 I welcome all of you to the Talking the Library series, which is part of the Mary Tepht White lecture series, and as many of you know, I won't go into the whole history right now, but that this was endowed with a gift of Mary Tepht White, who was an alum of the university, who endowed this series for people to come in and talk to students, particularly about their work, their path to their work, and share their passion with students, hoping to inspire passion as well. I also will add that there are two more talks coming up this semester, one of them on Monday, which will be at Rogers Free Library at 7 p.m. with novelist Jennifer Hague. She'll be talking, I think specifically, focusing on her book Heat and Light, which some of you may have been familiar with. There's definitely on a best of lists all year last year in terms of novels. And then back here on November 16th, will be a poet, Vijay Sashrati, who was the 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner for his book. And as I said just the other day in the librarians meeting, he's not only just an incredibly moving, an incredibly smart poet, but also just an incredibly interesting person to just be in the room with. And I think even if I know most of you I actually probably have an interest in poetry if you're here, but even for those of you who don't, just being in the room with him is worth, believe me. So that's where we're going, but let's get to where we are. In times like these, during this day and age, given the current climate, these are all expressions that seek to bind us to the unique aspects of our generation and era. Of course, all generations see their moments of time as distinct and unique, therefore suggesting a need for their own language and vocabulary in order to fully express the gravity and severity of their times. And that is where literature comes into place, showing that in fact the language of concern, dissent, and hope transcends the specifics of the moments and in fact usually cuts to the core of human consciousness, in other words, a sense of timelessness. Poetry is chief among the literary art forms that allows for such timelessness, whether it is the ancient Greeks meditating on the horrors of war and the corruption of power or the more recent catalog of so-called resistance poetry following the last election, meditating on the horrors of war and the corruption of power. Poetry allows us to see the span of human consciousness over time and through history while reaffirming a continuum of that human consciousness and thought that outlives its moment of history. Again, timelessness. Tina Kane was born in Hell's Kitchen in New York City in 1969 and grew up in the city's east and west village. She attended the University of Vermont, the Sorbonne and completed her master's degree in French literature in Middlebury College. Another university, I'm not gonna pronounce. She is the founder and director of the writers in schools in New York, I'm sorry, Rhode Island, for which she works as a visiting poet and is also an instructor with the writing community Frequency Providence. Over the past 20 years, Tina's taught English, French and creative writing in public and private schools throughout New York City and Rhode Island. Her poems and translations have appeared in numerous publications and she's the author of Dear Elena, Letters for Elena Ferrante, Poems with Art by Esther Solans, and the book Once More with Feeling, which is just out from the release of books. And of course, Tina is the poet laureate of Rhode Island, which is in their second year of that, wrapping up, going into the second year of that post, which she'll talk about, read some of her own work, talk a little bit about that, answer some questions as well. So in our times like these, please welcome our poet laureate, Tina Kane. Thanks, Adam Braver and everybody here for coming and anybody who was involved in bringing me here. So thank you. You always think no one's gonna come when you're a poet and sometimes people don't, so it's lovely to see you here. And I've never been on the campus and it's right at the water, so it's stunning. So I thought I'd read a bunch of work. I'm pretty shy, so I like to read because it forces me to kind of confront the work. And a lot of times, even if it's already been published, I'm rethinking it in my head as I read it. So, but I'm gonna read a bunch of work from this book Once More with Feeling. Depending, I might read some letters for Elena Ferrante and then I'm gonna read some stuff that I'm kind of still working on that's new from a group of poems tentatively called Work. But I'll start with this poem Sirens, which is about growing up in New York and it's the first poem I wrote for this book and it's kind of the foundational piece of the book, Sirens. I've been meaning to tell you that the skin around her eyes was thin with blue veins fanning out like ferns, that she was pale for a Puerto Rican and that she spit and threw change at my feet as I waited to cross the street. To tell you that I wouldn't let her man take me for hot dogs at the Second Avenue deli or to jade mountain for pork fried rice. That I knew what a hat like that meant to say is diamond crucifix, the way he swayed his coat. Flick sunflower seeds from between his teeth strutting behind the line of parked cars. I've been meaning to tell you