 2012, though. OK, well, they have some good poems, I know. Definitely, because poems are eternal. That's what they say anyways. So here we are in the 800 section of the library. I'm a big Dewey Decimal System guy myself. I don't know if you are, too. Moderate. I know nothing. I'm impressed. I'm a Dewey Decimal Enthusiast. I was a big 796 guy as a kid, a big 937 guy as a kid. He's still my beating heart. A 362 guy, true crime. Oh, no, never, never, never, never. But 808, it's sort of a gray area for me. And we're here to find your favorite book. OK, 808. I think it is right. I think we put it somewhere. Here. Hey, there it is. What do we got here, Matthew? We have a first edition of The Lice, or I think it's a first edition of The Lice, which was published in 1967, also the year of my birth. Same. And all good people were born. And I was born in 1965. This book, as we'll talk about, made a huge impact on me as a writer, but it also was a big book when it, more importantly, it was a big book when it came out. But for you, personally, it made such a big impact that you wrote the intro to the 50th anniversary edition. I actually happened to, my publisher, Coppercane Impress, which is up in Port Townsend, Washington, is also publishes Merwin. And so when they decided to do Reissue of The Lice, the 50th anniversary issue, they asked me to do the introduction, which I did. And so I wrote a few pages at the beginning of it, which was just the coolest thing. Given the impact that book had on you, which we're going to talk more about when we sit down in a little bit later, what did that mean to you to write that intro? It was amazing. It was probably a professional highlight. And I mean, I don't know. I never imagined anything like that when I started writing that I would be asked to write the introduction for a book that changed my life. I mean, that's the kind of thing. Yeah, that's sort of a pinnacle right there. You know what else is kind of mind-blowing is that in 1967, lots going on, but a poetry book was big. Big deal, this book. Makes me feel excited. And I hope that can still happen. Does that still happen? Yes. Oh, definitely happens. I mean, there's lots of, I mean, I've just the first idea that came into my head was Claudie Rankine's book, Citizen, which is a huge deal. But there's lots. That's just the first thing that popped in my head. I mean, we can think of other examples. Yeah, I think poetry, we'll talk about it, but poetry does something that other forms of writing can't do, which we need. You know what I like is just so much poetry. I know. Like, you just can just rub against all the poetry in the library, and there's so much of it. Yeah, here we go. And if you feel like it, you can read this book, too, The Joy of Sex. That's like. The Joy of Writing Sex. Oh, The Joy of Writing Sex. Oh, I got confused. For people who are a little bit afraid of intimacy, but not too much. That's a big difference. But it's so nice. I like seeing all these, oh, Sandra Scofield. I just like seeing all the books. And you had mentioned before we started recording, Matthew, something you like to do in the library. I thought that was pretty cool. I'm going to make this a neater. Yeah, I mean, I love, I too love OpenStacks, and I really miss when you go look for a book, and then you see what's next to it, and you get all interested. That's like magic. So many things like that, and did research that way because of the Dewey Decimal System. It's actually the design. You know there's going to be a huge section of stuff. Right. I mean, it's design with that idea in mind. Yeah. That related things are kind of near each other. But also, the titles of things that you see are so amazing. I find the titles of books so intriguing. And I like to, when I'm working on a poem, sometimes I like to just come in and look at the stacks and just find a title that seems to somehow relate to what I'm writing or pushing the direction. Oh, has that ever happened that you've found a pre-made title in the stacks? Well, yeah. But I'll also sometimes fold the titles into the poem. Yeah, not as a title, but just as a phrase. Stop to sort of just use as an engine to keep going. It's something that's exciting, feels intuitively related, but pushes me in a different direction. Yeah, all the time. I love that. I love it. Well, I'll tell you what. We're in for a good night because I am not a poetry guy, as you know. And it is a little bit like looking at a Rubik's Cube to me. So I'm really looking forward to learning a little bit more about poetry and learning a little bit more about Merwin and learning a little bit more about why this book spoke to you in such a way. Reading your intro, it was very clear that this book was a pivot in your life. It was, yeah. So I'm really looking forward to finding that. So why don't we get down there? All right, head on down. All right, we'll talk about it. All right, let's do it. Thanks. All right, take it with you. We've each got one. Yes, I have the 50th anniversary. I have the 50th, the cool intro. All right, well, let's get started. Matthew, welcome to the Grotto Pod. Thanks. It's not your first time. You've been here before. But that time, we talked mostly about you and your career. And I do want to touch on that a little bit. But more than that, we're here to talk about this book, The Lice, W.S. Merwin. I thought maybe we could start with you recounting your first encounter with this book. So Matthew wrote the 50th anniversary intro to The Lice, which came out last year. And in it, he told of how he first encountered this book. And it's a really great story. So I think I want you to start by telling everyone how that happened. Yeah. Well, I was in graduate school at UMass Amherst. So in Western Massachusetts, the MFA program there. And I used to haunt, used bookstores a lot as writers used to do. I don't know if people still do that or not, but I did. And I remember just sort of kind of trolling the bookstores, looking for new things. And I just had this experience of wandering into this different bookstore that I don't usually go into, this sort of new age bookstore. I have a very vivid memory of it. I like the picture you're going in there. Yeah, it was like an ape suddenly go escape from the zoo. And it was like eating a candle or whatever. But anyway, so I had a pretty small poetry section. But I noticed this one book called The Second Four Books of Poems, which seemed so mystical and weird to me. And I picked it up and just decided I was going to buy it. And it turned out that The Lice was one of those books. It was a reissue of Merwin's second Four Books of Poems. An inauspicious title, maybe. I guess. I mean, you don't think about it. I was at the title that drew you in. I think it was the title that drew me. It seems so mystical. It's like the spells. So you picked it up and you started reading it. And what was the initial feeling you had? Well, I talk about it in the introduction to the volume. But the first book of The Second Four Books of Merwin's fifth book is called The Moving Target. And I don't really actually remember that book very well. But the next book, the sixth book, is The Lice. And I just remember just being so blown away by the kind of ghosty weirdness of these poems. And I never had read anything like that before. Of course, later on I came to see that it's in a tradition of writing. And we were talking about that a little bit before with me. We talked about it so much already, you guys. I know. And it was really great. We got to try and revive. You really should mic up the green room. Yeah, now we'd set a lot of cool stuff in the green room. Well, I liked one of the things that you say in the introduction. And you just said here that it sounded like a quest book, a kind of book you'd find on a quest. And this book did turn out to be kind of a quest for you. I mean, your life had changed. You've dedicated your life to poetry. And now you've written the 50th anniversary edition intro. That's a pretty amazing circle. Yeah, I mean, it was incredible. I never could have dreamed of that when I first picked up the book. It was not even a ventured into my mind. But I don't, you know, I mean, it's like that thing. I don't know if people have this experience so much. Now maybe they do. But it was a lot of my discovery of literature at that point was in a context of not knowing anything about the person or the book or anything. And it's. You think that's better? Yes. I don't know how it can be replicated, but I think it was nice to just pick up a book and not know anything except what I read on the back of it and what was going on. I couldn't Google the person or look at their website or chat to them and be like, I love your book. Can we be friends? There was like, that was beyond, I mean, I'm sure many people know what I'm talking about. But that idea of even having that kind of connection with authors was impossible to imagine. I mean, maybe you could write them a letter or something, I guess, but that. People did that. Well, so that's interesting because I wrote in my notes what was it that attracted you first? Was it the work or the person? Because Merwin, as a person, is pretty admirable in his own right. Did you find that out later? And once you did, did that change your opinion or confirm your opinion? I had no idea who he was. I didn't know anything about him. There was no, I don't think there's a picture on that. A book, there's a