days, if you go to readings, particularly in academia. So I always appreciate. I'm going to read a bunch of stuff. I won't keep you too long. I'm going to put this. I do have to. Oh, thank you. Is that better? Thank you. I do have to time it because I have a tendency to go on and on and on, which my students constantly aware. I'm a very tangential teacher and I go on a lot of tangents when I'm teaching. And it works most of the time. I won't do that today. I'm just going to read poems and I will tell you a little bit about when I read the prose, I'll tell you a little bit about where that's coming from, but I'm going to start with some poems. And this is one that I really wanted to read, but I forgot to print out. It's called Drinking Money. In 1939, when my mother was seven years old, the lyricist Lorenz Hart gave her a photograph of himself on which he had inscribed in midnight blue ink for Catherine Jacqueline from Lorenz Hart, whose name will probably be forgotten by the time she's able to read this. Hart had been a friend of my grandfather's, my grandfather, a vaudevillian. I remember reading Hart's inscription for the first time and thinking it was an extraordinary thing for someone to say to a child as if childhood had the same kind of unpredictability and loneliness that fame did. I inherited that photograph after my mother's death and sold it to an autographed dealer on 18th Street for drinking money in the museum of saddest things I've ever done. That could have been the saddest. It felt like I was making fun of beauty. I have about three subjects, drunkenness. I'm sober, 37 years sobriety, I guess, the flip side of trying this. And I am a twin, which I write a lot about. And this he died in 2002. And I wrote this poem before that, it's called The Twin. I wasn't supposed to have a body. I'm not from a family of bodies. None of us were supposed to have bodies. But then the light left us in a dark chamber and each one of us stood in the hall of my mother's heart beating. My mother and my brother were there. I was inhabiting a body of company. Could I have my own apart from the one I was inside, apart from the one floating next to me, which looked like mine? My soul was already confused. It didn't know how consciousness pulls the body into the world or pulls it out. My soul was inside the inside. All this I was thinking, still lying there in my mother's cocktail, only a light filling a body, frail in the counter music of my brother's heart, singing in my brother's body and in the same time of his body that mine was in. Then 48 years later, my brother died and dropped his body on a bed. And I carried the effect of him afterwards down some coiling stairs into the streets of Boston. Music, garments, literature, some beauty stuff. When he was living, we used to dare each other. I dare you, he said. I dare you. And then he died. So it is true. I quick segue. It is true that I groomed the Kentucky Derby winner in 1984. His name was Swale. That's me with the horse after losing the prep race to the Derby, which was like Keeneland. In Lexington, Kentucky, which is a racetrack that is so snobby that they don't have a track announcer. They figured that everybody knows the the the silks and who owns the horse. And but he was in a prep race before the Derby and he lost miserably. And we all thought he was going to lose, but he didn't. And this is a poem that I wrote. I wrote, you know, I wrote a memoir about it. But I also and I wouldn't think he would find his way into poetry because of the memoir, but he did. And it's called Swale. It's Derby Day and it's been 30 years since 1984 when I stood in the grandstand at Churchill Downs after betting 20 bucks on Swale, the horse I groomed and watched as he pulled away from Wayne Lucas's great filly, Althea, to win the 110th running of the race, 30 years. And a lot of souls have risen to the upper register of life. And my own life has been made more reachable by what their love did to me. I read some books and wrote some books and watched performances that moved my thinking left. I've seen the man who gave me horses go home to his mother and I've seen other horses break down or go home to the grasses of their beginning to make more pleasing kind. And after all, I met the love of my life. And when the government turned something over, I married him foolishly only because all marriages foolish and errand into a maze. It's Derby Day and I'm remembering my life in an errand into a maze. It's Derby Day and I'm remembering my life in a stable and the ordinary living that spilled around it. I've eaten good food in places that had views of the everlasting. And I'm certain I've seen the face of God on more than one occasion. And I've held animals so close to my own body that something in theirs must have passed through mine. But nothing has given me more life than watching that big black, beautiful, shining soul run through the animal line past all comprehension into the music of his speed and win that race on the first Saturday in May, in the year of forever. Here's to Swale and to others of his kind, creature of my joy and of my sorrow, cancel culture. And later in the room upstairs, empty because it's a lookout, we are staring at the carnal in a tree. And I say, he's so red and James says almost too red. And I say, and a little fat, actually. And then I say, great, let's criticize birds. That's funny, that bomb. And I'm only saying that because it's like the only funny bomb I've ever written. And of course, it's transcribed from an actual conversation. James is a wonderful actor and writer named James LeSine, who's now known as Celeste LeSine. Speaking of animals, this is called the animals, the animals. Here I am. I've been watching the animals. I watch them in the afternoon that seems to drop me lower into time. Bullfrogs singing from the long grasses, horses, caption in a video. Wild is a horse's word. They are running wild on an island and ending sharply as if stopped by something that isn't there. I've been watching the animals move through sudden predicaments or work like joy from a habit, as in