Focus 580; Poetry with David Wright

In this part of focus 580 we'll be talking about the craft of poetry and our guest for the program is poet and professor of English David Wright. He teaches at Richland community college in Decatur. He has published poems essays and reviews and a number of places including the Midwest Quarterly and the Mennonite. His first book of poetry lines from the provinces is out it is published by a publisher called great unpublished dot com that has an interesting approach to publishing. They publish on demand. They have the book loaded into a computer in fact and when you call and say I want a copy of this book they make one. So that's how you can get it. It's title lines from the provinces and has I think a lot of fine writing in it. So you could take a look at it he just was he gave writing a reading of his writing last week in that pages for all ages bookstore that was on Saturday in fact he was going to be on the show a week ago. And I got sick. So he was good enough to reschedule. Say yes he would come in this morning and I would talk a little bit about his writing about poetry about what makes that form

special. Maybe we'll talk a little bit about how one works with young poets or would be poets and of course we'll have him read from his work. So that's what we'll do and if there are questions by the way people can certainly call in three three three. Wy L.L. or 9 4 5 5 that's for local folks toll free 800 1:58 wy Hello. You are welcome to give us a call. Well we're pleased to have you here. Thanks for having me. I just I think before anything else before launching into any questions about poetry or anything else I would ask you to read something. Sure To start let me start with a sort of classic. We were talking a bit before the show about writing making art in the Midwest and how you see the landscape here or how outsiders see the landscape here I think. The book is sort of tongue in cheek title the lines from the provinces because most people think of the Midwest as provincial as flyover country. And I think there is a sense in that I understand why people feel that way. But having grown up in the Midwest I sort of see the the

aesthetics of it a little differently. So the first poem is the classic Illinois poem if you're going to write an Illinois poem the most obviously aesthetic thing is the sunset and so a poem called Nineveh. The drippings of sunset ride away on a cloud like water on a huge gray whales back or a child's writing on a wall with orange and red crayon each shade heated and melted until the mother blue of night comes to wipe them away and the trees kneel to pray by a white bed still and perfectly made and their answer comes with a new white whale that spits up a sun jaundiced and pale that rises to write like a child again with a new bold sharp hand as the trees raise their dark arms in praise. It was very nice. This is one of those things I suppose that as you say it's one of the striking features of the Midwest because it is flat and open and we do have some pretty spectacular sunsets. Yeah I'm sure many poems have been written. Many photographs have been taken people have tried to do that. How was this a. Did you consider this to be a challenge to try to do

something that wouldn't end up being a cliche. Well who knows that I haven't I mean you think I haven't. I think I have and I think there are plenty who think I have. Yeah I think that's I think that's the hard thing and I think we should get see who's a writer up at the Illinois State University really fine poet says. One of the troubles in the Midwest is figuring out where to put the frame. Because the land in the sky go on so long that it's hard for artists to figure out where to put the frame and so we find ourselves framing poems photographs paintings whatever we're doing with the with the landscape. Very deliberately so here I took this sort of a biblical biblical eye Luzhin of Nineveh the city that Jonah was supposed to talk to got caught up in a whale's belly and took that metaphor that idea and played with it and that was the frame for the poem. It's also a poem that starts at dusk and comes comes back to Dawn the obit is an old form of poetry that does that it's usually a love song. So you find ways to frame what you see. And I think that's one of the things that a poem can do.

Did you grow up around this part. I grew up in Washington Illinois which is a little farm town outside of farming bedroom community for Caterpillar outside of Peoria. And then I studied at Millikin University in Decatur. And then we've been living I went to Chicago for grad school and we've been living back here in Champaign and I've been teaching in Decatur for the last four five years. So people I think should not come away from that poem thinking that well that's what lines from the provinces are about or that's what your work is about. Because there are a lot of different things. There also I think some some nice poems about Chicago. Yeah yeah it gives a sort of gritty and urban and very different from this kind of prairie sunsets. Well actually moving to Chicago was really helpful for me in terms of seeing the Midwest differently I moved to Chicago go to grad school and found myself just immersed I think a lot of people who come from small towns go to the big city find themselves immersed in this chaotic busy life and try to find a way to cope with it and realizing just how complex Chicago

