 Hello and welcome. Thank you for joining us for our online program at Mechanics Institute. And tonight we have a celebration of National Poetry Month with readings from why to these rocks with the community of writers, and this evening we'll be hearing from some of the contributing writers. I'm Laura Altfeld, Monica Dillatorre, Sean Young-Fong, Ken Haas, Troy Jalamore, and Margaret Reeve. And I'm Laura Shepherd, Director of Events at the Mechanics Institute. Also, we're very pleased to sponsor our program once again with our dear friends and collaborators, Heyday Books, with this wonderful anthology. If you're new to Mechanics Institute, we were founded in 1854, and we're one of San Francisco's most vital and literary cultural centers in the heart of the city. It features a General Interest Library, a chess club, and our ongoing author events and programs, and on Friday night our Cinema Literal Series. Now we have exciting news. The library will be open starting on April 10, Monday, Wednesday, Friday for two hours, so you can go online, sign up for your space and place, and join us down at the library. This is just a great next step in having us back in the library, so we're very excited to welcome you back in the building. But tonight is a special night as well. Our hats go off to Lawrence for Linguetti, our beloved literary giant of San Francisco. He gave so much with his founding and heralding City Lights bookstore and publishing. Also for his fights for social justice and freedom of speech, and the voice he gave to so many writers and poets. What gratitude we owe him and so we celebrate his creativity and tenacity poetry and his artwork and his very long rich life. And for this dedication, I would like to read one of his poems. It seems appropriate for April Fool's Day, for some reason. It's called Untitled. Constantly risking absurdity and death. Whenever he performs above the heads of his audience. The poet like an acrobat climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making and balancing on I beans above a sea of faces, paces his way to the other side of day, performing on for Shaw and sleight of foot tricks and other high theatrics and all without taking anything for what it may not be. For he is the super realist who must perforce perceived taught truth before the taking of each stance or step in his supposed advance toward that still higher perch where beauty stands and waits with gravity. He is the art her death defying leap, and he a little Charlie Chaplin man, who may or may not catch her fair eternal form, spread eagle in the in the empty air of existence. Laurence Ferlinghetti. Thank you. And now I'd like to introduce Heather Altfeld, who will be our first reader and I'm also going to give a little her a little bio about her, and then she'll talk to us more about the community of writers. Heather is a poet and an essayist, and her two books of poetry are post mortem from 2021 and the disappearing theater 2016. Her work is featured or forthcoming in the 2019 was featured in the 2019 best American essays, Orion magazine, eon magazine conjunctions narrative magazine and others. She was a 2017 recipient of a Robert H winner award with the poetry Society of America. And also the 2015 recipient of the Pablo Neruda prize for poetry. She teaches in the Department of comparative religion and humanities, and the honors program at CSU Chico. And she's attended the poetry workshop several times since 2008. So please welcome Heather Altfeld. Thank you so much. And thank you. This is really a truly wonderful honor to be invited to do this. And I want to talk just a little bit about the community of writers. You know, this is the 50th year anniversary. The community writers was of course started by the novelists Blair Fuller and Oakley Hall. Brett Hall Jones, who is the director of the program now is his daughter. And the program when the poetry program at least went under the directorship of Galway canal. And as such it evolved to have its own week, during which poets and staff were to generate a poem every day of the workshops. This led to all kinds of squaw lore, including the most unspoken rule that you were not supposed to arrive with even a scrap of a previous poem. The first time I came to the valley, I heard that you could be banned from the returning if you brought work in progress. A poem a day sounds pretty easy. But if you attended the workshop without a giant journal full of ideas and starts as a cheat sheet. The process is something like one of the worst forms of death that Talmudic scholars call pulling wool through thorns. So the work in this anthology we're reading from tonight, pulled as it was through thorns is made its way into the world and back again. I remember that the second time I attended the community writers Robert Haas gave this wonderful talk on Robert Duncan's poem often I am permitted to return to a meadow. I'm not going to find my notes from his talk but alas, I will only be able to render a few impressions of what Bob said here. The first couple of lines of Duncan's poem, go like this. Often I am permitted to return to a meadow, as if it were a scene made up by the mind that is not mine, but is a made place that is mine. It's near to the heart, an eternal pasture bolded in all thought. So, when Bob started talking about this it was the first time I'd heard the poem. What I was really left with was a sense of this meadow is a place of great mystery, a place where when permitted by the geographies of time and memory, a little bit more of the world is unveiled to us. It's like this essence of dream and memory and spirit that slowly reveals ourselves to ourselves. It is so near to the heart. So many of us feel about this community in this valley. It's great peaks, it's pines, it's silences, the winds that bend and flatten the grass and the great meadow, where we meet to make in words what our minds have wanted to say all year long. It's the place that is Duncan writes into the end of the poem, certain bounds hold against chaos. So many of us come and return to these mountains to find this permission to listen to what the meadow wants to tell us, so we can try in our most paltry of human ways to write what we hear. This evening's reading and