 I want to welcome everybody to the Talking in the Library series. Some of you, many of you I know, some of you I don't know, my name is Adam Braver. I am the Library Program Director, as well as on the Faculty of Creative Writing. I'm introducing this on behalf of Betsy Lerner, Dean of the Libraries, who is not able to be here today. She would normally give this introduction. The Talking in the Library series is part of the Mary Teft White Endowment. The series, which was endowed by Mary Teft White and alumna from the class of 1976, was created with the belief from Mary Teft White that there always is inspiration in hearing the story of someone's path to their life's work. We have one more program in this and the spring series, which I'll just tell you about particularly because I presume many of you are interested in writing if you're here. That will be on April 15th at Roger. It will be held at Rogers Free Library in Bristol, right up the street. It's part of our Burmont program as well. It will be with the novelist David Abrams, who has written a couple of novels, most notably a novel called Fobbit, which is somewhat based on his time in, I'm not sure what the term is, but he was in the Afghanistan war working on the bases, the forward operating bases, which is what the Fobbit, the FOB and the Fobbits were the people that work on those bases. It's a great book. It's actually kind of a funny book, oddly enough, in the humor of bureaucracy kind of book, but a great speaker and hopefully you can be there, but be that as it may tonight is where we are. We're very pleased to have Juliana Spar as part of our series and particularly in connection with, almost with National Poetry Month. But to introduce Juliana, I want to introduce Dean Cynthia Scheinberg from the Shea School, who will tell you a little more about Juliana. How's everybody doing? It's going to be really good. I'm just telling you. And how do I know that? Well, you'll find out. Juliana Spar is a professor of English at Mills College, where I taught for 26 years and had the pleasure of watching her get hired and then completely transform our creative writing programs, both undergraduate and the MFA. Everything I know about teaching creative writing or creative writing programs, I owe to her and the conversations I've had with her over the last many years about that and the hard work that she puts into her teaching and her concern for her students. She's also the author of eight volumes of poetry, including The Winter the Wolf Came, Well Then, There Now, and Response. She's a winner of a National Poetry Series Award, the editor of American Women Poets in the 21st Century with Claudia Rankin, and she received the Obi-Hardison Junior Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Concerned with poetry, without being overtly political, Spar's work crosses a variety of American landscapes, from the disappearing beaches of Hawaii to the small town of her Appalachia childhood, and I'm obviously taking that from the blurb, but it was well done, so I thought I would. My favorite book of hers is The Transformation, which is out there and which I recommend, and I know she's not going to read from it today, so we won't talk about it, but I recommend it, but her most recent book is actually a book of criticism called Du Bois Telegram, Literary Resistance and State Containment. And though not a book of poetry per se, I think it tells us important things about her and her larger career and body of work. If you pick up that book in the blurb in the Harvard University Press site that published it, they suggest some key questions and themes that that book of criticism is about. What is the relationship between literature and politics? Can writing be revolutionary? Can art be autonomous, or is escape from nations and nationalisms impossible? These questions seem also to animate, to me, to animate Juliana's poetry, where she connects us all with intersecting questions about our intimate lives, our political lives, our writing lives, and asks, can we really resist what deserves resistance and make a difference in the world? Our environment, our relationships, our economies, our art. Working with and knowing Juliana for close to two decades, I'm always eager to listen to her voice, finding in her words and her actions what is often sadly unique in academic and literary circles. A passionate and gifted artist who insistently insists that art and the analysis of art must have an ethical and political dimension and activist roots. It is an honor to introduce Juliana Spar. Hi, good to see you guys. Thanks for having me. Really, it's a beautiful day. You should be outside. I encourage you to go out. I'm going to read, it feels too loud, a piece from this that's in prose, and then depending on where we are with time, maybe some other things, but I write, I think I'm a poet, I always say I'm socially a poet, and then I keep writing, sometimes I write stuff in prose that I often think of as related to poetry or as a part of poetry, but it doesn't have line breaks, and that's one of the pieces I'm going to read to you today. It's all good I would say, it's all fucked, and then I would breathe, and then again it's all good, it's all fucked, again breathe, and then it's all good, it's all fucked, breathe again. I might do this while walking or while driving in the car or while lying down before taking a nap. It was non-revolution, or it was me, or it was non-revolution and me. I was unsure what it really was, maybe it was my thoughts, my thoughts at one moment about non-revolution, the smell of non-revolution, sweat, urine, sage, pot, riding food, hey, all mixed together. Perhaps about non-revolution's body, I'm sure I'm not the only one who has thought it exceptional, but I'm also just assured that by the standards of bodies, non-revolutions is fine, but not exceptional. That is the point. That is why non-revolution is called non-revolution. Why they have revolution as a possibility in their name, but it is a modified and thus negated possibility, so as to suggest they are possibly neither good nor fucked. Still something about non-revolution's smell and body had gotten into me. It was thin, except when it was not, and not