was that in a short period of time I was going to get my brain around it. Writing the l became for me a kind of an exercise not just in sociology but also in the statics there's a there's a sort of aesthetics of writing the L who you sit next to how do you leave the buffer seat between you and the guy next to you. What do you do when the homeless guy gets on what do you do when the card players get on and try to involve you in the shell game. How do you ignore folks how do you watch folks you realize you're watching people they must be watching you. It's going to be happening and so once I move back to the back to downstate I found myself looking at this place in the same way how infinitely complex My central Illinois be and I know folks are maybe laughing at home about that notion but I think that it that it's true that there's a line in the book I quote from the poet Geoff Gundy. He says even in the province's complications persist. And so let me let me read one of the Chicago fellows all right. So a point called Addison Street the stop you get off to a cup game. A small rounded woman sits next to me she is gumming sunflower seeds. Her licks lips

close and click like the clasps on a purse. She makes a comic face like my infant daughter tasting peaches for the first time we stop just past Wrigley Field old green and empty. She reaches into her enormous crinkled plastic bag. She feels her hand then fills her mouth the entire handful at once she cannot contain them all in the gathers and folds of her pleated cheeks she coughs seeds scatter from her lips a shower of shells splattered my arm. No seed takes root. Not one of them bursts into a small sun or anything beautiful at all. She reaches her slim fingers towards me without hesitation and picks a seed from my skin she licks off the salt and flicks the seed back into her mouth. She does not look at my face but I look at hers. I see her cheeks churn like a squirrel's. She gleans another full seed from my arm fixes it on her lips squeezes them together and forces the oily heart under her tongue. We hurdle at last to her stop she stands to leave and sputters a coarse laugh like static before she spits. She has

swallowed the salty husks and strewn grey lifeless seeds at my feet. Did this happen. That's a great question and it's the one that everyone always asks and I always refuse to answer it straightforwardly something a lot like it sure. And what happens I think with a poem is that you end up trying to compress a whole set of experiences or even one single but fairly complex experience into something that you can do in a few lines or in a page or two. And that compression process is part of what it means to make poetry what Brooks was fond of saying that poetry is life distilled this kind of purifying process or distilling process is something that. That poems allow you to do and so it takes experience and compresses it in a way that focuses on some aspects of it focuses on the music of the experience focuses on a whole variety things and here. The l became for me a kind of metaphorical of city life. You know it was the one place where all of the ranges of people who lived in Chicago were forced

together so you have this woman with her big bag of sunflower seeds next to the guy in the suit who's headed down to the loop you have this whole batch of folks who wouldn't otherwise be in the same place in the same place. And it's a kind of almost forced intimacy that I think. Just was sort of poetically fertile for me as lots of other poets have done it lots of poems about the subways in New York lots of poems about bus rides of Carl Sandburg has a whole bunch of poems set on street cars and buses in Chicago. So it was irresistibly about a fork for me what city life was about. And so I've avoided your question and something like it happened. Well you but you also have answered another question that I wanted to ask and that was what. What is poetry about what is it that makes this form of writing different from. Or what sort of things can you do with it that maybe you can't do in any other way.

Yeah I think that all kinds of imaginative discourse all kinds of imaginative the uses of language are asking you not just to think about the language but to experience it and. Of course there are things to think about in a poem of course there are ideas but there's also the level of of your senses and your experience of the of the language and of the ideas and of the images and of all the stuff that goes into poetry and so that level of experience seeing something when you encounter a poem is really strong. Just popping out all these quotes or exclude my teacher i do this kind of thing but killing for she has a line where she says poetry is what helps us to sustain our capacity for contemplation. It's what allows us to experience experience. And we experience it through the sort of the sensual qualities of the language. And that means the imagery that means the sound that means the music of the language. All of those kinds of things are what poets are playing with and so any given poem will do all of that. But we tend to. I think people tend to mystify poetry.

