 I'm David Thorburn, Director of the Communications Forum. I'm happy to see you all here. I would be happier if there were more of you, but I remind our guests that we are in touch with an international audience through our website and through the audio recordings and now video that are archived on our site. And we should reach a considerably larger audience than the folks who are here. And my hope is that as is often the case with forums, some folks will be coming in as we speak. I'm going to be very brief in my introductions because we have a full venue and I'm hoping for a very exciting conversation. Robert Pinsky is the former Poet Laureate of the United States, the only man poet in American history to serve three terms as Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000. He's the Poetry Editor of the online journal Slate. He teaches in the writing program at Boston University and is the author of a series of remarkable books of poetry of which the most recent is Jersey Rain and then a forthcoming chapbook about to appear I think later this month or next month called First Things to Hand. One of his most recent publications which we will have a chance to talk about a bit later in our conversation is a very interesting and in some ways surprising book for Robert Pinsky, a book called The Life of David. It's not about me, however. It's about the biblical King David, much to my dismay when he told me that. Also sitting at our conversation table is my colleague from MIT, Todd Mockover. He's the head of the Media Lab's Hyper Instruments and Opera of the Future Group. He's the creator of the Toy Symphony and International Music Performance and Education Project and is kind of a legend at MIT for his imaginative way of bringing classical attitudes toward music together with new technologies and with experimental forms of various kinds. We're going to begin today by showing a fragment of an opera that Pinsky and Mockover have collaborated on and then they will talk about it. I thought I would just quickly just show you a little bit about the opera and then we'll show you a couple of minutes of it called Death and the Powers. And Robert and I, I called Robert out of the blue to see if he might want to collaborate on a project several years ago and thank God he said yes. It's been a very, very interesting project. It's still in process. Robert finished the libretto about four or five months ago. And so I've started on the music. It's quite a wild project. Maybe we'll tell you a little bit about the story later. It's about a man. Do you want to say two words about what the story is? He's a billionaire, sort of a Rupert Murdoch hyphen Walt Disney character. He's a creative billionaire who is getting kind of like Robert. Kind of a mortality by having himself converted into software. He's leaving the meat machine and he's basically abstracting himself. And this has implications for his family who may or may not follow him into this state. And also because he's so rich for the world and the world economy. And the subtitle is a robot pageant. The whole show is put on by robots and our robots won't look like any robots you've ever seen. And in fact the biggest robot of all is the set itself because one of the ideas is that this character Simon Powers decides that he wants to leave everything about himself in the world even though he himself wants to leave. So he turns himself into his environment and the stage itself is a big robot. It's made up of gigantic panels that move into different configurations as you can see. The panels themselves look like a room at first and then they start to vibrate and undulate. In fact the floor does as well all the surfaces that you wouldn't expect come alive. And somehow or other we're going to make this stage sing. Haven't quite figured that out yet. But characters, all kinds of unusual things happen with the characters as well. So objects that usually stay on the ground like grand pianos don't. They float as well. So this is a scene with the third wife, Evie, who floats and dances with Simon in the walls and the piano plays while it's in the air. This is my favorite shot so far of the animation of the set because it also, the whole thing explodes and goes out into the audience. Don't sit in the front row for that one, we'll see. And we're also collaborating with a few other wonderful people on this project. Cynthia Brazil who works here in the Media Lab is designing the robotics for the set and for a variety of objects. Randy Weiner who is a writer and dramaturg worked very closely with Robert to help craft the story, the story's Roberts, but to get it just right for an opera. Randy was extremely helpful. Diane Paulus is the theatrical director, wonderful young New York based director who is exceptional because she's very well known for her classical opera, Mozart and Monteverdi in particular. She also has a variety of kind of cult hit off Broadway shows in New York that have been running for a long time. The donkey shows, one of them if you've heard of it. And she also designs a lot of the theatricals for Disney these days. And Alex McDowell is the designer. He's the one who's helping us figure out how to make these walls feel like they're alive. He's one of the very best Hollywood film designers right now. He designs all of Spielberg's movies including Minority Report, The Terminal and also does Tim Burton's movie. So he did Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Corpse Bride if you've heard of those. So we are starting to make this project now. It opens in two years in Monte Carlo. I'm starting to compose the music. We're designing the sets and building everything. And we put on a little sneak preview which we're going to show you a teeny bit of right now in Monte Carlo in the fall. If you look at the top left, the characters, these are the four main characters. The person on the, all the way on the left is Evie, the third wife in the black dress. She's sung by Elizabeth Coyche who's a Boston based mezzo-soprano. The person next to her, to her left holding the wheelchair is Nicholas who's a kind of grad student, scientist, assistant to Simon Powers. And he's the one who has the know-how to actually build this system. And his role is sung by the tenor Brian Groman. Next to him is Simon Powers, the main character with the white shirt and his sleeves rolled up. He's sung by the baritone James Maddalena, great singer who if any of you have seen any of John Adams operas, he originated the role of Richard Nixon and Nixon and China for instance. And on the end, wearing the black shirt and the skirt is Miranda. The daughter was about 12 years old. And she's sung by a remarkable young singer and 18-year-old New Yorker freshman at Manhattan School of Music named Elizabeth Reiter. So now I'll just, let's give you a tiny glimpse of what this is going to be like. This is the simplest possible set, no set at all, just the performers. And I put together a little three-minute excerpt so you can hear it. So, could you make that louder please? I guess I should say I don't get up, right? You know, well, that's... Talk a little bit about it. I don't see why you're saying that. Yeah, really. Talk a little bit about it. Great way to start. That's how you feel as a... It would have appeared to David Moore if, Todd, for the compressiveness, he edited out my favorite part right at the beginning there, the first words that this guy sings are the beginning of Yates' 7th Byzantine. He says, once out of nature, I will never take my bodily form from any natural thing. And he says, the da, the da, the da, the da, the da, the da. The immortal William Butler Yates with his bird. And he says something like, mechanical parakeet? Yeah. Mechanical parakeet. He says golden amulet. Mechanical parakeet. And then he says, Yates, you can have your bird. Yates. And you edited out the part where then Jimmy Madalina says, Yates, I give you the bird. And I don't know if that was your delicacy, Todd, but for the lump in audience, like David, that would have... Yeah, that's right. We took out the obscenities for now. But it's an interesting... And in some ways, one would think of it as partly a problematic collaboration between someone who spends his time worrying about the nuances of vowel sounds and consonant sounds at the end of words and then having it translated into this environment in which people sing it. It's surrounded by music. For me, there's a kind of freedom in the composition. I knew that Todd was going to set these things to music. I don't have a wide knowledge of modern music. I actually did know Todd's music. And as you can tell, it's quite melodic and emotional, and it really is very referential for me. It's referential to all kinds of familiar music so that it's an exciting feeling for me. Thank God we'll have super titles. My main problem with it is that as with heavy metal music, as with many kinds of music, it's hard to understand the words. And I have never liked the art song if I know the poem. As you say, I'm thinking about the original music that is built into the vowels. And usually the less I know the poem, the better I like the art song. And in this case, I had the freedom of an effect writing for this format. And I could throw in rhymes and false rhymes and little literations and feel it was like playing. It was the freedom of a rather new medium. So as a way of composing, I had no confidence in my ability to make a good story for the stage. And that's where Randy Weiner was very useful, almost as my psychiatrist. I said, well, you can make this work. I had the what Todd has done with the words is very beautiful to me, very expressive. And it was not, I was not saying goodbye to poetry. I can write a poem whenever I like or whenever I can. It was adding this other kind of composition, which I found very liberating, very pleasurable. Talk a little bit about the sequence of the work. Robert did all his work first and then you work from that text. Yeah, but usually, so I have always liked, not just liked, but I think I write best to text. And I probably write melody more naturally than other things as well. And so I'm also very inspired by text. So for a piece like this, I thought a lot about it, had many, many ideas, but nothing was absolutely specific until I not just saw some words, but saw the words. But Robert and I spent a huge amount of time together over those few years, actually, talking about the story and talking about specific text. And then sometimes we work together, sometimes Robert worked with Randy. But I didn't write a note of music until, again, not until there were