Cambridge Forum; WGBH Forum Network; Creativity and Mood

A program tonight it's going to be moderated by Dr. Sasha helper. Sasha is a child psychiatrist with a private practice in the Boston area and she is herself a writer her columns appear regularly in Psychiatric Times. And after a speaker's formal remarks she opened the dialogue with some questions for them. After those initial questions the discussion will be open to include all the members of the audience. Thank you again for coming tonight. And now here is our moderator to introduce the program and our speakers. Artistic creativity has long been linked in popular imagination with suffering illness untimely death. Does this romantic image correspond to the reality of producing a work of art. I play a song tonight we're fortunate enough to have two noted artists of each effectively captured events experiences and emotions in multiple genres and to help

eliminate the relationship between one's emotional life and one's creative life. Pam I don't see how MJB Clark professor at Princeton University his chair of Princeton Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts. He's poetry editor of The New Yorker. His collections of poetry include poems 1968 in 1998 with sand and gravel for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize and his 10th collection of poems is horse latitude which appeared in the fall of 2006. He's received numerous literary awards and been described by the Times Literary Supplement as quote the most significant English language poet born since the Second World War. In my family pommelled in name does not come up when Robert Frost comes up where Longfellow comes up with. Donald Hall comes up and Mick Jagger is

mentioned. Day. Comes out because Paul Muldoon has a rock band named racket and perhaps during the conversation that will be talked about as well. So Paul if you'd like to start thinking Oh wait I guess I. I'm sorry go ahead. I should introduce Elizabeth to before she starts to persuade us. Is best known for Broadway. An international smash hit runaways. She's composed and written and directed for over 30 years works include the award winning trilogy at La Mama. Alice at the palace with Meryl Streep. At the New York's Shakespeare Theater groundhog a variety of musical adaptations as well. She published novels non-fiction books children's books and poetry to great acclaim and has received the Cannes award for her book on her a depressive episode called my depression theater textbook at

play teaching teenagers theater was published in 2006. A new book of poetry has come out. The one and only human galaxy I want to include five Tony nominations three OAB awards a Guggenheim Fellowship for Grant Helen Hayes award. Laila Acheson Wallace Grant and apan citation list has been creating issue oriented Theatre for Young People her entire career. So welcome to the Cambridge prom. Pamela do an endless wait us. So Paul thank you very much indeed. I'd just like to begin by saying that I think I much prefer this reduces list of achievements to my own. And I suppose in a strange way you know the topic tonight is the artistic life and the extent to which the word mood might be appropriate. It's one of those words of course that I as

I usually do when I'm faced by a word that I that I don't understand or think perhaps I do understand but almost certainly don't. I do go running off to the grand Oxford English Dictionary to have a little truth in mind as to what the words might mean. And in fact yet again I was astonished to discover that it's a word that's been with us for a rather long time and I'm trying. It's a word that's used in Beowulf. If we konked Beowulf was the first great English poem I know there are those who cling to something else. But let's take for the purpose of argument that it is an English poem rather than a German bomb or whatever it might be the word. What's interesting Randi bad wolf is that the word has already two meanings it has already two meanings. There's a nuance involved with it.

And let me just check what they are here. I mean at its root it refers to some notion of a mournful frame of mind. What is the age in Beowulf. Had a full frame of mind what we would refer to as a stage of feelings one's humor temper or disposition at a particular time. The honor sense the other sense in which it's used in Beowulf is that of courage and that courage is related to. The notion of anger. Range and that of course is a is a sense of the word and that I suppose we have in the word Moody to some extent certainly in Shakespeare and two gentlemen of Verona in my mood I

stabbed to the heart a sense that it was something of a fit of rage in which this violent activity took place. And I suppose one of the things and. Insofar as I understand anything about this which of course is and perfectly which is one of the reasons why we're here this evening perhaps to try to figure out a few of these aspects of what might be connected between these connecting these two ideas I suppose I'm fascinated by the notion that indeed there is a connection between the fit of rage. Certainly some sense of being beyond one's self ecstatic. Or indeed being beyond time in some sense. And then the third in the sense that words worth would have used as. Well just to get my quote. Right. For office.

When I went on my couch I lie in vacant or pensive bird. They flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude and. One's breath is using the term I suppose in the sense of being almost a condition in which inspiration might come flooding or flowing and. I would think for a moment to find about a connection between Wordsworth and Robert Frost or to Murray from Wordsworth to Robert Frost because Frost picks up a notion and writes a piece called before the beginning and after the end of upon a little talk him Coral Gables in Florida I think sometime in the 1930s he writes as follows. And I want you to consider this as a description of an art of the body

experience as it were. The subject should emerge as the poem is written we. Should not. React to. A poem tell him. I'm sure he means she has at least two thirds through it. The person. Was the man. It's interesting he doesn't say the title of the poem. If this poem The performed before him right said What. Not to write it. As much as giving oneself over into a state of. Ecstasy. And yet the thing should emerge as if it had the enthusiasm of the then. That there's a sense that it's predestined preordained and the object being for. When there's a person know what he means by upon he draws near the

end and he writes his great piece as a figure upon makes it has an outcome that. The. Same was predestined from the first image of the legend. And indeed. From. The very mode which is a very particular sense of the word murd it seems to me and I'm coming off. Related to the words worthy and zens use of that word. I suggest to you that I am sometimes given to suggesting that there's a particular charge to Frost's use of this word which might bring us back to the sense of the mood as a rage. That.

