Greetings form Iowa City, A UNESCO City of Literature.
My name is Christopher Merrill and I have the good fortune to direct the International
Writing Program at the University of Iowa.
I've also been lucky enough to travel in Morocco on several occasions, to bring American writers
together with Moroccan students and writers and faculty to train ideas about how we write
poems and stories and essays, how we engage in the literary life.
I'm really happy to spend some time with you today, reading some poems and answering the
very good questions our friend Mohammed sent along to me.
And I thought I might begin with the poem I wrote when I was quite young, not much older
than most of you, that seemed to me to the first poem that got at something central to
who I am as a human being.
It's called "A Boy Juggling a Soccer Ball After Practice" . 'Right foot to left foot,
stepping forward and back, to right foot and left foot, and left foot up to his thigh,
holding it on his thigh as he twists around in a circle until it rolls down the inside
of his leg like a tickle of sweat, now catching and tapping on the soft side of his foot,
and juggling once twice, three times hopping on one foot like a jump roper in the gym,
now trapping and holding the ball in mid air, balancing it on the instep of his weak left
foot, stepping forward and forward and back then lifting it overhead until it hangs there
and squaring off his body, he keeps the ball aloft with a nudge of his neck hanging it
from side to side softer and softer, like a dying refrain until the ball, slowing balances
itself on his hairline, the hot sun and sweat filling his eyes as he jiggles this way and
that then flicking it up gently, hunching his shoulders and tilting his head back he
traps it in the hollow of his neck and bending at the waist, sees his shadow, his dangling
t-shirt the bent blades of ground grass in the summer heat, and relaxing the ball slipping
down his back and missing his foot, he wheels around, he marches over the ball as if it
were a rock he stumbled into and pressing his left foot against it, he pushes it against
the inside of right until it pops into the air as over his head the rainbow and settles
on his extended thigh before rolling over his knee and down his chin so he can juggle
it again, his left foot to his right foot and right foot to left foot to thigh as he
wanders on the last day of summer around the empty field."
Now I've told a story many times connected to this poem and that is that two days after
I wrote it I recieved a phone call out of the blue offering me a job to coach a college
soccer team and I began to think that poetry could change my life.
And indeed it has changed my life because I've managed to live a life in poetry, if
you will, for the last 40-45 years.
But more importantly, that poem has a lesson in it about writing.
when I was five years old, my family's house was washed out to sea on the south shore of
Long Island in a hurricane.
Everything went except my bedroom.
And the next summer, my father and I found our refrigerator about a mile and a half up
the beach in a dune.
It was a great tragedy for our family and of course it was the kind of thing that I
would try to write about from very early on.
One day, I was trying to write a poem about that and I was using a form of a long line
followed by a short line.
This would be what we would call free verse.
And the poem wasn't going anywhere.
But out of the corner of my eye, if you will, out of my imaginative eye, I suddenly remembered
juggling a soccer ball, something I had done for hundreds and hundreds of hours as a kid
because I played college soccer.
I played for clubs.
I was quite passionate about the game.
And that day when suddenly I was able to write a poem about a boy juggling a soccer ball,
I caught something central about who I am as an individual.
It's something, I'm always looking for in my work, to try and capture those essential
pieces of my experience of my memory and see if I can't fashion it into some kind of pleasing
order of words.
Now as it happens, I did manage to write a poem about that hurricane but it was not for
another 10 years or so, when I was a more accomplished poet if you will.
When I had enough experience, I think, to finally be able to do something with that
material.
And that is one of the things we do as writers; we are always trying to approach material
from a formal perspective, whether we are writing in traditional forms or in open forms.
And we are just trying day after day, night after night, to see what we can do on the
page.
So that is just a poem to start with.
I think I will answer some of your questions.
The first question is, "It does indeed take several poems to put a collection together.
Do you have a writing routine?"
That seems to me to be two questions.
It does take a number of poems to make a collection.
The great American poet Robert Frost said, "If you write 24 poems, the 25th is the order
that they go into when you make a collection."
And what happens for most poets, for me as well, is that we write poems, day by day,
week by week.
And after a certain period of time, they begin to accumulate a kind of weight, a kind of
gravity, a narrative arc if you will, begins to make itself apparent.
And that is the time when it becomes possible to imagine putting a book together.
My writing routine is try to do a little something every day.
If all is well in my life, I get up early in the morning and start writing then, but
I do have a busy life and so it often comes that the poems might begin on the fly.
