 Hello, ladies and gentlemen, welcome. My name is Kevin Visera, and I'm the artistic engagement manager for ArtsEmerson. And it is my extreme pleasure to invite you all to this wonderful Q&A today, kind of our day of Claudia Rankin, brought to you by ArtsEmerson and WLP and the Fresh Sound Foundation. Couple housekeeping things. Note the exit nearest to you in case of an emergency. Calmly exit the building away from any kind of fire or whatever's happening. So those exits are there and there. Just so you all know, this is being live streamed on HowRound TV, HowRound, part of the Office of the Arts here at ArtsEmerson College. You'll be able to find it on HowRound's blog after the event is over. And also, don't miss 6 o'clock. Claudia will be doing a reading, and it should be quite lovely. So now, I'm so happy to welcome Kimberly McLaren of WLP and poet and esteemed author, Claudia Rankin. Thank you so much. You're not sure? No. Are the microphones? I think if the case is a sound problem, like if there's a hearing problem, they're there and they're ready. OK, yes. You want them? No, can you hear us? Yes. OK, is that OK? It's OK if you can hear me. OK, we'll proceed. I can be quite loud, but I don't want you to have to strain your voice, because you'll be reading later. So if you have any trouble hearing us, you should use them. Yes. And then you're going to do a good job. Also, it'll be better for the camera. Oh, you're the one who's better? The sound. The sound. The sound. Who is the kid? My girlfriend. Does that pick me up? Yes. Yes. The pick up. Thank you very much. Again, my name is Kimberly McLaren. I'm a professor in the Department of Writing and Literature and Publishing, and I'm really excited and honored to be here with Claudia Rankin. I'm not going to do a formal introduction, because my colleague, Wendy Walters, will do a much more extensive introduction at the reading tonight, which I hope you all will attend. It's going to be an extraordinary evening. I am going to just give a few of Ms. Rankin's accolades. I want to start, Howard, by thanking David Dower, Arts Inverson, Office of the Arts, Kevin, and I want to say honestly, I was thinking about this walking over here, and I looked at the Arts Inverson, Office of the Arts, excuse me, website, in which their mission statement says, we see our work in service of the college, the public, and the arts. Prioritizing community engagement with our Boston neighbors, national dialogue, shared field-wide learning and curricular engagement that connects students with our work. We operate from the assumption that the arts belong to everyone. And I just wanted to say that that is often a statement that is made at the elite institutions in Boston, but not often a statement that is followed through. And Office of the Arts, Arts Inverson, is actually doing that this year, and I'm proud of that, and I want to thank them for doing that. And this event is just one opportunity, but they are going into the communities in ways that many of us who have tried to get some of these elite institutions to do in the past have not been willing to do. And I just wanted to say that. Thank you very much, Phil. So I want to thank our Chair, Maria Condora, and our Dean, who I don't know if he's here, but just wanted to consider who he is. Thank you, Dean, Samal, wherever you are. All right, of the School of the Arts. Claudia Rankin is the author of five collections of poetry. The first one is Nothing in Nature's Private, 1995, The End of the Alphabet, 1998. Don't Let Me Be Lonely, an American Lyric in 2004. Plot in 2001. That's more than four. And Citizen, an American, that's five. Citizen, an American Lyric, Gravel Press 2014, which is this extraordinary volume right here, which we'll talk about. She has edited numerous anthologies and produced a number of videos in collaboration with John Lucas, including Situation One. Her book, Don't Let Me Be Lonely, an American Lyric, an experimental multi-genre project that blends poetry, essays, and images. Of this book, poet Robert Creely said, Claudia Rankin here manages an extraordinary melding of memes to effect the most articulate and moving testament to the bleak times we live in I have yet seen. It is a masterwork in every sense and altogether her own. She has numerous honors and fellowships, which I'm sure Wendy will document later on, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is currently the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Memorial College. And in 2013, she was elected the Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Mark Doty has praised her selection, saying, Claudia Rankin's formerly inventive poems investigate many kinds of boundaries. The unsettled territory between poetry and prose, which this book does briefly, between the word and the visual image, between what is like to be a subject and the ways we're defined from outside by skin color, economics, and global corporate culture. This fearless poet extends American poetry in invigorating new directions. It is our honor and our thrill to welcome here for this conversation, Claudia Rankin. So we're going to get started, as usual in these conversations, and especially in this one, the challenge is going to be to shut me up in time so that you have a chance to have questions. This is a Q and A. I'm going to spend the first, I don't know, 15 or 20 minutes in conversation with a poet, but I want to make sure, so please, you know, check me, because I will, we can talk all day, so that we have opportunity for you guys to engage in the dialogue. This is an extraordinary opportunity for students, especially, to engage in a poet working at the top of her form. And so I want to leave the time for that. I want to start, I want to talk, there's so much to talk