 Please to welcome you to our program for the book launch of Orphic Paris with author Henri Cole in conversation with Professor Mark Calkins. We are very pleased that we are co-sponsoring this event with City Lights Bookstore and Publishers and very pleased to welcome Peter Maravellis Program Director of City Lights and Cassie Dugan who are here with us and who will be selling books after our program. Now we before we begin I'd like to find out how many of you are new to the Mechanics Institute. Who's never been here before? Welcome. The En Vannu on Mechanics Institute and we hope that this will be one of many visits here. First of all I'd like to invite you to come back on a Wednesday at noon time and take the free tour of the Mechanics Institute and our incredible library which is on the second and third floors. Also you'll see our International Chess Club which is right down the hallway and also you'll get an introduction to our history. Of course we were founded in 1854 so we have a long exciting history here in the city of San Francisco. Also under this incredible in this under one roof in this incredible building here at 57 Post Street we have author programs on a weekly basis, our Cinema Lit film series on Friday night, the library offers workshops on writing, writer support groups, book clubs, Mark is doing his incredible Proust group and also the chess club with its tournaments, lectures, chess for women, children, all ages and all backgrounds so we hope that you'll come take the tour and then become a member and become part of our incredible vital cultural community here. So tonight is very special we're very pleased to welcome Henri Kohl here for the first time. Orphic Paris is a poet's view of his favorite city it is part diary, memoir and essay. Henri is a world citizen he was born in Fukua, Japan and also raised in Virginia and travels often to Paris. He received his BA from the College of William and Mary in 78 and MA from the University of Wisconsin and an MFA from Columbia University. His volumes of poetry include nothing to declare poems, pierced the skin selected poems, Blackbird and Wolves, the 2008 recipient of Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and Middle Earth which received the 2004 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Camargo Foundation in Cassis France, the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He currently teaches in the Department of Literature at Claremont Mechanic College. And Professor Mark Cawkins is the lecturer faculty in the Department of Comparative and World Literature at the College of Liberal and Creative Arts at San Francisco State University and as I mentioned before he is the leader of our Proust Group here at the Mechanics Institute which is now in its 12th year. So please welcome Henri Kohl and Professor Mark Cawkins. Good evening and welcome to San Francisco. Tonight I as a Proustian I'm bringing a lot of Proustian baggage in a sense with me tonight. I wonder if we could I'd like to talk about bees tonight. You talk about bees in Orphan Paris. I like to talk about Orpheus a little bit. Fables perhaps. You mentioned La Fontaine. I teach La Fontaine in a class at state. If we get to it maybe the relationship between the photography in Orphan Paris and the word and of course a way to read some excerpts from Orphan Paris. So one of the first things you say about bees is the hives in the Jardin de Luxembourg and you describe them as looking like Victorian houses. I thought San Francisco Victorian houses. So welcome to San Francisco. There are many presences I thought in in Orphan Paris. There's some explicit presences for example your family your intimate friendships. Many poets you mentioned I think most notably Baudelaire, Rilke, Bishop and Plath as well as visual artists. I think there's also I found some implicit presences like Roland Barthes. There's a real warmth in Orphan Paris. A generosity and intimacy that I associate with some of the late Barthes. I thought of W.G. Sebald and his use of text and pictures and I also had the sense that there were some Proustian topoi in this book. You mentioned that one of your first memories is dunking a croissant in your grandmother's cafe au lait. You want to say anything more about that memory? No. It was in Marseille. I was a little boy and my parents were visiting from a military base to my mother's parents and amazingly I have a video film of that time that my father was a real kind of photography nut. So he filmed a lot of these things. So I have video... well actually some of the images in the book are stills from the videos that my father took. Oh very interesting. So I'm going to go off plan. I'm very interested in the fact that some of the images in the book are from family videos. That's amazing. How did you come about going through that material and deciding to include it? Well my sister some years ago, my sister Patricia, some years ago took all these family videos and she made DVDs of them. So I had them. I could just watch them on my laptop and I went through them all. When I was making the book as well as you know there are a hundred images in the book and about 80 of them are from my little blackberry telephone and some are by a friend Susan Unterberg and then the others are stills from these videos that my father made. Was there a principle of selection? What images you decided to include? No. The actual conception of the book was meant to... I'm flattered by your mentioning Zeybald and Proust. I don't really think my name should be in