book are made possible by the support of so many people, not just the poets you hear tonight or the ones you'll read later on in the anthology, but organizations and individuals who recognize the indispensability of the literary arts, including hard working board members and support staff of the community of writers, the community of writers would like to think heyday books gave this volume, the best home possible. Also to the California State Library and the California Center for the book, you're extremely grateful. Thank you to all of you who've made time to come to this reading tonight. We're exceptionally thrilled to have you here for this pre publication celebration. So I'd like now to read a poem by one of the most beloved longtime teachers in the community of writers Sharon Olds. This is her song before dawn in the dark, not the full dark, woken by the cold, pulling the covers up around my mouth, making a small cavern of warmth of living breath, sensing the over under of my sleep loosened by the raids. All my arms and legs tangled around each other. I used to lie on this mountain and Galway Lucille were dreaming nearby. I used to put on layers and layers by touch. Despite my fear of being outdoors in the night as if I were not a person, but an occasion for violence. On the other side, the sky black as if there had been a God, it might have petted me on the head, like Galway in his scrupulous mercy toward me, like my chivalry toward him, and our confiding in each other, like a child in the woods, confiding without a bridge in the needles and cones. In the desk before first light, above the granite domes, which look from here like peaks, but are the knees and hip bone crests and clavicles jaws, occipital arches under the mountains fontanels. The stars are still just visible and in the binoculars clean and sharp. But despite holding the heavy lenses being against the stucco frame, my tremor shows each star swiftly whirling in a white gold ring, like Saturn's in one direction. Then swerving, then the other, then an hourglass, a spiral, a bedspring. The stars sparkler tracing my shaking. And now in the quietest moment, the voice that took the earth millions of years to speak, the virial before first light. When my hands were steady, I would stand at Lucille's shoulder at the lake and softly pluck insects. Nine spotted lady beetle, giant crane fly, green darner, black snow mosquito. Off her shoulder, nape, white cap, blow them out over the glacier blue water toward the place where we're going, one by one, two by two. Sometimes many at a time, someday altogether, as if reunited. A stunning poem. Really, like everything Sharon writes, it really, really moves me. And here's the one, the poem of mine that is included in the anthology. It's called Letter to Hugo from Carson Pass. It starts with a quote by the poet Richard Hugo, who wrote lots and lots of letters. You know the mind, how it comes on the scene again, and makes tiny histories of things. Dear Richard, I woke up crying again, thinking of 11th grade, and my English teacher, who believed in the laying of hands, wheat germ, the amazing potential of collodial silver, the necessity of reading brute warriors, and the God who lives inside mountains and Lupine. She strapped packs to our backs and took us to Whitney, where we lay beneath innumerable stars, counting the minutiae of our pulse, so we would know we were really alive. We'd lie on the floor of our classroom breathing in and out a slow chant of the week's vocabulary. And we'd hear the chorus, valiance, inundate, theosophist, harbinger. And when she didn't have another way to get us out of our adolescent noise, she simulated nuclear war. 10,000 marbles dropped down a steel chute, reading our obituaries to us in the darkened classroom. In the world out there somewhere, she wanted us to know about, besides the one warring inside of our terrible bodies, a place where Oliver North woke up as stoned as we did, in order to forget the week behind him. The internet seemed so much more timid and kind than the one my girl inhabits now, where the thick ropes of the internet send boys streaming into her bedroom, and the grim light of her phone is the only guidance she seems to know. Reading your letters again, I have begun to see that darkness looks like darkness looks like darkness, no matter its speed hurdling through space. I could not have known then what was saving me from slipping over the edge, or how it seemed to arrive in that field of penstemon between home and school, where I sat when things grew hard, cat Stevens crooning about a tillerman through the Walkman. If I could ship my girl back through smoke and time, I would give her a seat in that class, so she could learn to bear and carry what hurls her through this world, like a terrible lonely laundry. So that the tiny histories growing inside of her will not be dioramas of moats studded with nails, but might instead be dotted with the occasional buttercup. Where a fleeting hole in the sky, where a bit of light pokes in. No doubt, you get a lot of stray letters from writers who have run out of living poets to talk to missives from the front lines of our lives that swell and ache with bright grief. I write to you, because something in your notes tells me that you would care that you would listen to her bruises and hear the hail of pills that Pearl and gather in the bottom of her denim bag. In the porch where I imagine you sitting now, watching the waist high wheat glimmering in the long summer sun. You would rise and wish a wish wisdom to me. Yours always H. Now, I'd like to introduce our second reader, shanging Frank, who is from Chengdu, China. He's a Wallace Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University and the recipient of the Joy Harjo Award, and the Gregory O'Donohue International Poetry Prize. He's also the author of the poetry collection, burying the mountain which is coming out this year with copper Kenyan press, attended the poetry workshop in 2019. I was wonderful. And what an honor to be here. What a wonderful event. Thank you for inviting me. I will talk about the remarks about community writers in a very personal way. I still remember the summer of 2019. I was deciding whether to return to