about, also, Claudia, if I may, I want to talk about the book. I want to talk about the role of the artist in times like these, which is really pertinent today. I want to talk about the personal and the political, balancing and merging those things. I want to talk about how you use other genres, like playwriting to inform your poetry and vice versa, to be pertinent to the students and how you use art and collage and painting in this, all of this. I want to talk about what's happening in Baltimore right now and I want to talk about what happened on Emerson's campus yesterday. I want to talk about leather hood and being an artist. And I want to talk about James Baldwin, because I always want to talk about James Baldwin and because you referenced James Baldwin in here. So let's start with the book. And I think it's appropriate that we have the cover, the beautiful cover, up here. And I know there's another connection because I'm sure you're aware today is actually the anniversary of the riots in Los Angeles after the Rodney King beating and after the police were acquitted. So, I mean, the timing. And this, I want you to talk about, if you would, talk about the cover and the image and the connection there and, you know, what you've made of all that connection. We're going to start here. Okay. The image is by the amazing conceptual artist David Hammons. It was done in 1993. So many people have thought that it was done in response to Trayvon Martin. And so it's yet another example of the continuance of this kind of thing ingrained inside the culture and the sort of mobility of whiteness to move away from it when it wants to and back into it. Where else the rest of us are sort of in a true line, you know, from Emmett Till up. So, yeah. So it's an incident of great hope. Hammons, I don't know. Do you guys know David Hammons at all? He has done things like sold snowballs on the side of the road so that you could have the melting whiteness of your hand. He's made bejeweled basketball hoops that sit inside of buildings in Soho as chandeliers. So he's a master at going inside the culture and taking the object and marrying it to its political reputation. And I wondered about the, you mentioned the melting whiteness in your hands, which is very interesting, and the white background here. And I don't know if that was intentional on your part. The connection with one of the themes that recurs in the book is the quote from Zorniel Hurston, right, about, I feel myself, what is the exact word I'm going to show? I feel most colored when I'm thrown again to show a white background. When you see the, it's just, it actually is the piece of art is the actual object and it would be mounted on a wall. So the decision to have the white background was our decision. Partly, visually, but partly to engage visually in the subject. What does that mean to you? I mean, excuse the question, but there's a work in here. Who's the artist who does the, over and over again, in which the quote recurs over and over again until it kind of shades into blurriness. I'm interested in that because that quote, of course, is from her essay, how it feels to be colored in me. And the essay is multi-layered. The essay, so I'm curious about why that quote spoke to you. I feel myself most colored when I am thrown up against the wall today. It's actually about the times also which it doesn't feel to be colored, right? And how do we balance those? I'm just curious. Well, I wanted this book to sit in the world as I sit in the wall. So sometimes there is mobility. Sometimes one is able to move through. And then you have those moments when an obstruction happens because racism enters. And then you find yourself having to negotiate something you didn't expect. Partly because it's coming out of the mouths of your friends, your colleagues, or out of the quotidian day, you know, if it happens in the restaurant and you're just wanting to pay your bill or something like that. So in that sense, it's about both things. The opening quote by Chris Marker, if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black, is in reference to the film, Sam Soleil. And if you see the film, when he says there's a photograph of, I think, two blonde children on a beautiful day, then later on in the film, he shows the same landscape that a volcano has erupted and wiped out where those children would have stood. And so that for me became a metaphor for what happens when institutionalized racism constructs both the black and the white self and also the brown self, so that it's coming in and erupting and wiping out whatever stood before, including any kind of encounter that had mobility written into it. Yeah, that's powerful. One of the words you just used was, because the beginning of the book kind of is a, I don't want to say litany, but it's a meditation on the everyday acts of racism, right? A micro regression, which is what our students were discussing just yesterday. And you used the word unexpected and that was, to me, that was compelling that it was a word that came up with a lot of the students over and over again, unexpected. And I guess what I'm interested in is why it's unexpected. I'm trying not to reveal too much of myself here, but I think it's like, I guess I always be expected, quite frankly, right? So I'm wondering how that fits into the eruption of self the unexpectedness of it. I mean, I think it's both things. I think there's a knowledge and there's mobility. So if I thought that at every step something was going to trip me up, I might think about doing, you know, second thoughts about doing anything. So I don't, it's not in my conscious mind. And especially not in my conscious mind when I'm inside an institution that has said come inside this institution, whether it is this school or, I don't