the sea turtle pulling her anvil body down to the continent of ocean and leaving her eggs in the upper sands. She's returning to single life and the sequined minutes of light breaking softly on the surface of the water. How delicate it is below where daylight doesn't reach all the wet and green, one world brushing up against the slippery gardens of another. I've been watching the animals with more knowing than childhood secret knowing. Secret gratitude for animals and my spirit seems to make music. I can hear for each one like a theme for staying. Only once did the dog run away. I've been watching them with a sense of circling back into myself through their restlessness, feeling their nature. Take the wheel of what's on again off again in my life. The life of human stories beginning in deliverance and ending up torn from reaching the eventual. There is nothing in the world to confirm or not confirm the fear that I will stay like this. Disillusion with everything that is an animally connected or unconditional. I will always regret not staying with someone only for love and remain powerless over the photographic grief of empty stations that once held people. I will always be just this, the human boy, the human man who goes to animals, the animals to check to see. I'm going to read two more poems and then some prose. Where am I in time? Hold on. Hold on. I got so nervous that shit. I'm not bad. OK, this is called Beginners. Truth. Oh, I'm 67 years old. And so this poem is like when I was a kid in the 60s. Truth leaked through time in 1963, 130 Eastern standard time and Gary Oren's nervous laughter at the news of Kennedy's 1230 central murder coming through as a bad spill of static over PS 41's cheap PA. There is Greenwich Village, a drowsy dandelion. I called it once. There is the heart sick monitor of trouble in the afternoon. My mother is late to pick me up again. She's almost better, but will never manage to cure. Outside American family life, nothing really happens until OJ and a glove. But I can't rely on memory alone to determine what it means to bring closer. I know feelings can change the math of time and we're wrong about feelings anyway. They are facts, which is why I go to my dog for all the important stuff. She's rifling through her morning bowl in the galley kitchen of both our late adulthoods, poor Ruby. She wants to feel as much as I do. She is eating the world to save it. I'm working on a memoir. The tenet of title of which is a radical loneliness and the life imaginary. And it's a story of an experience that I had in 2016. Right around, you know what, in the White House and being very badly ripped off on I was catfished, basically. And the whole the reason I'm writing about it is because it's something that that somebody who looked like me that it happened to that person because I've never behaved this way my entire life. And I thought it was I had started taking Lyrica for arthritis. And I thought it was a side effect of the drug. And I never really knew. But I kept in the the the scam because I kept thinking it was going to change. And of course, I was in love with this guy, right? And there's so much. It was so complicated. And this is the beginning. I'm going to read. I guess I'm going to read this and then I'll read from track conditions. But this is the part pretty much near the beginning of it. It's very difficult to write. I usually need a lot of time between something that happened. And when I write about it, particularly when it's prose. And there are books that actually suffer from this, where the memoir is actually starts writing way too soon. I won't mention any titles, but there's one very well known memoir. And it was just too close to the event to be objective about. And there is an objectivity, I think, that's very essential to memoir writing. But it's also about the way you remember something, right? Which nobody can criticize to bias wolf. And this is so this is near the beginning of the book. I'm a little nervous because I've never read it out loud. I usually have a pen. Because I'll probably make changes one. I left my body to go online and found the devil on the same channel as love. He was setting it up, the beat, the plan, the money. I didn't know what he was doing until I knew what he was doing. The only thing I knew was that he had to leave his body. The way I had to leave my body for us to meet in the same place at the same time, the body electric tapping the space of another body electric. I had forgotten how long the body itself can feel virtual. And what it happens, a kind of longing emerges as if you've been waiting a long time to be made of light. I had waited a long time to be made of light. That was the year I wasn't there because of the decision to hurl into space. That was the year I couldn't perform a job I was good at or remember appointments or dates that I had made with friends. I once got a phone call during a class I was teaching. And it was my friend Marie wondering where I was because he was supposed to meet for a movie 15 minutes ago. I remember we were going to plan to see each other, but I don't recall finding the date or the movie or the time. That was the year time felt away. A sundial turns it into a shadow across the exact length of itself. I was in something bad and I knew it, but I took it to its finish because it was breaking apart in the middle. And I wanted to see if I could take it from the middle to the end by fixing it. I needed help, but never asked for it or didn't know how to ask. What happened made me ashamed and embarrassed. But one or two people I did give parts of the story to seemed to be more entertained by the way I was telling it than offer anything like advice. Or maybe they just hadn't known me long enough to know what I considered actual in trouble. I suffered every moment it was happening and ecstatic at every moment it was happening. It was as if I was discovering sensations in my body were two kinds of upheavals were happening at the same time. The lower part of my body was an ecstasy and everything happening from the lower part to the heart and