good evening thank you for coming i'm henry hughes and i teach literature and writing here at western and uh for 20 years i've been blessed to have as a wonderful colleague friend and fellow poet david hargraves our featured writer tonight sure that's a plus

people aren't sure what to do at poetry readings thank you becca so david is a pisces uh born and raised in detroit michigan i went to michigan state and did his masters and phd in linguistics at the university of oregon he's one of the world's experts in nepal basa a sino-tibetan language spoken by the noir people of the kathmandu valley in nepal david has spent a lot of time in nepal he did a superb translation of dergala shrestha one of the leading poets in nepal and i really recommend this book too it's a beautiful beautiful collection um you know tonight you really you're going to see feel experience a lot of things from kathmandu it's interesting one of david visited my class this week and william he made a great comment you were talking about david's poetry kind of mingling the sacred and the ordinary right the sacred and the profane it's so true because there's all these rich traditions of hinduism and buddhism and there's also just kind of the grime and noise and action of the street and i think david's work really captures that so beautifully so i'll look forward to more poems like that tonight um david is a linguist and many of these poems are informed by the science of language but also by a sensibility there's a really deep reader and a thinker and a writer i always find kind of a skepticism about language and david's poetry languages comes sometimes inability right to express who we are and yet there's absolutely a love for language a lover's embrace at one point he says he's reborn a luscious fern or redwood trunk thrusting skyward language is always kind of finding itself in a hope and a new life i love that about his work these poems examine life and the perceived self what is a self he asks sometimes i think these poems are very grounded but sometimes i feel dis dislocated too that's a beautiful kind of paradox a tension that goes on in his work and they kind of inform us and then confuse us at the same time and i always ask like how do we know these things and so i think almost every poem is kind of an epistemological quest in itself and i love that about his work david's poetry is also just sounds good it's rich the imagery is so luscious i mean whether it's like detroit or kathmandu or nature he's a really good nature poet an amateur naturalist a professional birder this man knows his birds we were just out fishing a couple weeks ago and uh i just i look like i don't even know what it was maybe an osprey and david immediately recognized a white-tailed kite at a distance we approached confirmed the sighting we have some murders here it was very exciting and this kind of detail and love for nature also informs his work this is a poet who's smart sometimes a smart ass he's punny he's humorous he's also serious and heartbreaking he's honest about loss and desire and intimacy and joy it's a real voice here intelligent and felt he's such a fine poet please welcome david hargraves

well that's going to be difficult to live up to thank you henry um henry first of all is probably the person i should most thank for being up here at all he has been a a friend and a tireless supporter of people just putting it out there just trying to write whatever whatever you can put together you you try and write it you get feedback you just keep at it and keep at it there's really no other way and henry has done that for me he's done it for students and i can't can't thank you enough henry there's quite a few other people i want to thank before i begin first of all paula my division oh she's right up front here she's been super uh supportive in getting this running and and i again thank you very much

the cover of this book if there ever was a book to judge by its cover this is the one okay and i have to thank natalie laswell for her wonderful art and giving me the permission to use this art on the front so thank you thank you natalie um i don't know who's on the live stream here but i also want to thank larry moore the publisher of broadstone books who really took a chance he read my work said we're going to give it a go and he's been also very very supportive and i appreciate that now the last thing since this is live stream and i'm not quite sure what that means exactly but it is now roughly what six o'clock in kathmandu right now is it roughly all right so maybe some of my friends would be getting up early i certainly wouldn't wish that on them but they but they may be getting up early to watch this so uh i also want to thank the poet derger who has also inspired me the the process of learning nepal vasa and trying to translate his work is really one of the most profound experiences and again this book wouldn't exist without uh without him as an inspiration so again thank you very much uh okay so i'm going to go ahead and start reading and the first poem here really is a poem that takes place in kathmandu not all of them will and there's really not too much background here other than to say the the bhagmati river is the main river that flows through kathmandu the bridge that we will or i will be crossing is called the black bridge because it's black back in the 80s when i first was going there it was the only way to cross the bagmati river at that time and it was a footbridge and it crossed over just um would be just upstream from some cremation grounds and so to cross the river at night was uh scary it was haunted it was a haunted place and my friends would say uh no you don't don't go home tonight walking along that bridge you need to stay with us tonight don't you don't need you don't want to cross that river all right so the first poem here then is called no tongue can tell crossing the bhagmati river at night we could see from the black bridge fires along the riverfront smell cremation a language of flame without words for tongue or lick yet in translation we drink smoke from cigarettes as if straws and moonshine high poured into shallow clay cups frothy bubble eyes winking each dawn pigeons on my window ledge mumbled love while an old man opened a different window ratcheted up his morning phlegm gobbed into the courtyard three floors down scattering the chickens do you wonder as i do is all this connected taxi horns and the peel of a temple bell do you wonder is anything not