that the parking lot on the corner was not always a dorm, that I once saw her bloodied and on her back beside a car. That two kids laughed pulling rings off her fingers as she squinted in the sun. That I put my backpack on both shoulders and readied my key. That I ran from the sound of the sirens. To tell you that my dad drove a cab for 40 years, kept a red bean he got from an Ethiopian guy in the back pocket of his Levi's to ward off hemorrhoids. That he wrote me notes throughout the night on the margins of his fair sheet, stuff like eat yogurt for osteoporosis. That he listened to Tosca for another life in which he didn't have his foot on any pedal, didn't ever have to chase a punk ass kid to get his money back and end up buying the kid a sandwich. To tell you that he was a Jewish guy from Brooklyn. What the fuck? He pounded the wheel, cut off, cut short, another Brooklyn fair, not going back there with no return trip over the bridge. To tell you that he drove like a pro back when the medallion itself was a thing of beauty. Deco-like, clicking, it's nickel intervals with approximate precision. The weight of it, enough to crush just about anything. I've been meaning to tell you that my mother and father once fought for 50 hours straight in our basement apartment off Second Avenue. That the table fan was set to oscillate as they worked their way through acclimations, cups of coffee, a carton of marbles. That my mother tossed a day's worth of meals into her flashing walk at hasty intervals as my father paced the room. And meaning to tell you that the girls on the block scraped pavement in their platform shoes like weights just outside our one gated window. That we often heard peaches, the transvestite weeping about a Hassa John from Delancey Street or a guy from Staten Island who liked to rip her hair out. Meaning to tell you that they made the movie Taxi Driver right around the corner the year before. That I thought my dad might have been in it since he drove a cab. That had also been an actor, was once a bartender down on Bleaker Street. That he said I was too young to see such a film and about Saturday Night Fever my mother said definitely not. That there was a Nordic track bought in 1996 still in its box blocking the way to the coat rack on which my dad hung his London fog, $3,000 in its pocket for me to collect as he had requested from his hospital bed. The stacks of cash from the safe deposit box from under the mattress and the poly orecotta container in the freezer beside the Eddie's Light Ice Cream an empty ice tray. Been meaning to tell you there was $30,000 in my purse by the end of the day. To tell you that I tried to buy a giant stuffed peacock from a shop on Christopher Street the day he died. But ended up lugging a duffel bag of 20s to Greenwood Cemetery instead to purchase a plot for him on the hill. I've been meaning to tell you that cash is how a cabbie's daughter pays her father's bills. To tell you there was a wall of books by his bed a broken shutter on a split hinge piles of newspaper clippings to be filed per a system that didn't exist. That he left his hack license on the bed stand with the pocket knife we gave him. The carnillion ring, the paper birthday crown my children made and made him wear buried in plush animals on the carpet in their room. That there was a ruck sack of photos and mementos from his old friend Wallach when my dad cleared out his place but never had the wake. To tell you that he never even opened the bag after humping it up the stairs. Just talked to Wallach in his head every day till the end about the girl in those photos about articles he should have read. So this is a book about, it's about a lot of things but a lot of it's about growing up in New York. I grew up in New York in 70s and 80s between we kind of like moved every year but between from Hell's Kitchen down to the East Village and the West Village which were kind of radically different neighborhoods at that point and everything's kind of the same now. But anyway East Village was kind of was very scrappy and Tompkins Square Park is this park in the East Village that I didn't even go into until I graduated from college because it was so dangerous. So that's the reference here and there's a couple other local things. A minor history of the East Village. Maybe you knew a kid who booked through Tompkins Square on a Schwinn and came out the other side without his bike and in his socks. Never mind he wasn't buying drugs this the price of his stupidity. Or maybe you went to Gem Spa three days in a row for egg creams to flip through interview magazine still a stack of colors, your oxes assembled by Andy Warhol or to the St. Mark's Theater to see Oh God starring George Burns. Enough you'd said, crouched on the seat, knees beneath your chin, rats scuttling the aisle for popcorn dregs. But it never was. Not when that guy died trying to sleep in a hammock on his fire escape off Avenue A. Not when the cops found a woman's head in a pot on her boyfriend's stove on Avenue B. And when you and your friends mistakenly buzzed in the guys who would beat Faye's elderly neighbor close to death, junkies hunting jewelry are just high. They were men you could describe to the cops, to anyone for a long time after. And when the paramedics had you stand by the stretcher as they unjammed the break, it wasn't enough to want