sections, but I usually like to imagine the whole shape of a thing and the personality of a piece and of these characters. I got the whole libretto and then really dug in. That's when I started writing. I do hope that people, I think the sound system in here is awful. My goal, I think the text... The lights ain't that great either. There's a lot of ethnic humor, political allusions. Todd is leaving out a false start in which we wrote an aria. There's only one false start. In Monaco we had a soprano who sang the aria for the people in Monaco. And with that false start and with this project so far, Todd will email me and say something like, there are a lot of syllables right here. Can you find a way to use fewer syllables? Because the music requires... Of course the exigencies of needing to compose music for it. I'm sort of forgetting things like that. There's a simpler word here instead of a longer word. You never know what's going to come up. A little tinkering. I think in every case I've responded by saying, no, but this. In every case I said, well not that fixed, but how about this fixed? And I think the fixes have been appropriate. Yeah, I think often it goes back a few times. So there has been a process of collaboration on that level where this won't work here like this. Can we try that? Well, A wasn't any good, B wasn't any good. How about B prime or C? Yeah, and I think probably that's the way you like to work, but especially with a project like this where it's not a fixed poem, it's also incredibly liberating for me because you can start writing the music and see where I remember something that came up in this section was it's not always easy ahead of time. I think in the old days you could plan out the structure of an opera and say, okay, I need a trio here and I need a duet here and here we bring everybody in. This, I think, was more fluid. We knew we were setting up characters and situations. But as I'm writing it, you say, well, here's a place we really do have to have these people be together. We made a quartet out of what had been part of a monologue. I remember now, there was things that Simon said, and we just changed them a little, and we made them, you got a little glimpse of some of the, I didn't quite get the quartet, but we got a trio. A trio. And it does become a quartet right before the close of the scene. And when you heard that trio, you were hearing words that I had originally written for one character. Partly because I am a complete beginner at doing this. And it didn't take us long to turn it into a trio. How long do you think the entire project will, how long will the production be, do you think? You'll wake up and it'll be as though it was two minutes. I'm sure that's true. Not him, no, you might have a hard time. Our goal is I've done different kinds of operas. That only happens when I read your poems. The goal is to have no intermission. So you can't have more than eight or nine hours. Probably an hour and a half without a break is the idea. Maybe it'll be longer. Now that we're starting, when you look at the text, it reads quickly, it's very elegant, beautiful. But when you spend time with it and make these characters real, there's a lot going on. There are a lot of changes in characters, a lot of beautiful words that you don't want to just run through. There are links to this project on the communications forum website. And I assume, Todd, also from your own website. I think there probably are. So those of you who want to sort of pursue this and find out more about this project, have we been able to put anything online yet of the fragments that you've completed? No, I haven't wanted to put those online yet, but there's some good text on the opera online and pictures, and there's an amazing amount of set design, wonderful graphics working on them again next week. So I would say pretty soon they'll be... Actually, I'll probably put up a website on this. I don't like putting excerpts of things that aren't finished. I usually don't like to make public. There's something about collaboration, and it sounds like the website does dramatize these different elements that are coming together. I'm thrilled when I first hear the music, and I was thrilled when I saw Alex's set designs. And Alex really is very, very good. And when I first saw those walls breathe and when we started talking about things floating and that there are ways to do it, and that then this whole... It's an organism that is an expression of this man's consciousness. And then when it goes... And all goes out over the audience, and it can be done. And the robots can be done. The robots, they're not going to look like stainless steel department store dummies. They're not going to look like Robert the Robot or some post-war Japanese thing. They're largely made out of light. And they come on as one thing, and they have lights on them, and then they devolve into the separate robots who will become the characters. You didn't say anything about the robot prologue. That's a pretty unusual... The robot prologue, they say. They come out with the head robot. After they come apart, the head robot says or sings. Well, the human creators did instruct us. The human creators, back in the organic age, instructed us to perform this at certain times and so we're going to do it. And one of the other robots says, but I don't get it. This thing, death, it's supposed to be so important. Is it like lost data? But data can always be recovered. I don't get it. It doesn't matter. We're going to do it. And then they discuss it and then they gradually become the singers we're going to sing. The light makes it possible to do that. Then at the end, after our big finish, they recoalesce. But before they... One of the robots says, was that it? I still don't really understand why we did this. What is that about? And the head robot says, I know what you mean, but everybody who participates gets 10,000 human rights credits. And they turn back into this thing. So there's a backstory that is partly filled in which is where did we go? Where did the human creators go and what form of quote life and quote is persisting in the form of these robots who are performing basically a kind of a ritual as with the origins of drama. And a thing we've arrived at for that is that when the robots say this to one another, there'll be super titles where you get it in English, but they're speaking robot to one another. So they say, smarnett and fanden, Dork and Stasen State? Written Stood. Written Stood, Dork and Latin Flying. For Staven. For Staven, Arten Dordan. Arten Ressensstutendabbin. Maybe we should continue like this. It's actually very interesting. Some of you I know who know robot were laughing. The native robot speakers won't find this that interesting. Todd, thank you very much. It looks like a wonderful project and we thank you for taking part today. Thank you. We premiere this in about two years, so we'll let you know. Come to Monte Carlo. Written Stoodle Band. See you there. We're going to try to have a conversation for about another half hour and then we'll open the floor to general discussion. I thought the conversation would be helpful because we could cover a number of aspects of Pinsky's immensely diverse, intimidatingly diverse portfolio. And one of the most important aspects of his recent work has been another form of outreach that I'm sure many of you know about and Robert and I have talked about it many times. I guess it's a project that he started when he was the poet laureate. I'll let him describe it. It's the favorite poem project and we're going to have a clip or two to show you. Can you talk a little about it, Robert? I invited Americans to write me a letter or an email saying the title and author of a poem that the person writing loved and would be willing to read for a national archive. My advertising budget was about $7. I received tens of thousands of responses. There is a book for sale outside called An Invitation to Poetry. It has a DVD in the back that has about 25 of the video segments which I'm about to show you a couple. And if anybody here teaches or knows a teacher, I really urge you to buy the book if only for the DVD. I think you'll see what I mean. You want to do the Whitman first? Well, look at a couple of the segments on that DVD that is in the back of the back of the book. And yeah, why not start with a sort of flagship one, track 6. These are maybe four-minute, three-minute video segments. Mr. Whitman, get these lights down. My name is John Daugherty. I'm from Brenton, Massachusetts, 34 years old. And I'm a construction worker for the Boston Gas Company. We do outside construction work providing natural gas for residents or businesses. A lot of digging, laying pipelines, having gas mains, all outdoor work. The satisfying thing about the job is you're working with a dangerous element, really. It's important to be exact in everything you do. You certainly don't want to leave any kind of a gas leak behind. You have to be careful. You have to pay attention. Poetry was definitely intimidating initially. It just looked like a lot of words that were out of order and out of place and did not belong together. And that's the challenge of it. There's a lot of reading and rereading to grasp it. But once you do, once you come to understand it, you have achieved something. So now you feel good. Song of myself is a poem that I probably had a lot of difficulty understanding the first time. And there were certain lines that caught me and that I liked. And when I got to the very end of this the last half dozen lines so encouraging, in those last few lines Whitman tells you what you're thinking. He says that you probably didn't understand what you just read. But stay with it and you will and you'll love it. And so it felt like it was speaking directly to me when I first read it. And I keep those lines in mind no matter what I read now. The connection I feel with Whitman's poem, Song of Myself is not due to the fact that he talks about laborers, physical labor working outside, like the common working American. That's a nice touch in it, of course, but I enjoyed it for its uplifting-ness its ability to inspire me and see things in life and in everyday existence that I hadn't noticed before that I might have taken it for granted before. Song of Myself by Walt Whitman There is that in me I do not know what it is but I know it is in me Wrenched and sweaty calm and cool then my body becomes I sleep I sleep long I do not know it it is without name it is a word unsaid it is not in any dictionary utterance, symbol something it swings on more than the earth