 My name is Ed Barrett and welcome to the Corbett Poetry Series at MIT sponsored by a comparative media studies and writing program at MIT. Tonight I have the pleasure, and it is a pleasure, to welcome David Thorburn, reading from his recently published first book of poetry titled, Notts. David is a distinguished professor of literature and media at MIT and a beloved and award-winning teacher to generations of MIT students who have taken his popular film class, film and literature. As I mentioned, David will be reading from Notts, his first book of poetry. With the title like, Notts, you might expect poems that are written in, you know, a naughty, difficult to untangle style. But the poems, at least in my reading of the book, in this book are written with an open, direct style. Embracing family, marriage, sex, sports, history. And now and then a Greek god or the 50s TV character Ralph Crampton. It's a subtle, quick-paced book, just like life. After his reading, David will be happy to answer questions, comments that you're writing in the chat. Thank you. Thank you, Majig. And he will respond to those questions. So please welcome our new poet, David Thorburn. Thank you, Ed. I'm very grateful. That was a very generous introduction. And thank you everyone who's here. Colleagues, former students, family. Hello. Dressed for the day. Dressed for the day at 93 in flannel shirt and khakis. He warned me to keep the coffee hot and was a corpse three minutes later. I touched his arm, raised and dropped it. I touched his forehead. It was deep, but cold. He knew knots and rigging varieties of the hammer, Marlin spikes masonry copper. That's the first poem in my book. The book was, although I've been writing poems on and off all my life. I've been arguing with them and playing with them. I never thought seriously about publishing more than an occasional poem. I never thought of myself as writing a book of poems, but a spurt of grief and create creativity combined caused me to begin to write much more seriously when my father died. This poem was the first poem I wrote, although the original version of it was three times longer than the poem I read to you. And what emerged was a book in which the through line was the story of my relation to my father. And as you can see it opens with his death. So there's no mystery about that. And it isn't actually a biography of my father or myself, but it may be a kind of biography of the of my ambivalence toward this extraordinary man at this extraordinary in many ways. Dane difficult man. So there's a through line in the book in which every few every four or five poems there's another short poem about my father, altogether mounting I hope amounted to a kind of interesting portrait, and then interspersed with that are other poems drawn from family life. Ed gave a very generous description of the range of the book. And I fear it was more generous than I deserve, because what I looked back at the book. I myself was shocked by how bloody literary it is. And even some of the poems are forms of literary criticism, not really surprising I suppose, given who I am. But, but I think actually some of the most interesting poems in my book are a kind of literary criticism, not really so surprising when you think that poetry itself is often that a form of interpretation of a reading of the world, a reading of objects, and many poems are readings of texts, as is this one. Hattrick. The ventures of the blue carbuncle homes deduces an intelligent, once respectable tradesmen in degraded lodgings, whose wife no longer loves him. All this from a tattered bowler, whose size means brainpower, whose broken chin band proves foresight corrupted, whose yellowing stains disclose a stumbling candle holder. A stumbling candle holder sneaking late to bed in a flat, not lit by gas, unloved by one so careless of this grimy, unbrushed felt, this grimy, unbrushed felt. Amazing Dr. Watson, not to mention us, inside their parallel universe, where crime and married life parse, like this sentence. Well, one of the things that bore in on me, after I that I sort of discovered with with an embarrassed shot because I should have realized this. When I was asked to do an occasional reading and I haven't read very often this is only the third or fourth time I've read, and I'm very grateful for the opportunity. But I became very conscious of the difference between poems that you speak to an audience, even a virtual audience. The poems that you write that are that you imagine are read in the privacy of her own space by a reader who has the book in front of her. And, and it's a different relationship in a certain way. And there are complications about it that are that are worth thinking about. In any case, here's a poem in which it seems to me the spacing of the the arrangement of the poem on the page is part of its meaning. And I like the poem so much I think it's a valuable poem I want to read it anyway, even though I think it needs to be on the page, but I will try to compensate for that by describing its format. The poem belongs to the category to the old famous category