to take the woman's trembling hand and it wouldn't have been enough to take it. So I was like worried that people think it was just such a horror show growing up there but it was wonderful too. And, you know, someone asked me something about what's difficult about writing and I was like it's really difficult and this was really difficult. This book to reach back into the past with a kind of great middle-aged yearning nostalgia that I have right now without being really sentimental. So that's something, you know, always trying to figure out. Anyway, there's a bunch of minor histories in this book but there's also like a whole stack of them at my house. So a few of them are in here and this is a minor history of Bodega and Bodega's what you call a deli on your corner. A minor history of Bodega. More a mindset. The Bodega was where you could get lemonheads and Mary Jane's, a set of radial tires, a pack of rough riders and bottles of pineapple douche or for two quarters a half pint of chocolate milk to wash down your Roland's fried pork rinds. Just in time for Michael Aguirre to follow up on his promise to punch you in the face. Which you had dared him to do which you later did against the brick wall near face place. So when your mother, her eyes still set on her sizzling wok said, what did you expect? You just had to snag a stack of quarters from her bag so you could stomp back to the corner for a box of red hops and sit on the steps of the laundry mat sucking the color from each bit of sweet before shooting it from between your teeth onto the sidewalk until the pavement around your feet was a dingy constellation charting your indifference towards any transaction that didn't first pass beneath a pane of bulletproof glass. More minor history. This is called the minor history of police work and the little girl referenced in the poem, Diana is the daughter of Philandra Castile. She was in the car when he was murdered. Minor history of police work. I'm trying now to live in a clear headed tenderness that I could afford to be disorganized, defiant, delinquent even back then when others could not, cannot still, maybe never will. I was a kid when the cops once tried to take me from my home to the station for my safety. I was several years older than Diana in that car who watched a bullet wound bloom in the driver's seat on the screen cradled in her mother's palm. Her story now replaying as the blood expands like a hand around the young man's torso over and over a small shadow falling across his ripped white tank. Nothing so red as that fixed for a lifetime in my eye until now, nothing like that back then until now I see how memory serves, may work for her and I grieve. When I said I was safe, the cops didn't make me go that I could not be forced. So rooted to the basement apartment that was my home, not a car but a room with bars on the window and a gate to the street. We didn't own a vehicle, didn't drive, my father was white, my mother was Chinese and the police were nice to us, tried to break things up though their very presence in our home meant broken. They let me stay, no one was speeding or failing to signal after all. We were just failing in a loud and crazy time and whatever else we couldn't afford we could still afford to fail. We worked with what we had and they let us. I'll read a couple more from here. I'm gonna read Nocturne Proof. There's a series of Nocturnes. I really love Federico Garcia Lorca and he really loved New York so we have that in common. And so he wrote a bunch of Nocturnes and so I wrote some too and this one's called Nocturne Proof. If it isn't a mother appealing an orange for her son, my mother, my son, if it isn't a soldier hiding from chopper's heart of bamboo, it is one's own father living in a tree house in his own mother's yard, unable to shed the ghosts. It is his white uniform hung on the door of a pink tiled bathroom for a final shave. Or the photo of a bride in a mini dress kept in a flowered suitcase by the door. It is a fear of fire, memories filigree like lace or birds scattered like buckshot from the tops of towers. And if not birds then it is people pixelated to grains of sand as if information or children linking arms across a corridor to make a finish line. And if not them then one's own children climbing a shady tree suspended in the lens of their own mother's eye. If not a rush to perceive oneself, can I see, can I see? It is a rush to hold hands through the fire, the birds and the children. It is a push to shed ghosts. If it isn't sacred space of school bus, it is ninja lunchbox and secret coat closet, an invincible way home. If it isn't never being crouched beneath a desk, it is the right to say anything, unmolested. It is empire and oysters in the bay, a sea gate spanning the entire state. It is restoration or a watermark above the sideboard that is not indelible. It is unassailable sky, indivisible sea. If not right action, then it is right speech or inviolate fatigue possessing every frozen delicacy in the stop and shop at midnight. And trees, shading trees on solitary streets. It is smoking in one's car, which is the opposite of breathing. It is wanting to do both all the same. And if not that, then it is having indelicate thoughts beneath the delicate leaves of trees, shades of one's own breathing. One more nocturne. This is called nocturne starting