slight, except when it was. It had this odd patch of hair on its lower back, except when it didn't, and it tasted slightly sour off, except when it was sweet on. At any moment, though, to me, it was like something so excellent I could not get enough of it. I will not go on. I do not need to. You know desires, perceptual alterations, as well as me. The way that what might repulse someone not going around saying it's all good, it's all fucked, might become the very thing that makes someone else go around saying it's all good, it's all fucked. I remember saying to non-revolution once, after I said I so want to fuck you right now, I said you smell good to me. These are the mundane things one says in these moments, the moments when one cannot say you smell like sweat, hot, rotting food, hey. And it is all good in this moment. All I could say was I want to fuck you, and you smell good to me. Our relation was brief. We spent some time together, a few months maybe, perhaps just a few weeks, depends on how you count it. It happened, it was all fucked, tongue and hands on clit or cock, fist fights too, miscommunication, constant emergencies. It unhappened, text after text. Then it happened again, tongue and hands also injuries, illness, more miscommunication, status updates, deep emotional confusion. It was all good, hand in hand, exuberant, giggling desire. And then it unhappened again, and still joy, laughter, care, almost psychedelic. A feeling that at moments hinted at rivers running backwards, a flooding in other words, wind and rain and hatred of capitalism with tongue on tongue, stuff like that happening all fucked, unhappening all good. And also happening all good, unhappening all fucked. And during these moments of happening, of compassion and dedication, giggling, exuberance, hands around waist, turning around and pushing into the wall, for the deep moment of tongue against tongue, non-revolution was an uneven lover. At moments there, at other moments not. Often non-revolution was off with others, tongue somewhere else in the corner of some other plaza somewhere. This hurt me and it didn't hurt me. I was jealous, I'll admit it. I wanted all the possibility of revolution all the fucking time. I was willing to take it modified and negated even, but I was not jealous in the convention. I was jealous that I was not there with the exuberance at every moment. I wanted to be, I wanted to be there. I wanted to be there all the time, to be inside every moment, to always be on the lips of non-revolution, and whomever non-revolution was touching with their tongue. Whatever parts of bodies of Mexico City, Santiago, El Alto, Madrid, Cairo, Suez, Istanbul, I wanted to be everywhere that non-revolution was. I wanted to be with non-revolution and everyone non-revolution was with. I was so classic, so cliche those months. I joined all the social media and then I checked all the social media I had just joined all the time. I got up each morning just to check my phone, click its button to light it up to see if anyone had texted why I was sleeping, and then still holding my phone and not yet dressed, uncombed and unbrushed, I would click to check my email, always looking for non-revolution, looking for the white and pink mists of the gases, the burning bus and the burning car too. Non-revolution wearing a trapping cone that's throwing rocks at the cops as they retreat, the ice pick and the car tires, the hammer and the window, the chair flying through the air, the paint bomb on the visor. And then after that, if nothing was doing, I would calm down, eat breakfast, realize I had not missed something during the night that I did not want to miss. Then after breakfast, I would one by one go through the social media looking for non-revolution and the status updates and photos and links of friends and friends of friends. And I often felt a tingling excitement when I found non-revolution in the feed of friends of friends. Non-revolution in these moments often looked happy, looked a lover, a little drunk, a little stimulated too, a little sweaty, flushed. I so wanted to be with non-revolution, I even went to the assemblies. I wanted to be at the assemblies even though they were often long and it was often cold and I was often sitting outside on concrete, shivering up from the butt. I wanted to be with. I could not drag myself away. At moments, this desire made sense. I mean, is it not a universal desire to be with under a light, urban night sky? With a crowd that moves from annoyance at the man who keeps interrupting to yell, I love Michael Jackson. To be with this man as we all begin to call out, I love Michael Jackson one by one. And then the sound guy puts on smooth criminal and everyone then rushes the stage dancing hard. At other moments, off the pigs, a history so rich, so failed, so sad and yet still so resistant. They are sing-chanting no more pigs in our community which is followed by the heartbeat of off the pigs. And then the pigs are there coming of course and non-revolution is texting me. Non-revolution is high above me in a building talking with lawyers about non-revolution who got arrested earlier, beaten in the hospital. Non-revolution can see more police gathering behind the ones to whom we are sing-chanting no more pigs in our community. Leave non-revolution texts. Leave now. And I'm so caught in the moment I can't leave. I can't stop the hard chanting of off the pigs with. And then more police come around the corner, some of them rushing in to grab us, part of the crowd screaming, part of it trying to pull back those who are getting snatched, part of it running like they're running with them and away from them to get out of their way. Then suddenly police running towards me and us and then I'm running in between the police their line is not holding and I see non-revolution running down the street beside me and I say hey and nothing else as we run together grabbing each other's hands and run down the street into the bar again. During these weeks, these months, non-revolution was a particularly cloudy and confused meme like wind and rain and rivers running backwards. I had no control. When I wondered it, wondered how it could be like this for me at this moment I blamed it on the