I swing on to it the creation is the friend who's embracing awakes me perhaps I might tell more outlines I plead for my brothers and sisters do you see all my brothers and sisters it is not chaos or death it is form, union, plan it is eternal life it is happiness the spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me he complains of my gab and my loitering I too am not a bit tamed I too am untranslatable I sound my barbaric yop over the roofs of the world the last scud of day holds back for me it flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadowed wilds it coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk I depart as air I shake my white locks at the runaway sun I effuse my flesh and eddies and drift it in lacy jags I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love if you want me again look for me under your boot soles you will hardly know who I am or what I mean but I shall be good health to you nevertheless and filter and fire be your blood failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged missing me one place search another I stop somewhere waiting for you thank you could we see the audience the filmmakers were independent producer directors around the country so we didn't have to pay transportation costs we brought them here for a film school and my executive producer Anita Anderson told them about library of shots video they're going to use lenses and I talked to them about the project and we had a favorite poem reading at BU which we had a college president and a grade school kid and a high school kid and an art director and an elderly person we had a reading with the kind of range which we can't demonstrate with one video but the point is partly a very great range of people not particularly poets or professors of poetry Robert let's talk a little bit about about the the democratic implications of this I mean clearly one of the implications of the whole project is to say poetry should be we shouldn't think of poetry as a kind of elite activity which only professors and poet tasters like but then something that ordinary people can enjoy and experience that poetry belongs to everyone but of course there are plenty of poets who think that this is sort of selling out we could put it differently we could say we're establishing a true elite of people who understand a poem have incorporated can read it aloud in a way that other people can perceive it against the false elite of people who get tenure at Yale or Harvard or BU or somewhere and often don't know anything about what a poem actually is so it's a it's a the elitism of people who are actually responding to a poem in a way that can be communicated to another person which is very fundamental to the art of poetry and it substitutes for a couple of elites there's the academic elite which sometimes really not very close to the nature of the art of poetry and in our country what the most true elite in American culture is an elite based on performers so that instead of kings and queens and dukes and earls and actresses we have singers and actors and athletes this is a great improvement far better to idealize somebody because they can throw a ball like hell or they're beautiful they can sing and dance very well because of who their great-great-grandparents were but this is different from either the academic world or the media world of celebrity this is an art in which each individual's the reader's body the reader's breath is the medium Walt Whitman is dead John Doherty is alive John Doherty's breath saying those words by Whitman become Whitman's medium it's not Whitman being read by an actor it's not Whitman himself giving a poetry reading on the poetry reading circuit it is the reader's realization literal realization of the poem and yes I think that in a democracy the idea of an art in which not the performer but each an art that is inherently on a human scale on the scale of one person I love digital media there's a digital medium itself but the medium that is also human and bodily as in the subject of the opera there's a certain respect for that and I think there are ways you could argue that in a democracy this ancient art in some ways has non-democratic origins, courtly origins has an important function because it inherently respects what used to be called digital do you remember the J.V. Cunningham poem that talks about breathes on the words he made it's sort of an embodiment of your I couldn't quote it but yes it was a test you were supposed to be able to quote it the artist is dead but the reader's breath literal or imaginary because it might not be reading aloud it might be just hearing it in your mind's ear that is your particular form of possession by the dead if John Doherty reads that or David reads the Cunningham or I read a Ben Johnson that sliver of that original consciousness is being realized in the new person's breath but can it also be realized Robert just in reading why do I have to read it aloud to reanimate it poetry is an art that takes for its material sounds of a language as Rapound said poetry is a centaur by which he means in prose you fire an arrow at a target in poetry you do the same thing but you're writing a horse at the same time and the horse I take to be the human body the bodily part of poetry so if you're reading a poem and not hearing it at all as far as I'm concerned you're missing an important part of it also true if you're stupid you won't get it at all it is an art of the mind of the body and every art that I can think of in some way uses something physical music uses physical sounds film is a physical phenomenon you take in visually and oratorily or plastic art visual arts and poetry also has a physical bodily component and that is the sounds of the words let's show you one more fragment from this and then we'll go on to some other discussion we can come back to these could I nominate one because I think she actually starts reading right away and I'd rather just either read could we do number four and I think she actually reads the poem or recites the poem so let's just look at the recitation in the beginning and not watch the whole unless you think it's valuable I don't want to watch only part of one you want to watch the whole thing alright it's your project I'll go through with this tedious idea go ahead actually it's a very this is my favorite of all of the he has an au pair you ask him something in his ear he thinks about it for a year I interrupted her in moving slow he has an au pair you ask him something in his ear he thinks about it for a year before he says a word there upside down unlike a bird he will assume that you have heard parading lug but should you call his name or smug and give his branch a hug then off again to sleep he goes I'm 11 years old I live in Lexington, Massachusetts she's actually very charming and at the end of this fragment she recites it again she analyzes the sound I'd rather hear Robert than his she says that she likes the line still swaying gently by his toes she says quite correctly that it's an amount of poetic she says it's like you can see him swinging there I don't mean to deprecate the entire academic profession of the study of literature but it is true that often you will hear an extremely celebrated Grand Professor or Professora give a lecture and when the person reads parts of the poems you'll realize the person is not hearing the poems this is not incidental or ornamental and it's not histrionic skill it's not being an actor these are not trained actors but it's a little bit like music or dancing you're either doing it or not I mean you can tell when someone just is not hearing it so I say that mysteriously but partly to say that it's not all about democracy or the people there also is something exacting about art and every art has its techniques and its demands and it can be quite stringent and it's not just as an acute child or construction workers reading a poem the things they say about the poems in every case I think are cogent the book prints 200 poems and there's a quotation from a letter that I got next to each poem we tried to choose things that were quite illuminating so there's an aspect of the project that I'm happy to say is elitist as well as clearly an aspect that is democratic too I was the editor I chose which letters I thought were very good and though the poems included don't represent my taste exactly there aren't the poems I would have chosen they do represent my standards if a poem was not up to my standards we didn't put it in anthology we didn't make a video of it Casey at the bat Casey at the bat perhaps an exception but it's a very good piece of pop art and the kid does do it very well well I'm glad you're in favor of some aspects of pop art I'd like to make a quick transition we don't have a lot of time and I want to give the audience a chance at you but there are at least two topics that I want us to talk a little bit about Robert when Robert first began to publish he was immensely influential even as a young poet because he seemed to be doing something at the time that was new in quotes in the sense that the established line in poetry was elsewhere and what was new essentially was how deeply conversational his early poetry was and his first few books of poetry were published by Robert and his first few books of poetry not only had a kind of conversational feel but they were and a kind of syntactic coherence that was close in some respects closer to prose than it was to poetry although they were very sort of thought through and careful poems they were true poems there was this not exactly prosaic but conversational dimension to Robert's early poetry and especially in the book entitled an explanation of America but as you've gone on though your poetry has changed in somewhat radical ways and in somewhat surprising ways and there have been some essays written about this which I've learned from studying Robert's work at different stages of his career but to oversimplify his work becomes less and less conversational it becomes harder I think more difficult sometimes harder to follow you have to work harder to get the meaning although I think he's always an accessible poet and moves toward a condition in which he seems to be writing something closer to incantation than conversation and there's a deeply sort of incantatory and visionary dimension to his most recent poetry and many people have commented on this my first question is do you remember a moment in your own work when you felt a turning like that I mean I know of some poems I might nominate but I was wondering if you felt a moment where you were