picture on this book, but there wasn't on the second four books, poems, I don't think. And if there was, I don't think it would have mattered to me very much. I mean, it was just some guy. I didn't know. That meant nothing to me. I didn't know anything. I, it was the work. And I was reading a lot. You know, I mean, when you're trying to like learn to be a writer, you read a lot. And you just read everything. You can get your hands on. It's indiscriminate in a way. You're just eating, eating everything that you can get your hands on. And so I didn't judge necessarily anything because I didn't, I didn't have any context for it. And this person was just, he wrote like, like a go, like a damaged ghost, like from the future past. I mean, it was like, it was just completely like just not like anything you've ever heard in your whole life. And it just, it was, it was, you know, and I'm not the only person who's had this experience with this book. I didn't know that it was a famous book. I didn't know it was an important book. I didn't know anything. I mean, I really literally did not know anything. And I think that was great. I think it was good. That's a good way to read. Yeah, that's pretty cool that it was just the power of what was on the page really that got to you. I guess though, I do want to know that as you learned more, how did that change your opinion of the book? You know, it turned out to be, what was the quote? I saw one of the indelible books about the Vietnam War. Yeah, and I didn't even know that to be honest. I mean, it wasn't that hard to know because there's a couple of poems in the book that are obviously about the war. I mean, there's a book called The Asians Dying. And it's, you know, I mean, obviously there's some, and when the war is over, there's a famous poem from that. There's poems that are obviously, and there's also poems about ecological matters. But I think if you would ask me after I read it when it was written, I don't think I would have been able to, I don't think I would have maybe exactly known the date. And we were talking about this a little bit before too. It feels like I like most great books. It feels in some way timeless, although marriage of its time too when you don't think, so it's in both. But a lot of times, I mean, you quote Virginia Woolf, is it every poet is our contemporary? The poet is always our contemporary. Poet is always our contemporary, which is so beautiful. But usually, you know, you can really say, you read something and you think, oh yeah, that's kind of the 50s or that's this feeling of the 19th century or there's something about Merwin that does feel out of time. Yeah. Yeah, I think he has. Well, that's his whole thing when he lives. This book was, I mean, I didn't know this then and only came to know much later. I mean, he, I don't know the exact circumstances of his life, but something happened. I think there was a divorce or the end of a relationship or something. And he moved to this town in France, this rural community in France and he has a house which he still has today, which is there. And it's in this region of France. It's not a very touristy place and it's not a very famous place. And he has this house there and he's actually written some great prose about this, The Lost Uplands is a book about this region. But anyway, but so, but for him, like he was there and it felt like the cycles, the cyclical nature of life there and the rural community and the farming and the seasons and the way thing. I mean, the way things moved and the way people moved things around from still mules, still hauling carts or whatever. Those things were timeless. And I think that timelessness permeates these poems also and it's permeated a lot of his poems. And so it is out of time in a way. I mean, it's, you know, which I think is also kind of amazing experience. Well, and it would have to be to have that impact on you. If it is an indelible book about the Vietnam War, you're looking at it in what, 1997? I think that was 96, yeah. Yeah, 96. And for it to still have that kind of power to you, yeah. Then it couldn't be something limited to that topic. Yeah, I mean, there are poems that are very specifically about that war or other wars that I also am really interested in and care about a lot that just have a different impact on me, you know, they're not, but this, this is a different kind of book. This book feels archetypal, it feels symbolic. It feels beyond the personal. It feels like about being human. It's about the border between life and death. It's about, you know, it's about consciousness. It's very emotional and an idiosyncratic way. I mean, it's a weird, amazing, singular book. It's emotional in this kind of Zen way where he's feeling emotion deeply, but it's been distilled. Yeah. Well, I think he's also pretty blasted in the book. I think there's a lot of like sorrow in the book. There's a lot of fear of mortality. There's a lot of loss in the book. And it's not like a lot of book about, you know, there's not a lot of poems about like having really fun dinner parties with like your new friends. Are there other poems like that? Not by Mervyn, but like... Sure, sure. Yeah. Okay, good. All my poems are about dinner parties. I don't feel that's true. You have read a ton of poetry. I don't want to assume too much, but I'm assuming you've read a ton of poetry in your life. And I'm assuming you had already read quite a bit of poetry at this point. What was it? I mean, you're describing, I guess I can't say what was it that made it so powerful too, but how was it so powerful? What was it? When you walked away from seeing this book, how did things change? I think there are several things. And I think one thing is the clear mystery of the book. I think it's a very mysterious book. We should probably at some point not too far from now actually try to get into some poems. I think that's a very good idea. But I mean, it's a very mysterious, elusive book. You know, it's not like, oh, he's really talking about X, Y, or Z. It's just, you know, but also it's really, really, really clear and grounded and the voice feels very present to me. And I think I was just like, oh, I want to do that. I want to write spooky, weird, cool poems that feel connected to human readers. I don't want to write stuff that's like just to show off or like just to be smart or just to be, I mean, these poems aren't about being smart. They're about, I don't think, I mean, they're written in very simple language. You know, a lot of the motifs in them, I hate that word motif. It's something in English, I sound like an English teacher. But like, but you know, but like, I'm right, I am. But like, but they're, you know, the objects in them are words in them. Just repeat. I mean, there's a lot of words that repeat. And so it accumulates the meaning of it, but they're simple words. It's interesting to hear that it inspired you and didn't intimidate you. I was too dumb to be intimidated. I don't, I don't, I wasn't, I wasn't interested in being, I mean, I, I was looking for fellowship. You know, I was looking for community and I didn't care if the poets were old or infamous or my age or dead or alive. I didn't even know. I didn't know if my mom was still alive or not. It was born in 1927 for all I knew who was dead. And how would I know? Right, right. There was no Google. What? There was no Google. No, I mean, I could have asked somebody, but I didn't, why would I do that? I just like, I didn't, I honestly didn't know if he was alive or dead and didn't care. Why don't you read something? What? Well, what do you want me to read? I want, well, I, I'd like something from The Lice. I mean, why don't you pick just cut? Cause like, there might be people who don't, who don't know Merwin at all. And certainly probably don't know this book necessarily. And it would be nice to have a little sense of what we're talking about. Raise your hand if you need any Merwin biographical information or if we can skip over that. We're all, oh, I need somewhere. Okay, I did write some down because I needed some Merwin biographical information. It will be revealed as time goes on that I'm a poetry neophyte. And that's okay. Cause Merwin is considered the greatest living American poet. He's won, he won Pulitzer's in 1971 and 2009, making him sort of the San Antonio Spurs of Pulitzer. I throw that in for Matthew. Oh, okay. He was the US poet laureate in 2010. National Book Award in 2005. But he also was important in that during this, during the period of time that he wrote The Lice, he sort of, he took on the challenge of becoming an activist poet as well. You have a, could you read that part of the intro? Well, I did want to say, yeah, first that he says that he was looking to create engaged poetry, but free of obligation. And for me as a writer right now, I found that something I really want to think about because it's, you know, you don't want to be engaging in propaganda and at the same time, you want to be engaged and be taking up the important issues of your time and the things that matter. But he says that Vietnam War led many poets of my generation to try to use poetry to make something stop happening. That's interesting, right? Not to make something happening, which is an allusion to Odin, but to make something stop happening, which is the war. Yeah, the war. That's the thing I think that still resonates right now, that's for sure. And I think he continued that sort of