It's beyond me. I can't read it my high school teacher was an expert because she told me what all the symbols meant in everything Keats ever wrote to my junior year. Only she had the code I haven't been able to crack the code I think you're asking some of the wrong things about poems if that's the way you're approaching it you know mystery and ambiguity that's fine if you don't understand completely. It's the ability to experience experience and to sort of sustain your capacity for contemplation. And that's one of the things I'm trying to do when I work with poems. And there's also something it's somebody said something to the effect of the what poetry is about is is this the immediacy of an experience. But observed with some distance as Coleridge and Wordsworth their line about poetry was poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity. And you asked earlier a little bit about young poets and what do you do with them. And I think most young writers and maybe too many older writers have that spontaneous overflow of powerful

feelings down. We're good at that. You know we're good at sort of spewing feelings and getting things out there. But it's that recollection process the recollected in tranquillity the ability to recollect it into something that has a value beyond just the kind of value of writing down what you feel in your journal beyond having a temper tantrum beyond. Being in therapy. All valuable things not necessarily poems. You know in the poem is going to distill that experience and recollect it in some way that it can exist on the page or on the table or in the air between the reader and the writer and it has a life that is beyond you sort of the immediate emotional impact for the writer and that then allows someone else to vicariously experience that experience. Our guest is David Wright He's associate professor of English at Richland community college in Decatur. His home is here in champagne the champagne area. He's published poems and essays a variety of places and has a collection of poetry that's titled lions from the provinces and the poems that he has read come from

there. And we are happy to hear having here talking about his writing specifically and writing poetry more generally I should say pages still has copies of the book that they imported for the reading and so if someone's really interested in getting a copy that's a good spot to go. And of course they can order it online as well. And questions to welcome you no. 3 3 3 w. Wilde toll free 800 1:58 W-M. You'd like to read something I'm sure you were talking about that kind of spontaneous overflow recollected in tranquillity. And one of the poems that in the book where I was real conscious about that process. So a poem called Medium. And it's a poem about my father that was written a year and a half after he passed away. He died fairly suddenly at the age of 59. And it's a real iffy thing to try to write about a situation like that in the same way that writing about a sunset in the Midwest can become a cliche. Writing about death can become a cliche. It can become a kind of spewing or venting process and all that other kind of personal value I'm not sure has a lot of poetic value

and lots of poems about dead fathers have been written. They've been written better than you're likely to write them you know it sorts a little daunting to do and so I wasn't able to allow myself to write the poem about him or any poems about him for quite a while. And then when I finally did that the challenge was to try to be very concrete. The only sort of concrete images in the poem and have a kind of control over how the poem worked. Because of that so this is a poem called The called Medium. In my parents home all its familiar rooms collapsed into a cutaway set. I moved without effort from the kitchen table to my old bed fall painlessly into the basement where I am folding laundry with my dead father. He deftly pairs black socks rolling their tops together and smooths a pile of my mother's shirts with a quick firm caress as if he enjoys all of this now that he is dead. And we talk about teaching about giving grades to students lives and about my mother.

He tells me what it is like to be dead as he picks blue dryer lint from his huge mauve T-shirt that I'm now wearing. How I wonder will I explain to her that he finally folds clothes. I stand in the backyard alone with the wind filling billowing the shirt still warm from the dryer. And so much larger than I remember. I like that very much. One of the things I just I'm curious about when you read this way is when you do readings and there's an audience and they know that this is this is somewhat serious and after all it is about your experience of losing your dad when you get to the line. How will they explain to her he finally folds close to people laugh. He depends on the audience. Audiences that know my mom don't. I gave a reading in my hometown public library and shortly after the book came out and that audience didn't laugh. But other audiences will laugh it's meant to be a funny line and

it's meant to be I mean it's a poem about a dream. And in that way there's an absurdity too to what happens I think to the psyche after someone dies we all have these odd dreams where people show up who've been gone in dead end and there were a whole collection of those kinds of dreams for myself that I was trying to distill into this poem and yet not just make it a kind of a dream journal for myself but to give it that life that has something going on outside it was her response to this. It was a very sensible response she said Well your father must have all the clothes at some point you know. And she was absolutely right and yet he didn't do it very often and so you know there is a there is a censor in the poems intitled medium in part because there's a kind of standing between that's going on and so in the. I think any parent child relationship there very often is a place where the child is mediating the relationship. Between the parents the medium is also someone who is in touch with the dead and who who channels ghosts in some way and having dreams about a dead parent or a dead family