changing it's so hard to write a good poem and you die not knowing if you ever have I mean if you want to know that you've done something right you must become something like a surgeon or an airline pilot really seriously then you know you perform the mission to do with the surgery you have a much more objective measure than if you're an artist earlier to the students earlier I quoted Keats epitaph that he wrote for himself here lies one whose name was written water part of him knew or suspected that he was John Keats that people like us would be reading his words hundreds of years later but since he wasn't a madman he admitted the possibility perhaps his life had been a vein he had not written masterpieces and when he thought he did or had it was a delusion and being a genius he wrote a brilliant epitaph that covers both cases it's ironic if he is John Keats and it is a very moving evocation of what it is to have your name be written water if not it's so hard to write a good poem that when you are trying to do it what you are thinking about is how you can possibly approach that goal so you're not thinking about well I've done the conversational thing I think kind of be a little more you're much more you're much more like somebody that's exactly how I thought it was trying to keep an airplane in the air or trying to save the patient you're just desperately very intensely trying to make something that works it's also true that explanation of America is spoken and it's spoken fictionally to a child between the ages of 8 and 11 and almost because of that it's a book length poem with a little prefatory poem that is rather imagistic and more incantational and a poem at the end that is also much less conversational and more like a litany or prayer I wasn't consciously saying look I can do that too but it seemed an appropriate way to say this is a little bit like I'm writing a concerto minor keys are involved another time I might be writing a song cycle or this isn't a major key that there is not only development there's also different tasks at some point it is true I fell in love with the substantive and this is I mean grammatically this is like talking about nuts and bolts I had been very much in love with very complicated sentences like the first sentence of George Herbert's poem church monuments the man is about to go to pray and he stops in the graveyard outside the church and he addresses his body and he says the soul is going to go and pray now body little child you be good stay out here and look at this you're going to learn something from it while that my soul repairs to her devotion here I entomb my flesh that it be times may take acquaintance of these heaps of dust to which the blast of death's incessant motion fed by the exhalation of our crimes drives all at last you know your diagram on the blackboard it's like a spidery thing but how beautiful the energy is directed while that my soul repairs her devotion here I entomb my flesh that it be times may take acquaintance of these heaps of dust to which the blast of death's incessant motion fed by the exhalation of our crimes drives all at last I once asked a lot of doctoral students at Berkeley what's the main verb of that sentence some of them said drives no F it is entomb isn't it great that everything grows off entomb the poem is called church monuments so part of oneself technically is in love with the idea of how much energy syntax generates and it's taking the rhymes as it goes and it's taking the line innings as it goes and then at some point you've been doing that a lot those long sentences and at some point you know you're probably thinking about where the sentence is coming with the articles the yoke the back the needle the treadle this is one of Robert's most famous poems it's a prize winning poem called shirt maybe you should read it Robert but describe it and then read it I mean that poem in fact goes all over the lot intellectually things I've read plagiarized a little bit of a thing here and I have another idea I got from there but the poem is sort of dominated by that the sense of substantive in that case with the article the this the this the that and there's a power to that it's a kind of inventory since he doesn't want to read it it's a kind of inventory I'll read it so he would be much more cooperative if it wasn't his friend it's what friends are for oh no I mustn't he's not behaving well if he doesn't behave better I'm going to recite some of his suppressed poetry I said to David tell me at the reach right now pretend I don't want to the yoke the yardage lapped seams the nearly invisible stitches along the collar turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians gossiping over tea and noodles on their break or talking money or politics while one fitted this arm piece with its overseen to the band of cuff eye button at my wrist the presser the cutter the wringer the mangle the needle the union the treadle the bobbin the code the infamous blaze at the triangle factory in 1911 146 died in the flames on the ninth floor no hydrants helped a girl to step up to the window sill then held her out away from the masonry wall and let her drop and then another as if he were helping them up to enter a streetcar and not eternity a third before he dropped her put her arms around his neck and kissed him then he held her into space and dropped her almost at once he stepped to the sill himself his jacket flared and fluttered up from his shirt as he came down air filling up the legs of his grey trousers like heart cranes bedlamite shrill shirt ballooning wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked corners of both pockets like a strict rhyme word prince plaids cheques houndstooth tattersall madras the clan tartans invented by mill owners inspired by the hoax of ashen to control their savage Scottish workers tamed by a fabricated heraldry Mcgregor tannins weavers carters spinners the loader the docker the navi the planter the picker the sorter sweating at her machine in the litter of cotton as slaves in calico head rags sweated in fields George Herbert, your descendant his color and fit and feel and its clean smell have satisfied both her and me we have culled its cost and quality down to the buttons of simulated bone the button holes, the sizing the facing the characters printed in black on neckband and tail the shape, the label the labor the color, the shade the shirt the later poems become even more visionary and we may have a chance to look at those later, but I want to make a transition to the final topic we'll discuss before we open to the general discussion. And that is this recent prose book that Robert has written called The Life of David. I've read it closely and been deeply moved by it and it strikes me that one of the interesting things about the book it is like a vast Pinsky poem that is to say it's full of disparate energies that create at least the illusion of an absence of coherence, but finally when you finish the whole you realize how richly coherent it is and it is in some degree a kind of departure for a poet like Robert Pinsky to turn to this sort of a book. I thought that first Robert I might ask you to sort of in just a general way describe why you felt David was such a fascinating figure why he mattered to you in a way? I'll try to unite the two subjects the previous subject in this one syntax and poetry is the equivalent of melody in music it connects things over time it's the equivalent perhaps of harmonic structure but even more of melody so that any good syntax is in some sense conversational that it converts and it's between so that sometimes when people are talking they talk rather like while that my soul repairs to the potion here I still my flesh because at the time and there are other times when it is more also conversational when it's no hydrants no fire escapes Yates says in a letter it is the syntax of in memoriam that is odious it is the language of no man when moved our teacher Winters says somewhere else poetry doesn't like something one would never say moving in a certain way on some level it has to seem like some even if the person were muttering it to themselves it's what connects part to part and to say no hydrants no fire escapes is to emphasize minimal connection and to say while that my soul repairs to the origin here I until now connect suggests very very almost entraping elaborate hypotactic and paratactic syntax are the rhetorical terms the David book is in a way about being Jewish it's about what is a Jew and Jews through a historical destiny are highly syncretic you might even say synthetic in the sense of synthesis and connecting one thing to another thing it's been said one of the things people say about Jews is if you go to Chile or you could go to Romania or if you go to Alabama and Alabama the most Chilean Chileanos are the Jews that they are extremely adaptable in some sense so that in this country Irving Berlin who was born in Russia and had a longer name than Berlin at one point wrote White Christmas having succeeded at that he also wrote Easter Parade David interesting reasons we can speculate about rather than Abraham is the quintessential hero of these people Abraham is the father he's the first Jew David some of the rabbis say is he really Jewish should he sit among the Jews his great grandmother was Ruth a Moabite woman my chapter about Goliath is titled Cousin Goliath I point out with the light in the last chapter that the six-pointed star is of David only by the most imaginative process he never if there was an actual person there it wasn't until really what they now call early modern Europe that symbol of six-pointed star was connected with Jews it's a great symbol the two triangles the male dagger pointing to the sky embraces the earth the female chalice open to the sky points to the earth it's a yin-yang symbol and David too is all of the above he's a great killer he's a great poet he's an artist he's a politician he's a terrible person he's a great person he has this he connects many things he's very disparate and just as one is interested technically in all the many many ways that one word is connected to another word all the varieties of syntax no two grammatical junctures are exactly the same even if you write a line like tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow each end and each tomorrow has a slightly different character each juncture is a slightly different juncture because the pressure of repetition varies through the course of the line and just as one might be fascinated by all the infinite range of grammatical junctures and connections one is