let's see here so i don't know who knows who's watching this but i also shout out to my good friend cece ford who sent me she's also a linguist and she sent me an article on the uh phonetics of poet speak and there's a certain kind of earnest voice that goes with poets so i'm trying not to do that there's another voice that goes with poetry is when you get done with each poem there's a oh okay so that's so we're all together on trying to avoid that as much as possible okay yeah there you just did it okay this room uh this fishbowl of a room it reminds me of a poem that i wrote and it's called the library window but this could just as well be the window here the epigraph is a quote by the argentinian poet borges who i have to say when i was an undergraduate at michigan state

one of my literature teachers i only took one actual literature class and he said oh there's this guy borjes who's going to come and speak and you need to go so it turns out that one of his translators was in the spanish department at michigan state so at that point borges was blind and he they bought him out onto the stage and at that point being an undergraduate french intellectuals were cool right deconstruction was cool existentialism was cool

emerson whitman americans totally uninteresting to undergraduates okay but then borges gets up in quotes from memory passages from emerson and whitman that just were absolutely it just brought tears to my eyes absolutely gorgeous so um i suppose you could say that was one of those moments where you just realized the power of literature so the quote from borges here is from his famous uh short story and the quote here is nonsense is normal in the library we all were fretting will the drought break before the ferns on the boulevard turn brittle brown and then like lepers lose their fingers so it made sense when clouds coaxed in from the ocean let down we didn't mind the parking lot drizzle the rainbow oil slick surrounding the coffee kiosk painted pumpkin and lime so long as the cars still idled in line for lattes and americanos but our elders who knew their weather weather furrowed their brows noting how dusty main street seemed no longer clogged with farm machinery no muscular tractors no pesticide sprayers with long arm nozzles folded like wings no more hay rigs holding up traffic annoying the hybrids and suvs already late for couples counseling yet not until the bohemian wax wings gathered like poets in ash trees thirsting to gorge on the last orange berries get careless drunk and fly smack dab into the library window did we admit the heat was news that's staying news

as uh henry mentioned i i do enjoy birds it's annoying if too many birds get in your poems but there's going to be a few here this particular poem is a couple of ideas i want to sort of get on the table before i start to read the poem one is the the northern harrier the male northern harrier has a sort of is gray looks very much from an unschooled eye like a white-tailed kite but but but in fact it's not all right so this you have to sort of picture the uh the northern harrier and then maybe a few other notes here linnaeus i'm going to refer to of course is this uh swedish biologist who founded the taxonomy system for what we use now and then we all know darwin okay and finally the the goss the the bible of bird watching from the old good old days was a roger tory peterson who who sort of has been usurped by newer authors so the adult males are grayish above with a dark trailing edge on the wing and that's the cornell lab of ornithology's description of the northern harrier so it turns out i'm attracted to wetlands not just for the beauty of linnaeus and darwin's legalese but for the miles of ponderous meyer cattail flowers and various stages of fray like my brain waves of wispy cotton drifting among the chatter of red-winged blackbird's past oasis of memory duckweed pondlinly thermonade noopfar since you asked i'm drawn to wetlands not just for the gist between the lines of sedge and reed thickets bitterness galumph or wren's territorial prattle but for the sacred weekend in may when grossbeak's lollygag trill glissandos through mother's day preaching from an ashgrove truth universal as pollen reminding me call mom she knew the latin names for all the birds but now she's forgotten even mine still the worlds the words in the gospel of peterson tell me northern harrier circus hudsonius my avatar hunting low over the marsh still carries within an insatiable want third eye scanning my inner life for the slightest sign of

voles here this is tremendously rewarding so again i want to thank you all for coming here i'm not done yet but i just looking out i'm seeing a lot of familiar faces the entire linguistics department is here which i can't thank you all enough for her for coming um it's it's really good to see everybody so uh we're having some weather events taking place over the last couple months and a lot of them coming from the ocean so i thought an ocean poem might be a good one and this will all be this poem will also be an entryway into a series of of other poems and this is called dream vista the pacific swells and rolls unhurried sidling up to a jagged cliff along the coastline then exhales harmonic wave oscillation oceanographers love to say yet were the sea still a god we'd say it slumbers ebb and flow each high followed by a low trough exposing mollusk crusted fissures cracks recessed deep into crevices teeming with shifty eyed marine lowlife clammed up clinging to rocks the usual riffraff of my unconscious