China. I had only one year left in my MFA. Immediately after that my visa would expire. I barely published anything at the time and had a manuscript in my backpack, which no one read. I was thinking maybe I should stop writing poetry for a while, of course, never forever. Then I received an email that invited me to community of writers. I started to go. I decided to go because my mentor and my biggest idol, Jane Miller, was a faculty that summer. Being with her, I always feel saved. So when the car entered the Olympic Valley, I remember I screamed because of the beautiful side of the snow-topped mountain lines. And that screaming or let's say astonishment never stopped during my brief stay at community of writers. Being with so many like-minded, brilliant poets, I was in awe of their poetry words and talent as much as the rivers and mountains of infinite beauty. In the minds of endless talks about poetry, reading with laughter and, of course, with the indispensable liquor and wine, which is very important to Chinese literary history if you're familiar with those poems by Li Bai. But unlikely by whose drinking friends were owning the moon and its own shadow, I had real friends with me sharing words and poetry with those writers made me feel less alone. Not to mention the opportunity to meet the stellar faculties, my poetry heroes, ever since I started writing in English. In fact, struggling as a college student, studying engineering. To an international student, a foreigner like me, this experience means paradise. It was magical for it seemed at the time the rigid border of differences, nationalities and reality was temporarily erased. And we conversed only in the language of poetry with passion and with love. I felt transformed as Jane famously said in her craft talk at the community of writers that the primary function of art is the transformation of consciousness. The day before the conference ended, Jane invited me to her place where we had a simple lunch, bread and boiled eggs, but because of the altitude, the eggs were uncooked. She started telling me a story about Mendeshtam and Akmatava, where a boiled egg served as the protagonist. I remember in a workshop she showed us a poem by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. The poem ended with a couplet, so beautiful I'm going to recite it here. It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell, we live on archipelagos and that water, these words, what can they do, what can they do, pranks. And that night I wrote a poem for Jane on the balcony of the little cottage facing the mountains and stars, which ends allow me to read. For parting is the younger sister of death, as Mendeshtam justly said. Here we drift apart at this snow-topped outpine of California, an evening unscrewed on the vast sheet of this code, where our names are paper boats on water. I am going to read my poem in the anthology, which was the first poem I wrote arriving at community of writers. It is an absurd poem, somehow reflecting my anxiety of writing at the time, whether to continue writing, whether the speaker would reach the other side. And it was mainly inspired by Garcia Lorca and Robert Browning. Writer's song. It is now the time said the crooked man to know that after your meaniness meandering to make meaning, it is time to hold what was not told but told, regardless by a real told in this imaginary code that you, young men, would die before you get to Cordova, meaning you with your black pony red moon never will get to Cordova, let alone the dark tower where a girl long hair chestnut, whose name is also Cordova. Cordova in Cordova is called Cordova is calling you and you who've come such a long way do not have a name ache to be called by her so that you become real as the told except that the tower is not and the girl no more real than unreal is Cordova is calling you but child knowing yourself is not Roland the child but a proletariat son in a capitalistic world. Are you sure to go on this meaningless road to make yourself a told my poor writer who mistakes his quill as a dagger who takes water as his mother death by water death by water press by the sirens music, which is only a discuses of speculation and you who sing to repeat a world, unworthy to be repeated. You set for whom don't list the slug horn to your lips you set and blow though really really you know and know it well, Cordova, Cordova, perhaps itself is aware that it is called something else. I read a poem in the anthology by one of my favorite writers poets CD right. It's called obscurity and isolation. The left hand rests on the paper. The hand has entered the frame just above the elbow to review a half road sleeve. The other hand is in its service. It holds a foggy glass up to a standing lamp motel furniture motel paneling from the outside what light slips through the blind is gray blue gray. The phone rings. The hand conditioned to pick up hesitates with drawers before the ringing finally breaks off. Thank you and I'm going to introduce the next wonderful poet Ken Haas. Ken Haas has had his poems published in more than 50 journals and a variety of anthologies. His first full book, Borrowed Light, won the 2020 Red Mountain Press Discovery Award, nominated for a push God prize. He won the Betsy Coquit poetry award and serves on the board of directors of the community of writers. He works in San Francisco where he works in healthcare and sponsors a weekly poetry writing program at UCSF Children's Hospital. He has attended the poetry workshop several times over since 2008. Welcome Ken Haas. And thank you so much. Fabulous greeting as always. Big thanks also to the Mechanics Institute for hosting this event. One of the unique features of the community of writers is that, you know, the teachers, many of whom have won Pulitzers and other major prizes, not only teach and teach deeply, but they also write with us and listen to us. And are often as amazed by us as they are amazing, which imagine how that feels for, you know, a new writer. During Poets Week the Valley is awash in sharing, belonging, and praise. And it's this spirit of community that shines I think also in the anthology. Building Little on Heather's comments as a leader of this community for decades now Bob Haas