interested in the yin and yang the inclusive did I do that dagger chalice thing right? female chalice points to the earth the male dagger points to the sky I'm okay it is all of the above the quality of David to be all of the above the quality of the Jews to be all of the above are related in my mind to the ambition of writing a kind of poetry in which anything can be included well the David book is perhaps less capacious than some of the poems because not everything is included, relevant but it is a kind of very imaginative retelling of the David story that goes beyond the Bible in some respect so I thought maybe you should you might mention something about some of the other homework you did when you were working on the book it was so easy to do the homework because Louis Ginsberg compiled this great great compilation called The Legends of the Jews it's all of the crazy weird midrashes all of the stories and he ranges it by character so also there are other things about David are right there and they are many and they are very very weird the one that I'll tell quickly the one that epitomizes what I just said about inclusiveness David was not supposed to live his full 70 years as he did his original destiny was to die as an infant but Adam happened to be walking around in the part of heaven where the souls are waiting to be born he saw David's soul and he said whoa that's a great soul that kid is that soul shouldn't die oh he should have a whole life fortunately God is in that part of heaven too and David there and waiting to be born and Adam says to God that kid should have a whole life that's a great soul you gave me a thousand years to live I'll give him 70 of my years so God calls up the lawyer angels they write up a contract the undersigned Adam the hereby and David gets to live a whole well this is Adam who's the seed all the potential good and bad and glorious and various things that we can do he's the seed of all of us and he recognizes the soul that is all of the above so he's all of the above in potential he recognizes the life that has come closest to the fruition or flowering of everything that a person might be and that's not biblical that's some manic rabbi made that up it's certainly it's certainly a book that will surprise you even if you have no interest in the Bible or in David you'll find this a remarkable book and there's a turning at the end that I think we can conclude on I'd like to ask you Robert to read the very end of the book because I have a copy if you need it there is very little hint of an autobiographical dimension to the book unlike many of Robert's poems which always have at least a kind of hint of a personal engagement but the autobiographical element emerges with astonishing clarity and poignance at the very end of the book and that's the part of the book that I'm asking Robert to look at David is more enigmatic than any purely Christian or Jewish paradigm more tangled at the roots and more proliferating larger and enduring story of stories necessarily involves quirks and guises a paradoxical incrustation of Midrash for example the six-pointed figure known as the star of David was pretty certainly unknown to David though Gregory Peck wears the image on his tunic in David in Bathsheba the six-pointed star was not associated with King David but with Jews until more than a thousand years after the time of David the star is of David the Psalms are of David the very stories in the Hebrew Bible and in the legends are of David all are of him by sovereign possessive force of attribution beyond scholarly demonstration in their different ways and degrees all rotating around David's genitive central energy that attracts and embraces them the human forum on the triumphal arch of the Emperor Titus celebrating his capture and destruction of Jerusalem a millennium after its founding the branched candelabrum appears but not the anachronistic star it is not mentioned in the Bible nor in the Talmud nor in the rabbinical literature the first Jewish source to mention the stars in the 13th century of the common era a symbol doesn't appear to be much used before the 15th century the Jewish encyclopedia says it probably was the cabala that deprived the symbol from the Templars I'll skip the paragraph I've already paraphrased to you about the male dagger in the female chalice the star of David's history has been far from uniformly sweet when the Portuguese monarch Afonso IV reversed his predecessors benign policies all Jews were forbidden to appear in public without a visible six-pointed yellow star on their hat or coat in this regard the Nazis again appear as not originators but copiers adapters, exploiters and refiners continuing and extending the theme of inclusion Gershom Sholom in his essay on the star commends the wisdom of converting the symbol of oppression into an insignia of national identity on the flag of Israel and as a glyph unmistakable as the cross the stringent geometry of the star in the way of human makings accepts but transfigures its range of meanings here is a particular instance a photograph of 12 young men taken in the bad year 1939 so not to their uniforms is that six-pointed star of interlocked triangles said to be borrowed from a device of the Knights Templar and incorporated without rabbinic approval into the agonized mysticisms and the head entries of Kabbalah the young men squinting back at the camera are named Ralph Binder Joseph Siegel Nathan Schneider Morris Newberg Herman Schneider Gilbert Kaplan Harry Silver David Becker Milton Silver Milford Pinsky Abraham Baum the Jewish aces in shorts, knee pads and basketball shoes one of them holds a basketball on which someone has painted City Champs 1938-1939 another cradles the trophy with its crowning figure of an athlete holding the ball overhead in the trophy makers stylized gesture of attainment in plated metal they are standing in front of their high school in French New Jersey 1939 the group picture is an interesting artifact because of the apparent wacky or tragic incongruity of that six pointed emblem deployed in Europe for such different purposes far more like those of King Afonso at the moment the photograph was taken the players of the Jewish aces were most likely far from unaware of the laws and measures enacted by the Third Reich some of them would eventually go into battle against that regime it seems safe to assume also that on that sunny afternoon in Long Branch beaming at the camera the young men were aware of the assertive maybe even defiant quality of the team's name the Jewish aces the implications of aces superior primary sensual worldly singular or lone victorious adept also fit David in such impure fluid partly accidental manifestations certain human doings continue as nodes of energy durably complex particles that radiate, shift and recombine to exceed likelihood and evade prediction King David like the six-pointed design he would not have recognized gathers meaning in assistively and diastole of need and invention over centuries of attainment and outrage suffering an ordinary life in an endlessly glamorous stubborn accrucian the floor is open to questions comments responses of various kinds yes can you come to the microphone because event is being recorded and we want to hear what everyone has to say I can repeat questions too if others are trying to do that the answer to my question is already contained in some of your remarks but I wanted to know if you could comment on the importance of the human voice as the medium of poetry when you first launched the favorite poem project I started thinking about what my favorite poem might be and all of the poems that originally came to my mind were poems that I had memorized as a child now did I memorize them because they were my favorites or did they become my favorites because I memorized them I don't know but you were talking about you know the voice as being kind of an embodiment a re-embodiment of the original spirit to my say spirit's a good word because it means breath and Latin of say the Whitman poem and you know especially at a moment in history where we're shifting our media and you know technology you know poetry was originally spoken I believe and I just wanted to know if you could talk about voice and poetry the human voice the spoken voice an important distinction for me is that it is a vocal art though not necessarily a performative art and in a culture where as I've said performance is so central it's a very important distinction when you memorize poems you incorporated them took them into your body quite literally you know as in that the redberry novel where certain people have memorized certain poems that person's body is that book the poem in my opinion is something that happens it takes place each time someone reads it is like a piece of music it happens each time it's been there's notation that represents it but it is something that happens in the course of a certain amount of time it takes place it takes place in a literal or imagined voice so the vocality is not an ornament it is not part of show business as a category of show business poetry will always be kind of cute and trivial as an art it's immense and central and it's nature is vocal intellectual as well as in the pound metaphor of the centaur but it is also essentially vocal and I really do I suppose I'm promoting my product but the DVD you've only gotten a glimpse of it the DVD that is in that book invitation to poetry is for me I can't tell you how glad I am that teachers can get it to me it's a great teaching tool the teacher can show the kids it's not a tape of a professor talking about the poem or Sir John Dillgood reading Shakespeare or of a rap artist doing a skillful or the poet with a great personality it's anyone at all who loves the poem and that to me is very important in the nature of the art I encourage you to sort of meditate your questions raise your hands when you're ready while we're waiting for more energy from the audience I have a question you mentioned Evor Winters a little while ago Robert and he was certainly the most compelling teacher I ever experienced and Robert and I were at Stanford together in a period when this astonishing poet critic was a very important influence on anyone who came within 100 miles of Stanford I wonder if you'd talk a little bit about Winters and how you see him now from in many ways your career is not congenial to what Winters might have imagined for you I think necessarily true I remember one time another teacher we had Bud Pfeiffer wonderful man who taught the 18th century described reading applications with Winters and Bud