so let's explore my unconscious shall we

um at michigan state at the time the psychology department had two schools and they hated each other there were the freudians and the behaviorists and that was psychology at the time that's who that's all there whenever there's no cognitive psychology there was there was nothing so you pretty much had to choose size if you were going to be in it and so i didn't choose and i didn't become a psychology major though i might have so what i wanted i used to dream of being ravished decomposed into smutty loam then reborn a luscious fern or redwood trunk thrusting skyward above the arms of maple saplings praying to what little light chaos allotted what i got instead a quota of koi and lily pads floating on duckweed sedated ponds appetite tame as houseplants hung from macrame parachutes dropped onto sweater vest lawns with growing high hedges all i do now is sit and sip wine beside the new fountain while the old fountain pens sign the treaty the latest versailles concession to the bonsai garden path so zen clean shaven so well pruned yet always always always thirsty

now if you've ever been over to the south jetty in newport there's a the drive that goes up there and there's a there's a whole bevy i i'm embarrassed to admit i don't know the actual collective noun for gulls if anyone wants to [ __ ] but there's a flock which seems not a very interesting word for the most part but lots of gulls and they love to be fed and so this sort of starts to move from that that experience uh the epigraph here is from an irish uh poet uh by the name of nuella ni gomijo and the line goes when you sailed away my goodbyes were the gulls in your wake they say gull woman used to mix men saseracs rye with bitters and serve them peanuts she may even have once or twice swallowed some sad husband's last call but that's all over since that night her eyes tear smeared in the bar mirror caught a glimpse of her own divinity and cracked the code programming her to serve those greedy sea birds crying for crumbs nowadays while the dawn mist burns and distantly a jack medi and waiters cast into the surf the gulls flocked the opposite way tracking the shoreline through the haze to throng above her hovering on her every word for cheetos her ankles bathed in ocean waves hallelujah hallelujah hand raised she calls her children all by the same name

all right

i'm stretching out here a little bit on some of some of the poems so this poem is called apologies to the sanskritis in the room

okay i'll translate for you vulture peak or better yet buzzard butte where the buddha turned the second wheel of law the self is an illusion damn confusion try to picture yourself as a hollow gourd carved with a jack-o'-lantern's grimace seeds scooped out salted baked into a snack the rest pulped into pie picture light through the holes you call eyes picture your candle melted flat soon a frozen puddle of wax picture fuzzy blue gray mold the rot as your bankrupt shell corporation collapses and yet your monkey brain chitters on all through lunch with your reptile brain and voluptuous tara who points to the rusty lettuce on your plate declaring don't be a baby that salad is sad

hey so see i think i have a next two poems will uh reference growing up i wasn't technically i didn't technically grow up in detroit i was born in detroit and i grew up in royal oak which was a borderline suburb

my mom was actually grew up on eight mile road in woodward avenue which woodward is the main line that goes right through the detroit out to the suburbs eight mile is the famous eight mile of eminem uh for those of you who know who he is okay all right we're kind of we're kind of dividing by generations here so um okay so uh there's two references here one is to jimmy hoffa famous detroiter if you've seen the uh the scarcity's movie the irishman there's about the jimmy hoffa it turns out that the restaurant that he disappeared from just one year before i had gone there on my senior prom with a date

so it's a real place it's a it's a real place um the second thing is that there's a term that may or may not be familiar and it's the term bodhisattva so in buddhist uh practice the bodhisattva is the name for the person who having the opportunity to achieve enlightenment instead of absolving themselves into the absolute they return and they return in order to out of compassion in order to help others achieve their own mastery through the practices of buddhism so the term is bodhisattva

call before you dig this is a cautionary tale of cryptic glyphs in day glow orange scrawled across my lawn blew along the sidewalk a story of hidden gas line cables all things buried of how i spent my life afraid to dig denying a taste for dirt a lust to root in rich black clay and feel it ooze between my toes and yet all the while while ophobic praying to remain unsoiled no wonder when the snow fell i became self-interred confined to solitary listening to inside voices beneath the covers of my favorite goose down comforter with all the other smothered bodies found dug up wrist bone relic of a bodhisattva wearing jimmy hoffa's handcuffs call before you dig