I might be sitting in a meeting or reading something or at a movie and a little bit of
language or an image, a cadence will come to my mind and that will be the start of a
poem and then the trick is find the time over the next days or hours or weeks or months
or years even to make that cadence, that initiating image or idea, start to come into some kind
of focus.
It's not a terribly efficient to do your work, but the fact is writing is highly inefficient,
you try going this way, you try going that way, and finally it begins to work or it doesn't.
And you pick up another poem and start trying to write.
"One poet more people should know, who is it?"
I'm going to mention the great french poet-diplomat who went by the name Mont-Saint John Perse.
He won the Nobel Prize in 1960 and famously said at the end of his Nobel Address, "It
is enough for the poet to be the guilty conscience of his time."
Saint John was one of the great diplomats between the two world wars.
People even said his real name was Alexis Leger.
He was born in Guadaloupe in the Caribbean and his family moved back to France when he
was 12.
And people said, that foreign ministers come and go but Alexis Leger remains.
He famously stared Hitler down at the Munich Conference and when the Germans invaded Paris
at the start of World War II, one of the first stops for the Gestapo was Saint John Perse's
apartment, but by that time he had vacated and was headed into exile in the New World.
And five full length manuscripts which he had written between his first diplomatic posting
China in 1916 and the outbreak of the war disappeared, never to emerge again.
But in the New world in exile, Saint John Perse gave up his diplomatic duties and wrote
the poems that made him one of the most important poets of the 20th Century and a poet that
is read quite so much these days because he is viewed sometimes as writing in a rather
high style.
But I love that high style of his, he really knew his stuff.
And he also really knew what the world was all about.
One of the most intelligent poets of the 20th century, one of the most well read, and certainly
one of the most vast experience in the world thanks to his diplomatic work.
"Can anyone be a poet?"
I suppose in theory anyone can be a poet but the fact is that, the people who might become
poets are the ones who show an interest in poetry, a kind of talent for that.
A talent that expresses itself by your interest in poetry, if you are one of those rare people
who likes to read poetry and reads it before anything else, then that is a sign that you
are possibly on your way to becoming a poet.
Of course, interest or talent is only part of the story.
You have to cultivate that talent, and the way you do that is by reading very closely
a wide range of poets, by trying to engage with them in every possible way, and then
by writing religiously, day by day if you can.
Even if nothing comes of it.
A friend of mine once said the only thing that matters for a writer at the end of the
day, is if you ask yourself the question, "Did I write today?"If the answer is yes,
then today was a good day.
So you try to write everyday, you read closely, and something, a question that comes towards
the end here, that I will concentrate on that you all are listening to me in English.
Which is either your second or your third language, with the addition of Arabic or Berber
or a host of other languages, you have the capability to do that incredibly important
work of translation.Which is one of the ways in which poets learn how to write their own
poems, to take a poem from a language that you know well, from let's say English or from
French or Arabic or Berber, and to take it to bring it to life in another language to
try and get as close to the original as possible.
So that is how you make not only a gift to your fellow practictioners in that language
and your fellow readers in that language but also how you get close to another poem, to
internal the tricks of the trade that poet has learned along the way and then ideally,
at some point further down the road you'll be able to use those tricks in making your
own poems.
Let me give you an example of that.
Early on I read and translated poems by the wonderful French surrealist Andre Breton.
I absolutely loved his poems early on and there came a time when I realized reading
some translations of his poems that I couldn't stand the translations.
They were just boring!
So, I thought I would try my hand at translating a little Breton.
And the first poem I translated of his, I felt like a kind of genius for an hour after
that because it seemed to me, I felt as if I had written the poem and brought it to life
in English.
Of course Breton was the genius but having him in my mind and trying to bring him into
English helped me to write my own poems.
So here is a poem I wrote called Andre Breton.
It has a little epigraph from his obituary notice which goes, "Je cherche leur de temps.
At night fall when the plowman and the pianist collided in the street, their clothes lying
stretched, snapped, the coffee tree with its leaves clipped to its bare limbs and sparrows
riffling through its knives for seeds became an emblem for the season.
An audience of 1.
Black ice, white sheets, the tone deaf singer on his knees.
Gold coursed through the collapsing veins of his last words."
So you see in that little poem, what I'm doing is taking, the line from his obituary as what
would become part of the last line of my poem.