Pfeiffer said I thought I was going to please him his intellectual side and I said look at this woman she says the main part of poetry for her is the sounds of the words and Winters said that's pretty much right Bud Pfeiffer Bud Pfeiffer and what I remember very well is Winters really particularly in French very beautifully had a rather beautiful voice he said about his own work in poetry what I did was small but good and he wrote beautiful little poem this is a poem by Ivor Winters a summer commentary when I was young in a sharper sense the farthest insect cry I heard could stay me through the trees intense I watched the hunter and the bird where is the meaning that I found or was it but a state of mind some old pen number of the ground in which to be but not defined now summer grasses brown with heat have crowded sweetness through the air the sky dust is sweet even the unshadowed earth is fair the soft voice of the nesting dove and the dove and swift erratic flight like a rapid hand within a glove caressed the silence and the light beautiful last answer amid the rubble the fallen fruit fermenting in its rich decay smears brandy on the trampling boot and sends it sweeter on its way that sense of scale it's very beautiful and David and I were fortunate to study with a real artist who's also a very learned man I think his work lives I think people still other celebrity critics at the time seemed to me absolutely forgotten I haven't only I read the book I think people are still quoting him and arguing with him and he did leave right those poems that are terrific not great great poet beautiful things like that his emphasis was very powerfully rationalist his great collection of critical writings was called indefensive reason and he was often complained against for emphasizing the rational so intensely that the emotional dimension of poetry was given according to these complaints inadequate acknowledgement in Winters account I take it you don't agree Robert he was very irritated by some of his adherents remember he I may have been the one who asked him what he made of the fact so many nuns came to study with him and he did look very what in the world do you think I'm saying he was he had his blindness but he did not just say the poems were only rational he was very interested in the interplay between things I've been talking to you about he had his limitations I'm proud to say that David and I were not amongst the robots we were willing to argue with him he was not to be said on behalf of Yeats as compared to T. Sturgemore while others were just saying yeah okay T. Sturgemore greater one of the things Robert and I did when we were in graduate school Winters was famous for making obiter dicta judgments of poetry dislike so he would say things like Wordsworth is a marginal figure and he would often choose iconic figure Shakespeare sonnets are not what they're cracked up to be he would say things like that and he would also celebrate or argue for poets no one had ever heard of often with ridiculous names very comical names like Barnaby Gooch and Adelaide Crapsey was another one of the poets that Winters defended and at one point because we were sort of arrogant graduate students Robert and I collaborated on a parody of Winters in which I wrote the prose and Robert wrote all the poetry and it was a sort of fake Winters essay in which we created in which we created a typical Winters poet who was virtually unknown I think well you left out Jones Ferry it was one of the colonial discoveries actually Jones Ferry wrote some interesting poems one of Winters favorite was very early 18th century American poet named I've learned since it's actually pronounced Jonas Ferry but it's Jones Ferry if you see its spell and Jones Ferry was one of Winters great discoveries and amongst other he had couplets at the bottom of the page on all his poems and one of the couplets was I now I'll read it in the Winters voice I know repose my weary head upon my pillow but I shall be shortly gone not bad a little gloomy and our poet was called Smith extremely and Robert wrote a series of comical little poems I wish I had the text here the rational paraphrase of all the poems one was a sonnet one was an elegy wrote them in all forms and all of them basically said I put a seedless roll into my lunchbox I wish I could find this manuscript I think it would be worth something now because of Robert's poem what I remember is the couplet I now insert a seedless roll into my lunchbox but I shall be shortly through so so I remember reading this to another colleague a professor that we both liked very much a great great man in his own right who had been a student of Winters himself Albert Gerard and Gerard loved this parody but he warned to let Winters see it and to my knowledge he never saw it we were so scared that all there are no extant copies unless you've been hiding well I have one but I can't find it question then you'll be second in English language poetry there is no sticked rhyme whatsoever anymore you are suffering the question is why in this day and the age in the English language is there no rhyme any more you're not the only person to have that misapprehension I think that Joseph Brodsky who wrote so many awful poems in English also had that notion that he was the only one writing in rhyme and meter many people do some very well Tom Gunn wrote great poems wonderful poems beautiful for his brother in a poem inviting his brother Tom wrote beautifully in couplets he is only one example so it's not the case David's been talking about an explanation for America I broke my neck writing that poem in iambic pentameter and the poem that I read to you is also in the measure of iambic pentameter and rhyme in English was considered vulgar by writers like Milton because the classical languages didn't rhyme so it's a more complicated question than it appears to be and the fact that there are a lot of people who are writing free verse badly or not really verse at all shouldn't obscure the fact that it's possible to write rhyme and meter quite badly too I'm afraid it all depends yes sir as a practitioner of maybe the most humanistic of the arts of poetry I just finished an opera about a man who wants to be a robot and it's introduced by robots does that horrify you the idea that someone would wish to be a machine do you think that robots will ever be able to write poetry the same way that humans would the character in the character's mind he's doing the opposite of becoming a machine he's freeing himself from the fungible mortal machine of the body he thinks he's becoming pure spirit the word robot as I understand it is a check word originally it means worker thing that works in that sense we all aspire to be robots to get our work done is one of the great human pleasures I don't think it's that simple I do want very much with that story to raise questions like the questions you're asking whether I mean there are characters there are characters three characters named the united nations, the united way and the administration come to Simon and say what about the starving of the earth what about people who are suffering you've already upset the world economy by putting all your resources into this project and in the script it does say there is a pageant, a parade of the starving and suffering of the earth people who don't have enough to eat diseases, children and we somehow put that on stage I don't know how we put it on stage it's almost more of a social question as a philosophical one in the opera I'm not unaware of the question but I wouldn't boil it down oh he wants to become a robot I was very interested in the idea of robotics very interested by the idea of being of thinking machines and of this idea that we are evolving away from the human container for intelligence itself will evolve into some other format let's say and I didn't want to make a trite frankensine story out of it I didn't want to say yet again oh you're overweening you will come to a bad end I wanted to make it more ambiguous than that and the daughter character has a very she's very ambivalent about this and she has a strong social conscience and many misgivings and all through including the bit here it quotes that wonderful May Swenson poem body my horse my hound what will I do who will I be and she says how will I remember without my forgetting how will I live without my death and I think those are important questions but I don't want to answer them in a way that is merely humanistic in some facile way so it's it's smoky down here we have in the front here two things by way of introduction to my question I want to cover what you just said from my limited knowledge robot is a Czech word that was popularized if not invented by Karl Čepek and how you are anyway that's besides the question I had you kind of threw me off David I don't know your last name professor I'm sorry you said that Dr. Pinsky David was a point of departure for him I think those were your words as though he was creating something new for himself I take mild exception and I could be wrong I think you may be right because we would agree with you and Dr. Pinsky's poem about Daniel I see a lot of biblical adherence and yet a certain personal creativity of his own building on what the Bible offers about Daniel and giving it a lot more a lot more cloth and also in something as disparate precursor from that is his poem about the child Jesus and so if you put those two yin and yangs together if you will I think they both form a precursor to the current David completely from the childhood of Jesus is a model for the David book and it's based on the infancy Gospel of Thomas and other parts of the apocryphal book of Thomas the idea of apocryphal, the idea of Midrash, those are very interesting ideas to me it seems to me that retellings, redactions improvisations at what point does the star get attached to him, what point did the psalms get attached to him in what way Jesus in these tellings becomes rather a brat unlike in the Christian scriptures we see him between infancy and adolescence and he's a very only Joseph has authority over him this human quality of retelling of giving another version seems to me one of the many points of nexus between art and human behavior art is not, art is continuous with things that people do all day we make little many works of art famously in our dreams but when you're trying to be amusing to someone phone conversation or when friends try to have fun at a party when you choose colors for your living room or when you, we do our grooming there are little works of art and a character like Daniel or Jesus