the same sentence with them but I was born in Japan and there are these forms in Japanese literature. One is called a Haipun and one is called the Zewitsu. Are those poetic forms? Yes. Well the Haipun is a diary form in which you make an entry in a diary and you write down to a lyric moment of a Haiku or a Tanka. So my strategy in the book was to use the photographs as the sort of lyric moment and the prose diary to be the diary part that would be in the Japanese form. In the Zewitsu it's a loosely connected group of personal essays very often made out of fragments and very often they deal with time and the passing of the seasons and so those were sort of the models that were more uppermost in my mind. They were these Eastern models which I was applying to the setting of Paris. Did you begin with the photographs of men right from there? The photographs... I would say no. I mean I have hundreds and hundreds of Blackberry photographs in Paris but it's possible some of the memory... Well there is one moment where I take a... I amazingly have a video or photograph of my first ride on a boat on the set and that's in the book. That's probably the only occasion where I actually wrote to the image but I like the counterpoint between the images and that you know some of this was on the New Yorkers literary blog the page turner and when you were putting something on the on a literary blog on the internet they were really quite splendid color photographs but for the purposes of the book we made the conscious decision to make them more documentary like and to sort of sublimate them and push the text forward so they have a whole different relationship in a way they're not pretty in the same way they're kind of more hands and they're relatively small and they're very small and some of them are you know it's hard to make out what's in them but unlike with the Zabald model I was certainly aware of the Zabald model I think my favorite book of his I mean I read all the books you know a long time ago when they came out well actually I met him once in Berlin and he was I had the privilege of sitting cross on a lunch table and he was a very very lovely gentleman and I had already you know read all of his books but we had very little to say to each other we were both so deferential to each other and then and then he was dead but have you read his poetry I have read his poetry in fact I had the privilege of publishing a little bit of it in the New Republic when I was the poetry editor there they were past the posthumous poems that were hanging around but the book that I really loved was the immigrants which also I know you had mentioned the rings of Saturn in our communication but both books use this you know this in image as a counterpoint right I think in his case you can actually say a little more about the image as a counterpoint as a pin as you see that happening in cybold well in his as I understand it in his book or in his books he photocopied his images a hundred times to make them to push them as far away to make them unrecognizable almost and they're just there and they do seem to have you know an archival yes sense I don't think minor archival I mean minor sort of prettier and and they're not illustrations but I think they're meant to they're meant to be a counterpoint emotionally in some way you know I mean I think they're I mean they work differently in different places I think you know the the family narrative is an important one to me in the book and so those you know those family images are important and yet I just wanted that to be a kind of backdrop right you know to the the grown-up adult narrative yeah I think you were successful with that thank you so you mentioned there is a part as I mentioned the you described the the hives in the Jardin de Luxembourg yes and then later on you have a little bit more extended development about bees and about Sylvia Plath's bee poems heard the bee sequence for those who don't know the bee and Horace the in odes came up with this metaphor of a poet is like a bee that goes from different flowers to flowers and you know takes something from this flower takes something from this far but the poet ultimately goes back and makes his or her own honey so to speak although has taken from the bee takes something rough yeah you know from the flowers and then refines it into gold and for Horace and for Petrarch elaborates this this metaphor is does as does Montaigne that those flowers that the bee sucks from are actually like other authors and this metaphor in in in the Renaissance in the career of the ancients and the modern you know should poets follow ancient models like Homer and Virgil which have such prestige or should the modern European poet do something that's modern and true to something contemporary so the that model of the Apian model is yeah you can take a little bit of from ancient authors take a little bit of nectar from various ancient authors but make it yourself so there's a kind of like inter it's kind of an intertextual metaphor I think that's interesting so yeah so you you talk about a lot of poets and you cite their poetry and I wondered if there's the relationship of you as a and you identify yourself and I hope you can read as a kind of a what you do is kind of like what a bee does but in particular in terms of relation to sucking the nectar of other poets and well I don't think of the bees that way actually I mean I don't I I think of the bees in relation to the writing process in the sense that the bees are collecting something raw as