activism after that. He's a huge environmentalist. I can't remember what the name, there was a documentary called Even Though, Even Though The Whole World Is Burning about his life that came out in 2014 that sort of shows him. He lives in Hawaii and has a huge rare palm tree grove. Yeah, he basically preserves species of trees that would otherwise be extinct. And there's now an organization called the Merwin Conservancy and his house is on it. And he actually lives in a town called Haiku, believe it or not. But he, yeah, it's kind of in the central part of Maui, if you've ever been to Maui, so it's not like where the beaches are, but it's... It's a really magical, mystical place, though. Yeah, it's amazing. And he, yeah, so he's been that kind of activist, but not like a marching on the streets kind of activist necessarily. But like a, yeah, and I think his work is in a certain kind of way, extremely unfashionable. It's not identity based. I mean, he's a white cisgendered man. So he's not, so he doesn't, he isn't like, he isn't, he doesn't speak to that set of concerns that's very present, I think, in our literature right now. But I think his work is very, it's full of resistance. I saw read two poems, like one poem, I mentioned earlier this thing about him living in France. And he, this poem, I think, sort of had the landscape of it is in that sort of rural French space, that little town space, but it's also part of, there's a lot of dream in this poem. It's called the River of Bees. In a dream, I returned to the River of Bees, five orange trees by the bridge and beside two mills, my house, into whose courtyard a blind man followed, the goats and stood singing of what was older. Soon it will be 15 years. He was old, he will have fallen into his eyes. I took my eyes a long way to the calendars, room after room asking, how shall I live? One of the ends is made of streets. One man, processions carry through it empty bottles, their image of hope, it was offered to me by name. Once, once and once in the same city I was born, asking what shall I say? He will have fallen into his mouth. Men think they're better than grass. I returned to his voice rising like a fork full of hay. He was old, he is not real, nothing is real, nor the noise of death drawing water. We have the echo of the future. On the door it says what to do to survive, but we were not born to survive, only to live. And this other poem is called Caesar and it's, we were talking about how this book is in the context of this political situation of the Vietnam War and obviously a sense that a lot of people had that the government had, you know, really abandoned their concerns and was sending very young to die and just, it was just a complete catastrophe. And obviously I think there's a lot we can, you know, relate to about that feeling in relation to our government right now, goes without saying. So this, I read when I was reading this poem today, I thought, oh, this sounds like it could have been written, you know, five minutes ago. It's called Caesar. My shoes are almost dead. And as I wait at the doors of ice, I hear the cry go up for him, Caesar, Caesar. But when I look out the window, I see only the flatlands and the slow vanishing of the windmills, the centuries draining the deep fields. Yet this is still my country. The thug on duty says, what would you change? He looks at his watch, he lifts emptiness out of the vases and holds it up to examine. So it is evening with the rain starting to fall forever. One by one, he calls night out of the teeth. And at last I take up my duty, wheeling the president past banks of flowers, past the feet of empty stairs, hoping he's dead. That's hardcore, you know? That's like, that ending, I was like, ugh. I remember he was like, wow, okay. All right, you can say that. Rest it for that. That's like, but you know, the thing about Murrah is like that, the logic of this, he's always so committed to this logic of like, you know, he looks at his watch, he lifts emptiness out of the vases and holds it up to examine. That's not like, that's not real life. You know, you're not gonna like, you know, that's not something you'd see really. Or when he says, you know, one by one, he calls night out of the teeth. That's not like, that's a deeper kind of logic. You know, that's a deeper logic. And either you're in or you're out. You know, either you're gonna be the bureaucrat of the imagination and be like, well, what does that mean? You know, it's not like, I'm just saying, what does night really mean? Or you're just gonna fall into it, you know? So you go for it. Let it wash over you. Yeah, I mean, to me, it's some deeper feeling than letting it wash over me. I feel very implicated, you know, in it. Like I feel, I feel actually more, I feel more committed to that language than I do to most of the language I hear every day. I feel like most of the language I hear every day does wash over me and I feel I experience it with a kind of horror of like, of just like despair of superficial meaninglessness. Why do you think that is? Do you think that's because of the language? Because people are lying. And most of what they say is banal and stupid. And it's on social media or on the internet or in the news or whatever. Most of the language we hear is, oh God, I scared this poor kid out of here about this depressing stuff about language. Not really, it's gonna be okay, I promise. But I just mean that for me, most of the language I hear is at best accurate. Are you talking about, are you talking about language you consume or language that you hear on the street, that you overhear or people talking to each other? I mean, I don't hear a lot of language on the street over here. I mean, I don't walk around just listening to conversations and that'd be great. But like, I don't hear, it's not like that. I just mean the news of the media and the news of all this constant noise that surrounds us of information, which is 95% of it is just banalities and nonsense. It's like repeated phrases. It's almost, that to me, that was, I mean, I didn't wanna be argumentative when you said that thing about washing over you. But it's like, that to me feels like it's washing over me, like almost drowning me. And then I read something like this and I feel a sharpness. I feel an accuracy. But that's the mystery of poetry, right? There's this sharpness and this accuracy, but you can't pin down the meaning. Right. And that's really beautiful. Yeah, the meaning is in what it is. Exactly. The meaning is in that challenge to the ways that people usually say things. That's funny because as I said, I'll be up front. Most poetry is a mystery to me. Finding the meaning is a mystery. And when I figured it out, like we were reading on the anniversary of my death, I'll read, I'll go ahead. Yeah, read it. That's probably the most, we were talking about this. That's probably the most famous. The famous one, yeah. Famous one. It's on the anniversary of my death. And the cool thing was, 61, I read it and it made sense to me, which was awesome. In fact, I found it kind of chilling because it introduced ideas I had never thought about and important thing being I understood that's what it was doing. Every year without knowing it, I have passed the day when the last fires will wave to me and the silence will set out tireless traveler, like the beam of a lightless star. Then I will no longer find myself in life as in a strange garment, surprised at the earth and the love of one woman and the shamelessness of men. As a day writing after three days of rain, hearing the rend sing and the falling cease and bowing not knowing to what. So I read the first line of that said, whoa, I've never thought about every day, every year you pass the day of your death, right? Like you pass the anniversary of your death every year and I had never thought of that and now it kind of creeps me out, but I was really excited that I got it because it is, because poetic language can be, I don't want to say obscuring, but challenging to find the meaning, at least for me. I think that's what I mean when I say letting it wash over you is that I don't, at least the first time I read a poem, I don't find myself. You don't have to work that hard? No, I don't know what it means and I don't care. Like I'm not really working to find the meaning, I don't think. We got a big time poet with us up here on stage. Tell us what to do. We'll ask him what he thinks. Who's reading it right, me or Larry? We want an answer. I mean, part of the problem is with the words meaning and understand. I mean, that sort of begs the question in a way because the way something makes meaning is different depending on what it's, you know, what genre it is or what it's doing. I mean, the way that like a song lyric makes meaning is not the same as the way that like a manual telling you how to put your coffee maker together makes meaning. Right. So it's like, it's all language, but it's not, but it's does, it's a, I mean, I guess one way maybe to think about it is that language is this super powerful, incredibly complicated substance and it does different things in different contexts and it can be very direct and communicative. It's powerful, you know, in that way. Like I can give you precise directions of like how to get somewhere or how to do some very complicated thing, you know, using language, but also, it can also be used to access areas of the unconscious. It can be used to, it can be