His mother's name was Isabel moody. And I want to suggest to you that Frost is not idly using maybe actually unconsciously but at some level consciously or unconsciously not idly that using the word mind and not connecting it in some sense profoundly with making sense of himself and with his relationship. To his mother and his mother to himself he associates himself by the way with a character he may recall called the forester. The first poem in a with a story written by a. Version of frost known as the moody forester. I. Say that first and foremost to want to start. To growing plants. I'm proud of the earth is eternal

and time with a medley of sort of chimes that becoming aware of song boys from school had stopped outside the fence to spy. I stopped my song and almost heart for my evil eye looks in a good part. That seems to me that it's almost as if there's a description here of a primal scene in which a turtle which is proud of the earth is stopped some boys from school in Trude and the drawings are not welcomed. As. They often seem to be welcomed into other. Franz Pom's you come in any case I want to suggest to you that what Frost is describing this notion of the word

as I say has to do primarily with the. Condition of being somewhat outside of time. That is associated with the making of art. We recognize that as writers we read a novel and we. Discover. That afternoon has gone by and we're not entirely certain. Where it's gone and exactly the same experience has befallen the writer the artist the playwright the poet. There has been an absolute. Shutting down of a sense of time in any conventional conventional manner. While that poem was written one of the reasons it seems to me that. Those poems are written

in many cases atol has to do with the fact that the poet. Is engaged in a form of enhancement that is being written and may have to do with coming to terms with the matter of the poem with a matter of her hands life. But there's a particular chemical. Charge I think you may experience. That many but most writers I think of as their work with a rush of endorphins or whatever it might be that I think is the equivalent of a drug to which the writer returns and making sense of her or his life may actually have some respite some element of being equal to the

difficulty of her or his life. In that case I'm going to stop there by just having thrown out one or two of these ideas and we'll come back to them I hope later on. Thank you. So Paul I wanted to ask one question before we move to LA and Dan I wondered when you write that how. Do you start with an image an idea or as you were describing do you think there is a feeling state and added the feeling state something coalesces in terms of more. You know I think that often it does come down to a feeling a sense of vague hunch that if one were to put on these elements something interesting might happen but frost description there of not knowing what he's doing which of course we've heard from many many other sources

kicks most memorably in his description of negative capability. They must not know what is going on. Frankly they must not know what the poem is about for the simple reason that if they know the rest of us probably know. And we need to be brought to a place where none of us expected to be. So as the. The required stage and of course ignorance of what we find. For some reason not to be greatly cherished in our society though I'm sure there's plenty of it around. We went looking for it and I said take my students at Princeton are often taken aback when having. Arrived in this institution.

The first thing that many of us and certainly I tried to do with them is to suggest that only when they give themselves over to a very particular kind of humility before the possibility of what might happen to them if they give themselves over to them or subconscious out of which. That if there's anything in there at all then what will emerge. Thank you. Now I'd like to hear from Ms. Okay. I'm going to come at this from a completely opposite situation. BUSH I don't think is in any way a disagreement. It's just a different way of talking. And I believe in the

arts music theater poetry as a true healing and enlightening form that is good. I don't take well to these forms being used with bad language and phony ethnic runs and all that stuff. So but I I my mother as I've written about committed suicide when I was 23 and my brother was the schizophrenia who starved himself when he was 46 to death. And I grew up with. Fluent in schizophrenia because I didn't know schizophrenia. And anybody I could be walking down the street and schizophrenia. No I'm you know they just walked up to me. I go I don't. And I've witnessed so much trauma and so much

mood. I mean I myself was diagnosed as bipolar but I have been for 20 years now completely OK. And I'm not ashamed of you know the medication or whatever you have to do the sleep and all that stuff. I come to the arts with a mission on some level but I'm always very careful to say it's got to be good. And so given all of this I wrote a show with runaways and took runaways off the street and I gave them poetry and I gave them all kinds of things to bring them up. And since then I have done many many different kinds of artistic endeavors that take on these very dark sides of human nature. And in some way you use them.

As a way to show people how to survive. And. One of the things that has happened because of that is that I was hired by NYU. There were four suicides six years ago. At NYU and they didn't know what to do. They were afraid of contagion. And so they called upon me to make a show called The reality show which would help freshmen look at. What they're up against alienation sexually transmitted infections and sex before you're ready. Rolling this depression anything that you could imagine when you first in New York. Right. You come from the Midwest right. And again they call upon me and they said

would you make a show with these students with sand's poetry whatever. And I said there's one criteria it has to be good. It has to be a show because the arts have to be really good. I'm not putting down Sylvia Plath right. In fact I sent the entire book of Ariel. To music but I was 21 when I did it. And a lot of black. You know and I walked around and I and I did that right. I also said Ted Hughes cradle to music and that's how I learned about poetry by sending it to music. So it's not that I'm saying you can't go to those dark places and you can't you know but. There are other ways to deal with the traumas that human beings who are either economically crippled or emotionally damaged. Latchkey kids

abuse women whenever I deal with these things as in the NYU show. I try to come at them with what I call through the back door which is. Intensifying what the experiences but doing it in another way and in doing that when I try to do is I try to wake up the unconscious of the audiences and say to them you know these people are in trouble maybe you're in trouble. But there's. A really. Wonderful thing called the arts which can help free you. Because you can look at things in a different way. Humor for me. Is very important. So I'm going to start out. I'm not going to do the stuff I do with the kids because I don't want to say fuck. Twenty seven times like we do an our show.