has inspired many of us, particularly with his capacity to write about the natural world in a way that is modern, even postmodern, yet also accessible and wondrous. So to illustrate the spirit of I think both the community and the anthology, I'd like to read two poems that were inspired by Bob, though in different ways. The poem of mine in the book, which is called Apes for Pandas, goes back to my early days in San Francisco when I was an attorney doing some pro bono work for the zoo. And I received an unusual assignment. When I reached the community of writers. One year I had the story of that assignment bubbling inside me. A story involving the natural world, which as a guy who had mostly lived in cities. I didn't quite know how to tell, least of all tell poetically. So I just imagined telling it to Bob. And then I shared my first draft in one of his workshops. Apes for pandas. A few years after Nixon forged the deal with China that brought Ling Ling and shing shing to Washington. In the period of our history known as Panda diplomacy. I was assigned to represent the San Francisco zoo, which had recently built a natural habitat for Western lowland gorillas. The mayor at the time anxious to approach the Chinese with the idea of trading a few of our apes for some of their pandas asked me to craft a great a panda exchange agreement. For which, as you might imagine, there was no template. So I drove to the intersection of slope Boulevard and the great highway to check out the currency. And then finally, the patriarch, born in the rainforests of Cameroon, black and shiny as the hood of a Mercedes, except for a silver swath on his back, and a russet crown. He had a taste for grass and slept at the foot of an obituary, his family on the branches above. In his daughter's cocoa became world famous for learning a thousand English words and sign language, then asking for two kittens at Christmas, whom she named lipstick and smoking. But that was later. He envisioned twin 747s landing simultaneously at SFO and Shanghai International. My draft of the agreement called for a Cold War style swap across a bridge on an unnamed volcanic atoll in the Pacific. As if the exchange ease were decorated military brass. There met me with a look that said, you are not my friend. So I spoke of the indignity of trading our nearest relatives for pea brained fur balls, the world had temporarily fallen in love with because they resemble the six year olds stuffed pillow. I was removed from the project. And I walked Wanda and three of his kin to the midpoint of the bridge, where we meet the pandas, the alpha panda growls and Wanda pretends to be impressed nods to the mammalian king of a different continent rises and roars. The bridge rattles. He moves on turning back briefly with deep set eyes from a day 10 million years ago, when his forebears and ours went their separate ways. The second piece I'd like to read from the anthology is Dean Young's I was in community workshops with Dean a couple of times. He's a singular teacher and poet and human being. He's about another primarily urban guy, basically Dean with a wild soul coming into nature in the valley. He misses Bob has alongside whom he has taught, but has taught before, but who has apparently taken this year off. So he uses Bob's spirit as a kind of muse. It's called Dear Bob. The fountain thinks it's the same without you but it's wrong. Maybe the same stars whisking themselves further off the darker, the brighter some chamomile crushed underfoot, but the little wiry dog we love has preceded us into paradise. I don't expect to join her, even though my own crappy hearts worse running out, but I may be finally learning how to sit in a chair. I still don't know what to call the good morning bird, although whatever word would be no truer than manzanita. The homelessness has a crush on me on how clean I keep my room, the usual stunned ruckus of wake up. But it's a different moon, different woman on the hotel balcony, yet the same kind of scary vacant stair carry added for seeing what before turning back to the customary immaculate vacation squalor inside. The cash machine still says enter to exit. But there's more water in the creek than I've ever seen the brighter, the darker. In that first dream, there was not. And thank you and now it's my pleasure to introduce our next reader, Troy Jollamore. Troy's books of poetry are syllabus of errors at Lake Scucog and Tom Thompson and purgatory, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry in 2006. His works have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Poetry 2020, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. His fourth collection of poetry, Earthly Delights will be published in September 2021. He attended the poetry workshop in 2012 and 2015. Welcome Troy. Thanks Ken. I also sort of attended in 2010, I think, but not officially I just came and hung around, which is how I sort of got into all this to begin with. I'm so glad Ken that you read that poem by Dean Young. I love Dean Young and getting to meet him and getting to meet CD right which also did the community of writers for really big events in my life is pretty amazing. I want to start. I want to start by saying how glad I am to be here and thanks to everyone who helped set this up or simply is here. I don't know what I mean by here because this is zoom so don't ask me what that means but I'm glad whatever here means we are here and it's lovely. I'm going to read my poem that's in the anthology, which feels to me like a, an appropriate community of writers poem. It's about the thing we're all trying to do. When we're there, I think it's called the poem, you will not live to write. So it's a poem about impossible aspiration, I guess, and you know the poem I mean the poem you will not live to write the poem you would have written. Only you've had one more month, one more day, one more hour is a killer. A no holds barred balls out masterpiece, the one where you put it all together. Everything you learned everything you've suffered, all the little bits of being human you spent your life gathering up. It's the poem you've been waiting for all your life. The poem you will not live to write. The poem you would have written after the last