member or a dead friend. One becomes a medium between that person in the world with a living and then poetically. I think you know the medium of poetry is a way in which we tend to figure out relationships figure out feelings figure out how all of those connect somehow and so you know it's always dangerous when a poet talks about her intentions or what he meant. So you need to completely be in doubt about this but those are some of the things going on in the poem and I think the response to this poem has been very interesting many folks have told me about dreams of loved ones who passed away. Have talked about the physicality of objects and how those physical objects sex are very often sort of talismans or icons to the dead you know that putting on a piece of clothing from someone who who has passed away is in some ways a very intimate gesture. You know the clothing retains the shape and the smell perhaps

of of the person who had it Maxine Kumin is a poet who writes about her relationship with Anne Sexton and Anne Sexton have course committed suicide and when she died her family said you can come pick out anything. Vans. And so she picked out an old blue blazer that had worn all the time and when she brought it home she hung in the closet and didn't wear it for a while. So when she finally put it on she said that her dog sort of freaked out and thought that Anne Sexton was coming over because the dog saw the. The coat and thought of it as. You know and sextants and so for the dog that meant that his friend was coming over to that maybe also it still smelled exactly and had all of the features and so she talks about it and what the line of that poem is the dumb blue blazer of your death. And so that's sort of the background of this poem to put those physical objects have a real ability to almost be icons to the to the departed person and I guess I'd know from

having read an essay that you wrote about this poem that in fact when your dad died you got some of his cause exactly. Yeah yeah. So you take that you try to make a bomb. We have somebody here to talk with and we'd be happy to have others who are already close to the midpoint here. Talking with David Wright He's associate professor of English at Richland community college in Decatur. He's a poet. His poems are published in a book collection titled lines from the provinces. And he's actually been good enough to provide us with a few poets here to be on the show the past couple of years. He's brought them to Richland to talk with his students. And one of the highlights has been being on the show so that's well I don't know if that well that's that's nice will pretend that it was once the right thing to say it OK. That's right. Christians are welcome. We have someone here I think in well it's online Number one I'm not sure of the location here. Hello. Yes. Yes go ahead. I've got a question. For you you kind of touched on this a little while ago. And by the way I'm not being facetious because this has made me wonder for some time.

What is the definition of a poem. It seems to me that you could take an essay. Write it in successive lines and have somebody read it in a particular manner and it could be called a poem that is between this and what is being done nowadays. Written nowadays is poetry. I think it's a great question Have I really wanted to ask essentially the same question because you know what a poem supposed to look like. Sure we've seen it and you know we know it's what's looked like on the page but then what. To be a poem what. What rules do you have to satisfy. Well of course the rules have been broken broken broken and broken broken in decade after decade after decade and so you end up with the question what is a poem anymore. And one of the distinctions I make between prose and poetry is that poem poems have a kind of embodied music to them and that music used to be represented most obviously in things like

rhyme regular meter. You know Emily Dickinson I heard if I was when I dug around in around the room the problem with that is that quite easily then becomes the driving force in the poem as opposed to the ideas the images other kinds of things so 20th century poets began to write what they would call free verse organic verse where they wanted the form of the poem to match the subject of the poem. So you see someone like e cummings playing with language breaking it all up you see other poets who were trying then to make the form fit. What they have to say they're playing with the language. I think an awful lot of poems these days I'm probably guilty of writing it could just be sentences with pauses in them and I try to be real conscious of the fact that that that may or may not be poetry I think that to have a kind of internal embodied music in the poem makes it work. Obviously formal devices like writing a sonnet where you've got the eye of a contaminant or you know 10 beats in a line 14 lines allows you to sort of hear that music fairly obviously rhyme does that. But you know there's always the

trick of taking the Emily Dickinson poem and setting it to the Yellow Rose of Texas and so you've got I heard a fly buzz when I died go around and around the room and that kind of ruins it for you. So there's no guarantee there's no guarantee that those formal devices will create music. It's really easy to write a bad stilted piece of dog by attending to the other aspects of music so I think it's become more complicated I'm afraid I'm not giving the straightforward answer you want but that's what poets also do is veer off and. You know supports a plethora of prose poems. It is a funny exercise in the class I'll take a passage from Faulkner or from some other fiction or prose writer break it up into lines show it to students and say you know tell me why this is or isn't a poem not tell them who it's by and that's often a fun task because then they have to begin to think about what it is that makes poetry. Okay there's a use of imagery here OK there is a kind of rhythmic sense to the language OK there is a metaphor being used all those things that we might sort of apply to poetry but then they have to make a decision is it. Is it poetry. And