of poetry called ecfrasis, which is derived from the Greek and it means it's a description. It means a description of any artwork, a description of a painting, especially. And there is a great tradition of poetry about this as many of you must realize. And this, in a way, is my contribution to that conversation. But the conversation is complicated by the fact that the full effect of the poem of my poem depends on the ending where after the poem is over there is an italics right justified a replication of the legend that's posted about the painting, which I'm describing in the poem in at the bottom of the frame, and the poem in a way depends on what happens when the reader gets there. So I thought of reading this first but that would spoil the experience of the poem. I just guess it means you should listen extra extra carefully. Because I think I intend I suppose that the reader be driven back to reread. Leaves, leaves in the Leopold Museum in Vienna way up floors above the sullen shillers. They're grimacing gaudy cunts and faces, and Janssen's yowling pencils of himself, bug eyes, bloating cheeks, hair and the top of his head dissolving, irradiating out and away like nebulae. After all these paintings, a winter pastoral so modest, you almost pass it by. Hundreds of withered leaves floating in windless air bring dull color to a regiment of slender trees. The stalks of white bark, branches, the children, two of them in winter wrappings small against the trees and empty sky foraging for beach nuts in the snow. Edor von Hormann 1840, 1895. Baron Kinder im Winterlichen Buchenwald, 1892. Peasant children in Wintry Beach Forest. Oil on canvas, painted in Dachau Bavaria. Morning watch. Tiger loose on deck. First mate Thorburn tackles his captain to stop him firing the handgun. Rips free of his shirt to wave it like a flare, or so he'll tell it years on to his son. As the creature coils in the early glare and starts her death by water in the fiery air. I remember when I first wrote this poem I got a kind of thrill, an impulse that maybe you're really a poet when I had the triple rhyme of flair glare air. Not so surprising, but for a first time poet a very, very exciting, very exciting discovery. Excuse me about that. Well, one of the things one of the things I, I like to do is is I'm looking for page numbers here. Pardon me. One of the things I like to do sometimes is play is play with titles, use titles that that aren't that don't exactly mislead, but that have a kind of ambiguity in them and maybe mislead slightly in one. And I hope I have time to read two examples of that stratagem in the second. So the first of these poems is called quibble. Quibble. I see them quibbling over our stuff, loving as they are at heart. Who gets the kitchen burrow. A fiery woman chomping lunch. Who'll want the brass Lincoln book ends. Apes poor Apes right arms casualties of our March to Boston. Which of them will have the message of the Mediterranean bedroom. Hardly scuffed dear after 45 years. The story of architecture. Our dictionaries. I fear dispersal and dismemberment. Well, here's another of those kind of poems, poems with, with what I guess, modestly tricky titles. I'm sorry about the page turning its bed for me not to my book, my bookmarks fell apart a bit. This pain this poem is called bridling bridling at the insinuation he's shit to his master. The bridler toys with revenge. Maybe bridling my Lord's big chestnut with a virgin bit. She'll spit in rage in half a mile and rub his fucking hours our soul off her back against the willow branches in the swamp along the river. How many boys and men in saddlery and harness making then, then he's not primitive technology deprived, but literate, generous, adept among his world's deep systems of transport, cast and commerce. He won't bloody the grand creatures tender mouth, lucky for pox nose, and selects a gentler harness, hating how she lifts her quivering lips to take the iron in. Here's a poem. Here's a poem for my basketball buddies. Running the break. Not rushing is the secret under control, never full out but in a range of speeds. Keep the ball to the top of the key, or else the foul line, ready to pop from 18 or bounce past left or right, or take it down the lane and dish, or kiss it off the glass yourself. Or take it to the rim, or kick it to the shooter in the corner. Well, I mentioned a moment ago that that I was struck when I began to think about the oral presentation of poetry, about how much more vulnerable and intimate you become when you have a real audience and when you're speaking your breath. And there are poems in my book that make me very uncomfortable to do that with. And, but I thought if I mentioned this at all I had to give you an example. So this is one of the poems that that. I think it demonstrates why, if you think about it as an as a message that I might send to someone sitting reading in her room, why that would be an easier message an easier confession about my family's stories to make, not to mention more scandalous kinds of confessions that are typical of confessional poetry. And it's a very rich