or David the biblical part is only a part of all the tremendous incrustation of human thought and feeling that it's built around that thing and it's deeply human and I'm endlessly interested in that phenomenon and yeah I think of my book about David as being a stone that I add to this huge human monument all the things that people, the movies the midrashes, the commentaries the attacks that the bizarre exculpations people invented for the terrible things he does as to Uriah the Hittite so a certain number of scholars make up absolutely bizarre stories and theories to, you know Uriah the Hittite looks like a straight hour nice guy in the bob but really he had the key to Goliath's armor and Goliath was covered in sorry David couldn't cut his head off because of the armor so Uriah said well I have the key but I'll give you the key if you give me a beautiful Israelite bride so he does an entitled to Bathsheba anyway it's hard to believe that some of these sages did not have any access to marijuana that is all part of the process of retelling and telling again and bringing out the nefarious and sinister aspects of the story stories as great as these read us Jesus reads us, David each telling reads whoever reads it the story of stories and I'm very interested in that process where the book reads you then you read the book back and forth endlessly way back let's say it's 2070 if the republic survives will the poet laureate be propped up by structure or by subject it's 2070 by structure you're talking about the aesthetic structure social structure exactly I'm talking about the structure the format of the structure of one's work for me it will begin with the human body is there is there a way that someone will want to say again the words that another person made I chose to say you words that winters put together I chose this afternoon to put words say words that Frank O'Hara and Thomas Nash put together in the 20th and in the 16th century my strongest ambition is that 100 years from now some woman who's studying English in Tanzania or Uganda or Belize or Thailand will choose to say words that I put together and in 2070 I think poet laureate is not important it's just a sort of a title but if there is a poet who as I have gotten inspiration from Frank O'Hara Emily Dickinson, Ivor Winters whatever the things are I've read I'm hoping that it's the centaur I'm hoping that the person looks around has feelings and says I'm going to express these feelings by the sounds of the words and if I'm one of the models that's much more important than poet laureate use the microphone to be I'll repeat what you said the difficulty of writing a good poem but it's also true that not all poets feel that that some poets have found it easy to write or at least that there are periods when people have a tremendous outflowing of work so I was wondering do you feel that hardness first of all have you ever had a period that was like that and do you feel that that hardness has to do with you personally with the kind of work that you're trying to make or what? The question has to do with my saying that it's so hard to write a good poem and the question rightly points out that some poets have found it easy or there are times in a career when people find it easy Frank O'Hara said I like to play the typewriter after breakfast for an hour or so it's like this you have to climb a mountain find your way through a maze get to the field that has a tree in it you climb up to the top of the tree and you wait for a thunderstorm then it's easy once you're hit by lightning it's a computer game to get hit by lightning to get hit by lightning once you're hit by lightning no problem I'm hit by lightning but you go through a lot of school for you before you can get there you listen to that famous thing where Illinois Jacket played Flyin' Home at the Newport Jazz Festival and it sounds like it sounds so exciting and it also sounds like he just he's breathing he's having sex, he's eating he's just doing something, no problem play this major and minor scales and all keys he, you know, you don't pick up a saxophone and just blow it he studied, he understands the harmonic structure of that rather simple blues-like harmonic structure chord progression a lot goes you work real hard to get to where it's easy Robert, in a related aspect to that question that struck me as you were talking the comment that you made Robert was commissioned to write a poem about 9-11 by the Washington Post it's a beautiful poem and it was reprinted in the best American poems of whatever year it was and the poets are asked to make a comment in it and Robert's comment was interesting because he says, because this was an assignment people think this was hard but then you say, not really talk about that a little you say, you know, people are surprised by this got me on some occasions it's fun to say that it's very hard to write a good poem on some occasions it's fun to say it's not hard I used to say people would talk about translating the inferno and I would say translation is it's easy because it's impossible if you're trying to do something impossible it's a lighthearted enterprise because you know there's no such thing an assignment people say it must be difficult to write to assignment in a way an assignment gives you the freedom of saying gotta do this and there's something a little bit liberating it's like I used the same word where I often find a can't word word liberating I used it when I talked about working with Todd one of the human beings enjoy difficulty very much and when you're doing the video game or playing golf or basketball or tennis or you're working on a new knitting pattern or building a boat or you have software you're figuring out or you're solving a problem at work you get to a point where it's neither difficult nor easy it's just what you want to be doing and it's hard to remember to eat or go to the bathroom because you just want to be doing that and I think that is one of the most desired human states that engaging a worthy difficulty a difficulty worthy of yourself and I said that about that poem and in recent weeks in correspondence with somebody who wrote an essay about the poem I've been revising it ever since I think I may finally have it right at one point I took it out of my book because frankly I felt that I have to find out which Polish poet it is Adam Zagiejewski saying during the Soviet years Polish poet was the state they wanted to control all the metaphors and I felt that I felt quite frankly I feel I'm going to be preaching to the choir or something I don't want this to be a big highlight but I felt that the Bush administration had so much taken over 9-11 that my poem had changed and that I was unhappy I was unhappy to think that that the meaning of my poem was going to somehow accede to the use of this as a really preposterous political slogan you know like invading a country that had nothing to do with it or fighting back back means to fight the people who you know that I I have gone through agony over that poem which I you remind me I said in print it was easy to write I've never spent so long revising a poem and frankly the woman said about it described just the poem I want to have written it included the ambiguity and she felt I was going crazy which could be true I have revised the poem I've revised the constant look the post version is different from the best American poetry version the version that's been in my manuscript that I took out and put that in is different she this woman wrote this beautiful essay about my poem I emailed her the latest revision which incorporates a lot of Catherine Lee Bates's America the Beautiful near the end I haven't heard from her I think she thinks I screwed my poem up she's been very afraid of me she may be right she may be right one of the really remarkable things about Robert there are many things about him I admire but he published a poem in New Yorker a couple of years ago and I wrote him an email about it saying I didn't understand one part of it and he wrote back saying it bothers me a lot that this poem is not accessible and he engaged in a process of revision and he sent me some changes I'm not sure that the poem was really improved by his changes but I know that the poem became clearer because of his changes it seems to me a very meaningful comment on his way of working that it matters to him to be understood and I thought maybe you don't like to do this because in your position you have to be friendly to all forms of poetry but there really is a situation in the poetry world at large in which there is a vast ocean of material that's being written is written in a kind of mystical or obscurantist way in which no rational reader can make sense of it I'm wondering if you would be willing to say something about sort of the condition of poetry in that way but no one never knows what the condition of poetry is the day that Elizabeth Bishop wrote At the Fish Houses which I consider a great poem it didn't say the next day or the next week or so in Time Magazine, New York Times or in Poetry Magazine last week Elizabeth Bishop wrote At the Fish Houses one of the best poems of the last 30-40 years you perceive these things over time and there's a moment at which Stephen Vincent Benet becomes recast and it becomes recast so you don't know, you don't see the scene well, I do know that for many very young people there isn't available style that's very opaque and you can see why it is attractive because in this opacity you seem to be tormented, profound dissatisfied with the limitations of language and it's an armor against grocery it's an armor against seeming naive it's an instant access to sophistication and it's a too effective defense you perfect a way of writing that seems to solve all problems and this was true of some of Winter's Disciples who wrote Skill, Will, Must, Trust that also is a kind of defense and I think that to do an art you need to be vulnerable you need to be young, you need to be gauche how can you ever get further if you don't manifest your grocery and so you think it's protective, Robert? Yeah, I think so, you can see why especially when there's lots and lots of people who want to write poetry which is a good thing but then they're afraid of being klutzy I know that terror very well myself and if there's an available style that protects you against being clumsy or unsure or uncertain it's a great temptation very attractive I think you must risk seeming stupid and I feel it every time I write that I am risking seeming stupid, self-sad and whatever bad thing you're worried about banal you know I