so the second poem that references detroit here is appropriate um because today today is veterans day and there is a there will be a reference in here uh to issues that certainly all veterans would contend with and it doesn't matter really what your feeling is about whatever war is being fought the veterans themselves deserve this kind of recognition and appreciation so go ahead and say that and read you the poem and it's called learning curve when i found out screech owls don't actually they whistle and trill desire and defense i cringed turns out it was a barn owl screeching from its hole in a sycamore all night that reminded me of hearing my girlfriend's pleasure through the wall next door well i munched called pizza with my dealer rachel from across the hall and tried not to stare at her shriveled arm or mispronounce thalidomide asking nonchalant i didn't expect she'd let me in or call me out on just how cruelly everyone gawked when she dropped her cafeteria tray tater tots rolling across the tiles or how cruel we all have been she said to let that [ __ ] johnson call up more troops for his dirty war even cooler the cute lifeguard never returned home to our city pool he was always kind to me she said it's always kids like him whose dad worked the line at ford river rouge stood with the union got beat up by the company thugs dense as i am i was unaware it was so late when she leaned her cheek on my shoulder exhaled a smoky [ __ ] a and passed me back the bong asking do you did you know him

okay all right this should be this next poem should be recognizable uh it's called elegy for an election i think everything should be pretty clear except perhaps the concept of the mercator projection is a type of projection in geography

if we had a department wouldn't that be nice

when you take an orange globe an orange or a globe and you peel it into one piece and you put it on the wall instead of having it distorted like a flat you have this certain kind of shape so it's like a it's like a it's called a mercator projection i had to look it up too okay elegy for an election we've nothing left but the rind of ourselves peeled from the hole paired like an orange globe a mercator projection our future pinned to the classroom wall by alien cartographers two months ago when the polar axis wobbled away from true north when the sky ignited screensaver colors when the otherworldly spacecraft landed as i was raising her cusp to my lips her back arching gasping pulling my hair and then we watch tv like the rest us and the billions earth the networks called it early now a mere crossroad midden where they've come to bury their after birth dump their trash and advertise the rapture how to commemorate our own apocalypse how to observe we sit in orange naugahyde chairs playing gin rummy in a double wide i'm so happy i chained smoke cools sip seven and seven our eyes gaze up tracking the ceiling fan strobe illusion shadows paddling backward even the cats confused swatting at the empty air

okay so um i've already referenced geography it's time to reference philosophy another department which

who who can say but i i do know that i am going to uh misquote heraclitus i've already been informed that i'm doing so i don't care uh i'm not actually miss but heraclitus is famous of course for the you know you can never step in the same river twice it's a cliche that gets trotted around quite a bit it may or may not be what he actually said or he might have meant something very different that's okay this is post-modern times we can interpret the text however we want okay this is called step in the same river twice heraclitus says we can't but then again he's never been to utah he could never understand how two geeks could meet through math inside the curly brackets both wanting to follow the order of operations and how at dinner we discover a scatter plot of poppy seeds on a white tablecloth and scribble together on a sazerac stain napkin the formula for why not leave salt lake rent a prius drive due west and doing 85 calculate the path of a hawk lifted off from the earth exploding on our grill he couldn't predict how a gravel truck rattles past shooting pebbles how our windshield wise cracks about the sky although he should have seen at midnight how oncoming brights from a bully pickup rushing drunk towards us cried repent repent luckily a jerk of the wheel saves us onto the shoulder where we weep hug kiss [ __ ] under the hatchback fall asleep i'm certain he never dreamed of an oregon high desert sunrise or watched the john day river snuggle a cliff curl into a pool across from where we stand together on a pebble shore we sacrifice our bacon fat from the skillet to the god of fire say a prayer then step goose bump naked clasping hands two souls in the same river once as the current so revered by the esteemed philosopher's struggles to grasp the simple idea of feet