poem you will write, which is it must be said a perfectly decent, unexceptionable, unexceptional poem. The sort of poem you would have read in some magazine or other had someone else been the author or made it through the first half. Anyway, and then maybe turn to the theater reviews or the gossip column, or else just put the whole tiresome issue is, let's admit it, a knockout. There's no avoiding the fact. The poem you will not live to write is the one that would make the grocer's daughter come back to you. It's the poem you'd wear like a pair of expensive stolen shoes to a wedding you weren't invited to. It's the one that waits for you in the dark, unseen in the underbrush just outside the campfire zone of protected light. It's nothing but an uninhibited passionate kiss and your death on its mind. And I'm going to read a poem by Major Jackson named after a wonderful Ingmar Bergman film, the name of the poem is cries and whispers. Today I forget something. Yet happy I never forget to wake to the bright corollas of summer mornings. In the jury box of my bed, I listened to the counter arguments of finches and blue jays, cardinals, and the tufted titmice and the sharp judgment of the crow grow to sweet clamors. In my neighborhood, someone like me is sitting at a kitchen table taking down notes between bites of granola and gentle sips of oolong tea and recording the soap opera in the trees. The pen is her large antenna to the mysteries which come in alternate currents of slapstick and calamity. She writes away her nights of emptiness and boredom. We'd be perfect in a Bergman film, both of us entering into day seeking the final appearance of things bumping around like this, a delivery truck backs into a driveway. The streets begin their excited breathing. And I'll read one more. Another one of mine. This one like the one I read at first will be in my book that's coming out in the fall. It's the first poem in the book because it's an invocation to the muse and when I think about the times I've been at the community of writers whether officially or just hanging around. I think about all the time people spend waiting for the muse to show up trying to invite her in trying to figure out what she responds to she or he or it or they or whatever your muse you know hoping might be I think any muse will do in those moments of just trying to write something decent so that the next day you know that you go to workshop and you've got something that hopefully you aren't completely embarrassed by because you know you you might have Sharon holds her Bob has your dean or who knows who that you have to show this thing to. And so you hope that you write something that's not embarrassing and you hope that if what you had is embarrassing that maybe they've written something embarrassing to so it's okay. It is simply called muse muse wear me like clothing fade into my skin as I unfurl for you like an oyster shell or a work shirt bleached by sunlight. I've hung on the line for so long here under the moon to make this dark space inside where a song can suffer and grow. The mouth move against me. You will sing, and then you will sing. Then you will go. Then I will see. Then I will sing. And then go. So it's my pleasure now to introduce Margaret Reed. She is the author of love robot named a 2017 best book of poetry by entropy magazine awarded an Elgin award by the science fiction poetry association, and the 2019 book prize in poetry by the Asian American Studies Association. She is assistant professor in media studies at SUNY Buffalo, and she attended the poetry workshop in 2018. Thank you so much Troy that was a amazing reading. I just want to start off by saying this is such an honor to be here. Thank you again to the mechanics Institute for hosting us and to Brett for her invitation and her vision for the community of writers. You know, these days I think a lot about dystopia and how we're living in really challenging times almost every week something pretty terrible happens and tonight, even though it's, you know, via zoom I feel like a lot of the community of writers poetry magic has come through so Thank you so much to everyone for your sharing. This has been amazing. So, I'm just going to start by sharing a little bit about what's really magical right about the community of writers and how it's kind of the opposite of this idea of a dystopia, you know, there, if I think about a utopia I don't know what is more utopian than being in the beautiful mountains, being amongst poets, writing poetry, eating good food, having late nights of talking about poetry and and having poetry elves right deliver our poems and materials for us. So it's incredibly just magical place and a lot of, you know, rich connections and friendships happen there. What I also really appreciate is, I mean, many poet friends at the community of writers that were across many generations and many different ages and racial backgrounds and economic backgrounds and I think that's part of also the magic of the retreat. When I came to the community of writers I was a graduate student and I was working with Bob Haas at Berkeley. And so I was familiar with the workshop setting, but the community of writers really provided that space for poetry, to really have a hierarchical way of reading and, you know, studying poetry and writing poetry. And I think it was mentioned how the faculty, you know, many people we admire so much also write poems with us. And I think that's just one of the practices. The community of writers employs to really help make such a magical space so I keep saying the word magical because it really quite is so thank you again for having me and for being here tonight. So, I'm going to go ahead and read a poem by Harriet Mullen someone I greatly admired and was so thrilled to work with at the retreat when I was there. She wrote this book called Sleeping with a Dictionary and I loved it so much I would sleep with that book, you know, so. And she wrote a poem from her Tonka diary, which evokes the community of writers and the Valley. The Botanical Garden is just as I remember, although it is certain that everything has changed since my last visit. Although it is certain that everything has changed. How many hilarious questions these