from there to the head was suffering. I suffered the air I was breathing. I wasn't in sync with what I looked like and I felt what I looked like. I wasn't eating, but not very much and not very much. And if it was a day that I was eating was just dinner and minutes before going to bed. I didn't always remember to take a shower. I wasn't connecting. I wasn't connected to people except to one person who I spoke to and or texted every day in the broad daylight of never seeing him and knowing I would never see him. I was connecting to the one person who was slowly taking my money while I was wasting time trying to figure out how to get him to last in love until he paid me back. That was the year I met a geologist who preposterously called himself Clive Owen. Oh, come on. That's an actor. OK, he revised Clive Owen Simpson. You don't actually meet people online. You find them. And then I disappeared with Clive Owen Simpson into a geologist's dream because nothing about him was true or awake, except an unidentifiable accent and phone number, the photograph of himself looking like a schoolboy, handsome, sexy, I guess, underneath. None of it was true. Where was he calling from? Where was I calling to? He was the only one who always knew where both of us were at the same time. Where was he calling from? Reality works because of the names for things. We wouldn't know what anything is if it didn't we didn't have the word for it. So if Clive Owen Simpson says he's calling from Alaska, Alaska is the name from the place he is calling from, even if he wasn't calling from Alaska. There's nothing about reality that says you can't switch the names around. Clive Owen Simpson is a geologist who's calling from Alaska. And later Clive Owen Simpson is a geologist calling from Canada. He dug the earth. And later when the criminal nature of the relationship became more very clear, he's calling from London, London, where he said he was settling his dead father's affairs and needed twenty thousand dollars to play the estate attorneys and where when I called the manager of the hotel he'd been living in for a week to pay his bill. I heard distinct and loud chickens squawking in the background. Chickens about which one of my friends who was getting the timeline of my fucked up life then replied he wasn't in London. He was in Nigeria. You've been talking and falling in love with the Nigerian with AIDS, probably, I said, I know that's a mean sentence at the end. But I said it and this is from track conditions. I'm going to read the last two chapters, but don't let that sway you from not reading the book. I have two friends, actually, who when they go to a bookstore, they read the last couple of sentences of the book. And if they don't like it, they don't get the book. One of them is Jacqueline Woodson, who's like a really wonderful writer. I said, Jacqueline, that's terrible. But I do the same thing now. It works, actually. But you should never know the end of the book. There's this great story. I just have to tell you the story for the writers in the room. I took a workshop with the wonderful writer, Andrew DeBuse, the third, because I needed. What did I need? I needed confidence. I was having a really hard time with this thing I'm writing. And he's a wonderful teacher and he tells this wonderful story about Mary McCarthy, who was a very well known fiction. I guess fiction, yes, you have the group and memoirs from the fifties, I guess. Yeah, fifties. And this is this time before computers and everything, right? And she had just finished a novel and lost the manuscript somehow. And somebody at a party and she's known to have a very good memory. And somebody at a party said, Mary McCarthy, what's the problem? You have such a good memory? I'm sure you can just rewrite the book, right? And she said, oh, no, I can't do that. And the woman said, well, why not? And she said, I know how it ends. I'm great. She never knew how it ends until you get to the end. I think it depends what you're writing, but I love not knowing how it's going to end. I was going to end. It's the big existential question. No horses. The very briefly, this is a book about the racetrack and my grooming this Kentucky Derby winner named Swale, who was owned by millionaires from a farm called Claybourne. And then he died of a heart attack, but it was very mysterious. I had been fired from being his groom for my basically my alcoholism. And and when he died, it was really strange, like I was not allowed anywhere near the barn, but my boyfriend at the time was living in this place that we had been living in on the track. And I was I spent the night with him, I guess, or whatever. And that day I could hear Swale outside. You know, he was right outside the door. The places where people who worked on the track lived were right next to the barn. And we and I heard this horse like kill over and just and die, basically. And I got out of there really quickly because I thought they would I thought people would think I had something to do with it. Like I was it was a revenge killing for being fired. So anyway, he died and this these last two chapters are about his burial and about me ending up in rehab. And I got sober. I got sober in 1984, which is the year he died because of his death. I got sober. Well, because of my death, too. No horses. Seth Hancock, who owned the horse, asked the bourbon lumber company to build a box big enough for a horse and then line it in yellow satin. A race source usually gets buried in sections, head, heart, hooves, testicles, the parts the fire is in. I imagine it was Swale's champion status. He had won the eclipse award that year for top three year old, then entitled him to full treatment in death. And of course, he was Claiborne's first star, having risen over the farm at a time when they needed a start to confirm that it was the right choice to raise their own yearlings instead of selling them. The coffin was delivered one bright August morning and everyone who worked at Claiborne took the day off to Barry Swale, the champion of so many dreams, lies today in the same meadow he got