often say well you hear that in body music. Is there something there that's a kind of rhythmic musical lyric sense. And if it's not there then they'll say well no it's not poetry. Does that help. Yes it does. Thank you very much. Thanks for calling. I'll be looking at portraying a little different light in the future. Glad to hear it. Thank you excellent excellent question. And others are welcome. If you want to give us a call 3 3 3 wy L.L. toll free 800 1:58 WLM. One of the things that I suggested we might do would be to to to take one of the poems and talk a little bit more about it on a structural sort of way so that maybe we could you could say a little bit about how this is it's not just a set of sentences that are arranged in a form where we would look at it and we would say oh yes that's a poem I know what a poem supposed right to look like. Can you take one and take it apart a little bit for us.

Sure. Let me let me do this one this is a poem that tries to do something with music. So it's doing a little bit of what I was talking about with the last the last caller who has such a good question it's a poem called Beethoven's romance in G. It's actually for a local violinist a kid named Christopher Otto who is really just a fine player and Beethoven's romance in G. Here is why we listen. A 15 year old boy who will not yet have mangled his heart in the barbed wire of loss and desire can sing violin strings through human hair so the deaf man's beautiful wound heals allowed above and within us. Hands on a fretless neck and bow on stretched strings vibrate his narrow shoulders echo under his slim clean fingers the sound moves presses grooves cut sing grows through his still body and eyes where he can only imagine the fresh and worn scars of love. But he can hear and bless the air with lucid sound that filters through fences and assaulted in free and in this morning saves and releases whole be graceful tomorrow and in memory even

after being sifted through the sieves of ourselves. So talk a little bit a bit about tell me a little bit about more about what. What happens in this poem. Well you know it on the very surface of the poem it's simply someone listening to someone play a piece of music and listening to a 50 year old boy put that piece of music in so that the poem follows the the progression of the piece. You hear the piece being played you hear the piece. You watch the young man playing the playing the piece music hands on stretch on a fretless neck and bow on straight string vibrate his narrow shoulders go under his slim clean fingers so on a sort of just very literal level. It's a picture of someone playing the violin. But there are several other things going on and one of those is the attempt to mimic the music to a degree. And to do that what I did was I tried to make each line have the same phrase of a piece of music. They're very fairly short lines.

So a piece of you know phrases the collection notes it's put together to make a kind of single statement musically. And so a 15 year old boy who will not yet have mangled his heart in the barbed wire of loss and desire through a little rhyme in there and the rhyme and the musicality to it can sing violin strings pulled up another poet trick which is to use alliteration or the repetition of these consonant sounds which gives a kind of rhythmic musicality to the poem can sing violin strings through human hair so the deaf man's beautiful wound heals allowed above and within us a lot of percussive sounds in those lines. Beautiful wound heals allowed above and within us. And so at the same time your. Talking about music talking about this performance of this piece of music you're also trying to mimic the music too and to an extent happens again towards the end of the poem. Even after being sifted through the sieves of ourselves and you can hear all those S and V sounds there as a as a way of slowing the poem down at the end because that's what happens in the music itself as it slows down and comes to a pause. Those are the

kinds of choices you make and I tell students all the time that writing is nothing else but a set of conscious choices with language. And at what point they become conscious is different for every writer some folks are very very conscious of what they're doing as they craft the poem every line every line they can't go on until they've gotten the line right. Others do that in the revision process. You know you sort of get that poem out there and stop and piece it back together in a way that it seems to do what you're hoping the poem will do. And then of course the other thing going on the poem is always trying to give the sense that here's this 15 year old boy playing this piece by this deaf man. How in the world does music function as the medium for that deaf man to communicate to us through this seemingly innocent 15 year old boy you know whose heart has not yet been mangled in the barbed wire of loss and desire. And here here's a poem that there are there are a couple of factual details in for example the line the deaf man's beautiful woman and obviously

referring to Beethoven the fact that later in his life he went deaf now. I was or the hands on a fretless neck while a violin doesn't have frets. A guitar has frets those of those little wires that go across that violin doesn't have them. I wonder as you think about it where you think about the fact. Well I wonder some people won't get the fact that the deaf person I'm referring to is Beethoven maybe everybody doesn't know that or maybe someone will hear that line about the fretless neck and they'll say what you know better immediately say Oh yeah I get it. The violin doesn't have frets is that something that you when you toss details like that in that maybe to you. You don't have to think about the fact. Oh yeah of course I get what this is you think about how some readers will stumble across those lines and think what is he talking. When I make poems what I hope they do is I hope they reward the generous reader and generous readers will always come at a poem with different levels of sophistication different levels of experience different levels of information.