fuzzy fiddle heads are inquiring of spring will be answered as green ferns unfurl. Walking the path I stopped to pick up bleach spark from a tree curled into a scroll of ancient wisdom, I was, I am unable to read. Even in my dreams, I'm hiking these mountain trails, expecting to find a rock that nature has shaped to remind me of a heart. All right. And the poem I'll read that's in the anthology is from my collection love robot, and many of these poems. I wrote at the retreat as well as at the workshop as well as with Bob Haas in his class at Berkeley. It's entitled laugh robot and it draws from some coding and chat scripts so I could share some of that too. Do you make me laugh dear robot, but your laugh seems to disappear just when I'm ready to process it. Do you understand. This is me showing you that I like you and what you do in congruity is sexy. Don't let them tell you otherwise. No suture for robots and humans, but still hold my hand. Don't be ashamed of me please. I want to hear you laugh to remind myself that you are not human. I want to hear you laugh to remind myself why laughter feels good so good contagious. Let me translate question. Can you write me a funny poem. Sure. Yes, I am very happy to write a funny poem for you. Never. I am sorry I cannot write a funny poem for you unless question if you could write a funny poem what would you include lavender purple isn't lavender also a color so confusing. Three Filipinos loud three Filipinos sound like 20 laughing hold my belly robot joke. Why did the robot cross the road to get away from you. Did I laugh at the wrong things. Are you laughing at me. Pause because it is funny, because I did everything I tried reload me. I am your glitch. Do not be afraid. My name mouth me hello protest and coffee. That is not funny. Why did the robot cross the road. I am naked. Do not laugh at me. Laugh up my body as I am part of you. Let's forget the word 0110110101. That is an ugly word. All your wires should tell us that don't short circuit on me 15 facial muscles contract can't count them fast. Let your sensors lead being a human being is the best joke. Thank you. So, I'll just briefly just show the coding because anyone's interested, I don't know if you can see it, I just printed it out. So it's just like robotics algorithm coding. So, I am very honored to introduce the next poet, someone I have also admired greatly and hope to attend the workshop when she's teaching. Monica de la Torre is a poet and translator. She has published six collections of poetry, as well as edited and translated and collaborated on many other books. She has served as poetry editor of the Brooklyn Rail and senior editor of bomb magazine and teaches poetry at Brooklyn College. Her most recent book is repetition 19, and she served on the teaching staff at the community of writers in 2018. Please help me welcome Monica. Thank you Margaret thank you so much everybody. What an incredible reading. I'm just flooded by memories of being there in 2018 in a totally different world, it seems, and hearing your poems is so inspiring and hearing your memories of being there is also really inspiring and I'm thinking, before Joe brainered, I would be writing a book called I remember, and just the memories would make for pretty awesome piece, because the things I remember are, for instance, I remember elves. I remember a softball game in which, at least two poets suffered pretty significant injuries. I remember going shopping with cousin Ali to he bought an inordinate amount of food that then proceeded to be transformed into the most exquisite meal prepared at the motel at the hotel for faculty and then participants of the workshops. I remember, what else do I remember, I remember extraordinary hike. I remember wandering about an Olympic Valley, trying to spot the poets to differentiate the poets from the people who are vacationing there and going like, I wonder, you know the early days, and I was always right. I was like, oh, that's a put that that person looks like a poet and then I'd see them in a workshop. And then the other thing I remember is that hesitation of going to my box and picking up the poems by everyone and the poet is written by faculty and going. Do I dare read this like it's going to be crashing like I have to produce a poem today and I have to teach and just going, no, no, get over it, read it and write and you'll see what happens and the magic was there. So, thank you for eliciting all these memories. It was really amazing to be there and again thank you for everything that you are doing. And that mechanics Institute and at community of writers to keep us going. So, I had an aha moment when I was there, I wrote. I was trying to write 25 different translations of the poem I wrote in Spanish in the 90s and the poem is called equivalence yes. And I hit a wall and I couldn't come up with anything. And so I just put it asleep and I went okay at some point, I'll come up with more ideas for translations but at community of writers. And I, I had this aha moment and the aha moment was right up translation riffing off this idea of an ambiguous figure. So it has to do with the duck rabbit illusion, which consists of seeing something and then seeing something else in that thing. And the second thing that you see in that thing then transforms the same. So, okay, I'll translate that into what that how that led into a poem. So one of the differences I squished together all the words in Spanish in the poem in the original poem, and I took out all the spaces between the words, and then I looked for embedded English words in the original poem. And then I isolated the English words that I could spot and then I built a poem around them. So it was very much like a constraint poem, which also felt consistent with the constraint of having to write a poem a day. And this wacky poem that, you know, I never would have written in different conditions. It's called equivocal valences. And now a silent one, despite the assertiveness of such parts of speech, and I owe you of sorts, from a person like a llama, not a Yama reading us a free radicals, figuratively with his glowing orbs. I nursed a decaf while he upped the ante, promising pie in the sky. A woman named Margo explained that although