lost in one morning before he had a name. I wasn't at that funeral as public as the death was due to the media. It was the headline of the post the day he died. It's aftermath was stunning in its privacy and so is my broken heart. Stumbling around in amazement and grief is a common sight on the racetrack, so nobody paid any special attention to me. Before Swale's death, I had been seriously contemplating suicide. And now I was in shock. I still wanted to die even more intensely. But the profound loss drained me of the ability to make any kind of decision rational or irrational for the first time in my life, drinking was losing its effect. The only way I could see through the first movement of this grief was to have my hand on a racehorse again. I got a job hot walking from Mary Carter, my last official job on the racetrack. I had drunk a lot the night before and was very tired. I fell in the shed row still holding on to the horses shank. Instead of taking off with me the way aid to reason had taken off with me at Latonia, the horse looked down at me in a locked stare. What are you doing? The horse seemed to be saying for the first time since being in a courtroom in Bennington, Vermont, I was in the presence again of something I couldn't touch with my mind, suddenly inexplicably in the silent and frozen stare from a horse came this, I don't want to drink anymore. The horse's look went so far inside of me that it made me a different person. And this you don't have to drink exactly what Richard had been telling me at least once a week for 12 years. David M, the only person I knew on the track. Excuse me. I'm getting like pill mouth. No, that is like this is really like I've taken pills and I haven't. I'm sober 37 years. I told you that, right? Ah, sobriety, a mystery to be celebrated. David M, the only person I knew on the track who had gotten sober, took me to Nassau County Nassau Community Hospital and admitted to me and admitted me to the detox ward. I was put on the Librium for five days, attended group therapy sessions and watched a film called Chalk Talk in which a man named the father Martin talked about the disease of alcoholism. Everything he said went as far inside me as the look the anonymous horse gave me on Mary Cutter's shed row. The first horse I'd met in all those years on the racetrack whose name I didn't know, which took time back to the beginning of the racetrack when horses didn't have names yet, the way it was down in Aiken. A week later, I went to Plainview Rehabilitation Center and began the slow process of recovery. The sliver of world going on without me didn't matter anymore. I hadn't given up drinking as much as given in. The date was July 17th, 1984. Swale was dead a month. This chapter, the last chapter is called Merton's Fan. Thomas Merton. Plainview Rehab was once a sanitarium and each room externally connects to the next by a large veranda where I've been told the staff would roll the patients out in their hospital beds for doses of sunlight. The hallways there are long and wide and dark, so dark that it's hard to tell what time of day it is. The halls seem disconnected from the rest of the building in that way because the sources of light from the windows in the patients rooms and from the verandahs further out are too far away for any of it to penetrate the building central artery. Walking down those halls felt like being on a scavenger hunt through a cave where the prices at the end were light and time. And as it happened, the price of the rest of our lives, if we wanted it. I got week and passes after being in rehab a month and I used to take the bus and train back to Belmont Park to visit Richard, who was still my boyfriend, who was still working for Woody Stevens. It felt strange knowing Richard had stayed behind in a barn that had dissolved in my bloodstream along with the Librium, the nurse administer in detox to keep me from jumping out of my skin. Richard and I would meet at the diner across the street from the track, a favorite place of ours. It reminded us of the famous diner on 46th Street and 9th Avenue where we had gone practically every Sunday morning during the years we lived in Hell's Kitchen. On those visits back to the track, Richard and I would sit in a booth in the silence of amazement over Swales death and my own being sober. It was hard for Richard to face me at the beginning, even in the first months of not drinking. I was already so different, steadier, not looking for an argument. And almost immediately it seemed I wasn't nearly as emotionally dependent on him as I had been those many years. It was as though the alcohol had provided the only cause for longing. And without it, I was actually beginning to enjoy my own company, a sense of well-being kept shooting through me like cold water. And I became interested in books and music and even clothes again. And I didn't have the physical desire for alcohol. Call it God or whatever you want. The desire had been lifted from me. Still, it wasn't easy. I shook for three months and couldn't stay awake for more than six or seven hours a day. They told us in rehab that for many recovering drunks, the hardest thing to face in the beginning was what to do with unstructured time. It seemed as if the only thing I could concentrate on was what a book said. I was immersed in Thomas Merton's secular work. No man is an island on the one hand. And Thomas A. Kempis' sacred imitation of Christ on the other. I couldn't listen to what people said to me at the beginning. Mostly I was spiritually and psychically exhausted. But after the few months in rehab when my body and mind started feeling more energetic, I started talking a lot to the other members of my daily therapy group and was eating regularly for the first time in 10 years. I also began to understand the way it must be for a crash victim coming out of a coma, that this was the world I remembered before the accident. I wanted to live there again. I was never the kind of alcoholic who through a period, who went through a period of laying off the sauce for a while. I drank to get drunk, to dream, to