know, an intimate level of friendship. And so you think, oh, in the bounds of this there will be some sense that will exist, some sense of recognition that must exist because here I am. And then it erupts out and then that's why it feels unexpected. But of course, you know, it's institutional that we have been built out of this kind of understanding. Maybe, I don't know where Kevin was. He's going to put up some of these images. I wonder if we could put up the image of the the glen, the glen, just so people who haven't seen it. Because that moves into one of the, the final one of the, I think it is in the first section of the final moment. The man at the cash register wants to know if you think your card will work one of these microaggressions. But what's compelling is to me, also equally compelling is on the next page the responsive front, right? I wonder if you could talk about that. Who says your friend, she says she's not going to accept it. Your friend says I refuse to carry that. What doesn't belong to her. And I guess I'm wondering where the middle ground is between carrying it and not carrying it. Or is there, is there a third way? Or is there an alternative? Well, I think, I think there's always a third way. But I only exist in which is you receive it, you don't recognize. Sometimes you don't even recognize what has been said to you until. Or you recognize it and you give it back to you. In the sense of saying, I don't, you know, I want this. I mean, I have a lot of things that I have at the ready. I learned recently to stop right there. I feel like I'm gonna stop right there. Because it puts it back on. Yeah, and it puts it back on. Right. So then they have to do it. Right. And there is the immediate understanding that this is not about you, this is about you. And, you know, and then the response often is a kind of defensiveness. Or it's this evasive apology, apology, apology. But just don't do it. Just don't do it. Or that sense that the injury that you receive actually you're giving it by being like and telling the people that you don't want to hear about you. So the question of who is dealing the injury is always interesting to me. How do you advise students who come to you? I'm sure you must have. Well, I think the most common thing that happens in my office, let's say, is that phrase it's not my job to educate. I'm not a big fan of that phrase. Because I feel that it's not about education. It's about everybody understanding how this external structure is structuring their interactions. And without engagement we're not going to be able to. So those of us who work, so even if the student is conscious they have a responsibility to to share that consciousness. I mean, even to the extent of saying hey, that's not acceptable. Not for me. Does that place unfair weight on the students of color? No, because I don't think it's good to take the whole that that shit let me put it that way in their body. I think it's actually actively helpful to acknowledge it as something that doesn't. And if you go around thinking it's not my job to educate I think that language becomes part of the mechanism of silencing in the same way that the angry black woman became a mechanism of silencing. Black women aren't allowed to get angry because then they're the angry black women. But what happens when you're supposed to be angry? Can't be angry. So I think there are all these these categories that are created and then they actually are mechanisms of silencing in an encounter I mean that's if you're encountering an encounter but encounter from the space of saying I don't want that. So I don't want that but then you have to go forward and explain why or can you just say I guess that's what I'm saying. I think you don't. You don't. Then what often happens at least what happens to me is why are you so rude? Why are you so sensitive? Alright I'm rude and sensitive. You know? Okay so that's the part about what people say I don't feel like I have to explain why I want to educate them. That's what people mean. You know because that means that whiteness is now injured. Like I in refusing the injury has injured whiteness. And whiteness needs me to show up and say you're a caretaker and caretaker. And that I don't need to do. Right. Okay. That's what I was thinking too. Alright. So maybe that's a good segue into the discussion of whatever people's personal responsibility but the role of the artist the artist's responsibility or the role of the artist in times like these or in times in general you quote James Baldwin and in some interview I read you talk about how James Baldwin talks about how artist part of the reason you include art in this I think is that it helps the art helps writers to see it. Right. So maybe you can talk about that but also about you know he wrote James Baldwin of course wrote eloquently and passionately about the role of the artist the responsibility of the artist in a society which is to help people to keep to make people see what they don't want to see and the cost to the artist of the fit in their role so I'm just wondering what do you think about that I mean certainly your work is doing that but I don't know if that is you feel like that's your intention or this is just the outcome of your role is that your purpose or is that just what happens? I'm an artist so I feel like the purpose of my work is to make art I to be honest I really am not I am engaged and interrogated in a condition in the but I am I am not thinking about any outcome I'm just making another thing that's asked of me then perhaps I will do that in another way but that has nothing to do with making for me So where does the work come from? The work comes from the interrogation of experience where I think all work comes from I don't think that this work is