So I would hope that a generous reader who doesn't know much about Beethoven doesn't know much about classical music doesn't know much about violins doesn't know any of those kinds of things could hear in this poem the sense of musicality could appreciate the fact that this 15 year old boy plays the violin beautifully to get something worth getting out of the poem you don't have to know every allusion in the poem. On the other hand I would like a more sophisticated intelligent reader who knows a great deal about music. To read the poem and be rewarded for generously reading it. And so yeah you make conscious choices I mean you know use a word for the word fretless there's a pun been made there as well. It's not just that there aren't frets but this is a fretless boy isn't it. You know he has nothing to worry. Nothing to fret about. Now obviously it's a stereotype of this kid every 15 year old has more to fret about than this. Then you can then you can shake a violin bow at but so again the hope is to reward a generous reader at a variety of levels and of course you're going to make decisions and sometimes you're going to cut

whole audiences off by putting in illusions to things that they couldn't possibly get and that's that's the responsibility of the poet to decide which readers do I want to reward. Ultimately you're hoping to reward a whole range of readers civils yourself. Well the rule that raises an interesting notion though that that you get from a poem what you bring to it. Well you can but then there are things that the poem will keep you from bringing to it so that that poem I just read and I tell students all the time was not a poem about baseball. You know there are things that might you might bring to the poem. But it's really not a poem about baseball. It's a poem about a boy playing a violin. And of course one brings to it a whole range of things. But the poem also will focus and force you to pay attention in a particular way. If you're a generous reader if you allow the poem to work on you Wendell Berry who's one of my favorite writers talks about understanding as a kind of standing under something or allowing it to affect you. And that's

been. That's been a useful notion for me. We have another caller who's been with us line number one the champaign alone. Hi this is union chairperson and I want to say I really appreciate this program. Being a poet among other things I really appreciate you David Wright and also you and I have one question I know that everything you said about poetry is true. That's that's awful nice to hear you don't often hear everything you said is true so I thank you very much. You're welcome. But my question is. You have to have absolute They're like kids they have serious flaws. They are like offspring and so I think a lot of times we minimize it's only dog or it's only a cat. Well if it's a person and we have a lots of books on pet laws and people lost all that stuff and

so thank you so much for saying what you said because I think most people are have an aversion and they think poetry is obscure and I don't think so I I agree with you that it's a kind of in body music and this is you. It's a real complex experience and I'll stop talking and listen to your response. Well I'm glad you resonated with the poem about loss as well as with the the idea of poetry as as a kind of embodied music. I think there are lots of things poems can do I think that's one of the mistakes that we make is when we expect poems only do one thing. So if a poem is only to express an emotion Well that's only one dimension of it of course poems can also be musical. That's only another dimension of it of course poems can be about ideas and be about historical places and times and just as whole range of things that poems can do the thing that poems do I think is that they do

that with a particular set of tools. Yeah. Thank you so much for this. I didn't know that April was sports month until yesterday and I'm not sure who the gods were that decided that but it's nice of them I tell you. It makes for more readings for poets. Yeah and thank you for this program in this present age. Very Young thank you for the call we do have about 10 minutes left. Our guest is David Wright. He is associate professor of English at Richland community college in Decatur as poems essays reviews have appeared in a number of places and he has a collection titled lines from the provinces. And he gave a rating at a page for all ages bookstore in Savoy last weekend and I know that there are a few copies of the book there so if you would like to have a copy of the book you can do it you can head over there and I'm sure that we have happy to provide you with one. It would be great I'm also doing a reading with several other poets at Milliken University on the 24th of April I think it's six o'clock in the Kirkland one twenty eight. DAN GUILLORY who is a writer over there has organized that along with