shift into the blackout. I lied until the track officials I'd never had when I was caring for soil. And while it seemed so inconceivable that I could actually manage to stop poisoning myself, there was a key in Swales' death that somehow turned the lock in a door that for years had been shut and deadbolted to me. Swales was the first death that alcohol couldn't alter the depth of. My mother's death, on the other hand, mixed well with alcohol. So sobriety was the only choice I had left if I wanted to live. And continuing life has been the light motif of abstinence. In a way, it's all you get with sobriety. What some people would term a reprieve is just really holding on to a life you have more interest in, but it all feels like a mystery somehow. It's never been easy being sober. And as I said, it didn't come easily just emphatically. While I don't think Swale would have appeared in my life unless I had been an outgift alcoholic, the road out of New York that first drew to River Downs and Cincinnati was laid down in inebriation. His death let me get sober. My mother, my lover and my horse were gone. And something about Swales vanishing told me it was time to take drastic measures. Something clear as day. The blurry effect of a drunk wasn't an appropriate response to a world that had now been empty of the three great forces of love in my life. But why credit Mary Cotter's horse when I could credit God? Because the God I felt tremble one time in the voice of a judge dropping charges in Bennington, Vermont hadn't been heard from for too long. And the horse, well, he appeared when I needed him the most and wouldn't run off with me when I first stopped drinking and told some sober friends that a horse got me sober, they all laughed, of course. But then as quickly as they responded light headedly, they went silent. Why couldn't it have been a horse leading me out of the fire? In early sobriety, the explainable and unexplainable very often ride the same wave, which makes sobriety different than drunkenness. When you're drunk, only one thing happens. My ears on the track make a great story to people I barely know, to tell people I barely know. All of this, the derby, the drinking, the governor of Kentucky, who I threw a drink in her face at that party, the lover in and out of my life, so many kinds of dying. And it's 12 years later and still no one really knows what happened to Swale. Pathologists at the New Bolton Clinic in Pennsylvania spent months looking into his heart and could only find a small tear there. Nothing dreadful enough to have killed him. It will always be a case unsolved matched in my mind with the conundrum of trying to explain how Swale ever came into my life to begin with. And when I first got to playing rehab, I kept overlaying Swale's story in my mind over the one about the death of Thomas Merton. I had been reading the seven story mountain and thinking about the electric fan that killed the writer after it toppled over into his Bangkok bathtub. The fans found madly in my imagination, making it hard to read any of the beautiful sentences that Merton had written about his early life. And when the fan stopped, Swale appeared to me in the most lasting image I will ever have of him just after he won the Young America Stakes at the Meadowlands. Black horse, snow, because it isn't a season for flowers. Swale is wrapped in a blanket of white satin like a boxer. At one point, before we get back on the van for home, he stops at a paperweight's worth of snow falling in front of a little light over a doorway of one of the concrete barns they have at the Meadowlands studying its descent or is he he nuzzles his big head into my chest because the world is cold again, but by this time, I know he's discovered where the human heart is. We're both still, but we both are so still in that moment when snow can actually make you feel warm. The van is waiting, but we're not in a hurry. I'm with the snow. I'm with the ambiguous moment with gravity when the direction of its falling isn't clear, up or down, the snow can't decide. But in that light, in swale time, I know all it can do is fall up. Thank you. Is this on? OK, it is on. Hi, I'm Kat. And first of all, wow, beautiful work. And my question was, how is writing or like poetry or just any kind of writing? Was it a form of like coping for you, like for your alcoholism or any kind of grief? Right now, I'm in a class and we're looking at Natasha Trotherway. And it's very clear that her poetry is a form of like her grieving. And I would just absolutely, it starts there. But I would never call and I'm really conscious of this, particularly when I'm teaching that writing is not a form of therapy and they feel like that. And obviously, because I write very close, I mean, everything I write is autobiographical and I'm also extremely open. I really, you know, I really, I really try to be dangerous. So then, you know, I try to write about things. I'm afraid of writing about, which to me is the whole point of writing is to find language or something that seems unsayable. And so in that way, yeah, it's therapeutic, but it's also an art. You know what I mean? And when you really get involved with sentences and syntax and all that stuff that makes writing what it is, you move quickly away from the therapeutic aspect of it. I'm lucky in that I've had a really fucked up life. I've got a lot of material. I mean, I'm being very honest with you. And it's also been material that I know as a writer has to be transcendent. Now, and not just because I saw the people can understand what I'm talking about. It has to be transcendent because it's because writing is an art. You know what I mean? And so there's a long answer to your question. But yeah, it starts off in therapy, but the more you do it, it becomes it's a spiritual practice is really what it becomes. I'm good at that. Yeah, you are. Instead of trying to write. Hi, my question is when you write poetry, do the words sound the same in your head as they do when you read them out loud? Like, do you do kind of sounded out almost in your head? But what you what