But I'm also trying to meditate on his walk in the sun, what his life meant, as his work
flurried and men followed in his footsteps.
"What is your advice for young poets and writers like us?"
Well, the advice is what I said a little bit earlier.
Read, read, read, write, read, write, translate, translate, translate.
And maybe more important than anything else, never give up.
You're going to fail repeatly as a writer and that is part of what it means to be an
artist.
As Samuel Beckett said at the end of one of his novels, " Fail again, fail better."That's
what our job is, fail again and fail better.
To take those individual failures and not let them discourage us, to try and try again.
Someone else asks "I tend to be influenced in my writing by the poets and writers I admire.
How can I cope with that?"This is a great question.
The fact is that one of the things that happens when we start to try and write is we fall
in love with a poet.
We want to write poems like them.
And that is how we learn our craft.
The wonderful American poet, Alan Doubie said, "If a young poet falls in love with one poet,
he won't become a poet.
But if a young poet falls in love with two poets, he might become a poet."
What I think Norman means by that, you fall in love with the poet, you imitate them, and
then at a certain point, you get tired of imitating them and find another poet to imitate
and that you fall in love with a number of poets like that and when you get tired of
them, you're on your way to finding your own voice.
So don't be afraid of being influenced by a poet, welcome that influence, its part of
who you will become as a writer.
Welcome that influence and use it to find your own voice.
"You are the author of a lot of books of poetry.
Does it get easier or harder to write as you go along?"
Another terrific question.
When you are writing your first poems, which will perhaps become part of your first collection
of poems, it seems like there is nothing more difficult to do in the world.
But the funny thing is, in some ways you are freer then than when you are much older because
by the time you've reached my age as a poet, if you're still writing poetry and that's
not something that happens to a lot of people, a lot of people do it when they're young and
give it up, but if you're still doing it at my age, its because it's because poetry has
become absolutely esseential to your life.
And the complication of writing for a long time and writing quite a lot, is that you
have tried a lot of different things and so the field may seem smaller than it was before.
The possibilities may seem less.
So the trick is to find ways to not repeat yourself, to keep trying to expand your vision,
to see further to maintain your curiosity, and so in that way it becomes a little bit
harder.
The easier part of writing when you get older, is that when you run into a problem, you have
the experience and perhaps the wisdom born of that experience, having been there before,
and you may find that may help you get through those dry patches.
Those times when it may not seem right, that you've been there before, if you are patient
and persistant, eventually you'll find your way to writing again.
So that's one of the things I live by.
"You do a lot of things in cultural diplomacy, while you keep writing.Does your busy schedule
affect your writing career and how do you balance duty and creative writing?"
That's the $64,000 dollar question, as we would say in america.
My life is busy, it is full.
So I have to write in spurts, write catch as catch can.
Like I said I do try to write a little bit everyday.
I write between meetings, between emails, between telephone calls, but I try to make
sure there is a little bit of time each morning that is a little bit my own, where I am just
staring at a blank piece of paper or a blank computer screen and just see what words might
come out.
On those days when nothing seems to be happening, I'm always doing some translation.
I've translated 6 books now from Korean, 6 books of poetry from Korean.
Right now, my co-translator and I are working on a huge collection of poems by a wonderful
Korean poet of the 18th century exiled from his home and wrote poems, every one of which
begins, "I ask, what do you think of our beloved northern seaside?"
Now that was where he was exiled to and he made a virtue of his exile by writing highly
descriptive poems of all the people he encountered in the years of his exile and also meditating
from time to time on what he left behind, including the woman he was closest to.
"One poet that nobody knows but should, who is it."
Well, I just mentioned Saint John Perse, here's another one: Norman Duke.
An American poet who I absolutely love his work.
He invents these crazy historical narratives; he may be the most well read poet I know.
He has an aphrosism I treasure.
He says, "I am a professional reader and an amateur writer.
When I become an amateur reader, then I'm in trouble."
It points to the importance of reading and reading deeply and reading widely.
"What is the central ingredient of a good poem?"
Well every poem that's good has a variety of essential ingredients and there are any
number of terrific definitions of what a good poem is, what good poetry is.
"The best words, in the best order," as Elliot said.
Or "News that stays News", as Esra Pound said.
For me, the poem has to has rhythmic beauty and intensity, leaps of thinking, insight
that the reader doesn't necessarily see coming, an original vision.