art. For all the art I have ever loved has been whatever it is that non-revolution was suggesting it could possibly be. For the river running backwards. For the wind and the rain. And I am someone who loves art who has always loved art despite. Despite its institutions and its patronages and its nationalisms and its capitalisms. All the art that has had a crowd seen in it in which the crowd has been loved I have loved. The moment and realist painting of the riot when the perspective switches from the soldier's point of view to that of the crowd and the people in the crowd are individuals flowing over and out of the space in the painting and the dog is barking causing a horse to rear up and the soldiers in the crowd are at risk isolated from the rest of the soldiers who are off there far in the distance and one of the rioters in the crowd has a spyglass trained on these soldiers and the crowd seems to be having fun. Even the dog joining in. Things tumbling. The crowd in this moment complicated but still joyous transitory momentary experiencing this one moment of freedom before what we know is to come because we know history and we know the crowd will not win. Just one day I noticed this and I should say that I was able to notice this because I had sing chanted with from then on a different sort of art. All art either with the crowd all art coming down to that simple divide. When I was off doing non-revolutionary things such as drinking the whites newly arrived from Croatia with the poets reading the thinly sliced cured meats of the bar with the historian of revolution who disdained non-revolution. I kept thinking about wanting to be with instead. At moments I would give myself over. I would just get up and leave the historian of revolution who kept pressing his leg against mine while mocking my attraction to non-revolution of the bar and down the street to the plaza to be with. When I got to with it was entirely possible. Likely even that smooth criminal was playing and a form of dancing that made no sense was going on. Messy, chaotic, slightly frightening in its uneven physicality and very likely at that moment the sky was a deep dark clear with no stars because of the lights on the buildings. They are jostled in that crowd by the felonious and the thieving and the sincere and the giant and the stoned and the over educated and underemployed and the constantly shaking and the drunk all the time and the missing teeth and the bloodstained crescendo Annie and even by the socialist with the small yapping dog at that moment I would feel I had made a right decision. Were we okay? Like Annie of course we were not would not ever be because we were non-revolution. We were with instead but not just any old sort of with but with each other in the pursuit of capitalism and if I was a poet of many centuries previous I call that the sweetest wine of the beloved. When I say non-revolution and a river running backwards it was not that the ground rippled and quivered, not that the chasms opened up, not that sand and dirt exploded from the ground like volcanic eruptions and blotted out the sun as the water ran backwards and boats were dragged upstream. Not that. It was more like there was a river that led into the water, the lake began to slowly sleep out into the river. This was how the river ran backwards slowly and a small way incrementally over time. Still it was a time when a river ran backwards and those times were rare enough that I felt lucky to be able to say the river ran backwards or the river is running backwards. Luckily I didn't notice it and put my hands into it and feel it running backwards. Wet, cool. It was all good and it was all fucked while it lasted but eventually non-revolution and me were over. It was not that one day I woke up and knew it was over. What we had, non-revolution and me, was like all relationships built to last. But unlike many relationships, everything was against us. Yes, we cared for each other. Yes, we learned to tend to each other's wounds too, to medicate and to bandage. But we suffered from a larger social lack of care or worse, a relentless disdain. We were together but we were in it alone at the same time except the state was there with us in all sorts of ways and we suffered from too much of a different sort of care from the state and we knew history and we knew we would not be together long. But still long after it was clear it was over we kept texting, kept emailing. I continued looking through the feeds of friends of friends for non-revolution, clicking like when I found them. At first everything was just less. The texting had less joking, less in your window, less love, the images were less triumphant benefits, barbecues, squats. Then the rains came and after that the snows and then the rivers filled up and they fed into the lake and the lake filled up slowly and the river no longer ran backwards. And all at once the social media feeds filled up with poets who got Shirley Manson as our all rock girl, newly bathed and trimmed little dogs, cats with mustaches, babies and funny hats. I got up each morning and looked for non-revolution in the feeds of friends and friends but I noticed they looked less often like a lover. More often they looked tired and run down, they were starting a social center or a school of some sort or assembling an anthology for a revolutionary theory reading group. They were building out walls, hammers in their hands attempting to build a plaza within. I knew this happens, the move from non-revolution with its minor insurrections to social center. I knew going into it that it never lasts with non-revolution, I never thought it would. I just knew I wanted it in whatever moment I could get it. If it did not end, if it became revolution, I knew that would be hard. That was an entirely different lover. One I was not sure I was ready for and yet long for so much that they often showed up in my dreams and led me by a hand into an incredible sadness and a high so intense that the personal sadness would become incidental to the possibility. I mean I will take that hand and be led to whatever moment it comes because oh my god the body of revolution is something magnificent but I also know that at that moment I will know