 If you enjoy watching Common Ground online, please consider making a tax-deductible donation at lptv.org. Lakeland Public Television presents Common Ground, brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota. Hi, I'm Taren Chase, and I'm here at Central Lakes College giving a poetry reading. I travel maybe once a month to give poetry readings, and I heard from Jeff Johnson in the English department. He invited me out to Minnesota, and I was happy to come. I've been reading Taren Chase for a number of years now. Since before, he won that National Book Award, and so what it means for me is the privilege of bringing a great American writer to kind of an unlikely place, the Brainerd Lakes region. We are in the middle of Minnesota, and an awful lot of cultural events happen in the Twin Tones. That's also where an awful lot of grant funding goes. So the argument from the beginning four years ago when we started this was to say, you know, we deserve great cultural events here. We deserve beauty here too. And part of it is bringing writers that I know are gonna be great performers. It's also a little bit about bringing people who are not necessarily of Brainerd, right? So we brought Richard Blanco, the first gay Latino ever to read at an inauguration. I brought Naomi Shehab Nive because she's Palestinian, and we don't have an awful lot of Palestinians in Brainerd, so it's kind of about bringing and celebrating the other, right, someone who can help us think differently about ourselves and differently about the world. The deer. Outside Patascula, I saw the deer with the soft white belly. The deer with two eyes as blind as holes. I saw it leap from a bush beside the highway as if a moment before it left, it had been a bush beside the highway. And I saw how if I wished it, I could be the deer or creature bony as a branch and spring. And when I closed my eyes, I found the scent of muscadine. The berry, my mother plucked Sundays from the roadside where fumes toughened its speckled skin and seed slept suspended in a mucus thick as the sleep of an embryo. It is the ugliest berry along the road, but chewed it reminded me of speed. And I saw when I was the deer that I didn't have to be a deer. I could become a machine with a woman inside it, moving at a speed that leaves a stain on the breeze and on the muscadine's flesh, which is almost meat, the sweet pulp of muscadine leaves when it's crushed in the teeth of a deer or a mother for that matter, or her child waiting with something like shame to be fed a berry uglier than shame. Though it is not like this for the deer, it is not shame because the deer is not human. It is only almost human when it looks on the road and leaps covering at least 30 feet in a blink. The deer I cannot be, the dumb deer, dumb and foolish enough to ignore anything that runs but is not alive. A trafficking machine filled with a distracted mind and body deadly and durable enough to deconstruct a deer when it leaps, I'm telling you like someone being chased. I remember a friend told me how when he was eight or nine, a half-naked woman ran to the car window crying her man was after her with a knife. But his mother locked the doors and sped away. Someone tell him his mother was not a coward. That's what he thinks. Tell him it was because he and his little brother were in the car that she would not let the troubled world inside. It was no one's fault. The mind separated from the body. I could almost see the holes of her eyes, the white fuzz on her tongue, the raised buds soft as a bed of pink seeds, the hold of a mouth stretched wide enough to hold a whole baby inside. I could almost see its eyes at the back of her throat. I could definitely hear its cries. So what I'll tell you about that one is that, do not ask any questions. So one of the poems I read, which is the second poem in my most recent book, The Deer does have a kind of perplexing ending. It begins in a fairly true experience of driving and seeing a deer jump into the traffic on the highway and get hit, but it triggered another kind of memory of a friend telling a story of a woman approaching the car when he was young and his mother not saving the woman. So in anticipation of that poem, I didn't know where it was gonna go. I knew that I'd seen a deer and I thought I would write about it, but then it sort of led surprisingly to this other moment. And then out of that, a third moment arise, which is at the end of the poem, sort of making the woman the deer or sort of the feeling, the horror that would come from like not being able to help the woman or seeing a deer. So I've never quite known exactly what the images at the end of that poem mean, the images of like a baby crying and the eyes being at the back of the throat of a woman that's yelling. So it's sort of a dream image, but I do value those kinds of moments. I'm not so interested in explicating and dissolving the mystery around poems. So those are the poems that I value most. I mean, I work on them so much that at some point I feel like I know exactly how they work, like little machines. And I can appreciate a poem that works like a machine, you know exactly what needs to be tightened. But I also like a poem that's like an animal which has a certain kind of mystery, like why do animals work? Where does the energy come from? Those kinds of questions. And so that poem, the deer, and there are a few others. But it's just probably a handful, half a dozen, a dozen over my career that I can still look at and be a little bit baffled by. And that always excites me more than a poem that I have totally figured out. What would you put on to attend your daddy's sentencing? What would you put on if you went with your father to work filling a swamp of dirt for a real estate company developing a residential area called Magnolia Plantation? What would you wear to a party thrown under plastic palm trees around a shabby pool with no deep end at a motel called Oceanside? What would you wear to visit your big brother at the hospital after they moved him from the ER to the ICU? What would you wear in a house of mirrors? What would you wear in a house of guide? What would you wear to visit your father in prison? What would you wear if you was in a music video? What would you put on if you was in a shoe store selling nothing but oxfords and penny loafers? What would you put on if you knew the news lady and her cameraman was coming to interview you about a crime you witnessed? What would you put on if your mama let you drive her car to visit your girl across town Saturday night? What would you wear if you drove half a day to see a girl downstate and when you got there it was way past the time her parents said you could visit after they saw what you was wearing but you waited three, four hours until she snuck out the back door so you could walk with her up and down the neighborhood with dogs barking in the moonlight. I would wear the necklace my daddy gave me when he came home after a year locked away. I would put on Tim boots to keep the mud from swallowing all the places I stood. I would roll my pants, legs up and wade in the water and gaze at the parts of me turned blue. I would wear blood on my shirt and blood on my fingers and leave some of what makes me breathe on the places