So I'm going to do something a little bit more recent. But you have to understand that I believe that the arts as as good or full as Robert Frost I went to Bennington and I used to go and visit him and it's Robert Frost. And it's a kid from a blood gang. Who after five weeks of working with me finally writes down ending paragraph about what it took to do his initiation and how he was forced to cut another kid across the face and he'd never done it before he never said it and it's good writing. And when he performs it for other people like. That. And not just because but and also the performance of it. But. Let me take you into

the. More humorous land of I'll show you some of the subjects that are treated in these two poems I've got to read to you are more adult perhaps problems but they're are contemporary psychological sociological problems which girl with kids and adults. And so I just want to show you in a way kind of like what my attitude. Is. This is called contest. OK. It is a rowing contest. And I don't know who's going to win. Stroke you motherfuckers. Oh I like this one in one show. The anorexics in another. The bulimics on the right. The bi polar bears on the left the depressives

stretch you motherfuckers. They race towards the stone bridge but the low arches they're all Ivy Leaguers. The price books to be published about conquering their conditions but not if your madness can't speed the oars. The water is murky brown ugly and intentionally muddied up for the race not deep enough so the oars scrape. Perfect conditions for the wrist and arm cutters. Shallow enough to break bones for the Munchausens. Lots of broken glass from the young alcoholics who smashed boggles the night before and therefore were disqualified. Thus meeting their goal. What fun what fun but fun to be mental mentally emotionally undone. So you motherfuckers that anorexics and bulimics are already publishing you moody bastards. Don't let those bony shoulders cross the line. It's tight to the

finish. The bipolar zoom ahead and the mystifying speed manic manic it and then inexplicably they roll backwards. Depression just exactly as it should be. Professionals the announcers announce the referee has gone the checkered flag and there's tight striped shirt and two small baseball cap. He is laughing. Obesity disqualified him when his kayak kept sinking whichever crew wins. The referee shoots whichever crew loses. Shoots themselves. What fun it's done. College shootings high on the charts bestseller list some movies of the week in the making next week gymnastics could be the most ever trained underfed abused overworked and under-aged champions. To the winners a television series 10

years in the making. So you see this is the. This is what I try to work on with my actors and my kids and in my shows. Theater People always drink a lot of water. I don't know what it is. We walk around with bottles of water and we drink it. The idea of move by idea of. The tragedy. It's much more. I mean I don't claim to be anywhere near the Greeks although I I've done media electro The Trojan Women I've scored them in in ancient Greek and Latin and I've done Agamemnon and I did hear CLI's in Greece and I know. That the tragedies are very very strong and are at the root of even what people feel when they are in a psychotic or

clinical depressions. And I know that the arts are deeper than what I'm reading to you right now I'm trying to cover a couple of things that the Greek tragedies and how they saw our. Culture and where we would go emotionally. And then I'm trying to show you how I tried to take away that kind of narcissism when I'm working with people and what I'm working on a contemporary political or emotional issues and how I try to take away that romance with death and that romance with suicide because it does nobody any good. And certainly with younger performers It really is dangerous. So it's a double thing. I understand the depth of the

sorrow the grief the rage that you kept using rage that's the word. I understand how that can you know. I've had kids pull lives of me I've had older actresses throw chairs at me. Right. And yet I know that there is great beauty that can come out of these kinds of situations and that is through the arts poetry music. I had a group of four. I did a piece called Jerusalem. Tell me if I'm talking to. OK. OK. I did a piece called Jerusalem which is about the Middle East. And I found 14 different languages. I had a Ford Foundation grant and it went all around New York and it's Burrough's and I found all of the people that exist in the Old City of Jerusalem and they hated each other. I had them sitting in a

circle and they hated each other until I began to sing. And I had them sing their religious songs because they were religious people I had Ethiopian priests. I had a Russian Orthodox priest. I had a cantor. I had a rabbi I had you name it. I had it. It was in this room and they began to sing. And when they sang and I asked them first to sing lullabies and they had gorgeous voices and as they began to sing something really did change. Now that may sound very sentimental but it wasn't. You really saw that there mortalities their phrasing right there that there was a there was something that went through and they came together and they created this piece with me about Jeremiah I'm going to the people in Jerusalem and saying stop fighting or you're going to burn your city. And we did that. And we did

it in the languages and they didn't listen. And so we use the Book of Revelations and a quotation from the Torah and exploded with voice at the end. So there are pieces that I've done that have dealt with cultures moods. So ok then. I just want to read one more humorous thing just to really put us all. In the middle of. Chaos because I'm talking about so many different things. But that's me. I I. That's my life. And then we'll go back. Is this OK. OK. This is a new poem and this deals with women which I believe is something I also I've done Bible women I've done women of valor. I believe that women's liberation is back in the 14 hundreds. I think there's a lot that's gone wrong anyway.

Massacre. At the spa. I wonder if anyone has ever committed suicide at one of those posh summer camps for adult women who whether wanting to or not must concentrate hour after hour on the skin tone smell beneath the fingernails strength of calves muscles under the neck placement of spine strength that Claire. Claire. CLAIRE I mean what if you're one of those unfortunates who have no clear less clearly says you are dragging your self from class to class being told endlessly to concentrate on your career or even as you unsuccessfully tried to stand on one foot. Couldn't a women go mad. Comparing flesh against flesh and the heaving sea room the Northern California sauna the Jacuzzi the Jacuzzi red breasts float and look at each other like stupid