home in H.O. plays no biological role in humans, it salts quicken your metabolism. There's a dent in my car. It's no hot rod but still some guy nagged as I was heading back on my bike. I'd either done damage or it was a scam. I preferred not to spar, so produced an ashtray since he was fuming. He went on hectoring. I, a bit differential for the sake of all of us, and that of my radius, kept my unruffled mean ala Alcat and got away singing do re mi fa sol la siesta. In the dream, there is an infant son, and I am elated, aren't we motherly, despite the kids yapping. Are they ever to end. Osmium OS is the densest of natural elements Margo says now in the dream. Lucky for me, I got a dose of instruction while I yak about my son. In media's res I can be such as spads. I forgotten the man's rant. I've got a companion and have missed the fact that my kids got life and might need an enema. I go I go on ad living and ask Rosa, who also happens to be Margo, if she too is biffid snake like. Osmium is the densest of natural elements. She others repeated knows our differences become salient. Here's a trove of documents I found their relevance might be nominal but still she braze laughing. Nada, no say nada. At least it's not row, almost in slow mo. This is unrealism. It's dues and don'ts made corporeal. I'm going to take a step face a gun. No one's haggling with her IQ address. I'd rise from the mat, study my cam record deja vu, and artistly that elements such as these. So that is my poem, and finally in us. I'm going to read the poem by someone else in the book, who I met that summer but not there. I met her on the East Coast, even though she's from the West Coast her name is Vicki birdies. And she's wonderful. She told me, oh, you're going to community of writers later in the summer, you're going to love it and she was right, of course. And I wish he had been there just because I love her and she was so amazing to meet her before her poem is called 61 Ford sunliner. And it's just interesting that it's also about a car. Here we go. The main shaft. I say, it's got gunk. He doesn't wipe it. My pilot bears the springs under his seat. I was once a tri-star vehicle. He procured my metal, my body on rear view. He revved my transmission cannery yellow. I tore it until I didn't. The gas gets blue this cover, this trunk try. He ignored my failing rack and pinion. When he puts a sign in a night back window, I won't be down and glittered blue. Any passenger can see he is watching for automatic restoration. He's looking for replacement carriage, his mother, maker. She was a near solid gasket, an original model. He was her firstborn, but he came too early and looked too much like his father, even though he had spark plugs. Her new boyfriend had a solid differential. That man had the kind of mustache you don't pass up. She hopped in his Chevy so fast, my driver didn't know she was gone. I could be his first, but I won't be his last. I'm looking to you buy and sell all the time. When the oil pan leaks, do you want a new metal to see a reflection? Just look at him. He's already following another galaxy or a Cadillac. They're chrome so clean he can see himself. Thank you. I want to thank all of the writers and poets here tonight. What an extraordinary collection of poems from the collection and also your own. And it's just such an inspiring, all the different voices is so inspiring to hear. So I also want to make note that the collection can be purchased at Heyday Books, which is heydaybooks.com. As well as you can look at the more information on the community of writers site that Laura Howard has put up in the chat. I encourage you to purchase a book for yourself or a friend as we launch into our poetry month all month long. And I want to also say that we have another program to kind of bookend our month. And it's called No Poetry, No Peace, and that's on April 26 at 6 o'clock PM and that's on our website at my library.org. So now we'd like to open up to the audience for questions. And so put your questions in the chat. And Pam Troy, our events assistant will read off your questions. And once again, much thanks to Heyday Books and to Laura Howard and all of our guest readers and poets tonight. This spectacular. So, as Laura said, anybody who has questions or comments should put them into the chat. Most of the comments have just been compliments on the on the poems. That's from some of our participants. Perhaps I actually have one and it's a question I generally have for every poet. Is there a moment in any of your lives where you knew you were going to be a poet a poet is kind of a special kind of writer. It's one of the most I've always thought one of the most demanding forms of writing. Is there a moment when you realized you were going to be a poet and not a novelist or a short story writer that that was going to primarily be what you are. Maybe it's it's kind of a. I can, you know, I can say a word about it. Which is it actually I'm stealing this from my friend another really fine poet Joe Malar. He said, you know, if you're if you're on a ride with your kids in the back backseat, and you're kind of going through a farm or something like that. And you want to know which of the three kids, the poet, it's the one who's sitting in the back, you know, looking out the window and saying, Apple Snapple grapple fapple. You know, so I think, you know, it's at an early age for me and I think it's true. Oh, it says, you fall in love with word. Um, it's, it's a, it's about the language, ultimately, whether you're telling a story or, you know, writing concrete poetry or writing more postmodern poetry, you fall in love with the language, and it is the medium for people who are in love with language. I think when you realize that, then, you know, you, you know, you're stuck with being a poet. Well, we have kind of a whimsical question Emily sellers wants to know to as asking as asking did you put out cookies and milk for the poetry elves. Or, you know, that could lead to another question what, what would you do what's your version of putting out what do you what is there's something you do that inspires your that can inspire you, or is poetry simply not something that you can lure in. They can't, it can't be enticed