I touched you. I'd wear a mask of silence and blind you. I'd wear a mask of myself and fit the same mask on you. I'd wear a year of sins around my neck and beg God to loosen the noose. I'd wear my father's disillusionment and fortitude. I'd put on a fitted cap so the shade over my eyes would move as I moved. I would never wear a white man's shoes. I'd put on sunglasses. I would wear a t-shirt that says I am the news. I would wear a tattoo of my daughter's name above my muscle. I would wear the moonlight like a tattoo. All right. Reading my poems is actually part of my revision process. So I don't think I've ever given a reading where I didn't try at least one new thing. New for me means that I haven't sent it out to be published. So I see it and the audience is hearing it but I may read it seven, eight, nine, 10, 12 times and it'll still be new because I'm changing it with each one of those processes. So that kind of keeps me humble. It keeps me present for the audience because everything in the book has gone through that process and so I'm pretty confident about the poems when I hold the book. So the only thing that really, the primary thing that excites me when I'm giving a reading is the new stuff to see if it works or if it doesn't work. And sometimes it doesn't and I think that that's okay because I know the bulk of the stuff that I'm reading has already kind of been tried. Well, one of the things I'm trying to do is just put the poem in the air when I read a new poem. I don't think of it as that different than what a musician is doing when you're trying to just playing it and you hit a C where you should have hit a D or you hit an E flat where you shouldn't have. And so for a lot of it, it is just verbalizing and vocalizing the poem and then hearing the way it hits my ear. Sometimes I can tell from an audience but mostly I'm listening to what it sounds like and sort of like what do I believe? If I believe enough in it to be comfortable reading it for an audience. So sometimes I'll look at a line and I'll say that line shouldn't be there and I'll know it especially when I'm under the spotlight in a way that I might not know it when I'm alone reading the poem and trying to convince myself that maybe it's okay, maybe it's all right. So I do need that process and I do rely on it. And because I travel, maybe I give about a reading a month, sometimes two readings a month, it is always a way to sort of be on top of poems. So if I give a reading and I don't have a new poem or something that I'm still sort of questioning, then I sort of don't even know why I would do it. I mean, I know it's to sell books but that's sort of not really my primary interest as a person who is always trying to be out in front of my own poems, trying to think about like the present moment with my work. I'm Steve Downing. I am an arts producer for Northern Community Radio and the Verse Like Water Visiting Poets series is one of my favorite assignments. I'm sure everybody takes away something unique, something personal from an event like this. One thing that always sticks with me is how approachable these poets are. No matter how well known they are, how famous they are, they could all be completely full of themselves and they're just not. They're interested in talking with you, they're interested in listening to you and of course they love sharing their work in an intimate and comfortable setting which Verse Like Water at Chalberg Theater provides. And I always leave here uplifted and inspired. Communities need projects like this. What do I hope my audience takes with them? I think of it as an exchange. I don't wanna like get too heavy with it but I think it's the same you would say when people go to church on Sunday, what is it? It's probably closer to that experience than like when people go to college and you go and you go to your history class. When you leave the history class, the knowledge that you've required supposedly is useful and it will help you get a job but you know when you go to church, it's a sort of kind of like spiritual thing that's being given to you and to sit and listen, to sort of share in what the preacher's thinking. So I think of it in some ways closer to that. Like we just sort of, it's a shared space where understanding what language is, what language can do and it's empowering as much as everybody has language. So I hope that that's what people think. I hope that they leave my reading saying I think I wanna try that, I think I wanna do that. That's more important than buying my books but some sense of their own creativity being stimulated is probably the best effect that I can have. To me the thing that is most interesting is to watch what happens to them when they encounter poetry. I didn't do it today but with Marie Hall this last spring, I had to ask after I got done with the introduction, I had to say raise your hand if you've never been to a poetry event before and it was just a flurry of hands in the air. A lot of young people who were attending their very first reading. So the first thing that I marvel over is what happens when they come into that auditorium not knowing what's going to happen to them and inhabit a space with a great writer and find themselves surprised if not astonished that they're happy, that they're enjoying themselves and that maybe an art form that they maybe felt put down by before maybe an art form that they feel they don't understand is all of a sudden taking a hold of them and giving them a joy that they probably weren't ready for. Today I think what happened is we had an awful lot of people surprised by how colorful the poems were, how happy they were to hear language that they're not used to hearing. I think one thing that happens for sure is that they realize that poetry is alive and well. Poetry is not just consigned to these dusty shelves, right? Poetry is something that is thriving and available to everyone. Charles Simic, who was here last March, wrote once in a book that in the worst of all centuries in the crummies countries in the world, poetry will still get written and I think that their minds were alive, their hearts were open to that idea. I think what something else also happened, they got permission to be confused. They got permission not to get it. We had a lot of community members in there and some faculty and staff, but we had students and college students want to be smart. They want to be able to understand things and figure things out. And I think what Terrence did today was enable them to say to themselves, okay, maybe you didn't get that line. Maybe that poem confused you. But understanding the thing is not the most important aspect to the experience. Just if they get a line, if they get a phrase, if they get a memory, if they laughed, that is enough. They don't have to figure out every single syllable of it. When I'm at one of these events, I feel affirmed and reaffirmed as a writer, as an arts advocate, as a human being. Poetry is one of our earliest art forms. It predates writing even. And Jeff Johnson's verse like water proves again and again that poetry is still happening, still flourishing. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland Public Television's Common Ground, consider making a contribution at lptv.org.