okay so um i think i'm going to have time this is a this is a poem that actually in henry's poetry class they henry asked me to read it and they read it and they did a fantastic job reading it and i'm was so i mean it was flattering and i was very it was very flattering to have students look at it read a poem so closely so i'm going to go ahead and read that one and then i've just got a couple more and we'll call it let me find this one okay so the concept here the title of the poem is samsara which is an another term originally from the sanskrit it means simply to wander it means simply to wander around uh eventually in buddhist practice in particular it comes to mean the the cycle of birth and rebirth through mundane life as we know life is mostly painful okay and then you uh struggle and struggle and struggle and you seek release and then the next thing you know you're reborn into the same struggle again over and over and over again that form of wandering is what in buddhist practice is called samsara so the name of this poem is samsara the second thing i should should add is i'm going to tell you a brief little story here and it involves the the god shiva and his wife parvati they had a child and the child's name was ganesh so shiva went out one day leaving the house and went out to do what whatever gods do when they leave the house and go to work wandered around and came back many years later and saw this very beautiful boy at his house and was his mother was bestowing attentions on this beautiful boy so shiva went into a jealous rage and cut the boy's head off of course it turns out as freud would have predicted it's his son so parvati says you got to do your god you got to do something about this and the he seeks other gods because there's actually other gods that are more powerful than him when you do things like that and they said okay we'll we'll fix it but under one condition you can only restore him to the first animal that you see coming along which turns out to be an elephant so you may recognize the the very famous and popular hindu deity ganesh in kathmandu virtually every street every street corner has got a sculpture that represents ganesh he is one he is a beloved deity for all kinds of reasons so samsara in the epigraph here which i already talked about with sanskrit there's a one more from stephen crane american uh writer and it goes like this i saw a man pursuing the horizon

eternal as a netflix series end and beginning another season here's the recap shaken awake to monsoon lightning in a thunder tossed bed an earthquake rattling tiles on the temple roof rain-flooded streets conceal a dangerous crack in the cobblestone another inkling of me ago a girl maroon school uniformed riding her bike past the temple tires striking the hidden gap untruing spokes misshaping the wheel clouds gather my wits the sun a memory on my face a jet-haired woman in a red sari comes with a tray of yogurt flowers vermilion powder kneels at my stone sculptured feet to place an offering for me the boy whose head lopped off by his jealous father lord shiva got reborn as an elephant another case of identity theft another way of being misled and always this craving this thirst for release to let go the world seen through green eyes me taught smile hay bale blonde meth wrong kearney at the county fair leveraging the t of the world my skin itches wearing this saffron robe

okay so we'll just do uh i'm gonna do a couple more poems here we're gonna um this one i think i should send out to uh paula she's the one who has named this poem the grilled cheese poem so you will that's the only reference you will have you'll find a reference to grilled cheese sandwiches in here okay and this again from for the philosophers in the house uh the the upper graph here comes from wittgenstein and it's from the blue and brown books and he asks us what is the difference between searching for a word in memory and searching for a friend in the park let us attack the question first by asking the slide rule how a worker feels getting laid off then ask the red nectar feeder what it thinks about hummingbirds choosing smack over fuchsia now translate this into emoji just to see how meaning gets lost traded off for 68 tigers baseball cards some of us explode at the thought act out in daycare throw letter blocks some of us get stoned behind the wheel until an unmarked song comes along on the radio pulls us over catches us weeping we fess up sputtering like summer sprinklers trying to endure the starlings jeer from a dead oak trusting the night shift to clean up the mess it's so easy to misconstrue is no excuse in any in any case hey you're quite the grilled cheese sandwich was never a compliment more like a threat even humpty dumpty knows he's liable to take home the wrong pair of pants from the cleaner

i forgot to tell you the name of that poem it's ordinary language okay so uh two two more two more poems here uh this one is the last one in the book and it's also and then i'm going to go back to the title the poem from which the title is taken and this was actually the very first poem i published and it involved it was a meditation really on a word i just couldn't figure out how to translate

it's called language lesson due north of sweet mango summer slippery pulp between the teeth or frothy chia and fog bound winter steaming cardamom and clove far east of bitter greens garlic and pouty little fruit omli in hot and sour soup west of the fire flesh from the butcher fresh green chili fried with finger fulls of pounded rice flakes and grandma's moonshine ayla poured high from a narrow spout bubble eyes splashing in a shallow clay cup south of the salt trade buddhas footfalls ancient paths along the patty where anklets jangle gracefully passed tender shoots impatient for the monsoon to mount the himalayas there's a place on the tongue too slowly savor a moment english cannot reach

so the the last poem i'm going to read is uh it's called the rule of threes and uh again just the rule of threes is a term that's used you got three three little pigs uh three three blind mice three wishes every folk tale in basically in the world revolves around threes in some kind of in some kind of order uh or sense and so it's this is sometimes called the rule of threes