the meaning of it's all fucked so hard and yet still that hand and the body attached to it, there is no not taking it. One day thinking my obsessive thoughts about non-revolution I walk into a coffee shop and sit down before my computer. By one day I mean today, I mean right now. This is where I am now writing the story of the most minor uprisings. A story about how when I entered into this one for a brief period of time I agreed to experience all the emotions and I realized there was a good chance that one of them would be sadness. Minor sadness I had hoped. What I have now even though minor is a sadness that has made it hard for me to concentrate. The coffee shop is full of light and tables and there is a milky sort of air and I am drinking a coffee that has a smoothness to it that coffee just now is beginning to have. I am writing about sadness that came over me, over us, but not just sadness. Melancholy, nostalgia, anger too, frustration, bitterness. I do not know why I want to write this but I feel as if it is something I have to do. I write about who this us could possibly be. If it could possibly be. About how I am still texting with non-revolution about missing the non-revolution. I write about the last year the dissolution. I write about social centers, about being the only woman for a while in the revolutionary theory. Reading grew up until I wasn't and it was mainly women. And the possible snitches and disruptors who got paid by the state for that work and who just idiotically did it for free. I write about the drugs those we sold and those we bought and what both these acts did to us did for us. And I write about the fights we have had among ourselves in the last year because we have fought hard about how we perform these fights for each other with our teeth showing a little and the fights from the outside might have looked like the end of any of us but to us the fights felt familiar and we fought with our teeth a little but also with our hearts and our hands to get back to life, to refuse to die, to just feel. We fought because we became through fight and because we don't agree and because we cared with an intensity I am unsure of my metaphors. Were we wolves? Were we even we? Were we lovers or were we just a brief hookup? Was non-revolution the hard dancing when sometimes does to feel less middle aged? Does it even matter? As I am writing this absurdly specific and muddled story that I, knowing I will be deleting in the near future, I am also listening to a woman who is talking loudly at the table beside me. She is talking to an old friend she has not seen for years. A friend who had been in a moment with her. She is telling a story similar to the one I am trying to tell but of ten, fifteen years previous. She talks about that moment when she went to go meet what she thought would be 200 people and when she got there, 3,000 people were there. And then she knew something was kicking off. As she tells it, she is often running. The months after that are a blur of tearing apart the police barricades, burning them in the bonfire, warming her hands on various fires, marshmallows too, running around a corner into a police line accidentally. The person beside her screaming, who made this route? Who made this route? She is running out of a jaw, a head, an arm, in a nun's habit running down the street, gaining volition so as to put the ice pick into the sidewall, barely stopping to pull it out with a twist. Unarresting a friend, pulling on her arm until the friend twists free and they go tumbling together. Police running after her, their clubs raised, a dog running beside her yapping, yapping, later in jail getting 104 degree fever and being taken off to the sick ward, lost for days. She is talking about a moment when she felt something, she was there, she was there with, and she can't stop talking about it. It is clear she has lost something and she barely holds on to it and she can't find it again, and this is a loss. I turn back to my writing. I am unsure what I think about her story. It moves me. I identify with her sadness that her non-revolution is gone. But I am also wondering why she was not there with me in the last few years. What kept her away from being with, being with me? I wanted her as I wanted everyone. When I resurfaced, she was talking about meeting her partner and how when she saw her she tried to kiss her right away and the partner turned her head and said not yet and everyone in the bar laughed at her but she said she knew then. She knew something about being awake and she would be awake with this woman this moment too. Then about her son being born, the moment when his heart began to beat and the body filled with the oxygen and the blood turned red and then there was the scream and the scream would be the scream for years to come. He is still screaming she said and I knew what she meant too. That moment with. I am listening to her and I am with her. She knows something. How this being with can be easily described with the private emotions of love and desire, the same emotions that are pillaged and packaged in popular music. This is a language she has, a language given to her by multinational corporations. A language of idealized family. I realize it might not be your language. You might have your heroic moments, your romantic roads of insurrection those two. And yet as she talks I am listening and I am writing and as she talks about her own specific story I am thinking about how she is saying something about how there are not that many possible loves. When I say that I am not saying something about humans. I do not mean actual lovers. There are endless possible lovers. There are more than 7 billion possible loves. The categories of love however are multiple and also yet also limited. When I decided to have a child I said I wanted to have a child because I wanted to experience all the loves. I had experienced many loves of the limited possible loves. I had loved many ways too. I had put parts of my body inside other bodies and let other bodies intermine. And I had not done this and I had still loved with an intensity variously. I inventory these loves and I studied these loves and I coveted them and I held on to them and I respected them. But