poets take human experience which is raw and then they assemble it into language poetry being the highest form of the highest art form of controlled language and the bees likewise you know take the pollen and the stuff of the flowers you know I think of the flowers I think of the flowers more as feelings than as individual there's a lot of writing about flowers in the book a whole bunch of writing about flowers and I think when I see flowers I see them to stand in for feelings you might say so you could say the bees take the feelings and then but I I do admit there is something parasitic about the life of the writer and you know who feeds off I would never characterize what a bee does is is parasitic to the flower but yeah yeah yeah so should I read something about the bees there's this little passage you know it's very strange for me to read a paragraph here and read a paragraph there in the book because the way I conceived of the book in a way was for it to proceed by digression and that the digressions are are not pointless but they they're meant to seem a little pointless but then in the end the book has a kind of call collage effect so that when you get to the end you know the parts of it come together there are about eight or ten different we mentioned a little narrative of my mother's French family from Marseille and then there's the little narrative of my my life in Paris and the people that I meet there are two two people that figure in the book very eminently for me one of them is my 92 year old translator Claire Malru who was a wonderful poet and the translator oh from Dickinson to Stevens to Bishop etc and then there's this really lovely man I was fortunate to meet named James Lord who was a friend of artists and a biographer of artists he wrote actually there's a book there's a film that's just come out called what is it called final time final time it's just come out and it starts this army hammer in bit from the what was that call me by your name film an army plays James Lord sit and he's sitting for Jacometti and he goes for 17 or 18 something about you it's lovely what you write about James Lord could you I could you identify him a little bit for sure well he's a he's now dead he died about 10 11 years ago and but he arrived in Paris he would grown up in Connecticut he was sort of a I think a Wesleyan dropout and he arrived in Paris as a soldier a slightly limping soldier at the door of Picasso in Paris and Picasso took him in and befriended him and he has a magnificent book called Picasso and Dora which is a kind of fictionalized account of his relationship with them but he also has he came to know about tooth and Jacometti and all these you know early painters that were working in Paris and he wrote about them all and these kind of magnificent books which are probably all out of print now but you can get them very cheap on Amazon and he befriended me or I befriended him I was given a connection to him through my editor who and James sort of took me into his life over this year that I was there and you know we spent a lot of time talking about paintings and in his living room you know he would always sit on the sofa and I would sit on this adjacent seat and he would drink a Coca-Cola and I would have a scotch and behind him hung this amazing portrait of him by Jacometti so this film that's just come out is about these 18s he wrote a book called sitting for Jacometti or some tiny little book about he must have rushed home and you know kept a complex elaborate narrative notebook of all the conversations and all of this was you know must it's used as a screenplay really for this film so I recommend it to you if you want to get a little taste of it certainly I think James would have been very happy to be you know to have Armie Hammer play him but James was a handsome man too he died in his 80s there's a there's a whole episode of the book written about him and after he died I received a letter amazingly from him and it took about 12 days for the letter to reach me and you know he died I think just of a heart attack but the letter was just an update and included in the letter was I always brought him flowers whenever we had supper and he made a like a Matisse like colored pencil drawing of these flowers and said you gave me real flowers and and all I can give you are these you know hand-drawn flowers and he inserted and amazingly it arrived after he was dead after the New York Times to find an abituary of them so one of the 17 parts of the book is a portrait of him you want to read some of that we've been digressing a little bit we you were gonna read about bees but where is that do you know I don't know I don't know where anything is in the book I have to say also I'm about to turn 62 years old and I have nine books of poetry but I have never published prose and I feel like an imposter reading prose for that reason but you know I had the sense sometimes that this was a lovely prose poem oh well thank you that's very nice it was certainly you know it certainly was hard to write prose is just so hard to write because there's so many more words wait wait wait I have to I have to hear about that tell me about tell me about prose having so tell me about prose having so many more words well or the way the book is actually conceived is like a lyric poem which is the you know in a lyric poem you take uncommon disparate things and push them together and you try and create something fresh something new you try to move towards some fresh knowledge of some sort and that's the way