a dream receding part one a dream receding leaves behind a tideline rack of stranded driftwood shell and pebble surf rolled randomized let go a shoreline swath a stochastic beauty beach detritus arrayed in bell curves plotting the chance of a lifetime the chance of my brother drowning the chance of my wife's cancer part two a dream of more pebbles raked in their bed by the braided waters of a stream where salmon spawn out rot in shallows where collard doves coo unitarian hymns above quiet pools where lazy eddie where lazy eddies swirl and shades drift between trees part three a dream of black hoods on sapphire jays flocking in the tops of fur trees my tutelary deities scolding they all know me as i am carried along by the current inner tube leaking like an old dictionary running out of words for afterwards thank you

thank you david that was great reading uh we have an opportunity for questions and i can deliver you the mic

paul do you have a question no i want to take a picture of the group okay so please look your best paula will be photographing you she's a wonderful activist for art and culture here at western questions anyone i'm sure there's some questions out there you're wondering about something scott you must be wondering about something you're puzzled

um i'll try to think of how to articulate the question as i'm asking it but uh so one of the interesting things i hear and seeing across your poems is maybe a certain relation between form and and force um whether it's the as we described earlier this sort of blending of uh a sacredness of a location with all the but with the kind of daily movement as well with it or if it's the um

the sort of science of birds in the environment but uh not really contrasted to the beauty and life of it in some romantic way but some sort of there's still some interesting relationship a gap between these two things but that isn't really fully a gap right a gap but also some sort of intrinsic relation same thing with your unconscious and the poems and this detailed um architecture that's connected to you somehow could you could you kind of reflect on that yeah help me understand what the gap is between between two between form and uh energy i i wasn't quite sure i'm trying yeah maybe that's a way of putting it um yeah i um okay and i'm addressing uh motif i'm seeing and asking you to just speak on it right whether as a as the writer or even distanced as a critic linguist i i no i appreciate the question it's actually takes me to a place i hadn't intended to go but um if i were to talk in terms of it maybe i don't i wouldn't call it my philosophy but my experience of buddhism and hinduism as practice not as esoteric texts but as practiced in in the actual lives of the people i've known over the years in nepal one of the things i noticed is that i've continually experienced is that it's not a textual experience it's an experience of daily ritual practices mundane as could be every day uh someone going and offering flowers or what to one of the deities and then maybe every month doing it a different and so on and so forth so in that sense it's ritual it's mundane it's ordinary but at the same time it carries with it this understanding that um that everything is temporary that the self is a temporary i entity that there's really no such thing as identity there's just simply the the movement maybe that's the sense of force you're describing a kind of movement through a process of always becoming and this is perhaps where this the site the notion of a cycle they're running out of words for afterwards in fact there's always an afterwards it just repeats again perhaps i'm really reluctant to commit myself to uh an ontology here or any kind of metaphysics i'm really but it's more to uh try and express somehow what i've come to feel about uh that sense of uh impermanence i suppose and maybe the gap is the concept of impermanence between i'm not sure but that you know you asked me to go there so i no i appreciate it ryan i very much appreciate the question it's it's thoughtful in close readings i really do appreciate that you know as a birder david is not a checklist kind of guy it's not he's not like kind of a statistical you know and you've talked about that you know the life list and i saw this today it's more about the experience would you agree it's very much about that so again i think as a linguist too the science of language i think you do not you do well to move against that into a kind of felt experience language experience you know which writers have to but it must it must be i think you're perceiving a struggle between these two worlds these two paradigms which i think you you know navigate beautifully um i don't feel the struggle but i feel the struggle no i i well actually i you know i feel the struggle and i i forgot to thank dennis eddings uh former chair of the english department was wise enough to hire me 20 odd years ago and talk about yeah he's having second thoughts yeah he is having but the struggle that i do experience is actually actually an academic or an institutional one the struggle between the way in which language is represented in linguistics as a as a discipline as an empirical science as part of a way of approaching as opposed to let's say the poetry and the humanities and in art and other and i don't feel those as being distinct any more than let's say studying music theory is incompatible with being a musician or studying uh color theory is incompatible with being an artist and yet institutionally there's always this force to push those things apart that's interesting and here in english studies they're very much integrated we have worked and i should thank my colleagues in linguistics they have worked very hard that's great try and make ourselves part of the larger story other questions comments