any different from from just yesterday I'm going to put myself people to hell and work out all of our burden or when like I don't expect that when this is done it will sit in the world to knowledge I really don't I just I just made it and I will go on and make something I think you know James Baldwin is not suggesting that artists operate out of some kind of comparative but that out of an allegiance to exactly what you're talking about to ultimate responsibility to examining what it means to be human in this world but that that in itself is a political imperative in some way I see your work situating in that regard I mean he's not saying that you should fulfill some political imperative he says to me the artist's struggle for integrity is a kind of metaphor for the struggle which is universal for all human beings all over the face of this terrifying bloke to get to become human beings right and that the poets you that's you that the poets by which I mean all artists are finally the only people who know the truth about us soldiers don't statesmen don't priests don't union leaders don't only the poets are willing to tell us the truth about ourselves I guess I'm wondering what you think about that because that's what I see you doing whether you know it or not right well that's that's the truth about ourselves well that you know I'm glad that's the question but the reason I'm backing up from this is I I'm very wary of this this idea that work done by minorities of any kind fall into this kind of activism that allows the academy to to segregate it out into these categories of political work over here is the work and over here you know are the people who are doing that if the work falls over here into the activism look for the work but I was just doing but in some ways it's the same connector which you were talking about about black women not allowing to get angry because I have the same standards I mean this is why I tell my writing students I preach to my writing students that the role of the artist is to explore what it means to be human so to me that's not activism that's the role of the artist but I can I understand what you're saying is that if you're a black artist and you're writing about race then you get categorized as a protest writer so it's almost a no-win situation right it's a no-win situation because you guys are here right and because I wrote what I wanted to write it's a no-win situation if you are going to be judged by the academy who separates out this heteronormative text versus everybody else right and then puts the judgment on one as transcendent and pure and the other as protest and alternative and political so this is in some ways analogous to the struggles that women novelists have when writing about right family issues and personal issues and which is deemed as though that's a nice little domestic novel but when male novels named Jonathan for example write about domestic issues they are right about universal issues we don't need to go there okay but I think that you know but I love that Baldwin quote wants to arrive at a human place and one is looking to to see to enter into the nerve that feels most human that feels most ordinary so it's not that I love the Baldwin quote but I don't have to be used right in incorrectly right I wanted to ask you about the the reprintings of the book and the the addition of the names I don't know if people are aware of that maybe you could talk about that because a friend of mine I didn't even realize until a friend of mine who had a first edition pointed out to me that when it was first on page 135 I don't know if we have that here but I haven't maybe you could just tell people what that was well initially when I did this page I did it for Jordan Russell David he was the the guy who was playing music in his car and the other the other guy shot him killed him and said that he felt better then he was retarded but when I wrote the book he had gotten off so that was the first thing the other page said Jordan Russell and then the other page it said the justice system because that was a clear place that the justice system had failed but then it was retried his girlfriend um ended up saying something like no that was not true he did not feel friend at all and who knows why she did that um what she did but in any case he was then I see how the and the book sold out before so they called they said you know the book is released in October but it's actually sold out so we're going to have to do another printer and if there's anything you would like to change at that point we'll change it and it was bothering me that moment that was actually not true So I said, I'd like to change those pages, they said fine. But I wanted to come up with a structure that would hold the debts of these men, the debts that I knew were coming. And then thinking back to the lie God, I feel was colored, the way that he went down the page into abstraction made me think of this format for this page. And so it just says in memory, and then it has the name. So it's in memory Jordan Russell Davis, in memory Eric Gardner, in memory John Corford, in memory Michael Brown. And then since then I just write them in. So now it says in memory Walter Lamar Scott, in memory Freddie Gray. And so now I just go in and I write them. The facing page that had earlier said the justice system. After Michael Brown was killed, policeman, what was his name? Darren Wilson. You might remember he said, I thought he was a demon. He looked like Hulk Hogan. And so I was thinking about that. I was thinking, what is going on in his head exactly? And so I wrote down on a piece of paper, because white men can't police their imagination, black men are dying. And I thought it was the first line of something. But everything else I wrote seemed