All of these things are nearly impossible to attain, but it is something every poet
seeks when they write.
"What is the reason that books written in Arabic are generally not known in the world?"
Well, a couple reasons I think.
1 is that there are not very many translations of Arabic poetry in English.
And English, at least from a literary perspective, is the most important vehicle for getting
a hearing in the larger world.
So the more poems that can be translated from Arabic into English, the better chance we
will have of hearing those poets a-new, giving them the hearing they demand.
And of course that goes to the fact that Arabic is a very difficult language to learn.
My daughter is studying Arabic in university.
And I know how very hard from watching her try to master the language how hard it is
to get that into an ear atuned to English and in her case also to French.
So the more people who can translate from Arabic into English, and that includes all
of you, the better.
The second thing is that it is a poetic tradition that we are just not very familiar with in
that is a function of the lack of proper translations.
So every poetic tradition demands of its readers and practioners a deep engagement with all
of the sources of that tradition, cultural sources, political traditions, religious sources.
And part of learning that tradition, which involves deep reading in it, which involves
gaining a liking for that tradition.
So we just need to hear more Arabic poets in English, because for people my age, the
odds of learning Arabic are absolutely nill.
I'm having a hard enough time trying to learn Greek, and if I can do that well enough to
translate some Greek poets I really love, I think that would be enough for my life.
"To what extent should writing be subjective or is it always subjective?"
Well I think it is subjective, it is an essential function of our emotional lives.
There's an earlier question here, do all your poems reflect your life and I would answer
yes.
A friend of mine, the marvelous novelist and short story writer, Carlson, was asked if
all of his stories and novels are rooted in personal experience.
And he says, "Yes, whether I've had it or not."
Which is to say, everything we write comes out of our experience, even if we invent things
or disguise those facts by putting our sentiments into the words of other people or use masks
or differeent formal devices of some form or another, everything we write comes out
of our subjective experience, its what we care about.
Otherwise, why bother?
You're probably not going to get famous and you're certainly not going to get rich writing
poetry, so you may as well enjoy it and use it as an occasion to get to the heart of who
you are as a human being.
"How does writing poems change your perspective on life?"
That's another terrific question.
I've often thought that the experience of writing poetry has meant to me that hopefully
I have adopted a more open approach to everything.
I've tried to be more familiar with the uncertainty that is absolutely essential to our lives.
We are usually in despair over what is going on, but the act of writing poetry depends
on finding ways of accomadating uncertainty, to being comfortable with it.
As John Keats said in his famous letter to his brother extolling Shakespeare's negative
capabilities said that Shakespeare was capable of being in a state of negative uncertianty
without any irritable reachign after of opinion or fact or belief.I just paraphrased but what
he's really saying is that Shakespeare was such a great writer because he was not frightened
by his uncertainty but he learned to live with that.
So that uncertainty is something you learn to live with and that informs my perspective
on life.
Question is, " Why is it that few Arabs make it to the Fall Residency?"
Well if you look at the roster of writers who fall within the International writing
program's reach, which this year celebrates its 50th Anniversary, we bring a few writers
from every continent.
This fall we have 35 writers from 34 countries.
So there is a pretty even spread of language groups and continents.
We seek to find writers early to mid career, who've published at least 1 book, who have
achieved at least national acclaim, if not international acclaim.
And we hope to find writers working in a variety of disciplines and literary traditions, who
come to the University of Iowa who come open minded and eager to learn from their fellow
writers.
So if you look over the time, I'm hosting my 18th residency right now and that means
I've hosted several hundred writers, we've had a lot of really terrific Arab writers
in my time.
I look forward to hosting more as the years go on.
"Please share your thoughts with us on collaborative poetry."
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this.
For the fortieth anniversary of the International Writing Program, I brought together six poet
friends of mine and over the course of four days, we wrote a book together.
It was as much an experiment as an occasion to have fun.
So we had poets from Slovenia, Malta, Russia, the United States, and Hungary.
And the two hours each day we spent writing poems, laughing with each other, trading ideas,
trading images, trading phrases, were some of the most interesting experiences of my
life.
After we had done that, one of the poets we had worked with is a poet named Marvin Bell,
who is about twenty years older than me, he had written a book with a poet back in the
seventies who was then about twenty years older than him, William Stafford, called "Segways".
One would write a poem and send it to the other and the other would write a poem in
response.