Randy Brooks and a couple of other writers and so we'll be reading to kind of celebrate the the end of National Poetry Month on the on the 24th so it's a good operator. Ready for folks in Decatur. And people listening have questioned their they'd like to talk with a guest you can do that. Three three three W I L L toll free 800 1:58 wy Lord 9 4 5 5. Would you like to read something you share. Noticing the number of farmers out in the fields these days swirling dirt and doing what they do. This is a poem that I stole the core of this poem from someone else which is always the danger if your friends are poets or writers of any sort is that you'll tell them things and they will not be able to let them rest and we'll fret them and worry them into something else. And so the story that's at the core of this is actually a story from a friend of mine who's a farmer down in the Arthur area and who talked about planting in late May

and working with his neighbor in that process so. So I stole from him. Planting in late May. The light cocoons you through dark fields is what circles of Earth brighten then vanish beneath the machine's heavy tires and home. Creatures come to braid and unravel the fringes of your lights. A single coyote keeps pace waiting for panicked mice deer edge the fence lines their dinner of sweet stocks still months away. Your neighbor hovers at the farm's margin visible only when the ovals flare on the turn at rows and he seldom speaks but tonight over the trolling motor. When you break for a bit backlit and dirty he talks with you like a tired spouse tells you how a rainy season almost got the best of this year's time. He seems easy as the Hungry Coyote resting for one lazy moment just outside the tractors glow when you finish. Put away your gear and see. Then join him at the house for beer he stands mute by the stove tense

uneasy. A deer poised to run yet standing still once he knows that he's been seen. The whole house black except that kitchen light. You leave him there alone. Skirt this field so full of seed left and tended to the dark to find its way. Very very nice and nice. So many one I think you know can get carried away with the idea that poems are about grand sweeping enormous ideas concept emotions a lot of poems are about very small things small small moments little events that doesn't necessarily have to be to something huge. Well and it's in those you know it's been quoted from a number of people. The bear is supposed to set a god is in the details that are the particulars what makes a poem I think work. If there's nothing particular in the poem then there's no reason to say it. If we're going to say for example Life is fleeting. Okay that's been said you

know while love is beautiful. Ok love is painful. OK. You can say all of those things but to experience it which was to take us back to the start of our conversation to experience it is. Requires a whole nother level of particularities and it without that I think then you're missing something in him. In the imagination of so I think that's another thing that young poets can learn from is to populate their poems with particulars. That if you want to write about love write about something specific you know and be aware of the fact that love doesn't happen out there somewhere in the air. It happens at a coffee shop between two people at a table it happens in a bedroom it happens you know on a walk it happens in a car it happens when the other person is not even there and you get a sense of their loss and that that particular stuff is part of the embodied music that brings to mind the poem.

I have a call I want to get right to them but I'm I'm wondering if you would read it tonight. Yeah that's the one. All right. That's the one tonight. Our spent evening collects on the Table Pizza bones my shirt the remote control your keys. Our genes are a tangle of legs and me my glasses. They're on the floor big reach and I knock over your drink mop it up with my shirt. That's love using my shirt. You laugh and dance across the hardwood floor your body rinsed in the TV colors ignoring my stare you peer away. Turn the corner come back in your pink worn robe I reach and tug at the loose half tied belt don't I'm cold. The picture blushes red blue green bright white. You laugh fall into me still cold. No we close our eyes and color spills everywhere. I like them very much. We have another caller here this is someone in Marshall That's line number four. Hello. I thought in a community college or a fan. Oh I know I argue or say a syndicator I'm at Richland Community

College which is in Decatur. OK are you. I guess I was wrong. All me is a fine community college as well. But I'm at Richland So thanks for calling. OK what was that it. Yeah but how can there be two colleges of the same name in the same state. There are not all ne easy in all me. I met Rich Land which is in Decatur. OK OK thank you. But other questions welcome. We do have a language matters I guess right. Maybe I'm not speaking clearly enough to matter. Ed David Wright our guest at Richland community college in Decatur and questions are welcome. There is another. Another poem that I really liked and that I actually kind of think is a love poem I don't know if it's really correct to say but it's you know we

were. Making confession. Oh you like that one. Yeah I like that with him. OK let me see if I can that page 15 I know if you're following along at home in your hymnal Let me read this one. And you asked it to talk just a tad about the way poems are put together I don't if you notice with this one but each stanza is a very long set of sentences with a long single sentence that just kind of rolls very quickly with very little punctuation and that's on purpose. I think that's the best way to make confession is to do it quickly. Making confession confess several sins right off the first date. Your selfishness your love of candy the child you fathered in high school your worthless collecting of old magazines how much you hate your mother's cooking how much you love your mother later. See what tolerance she has for real depravity if she empathizes and forgives too quickly. If she looks understanding but keeps a list of flaws to help you overcome or if she simply sees through the ruse of safe sins and habits of the past. If she knows how they will mask tomorrow or tonight snarled lip roll the