to be subsumed into, because white men can't police their imagination, black men are dying. And so I got rid of all of the rest of it and just kept that line. And so then I started playing around with it. And that ended up on the facing page. And then that's it. That's how the page remained after a very powerful moment. I think this actually might be a good place to open it up to audience questions. I'm sure there are plenty of people who would like to engage in conversation with the poet. Yes, ma'am? I understand what you were talking about when you said that you didn't want to be an artist and you create art. But as an artist, and as a human being, how can you not reflect what's happening in society? Isn't that what artists do? No, I'm not saying that I don't reflect what's happening in society. I'm saying that I'm not trying to control your response to my work. That I'm making work. I'm making the work out of the life that I live. So you're saying you don't have an ulterior motive? I don't have. I'm not trying to change your mind. I am not trying to persuade you. I am not trying to get sympathy from anyone. I am just making the thing. And also, this sense that one can segregate poetry is ridiculous. It's ridiculous. And I guess that's what I was trying to get at. How do you... I struggle with how to explain that to my students, I guess. Exactly that. So maybe you can go ahead. The idea that they are, in fact, separate things as things. They cannot be right. They cannot be because that is what is determining the fact that you are standing here now. It is what is sanctioning a police state that we live in. So, which is basically a lie. That it's over there and you're over here. It's crazy. Other questions? Yes. I need to have... He's not my job to educate. I mean, just listen to what he said. You say, I see it happen in all times directed at me, sometimes directed at others. So it is your experience. So how could you, on the one hand, be experiencing something inappropriate at the same time? I mean, something that happened... It was after the riots, after the police got off, after beating around the king. And when that decision came out, I was devastated. I think I was mentioning this as soon as yesterday. I was truly devastated. And I do not say this lightly. For the first time, I looked, I was in, I lived in New York at the time. And I was looking around and I thought, who are these people relative to me? Because there was the tape and then there was the decision. And for the first time, I just thought, who are they? And what does that mean for me? And I was walking down Broadway and I was, these thoughts were swirling and I was very sad. And I walked into a Barnes & Noble and there was a woman, a white woman, she was crying. And I said to her, you know, I just, I didn't know her, but I walked in and she was crying. So I said, are you okay? Referring to the decision. And that moment, I was back in. We were back, we were like two citizens. And that, I think, is the problem. When whiteness sees these aggressions as not about them. When it is about republic. It is about this, it's about what it means to be American. It is about what kind of acceptance we are giving to white supremacy. So when you start feeling like you're appropriating, that's the moment you begin to feel like it's not about you. It is as much an insult to you as it is to you. Or it should be. And it should feel like about what's going on. Why don't I feel this? Hi again. I just want to start by saying thank you for being here. It was a pleasure to be in your class yesterday. Wondering if you have any suggestions on how to use your text to teach students or to raise awareness among students about what's going on now. As an instructor of color, I often find it difficult to bring my full self in terms of current times in the classroom. So I'm wondering how I could shield myself behind your text while also sharing this wonderful piece of work with students who should know about it anyway. So I'm just wondering if you have suggestions that I can use tomorrow. Well, you know, one thing I've done that I find useful is I ask students to write down their own microaggressions. Where responsibility is taken inside the language and where it is not. Who gets to be of the object and who gets to be in the field. And that to me has revealed more than discussing the issues. Because then you really begin to understand where that particular body positions itself relative to the world and the things that they're thinking about. I was in a classroom of teachers, mostly women who dedicated their lives to teaching inner-city children. Then I asked them to write down my vague expectations for the black. And she read that. And I said, who's they? Well, me. And I said, well, why didn't you say I? I have a variety of expectations for the black child that I teach. And you said, my immediate face was turning red as she was reading. So even as she recognizes what she did, there was that grammatical move to move herself or distance herself from what she was knowing and what she was reading. So did you stay in the language? It seems to me that the young people, but anyway, it seems to me that the young people, the job of re-symbolizing, re-articulate in the kind of world we all want. Because all these inherited lines are good to see things. And their lives are a little bit different. I don't know if I'm just dreaming, but it seems to me that there is a lot of potential for the young people in their college years to begin to, because the politicians are not going to do it. The traders are not going to do it. Globalization of the market, they're not going to do it. But to begin to re-symbolize the world from the ground up is the world they're going to inherit. And I hope that when we all come