this is done I mean there's not a lot of exposition connecting anything there's not a through narrative in a way it's just a book about a conversation with myself about 15 different things that I hope will be you know interesting these are one of them flowers are one of them my family is one of them loneliness and solitude or one of them homosexuality is one of them there are you know maybe a dozen things you might think of the book is like a carpet through which there are you know 12 different colored stripes and those stripes all together make the carpet that's what I wanted how I wanted it to work I think I see that yeah so given that you feel uncomfortable taking these passages out of oh yeah out of context should I just read the 10 things yeah I mean how are we doing we've got about 10 minutes before we open for question okay I'm sorry you want to start reading from page 164 okay I think Paris is the city of the beloved we talked about that the last passage of the book is a kind of ecstatic praise praise poem you might say for Paris I mean a praise poem praise passage it's not a poem at all this picture my mother was a passport photo she's beautiful my mother died maybe 10 years ago and after she died I started going to Paris three or four times a year just because I loved being around the language it was the kind of mothering presence and that's really how the book got made was just through those very frequent visits and beginning to make notations so I think of Paris I think Paris is the city of the beloved some say a man goes mad if he is without love it is said with such a childlike simplicity the subject and the object to making a little clump of letters to support the M and create a memorable sound package it seems to defy the need for further explanation Jim Baudelaire his father died on the sixth birthday who stepfather sent him away on long voyage when he was 20 who lived for his writing and desired to derange conventions who was the first poet to write melancholic conversational poems about the demons and perversions of his life and yet whose art shrine art shines with an organic perfection of form Jim Roca though he found Paris oppressive his poems speak in a low calm voice he says in his book of ours let everything to let everything happen to you beauty and terror just keep going no feeling is final Jim James Lord who my last saw at the Hotel de Cuyol redone into a whorehouse he complained the corridors and shiny marble and golden with Rolls Royces and Jaguars with big hood ornaments waiting out front still his friendship like soup meat and wine nurtured the poet of iron goodbye sweetie he said his gift of friendship not accompanied by any claim the gem the poet and translator Claire Malru an alchemist of language whose translations transport transfer and transpose poetry from English into French and find a balance between passion and reason empathy and analysis blur and precision gem the kisses Parisians give one another touching their cheeks and allowing men to do the same though they never lock their arms and embrace gem the dogs and cats in the neighborhood as numerous as the children writing this now I can hear a litter weeping for a bowl of milk gem the silver splashing splashing sand river shimmering against its bank its banks in sunlight and at night with street lamps that sparkle like diamonds on the murky water surface gem Parisians strange obsession with their livers drinking no cold beverages with ice and keeping the windows close tight to avoid the current dare gem the expression j'yvée lâcher les vêtres les vitrines meaning literally to lick the windows while window shopping and LA a côté de saipom meaning that she is next to her pumps when she is not feeling quite like herself gem the sympathetic oysters sea urchins and crustaceans displayed on platters of ice outdoors on the avenues like vulnerable paralyzed edible artworks gem the BBC affects that Parisians deploy when speaking English with heavy action accents I shall see you in a fortnight at fontaine bleu gem the a gliss de la Madeleine because of Mary Magdalene whose boat without sales is said to have landed like a migrants at the mouth of the room before she took refuge in a mountain forest cave gem the cures with octaves octaves a figure in the book black currant liquor topped off with white burgundy at the cafe were stoned in winter sunlight overlooking the Luxembourg garden gem and Julie who lived through the Nazi occupation of Paris as a Jew and who never fully wrecked recovered from a broken heart after her brother died we drank chicory together and she was kind to me gem the little wooden matchsticks aloo met with rose colored combusted tips which I like the gas stove with to make cafe au lait in the morning gem the colonnades of gnarled trees at the Jardin de plant with their big scarred trunks and the red poppies scattered everywhere with bumblebees hugging their statements gem the handwritten brasserie menus the cursive writing less rigid and box-like than print with the feminine flourish like a bougeau gem the electrician who speaks with the heavy Marseille Marseille accent like Uncle Gabriel and who believes that Americans put ketchup on everything gem the myriad shades of blue and the flower shops of gray in the sulking sky of gray in the sulking sky and the primary colors in the ubiquitous in the ubiquitous posies in the squares gem the sweet cherries cavallion melons morel mushrooms and white asparagus at the Marseille at the Marseille gem the flountains that make only a little