seals. Has there ever been one suicide by a woman who went into the aerobics room in between step classes and shot out the combination of vitamin B-12 and smack. No one ever snuck in a bottle of JMB. Take a handful of antidepressants in the native american meditation room. No one has ever left off a cliff during the 6:30 a.m. brisk about in rap for beginners and intermediates. Put a plastic bag over her head and slashed her in her wrist in the rug. I can't believe this isn't so. But with the monotony the striving the control of daylight the flatness of Sweden the and forgiving mirrors the company of all secretly depressed women. I've come to rearrange the flesh around clothes flab genetics and just can't get the leg

to lift eight times like the scissors. One two three four five six seven eight. I want to research this. Remind me after I have my massage with hot rocks. I mean why hasn't anyone taken these smooth stones which he did in the clay oven and piled the bird and dyed blond haired misuse in her off white uniform to death. Or better yet. Why has no one brought an AK 47 or wenzi into the landscaped mini village of these lands of stucco and take out every nutritionist a counsellor brought her from a therapist past life expert manicurists of inner visual journey guide and visual Dial's diet specialist living low toned bodies in piles by the right exercise balls and the rest extracts blood in puddles by the learn how to cook their own meal. Many kitchen

corpse's and the outdoor yoga beach are right right no one has got mad from health mad from so much help. Violent for so much gentle attention the long flowing stairs the quick smiles. Why has there been no mass murder by a woman who came to lose eight pounds and only could make it far. Be careful of the time we'll call and the outcome will be messy and the white doves in the quiet room will fly off laughing with blood on their wings and screams will drag out from the slip float of the morning Hatha Yoga chanting teacher. Stay away. There will be one hamburger made out of zucchini. Too many one gentle squat holding a powder Bowl three hand three weight one too much. The time is coming. Revelation's is nothing. It is the spot brochure and extras that know the future of the end of the beginning of time spent time ignored and they are

lost. Thank you. And I was going to ask you a question but I think you did. I would like to quote you from a 2005 interview and I think that it sums up what you've just been discussing and that in that interview you said you could heal people through theater not by making everything all right. And I assume you mean you don't cure cancer you don't give them a roof over their head. You may not even be able to give them groceries to get them rooms over their heads. They help them buy groceries. OK. But you make them feel alive again through theater not just through the groceries and you show them that there's a point to life. And I think that's what you're talking about. Yes. OK. I guess I was going to ask you about something other than what I'm about to ask but I fear that listening to both of you I should put myself out of business or

it could be I could put the two of you out of business. And so this is the question if Robert Frost or if one of your runaway actors had talked to me about their troubles and understood their mood and their thoughts and images and feelings and their endorphins have gone up and they'd be OK. When you say talk to you do you mean see a psychiatrist or psychiatrist right then. No. They don't need to do it. They can feel better. But I think that there is a psychiatric aspect to art in the sense of one one is making self sense of oneself and one's society and I think that's would be a way of describing what's happening to the young people older people in some cases is working with them I don't know for example if it's. That they are been given solace for soccer in any of the conventional ways that we think of it because we do seem to have come to a

point where in the popular imagination that certainly is something that that art could or should be doing or all else has failed saving our circumstances here. Organized religion has failed. So Art must somehow come in to save the day. And while I think it does in some sense come in to help us make sense of things perhaps help us to live our lives. It's not necessarily through offering. Solace or soccer may be forcing the young man that you describe to come to terms with his with what he did and his gang initiation. And it's as much surely the fact that he's able to

get that aspect of himself as it is that he makes as in what you're describing as good language. And obviously one once it's preferable I suppose that there's some sense of artistry about it. I think it's the sense that he has. With himself. That is what is is going perhaps to help him and art being placed by the cook on the ills of society. I mean in terms of when you ask your question about health care for example you know poetry we would love to think we'll have many much impact on the world but frankly the president Obama's health plan is going to have more impact for more people than poetry. Well I

I believe that to be the case free will help in many other ways. But it should not necessarily be called upon to solve all society's ills. Society's ills Maybe but do you think people feel better just because they're involved in art. I'm not quite sure why we think that people feeling better is a good thing. I'm really not sure about that one. My sense is the art and I think this is probably actually what is. I don't think Liz and I are disagreeing on this. I suspect we're not is that they're not really. Not really attempting to find solace. If they're not. I may disagree as.

Artists you and I. What does a good poem or what is a good monologue. But. What I find is. That he read that to me and it was extraordinary. And I looked at him and I said that is really very good. It was really good but it's a little too long. Could you cut it. And he just lit up because he was working and he was working as an artist and he knew he wasn't just being treated like a psychiatric patient. Right. And. I believed in him by the way proof positive that he's not being phony. I really believed in that in that speech and I don't. I don't. Make it up it was too long and he fixed it and it was even more effective. And I

think that when people can be. Confronted with truly good art and this is where we may disagree what is truly good. But that's everybody in the world. You know. But when. His contrition when he is touched by his own good writing something happens inside that. I can't describe it it's I mean it's when I went to in my life to save myself I picked up the guitar at the age of 10 and I spent two weeks just until my fingers bled. I know that's so dramatic but it's true. And because. I had to get rid of what was going on in my family and. I wanted to do it well. And I think that that feeling of being able to be

an artist. Was. In some ways. A gift that is beyond anything else that I could imagine. But second to that is to be able to experience that artist like that and to have him share his. Freedom his discovery kids coming to terms with himself with you in the room as a witness to his discovery. So the audience wins too. It works both ways. I don't think psychiatry is. Good. I think it comes later. I need to remind people that you're at the Cambridge forum and we're discussing mood in news with us and Paul