interesting topic, great oral presentations may not be the best kinds of written poems. Anyway, here's a poem, Cremains. When she came out to you it's no excuse that you were 90 and Claire no longer there to steer you from your brutal deeps. Weeping she hears you say you cannot love her anymore. And then that sailors tale of murdering queers at night. This isn't the worst that can be told of you either. I wish it could pour out of me. The slingshot you carved mythic gift to your David perfect organic why of oak. And a riggers gift a sculpted tool for killing rabbits and small birds. At times I want to spit in your ashes, still in their blue canister. Cremains of Frank Thorburn, shelved in a back closet, where no one goes. At times, one of the things I discovered as I was began to write really seriously was how much poets need, need encouragement and how tender they are when they're given criticism even when they claim they want it. And I showed some I showed the poem I'm about to read to a number of friends including a couple of poet friends, and they were quite negative about and I was very down in the dumps even though I like the poem. I showed it to another poet friend. His name was Joel agee. Thank you, Joel. And Joel got it. Joel loved the poem. Joel understood what I was saying and I resolved that I had a new rule that maybe call it the forburn agee rule. If one person really likes your poem, publish it. Here it is. Payless fires may still sear. We know, of course, that for the Jews of Europe, the Messiah did not come, says Mr Spock on NPR. In his earthly guise as the actor Nimoy introducing Lauren Bacall to read Bernard Gurney's English version of Isaiah Spiegel's Yiddish story of the dog. Mickey, a dog story, bereaved by Hitler of his master, Jacob Simon Temkin fur dealer, and later exterminated by machine gun with his mistress, the widow Anna Nikolayevna in the loads ghetto husbandry. The stench and the black of the animal hold on the Adam Mackenzie out of Liverpool. You speak softly to the Arabian, calming her with Danny Deaver and Invictus knowing from your parents farm that horses need human voices. You will be finement, come to harm like children. You will feed her carrots, sugar cubes, Tennyson, every day of the voyage, then supervise her hoisting in rope harness you designed and rigged to the pier in Brooklyn. She'll be bulky entering the van. And you will until you gentle her and receive your tip of $50 from the owner. Two more to go people. Two more poems. This poem is my entry in the conversation that poets like to have about their own funeral arrangements. And some of you will discover will hear some of my praises to to my better to my betters to some great poets who have written poems of this sort in the Paul at Davies earn. At Davies earn let no one wear a tie. Let all smoke dope whose mortgages are paid, or children gone from home, or mates content. No prayers or seminars allowed. No art displayed. Let's start in twilight on my backyard deck and eat and drink enough to keep our talk alive at least through three or four a.m. Some may go, but most of you stay on for songs poached eggs and vivid argument to keep my drowsy Empress awake and save the earth from ill and fix the sky. Oh, wait till dawn before you say goodbye. Last poll. Dream work. Car repair was not in his repertoire, but here he is working a ratchet wrench under the hood of my blue station wagon. The 68 Ford with a hotspot in the cargo area where the kids would drive their bathing suits after the beach. He turns from the work now, hobbling strangely. My shoes, he says, where are my shoes. The kids are grown and far away. The shoes are 10 years gone to goodwill with his decent shirts and the woolen long johns he wore at sea before he came ashore to make me. Thank you very much. Thank you, David. Can you hear me. Yes. Thank you very, very much songs and poached eggs on your backyard porch. I think we'd all like to be there. This spring to There will be some questions and comments perhaps and Andrew will moderate them so that I don't press the wrong button suddenly turn on the air conditioning. I have one quick question for you. And it's very open ended. You've had a distinguished career as a scholar. You have your first book of poetry published. How does that feel. What's your process for writing a poem. My process is writing 80 years as waiting 80 years for the, for the courage. The truth is I tell you honestly, I actually think now that I reflect on my balked career in some ways. I've had a wonderful career and I don't mean to denigrate it in that way, but I've written much less than I intended and I've struggled with my writing much more than I have wanted to in my life. I'm proud of what I've written and I think I've written important work, but I've written much less than I expected to be able to and it's been a real burden to me. I think that one reason was that I had a kind of poets tendency in me from the beginning, but couldn't let myself acknowledge it or see it. There are a couple of reasons for this one is my temperament. I mean, I'm a fuss budget. I'm a, it's