right now. I mistook the mouth for speaking, the people for birds, the towers for totems to fire. I thought the TV was a crowd of assholes in my living room, and I was not wrong. I mistook the sky for water hanging by my feet from a tree I thought love was a trap that ideas were accidents, not the other way around. But with my feet always on the ground, I would not have seen how grass resembles rain, or heard how upside down your banjo strains despondent. This will not be a poem about New York and death. New York has never been a delicate city. Like my many fathers, it raised me on mistakes and put me in harm's way. Then swept in night like in a white jogging suit dressed like my uncle Marty from Staten Island, who always said stuff like, Eddie never hurt anyone, always mistaking everyone for someone else. He wept from his grave when the ferry slammed into the bulkhead that day. I know, he was not a meticulous man, though I hardly knew him. But who does not lament carelessness in the face of carelessness? Why, I still mistake speaking for meaning too often speaking of the subway and death. I take New York for my father, I take the grass holes for elsewhere in love with its delicate strain. I take it all to a rooftop in Hell's Kitchen, warm tar molting, water towers, the whir of choppers. And I sit with it as if a grail will rain down on me if I wait, but there are no mistakes. Starting right now, there's just a sky full of grass. I'm gonna read, I didn't tag this one, but I'm gonna read a short. There's a couple of really short poems in here that I wrote when I thought this book was done. It hadn't been taken by a publisher, but then I had a friend, this poet, Greg Pardlow, and he read it. He said, someone missing. And anyway, he really prompted me to write these small poems that I think ended up being really important. I'm just gonna read one. It's called Self Portrait with Mother as Cat. My hand flickers into a paw as I lick my finger to turn the page, stroke my daughter's hair, or reach to pet her feline eyes, narrowed in fury over an injustice I cannot fathom. It's that deep that we share molecules that the cells of children live in their mother's brain for decades after they leave her body, their childhood home. It makes sense, my son says, how you sometimes know what I am thinking, how I hold the scruff of his neck as the Uptown Express rushes into the tunnel is how deep I used to lean beyond the pillar to feel the wind of West 4th Street Station warm on my face. My mother calling over the rumble, don't let the train suck you in now. I think I'll read one last minor history, and we'll see. A minor history of night. This is about marriage. When our earliest hands dug for light in wet sand, when I swam in a bioluminescent bay. When I watched you watch me from the dock, the open water, my body so open. When they say there are fewer dark parts in the world today, I say still as many shadows. When they say the snowy owls are confused, I say we too. When one owl stunned by our car on the road at dusk seems poised to speak, we drive away spooked by her intensity. Winding instead past our neighbor's riot of Christmas lights shining like a Cumberland Farms. When through the kitchen window, the sleigh's glare reflects off glass across my chest. As I rinse a dish, electric snowflakes glow superimposed like lace in my hair. When I stare out fumbling a wet cup, when I see you approach mirror behind me in the window, when the snow and dusk is offening and deepening. So I think I'm gonna skip the Elena Ferrantes. It's like two sides of a person in these books. They're just very different. These are epistolary poems to the Italian writer Elena Ferrante. But I think I'm just gonna read some poems from this new stuff, Try Him Out. I've read a few of them recently. I'm still working on them. So I have been reading for months on and off. It's great, because you can just dip into it. Working by Studs Terkel, which came out in the early 70s. And it's this giant book. It's a beautiful book. It's a giant book of transcripts of interviews he did over many years traveling across America and just talking to all sorts of people about their work. And from this book, my publisher was great that book designer put a little tiny yellow taxi cab on the back as a nod to some of the content, which is my dad was a New York City cab driver for like 40 years. And my dad passed away about seven years ago, but I've been thinking recently about this notion of work and thinking about he hated his job and what does that do to a life or to a person's sense of self to go to work every day at a job that you find very grueling that you hate. And I think about the kinds of work that I do and that other people do. And like when I got this poet laureate gig, my kids were like, that's a job. I was like, yes, apparently it is. So, but I actually approach it. I was telling Adam right before, it's a title and you get this very nominal fee. But it's a title, but I approach it like a public service job, because that's my style. I just, I like projects and I'm really thrilled about the job. So I've just been thinking about all the kinds of work I do, but I have three children. So a lot of my work is outside of teaching and writing and anything else is also domestic. And it's funny because there's a real stigma too around women writing too much