from these kinds of discussions, we wait for responsibility. And the young people show that they have to re-symbolize the world anew. They've got to re-articulate the kind of world. And that story is really a powerful one. We're going to see that in a minute. There's a phrase by Jose Munez. He died recently. He did a multiplication. And that thing of bringing another lens and re-framing that which we inherited. Even though I'm not into work. Which are some special locations. In a sense, white privilege. Because white privilege is about what it would be. It's about being able to move without being hindered, right? And so, if I use the first person, there was a kind of static creation of an episode that did not belong to the reader. And that would be posited in this body. One of the reasons I never put my photo on the back of the book. A discussion of my publisher. Is to at least prevent that mode of identification. And I didn't like that sense. And also these stories are not mine. I collected, they talk about community. They came out of conversations with friends. And so, the eye would feel disingenuous in a way. Not that I wouldn't do that if I did. If I did it and don't, maybe won't. But here, there was a sense of, when I use the second person, I realize that if you strip everyone of color. So that no one was named as black or white, unless the telling needed it. But if we did that thing, we're all just people here. Why don't we do that? Let's just all be people here. And strip any demarcation from the text. So then, if you step into the, you're going to have to do that for yourself. And you would have to move around to figure out, is this the collective view? Is this a you in plural? Is this a you in political? You know, specifically, is it a you intimately? And all of that, that the you allows, was exciting as a writer. On the level of craft. To be able to traverse the territory of the youth. So that it was always fluid. That you didn't know sort of where it stood exactly from piece to piece. And so, to take the pronoun and give it the kind of privilege of mobility, was very exciting in the making of these pieces. The other word I love is here. And I use that in Dylan, maybe lonely. Because I love that here is both the positioning and the giving. You know, that I love words that, that's like, here is a sexy word. You are standing here and here. So I love words that have in built in them this kind of, this flex. The way it uses of a fixed idea. Onto the body. Onto the other. Right? And the way in which it has made you. As to the unit's idea of, let's get away with it. No, you're not. If we could recycle through it, why don't you try to begin? Well, we could, this one, this was an example. For me, I was thinking about Howard Cosell, the football, and his comment. I don't know if you remember the players running and he says something like, look at that monkey run. You remember that famous comment that he made. And I thought, first of all, we're all animals. But why don't we choose an animal that's more representative. Representative, right? Of the position of being hunted down and killed. And an animal that holds the memory of that. I mean, if you've ever been around a herd of bears, you just like me. So that sense of at least choosing your own, your own mode of identification, that is a disidentification. That actually wasn't this. Because the Nick Cave is an attempt to create an imagination that doesn't live inside of the white gaze. He started making these sound suits after the beating of Rodney Cameron. Because he said, if the problem is only the color, the skin color, really, literally the problem is skin color. Let's just cover it up. And so, from head to foot, you put on these beautiful garments. And it's impossible to know who's inside. And that attempting to leave out of the social constructs. You said somewhere, at first you thought that was escapism, right? At first I worried about it. But then I was reading Robin Kelly's Freedom Juniors, a book that I love. And in the very last chapter, he talks about how the only way out will be to make a leap. And partly because we are these institutions. Ben Affleck saying, I don't want anyone to know that my ancestors were... It's just a perfect metaphor for Americans, an inability to deal with. I mean, you couldn't have asked for a more perfect... Exactly. I thought that was... I just was like, what did you think was the case? Right, exactly. What exactly was the ultimate scenario that you encountered? And what is the danger in acknowledging that? Exactly. That's the question. What was the danger to himself in acknowledging the truth that was so bad and couldn't go near it? I think that's the question that's really interesting to answer. Great. We're at time, so we can take one more question in an hour. I'm not part of the academy, but I'm a person who reads poetry. My husband is a person who reads tennis. So the announces of Serena Williams at Indian Wells brought us together in a way that no book of poetry has ever been brought together. So thank you for that. I actually, I have a friend who is a poet and her brother is a commentator for ESPN. And she said exactly the same thing. Finally, my brother and I. So I know you're not an activist, but you are moving people. I'm not being an activist other places in my life, but I just wanted to... When I sit down to work, I'm not thinking about activism. I'm thinking about making it. I just think that if you have that other idea, it leads to a kind of a can lead to a didactic being placed in the world. So I think it's useful to give yourself all the freedom you should be able to have as much as you can muster when you sit down to work. You don't have to save the world while you're working. Thank you so much. Thank you very much.