almost, it's, it's I think part of what makes me a very good writing teacher, because I can't bear to let even mistakes go by. So I feel my, my students comments with my students papers with ridiculous grammatical complaints, you know. You know, kind of fuss budget side to me almost an obsessive side to me about trying to get things exactly right, which, which poetry can allow because you can work on single lines for so long, right. I would often do this in my essays, and it would take a long time and then I would get into horrible arguments with editors, especially when I began to write popular culture essays about television and forms of popular culture, because the editors I was reading were, how to put this gently less well read than I would like. So I would I would put in allusions really famous lines Shakespearean lines that everyone knows, and they would they would edit them and fix the grammar things like I would get in these ridiculous lines. And a lot of my career was spent in defending my prose against editors I thought were often were much younger than I and much stupider than I, and I realized that. So in any case, what I liked was to work on sentences and parent, and I think it also had to do with attention span, right, but I could, but but the other thing the confession I'm making is this, I went to graduate school. I was founded by great poets, people who be, I mean, friend dear friends of mine, but people I admired and that by shared seminar rooms with two of them became poet laureates, a third I think as a poet, at least as good as those two. It was an environment of such remarkable poetic intensity that I was I was a kind of fringe member of it. I was friends with those people, but I think I was, I think they intimidated me without my acknowledging it to myself. I can't be sure that that was true but I to be honest that's what I think it was. And I also think to be really honest. I was able to unlock my ability to write poetry, when it was too old to matter. When the competition was over it didn't matter. I'm still very grateful that I was able to write these. And I do regret that I didn't take it more take this quality in me more seriously. I have been writing poems all my life, and some of the poems in here. I started many years ago, but most of them are an old man's poems because I became a better writer as I got older. And the final point is of course, I don't really think in the end that there's such a big difference between my best paragraphs and my best poems. I think I wrote really good prose. And I think the, the, the attention I gave to my prose was unusual. I don't think it never happens. I think there are many very great prose writers that I admire tremendously. I can name two that will offend people they're both political conservatives or thought to be political conservatives, even though you're not one is Simon Shama the historian. The greatest prose writers of English who ever lived another prose writer I tremendously admire is Steven Pinker. Now they're not poets, and they don't write with a poet's compression, but I admire them very much. So I don't. Those are some of the reasons, but it, but it is also true that reading my poems to audiences, even the few times I've done it. This event tonight was so much more valuable moving forwarding pleasurable to me than any lecture I ever gave and I've given hundreds of lectures some of them really good to big audiences. I'm proud of them they were good work, but reading your own poems. Boy, I wish I'd had this experience all my life as you have it. But that's enough. That's enough of this. I'm grateful for the chance to have done it. And I believe, I believe in these poems I, I, I believe that these are good poems I'm, I'm, I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to live long enough to have written them. Thank you David I'm going to pass it over to Andrew, who has been collecting various questions coming through and chat. And I'll just disappear Andrew, who's that the idea. Yes, thanks. So thanks for that wonderful generous introduction that was really wonderful. Thank you for a wonderful, wonderful reading David. Absolutely wonderful. I wanted to comment how nice it is looking at the attendee listening so many people with the last name Thorborn. I think that's great. There's so many I didn't know. Five or six at least. There are a lot of. Well I have three boy three children I have two granddaughters I should have at least five there. My wife hasn't come I guess I'm going to be very unhappy. And a number of other familiar names and one of them is Steven Tapskett from from literature has a question saying I admired and enjoyed these poems when I read them in the book. It was interesting to hear you revising some of them or critiquing the aesthetic on the fly as you presented them. And that in turn makes me wonder if you're rethinking aesthetic positions, how or why, which further makes me wonder if you're writing new poems and if so what's new. How do they differ from these passionate quote early poems, what's to look forward to. Thank you Steven that's a very