before I had a child I had not yet known the love of growing another body inside my body. And I had not yet known the love of letting that body come out and go off into the world. And after that I needed to also learn to love the toddler who takes off. Loving the moment when love runs away and from the running gets both attention and freedom. Gets being alive and gets this will go on. Gets to know that this running towards and running away will be life at its best moments because it feels so good, so now. So full of every best moment yet to come. Before I just knew running. But after I learned to love the lover of running. I am writing that down I am writing this down. I am not happy with any of it. I turn off my computer with annoyance. I finish my coffee and I leave. I walk into a warm late afternoon, leave still on the trees but not for long. Sun at us land and go to meet a friend. My friend waits for me on a nearby corner. We hug, decide to get dinner in a bar. We eat fried fish, drink dark beers. There's also a coleslaw that is heavy on mayonnaise. The beer cuts the grease in my mouth and I am glad to have it. The bar is warm, vibrant, feels as if it has been there for years. But I know it is new, fake, and I don't really care. We talk about non-revolution about how they are, about how they might be now. Will they come back? What is left of them? My friend is years younger than me and more experienced too. She thinks of the last few years as life, not as a lover she met on the street and hooked up with briefly. She has been in and out of jail, house arrested too. She has blockaded several ports. I tell her as we talk about how so many of the poets that I know many of them poets that I love in a certain complicated way are writing about their hesitations about being with non-revolution. I have a long list of poems, books of poems, prose too, blog post, status updates, interviews, conversations at parties. I tell her how I am abandoning the mantra of it's all good, it's all fucked. And now I just walk around muttering, fuck all you all. I am sensitive, I told her. They are hurting me, I told her. They keep writing justifications about how they refuse to throw down with non-revolution. They mention non-revolution's bad aesthetics. They are awkward dancing. They are bad teeth. The way they were always stoned or easy or a mess, two skinning they say, hair on back as if that was a meaningful insult. Smelling maybe two, like sweat, urine, sage, pot, rotting food, hay, all mixed together. Or sometimes it was about them because they were in a breakup, because they were in a relationship, because they had a young child, because they liked wine, especially French ones, because it made them feel awkward, because BIFO told them it was okay not to. Because they were writers and they wrote FTP, they didn't have to sing chant with an anti-capitalist crowd. Because they donated on Kickstarter instead or they watched the live stream and I couldn't stop reading their accounts and then on top of them I told her I was feeling both rejected by non-revolution who never texted anymore, not even FTP and then trivial for falling in love with such a minor uprising, for taking a brief hookup so seriously, for feeling so sad. And there I would be reading, listening, and yet at the same time petulantly going fuck all you all and then I would say to myself that at least I had once said to non-revolution I so want to fuck you and I meant it. At least I knew that moment. At least I knew something about the sour and the sweet, about the smell of sweat, urine, sage, pot, riding food, hay, all mixed together, running down the street holding hands. And come on, that moment. That moment. Sometimes one goes one's entire life thinking one will show up for that moment if it just came and it never comes. It is not like any one individual gets to call it into existence. It comes to you as it comes to others slowly building and then suddenly there comes as a sort of lucky. And a version of it came to me, an imperfect version, but I still I let all its minorness into me and now I was something running backwards, something unable to be writing, something nostalgic. My friend looks at me and she says, what is wrong with you? And I say nothing. I'm just confused and then she said I was worried you were choking. You had a funny expression. Her question was literal, but it's like that. A sort of choking. A staring off into space that often precedes a coughing choking. The it, of it's all good, it's all fucked. The depression that follows after the most mundane of uprisings is over. Life feels less and might for a long time. It might be years before a day will go by that I do not think about non-revolution. Wonder where they are, wonder what they are doing. Want them back in my social media feeds. Want them to text me from the plaza, the park, the statue, saying we are here. Come down. Want them to say it is kicking off or throwing down in the coded way one has to use in the time of the NSA. Something that says bring your tools, your masks and your vinegars, something that says FTP. My friend goes on. She makes a joke about poets and kickstarters, about poets having money, and God bless them, she adds. She was trying to cheer me up and yet still trying to respect me. This respect thing is taking some work on her part. I can tell that it is puzzling my friend that I've held on to every possible turn of phrase ever said by a poet and read it as critique, as mattering in some way. She has read nothing of what I am talking about. She doesn't even know the poets really. She does not understand why it matters. I know she finds art at best trivial at worst capitalist. And I also know she appreciates that when there is a kickstarter, it is often the poets who donate. But still she says the obvious things that any friend would say to someone who first goes around muttering, it's all good, it's all fucked, and who now goes around muttering, fuck all you all. She begins by saying something about how I had it all wrong. How it's more like people are writing heroic stories in which they write themselves into non-revolutions advances and say their way of loving but she gets it. She gets that I am there going no, they