about their domestic life. But my domestic life and my interior intellectual life and my conflicts between those things are all bound up together. So they're like these threads in a big jumble and then that's me, you know? So they're inextricable. And so I've been thinking a lot about that. And I also think what a luxury to even reflect upon liking your job. Most of the world doesn't really have that. You know, most of the world is really working to live. So anyway, work. It starts with a line from the wonderful poet Michael Klein from his poem, Other Horses. I can't stop horses as much as you can't stop horses. What is work? But a horse is a beast. To be one with the broom, I bristle. Toil, tool, and trade. Work is a poem I made, is my children, is family. A broken phrase, difficult to say with a mouth full of teeth sore from grief is another kind of work. Or driving long hours through the night only to start each day in its middle. Spartan with a sparse meal to break the fast. A private kind of penance one man makes. While another says, we use water to start over. How Baldwin used snow from the Alps to write his way back to the Harlem streets of his youth. Whereas Debbie from Seaconk says, I'm Switzerland here, meaning you can tell me anything. And I almost do, keeping the most arduous parts of the work to myself or myself. Sometimes comparing my heart to a horse, sometimes fast and beautiful, often beastly and burdensome. With my sick shades of brown in each eye, I see work in every corner of the earth. The way work always finds me where I stand, the stinhand, a clover in my pocket. And this poem's called Systems. And I recently did a reading and a talk with Matthew Sepruder, who I love. And I had been working on this poem when we were talking about this event that we were gonna do in Providence. And I said, hey, what do you think of this poem? I have this line from your poem that I stole and put in my poem. And he wrote me back and he said, I really like this poem. You could take out my line, because it's not working. So I said, okay. So I dedicated the poem to him. So it's called Systems from Matthew Sepruder. Systems. What is work but a system? A solar powered family or animal of poverty whose hunger taste of metal is a tendency to hoard. Handed down, natural as disaster, like work within trees, secret language, a system of roots. The oldest machine of reciprocity and need is my mind, the grid off which I live, that my mind might also be a tree, or hummingbird freed from its cage. My trill tinted rose with nectar, a glow amid the aura of a Truscan woman who thrill at the songs I make of their aches and appetites, each refrain a wheel within a wheel, a music of lineage, ancient as math, bright as grass. House and home, house and home. I can't stop houses as much as you can't stop houses. Every home is a monument to industry. Every house has a skeleton of wood. I clear our refuse from the landing, the cobwebs from the bones, right? The poem that lives in my head, just as the bed wants to be made, the poem. Just as the sheets need to be cleaned, the poem. Home of living desire, house of creatures who require my touch, the poem. Just as daily love aches to be sung by night, the poem. All demand and appetite, the poem. Each day I trill industrious, a hummingbird poem of mothering my nature. The poem insists upon my presence, exerts upon my children the poem. In my throat on waking and at night when I take to my bed the poem in my head. Unstoppable house and home of poem. This is a really old poem, it's like 25 years old. And a student who is at this Matthews at Bruder event, a high school student came and she was wearing this t-shirt that said poet. She was great. And then she wrote to me and asked me some questions and she said, oh, I read this poem online. And I was like, right, I haven't read that poem for years. So I read it and so I'm bringing it here. Some kinds of fire. The reference here is the Hotel Chelsea, which is a hotel in New York City. And I lived there for a couple of years as a kid, one of our many stops. And in 1977, there was a huge fire among other things like Sid Vicious killing his girlfriend. And we lived there for both of those things. So this is about that fire and other things, some kinds of fire. Anna Akmatova burned her poems. And the light of Madrid was like water. At La Latina luncheonette, ate a cup of chocolate and a motor oil churro every day for a week recovering. The cherry bomb alley that was our street, Hotel Chelsea ablaze from a rum soaked pillow and a cigarette, 1977. Iron balconies were dropping like lace. Windows were popping like sobs. Can you describe this? Someone asked Anna Akmatova as she stood online. Yes, she said, I can. All right, so in this body of work work, my 11 year old daughter, I have three kids, but my 11 year old is obsessed with life hacks. So she spends a lot of time on YouTube watching life hack videos. So I'll be like getting in the car and she's like, if you put hand sanitizer on the door handle, it won't freeze a lock. Or pulling on boots, she's like, if you take pool noodles, cut them in half, you can use them as bootstays. It's like nonstop. So I've been thinking about this idea of life hacks. And then hack has all these other definitions. So for example, my father was a cab driver who had a hack license. It's called a hack