generous question. I guess I am I am still trying to write although I'm writing with the same slowness I've written a few new poems that are, I think are okay but these poems took me like, even after I got serious about 10 years all of them are much long were much longer in their original, in their original form. If I have a style I guess it would be called minimalist. I once wrote a poem called mission statement and I realized it was so bloated that I titled it nearly streamlined mission statement and then I wrote another law another poem called mission statement and essentially this was the mission statement. Don't lie scour scour each line and the spaces between them scour each poem scour them scour each piece of punctuation scour again. That's my, that's, that's my, that's my so it takes me a long time but I have, especially because there's nothing at stake, except my pleasure in the work. And tremendous pleasure from this kind of whittling away at the polls and making them as short as possible. One thing I've tried to do and I've succeeded in a few poems that I think friends of mine I respect have said it, they admire. Are there poems without any punctuation at all. Sometimes I'll put a period at the end, their poems without punctuation that are still. They're perfectly readable even though they're quite long I mean in fact the first poem I read as an example of that. If there is no punctuation in that poem that's what I was bragging a little when I said, in the last line, like this sentence, the original version was like the sentence, like a sentence, but then I got boastful and I said like this sentence because I was so proud of what I had had managed to do. Not a full answer to your question Steve but a partial one. So I am still writing. I don't know if they're changing that much, but I did change the poems on the fly, because I became aware of the difference between hearing a poem, and here having it being read to you as I was reading it, and I felt that I needed to give even though I had to violate some of the lineation in order to give a kind of emphasis appropriate to an oral presentation. And if I had thought more about this question I might have done more of that. I, and I, it is not a question I thought deeply enough about, but it's very interesting to me. My friend, a former colleague and poet Barry Spax many of you may remember him he used to teach at MIT, and then he went to California where he had a wonderful career as a poet Spax was a magnificent reader of his own poetry, very dramatic. He could put on voices and so on. And I often felt that his poems were much better listened to that read. This is a cruel thing to say about a wonderful man who was kind to me and I admired, but I think it was true. And he wrote, and he wrote a book wonderful books of poem many books, but hearing him read was a far more memorable experience than reading his poems by yourself. I guess I hope that's not true of my poems. I don't know. I hope I read well. I apologize for searching through my book that way for the pages I had marked them more carefully but my page markers fell out. Out of my nervousness before I began reading. Let's keep one thing in our back pocket here. Stephen. No, sorry, Richard Cross wonders if you might be able to read knots. So if we have if we have time. That's a kind question should I should I wait to do it to let it's it's the title poem of the of the book and the longest poem but still none of my poems are very long as you can tell it. This is so maybe it's two short pages long it's not a long poem I'd love to read it it's the it's the title poem of the book and it does give a kind of additional energy to this to that spine of stories about my father. I think one question then and then how about you you read that one Nick monford. If I can find my book. Yes, I can. Yes, okay. How has your experience as a poet, publishing and reading your work changed your teaching of poetry. Frankly Nick it's made me want to teach my own. I became jealous of the attention that we're giving. But the truth is, it's made me. I would reverse it. The fact is the fact that I think I was always a very attentive and engaged and even passionate close reader of very demanding modernist poetry helped me a lot. It gave me standards. And there were there was a certain level of crap I could not write, because I had been immersed in great poets all my life I've been hearing them and listening to, not to mention the great contemporaries, like Stephen Tapscott, who asked me a generous question, or Robert Haas to poet laureates or, or James McMichael, an incredibly great poet roughly, roughly my generation. Astonishing rich book. I mean I had their voices in my head all my life. So they wouldn't let me go too far wrong, even though I didn't have the skill to reach their levels and the, or the experience. I mean, you know, I sometimes wonder if I had started at the beginning, maybe I could have talked to them in a serious way. I don't mean to denigrate my own poems I believe in them very deeply. But I also have a realistic sense of where they belong in the, in