was excessively defensive and this gentleman asked me about the humanistic meaning of this because I'm thinking on the one hand do I want it to glibly say we must be humanists and not the robots and on the other hand do I want to make two you can see that in either way there's a pitfall and you have to confront your own ambivalence and believe me it's much worse for me than for a 20 year old 19 or 20 year old kid write something stupid you know you wrote something stupid I write something stupid Robert fucking Penske wrote something stupid so if anybody at all has heard of you the stakes go up if you don't feel any of that for me anyway I know you're right there are times when you say it's easy but you have to feel some of that and I think that all styles of the period probably always have an element in them of here's a way to seem to have done it right now it's a way to see not to have it's a way to defend yourself very easy, very available instant sophistication you don't even have to have read very much and you can see it can be sophisticated by adopting this manner is that okay? that was good it wasn't exactly an answer to the question I tell you David we were the two guys at Stanford we were the two guys at Stanford from New Jersey he had gone to Princeton I had gone to Rutgers and they actually got us mixed up a lot I've been very proud of this most of my life people would confuse us we didn't look particularly alike but we were the two smart guys from New Jersey and they were mostly Westerners and one day I stopped at a traffic light and a car full a convertible full of fellow graduate students pulled up and as the light was changing one of the women in the car looked at me and said well hello Mr. Law Brain Thorburn well I can't top that story actually I do have a story about our confusion though maybe it does top it when we came out when we came out of graduate school we went for interviews at various places this is an impossible situation for contemporary academics to imagine but there were hundreds of jobs available we were very sought after we were offered many jobs the University of Chicago offered me a job which I turned down to go to Yale the University of Chicago called Roberton offered him a job and they said to him they called Roberton they said to Robert well you can have this job we'd like you to come there to write about my dissertation topic Harvard was confusing so he refused them on this basis we'd like you to come here and among other things we'd like you to teach one of your favorite subjects perhaps Conrad and the Seatel which was my dissertation this reinforced what Winters said to me Winters said don't take the job at Yale or at Harvard those places are traps for young people and then when I read the Conrad thing I said maybe he's right so now I can say people say well you teach at Harvard right I said no my only relation to Harvard was I went to turn to job down it's actually probably a rarer group of people who can say they turned to job down at Harvard than people who have accepted jobs it's an impressive thing Robert one of amongst my credentials one of Robert's most remarkable credentials I think there was a a poem of Robert's I was hoping to have him read at a conclusion so a couple more questions if there are any and then I think I'd like Robert do you have copies of the chat book with you could you do door any final questions or comments the chat book that is about to appear in a month or two a question here yes good I've been watching our culture well forever or my version of forever 53 years but I've really noticed over the last 15 to 20 years what an odd way and I think it's not all Anglo-Saxon cultures I think it's particularly American this very weird relationship we have with memory actually I'm struck by more our relationship to forgetting and I just wondered if you could speak to that because the when you said or you described the moment when someone's words have impacted you enough that you want to say those same words again that's a moment that I recognize in my life not just from reading but I remember specific moments hundreds of them when my brother or a friend said something that was so perfect that I've repeated it a hundred times and it's part of the meaningfulness of my own life and I feel at the same time I look around me and get the feeling that I'm in a culture that's desperate to forget as much as it can and obliterate as much as it can and I can't quite pull that all together and I'm wondering how you do I thought of calling my new manuscript the book of forgetting and a line in one of the poems has to do with forgetting being a form of memory forgetting is a particularly disturbing form of memory I'm going to in response to your question I'm going to read a poem other than one David wanted me to read I'll read the other one as well oh gosh I'll read both this is a poem that is probably at the far end of being hard to understand for some of my friends I'm still not sure what I'm going to entitle it it's this phenomena of things being forgotten culturally poor Burt Williams W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor all those early comics the Ziegfield comic said the most inventive the best writer the best performer was Burt Williams Burt Williams was a black man he could only work in blackface he tried working without the blackface he was a rather light-skinned black man and it didn't work for him it was not a demeaning characters characters and the web you can pick up things like you can buy him singing his song nobody when I'm in trouble I know that how I can rely on nobody anyway he's just one example and cultural forgetting as well as personal forgetting sometimes I'm interested in and I think in a first draft this poem is called I've never heard of one of my friends suggested calling it what's now the title Louis Louis but probably a lot of people under a certain age even are forgotten Louis Louis and it's that phenomena and then there are expressions people forget how many people here have ever heard the expression white Catholic one person how many people have ever heard the expression white Jew nobody you can guess what they mean though right somebody who seems more like a wasp but they happen to be Jewish or Catholic I was at Notre Dame when I heard white Jews since I was a child at Notre Dame I was talking to a kid who explained that his parents were on the board of the symphony in the Midwestern city he came from and he said I'm what you call a white Catholic that is it's not a working-class family it's a very tennis playing kind of family I'll read this poem then I'll read the poem door that is that okay I have heard of black Irish but I never heard of white Catholic or white Jew I have heard of is poetry popular but I never heard of Lawrence Welk drove Sid Cesar off television I have heard of Kwanzaa I have never heard of Burt Williams I have never heard of Will Rogers or Roger Williams or Buck Rogers or Pearl Buck or Frank Bucket Yale or Frank Buck or Frank Marowell at Yale I have heard of Yale but I never heard of George W. Bush I have heard of Harvard but I never heard of numerous Colossus which sounds to me like some kind of pig Latin how many people here know what numerous Colossus is it's a secret number that until a couple of decades ago the secret percentage of Jubies Jews that were allowed into Yale or Harvard or Princeton numerous Colossus I have heard of Yale but I never heard of George W. Bush I have heard of Harvard but I never heard of numerous Colossus which sounds to me like some kind of pig Latin I have heard of the Pig Boy I have never heard of the Beastie Boys or the Scotsboro Boys how many people here have heard of the Scotsboro Boys almost a third almost a half I have heard of the Beastie Boys or the Scotsboro Boys I have never heard of the Beastie Boys or the Scotsboro Boys but I have heard singing boys what they were called I forget I have never heard America singing but I have heard of I hear America singing I think it must have been a book we had in school I forget I suppose it is a poem it is a poem of the person and the person of who I am scolding but it is also the person of myself there is a perverse Pinsky who comes out in poems like this I think in one of his poems he has one poem that is a disobedient adolescent it is an angry adolescent the poem calls itself I feel like I basically remain an angry adolescent which I certainly was and it is amazing that some of it goes down should I close with this yes maybe give it back to explain where it comes there is a sequence of poems that are it is called it is what the chap would be it will come back to come out it is called first thing to hand and the theory is that the first thing I touch has to be the occasion for a poem my U.S. Airways preferred Dividend Miles card and you would talk about plastic and this one is before they put the magnetic strip on it it is delaminating and the layers of what is happening to labor and health plans from airlines that whoever was in charge of laminating this the person who invented it I hope they made money but the clear plastic glossy is delaminate blah blah blah and the point is not ordinary life is so interesting but that the occasion for a poem is never really a subject Ode to a Nightingale is not about a bird Sailing to Byzantium is not about Byzantium they are about all the things Keats felt about life that day all the things that Yates was feeling about life that day and if each of us wrote a poem about the little plastic card each poem would express the personality and the obsessions and the concerns of that person if we even just wrote a paragraph describing it we would be writing the things that matter to us so there's a poem called book there's one called newspaper there's one called Jar of Pens there's one called Other Hand it's the next thing you touch and what time are we supposed to finish? right now when you finish this door door the cat cries for me from the other side it is beyond her to work this device that I open and cross and close with such ease when I mean to work it's four panels form a cross the rude impaling gatepost of redemption the rod dividing pike or pale mounted and hinged to swing between one place and another meow between the January vulva of birth and the January of death's door there are so many to negotiate closed or flung open or a jar valve of attention oh kitty if the doors of perception were cleansed all things would appear as they are infinite come in darling drows comfortably near my feet I will click the barrier closed again behind you oh sister will fellow mortal here we are