you how you want the poetry to sound? You mean before I write it? Yeah, but there are people who do that. No, not at all, never. I start with usually I start with an image or an idea. But with the way that sound does come into it is that I write. I've written a lot of poems in which the next word or a series of words would be based on how they sound and not necessarily what they mean. And then I'm lucky enough that when I look that up in terms of context, it usually fits. So and I'm very influenced by music as a writer. I'm always thinking of writing as a kind of composition that it is a musical form. The great writing is a musical form. It's a miracle. I mean, and we always hear people when they talk about novels or something that isn't poetry, the greatest compliment you can always give is that it's poetic, right, the way that sort of Adam was introducing me. But it is true. I mean, that's something that I think is really Nabokov always thought that, you know, he said, everybody should read poetry, but it sort of stops there. Like he didn't believe that you could you could actually become a great writer of all who wrote this poetry, which is a complete bullshit, but whatever. But I think it's essential if you're serious about writing it to my poetry. If you don't write it, it's essential. It's where language happens. Language does not happen in information. There's so much prose. You know, there's this wonderful essay by Linda Manuel called Why I Work in Poetry, and one of the things she talks about is I don't count how Robin Hood gets to the elevator, which is problems. How does Robin Hood get to the elevator? What color are the curtains? What color is the weather? Who the fuck cares? And that's how she said that's what she, you know, of course, it's all constant, but that shows poetry because you don't have to do things like that. You don't have to have sentences that are merely cargling information. Right. And novels are built and a lot of novels are built that way. I mean, if you take it out and you look at certain sentences, it's like, I mean, the great writers don't do this. I mean, who can I think of right now? Ceremonious who's coming is one is a great example. Every sentence, you know, I mean, Cormand McCarthy, every sentence, Faulkner, I mean, those, you know, every sentence is made as a sentence that then becomes part of the whole. Right. But it's all built on sentence making. And if you don't write a sentence, it's interesting. It's not, you know, I don't hear about what's going on, whether it's plot or character, if I don't hear anything else. To make a few pages, another one, that was no sense. It's built in the house of theater people in New Yorker. I mean, these people are writing sentences that blow your mind, right? William Maxwell is my favorite writer, actually. But anyway, long, you know, when I start talking about books, I can't stop. Thank you. Sure. What's your name? Ben. Ben Harvey. Do you like poetry or prose? Sometimes that won't both. But I'm more of a prose guy. Just counting around with sentences. I'm trying my best. Sometimes I don't come out. And I mean, the next day by William Maxwell, he talks about getting older. And one of the things he says is he's not indie and he says, I still enjoy making sentences. But I think I've forgotten where stories come from. But I still like making sentences. It all starts with the sentence, even in poetry. I mean, lines of poetry considered sentences, even if it's not end-stopped, you know, or a jammed or whatever device or strategy you're using. But I like it when it blurs. I really like the hybrid from things that are having with hypertext, fragments, a novel telling fragments, a novel with no dialogue. It's a great novel called The End of the Story by Lydia Davis that has no dialogue. It's fantastic. I love it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Chris Bailey was the only person in America that could write dialogue as far as I can tell. If you haven't read her work, any single dialogue. They were so idiosyncratic, those characters. They spoke like real people. So. I have a second question, but I want to make sure that anyone else, if anyone else has a question. All right. Very good, then. Did you start, like, did you start kind of, you know, when we're talking about sentence structure, talking about sentences and poetry and making things sound interesting? Kind of what's your origin for or where you started in general for writing? And how did you make your writings as interesting as it is itself? Well, thank you for that last one. I started as a songwriter. I started out as very healthy influenced by Johnny Mitchell and Laura Nero. I don't know if any of you know who Laura Nero is, but if you don't check her out, she's extraordinary, right? And the album that I would suggest is called New York Tend and the Berry, but she was a major. We went to the same high school, went to music in our high school in New York and we went to the same high school and I had this incredible bond with her. And she wrote lyrics that didn't rhyme. And Tom Leeds was another big influence on my work. Neurosists have seen a time called Porter. I mean, I just listened to music. I didn't read that much. I didn't read a novel until I was 20. I was afraid of it because I don't read poetry and I read poetry because it's short and I could take 20 books in the library at the same time and get them and read them in a week. Well, that's bliss, right? A novel of taking, you know, a year to read. But from the song lyrics and then I wrote song lyrics and then I started writing poetry after that. I was about 15 and it just sort of evolved and I started reading a lot. And Adrienne Rich came into my life when I was 15. And she was an example of somebody who could be a poet in the world. I loved the fact that you didn't make money at it. That's one of the things I chose that these money's never important to me. I wanted to be happy, you know, and money had nothing to do with that creation. And I love poetry and Adrienne, which was extraordinary. I met up with Hardwick and then all these other