with cookies and milk. I hadn't answered. I'm really hoping someone else will have an answer to that because then I'm going to use it myself as well. You know, I was going to say, if we don't have any more questions, if, if anyone would like to read another poem, got an extra one in your pocket, please share it with us, either one of your own, or one from the book. Heather you have a book coming out in about two days, you should read something from your book that's about to come out, or plug your book. You do have one one question from Laura Howard. Okay. She says for Margaret, I'm curious if you could speak more about your thinking about computers and jokes and how you approach writing this. Absolutely. Thanks so much for your question. So in another part of my life I do a lot of research around robots and sort of cultural difference on and media so at that time I was, you know, learning a lot about robots and some of the history of the robot. And as a poet, I wanted to write more poetry about robots but I didn't feel like there was permission to get really science fictional and it might be just my identity as an Asian American woman a queer woman I just, I didn't feel access to that. So, but then I just, you know spaces like the community of writers really help open that up as well as other poetry spaces. So, I also helped develop a computer game on the Turing test at Berkeley at the time. So I work also a new media art and so that tests involved a lot of chat scripts. And so, part of the work around the computers and the robots and poetry intersection was drawing from some of the computer language and seeing it as poetic, as well as seeing poetry as also like code or programming. And there's a question from Mr Moog. Is there such a thing as a poetic moment. And I guess that's that's kind of for everybody. I like to think that any moment has the potential to be poetic both in the sense that it may end up in a poem later on. And I find that this often happens things that at the time don't strike me with very much intensity at all. Come back to me. And for some reason, stay with me keep bothering me until I put them in a poem sort of make me do that. And then taking that in a different sense. I think I like to think that reading poetry and writing poetry help us become people who are more inclined to notice the poetic. And so they change us not just when we're doing those things explicitly, but they they change the way we experience things in life. I like to think that I wouldn't say that happens all the time, but I do think there is an effect there. A question from Brett Hall Jones. Can you. Oh, I'm sorry, did I. Oh, no, sorry, I was going to say something but go ahead, go ahead, please, please. No, just just to the question of whether there's a poetic moment for me personally I feel like, if I have a poetic moment, which I do that probably means I will not write a poem about that poetic moment. The moment is this poetic moment that that's like poetry but it refuses translation for me personally so. But there are moments that don't seem poetic in which something happens with the language that then lends itself to be to being translated into a text, a poem that then produces the poetry. But yeah, it's just interesting because there's something about like this resistance of the poetic moment to turn itself into a poem like it already happened so why try to replicate it, whereas when you're writing the poem. Something happens that could only happen in that mode with the language on the page and that well that is the most poetic moment perhaps. Yeah. That's what I want to say. Thank you. I have a question for Sean young. Because you started writing in English I'm just wondering if you are also writing in Chinese are you going back and forth are you combining languages or what motivates you to write in English versus to write in Chinese. Thank you. This. Thank you. This makes me nervous. It's like I'm studying English and practicing this kind of impromptu speech again when I was in grade school, middle school actually. I started reading, actually memorizing Chinese classical poetry before I could know the words, understand the words my grandfather was a great fan of poetry and he always wanted to be a poet. So he forced me to recite those poems memorized these those poems. I didn't understand their meaning. And that, I just hear the like the, like what Ken said that the apple grapple snapple stuff the sound of the music of the language. And that is why even when I transformed my writing into English, that still remains that love for the musicality of the language, the syntax, the rhythm, so on and so forth. I am writing essays in Chinese, mainly, not poetry. I find it very hard to find my way into contemporary Chinese poetry writing because my year is so attuned to this English language. And that is complicated. And the surrounding. I'm in with talking to my friends and mentors and structures. It's English city environment, and I hope I will return to writing poetry in Chinese when I go back sometimes in future. Great, thank you. Well, I just want to thank everyone once again for this gorgeous collection. Why to these rocks, please everyone take a look on the website at either community writers or heyday books and purchase your book and just savor every page of it. I hope that the muses or muses continue to speak to you and that that inspiration flows through you onto the page, and also have a great poetry months I know they're there all kinds of interesting and inspiring events going on through the month at our various doors, and other through other organizations so please enjoy and share your work and your inspirations. And let's just say, pan do you want to open up for a minute and we'll just say hello and a goodbye and everybody. Everybody on mute, and just take a moment to say bye to each other say hi and by and glad that everybody came for this event. You spend the rest of April celebrating this month. And enjoying poetry and appreciating poetry. Thank you all that was wonderful. Yeah. Thank you everybody. Thank you, thank you. gratitude gratitude to everybody. It's wonderful. Hey, hi. Okay, I'm going to close the doors. Thank you. Night everybody. Hi. Thank you again. Take care.