license. But a hack is also like a crappy writer. So this is called hack. He left his hack license on the bed stand with the pocket knife we gave him, reluctant to renew in case he didn't make it back. There was a wall of books by his bed, stacks of articles he would have read had he returned to spend the $65 on a photo of his eyes squinting into the middle distance of the days ahead. It said that every unworn shoe in a closet represents a unit of work, a mark of time wasted or money earned. But however you look, a shoe is a shoe is a shoe. An embarrassment of riches my dad always chimed as he ripped open his gifts at Christmas time. When he finally let go, they gave me his belongings in a clear plastic bag that read belongings. I couldn't carry his clothes while also carrying my baby in my belly down into the belly of the train. I took the buckle from his belt and put the bag in the trash on the corner of Lexington Avenue and caught the downtown express empty-handed brass in my pocket unable to end even this poem the way I want it. I just wrote this poem really recently, this last one. I was having coffee with this poet at Brown named Andrew Coleruso and I couldn't believe how young he was. I was like, oh my gosh, I could be your mom. And I could be. And then later on that day, I was driving my kid somewhere and we're all laughing how my youngest son, who's seven, the story that we tell him is like he says, where was I before I was here? So I always say you were naked and flying around in the sky. And then you came down and so that's been the story but now he's older so he doesn't buy it. So this is a little bit about that and it's a little bit about a ref, well it's an internal reference to a poem that Andrew Coleruso read for a podcast I have. And his poem is about Trayvon Martin, Youngest Son. We used to laugh and say he was naked and flying around with the stars before he came down to be with us. These days he says, when I was dead, because naked means sexy and he's not a baby, knows what sex is, would rather be dead. But I don't want the word dead around my kids or around any mother's son so I say honey, you were never dead. And he says, then I fell like a raindrop into your mouth and I say yes. Well the other morning I said yes when he called Fogg a cloud on the ground, how he was formed is forming from rain in my mouth. Just as one day I believe he will go out for sweets and come back just like that. For some boys like him it may be that easy to not be a cloud called back to its rain place for salt tears not to fill the space left in his wake. So I think I'll just end with the first poem of this book. Sometimes I read this at the very end because it's like aspirational. It's called wish list, wish list. These are actual things I wish were. To be the Mary J. Blige of poetry. To come back as Peter O'Toole. To have Peter Fogg expose his tender heart to you as John Cassavetes would make a monument to love of a fragile wife with a nervous tick and strangers from a bar on the couch. To be a poet of the sea pounding down each syllable till it resembles almost nothing but sound between lovers. To be an unscripted scene of oneself have a teardrop tattoo inked beneath one eye. To practice right action and right speech. To summon a stiff drink upon waking at the foot of a dune. To be a grain of sand in that dune. To be seen up close at maximum magnification, intricate, and entirely plausible. So I think I'll end there. So, questions? I think we're opening up to questions, so. All right, so I have a question. How many of you here are studying poetry or write poetry? Are any of you here? Do you have Adam Braver as your teacher or anything? So who do you like to read? Who do you like to read? I usually find when I need to write, I then I read someone. You know, I start pulling off my shelves when I'm trying to write. So, like one person that I love to read. And she's kind of well known on some level and then totally unknown. Lisa Jarno, does anybody know her? Julie, I love Lisa Jarno. So, so you should look her up. J-A-R-N-O-T. I don't know where she is now. She used to be in Brooklyn. Now she's somewhere upstate, being a farmer. But I'm sure she's also a poet. Anybody else from New York? Where? What's your family? Okay, okay. I used to live in the Upper West Side, though. Oh yeah, you did. I lived up there for one year, too. Moved up, moved back down. Where are the Upper West Side? Upper West Side Park. Yep, yep. Okay, that was 89th Street. Oh, I was 99th. Yeah. Well, it's funny, because when I first got the Poet Laureate appointment, literally hours after I got an email from someone in a nursing home inviting me to be in a nursing home, I was like, wow, I've never done that. So, so I went out to a nursing home in Barrington. And it was great because I was joking with my friend after I said, well, you know, it's amazing because, you know, when you get to a certain age, apparently, you can appear to be completely asleep. And then like wake up suddenly and ask a really smart question. And then like get the answer and go back to sleep. And then also, like, apparently everyone is from Brooklyn. Everybody afterwards came up, like a sea of women came up and they were like, I'm from Brooklyn. Honestly, they all had come here like during the 40s and the 50s. So, so I find that sometimes people come up and they're