writers. Jean Vantin was a poet who died last year. He was a very mentor to me for many, many, many years. So I had great people around me and I had a lot to do with it. It's very important to find your people when you're writing because it's very long way. You know, even when it's not intelligent, even if you're making shit up, you know, in and all or something. So thank you for coming, guys. I appreciate it. I appreciate your shot, thanks. I hope it's a little bit temporary. No, it's great. I love reading for college students. And thank you, Adam. Is that another question? Do you have time for another one? Absolutely. I'm just going to go to a good restaurant in Bristol. Bristol Oyster Bar. OK, you know, the oyster bar. That's what I was about to say. Thank you. It's excellent. Thanks. What's your question? What's your name? Sabrina. Nice to meet you. Sabrina. If you go garden, I'll treat you after. Oh, my God, the crime movies. Yes. So it's kind of like a two-folded question because first I was thinking, how do you write something and not feel like it's pretentious? Like, you know it's your voice. But then what if it was pretentious? But I mean, did you think it was pretentious? No, that's why I was like, because sometimes I read so much that I'm like, oh, who is this? Oh, yeah, yeah, I get it. So that's the first fold. What's the second fold? Well, when do you get so pointed in your writing when you feel OK with it? Like, all right, this is good. I'm going to put this up into the world. Why is something like that? What? Seriously, I mean, that's that's the end. That's, you know, and I want you all to please, who's a poet and translator, if you have a poet, you said that you don't finish a poem, you abandoned it. And I think that's absolutely true, too. I don't think that's the same thing with prose. So when you say pretentious, I'm thinking that in order to write good sentences, you of course, you don't want to be pretentious. You want to disappear. I mean, there's a part of writing in which you disappear and it's brainwave stuff. You go into alpha, you have no conception of time. I don't know, in any way. I mean, in many ways, I mean, once you're when you're really in it, you really have no it's the only thing happening. And when it's the only thing happening, it cannot be anything other than honest and real. And it's usually the voice that you keep hearing in your head in some ways, right? Because when you write, I don't know if it happens to you, but when I'm hearing it at the same time that I'm putting it on the page. And it's not my voice. I couldn't be my voice. I mean, listen to me again. I wouldn't be able to hear anything. Of course. But but that is how you you think of, you know, being pretentious or whatever. But also, I need to think that she never it's really important. I think it's not to be self-sensory. And it could and by the way, the first round could be completely pretentious. The first round is nothing. It's like spilling the paint on a page and then seeing what emerges. But it's always I mean, when I write something for the first when I start something, I cannot believe I've ever published a film. It's so awful. It really is. And particularly with poetry, because the real poem is always hiding somewhere. And it's never at the beginning. It's usually around the middle of the first draft. And with prose, you know, I'm not interested in telling a story as much as I am. Sort of tracing an emotional understanding of what it means to live in adversity. And, you know, and what it's like to really live and sort of like, I don't know. I don't know if that sounded like any good when I said that. But it's challenging. It's really a challenge. Just be true to yourself. That also goes for your life. You should be surrounded by people that make you feel like yourself. Because then you'll begin to start writing from that place. You won't have anything left when you get to that point. You still want to be curious. You know, I mean, that's a really essential part of it. I'm still curious. I'm sixty-seven years old. I'm still curious. You know, and right now I'm really interested in sort of obsessed with true crime. You can play me a cold blood for that, but I find it fascinating. Anyway, and how do you live? Anybody else? Right. We have time now? OK. I'm just going to sit because I just had to knee up or something. That would be even better. What's your name? My name's Catherine. Catherine? Yeah. I'm just curious because you you write both prose and poetry. I'm just curious as to what your opinion is on the difference between the two, because they seem so close together. Yeah, they can be. A couple of things. Gary Snyder is a wonderful poet once said, the difference between poetry and prose is that you can't force poetry, which I like that definition. And poetry is about dissolution. It's also about the emotion, the life. The reason why it's so unpopular is not because people think it's above them or too difficult to understand. You know, that whole myth of poetry, I don't understand what's going on. It's because people are afraid of feelings. They don't want to read about it. They don't care, you know, it's not a thing. We do not live in a culture in which feelings are important, really. And poetry, that's all it, that's what it is. And he comes. I hate to be quoting, but he kind of says this great thing. It's online, it's called, I think it's called Poets Advice. But one of the things he says about being a poet is that to live in a world that is constantly trying to make you into somebody that you're not is the hardest battle to fight or something like that. He said a poet is somebody. What is it? Wait a minute, wait a minute, it's short. Whenever you think or believe or know, you're lots of other people. It's only when you feel that you're nobody but yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you into somebody else. This is the great challenge, blah, blah, blah. Poetry is one of the hardest things in the world to do. But I love it. If you want to do something easy, blow up the world. He actually says, this is