eyes flared nostrils that will wilt cliched roses you deliver to reconcile things done and undone forgivable in the present. At last confess your future faithless words impatient hours of pretending to listen making up wisdom on the spot having sex when you should make love making love when sex would be enough. And if she calls them by their name sin and confesses they will matter will make her wonder why she chose you. A rock in her shoe working its way into her tough heel or soul then kiss her refill her coffee knowing just how much cream she takes and tell her all the wicked news she can stand never letting go of her small angry hand. I like that poem a lot. I'm not exactly sure why other than I think it's there's a lot of truth in it and it does roll wonderfully believe it or not. Last night Mrs. Inge and I were sitting around because she also she's going to have a poet on her show this afternoon OK. We actually sat there reading poetry to each

other love but never ever in my life have I done such a thing. Oh but we did and we had a great time and this was the one that I read to her several times and she went on. And that line your selfishness your love of candy she always laughed. She was laughing I'm not really sure you know. Well again the particulars tell us a lot about folks you know and the fact that I love cheap candy and stop at the time I stop the gas and buy some sort of cheap awful candy and eat it became a detail that I thought I could could could pull into that poem assuming that some of these other details are really about me. MARTIN But I think that's what our lives are made up of are those particulars but I think it's also true that you do. There is a lot of confession going on in relationships and probably you do at least in the beginning. Yeah you do the easy stuff. You you the stuff you did 10 12 years ago that's pretty easy to confess right away the stuff that you did yesterday is a little tough but when I guess personally yeah when it gets really into more serious things then that gets more difficult and there again is the measure of what the should be

where things are going is when you really the hard things. That's that's what you're going to discover something maybe about that about the other. Well I think it's confessing the future faithless words to you know to say you know I'm likely to do this again. That's what makes confession the hardest his one has to recognize that you you may or you may stop you may not. We're coming down to the point we had just a couple of minutes left there's one more that I also like very much and I think that it maybe says something about writing and what this the business of art creating art and experiencing art is supposed to be like poem that I like. That's titled What I wish I'd said oh yeah what I wish you'd heard or I was I don't know what it's worth but I wish I could say what it was here. Well this is this sort of ties together my life as a teacher in my life as as as a writer and wrote this for an actual an actual class of students in English want to Richland community college after I'd tried to make my way through some other papers.

Well I wish you'd heard find 10 sources I said and you listed them beautifully double spaced on the page like rows of tulip bulbs buried in the fall and forgotten I said choose a topic you can live with for 15 weeks my mistake. You chose the way we all do it Wal-Mart what looks quick and simple to own the most for the least in our conversations look like pantries stocked with giant boxes of Minute Rice and Fisi through plastic bottles marked soda or front yards and porches full of plastic flowers and plastic molded chairs comfortable and easy to keep clean. All things we can live with. Find something you would hate. I will say next time something that will ride under your ass like a cold stone bench or wake you up like a root beneath your sleeping bag something you overlooked when you pitched your tent on the most breathtaking spot not the flattest. Read one damn hard book twice. Get ticked at the author and write her a letter even if she's dead. Don't bury the bulbs bite into them as if you thought they were onions. Spit out the flake skins and bury your teeth into another and another. Maybe then we could all swallow in somewhere between our throats and the bile of our bellies before our systems eat through the tender hearts of ideas breaking them down to waste an

awkward yellow Bud might force itself into our mouths expanding in the warmth and opening our palates to a full round before we crush it to liquid with our teeth and the yellow spills from our lips onto the pages staining our papers our desks our fingers for ever and we would never get the smell from our nostrils the aftertaste would sting like liquor on our tongues. Very nice. Well we'll have to stop because we've used the time for folks who are listening if you'd like to have this collection instead of the lines from the provinces by David Wright it is available in book form pages has it. You can also get it on line a great unpublished onward. All right David Wright associate professor of English at Richland community college in Decatur Illinois. Thanks very much. Thanks so much for having me.