please introduce yourself i'm ryan i'm another ryan asking a question the um i i'm curious about the mood in the poems that you've just that you've just read because they're serious uh a lot of them but also there's a way in which the your voice in in the poem is i i don't want to say ironic and or it's not like laugh out loud funny i wouldn't describe it as mirthful or humorous right but there's a but there's a way in which some of the poems shift back and forth between something that's more serious and something that's a little bit an observation that's a little bit lighter have you done that on purpose am i just reading that into them is that in there what what do you um this is a great question it's flattering to have people read your stuff closely and ask these questions um i think maybe the way to approach that is to make the observation that other people my closest friends have made to me that sometimes they don't know when i'm joking or being serious that i have a kind of ironic s you know irony sarcasm i'm not sure um one friend described it as sardonic but then when i looked it up that's basically the description of the grim smile of a corpse and i thought that is probably not a compliment it would be describing my poems as sardonic but i i feel that i i feel like it's uh both deadly serious and also just light and funny and and and maybe you know a distance keeping it i don't know it's it's a real thing though i think you're right and i don't know how to describe it thank you how did he do with the heraclitus we have a living philosopher here i mean heraclitus has been misrepresented in that exact way for thousands of years so within the thousand year period you feel it he's okay all right let's just get to know that other questions comments

yes

i'm kit uh i'm a student here and i really like writing poetry and i guess i just wanted to know um maybe when you felt like you started getting serious about poetry serious um and when and where you like to do your writing great question um the seriousness about poetry really came as i was starting the translation project and that was and i was talking to the henry's class earlier as i was translating i realized i have to figure out how durga lal's voice sounds if he were writing in english and in nepal most of the translations of his poetry had been by very fluent you know educated nepalis who also spoke english very well but they wrote as if they were victorians and so because that was the colonial legacy of south asia the english there in the and so i had to figure out how to write in a colloquial american english because his poetry is colloquial it's very earthy and it's also abstract and imagist and all kinds of things but it's also very earthy from the point of view of the native speakers so i just read massively and that was my advice to the classes just read everything you can get your hands on outside of the anthologies that you're given you know yes the anthologies but there's a lot of uh there's a lot of poets that are left out of the anthologies that ought to be there there's a lot of poets that you know are in there and they don't speak to me at least i'm not going to say you know and for all kinds of reasons that you know people are excluded so just reading contemporary journals just getting a feel for all the different voices that are out there i think really got me serious about trying to find that place my own writing practice over time i found mornings it used to be and i this sounds terrible i hate when older men say well you know back in the days like i could stay up till one o'clock you know or something i mean i used to i used to do that and stay up and you know you get all jazzed and you'd write but no longer so instead i wake up and i've got a fresh clean brain for two three hours and that's when my best writing takes place now there are other occasions when i might just go off you know and write some real nonsense but then the next day you got to clean it up and look at it so that's that's my practice but reading and i find that i'll pick up a poet and i'll read and i'll get barely through one poem and boom all of a sudden i've got tons of ideas and it's not copying it's just being you know their language now is sort of unlocked this sort of part of my brain that i wanted to have access to thank you yeah thank you good yes i have a question sure and this i'm paula i'm communication humanities so this is uh not a terribly uh erudite question but when i listen to your poetry i have the sense that there's this other entire story underneath it this layer and so i'm wondering in your process do you have that story and then as you write your poetry you take this poignant statement and this turn of the narrative i mean is that how you do it i mean i literally really don't know but i was thinking with every poem i was like that i can almost see the story behind it and i wonder does that come first i don't know i really don't know i really don't know how i mean i i think it's fair to say that every poem that i've ever written at least is really an artifact of ultimately a crafting you know you get ideas and you've got stuff going on and you're really working to try but in the end it's not just i woke up and had a moment and now this poem shows up on the page and sometimes you'll work on a stanza or two and it kind of fails and you put it away and then all of a sudden some other piece will say well i could put these two together and i can find a way of linking them in some way now a new story is started and so it it's really sometimes very haphazard i don't think hardly any of these poems started as i have an idea and it's going to go from here to there sure and i i'm a lot of my writing is driven by what's by sound i just love the sound of certain movements and so that's i just hear something a phrase or an oddball comment somewhere and that and then that gives me yeah just like yeah grilled cheese sandwich yeah thank you but i mean grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup is i mean it's one of the favorite comfort foods of all time so there you go thank you any other comments or questions yes josiah josiah here is also trying to master the bridge between linguistics and poetry so i'm i'm sympathetic yeah thank you um i was wondering if i know you read a bunch of poetry i was wondering if you have any poets that you want to like have a shout out to that were really inspirations not just for this book of poetry but wanting to read poetry um in general that was the first question the second question i wonder in your process of writing poems um like in your first poem it seemed like it was imagery driven where that was the first thing that kind of imprints your mind and then you kind of you know maybe you know built a message or something else off of that but then in some of your poems it seemed like it was emotionally driven like there was one without the bird i think that was my favorite one where you time out birds and how it recalls that you should give your mom a call about the latin names um i wonder if if i mean what's your process do you sometimes you take like an emotional theme or quality and then you want to surround the imagery around that or do you start with the imagery and then inject that with a certain emotion or imbue a certain idea that you want to present okay can i answer the first question first yeah sure um there are many many great poets out there and contemporary i mean there's so many modern poets out there writing in so many new voices out there from you know previously uh un heard voices and it's really important to keep you know keep out there so there's lots of the those voices but in fact i'd go back farther there are two poets that are really modernist poets from the 20s 10s 20s 30s that don't get highly represented in anthologies and one of them is the woman mina loy who was a surrealist poet hung around with all with all the dadaists and uh was just a wild crazy liberated woman who wrote the most interesting and it's poetry that still holds up today among all the surrealist and uh uh imagist poets i i just think she's terrific she's very hard to make sense of you so you just go with it she's all right so mina loy the second is actually almost the opposite and he was a contemporary of uh t.s eliot in in ezra pound and so on as conrad aiken and he wrote volumes and volumes of really bad poetry but there are some places where his stuff is as beautiful and brilliant as any of the modernists and uh harold bloom did a volume of of conrad akin's poetry and went through and found the best stuff of his and if you want to if you want to hear language sing he is one of he's just one and you know it's the kind of thing where you i wouldn't come across him if i hadn't wandered through uh alleyways outside of the anthologies and the same with meena lloyd she gets a shout out once a while and she's now being understood more and more but those two you know if i were to rewrite the anthologies they'd be they'd be at the top and ezra pound can go off and do his fascist radio broadcasts and i really wouldn't miss him much at all now but there we go okay sorry thanks great question oh what was okay second the second one um for the process again