Aldin I told Liz the story and I sent Paul an e-mail about it. Are terrorists a psychiatrist who writes about trauma trauma is attached to mood and to intensity of feeling and to actually being shattered by feelings and what she writes about is artists who she feels continually try to get over what's happened to them as a life experience through. There. One example that she gives is made grete whose mother committed suicide and when my grandmother was found and Marguerite saw his mother her dead body her face was obscured by her clothing. And of course if you look at his artwork many of his paintings have no head no face. There may be an apple instead of a face on a lighter note. She describes Hitchcock and Alfred Hitchcock's father must have been not a very nice guy. He sent his little 6 year old Alfred to the magistrate then

sealed envelope and inside the envelope it said my little boy has been naughty put him in jail for a few minutes which the magistrate did. And Hitchcock being 6 years old didn't know how long this period of time would last. And my new book of poetry not to push it is about Houdini. Endlessly was trying to escape death endlessly was blaring the elements of the world to kill him and he always won. Until he did. And here's another example. He had a father who was a rabbi who was a bitter failure of a man and he had to beat his father at everything. Again and again and again and more tricks and harder tricks. Well with Hitchcock what she points out which is connected to this is that in many of his movies this false accusation and that

she doesn't say that trauma makes creativity. She says if you're creative you can make use of trauma. And she also says you don't necessarily feel better or work get out. And in fact it may be apocryphal but apparently Hitchcocks gravestone says Here lies a naughty little boy. So at the end he didn't work it out. Stephen King is another example where he went at age four playing on a train track with a pal. A train came. He jumped off and he saw his friend dismembered. And then again of course in his adult riding there are many dismembered characters. So I was going ask and I think you know you mentioned to me that you find Houdini not only as Houdini and his are but. That he captured you when you wrote about him had to do. With your traumas. Well yeah trying to escape again and again. And again from terrible situations

and be. Just another level of that which is that the need to recreate the terrible situations in other ways so that you symbolically keep escaping. That's an artistic thing that happens to you can a life thing you can neurotically artistically there are sometimes the same thing you can sort of create the situations that were traumatic for you so that you can win again and again and again because you don't really ever believe Houdini ever believed that he escaped. So I did want to just kind of said I mean there are other aspects of trauma that I find more and more engaging and one of them is the sense of a national trauma and insofar as one might discuss such a thing. You know one. Doesn't

want to start. Trying to claim that Ireland for example is being most put upon mention in the world. We certainly wouldn't want to be claiming that. However I think there are aspects of the Irish experience that. One of them being the great famine of the 1840s which at some level still hasn't quite been met. By the Irish people. And there's a lot of extraordinary work been done on this. Now there was a school of thought for example whereby James Joyce's story of the Dead which if you recall ends with this image of the shades of the dead all over Ireland looming in the darkness. And at the center of the story is a feast

at some level it's almost as if it's either a feast or famine and indeed it's very hard to find a work of Irish literature in the second half of the 19th century that really begins to come to terms with it. So I mean I think there is there is a delayed. Coming to terms if indeed we ever do come to terms with some of these issues and I'm sure that's true not only for nations but for. For individuals. And at some level whether or not we're involved in psychiatry. Or poetry or the extent to which we have been oppressed in our childhoods we are all. I'd like to suggest attempting to make sense if we're lucky if we have the pleasure to do it to try to make

sense of what happened to each of us when we were one or two or three or four to talk about it. I could try to. You. Know one thing I would say in that respect. When I was a kid I remember being lifted bodily. By a music teacher picked up by the scruff of the neck and the seat of the pants and threw me out of the classroom. Saying I must never go back in there again. I'm not quite sure what I was doing. I've sort of drawn a veil over that. But I think basically I was I was not able to sing. He insisted to me that I could not sing should not sing. Nothing about music. And I wonder if at some level I mean he happens to be right actually. But I

wonder I wonder if at some level my own interest song for me this is psychology. When I was not even one to one that's more like 50 and I have you know my own engagement with these these matters has to do with at some level at some level saying you know actually I can do this I believe I can. And you were wrong to do that to me. It wasn't right to say that to a child you know. And I mean of course I also happen to believe that people will attempt to write for the most part. And it's true of my own kids do so not because they're good at it but almost precisely because they're bad at it that they take. I. Certainly don't take so long to write a sentence in an email.

Otherwise. You know. I can't write. I want to see three 30. You know. I have to think about the order of every word. It's the curse of living on someone who doesn't expect to write anything that's going to go over the page for the most part and is willing. Become willing because at some level it's a necessity to spend so long writing that sentence and trying to get it right which is that idea that you referred to earlier on about your nurse student who had been in the gang. And I think what's great about that story is that it isn't the realization that occurs to me that it might have been making noise that you were thinking of as an artist you were meeting them on those turbines. It's not the subject matter necessarily which just happens to be in some sense graphic but I mean one could find any number of

graphic items of subject matter. So it's really as you say more about how it's done. One of the things about him just very briefly was that he wouldn't make eye contact for the first six weeks but he was how he got there is a long story. I read people kind of bring their friends when I'm making groups and he wouldn't make eye contact with me for he came but he wouldn't make eye contact and then one day and I and he and every time he would look at me I wouldn't make eye contact with him so he would look at him and he'd look away. And then he'd look at me and I'd look away. And then one day we looked at each other. And that's when it really. You know it really started to happen. So I'd like to ask one question that kind of ties us together and then we should open it to the audience. But you're both educators as well since you work in multiple genres of music and writing and you educate and I'll tell you a brief story. My son when he was in fourth grade wrote an