used to derange. It can be used to destabilize and create emotional reactions in people that are not predictable. And you know, it can be also used for that. It's like, you know, I'm thinking the analogy. I mean, it's a crude analogy, but maybe Bridget, you can call me if you think that it's, no, but that it's like, you know, paint. I was thinking about that when you were saying that. You can do different things. Well, I was also thinking. I know that you don't use house paint on campuses, although some people do, but you can, but you can paint a house or you can paint a mailbox, but you can also paint, you know, a Van Gogh. You know, you paint it like Van Gogh could paint a Van Gogh. I can't paint Van Gogh. Well, I was also thinking about paint and how much more, like you can go to a different place when you came with language, because the thing about language is it has a concreteness. To move past that is, I mean, that's the magic of poetry, right, that you take these very concrete things and you push it somehow past that into a place that is kind of mystical and that breaks open into not just a new meaning, but it's completely own thing. I mean, this is the hard thing to explain to people, although I think people understand this on some intuitive level is that words are repositories of historical memory. Their meanings are determined by history. You know, when we use every word we use is a word that comes to us from having been used through many, many, many generations before us and sometimes some words are very, very old, many, many thousands of years old and what they mean has been determined by human life and so when we use them, they have immense power and magic. They don't, when we say a word like knife, like that word has been through a lot and so I can mean, give me that knife and you know what I mean, but when Merwin says that thing about the ghosts living in the faces of the knives, that's like a different, that meaning of that word knife suddenly connects to all the other things that knives have meant to people over their whole existence, human beings and so that's the thing that poets are doing, they're accessing that, the bigger resonances of these, of language beyond the merely functional. You know, and they, they, that's, they're activating that meaning. You know, it's like elusive and kind of hippy sounding but it's true, that's why lines of poetry can be so resonant for people and they can carry them, like moving beyond, like, even if they have a clean, some sort of meaning out of it. Well, some sort of meaning they get out, they understand, I mean, here's the thing, if you look at this book, I challenge you to find a line in this book that is composed, I'm sure you understand every single word in this book and if we looked at a line, you would understand the meaning of the line. You know, it's just that you might not understand why he's saying it or like how it connects but you're not, but it's not like you don't understand what it means. That was gonna be my next question and I don't mean this in a old guy in Dead Poets Society making a graph way but how do you know as a poet if your poem has been successful? You don't know. I mean, if someone reads it, can you tell if they're getting out of it what you want them to get out of it? Does it matter? I don't, that's not really the question I don't, if I really want somebody to understand something I'm saying, I'm gonna say it as clearly as possible and I'm pretty sure I can do that. I'm pretty good with language, like I'm not worried that if I really need you to understand something that I can't say it but if I wanna make a poem that has an impact on you and like changes your life. Yeah, maybe you wanna take us somewhere. I don't know, I just do the best I can and I try to make these things and I've been doing it for a long time and I hope what I do does that I don't know if it does it or not and for some people doesn't, some people doesn't. You know, it's like writing a song or like making a painting, I can't say. But it's not like, I don't sit there and say like, oh, what I really wanted to communicate is that like death is scary and I really hope I got that idea across. I mean, there's nothing interesting and there's no, I mean, no ideas are interesting. I mean, you picked out the one poem that has like kind of a cool idea. Yeah, yeah. But like, most of the time in poetry, it's not like there's some big revelatory idea or something, it's like. And I like that idea, it's like, you know, my favorite songs are the kind that take a two minute period and explore it really clearly, you know, or one little feeling and really take it apart. But you must have intent when you're, when you're, I mean, I guess a hard part of me as a prose writer is you're like, I know what I'm editing toward. I may not get there, but I know what I'm trying to edit toward. When you're editing a poem, do you know what you're trying to edit toward? No, no, it's not prose. I'm not writing prose. If I were writing, if I wanted to get an idea across, there was a specific idea that was important to me that I needed to communicate and would feel bad if people didn't understand exactly what I was saying, I probably would write prose. That's not, that's what if I would like, you need to know that I, yeah, I don't know what, like, you know, I think that, you know, Russia's, you know, messing with our election system. Like, I'm not gonna write a poem. That's crazy. I'm gonna explain it, you know, but like, but if I want to, if I'm writing a poem, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to reach for the unknown and I'm trying to reach for something and I only know, I don't know what I'm writing towards. Do you ever write a poem where the intent is, I want the reader to feel this way? What do you mean, what way? Like, I want the reader to understand that, let's take the most banal, I'm sad. Not even that. I want the reader to understand that this cherry Coke tastes fantastic. The cherry Coke is a fantastic thing. I mean, I don't, I don't, it seems like deliberately chosen most. I'm kind of a small, yeah. Casting? Small, oh, don't. Ambition for a poem, but like, but I mean, like, but I mean, like, I. Well, yes and no. I mean, I think if I wanted someone to understand that line, I would just say that. I would just say we. Cherry Coke is fantastic. But it. I have a poem in my, in one of my books where I say that something a lot like that actually. And it, I was thinking of Frank O'Hara when he said that. Having a Coke with you. Yeah, having a Coke with you. And just like, but. I mean, there are those whole Frank O'Hara poems where he's just like, I'm walking down the street and there's a, I don't know, the girls are dancing and the hard hat guys are eating their sandwiches and same-bridged staples. Without getting to in the weeds, like. No, let's get the weeds. So it's my. Weedy. My anniversary's coming up. I'm married. Great. I know. Shout out. Shout out to Sarah. And I, you know, have been thinking that I would like to write a poem that in some way, you know, acknowledges that event, you know, for us. And that, that, that. So yes, I want to write a poem that in some ways authentic. Right. To the complexity and, and, and. Intensity and, and, and. All the joy. Joy, of course joy. But I'm guessing that you think like a prose writer and you think about scene, like the specific things, not, I want to talk about love. But the point is, is like, I mean, I don't not like, I'm not going to, like, if I just wanted to say I love you or I'm glad we're still married or whatever, like, thank you for bearing our child or whatever, like, I could just say that on a card. But if I want to write a poem, I'm trying to capture, not capture, I'm trying to grow into the, the reality, the strange realities of our actual relationship. And I don't know what those are until I write the, write it. Right. I don't know yet. And so, so it's dangerous work, because you don't know what you're going to say. You don't know what's going to happen. It sounds like it's dangerous for the author as well. For the poet. It is, it is dangerous. You don't know where it's going to go. It's extremely dangerous. Yeah. You don't know what you're going to say. You don't know what you're going to talk about. You don't know what you're going to discover when you're writing it. And the difference between prose and poetry is you don't, you don't say no to yourself in poetry. Or you shouldn't because if you're writing, if you're writing prose, you know, you have a subject. You have to like, you know, you're like, well, that's not part of what I'm talking about or whatever. And you're not just going to, but with poetry, that's not true. Poetry, you could say anything and you can go over here and you can beat one thing in the next thing. Can we talk about prose a little bit? Is that wrong? What I'm saying? Oh no, I think it's totally right. It sounded like she was saying something wrong. You know everything because here's why. Sure. Here's my notes. Such a good prose writer. Yeah. That's about you. And it kind of pissed me off. I told Clary because and Merwin also excellent prose writer and I can think of a lot of poets who have written absolutely beautiful books that are not poetry. Why do you think then are poets such good prose writers and why does it not go the other way? I mean, I guess I could just say that, you know, writing prose is something that a lot of us