or emotion and idea driven that you have something on your heart i think i find myself

stumbling across emotional passages as opposed to setting out to write an emotional poem i basically can't write a poem i can't sit down and say god i really feel this is really upsetting or this memory i just it sounds it sounds cliched and sounds off and there's you know the the genre of the occasional poem where you now you're gonna you know the presidential you know inauguration and now you have to write a poem about it i i couldn't imagine how to do that because it would just sound so artificial instead i just start with sounds and images and things that that are really sort of running around and are are interesting and beautiful and of course i'm going to end up bumping into things that i feel emotionally and they're going to remind me of this and then then that's a good you know that's a good energy to work with once you get there but i don't i certainly never start there i i wouldn't be able to

oh chloe

thanks thanks david yes um so i feel like your your poetry especially is very playful in part and i know that you'll kind of describe yourself as

you kind of believe in a descriptive um

uh someone who studies language in a descriptive way am i right yes rather than kind of you know very much in your translation pushing against those terrible british translators sorry so i i know i love it but um i'm just wondering i kind of see a lot of growth there right in language and um and i wonder what happens in your heart when that growth and playfulness meets the nature that you are so fond of and you study and you see it in great decline and how do you keep that kind of playfulness and language alive when you meet degradation of that sort yeah um

there's a couple of poems that i have written that are not playful in that sense and they go they go to those places um and yeah it's getting justifiably it's getting harder and harder to write nature poems or to have nature in a poem at all or to allow nature to speak for you or about you in all of those ways that we're used to um it's it's true i mean you're you're absolutely right and it's i wouldn't want to say that you know you shouldn't write or can't write if whatever it is that you're feeling but i i know what you're saying and the same is true for any any topic that you write on can be very quickly viewed especially if you're you know a older white man it's pretty hard not to write poetry about old white men when you're when you're an old white man so it's it's genuinely difficult and it's it's a it's a struggle and certainly you want to make sure that there are you know that there are as many voices besides yours that are out there in circulation but on the other hand i'm still going to write i'm going to write what i feel and i'm going to just you know go there i can't go there and there's nothing less appealing than writing didactic poetry just for the sake of let's say having a a point to make that that never that never works but often you will arrive there if you've if you keep writing but yeah it's a i mean every i think every modern poet or contemporary poet struggles right now with what it means to be writing poetry in this age absolutely thank you thank you chloe so then the act of writing itself is what just kind of keeps us going forward hopefully thank you very much and a wonderful evening david hargreaves thank you so much thanks for coming thank you