didn't, they didn't love non-revolution, like I love non-revolution. Maybe they didn't put their hands in the water when it ran backwards, didn't feel that moment and yet she continues they loved and might have even made out, maybe even fucked non-revolution. Maybe you see it as without your intensity but she continued, why not have some compassion for those who according to you missed out. Put your hands in the water and the backwards water was something you had not felt before and it made you moist and now the water goes forward as it always has. I get it, she says. Relationships I had been in have ended and I too felt sad about this but she says next, why the resentment? Is it really that terrible to see someone claim to have loved a lover that you have also loved? We have several more beers and we continue talking and she is generous to me and at some moment she says you can still think of yourself pretty despite it all and I start to cry because she has realized something about how I am trivial and then we realize we have to leave. She has to go to work. I will go home to read. We hug on the street corner, I watch her walk off confident with many years of walking off ahead of her. I stand on the corner for a few minutes feeling lost with a funny almost choking expression on my face. I decide to walk home. It will take an hour but it will let me find myself. I get out my phone. I don't bother to check my feeds. My phone is ringing. My computer is throwing down near me. I am after all standing on the corner of 14th and Broadway so I would know if it, if something was. Instead I put on my earphones and click on the app that imitates the radio. A country song abandonment is playing about laying down on the bathroom floor about wasting all those tears. The song is simple in its structure. Three chords of course two four line stanzas and one half stanza the refrain. The refrain repeats once after the first stanza and then twice after the second stanza. The song begins and ends with a singer crying on the bathroom floor but the song resolves it too. I'm through with all the crying the song states even though the song gets all its power from being about the soft crying after being left standing on the street corner. I begin walking determined head down. And then I'm going to read one more piece shorter. And it's also lineated if that matters. It also doesn't have a title. Those October's were so beautiful so warm during the drought. I lounged around, I lounged around the back yard tables full of food and wine friends laughing my son running around chasing Anya. He was wearing a white dress as she chased hummingbirds flitting in and out of various red bell shaped flowers their long stems gently swaying. I pretended at those moments that I didn't worry at all the time. It's okay these words came out of my mouth even though I didn't believe them. It's okay these end times so beautiful so warm the sun. Now it is all floods that and fascism. How did things get so much worse and so quickly? It is not just that the ice caps continue to melt. Suddenly there's a perfectly fine haircut that is now called the fashy and articles about well-dressed Nazis and the media. It is like the dam right now. It has so much water that it gets dumped down the spillway and then the spillway breaks and so the water gets dumped down the secondary spillway and then the town is evacuated. While watching the YouTube of the well-dressed Nazi do the sick heil while watching the dark muddy water spill out while worrying this year salmon friends get in my feed they say I'm angry at everyone who didn't vote which means they are angry at me and I think well I'm angry too I'm angry at everyone who voted and upheld this total bullshit moment in which we now find ourselves. Look at what electoral politics has unleashed. Not that all is lost yet. There have been small moments to celebrate and I've celebrated them as hard as I can. Someone punched that sick hail Nazi with a fashy and a pepe pin and a purple shirt in the face. For once the gods were on our side and there was a camera which meant I got to watch him get punched over and over. The internet then had one of those wonderful moments of harmony as everyone felt compelled to do their version of setting the punch to music. I watched the punch first to Celine Dion and then to Bruce Springsteen and then it's on. I watch at least 30 versions and I'm here to tell you that the one I preferred was the one set to let it go. The first punch and the face on the word let. The second punch to the gut on the word go. And yet for each moment when I felt it felt we might make it through another moment suggested otherwise. I was not the only one who took it hard when the Patriots won. I mean the name, right? But it wasn't just the name that made it feel suddenly very important that the Patriots not win. That Nazi was tweeting about how he hoped he would win because they were the widest team in the NFL. When Tom Brady through that desperation passed in the fourth quarter and when Julian Edelman caught it, it felt as if racists and Nazis and fascists also cheaters would keep on winning forever. It felt like the wrong sort of augury. Such a California poem. Sorry. All I know right now is that it feels as if it is some sort of end. If the floods don't get us the fashy will. I mean the hummingbirds will continue feeding and the rains will bring on some sort of green that is beyond all beauty this spring so life will go on. But this is a time when the wolves are no longer ashamed and afraid to show their faces. Instead they've got an Instagram account where they share their t-shirt designs, their Nordic tattoos, their Jim Begotten muscles too. Others keep bragging about how they are coming for us on 4chan. But it is not just creeps and kids on 4chan. Hey I say one morning over breakfast the president is tweeting about us. That's weird. Hey I say another time this guy in Africa just posted a photograph of his arsenal saying he's coming to get us. That's weird. But back from now I should have known it or at least something like it was coming. Some friends after all had started pickling and gone all third position in the last few years. So far our best scrimmage was the one