have been doing our whole lives. Maybe like just you have to write prose, you know, you can't so like I think it's like, you know, we've all had some exposure to that in a way like, and so it's writing a poem is such a different thing. Muscle. Yeah. And it's entirely possible that you would mostly go through your whole life without even having any experience with that. So I don't know. So I mean, it's like, it's kind of like. Yeah, I think that's why. I think that prose writers, I think the poets can often be really good prose writers. I feel like that. Not always. But what you just said sort of shed some light. Alejandro, I hope you don't mind if I bring this up, but that Alejandro's wife is a poet who won't write poems because it's too hard. Well, that's not what he said. That's not what he said. Well, I said he took it to a place. He didn't say it was too hard. And we don't want to, we don't want to betray it. No. I think it is. You need a certain kind of space to make poems that's very difficult to achieve in the hubbub of life. Like a headspace. Headspace, physical space, time, commitment. And I think that it is a different sort of consciousness. And it got sort of more, I don't know. I don't know your wife at all. And I don't know what's, but sort of the impression I got was that like, it does, you do have to cultivate a different mentality. And it takes, it's like, for me, it's a lot like exercising. Like you have to work out in a certain sense. And in the beginning it's very hard and painful. And then eventually after some period of time, you get back into shape and you can do it again. And I think it can be difficult. How do you work out? You do it by writing poetry? Yeah. Yeah, you do it by right, but willing to write bad poems. Do you have to get into the same physical space to write poetry? I think you can write anywhere. Not necessarily. Some people do. Some people need, some people are very sensitive to their environment. They need to be into some kind of space or whatever. I mean, BQ and I, we were talking about how you need to have a certain kind of environment to do, to write prose. I mean, it just depends on the writer. I think some people are very, I'm amenable. Like I can scribble pretty much anywhere. When I first started at the grotto, and I would face, you know, the blank computer screen and be so stressed out and watch the hours tick by and get nothing done, I would think, Matthew's a pruders over there writing poetry behind that door. He can write poetry, I can just like, get some shit down. Check the email. Lighten in sense. I'm so glad that that unrealistic expectation. I don't. Me, me, me, me, me. I mean, it really helped because I would think, you know, it's his job. He comes in here, writes some poems. I'm gonna come in here and write whatever I can write. Write some poems, get a little lunch. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, writing poems is different. Yeah, nothing about writing, different between writing poems and prose is that, you know, writing poems happens more, much more in bursts. And prose is a grime. I mean, it's a grime. It's a grime. It's like tough. I feel like it's a grime. I know when you were on the podcast earlier, we talked about that you'd spent a lot of time in bands. Did you write songs? No. You didn't write songs. So interesting. Have you tried? I kind of, my songs are not very good. So interesting. Yeah. I've written like two, I've written probably three songs that are good. But mostly I don't, my songs are bad. I play music in a band with a guy who's an incredible songwriter. And so it's sort of like, oh yeah, that guy can write songs. I don't write songs that are that good. Every once in a while, I would like give him a little tiny, tiny edit. I'd be like a couple lines. You just said that, no, just one. It was like, if you just changed that one word and you'd be like, that's better. But like that was one time and like one record, you know, like one, one word and one per record. Did you ever try in earnest to sit down and go, all right, I'm gonna write songs now? Not in a sustained way. I mean, I can write music, but like, you know, I'm musical, but like I just don't write songs very well. It's interesting, particularly with the whole. There's a lot of songs. We really need more songs. I kind of like it. Oh, I do, like I know he said it. Because the whole Bob Dylan thing really brings up and the Nobel Prize brings up this whole thing. The division between poetry and songwriting or division makes it sound good. We talked about this last time at the party. I know, but it was so good, we had to keep going. No, I wasn't saying that as a criticism, I was just remembering. Yeah, we did, because I am kind of fascinated. I mean, I'm really in two minds of him winning, honestly. And you said something like, they're not the same. And I was persuaded. Yeah, I mean, as I think I said, it's not the Nobel Prize for poetry. It's the Nobel Prize for literature. Although in the citation, they do talk about it as a poet, which I think is a mistake, but it's not the Nobel Prize for poetry. If it were, then that'd be different. That'd be like, well, it's not, you know, then we'd be having a different argument. That's a really good point. I mean, is Bob Dylan not literature? I think it'd be a tough argument to make. It seems kind of square to say that. I mean, we're totally square. I mean, I think that is definitely literature. I mean, my songwriting is literature. I love Bob Dylan. But there's so many great poets. True, true. Could have given it to John Ashbury, I wouldn't have minded. Yeah, I'm kind of. Okay, I do want to. But he did not died at that point. Right, I see what you're saying, yeah. Yes. Let's return to Merwin. Oh, yeah, sure. I want to know how the book has continued to impact you since that one afternoon in 1996. I think it's just, I think when I went back to, obviously when I had to write this introduction. So the book and I are the same age. It was published in 67 and. That's the year all good people were born. Yeah, it's a good year to be born. Okay. And so when I, a couple of years ago, whatever a few years ago when I was asked to do this, I obviously went back and reread the book and I was just struck by how much it had impacted by the way I write. I was like, wow, I didn't realize like how, how influential this book was. So it wasn't a deal though where you had it and you were pulling it out now and then and taking a look at it. I probably hadn't read it in 10 years at least, if not longer. Did you ever find that you had actually sort of used a line from the lice or a resonance of a line like that? No, I think that maybe there are certain that we were talking earlier about how he repeats certain words in the book a lot. You know, there are words like, I mean, I noticed that there's a there that he repeats the word darkness a lot and which has happened to be a word that I like a lot also. So maybe it's possible that I, you know, was so struck by his use of that word that I have also used it in my work. But I never, I mean, also his imagery is so original. But I think if I stole any of it by accident, I think I would notice right quickly. I mean, it's, it's, it's pretty, it's pretty striking. What about structure? Yeah, I mean, a lot. So these, we haven't mentioned, but this, these none of the poems, well, actually only one of the poems in this book uses any punctuation and Merwin is known for not using punctuation. I really like not having punctuation. Yeah, me too. Yeah, me too. And he says he'd like all of it because it made it, it made him, it made him feel like the poems were stapled to the page. And I, I have often in my poems used punctuation. I've, you know, there's a lot of poems over and, but I also often don't use it. And I think one of the reasons I don't use it is because I noticed in this book how letting go of punctuation forced him to really just be so attentive to the micro movements of the poem, you know, like, and be really, if you were, and if you don't have punctuation as a help, you have to be so attentive to the way the words are moving if you're not going to lose your reader, you know? And so I like that. I like that pressure on my own poems a lot to not have punctuation. I also feel like it's a little meddlesome punctuation sometimes. I do think that's partly what gives it the timeless feeling too, is that punctuation can speak of its time very much. Yeah, I feel like it kind of gives the reader a little bit of power too. You know, they're not being told when to stop and start. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Yeah, I think that's what he meant about, you know, making the poems feel like they're stable with the page a little bit. It's like they start to float off and then you can kind of like drift among the poems too. But like, you know, but you can easily lose control of the poems if they don't have punctuation. There's a reason why we have punctuation. It communicates information, tonal and syntactical information. And so if you let go of it, you're letting go of a pretty powerful aspect of language. So like, if you have to be really good with the words to not let things spin out of control, basically, you know. You're making poems sound like potentially dangerous, unruly things. They are, they should be, they should be, they should be dangerous. They should be, they should mess with you. What about when we were in the room earlier, we're talking, and I'm gonna stop because I didn't want to get ourselves talked out before we got out here, about reading poetry on the page versus hearing it spoken. But I also want to talk about the way it looks on the page and the use of white space and organizing poems. Talk a little bit about what drives you to make those choices, to make the choices for how it's gonna look on the page. I mean, all these decisions are ultimately emotional decisions. They're in the interest of creating an emotional effect in the imagined reader or listener. And so when I do any, make any kind of formal decision, I'm thinking somehow trying to intuit how it will feel, like how does a filled up page of words feel versus a very like spare thing. I mean, just take as an example, if you have a lot of, if you have a very formal structure, like let's say you have like terseps, you have three lines and then there's a break and three lines and a break through it, it gives a sense of orderliness and control to the poem and that the reader will perceive that. And that is a kind of thing that can be helpful for the poem or can be false, feeling in relation to the poem and a sort of spread out thing all over the page with a lot of white space can feel kind of drifty in a way that can either feel really authentic to the thinking or manufactured and false. It's like, it's just, you have to just find the form, I think that can, it's almost like, I mean, it's gonna sound like a stupid analogy, but it's like people who dress in a way that's authentic to their personality versus people who don't. You know, it's almost like clothing form, although that's a bad analogy in a certain sense because it makes it feel like it's draped on top of something which it isn't really good. Then the way, in the sense that it's like some sartorial decisions can feel authentic and others can feel horse-managed, you know? And so like, I just don't, you know, I want the formal decisions of my poems to feel authentic. So I, but it's trial and error, you don't know, and as you're making those decisions, it changes the poem and then you find a different, you know, you're like kind of messing with things and then something starts to change, you know? So it's very much like an interaction between the form and what's in the poem, I guess. And what about the question of poems being written to be read on a page versus being written to be heard out loud? Well, BQ, you're saying that you read, you like to read them to yourself. Yeah, I like to read poetry, but I like to read it out loud to myself. So I can't think of that I almost ever read poetry when I'm not alone somewhere because I like to read it out loud. But that's interesting. So you just sit in a room reading it out loud? Uh-huh. And I mean, I get really, I get really, even at my age, I get kind of swony and excited when I read poetry out loud. Yeah. I mean, I can read Frank O'Hara, just someone we've mentioned, and still for that same stirring excitement that I felt when I was 18 reading it. And I'm reading these, you know, you do, it is almost like, I think I mentioned to you, it reminded me of Chinese poetry. Yeah. I don't know, you knew the exact era. But it gives me that same feeling of being in this kind of in-between world, this floating world that I'm not quite sure where I am. And reading it out loud makes me feel more part of that. Yeah. I mean, it also sounds good. Yeah, it sounds really cool. I mean, is it meant to be read out loud, do you think, all poetry? Ah, well, I don't know. That's a big, that would be a big statement. I mean, I think generally speaking, it seems that there's something about the sound of the words that is really important to poets. And so that having it read out loud, either literally read out loud or just having it sound in the head of the person in a kind of more material way than prose might is pretty important. Yeah, I would say it's super important because the sound is part of the information of the words. Right. You want to read some of your poetry? What? You want to read some of your poetry? I can, sure. What do you think? Yeah, we got time. Yeah, I would like it. You want to hear something? Yeah. Yeah, okay. Don't you guys want to hear something? Yeah. I do. People are nodding. I was sort of trying to think about poems that were, yeah, I don't know, I was looking at some new work and I was thinking, oh, are any of these poems directly influenced by Merwin? And I don't know if that's true or not, but I mean, I can read just two or three or something, maybe three, and you can hear for yourself if you think that they sound Merwin-y to you because now you two at least are like big Merwin experts. Yeah, I've read a Merwin book. Okay, so this first poem is called a poem for Doom. Doom, D-O-M-M, D-O-O-M. Oh, I was like, D-O-M-M. Doom, poem for Doom, D-O-O-M, poem for Doom. Birds don't lie, they're never lost. They never think above the earth I stole this form or blue is the best. I listened to it singing my old man as far away, singing American songs, stolen from those who lived in what now is but was not the park, which makes me love him. I am eating an orange someone grabbed from nature. Over me I hear controlled mechanical obsidian dragonflies search for anarchists. For a long time I went to school in the palm of my life, carrying a stone, obeying the law of semblance. Now each night I bring it back down to the land Asphodel's cover. Then I wake and take my son out on the porch to say hello, everything. Hello, green hills that slept. Hello, tree drawn on the side of a white truck, exorably rumbling towards some hole. Hello, Magnolia, whose pink and white blossoms have left it for where, oh, sweet Doom, we are all going. Then behind us we close the black door with the golden knob and sit in the great chair. Morning light through the shades always makes look like a dream forest throne. All around our subjects, the shadow trees rise up, their private thoughts filling the room. I take them like an animal with gentle, ungrateful ceremony from a leaf takes dew. Not to me like the middle of that poem where I talk about going to school in the palm of my life and carrying a stone, obeying the law of semblance, and going back down to the underworld. That to me feel like some kind of Merwin. The first line did to me too. Maybe, yeah, that directness, weird directness. And the bird, I mean, there's a lot of his start with the bird. But poem for Doom, I always think of you in those kinds of titles, poem for giants, I think you have. I got sick of clever titles. I like it so much. But it sounded very, I mean, it sounded completely like your voice, but now that I've read Merwin this way, I really do hear it. Maybe we should bury this pod mask, I don't know. I like it. I don't think it's a big secret that I'm a Merwin. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of poets are Merwin. So I can read like a pretty new one, the branding a lot of poems. That was beautiful by the way. I was, thanks. So do you all know Kodernice's Park in the East Bay? It's in Berkeley. It's one of the oldest. It's one of the oldest parks in Berkeley. Yeah, and it was built during the WPA. So it's like there's all this extraneous stuff in it because they were just like trying to keep busy basically. Right, make something. So anyway, so my son loves that park because it has this tunnel underneath the road to go from the park to the rose garden. And there's, it's also got a train, like an old trolley train thing that they made there. So he's like in total heaven in this park. So anyway, and he calls it train park and tunnel park. So the title of this poem is called Tunnel Park. Tunnel Park. I never read this poem. Nobody's ever seen this poem by the way. Tunnel Park. World premiere. World premiere, yeah. Tunnel Park. 80 years ago, during those famous dark times, when the government paid men to build bridges and dams, they carved this park my son loves out of a hill. The men needed to keep working to get paid. So they made a long, dangerous concrete slide. Kids screamed down, their parents watching with their hands over their mouths. Then dug this unnecessary cool aperture full of obscure shadows through the hillside to the garden of famous roses I don't care about. And finally, some secret stairs. No matter how many times we've found, always seemed like they were forever waiting only for us. My son and I went upward. His red shirt kept disappearing into the shadows. From pointless worry, I became tired. So we sat on one stone step and shared some blue water. Through the leaves we could see a giant crumbling pastel house. It once was grand. Its dark windows still look down on everything. It was so quiet I could hear the message everyone knows. Worse times are coming. Who isn't afraid? Only the dead. We went further. The stairs never ended. We had to turn back to our lives knowing there is mystery even in the new world. Yes. So yeah, I mean, I don't know. I don't know why those poems, but just, you know, I mean, I think that, Merwini, like I'm always trying to get to that space where the real world becomes mystical or symbolic or resonant or, you know, emblematic of things that we can all connect to. And I'm looking for that space. I don't just want to write out my own experience. I'm not a diarist. I'm not writing journals, you know. But I also know I'm very interested in the real world. You know, I like things. I like stuff that we all can recognize. So