from the 30s. And when you get to that sentence, he wants to be involved. It's like, whoa, you know, radically. But it's great advice. I mean, I love that. But whenever you think or believe or you know, you're lots of other people. It's only when you feel that you're nobody but yourself. And that's what poetry is. And prose to a certain degree. But again, prose has a lot of cargo in it, that's the job of poetry. And I think part of the job, I mean, all my I think it's job is to make you feel more alive to yourself. And poetry just doesn't in a different way. You know, but I love great novels and I just read I'm learning every day. Absolutely. The person Carson Coe is in the title, actually. What is it? Do you know? It's a memo. It's it's it's like a memoir about loving. What's that to call it? The autobiography of my Carson. Oh, yeah. It's it's not finished, actually. It's fantastic. And I was just saying, you know, yes, the novel is fantastic. You know, I mean, I'm a poet, you know, in different ways. I'm not in prose can be poetic in a way that's not just using strategy. So poetry uses the idea in that, you know, another ideas is a poetic thing. It's a poetic construct when you read all of ideas. It's not, you know, like the end of the story by Lydia Davis. Do you guys know Lydia Davis? She's very popular for reasons that quite confound me, actually. I think the novel is great, but it's short pieces of like I have a poem about her where it talks about, you know, briefly, there's my friends or their mother to resume modern art and then looking at Picasso. This is called bouquet of pieces, I believe, and it's a hand-holding bouquet of flowers. And my friend says to her mother, I could do that. And your mother looks down and she says, yes, dear, but you didn't. And that's how I feel about Lydia Davis. I could do that, but no, you didn't. Right? It's like abstract art, like, you know, Rothko or anybody, you know, Rothko is fantastic, but if it's a black canvas or yellow canvas, I couldn't do that, but you didn't. That's a good deal that you didn't, or, you know, that was done, but you didn't do it. It also makes the art more exciting. I think it makes the art sweets more people in that way. I don't believe in universality, you know, that myth about, you know, I have to identify with it if I'm going to have any appreciation of it. I'm going to know about other moments, I'm going to know people without people. You know, anyway, anybody else? Yes, you know, you're to me with a mess. I always get that. That's really a tick a box of the wonderful cheese and fruit that are Oh, those are beautiful. Or if it's a pizza sauce. Yeah, Michael's got some books. I just want to get that because a lot of people are up to leave my mom. So if you have any books that you want, any of his books that you'd like to purchase. See you in a minute. Awesome. Sorry. Hi. This question might not even come out clearly at all. I don't know how to ask it, but I'll try. What's your name? I'm May, English, whatever that means. So you mentioned the coming home, whatever you think, the view or no, that's other people. And then you talk about poetry being how you feel. So I'm curious when you write memoir and you say that you have to get distance, where are you in that thinking, believing, knowing, feeling spectrum? That's a good question. I'm far. There's a distance between the thing I'm writing about and writing about it. Right. And the way that I look at it is that I look at I sort of look at a vague narrative in terms of what actually happened. But I'm also thinking two things. I'm thinking about the way I feel now about that. And very rarely do I think or I may say it in the sentence, but very rarely do I think in the same way that I did what was happening. So that part is a fiction, you know what I mean? And the only reason I do it is to make some sort of narrative connection. But I'm very much a lot of time now I felt at that particular time. And just knowing what happened doesn't necessarily give you that information. There could be a whole bunch of stuff going on into the side. So I think that that effect the way you feel about something to happen. So I don't really know. But but I'm very invested in the way that I feel about now, if it was. And I really try to always imagine it happening to somebody else, which Vivian Gornick actually talks about when she talks about memoir, that that's a really good way of looking at it sometimes. It's an instant way of being objective. But she also believes that when you run an essay that you have a persona, which is not necessarily yours, which I and I'm just in a class that I'm trying to disagree with her. She got really mad. I said, you know, I don't think that's true at all. And she didn't know the lyric essay was she's never written one. And she also never mind. I love Vivian Gornick. She's a great writer, but she's a shark. She's like something once went up to her. If you don't know Vivian Gornick, she's a very well-known essayist and critic. And it's written some fantastic books and something went up to her once and said, oh, I'm a very good writer. I don't know whether she knew her or not. But she said, oh, I'm just going to her really, really. And she gets up up to her and she said, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. I do all my work. I cast her off. She was horrified. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you all. Great questions. You know, writing is going to change the world. You know that, right? That seriously, when all is said and done, it's the writer. It's going to change us. That it's changing now. I mean, you know, you read somebody like Erin Dottie Roy, the Indian not an essayist. It's extraordinary. She's that psychic. It's incredible. It's a cult when you read her. And a lot of, you know, Rebecca Solman, Terry Tempest, Williams. I'm thinking of writer Sarah really writing about the times that we're looking through right now. And it's an extraordinary time. It really is. So many things, so much material. Well, thank you so much. Thank you. It's really fabulous. Thanks. Thanks.