outside of the Milo event. We won and we almost never win. Last time we showed up in Sacramento it was Mayhem and at least one of us got knifed. A few weeks before someone got shot at a Milo event. But this time we won and I say we won even though I wasn't there at the beginning on TV with my son there beside me as I waited for my boyfriend to come home so I could rush out to the inevitable dance party. It was like grease finally Duncan said when I got there the people who wanted to tear into the barricades tore into them and those who didn't stood back and cheered them on. That night when they played one of the many versions of fuck the police that are available to us in this time we were briefly someone's nightmare costume seething together more non-binary than binary with each other in our shared hatred of fascism but of course even though we won everyone had to tell us we were wrong to win like that or we had not won because we gave him attention as if attention was a way of winning. That night someone knocked a light over and we knew we didn't want what that light was there to expose. Gasoline trickled out of the light's generator and it caught on fire. It was a big hot fire. Some danced around the fire as a black smoke rose up our smoke. Smoke that I find each other in the near future smoke to come down to the bonfire smoke that we are going to be okay but there is no telling yet if that is true. Thanks. Okay and I'm actually focusing on one of your poems from my thesis it's called Went Looking and Found Coyotes and you mentioned and it's all good it's all fucked that you mentioned worry wolves and I know that book is titled The Winter the Wolf Came so I'm curious what is the wolf? It was or seven literally the Oregon it came from Oregon so it was called or seven probably the seventh in the litter or something and there was a moment when California had no wolves and they reintroduced them to Oregon and they released them and they had and so you could watch them go in and they went down to California or seven came down to California and I just like eventually he was trying to find someone to meet with and he couldn't find anyone but he kept hanging out with all these coyotes and then he went back up and I think he actually had some puppies or some moors or werewolves I mean I guess the other way to say that I was interested in it as a metaphor for mutualism or the odd mutualism that happens in moments of climate catastrophe or environmental catastrophe and one of them didn't but when you read them they didn't sound that different so tell us about when you decide to use line breaks and when you don't or how you make those decisions or more on that you know one of the complaints around free verse or is that it's just lineated prose and it might I just write lineated prose sometimes I mean I tend to write mainly in sentences and I just I don't quite know why I've ended up doing that I have moments where I'll do something else but it never kind of sticks in some form I mean probably I should read that second one with more pauses for the line breaks as poets traditionally do but I'm so adverse to poet voice but I think like I end up writing it together as an attempt to like not do poet voice I don't know I mean the thing that's happened is that the form of writing that I do which is not the novel just ends up tossed into poetry because there's no place for it otherwise so Juliana can you speak to the question of genre then do you in other words do you see this as a false construct of poetry versus prose or do you see them as mixing of sometimes I say that the only genre is the realist novel because it's someone that has a marketplace support and it's like very recognizable in some way but I mean that's kind of jokey right but I mean the other thing is like the novel kind of genre kind of like it kind of goes away in a lot of ways progressively throughout the 20th century like in the modernist tradition which is kind of how I would put my kind of like heritage lineage or whatever you want to say and and you know the places where the other thing that upholds genre are MFA programs right or creative writing and universities maintains really strict genre boundaries also but I'm not sure that that meaningful outside of those moments not meaningful to you when you're making well if they're the traditions often meaningful like would be the way that I would put it so like I'm often like look you know I'm often looking back and when I'm looking back I'm looking mainly at poetry which is what I've read mainly because I was you know like that's where I did my PhD in but yeah I'm not thinking like I have a book that I wrote that was main I actually twice I've written books that are almost memoirs that are very prosy and I don't think you would confuse them for poetry and they still circulated as if they were books of poems I think I think they circulated in the same networks and so I would probably say yeah it's probably not very meaningful finally like I don't think I could convince anyone that I'm a novelist I would rather do you have a question um one more question um I should have mentioned that my thesis has to do with docu poetics in general and um how would you distinguish poetry from well docu docu poetry from Rapportage I don't know what I would would you um I don't know but um I mean I could think of a couple of arguments but not the top of my head at the moment I mean I guess I mean Rapportage is like I'm trying to think about like what is Rapportage um because it can be prose right right um or just can it be journalism and then and then there would be like we might say documentary poetics might be art that covers some of the same categories that journalism covers yeah also like documentaries like documentary movies yeah think about like how to do it think about that separation I mean it's probably just comes down to what you can call poetry and what you can't like you can't call a news article poetry like you just can't successfully convince them no matter what Stanley Fish is okay I've got a whole pocket full of questions here um in a time when we are um when art is essentially in some kind of decline in the mass culture I mean it may be in level thriving but you know