like, I'm from New York. Yeah. I have a question. Yes. Well, like I have a comment too. I just really especially loved the description of the father's Italian. Something you would see in countless times. Something you had many thoughts on. How did you follow it down to that when you're making a decision in your work to have that sort of definitive description of it? How many iterations? You know, I have to say I revise a lot, but that poem, Sirens, I got asked this a while back by Brooklyn poets. And I said the only thing that I can compare the writing of that poem too is like the unfurling of a super eight movie. I don't remember writing the poem. It was really, and that's very rare. Usually I'm like, you know, anguishing and do millions of drafts. So with that particular image, it just came out like that. And that's rare, so, but that poem kind of set off a whole bunch of other work. And I think it was, because it was one of those poems that needed to be written. So, and you know, I think the medallion also has all of these other connotations that aren't in the poem. But miraculously, I met another poet whose father was a cab driver in Queens. So we were talking shop and she was like, her dad had bought a medallion in the 70s. And it was really expensive because my mom was always telling my father, you should just buy the medallion, take out a loan. And they never wanted to do it because he always wanted to stop driving the cab and do something else. So he missed the boat on that because then they were like, they were $100,000 in 1975. But then in 1995, they were a million and a half dollars. So they were worth a lot of money. Now with Uber, they're like worth nothing. So I don't Uber, because I can't. It's like my dad, which is right, can't do it. But the physicality of cash, and I mean, the part about the cash in the poem, that's true. I literally was walking around with $30,000 in my bag and I literally went to Greenwood Cemetery with a duffel bag of money. But the physicality of the medallion and the physicality of exchange of cash as we move towards a cashless society really seem like, almost like historical notes. And so, and that deco like is hearkening even further back, you know? But you know, I still remember, there were these little rumble seats in checker cabs for kids and little seats that folded down and you'd sit and face the other way. And it was such a different time. There were no seat belts, nothing. My friend was with me and she, this cab driver stopped short and she lost her front teeth because she flew into the back of the cab from the rumble seat. And it was just a much more unrestrained era. And so, but truthfully, I don't know. I don't know how that came out. But yeah. You've been talking about the risks of sentimentality when you're writing about the personal things. Yeah. Like the medallions and the physical objects and a lot of that in there. Can you talk for students a little bit about how to be truthful and honest without being sentimental and what's the problem with sentimentality? I don't know that I'm an authority on any of this. But, but, and sometimes what happens. So for example, with that short poem, self-portrait, Mother is Bird, that my friend Greg, is, you know, he said, there's someone in the book that's not in the book. And it took like three hours of talking for it to come out. I was like, all right, it's my mom. I was like, she's in there. And he was like, but she's not really in there. And he didn't even know really what it was, but he could feel an absence that was very present. So I said, you need to go and write a bunch of really crappy poems about your mom. Just get it out. And then it won't be anathema to find that presence where it pops up because I think that my feeling was that it was too direct and crossing over into sentimentality if I talk too much about her or her presence or if I alluded too much too directly to it. So, so it was, you know, I'm not a big believer in like, oh, it's being brave. You know, it's a thing that, you know. So I won't say it was brave, but I do think that it felt really uncomfortable to write that poem and then put it in the book. But I think it was important to. So I think that sometimes when you're writing something that's very personal and you're feeling like you're risking sentimentality, that's when you have to go through the multiple drafts and really push through and kind of shed all of the, carve it down and kind of think, what's the point of what I'm trying to get across here and not kind of shroud it with feelings because there is a kind of falseness too that sentimentality can end up achieving. And so I think that when something is very visceral and when a writer, if they're writing personally and it feels vulnerable is really, truly exposing a vulnerability, there is no sentimentality. That's not what that is. Sentimentality is the false version of the real thing. And I think that my kind of trying to steer clear of it is because if I'm doing that, then I might as well not be doing it. Really struggle, but it's a struggle. It's not, and you know, someone might read this book and be like, this is what a sentimental journey to the past, which is not my intention. And so some of that is subjective, obviously. But then there are other things that are really quite objective, like you feel like your