Marvin and I decided to do such a thing; we wrote a book eventually called, "After the
Fact: Scripts and Postscripts".
We wrote prose poems together and that has been a really thrilling thing for me.
So maybe I'll just read you a couple of these poems to give you a taste of what it is we
had tried to do.
Let's see, I'll give you one of Marvin's, then one of mine.
His is called "Frankie".
"They arrested the poet for inserting the phrase, 'a pig in boots'.
They testified that it wasn't poetry.
They said everyone knew who he meant.
A candle forever sputtered in the church where our hero in the past had forged alliances.
My host walked ever more slowly around the lake, while the others were far ahead.
Only then would he mention the protest.
The meeting was on.
The writer's union newspaper was set to shout at the government.
He could not know that the party editors would resign from the editorial board, undoing the
required quorum and the paper never appear.
Nor would one republic help another.
They each had their own language, ethnic foods, facial bones, and hair dyes.
They won their credentials with patriotic books extolling their leader.
They translated prodigiously but only from abroad.
At public events, the poets of beauty drew rolling applause, the syncronise thunder of
mass agreement.
Protests took the form of imaginative fictions.
Nuance and allegory, quick digs in the ribs of the rulers.
Laughs at their expense, the half hidden stages of early rebellion.
Every discentor a majority of 1.
I think of Frankie, my childhood friend from across the street.
Late in a short life, he opened a tattoo parlor.
You should see my arms he told me."
So Marvin wrote that poem.
And it comes out of his Fulbright experience in the former Yugoslavia, which took place
before the country broke apart.
And as it happened, I ended up writing two books about the break up of Yugoslavia, which
I covered as a journalist.
I spent a lot of time in the beseiged capital of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Hertzegovnia.
I traveled extensively in all the republics.
And after the war, at some point there was a return to Montenegro when it appeared that
the fighting would resume between Montenegro and Serbia.
And as it happened I found a connectiong between Marvin's friend Frankie and I wrote this poem
called 'Prayer Roping", you'll see the connection.
It's not just Yugoslavia but it's the name.
"He needed no training for the special work assigned to Frankie's boys.
His murder conviction had won him early release from prison.
And in the lobby of the Grand Hotel in Potscroritza, on the eve of a civil war that never came
to pass, he took pleasure in describing the clearing of a village in Kosovo.
The raping and pillaging, the breaks for tea and cocaine.
He looked high, bloodshot eyes, trembling hands.
And when he winked at me, twisting the black knots of his prayer rope, I looked down pretending
to read over my notes.
The faithful are instructed to silently recite the Jesuit prayer as they count the 33 knots
worked into the rope, one for each year of his life.
And if it was hard to imagine this paramilitary praying to the son of God, his loyalty being
to a man destined for the war crimes tribunal at the Hague, I could believe that he hoped
for even more rewards in the next life.
At the next table were three businessmen, speaking in hushed tones.
I made a mental note that they were probably as well armed as my jittery guest, who had
more stories to tell which I did not particularly want to hear.
But I took down every word of his testimony.
What did he say about the tax collectors, those who well, have no need for a physcian
but those who are sick.
Now I remember how the prayer ends.
Have mercy on me, the sinner."
So, I ended up writing about that experience in a different way as a journalist for a magazine
in America, but in a way, I feel that I got to the heart of that experience in writing
the prose poem and what made it possible was Marvin thinking of his friend Frankie from
childhood.
And Frankie then clicked in my head and in my memory and off I was going.
"Your works have been translated into several languages.To what extent do you think translation
affects the poems.
I don't always see a correct correlation in a poem like Andre Breton but the point is
every time I translate a poem that really speaks to me, it seems to me that I embody
or catch another way of hearing.
And that other way of hearing, I hope affects the poems, which may not be a direct corelation.
I think it may make me more open, to other ways of hearing, at least what I like to tell
myself.
"What sort of thing did you write about when you began and how did your poetry change overtime?"
Well, as I said, I began with that poem about juggling a soccer ball, though I had been
writing poems for five or six years to get that one.
The poem I'm writing, one of the poems I'm writing right now, if it has changed, in a
sense it is a bigger poem.
I'm writing a long poem called "Bridge".
I would like to think it's more ambitious.
It certainly encompasses more of my life, but if I am lucky, it is pointing to something
essential to what my experience here below has been.
I hope that as you go along in your lives as you write and read and translate, you have
that same experience.
I thank you for your time.
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