compared to what it once meant to culture is decline what's the argument that you make for how maybe you could I don't want to say argument maybe convey for you know our audience the importance of it especially in our times now um for art because it seems as though that at least from what you read from Cynthia's introduction that marriage of art and politics um is is um a part of your work um but how do you square that with a time when people you know when it's hard to make people believe in the power yeah um I'm not convinced I have not also been able to convince myself of its power in some way I mean that might be the answer is that um I mean I think there's no getting around that a very small small part of the population reads one point a year um as that question that the NEA asks that question every so often and tries to figure out who's reading it um and um but yet you know at the same time we could say that you know poetry is one of our oldest written genres or you know our oldest understanding of literature is somewhat around begins with poetry and um I mean I always think that like when I think of like I feel like like political content keeps ending up in my work because I write you know like I like many poets I write a lot about my own experiences in some way um and it just happens to be kind of incidental in some way but I would be really like I don't write thing I would never read get up and read a poem at a protest you know first of all that's really it would be way too long you know like whatever you see um it wouldn't work in some sense and so like I've never I I've never thought of myself as like a political poet that goes around claiming or telling people what they should do or something and I'm even a little hesitant about a lot of that like I keep being like I'm often I'm I'm more kind of like stop screaming at me um stop telling me what to do when I some of that some of that work has kind of been frustrating for me lately so would you say that um didacticism is um I mean it's I'm going to overstate the enemy of of art I don't know I mean it seems to be getting along fine right now with art but um it might be my enemy um or um yeah I don't yeah I don't yeah I don't know I mean it seems like it's hard to ask a question if you have the answer yeah yeah yeah that would be a good way to put it yeah um going back to this this notion of poetry and politics um one of the things that I think in watching has been interesting has been um seeing Bob Dylan get the prize the Nobel Prize but for poetry not as not as a musician and some talk these days about protest songs and so on and I I'm very curious about the position of rap and uh in the whole you know in this sort of contemporary world of poetry and particularly protest poetry um um I mean yeah the the rap question is I mean the version of rap that the the relative of rap doesn't really show up in poetry because we recognize it because it circulates through um um through CD or used to through sound let's say through sound um it um it often has ties to um uh the industry that we call the music industry and and then there's the the relative which is kind of like spoken word or slam in some form um and that's been you know that's a form of writing that's been around for a long time now although kind of oddly very rarely making it into higher education um if it's me kind of engrossed into educational institutions it's been the K through 12 um system I think that is also something that's starting to change I mean I don't really I mean the Dylan thing I don't really know what to say about it I was kind of interested in it um I was interested in the reaction to it um I mean I'm not really a Dylan fan it doesn't matter um I mean the Nobel Prize was always like I'm doing something interesting that you asked me because I feel like I should be able to figure out what it is because I'm writing a kind of scholarly book about literary prizes in the United States and so I should be able to figure out that Nobel Prize moment and I can't quite I haven't quite been able to figure out like what to what kind of what kind of thing I feel about it or kind of understand it I mean I think a lot of the writers in the United States felt annoyed by it because you know like it's not going to come back to the United States for a long time and he took he took their slot which is part of like which was one form of that reaction from life but I don't know did you have any thoughts about it? no I just I just think of poetry as I have this fantasy if I'd been alive many many years ago poetry would have been something that was very much around us now it's this as you said the NEAR somebody if they read a poem and I just have this I just had this idea that the poets are still amongst us that sort of fantasy who are the poets who are amongst us there's been a lot of questions or there's been a couple of interesting articles about at the last time at the last time of process when we protest when we had when the country was in crisis so the Vietnam era there was this huge movement towards protest songs a vast number of them and that sort of question had come up and it was interesting the person who was speaking about it made absolutely made no reference at all to any of the any of the stuff that had come out of NWA or that kind of experience out of the out of the the ghettos and the Dylan things surprised me just the same as when Yale gave him that is on our doctorate which was also the poetry I sometimes think that those awards are given because someone on the committee wants to meet the person but I don't know I mean you're right, we keep that separation is it a meaningful separation or like thousands of years from now if freakishly someone were able to be reading that work would that separation be meaningful we probably would say no but we do still kind of keep it I got the the Trump got elected we all start writing they annoyed me also I just felt like it was really wrong but I was also kind of slightly fascinated the way they were awkward everyone was suddenly convinced that if we wrote a lot of literature we could suddenly get rid of Trump he's more widely than that all right well thank you Juliana thanks for a great reading thank you