essay he was asked to write fiction. Write a story about a dinosaur that age Los Angeles. It was so well constructed that the teacher said You must read this to the class which he did. And then my husband and I were called in and we were told our son could never write about violence again. That was it. And so I tried to convince the teacher. Los Angeles was still in existence and. Dinosaurs were not. However she didn't buy that so now anyway what I was curious about from both of you is do you believe the current education system kills creativity. And if so what do the two of you do to counteract that. Well you know I do believe that children are more often than not natural musicians natural poets natural playwrights. It sounds a little words where and the child is father to the

man but I really believe that an eight or nine year old child in the area that I know a little bit about not much but something about which is poetry the greatest poets I think are often eight or nine years of age. And again that's because they don't know. What they're doing. A large part of it has to do with that. I mean. It have come to a point where we need to know what we're doing but combine that with that sense of not knowing all sorts of things happen. Of course by the time a child is 13 or 14 and if one asks 13 or 14 year old in this country to write a poem she will write a ninth rate version of a Dr. Seuss poem so grottos happened in there. I mean this is just a fact of life one has happened. Dr. Seuss is a great poet I think. How come everyone suddenly is writing these

plays have half baked examples of Dr. Seuss. Maybe a number of things going on. Puberty is kicking and self-consciousness the rest of it. But I think for the most part poetry is not particularly well taught in our secondary schools if indeed it's not at all. If it's taught it's at the very end of the year it's taught by people who were afraid to put themselves in a bad experience over themselves for the most part. And so on. And I believe virtually unfortunately unfortunately one of the things that our children are taught is poetry for young people which I'm sure there are wonderful wonderful examples of it but I don't know why don't we tend not to teach them astrophysics. For young people. Music for young people for. Chemistry for young people of course

we can imagine the minute they started a Bunsen burner you know that's that I think is a real problem. There there's absolutely no reason why our young people shouldn't be reading fast and yet and Elizabeth Bishop and Marion Mer and Emily Dickinson and all the rest of them. DADE reading if we were lucky enough to get our hands on of what your students come up with I think in this country we have our children playing cabbages and carrots and talking about nutrition or we have them doing Arsenic and Old Lace. Where like why is a 12 year old playing. You know there is absolutely no repertory no place nothing that they're doing that has been written even. I beg my friends who are really good writers to write plays for kids who are you know 10 to 15. Just please David

Mamet. Well I'm not David Mamet but you know that would be hard but you know please David. Well I don't know. Please please someone you know a playwright Wally Shaw could do it. He could write a great wonderful piece for our kids. I mean why is the children's theater so demeaning. I mean they do hello Dolly you know I mean hello Dolly is bad enough for grownups. It's you know it's horrendous. The State of the theater the state of the theater for young people is one of the worst things in the arts in this country and it's really one of the reasons why I set out the way I did was because I just couldn't believe it you know and there are a group of us who try to make stuff with kids and make it better.

But I believe really strongly that it's in this area that that you know any hope of having a vibrant cultural life in this country resigns. You know they if our secondary level students you know have not a better sense of what's available in all of these art forms that's very hard to see what they might be doing at the third level. I mean it seems in many cases at the secondary level. They're doing the work that should have been done at the primary level the first grade level grade school level and so on and so forth. And one has to sound like an old fogy But you know so much is being lost in this respect. So I think we opened many doors to many topics but we do need to let the audience

ask questions if you could line up and please ask questions. Otherwise I have plenty more. Well I want to deliver some good news which is that there actually are teachers in the secondary level who are doing magnificent things around poetry with with young people treating them as as who they are taking their material seriously as Liz knows. I happen to be our publisher and our magazine hanging loose which has been going for 43 years now has a special section devoted to high school poetry and has done so for the last 43 years. And the poems that are produced we don't produce them we're just the editors and they

come to us by poets who teach in high schools take their students seriously and teach them not children's literature but but real poetry. And the students respond and produce remarkable remarkable work. We're just publishing our fourth anthology of the best high school writing and some of the teachers to actually contribute. You know how do they do this how do they why are they different from all those other high school teachers that are producing all the schlock and getting them to look at the rhyme schemes and scansion rather than talking about you know what do you have to say what is your what is your your angry mood that's going to be the inspiration that makes you explore it and not know what whereas where you're going to end up with that poem so that it becomes the real the real thing. And sometimes these kids have been selected for the best American poetry anthology as high school kids that could well M-Day there.

As I suggested earlier on they're often much better than the rest of us. And I don't dodge for a minute that there there are many high school teachers who do a wonderful job of course there are but I think my sense is that the norm is still a little weak in that respect. The way poetry is taught has to do with alliteration and smooth and rough signs and in other words if chemistry were taught at that level it would be along the lines of here's the Bunson don't you like us so we would not have class in that van. So still a lot to be done. We say on that level there's wonderful people who are working with children in theater but

not nearly enough. Question is is there a thinking about poetry art in general and the whole related but very different idea of self-expression there's as some of you know Leslie university has has a course a graduate course in expressive therapy art creation expressions all kind of in there together which which leads me to a question is there or is there a correlation between taking poetry as an example is there a correlation between the value of a poem for the person who's written that and the quality of the poem from the person reading it. Is there a correlation there correlation between the want between the value of a poem. In other words can somebody write a poem which does them a lot of good but it's a lousy poem.