I like the permeability, you know, that I think is very present in this book of Merwins, you know. I think that one, too, had a little bit of that Merwin idea of the man-made world intruding on the natural world. Yeah. Yeah, or like the interaction of it and how they become like kind of echoes of each other almost. Like it's like this, yeah, like the, but yeah, for sure, like the idea that there's this big natural world that's sort of out there. Like, and then there's this, these puny efforts of human beings still like, you know, do stuff. I mean, Merwin, that's the only thing we need to mention is like this book is very, we talked a little about his environmental consciousness, there are these prototypical eco-palms, you know, these palms of environmental despair in this book and that's, you know, 50 years ahead of its time, you know, for sure. I mean, that's a little depressing, right? Super depressing, yeah. Saw that coming, you know. Yeah, yeah. Although I do really like the line in the poem you just read, where the roses are that I don't care about. I like just like enough of the roses. I don't really actually, I don't really care about it. I like that. Everyone's like, oh, that rose garden, I'm like, ah. You see when you walk around that rose garden seems a little boring to me. You know, what can I say? I think it's overrated for me. I mean, I don't care if everybody else is into them. But your son loves that park. Yeah, but he doesn't care about the, he wants to go to the tunnels. Well, I can see that, yeah. I would, I like tunnels too, that's very cool. Tunnels are really cool. I just think we should bring back the WPA. Sure, absolutely, of course. That's the hidden agenda of that poem. Yeah, oh, excellent, all right. We have about 15 minutes left. I wonder, you guys would be interested in asking Matthew some questions about all of us. Poetry about Merwin. Anything. Anything. Yes. Matthew's book. Oh, we have a mic, yeah. Oh my God, it's Diana Kapp, my high school friend. I'm not high school, my magic school friend. Wow. That's crazy. Right, or Diana Kapp. I was interested in the comment you made about this poem that you may write for Sarah on the occasion of your anniversary, and how you said, you're just gonna kind of wander into the poem and you're gonna not, it's a little bit scary because you don't know what it is you're going to say. And I would think on the occasion of your anniversary if you were gonna write a poem for your wife, you actually would have something that you wanted to say. It's not necessarily that you wanna say I love you or thanks for having my child, but talk about how it is this kind of random bumbling into something versus I have something I wanna say. And I'm gonna give you some sort of imagery for how it is I'm gonna express something I'm trying to say to you. Well, I mean, maybe you're pointing to just a personality flaw of mine. Like, I don't know what I want. I mean, without getting too intimate. I mean, there's lots of times when I say things to my wife that are very specific about our relationship that are very positive and about, you know, like, but a poem to me is not the place to necessarily say those things alone. Like, not only to say those things, I think it's, for me, it's a place to explore the deeper, they may be even hidden realities of our relationship in a way that's really honest. And maybe that's a mistake, you know, maybe I should just write. It's like, maybe that is not a good idea. I mean, I'm laughing, but it's like, it could be a terrible idea, actually. But I don't really think so because, you know, Sarah knows me and she knows that's who I am and that's who she is. And we don't expect, you know, that are the way that we talk about these things would necessarily be simple or predictable, you know? I think the point I'm asking is, is it something kind of unconscious? Is it something kind of unconscious? Yes, it is, it is. I mean, there are many things I know about my marriage that I could say, you know, that and many wonderful things about my wife that I could tell you that would be true. But, and I don't think the poem for me is not the place to like take those things and like turn them into images and just sort of restate them. That's not how I think about poetry. Like, I don't not like, you know, my wife is brilliant and she's beautiful and she's professionally successful and she's a wonderful mother and she's all many, many, many great friend, many other things, you know? Like, I could say those things and kind of talk about them and come up with little images or anecdotes which would be fine, but that's not for me what I want to make a poem out of. I want to go as deeply as I can into my own experience of the marriage. And you know, I mean, you're married and you have kids. I mean, you know that there are these depths of actuality in your life that are almost beyond language, you know? But is, and you could say, well, why are you even bothering to try to put them in the language? I mean, I guess that's just my damage, you know? I want to do that. Like I want to do that with, I want to make poems. Now the people might be satisfied to have those things remain wordless and I would respect that, you know? But I just can't leave it be, you know? I want to make a poem. But when you wait into, does that make sense what I'm saying? And that's why I was laughing when I said maybe it's a bad idea, but like it actually might be a bad idea, you know? That's what I was going to ask. When you wait into this poem, will you learn things? So I've written this poem, okay? And I'm not going to read it right now, but because she hasn't seen it, but there's a lot of stuff in there that's very intimate and not, I don't mean intimate about our sex life or something, I mean that intimate, but I mean about our lives that other people don't necessarily know, you know? And so publishing this poem will be, will expose us. And I don't mean in a bad way. It's not like, like, oh, whatever. There's nothing dramatic. I don't mean that. I just mean like that it's about our lives and our son and our, you know, and things that we've gone through, you know, I'm just like, it's heavy. And so it's, and so I don't know. I just, that's what happened when I got real on the poem. And I think, you know, that's just what I go to poetry for. And I think it's, I don't know. I just, that's the way that my poems come out. I can't do anything about it, you know? I don't even know what I'm saying about that. It's a very complete answer. We'll see. But I like that question. I think, I think it's a really great question because I think it gets to the heart of like, what different impulses people might have for writing, poems or anything else. Like, and there are different things that people want to do at different times of writing or with languages in general, we don't have to say writing. So, so I think that is a very perceptive question because it gets it like, maybe what's central for me about that trouble, like wanting to trouble the waters, you know, through poems or something, you know? Like, or get deeper into that, closer to that wordless space. So I'm glad you asked that question. I have a much more banal question. Is there another poet or author that had an impact similar to Merwin on you or others that you would? So many, so many. I mean, oh my God, I mean, we could go on. But one of the, well, you know, we brought up the 9th century Tom Dynasty poets, Chinese poets earlier, BQ mentioned that. I mean, poets like Lipo and Dufu and other poets in translation had a huge, you know, those poets made a huge impact on me. My teacher, James Tate, John Ashbury, Elizabeth Bishop, you know, so many, I mean, like, I mean, I mean, it could go on. Yeah, there are probably 20 names, 20 to 30 names that were like, you know, really, but when you're, you know, when you're really deeply involved in trying to teach yourself how to be an artist, I think they're artists who can take you over for a little while and you become completely, complete disciples of them. And that lasts a certain period of time and then you metabolize their, the information they have for you and then you move on. But there's always a kind of love that you retain for those artists, yeah. Does that still happen to you? Do you still like pick up a book of poetry and are just like, wow. Yeah, for sure. Lone away, fall in love. Mostly it's dead poets and it's not really, I mean, it's hard now to, you know, it's hard to write a really great book of poetry even though I happen that often. Yeah. Yeah, for sure there. Yeah, I mean, when I run into real poetry, I mean, I'm still become like a fan, you know, I'm a big fan for sure. Best. Yeah, it is the best. It is the best of all love or something like that. Yeah, definitely. Trying to think if there's anything new that I've run into that's done that to me, I don't, I mean, I don't know. I'd have to think about that. Do you ever run into any student poetry that really impresses you? All the time. My students are great poets. They don't, you know, it's hard to write a whole book like, you know, that, but, but, but yeah, I mean, for sure, almost always there's, you know, they'll write a couple of things that are really good. And you're like, oh, that's really great. Like you just have to do that a lot more. But it's not, but I mean, it's not, but yeah, I mean, a lot of time my students are fresher and they're more, they're more