sound when you walk by gem how things change only slowly despite the endless groan of construction and refurbishing gem the peace beauty and sense of calm that allow me to contemplate the lives of my maternal ancestors gem the Buddhist monks and the Mormon missionaries Aaron and Judd who hoped to convert me and with deep blue eyes almost did when we prayed on our knees together gem Gabrielle Michel and Raphael the lifeguards at the municipal pool who tried to revive the swimmer who suffered a heart attack were they the archangels I dove to the bottom and retrieved as goggles drifting there gem the railway cars spewing marvelous whiffs of steam at the San Lizar station in the Impressionist paintings at the Musée d'Orsay where color and light achieve an abstract vision gem the decrepit elderly who inched down the avenues with two canes to prop them up who impose on nobody and nothing but time gem la closerie de Lila's were poets once met regularly eating poached had had it with spinach I translated a quatrain that Octavia Octavia pause wrote there quote to most to the most romantic corner in Paris where I left my heart to my illusion between the glasses of red wine and quail breasts I leave this epigram full of affection gem the red clay tennis courts of Roland Garrows where I watched my favorite player powerful and restrained past his prime yet elegant like a god in his twilight gem the Napoleonic civil code title five chapter six on marriage and the respective rights and duties of married persons updated to include gays and lesbians and gem Octavia searching affectionate funny still finding his place for a time I lived here where the call of life is so strong my soul was colored by it instead of worshiping a creator or man I cared fully for myself and felt no guilt and confess nothing and in this place I wrote I was nourish and I grew and may I have to thank him for switching things up at the last minute and asking me to read that because I didn't want to read it and actually I loved reading it so thank you well this did not go how I planned but I'm so glad um there is there is a final image after after what you just read what is that a picture of these two people that's my grandfather yeah and that's actually my older brother everyone will think it's me but I used it because because there's I you know I only really met my grandfather once or twice and I love the image that's one of the stills from the video where they're walking down the street of Marseille I must be about two years old in that picture and your grandfather how does he his place at the end of the book well I don't know it's is it sentimental my my translator Claire didn't want me to put that picture there but because it's she thought it softened it but I I don't know hey the book for me you know we're living at a really course moment in American history and I wanted the book to sort of be tender in a way that I feel our days are not too full of tenderness so that's probably why the book is picture is there is the final little note of tenderness I think I think tenderness was really effectively thank you yeah it's it's hard you know in poems when you're writing poems you can write praise lyrics but it's hard to you know make a living just writing praise lyrics you you know you become you know you become a kind of you know you become a kind of caricature yourself very quickly but it's a little you know this is the book this is kind of like a love poem to Paris I suppose so it represents a side of my personality but doesn't get a much chance to be in the poem I think which is why I feel it's an important book for me I'm honored that this is how I got to know you oh well good yeah the poems are a real downer compared to the book yeah I have to say that though this you know this book does have shadows through it yes a lot of time is spent at Montparnasse honoring the dead thank you I'm glad this did not go how I play I'd like to open it up to questions I first off I hope that was interesting I have no idea it was what we were gonna do and how to do it but I'm happy to try and answer any questions coming around with a microphone coming away coming away yes you have a copy there just made a statement about thinking about this last image and that perhaps it's softened it and I just wondered if you could talk more about those thoughts I think it was because of the words I grew that I wanted to show a little boy with his grandfather I think that's really it's that simple that is my grandfather you know I was dandled on his knee when I was a tiny little boy he died when he was in the 1940s my mother's grandfather my mother's father so in terms of other images oh well it's you know all the pic you know the pictures that are film stills they're all they all have something about their coloring and in there well they're these black and white but the the color versions and they're all slightly out of focus and they're all you know they're vintage like and they they you know they exude nostalgia and I think nostalgia I guess I feel I feel as a poet that nostalgia is something one let's guard against constantly I do feel that because I fear sentimentality so there's a risk with that tenderness to become sentimental yes I think there always is and there's nothing will kill a poem faster than sentimentality I mean I suppose there's a whole genre fiction writing that is just sort of romantic and you know romantic sexual novels but I think that's what I mean I wanted there always to be you know the great thing about those deep poems by