I don't. Know. Like I I really don't believe I think that my job if I was would be to work and work and work and make it a good poem and then that person would be feeling better. I think they know I mean I believe in kids you know like like nothing else. And I think they know when they're doing good stuff and they know when they're not. So you're so your editing is is is aiding both the writer and the reader. I think so. I think so too actually. Frost I mentioned earlier on as a great line about this he says no tears in the writer no tears in the reader. And at some level if the person through whom the poem is being written let's stick with the play. The play is being written doesn't have some sense of revelation doesn't actually experience some shift in

herself. No one else will. Don't know that. So go ahead I'm sorry. But then what can you experience that sense of shift than a revelation and still have the poem come out not so good. You know I dyed it. I dyed it good. You know there is no gold standard for good the good is determined by each piece itself. The terms that it sets up. And so if it's going to work it's either going to work or it's not for the person who wrote it. And if it's not going to work for her or him it's certainly not going to work for anyone else really coming down the road to it in terms of self-expression. You know I'm a child I was born in 1951. So even in Ireland the 60s sort of happened. They didn't arrive until a bit later maybe even into the 70s in some cases but I was always amused by the notion of

self-expression and I'm not entirely sure if I understand it. I mean I'm not sure of what self-expression would look like look like a bad poem. Well you know this the last thing one will be expressing at some level is oneself because the self I think needs to be left out of the equation. You know you know it's I'm sorry but I was just going to say I don't necessarily but necessarily willy nilly the self does get expressed because I mean a profund amount of DNA of off the personality through the piece was written performed or whatever is left at the scene of the crime was at work. But the impulse that happens by the way by the way I think it's problematic if the impulse is to express the self.

I think there's also an issue here of orchestration because we're both musicians and I'll give an example. I had a kid who could not learn one piece of choreography First of all he was much cheesed Mo and he was not about to dance. And then when he tried he couldn't put his feet together and he was getting more and more miserable. And I sat and I looked at him and I thought about it and I thought now this guy's he's not a dancer. You know what am I doing with this poor kid you know. So I walked up to him and I said what's your favorite sport. And he said I play football. I said OK. So put together some football moves for me you know like get a football and make a football dance. He said What's a football. As I said I don't know I've never seen one. You know like you do it. Go ahead. And then you teach it to the

rest of the group. So he put together the moves. He looked great. He was totally confident. It was good. And when he taught it to the kids it really rocked. Now there were a few kids of course who couldn't do the football moves. So then I had to deal with that. But you know it's sort of orchestration. It's like it's like I'm talking about self-expression the true self-expression is to understand the instrument and start with what the instrument can really do. And then if you can stretch. Great but if you don't get the instrument doing the right thing it's not a stretch. I want to come back to something you asked you talked about earlier Paul and you said

that in some ways the act of writing which takes you out of time is like a drug. Like it is like a drug. And it's something that a writer needs to come back to again and again and again. I wanted to ask Liz whether how she reacted to that statement and then I wanted to ask you both how you would relate that sense of what writing does to the writer to the traditional images we've been given of the Muse and what what role does the Muse play in that drug scenario. Just to answer your question briefly I'm out in the field so much that it's the only place where I can find solace and it's the place that I come home to and either sitting at the piano and writing a piece of music of my own or

writing a poem is the place where I find myself again and it stores me up and helps me live and go out there again. It's it's absolutely a drug. It's a good drug it's the only drug. I'm sure that I have a sense anyway. I'm not sure about anything honestly. I'm sure that one of the reasons why I come back to that desk is in the hope that something akin to that particular bars that physical. Resonance that has occurred from time to time in the past might happen again you know that Osip

Mandelstam used to harm his poems he'd start humming and humming and humming and he lying on his couch and he'd hum until the words came. Well are there many songwriters I think you do you do something along those lines these lyrics that are Mark Mark lyrics. I'm sure words were mentioned earlier on did a bit of hemming and hawing as he walked up and down at the bottom of the garden. So you know I'm sure the art of art of the occasional hum ahem by a man who knows. But I mean I I'm sure there's a lot of work still to be done on this. There's already some work obviously been done on the way the brain is functioning during various types of art making and taking I

there being pretty much the same thing I think reading and writing are really part of the same activity. To go back to what we're seeing every year or so to scan we have only a dim view I think of what we're looking at now in terms of those elect little electrical peaks when we see an image being registered in a reader or certainly a apparently a metaphor being made. I think I'm right in saying that that impulse to make those connections is if you think about it very basic to why the brain itself is functioning in terms of these little neurons firing. I talk as if I know what I'm saying I really don't know anyway. But you know I'm sure I'm pretty sure that there is a physical. There's a sense of well-being which maybe

maybe is actually contradictory to what I was saying earlier on in terms of succor and solace and maybe I'm wrong to so readily sort of rule it out because that may be a version of it actually. That sense of well-being that we get was from from so many activities activity being one of them. But certainly for many of us who are not running five miles a day the poem or the possibility that the boss might come back to us. Unfortunately the boss is related not necessarily to a good poem it could be read. Oh at all. Oh yeah. I sweat when I write music. It doesn't mean a thing sweat when it's bad sweat when it's good to sweat.

A painter by profession and a lot of what you say I resonate in my studio. There are many drawings that I make that just don't make it. There's a lot of sweating a lot of accidents that I heard from. It's a very difficult process. I guess the question is exhibit's the work. Someone told me that people no longer spend more than six seconds looking at work. I was in a museum a few weeks ago and I actually looked around and sort of time people and they did move very quickly past a work of work that maybe took enormous amount of time and effort to make. So I. And I also noticed in my own field there's a lot of awful stuff that I can relate to. So I just wonder about the clutter. I mean there's a lot of stuff out there and I don't know if you can relate to that

in terms of the time. I mean actually there are a lot of work goes into making the poem and I'm sure the painting and they do have a sense of immediacy. So I'm not too worried about the six second taking in of the poem. I mean we've become quite sophisticated I think in the way we look with the with the development of our grammar of the visual image and the moving image in the 20th century. So it may be that looking quickly at a painting is ok. I think probably there's actually there comes a point in time in most art museums where you know you look for a while and then actually the eye is just there's a surfeit. And one begins to move quickly through your running past you in order to Vinci and say OK next place. So it may be a little bit of that also.