the pantheon of poetry. When Kelly asks David when you describe your writing I think of your description of your father, gently in courses. Is there a way in which shaping a poem is like calming a bulky animal. I guess I'm wondering how much your father with the subject of your poems might also have provided a model of a writer. That's a very smart question that when I hadn't thought about it in that way I mean I've always thought of my father as a kind of model of a kind although also a negative model as you can see from the one really negative poem I wrote about there are other things about him that emerge in the book it's not a not it's a bad I think it's a it's a very it's ambivalent it's deeply divided so it wins questions very, very acute. I thought he was a model he taught me how to use tools, he taught me about precision. And I do have one poem. I realize now that that that that does explain that maybe maybe really. I'm reaching down here from my book that does explain that really really powerfully and maybe the poem will explain it better than better than anything if I can find it quickly. I can't find it quickly. So, so, so I so I won't, I won't bother trying to, trying to try to discover it at so late when we have so little time, but, and if it if I find it. When I'm reading the other poem and looking through the book I'll dig it out again, but the basic idea was, he taught me precision he taught me, he taught me respect for accuracy. He, he had a, he had a mathematical and an architectural bent in a certain way. He liked, he always wished he had been an architect, I think, and, and, and he knew, and he knew an immense amount. He was an incredible, he had an incredible amount of practical knowledge. And his attitude toward tools and toward the uses of tools affected my attitude toward words and the uses of words. It certainly affected my desire to clean them and abrade them and send them down and scour them right. I mean a lot of the metaphors I use for working them do our metaphors that come from tools and toolmaking. So to go back to Richard Cross's request, would you like to read nuts? Yes, I'll read nuts 34. Maybe this would, maybe we should end at this note. Okay. I mean everyone's had enough. And this is a, let me find the poem. Sorry people. This is because I'm nervous. I think after all this time, all these audiences, that's another thing. When I read poetry to audiences, I'm nervous, and I never was nervous as a teacher. It's something different. It's something wonderful. I'm so happy to, it happened to me in my old age. Richard's being very helpful. He says page 34. Thanks. I have it already. Thanks, Richard. Very homie. The bride's necklace titles against resistance, but never fully closes, named and rigged so by an unknown, possibly Scott's or cockney sailor 300 years ago. Maybe the Matthew Walker whose namesake nuts for sale as a keepsake in nautical museums in Sydney and Dunedin. In a lapse in the aborigines of Borneo, knots or knotted garments are taboo for pregnant women and their husbands, lest the delivery be restricted. No crossing of legs, no locking of house or cupboard until the child comes. The hangman's noose with nine turns is made exactly as the hangman's noose with seven turns, except for the two extra turns reserved by long tradition for white men. The child's neck, aka half crown sizing doubles the strength of the round sizing by forming the eye at the point where both ropes cross. This loop knot was invented for the murderous harpoon murderous harpoons. They called dolphin strikers aboard the old whalers. The Turkish archers knot is lost. Joining slingshot to bowstring. The knot is illustrated and carefully described in many documents. But no archer in 1000 years has achieved the killing range, 800 yards of the ancient bowman who made this knot sacred to Allah. The knot in your belly from bad clams, the one in your chest for angina, the knot in my head and heart when I remember too much. A fellow in his frenzy says the heart is a cistern where foul toads, knot and gender. Triple hitch has saved many lives, including, said my father once or twice, a drunken Dutchman lonely for his wife, who pitched fed head first into the forward cargo hold, and dangled swinging by his hitched right ankle, laughing and vomiting before they cut him down to hose his mess before the morning watch on the SS California, New York to San Diego via Havana and the Panama Canal. The knot of Hercules secures the girdle barring entrance to Vestal Virgin's most sacred parts. Our oldest knot, the square knot, sometimes called the reef knot nowadays, so strong and perfect to its uses, its strength increasing under strain and use. That it was said to be the God's invention and was remembered in erotic rights once widely practiced on patrician wedding nights. The bridle gown, held barely shut by this God's knot, is gently, is gently nibbled open by the groom. Thank you, David. Thank you for your beautiful poems with us and thank you all for attending. And we're off to spring. Thanks again, David. Thank you very much for all of you for coming.