Sylvia Plath that she wrote in a week at the end of her life is that they're very hard edged and I wanted this book to have a hard edge but for that not to exclude tenderness as a presiding emotion in the book and there's tenderness for Mr. Lord there's tenderness for Claire my translator there's tenderness toward Octave and it's kind of a reciprocal emotion because I feel I'm being entranced by Paris you know it's in that sense that I wanted to call the book or Orphic Paris it's just that the Orphic is an entrancing power the way Orphic is used to fly or to entrance I feel Paris is a kind of entrancing force so I allowed myself at the end of the book a kind of ecstatic gush of all this all this the word love repeated I've never used the word love in French did you discover anything new about your family in going back and looking at these photos and reflecting was there anything surprising that you rediscovered about your past and your family well I just it feels the film is just filming with all my parents on yeah yeah on what way just that they you know my parents had five children they just had so little I think that would it just fills me with all what do you ecstatically hate in that there's ecstatically hate rudeness rudeness rudeness rude waiters they're tired of the tourists yeah that's hard to escape that sort of tired of the tourist thing I tease clear I gave her a no button you know you push that the clear of my translator I tease her because I'm always saying to her favorite word is no you know so I gave her a button that you push it and it says no in 10 15 20 different ways I hate the word no you know one of my favorite words in English language is yes no but you must have had so many impressions how did you ask a writer or just as a subject approaching these different elements how did you organize all your impressions because there must have been so many well I wrote them in I wrote there's 17 parts and I 17 and I wrote them in parts you know I mean but in you know like one part in six months so they were really and I perfected that part and then I have to say I didn't it wasn't until I'd written five or six parts that I began to see kind of what I was doing or what I wanted to do they become more thematically focused as the book proceeds I showed them all to Claire my 92 year old friend and you know she kind of went over the book is coming out in French as well in the summer and we wanted the book to not you know there's a whole kind of writing about France maybe that is suitable for Americans but not suitable for but I wanted French people to like it as well I mean for it to be interesting to French people because it's really celebrating their their culture and their landscape so there were certain you know like there are certain things that she would cut out because of that factor like food actually there's almost no writing about food in the book we agreed that I would not write about food because did you want to write about food well there there's one passage about food in the right a long sequence on the Christmas Eve or Christmas dinner and New Year's Eve or these big you know epochal dinner night so one of them I write about that I was your family yes with my French family my French family is now all dead the uncles that I met and knew all dead like my parents but in my 30s I went to France for the first time and had these amazing meals with you know I got to know my uncle Gabrielle and my uncle Mayuse who were very old country might say so yeah you know as I proceeded I realized I had to bring things in that had burned you know I had to keep the thread coming back in a certain case but I didn't know that when I was starting in that makes sense I only realized that as I went along first writes about retroactive unity retroactive unity you know in a sense of there was some kind of that's what critics provide you know I feel you know I know you know that when you're in when you're writing you're in a sort of close focus mode you're not in that sort of satellite mode of seeing everything globally when I'm writing I'm really in this so it's very often hard to you know to when I wrote them I put asterisk when I wrote the path I put asterisk between the episodes to provide breaks but with their only spaces in the book and that was an interesting editorial decision they didn't want you know those kinds of breaks and I think they made the right choice I really am happy with the way it flows more I think there's a little extra space to a degree where they written in order the parts they were written in the order they appear and I wrote that last I mean I wrote that last episode as the finish you know I feel like I could write another book just the same idea just the same thing about you know with 12 different things you know doing the same thing just with different subject matter we're like proofs visit I was telling him I'm embarrassed that because he's a proof scholar that I have you one of the things to do in Paris is to visit the proofs bedroom and I've never done that in all these years I have nothing to say about that yes I wanted to make one comment and then ask a question to it the comment is about the wonderful passage you read I was constantly hearing echoes of Walt Whitman yes and the reason I mean it's it's a piece of an anaphora where every line begins with the same words and then it's it sounds like free verse so I kind of wondered if you had written it in mind well well I think whenever you write long lines and anaphora just for those of you that aren't