their relationship to the poem is freer. They can have fewer preconceptions and make really, really interesting. I'm making air quotes now for the radio, like mistakes, which aren't really mistakes at all. They're actually like brilliant things, but that they do by accident or whatever. Oh no, my God, I mean, my students are, I mean, it's, it's horrible because some often I'll be sitting in class, I'll be like, God, that is so much better. I've written the past month or whatever, you know, I'm like, I'd have to just try to, you know, pretend that I'm not like- Are your students in MFA or? Yeah, I sometimes teach, I mean, I have people in the room it's like, I sometimes teach summer courses that I'm recently taught at Napa Valley, Ryder's Conference and Squaw Valley and things like that. But yes, I teach in the MFA program at St. Mary's College of California, which is a great MFA program and with very strong students. Yeah, so you're really teaching. I teach with Brenda Helm, and so I get to work with really great poets and other, and colleagues who are really amazing, so. So yeah, I mean, those poets, they're great. I mean, they're really good. You know, and again, I mean, it's tough to write a whole book, you know, it takes a lot of work to write a whole, but you know, you gotta kinda, there's a lot of trial and error, mistakes get made and stuff, but like, you know, for sure, there's a lot of good stuff happening. It's so good. It's cool, it's great, it's good. That's the best part of my job. Right here. Oh, we have one right here. I have one right there. Well, when you were talking about where you go in poetry, like what you're, the space that you're aiming for, I just wanted to stand up and say, yeah, but that's happening in fiction all the time. That where if you can precisely define it, it's really boring. And I think as a fiction writer, what I'm interested in are sort of these echoes. Echoes literally of like how words, you know, the end of a paragraph sounds to the, the end of a paragraph sounds to the beginning of the next paragraph, but also like the echoes, the big echoes of characters and theme and all of that. And it seems to me that poetry is also like that. So for me, it, it, they're, you know, fiction, I don't know about nonfiction writing. You guys are more nonfiction writers. I think that we're going for the same thing. We just are taking a really super different road. You know, one road is pages and pages of lines of words and the shape on the page is not that, is not relevant. Although I would argue that a shape of a paragraph could be relevant. But you know, and the other is, although that could, there, you can break that rule too. I mean, break that, whatever I'm saying too, but generally I think of poetry is more, is more digestible, more quickly digestible. And also again, as I said, the shape on the page. So I just wondered like, whether you would agree with that or disagree with that? I think one, one thing I took from what you were saying is this idea that the ultimate goal of fiction in poetry is the same or similar. And that may be true if you want to talk about changing people's consciousnesses in their lives and making them feel things and moving them and all those things. Yeah, I would agree with that. But I think that poetry and prose are pretty different in terms of their techniques and their choices and like the micro choices that get made. But not always, I mean, there's similarities and sometimes they can get pretty close and all that stuff. So I mean, it's not, I'm not like up here to defend like the singularity of poetry and relationship to prose or something. I just, I'm interested in thinking about it in that way because I think it helps clarify some of the things that when we read poems so that we can have a different kind of experience with them. That's more why I'm interested in it. I don't care ultimately like, you may be right, but I think that the problem is with that getting too deep in it, the problem is that people read poems like they're prose and they're not, that's the problem. And people don't know how to read poetry really or they did and then they forgot or they were taught out of it or they were given a lot of bad information. So it's like that's sort of what I'm talking about when I talk about that aspect, not to sort of say prose is banal and poetry is special or something. I read a lot of prose, I love prose. You write a lot of prose. Matthew's book, Why Poetry? Out This Month and Paperback? Yeah, but I also read a lot of fiction. I mean, I love fiction, I'm like a huge fan. So yeah, I didn't mean to denigrate prose. Oh yeah, yeah. I actually wanted to build, is poetry storytelling? Can be, yeah. There's lots of stories that get told in poems and yeah, for sure. But they don't have to be. I mean, I think that there is an aspect of poetry that is, often it moves from one place to another in the kind of way that's analogous to a story. But it can be more like philosophy or prayer or song or meditation or fragment or dream or fragments or whatever. So it's not, I don't think poetry is story. It's not because it's just too many other things and poems too. Down here? I wanted to ask you, when did you know that you were a writer? What kind of encouragement did you get and how can parents and teachers encourage kids and students to be like writers and creators and not just readers and consumers? Well, thank you for your question. I didn't know I was a writer until pretty late and I mean, what doesn't, actually doesn't seem like late in my life now, but at the time it did. Yeah, my twenties really is when I started writing. I mean, I always liked writing and thought I was a good writer, but I didn't start writing poetry really until my twenties. I didn't get a lot of encouragement. Most of my early time of being a writer was self-taught. No, I'm not complaining about that. I'm just saying it was like it happened kind of on my own. I wasn't like some star writer who won all the prizes and I taught myself a lot of things and it took quite a while. My first book was not published until my early thirties, which now seems ancient, which at the time was not ancient. Now seems ancient? Oh my God, people are publishing books when they're so young. Oh, I see. Yeah, 30 sounds like a baby to me. But I think now if a poet's first book came out in their thirties, it would seem late. Got it. But which it is not because nobody cares actually, but like, but you know, anyway. And I don't know about encouraging kids. You know, I'm not really an educator of young children. I have a child who's three and a half, so I'm not really there yet. I don't know. I just think kids are natural. I mean, whatever this is gonna be, get ready for like a waterfall of banalities, but like kids are naturally creative. They're interested in making things. You don't have to get that. I mean, my kid just draws and scribbles, you know, whatever. I mean, they're not, they don't need. Probably staying out of their way is a good idea. Not telling them a lot of information about it or just being like, you know, I'm being really positive and celebratory or whatever. It's probably the best. I don't know, I'm not a child educator, but I'm guessing that that's not a bad thing. You know, but yeah, and just not punishing them with a bunch of like rules and stuff about poetry is probably a good idea. Don't sign them up for a class. That's my advice. Don't sign them up for a class. I don't even know if they have poetry classes for kids. I'm sure they do. Sometimes. Just wait. I will say just a little shout out to Kenneth Koch's books about poetry. Rose, where'd you get that read? It's one of them. And that that's a book about teaching kids. He, Kenneth Koch, the poet, Kenneth Koch. Koch, K-O-C-H taught kids in public schools and I think in New York. And this book is sort of about his experiences and his writing exercises and all this is, and that book is so great and full of like terrific exercises for like young kids that are very generative and positive and open things up a lot. And it's great. I always recommend that if anybody says to me, oh, I have like a seven year old kid who's like really into poetry or whatever. I'm like, that book will not ruin their fun. That book will help. That's excellent. That is excellent. Everyone's looking at me, which must mean we're out of time. I know, I'm gonna be here. We are out of time. Before we go, Matthew, tell the assembled and listening at home audience. Your website, Twitter, all that stuff. Whatever you want. Whatever you want. Tell them what you want them to know about how to reach you or witness you. Yeah, you can find my website. It's just my name, matthewsapruder.com. That's all the information you need. Yeah, I don't really have anything else I need to say. I mean, thank you for having me and for talking about poetry. Thank you for coming. It was great to talk about Marwen and it's great to talk with you all about Marwen and poetry and thank you for everything. Say hi to him. Fantastic. Thanks for us here at the grotto pod. You can email us at grotto pod at gmail.com and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at the grotto pod. PQ, there's one more thing to say that you always say to end these shows. Why don't you say it now? I'm gonna say it now, everybody. This is for kids and for everyone. Read, write and just keep working. Great, thanks. Thank you very much. Bless you, bless you. Yeah.