I don't agree with that. Pete Seeger said that there's so much music now. There's so much going on that people can't differentiate anymore. They don't know how to differentiate style or I mean it's just noise it's just going on and on and on and. And Stravinsky said that he wished you know this that he wished that everybody had to walk to his concerts so that they had to work so hard to get there that they'd really listen. Once they got there you know and I. Because I worked a mime. One of my protege that my protege that's really arrogant. One of my mentors was Peter Brook and what he taught me was that the audience is the last thing to worry about. And how long they listen how long they look at that it's the process of making the thing and it will find its audience as

a lover finds another lover. I guess I told Paul that I had read his scholarly book The End of the poem and in that book I realized all the poetry I didn't understand I would understand better if I understood the life of the poet the culture the poet grew up in the context and historical events. And then I read John Tim Paine's it could reverse. And what he tries to help a person like me with poetry is to just swallow it. Swish the sounds around and enjoy. And I just wondered if either of you felt that that's not the best way to enter poetry I guess. I mean essentially it's sensual. I just felt that and that the thump and the rump and the sounds and the feel of it made me feel something. And even though I didn't know about Emily Dickinson and Franklin

stoves there in the Northwest Passage and when that was discovered and that was all referenced in some of Emily Dickinson's poetry suddenly because of this other way of looking at poetry I I I got something. Yeah. And that's OK. I think that's great. I think that's great too. I mean each poem as I say demands it sets up the terms in which it's going to be read and to admire the poem as one aspect of most poems is the physical aspect but it is only one aspect. And those are not merely songs that tend not always but they tend to be associated with meanings. So the poem you know is not in general merely a concatenation of noises. It is moving towards

meaning something. So go ahead. Well first of all I want to thank you both this wonderful evening. Thank you for coming up and being a part of it. My question has to do with when you think the news for the personal connects to the political. You earlier mentioned Pete Seeger a great hero. Many of us in the entire world were here in New England many other people found of great inspiration in him as a leader he found within his own style of presentation or a political way to talk to a generation that really died. And recently I saw the Joan Baez documentary on PBS the other woman who had a tremendous impact on those of us who were involved with the anti-war movement here in New England.

And I watch it knowing where is the personal become political in a good way. Meaning you shouldn't be political to start with. Yes be personal would come out with an authentic expression. But if you could spend some time talking about it I would appreciate that. Well I think the personal and the pathetic political are connected all the time and the intensity with which they're connected though I think varies varies from time to time. And you know if one happens to be an artist who holds the right view it's all very fine and well too expressive. And if not it's perhaps inappropriate to express it. I mean we tend to we've got to have the right views before we

express them. And so that's that's the point at which it becomes problematic and where it becomes proper you know where various types of propaganda in which I'm sure some artists genuinely believe that we would like to think that everyone believes in the right things. That's the point where we even have a camp where I even use a few sentences like that that's where difficulties arise. I personally see it as my job. I mean I think it's one with what I do and who I am. And sometimes people who disagree with me write amazing things and I can accept that. But I feel that my my work is meant to do both to to wake up some of those sleeping emotions about the

world. I don't want to be corny but are or you know to to wake up to the wish to care again you know to to want to do something again. Especially in my my work with kids but also in everything else I do. It's it's absolutely my job. So we do have to close up in a moment. I just wanted to ask one last thing of both of you since you write children's books and you wrote I think of several poems about your wife's pregnancy and the baby being born. I did. OK. Wait you really did. I was just wondering I guess see from the psychiatric standpoint that would have indicated to me your moods were good or happy ones are joyful when you are in the range of joy as opposed to

despair or low. Well actually you know that's an aspect of this that we haven't really touched on too much. The joy there is certainly there. There is a poem in which I am attempting I suppose or it is attempting to express something of the joy of the world in which we live and ends which this child is coming. But I think the other side of it is that really joy is tends tends to make news less frequently than it's opposite. I think we are we are naturally disposed to the offices of joy and when Sally comes down the corridor and says You won't believe I've just met this most wonderful guy you wouldn't. He's just adorable you think. OK. But if Sally comes on the court and says

You wouldn't believe what that horrible person has done to me he's left me. Then you think OK I'm interested. I mean it's just part of who we are we are magically more interest in that and for better or worse than we are and Sally's good news. So anyway we want to be able to explore both and to offer both since they are of course on offer here for us. Would you like to comment. There's a word that we haven't used once tonight and it's really icky but I love it through writing children's books. I I love them through what I write all their mushy sounds and they're weird things that they say and the wonderful ways they

topple over and you know the all the things that I love about children go into go into my my books. And it's it's a it's just a love of the creature. I mean children are creatures they're great you know they're great creatures. So that's what I try to do. And if I find them you know not loving a thing that I'm doing I usually throw it out not with the adult stuff but with the kids stuff. So unfortunately unless there's a last moment question that anybody feels urgently they need to ask. I do need to say thank you. PALMO Dan thank you. Weight. And you've been at the forum and we thank you for coming.