poetry people anaphora is repetition at the beginning of the line epistrophe is at the end of the line and I mean the two people to think you either think of Whitman or you think of the Old Testament you know those are the two things and he was thinking of that certainly Whitman was yes exactly so and also because it is praise you know instead of praise of the earth praise of the it's praise this is praise of a setting so yes thank you I mean that but that's sort of like Proust and was able that it's ridiculous for me to claim any relationship to these people and here's my follow-up it's about the translation one of the reasons that last passage works so beautifully is the transition from the French anaphora to English so in the translation is the French change to English well that's a good question I haven't seen the translation I guess it is it must be right for it to work no oh maybe it isn't no maybe it isn't I actually don't know I'll have to ask I feel embarrassed that I didn't ask her that there were there were tiny little edits that she did make for the French audience but if there was a point at which I just yielded to her that I trust you but that's a good question that that's a very I'm trying to think if there's anything else in the book like that that might apply in the same way yes yes it wouldn't yeah it wouldn't I am not bilingual you know I speak French like a very intelligent six-year-old well I grew up my father was in the military which is how he came to meet my mother after the war and my father retired in northern Virginia so I went to college there and there was a poet in residence there and I just you know took a class with him gosh now 40 years have gone by I can hardly believe it I love the poet Elizabeth Bishop when I was a young man I love the poet James Merrill there are two two poets in Boston Louise Glick and Frank Fadar who are sort of my favorite living American poets now nice to see all these hands thank you the photographs that you used as a poet what do you think I mean even with Ceball that I've always wondered this does it enhance the poetry for the reader because you're using your own imagination while you're while you're reading this and then there's the photographs yeah which sort of I mean I haven't seen the book I'm sure yes you know in the next 10 15 days I'm giving a lot of readings and in each case I was asked if I wanted to show the images when I was reading and I said no so I guess bottom level I want the writing to be able to list exists without the pictures but I think the pictures do add something and I don't know that I can say exactly what except maybe I think the way the book is written is that it sort of expands and contracts expands and contracts sort of like breathing and the pictures I think you know are part of that breathing process they give a little you know they give a little respite from the intent did the book is so highly descriptive you know that it's not and it's not like there's this exciting sexy narrative you know so you know it's not this there's not a lot of speed and the right reading you know it's intense reading and I think the pictures are meant to just give some air some some breath space in your reading I just it resonated a lot with my feelings about Paris too and many people's feelings about Paris and I'm just curious about the reflections on Paris as a like kind of a human invention I mean the Emperor Julian called it his beloved Lutetia you know so it's been loved like we love it for two thousand years why why there why that place it kind of is astounding yes well I I do feel I should add that one of the things that makes Paris special in addition to its supreme beauty you know the buildings the river the avenues is the fact that the historical past is documented I mean I'm always amazed by the plaques that I come across that you know a young soldier was shot on this corner a member of the resistance was held captive here I mean it's amazing or that thousands of school children were shipped from this very school to you know the camps I mean that is part of the that is part of what gives it in an intensity to me it isn't just about aesthetic beauty it's it is this juxtaposition you know and I know it was from my mother you know in writing about my Marseille about the what yeah it's hard America you can't feel it in your feet and even after walking ten miles I'd also say I'd also say the Parisian sky the sky the sky the way the clouds are and the gray yeah yeah yeah I mean it's an excellent question and Americans seem to be there is there is an extraordinary I mean for me they're part of it is the language that I I do come I come to love the language and I try and read as much as I can in French and I know that's connected to the fact of my mother my mother spent her whole life trying to be an American woman you know 50 years she spent trying to be an American woman and then in the very last couple years of her life she completely regressed to the French language again so that's part of my attachment I'm sure to to the language anyway any other questions how are we going on time we're winding up yeah well I think if there are no more questions I think it's time to go back to the past bring it to the present taste the beauty the tenderness the extraordinary inspiration that Paris has to offer so I invite you to come up and buy a book Orphic Paris and to meet Henri Cole and to talk with professor Mark Hawkins about Proust or anything else bees orifice Orpheus and join us for our next program merci et bonsoir