experience, there's a universality you wanna get to and that your experience is like everyone else's, but not in the particulars, in the archetypal emotional landscape of it. So, but there's nothing wrong with not sentimentality but emotion and real connection. And I think that sometimes, and Matthew Sepruder and I were talking about this, he wrote this great book, we should all buy called Why Poetry? It's a great book, but he, so we were talking about, I forget what we're talking about, but something around, it was like about John Ashbury and people sometimes feeling that they can't enter into his work. Like it's too intellectual or snarky or off-handed or strange. And so we were kind of saying that there's also this kind of whole offshoot of that snarky intellectual work that is not John Ashbury, but that verge is so clear of emotion and sentimentality that it's difficult to connect to it because it's very protective. So sometimes language, and it can use a lot of language and not really be saying anything, but sometimes language also serves as a barrier almost. So I think that you're always verging towards sentimentality because it's familiar and then you have to step back and think about what is the essence of the experience I'm trying to write about that's completely individual to my lexicon, my emotional and linguistic lexicon and revise the hell out of it. Except in isolated instances, you know. Yeah. Yeah, well I mean, and this is Zipruder's book, I'm not here as a paid person from Matthew Zipruder, but this book, Why Poetry, really addresses the way poetry is taught and approached. But I think that poetry and philosophy can overlap in the sense of, I mean, I feel that poetry, the best poetry is really like the fruit of the synthesis of the emotional and the intellectual, kind of fused or shot through the prism of language so that, you know, like I was saying, the kind of snarky, kind of clever intellectual stuff, if it's not like John Ashbury's stuff, there are poems that are heartbreaking and they're just so strange and random but somehow they're getting at you. And then there's some stuff where I'm just not connecting to it at all. So I think that the best work kind of fuses the intellectual and the emotional and connects with the reader. There has to be some way of connecting to the reader. But I think that poetry is also in the realm of ideas, in the sense that, I don't know, I'm interested in ideas, like just as a concept work as a concept and that idea in and of itself will give rise to a bunch of poems, right? And I think that, you know, in some of this work there's right action, right speech. And that is, you know, that comes from Buddhism and that my grandparents, you know, principles of ways of being and ways of comporting and interacting in the universe, right? So these, I don't know if they're philosophical or metaphysical or just how to get through daily life. But I can say that I think that if a person is reluctant or afraid of ideas that they're never gonna wanna read poetry or philosophy because they're idea rich. And that, I think, is where they overlap and like that poem, Systems, I wrote it with Matthew Subruder in mind because I was thinking about some of the things that he says about poetic state of mind and lucid dreaming being a kind of, like lucid dreaming is what poetry is and how poets think and how they synthesize ideas or concepts and express them in poetry. So I think that, you know, for your students if they're afraid of philosophy or afraid of poetry it's really has to do with a fear of the abstract or fear of the possibility of abstraction, you know? And I think that's more a cultural problem because other cultures have different tendencies but like in France when I was a student in France, it's considered kind of a defect of character not to at least pretend that you were interested in poetry and philosophy. I don't know if everybody in France really is, but you know. But certainly it was part of being a person in the world and certainly education wise coming up through in a French education that was it was rich on the poetry and the philosophy. So these are cultural questions too. You know, any other questions? All right, so I'm gonna just tell you a couple of things that you should look out for from the poet laureate side of my job. So if you ride the buses, anybody ride the bus? If you ride the buses in September I launched with the Poetry Society of America a very beloved that I loved and longstanding program from the New York City subway system called Poetry in Motion and I brought it to the Rhode Island bus system, RIPTA. So about 70% of the fleet now has these digital screens that are sort of like TV screens behind the driver and they have like Cardi's ads and you know, Benny's no longer Benny's but ads for other things. And then you'll also see poems come up. So that's what that is. It's public display of poems in the transit system. So September was Walt Whitman and right now there's an excerpt from a poem called Remember by Joy Harjo and then on November 15th we're gonna change over to Pablo Neruda and then I think December if I can get the rights to it Fernando Pessoa who's a Portuguese poet and then 2018's all Rhode Island poets. So you can look for that if you're on the bus or tell your friends. All right. Well, thank you. Thanks a lot. Thank you.