It's so great to see everybody coming on. Look at all these faces and so many people I know. And if you'd like to just put where you're from in the chat, sometimes it's fun to see where everybody's zooming in from. And I will get started in just a minute. I think we've got almost everybody admitted from the waiting room. I'm sure some people will come in as we get rolling, but I don't want to take any time away from today's program. So, I'll just get started. I'm Meg Weston. I'm the founder and host of the Poets Corner, and I want to welcome you back. Uh, we were quiet for the month of August, but we're making up for it this fall with so many wonderful events and craft talks, including today's reading. Uh, for those of you who are who are new, uh, 2025 is the fth anniversary of the founding of the Poets's Corner. And 5 years ago, I never would have imagined it would be the size and scale or the community that we've built in in this time. There are over 8,000 people in our community and we've been doing this free Sunday reading series for I think 63 months now. We include emerging writers as well as the distinguished poets that we have here with us today. Uh my nephew Lucas Adair has been our incredibly competent technical host since the very start. And this past year I was joined by the talented Liz Kick as our strategy and design director. A few words about upcoming events before we get started on today's program. On September 21st, we have a craft talk on the lyric essay with Heidi Serwick, who wrote, I think, the original book on the craft of the lyric essay. You'll definitely want to sign up for that if you're interested in the form. And then on September 23rd, in partnership with the Malay House in Rockland, Maine, we'll be hosting Conversations with Dead Poets. Okay, the dead poets aren't coming on. We're not using any AI magic, but we have four contemporary poets and writers um talking about those poets who have passed. We have Julia Bowsma who's the poet laurate of Maine talking about Edna St. Vincent Malay and she actually lives on a property where there's a cemetery of some of Malay's relatives and she's been writing about that. Rosa Lane has been writing in response to Emily Dickinson's poems. Sam Abd Abdurakib is going to be talking about June Jordan and AO Scott the New York Times critic will be on talking about Thomas Gun. Not to be missed there's a live event if you're here in Rockland Maine but there's a Zoom event that anybody can join and sign up on our website. And in October on our second Sunday reading, Jane Hersshfield will return to the poet's corner for a solo reading. And also in October, we'll be launching our fth annual ecfrastic challenge in partnership with the page gallery. They will post an exhibition online and in their gallery physically. And there will be poets selected by the poets corner and a separate set of poets selected by each of the artists in the exhibition. So there'll be a over zoom reading in November on the poet's corner and a um live reading in the gallery in November as well. and this year a printed chatbook in honor of the fifth anniversary with selections from over the years. You can find all those on on our website the poetscorner.org. So let's dig into the pleasure of today's guests, Melissa McKinstry, Diane Seuss, and Mark Dodie. Our reading is entitled Poets Past and Present. And each of the three poets joining us will read from their own work and talk about one or more of the poets who have influenced them. I'm going to introduce each of them when it's their turn to read. They'll read for a while and then we'll highlight the group for a further conversation about how other poets have influenced their personal trajectory. Knowing each of these folks, I have no doubt that we'll learn quite a few more things about the legacy of poetry this afternoon. So, and we'll have a chance you can put your questions in the chat when we get to that point, and I'd be happy to scan the chat and ask some of our poets to to answer some of your questions as well. So, let's get started with Melissa McKinstry. Melissa was the inaugural writer and residence at the Malay House in Ro Rockland in October of 2024 and selected by the judge who was Mark Dodie and uh it's such a pleasure to have them both together on the poet's corner today. Melissa, I think, is a rising star in the world of poetry. Having completed her MFA degree at Pacific University in 2022, she's gone on to engage with the world of poets and poetry in meaningful ways. She hosts quarterly poetry and jazz evenings, curates a community poetry tree in San Diego, serves as a research and production assistant for the poet Ellen Bass, and is now on the Malay house board as well. Her poetry appears in many journals including Bloid, a droid, and the best new poets of 2023. She's been recently selected for a 2026 pushcart prize and was selected by the poet Ted Cooer as a 2025 New Ohio review poetry contest winner. I know that Melissa approaches poetry with the same kind of generosity and enthusiasm that she radiates in the world. So, please join me in welcoming Melissa McKinstry. Thank you so much, Meg. I'm so happy to be here with you and the poets's corner tech artist, Lucas Adair, and two of my poetry heroes, Diane and Mark. Natasha Trethaway, the American poet, once said, "We need the truth of poetry and its beauty now more than ever." And that feels so true to me every day. So I'm always grateful for an opportunity to be included in a thriving poetry ecosystem such as the poet's corner. Our topic today is poems written in response to poets or poems we love as mentioned. So between reading a few of my own poems, I'll talk a bit about poets who've helped me do something I'm going to call luring chaos into meaning. About 10 years ago, I read Jane Hersshfield's wonderful and wise collection of essays, 10 windows, how great poems transform the world. And one essay titled Uncarryable Reainders: Poetry and Uncertainty made a particular impression on me. In this essay, Jane tells of winter solstice 1817 when John Keats was writing letters to his brothers. One such letter included his concept of what he called negative capability and he explained that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. I admit I've certainly done my share of irritable reaching after fact and reason in my life, but I was curious to understand ways of being in uncertainty. Perhaps in our own times, most of us feel uncertainty pressing on us. In this essay, Jane Hersshfield says that anxiety, grief, and the abysses of chaos can be lured into beauty and meaning and into the freedom such transmutation itself brings is no small part of literature's power. So, an ongoing question for my own reading and writing has been, how do we pull off this alchemy? How do we lure chaos into meaning and maybe even into beauty? Jane's essay led me to try. So, this first poem I'm going to read is one I wrote about a daily ritual with my son that was both harrowing and beautiful. This poem is called Showering My Son. Now over 100 lb your soft body like the lead drape a technician places before an X-ray like Tishan's Venus of Erbino white and pink sands all that hair sands the sentensient in the eyes every day for almost 24 years my arms under your shoulder blades and knees I scoop you out of bed pivot you to the blue mesh chase on wheels Your three stomata, a constellation from throat to belly to bladder. Oh, the way plastic meets the flesh. Our little mystery, our science experiment, our boy. Let us wheel to the shower now. I'll slle warm water over your chest, little tuft of hair. I'll lift each arm and rinse your musky man odor. I'll soap your groin, your legs, and your rocker bottom feet with those toes crossed for good luck. I'll shampoo your hair, a sort of translucence. I'll shave your chin, press a warm cloth gently to each eye, the whal of each ear, the nape of your neck under the traai, and then the swaddle of towels, the wheeling back to bed, and will become after the bath by Dega. The hairbrush and the awkward limbs. I'll lotion your knobby knees, thin shins, each little finger that has never held anything. I'll fluff your pillow, cover you with your old soft blanket, read you a poem. I'll be Frank O'Hara, made for the lunchtime ritual of this city, made for kangaroos, aspirins, beach heads, and beers. These things are with us every day, he says. Made for the daily touch, for the reminder, you really are beautiful, he says. And those lines of Frank O'Harez or words of Frank O'Harez come from his poem today which is available online at the Library of Congress website. Because I motherthered a child who was disabled and medically complex, I sought other poets who also shared this inertitude. I read many who were parenting children with uncertain prognosis. One of these, Denia Lamaris, showed me how a poem can convey experience without self-pity or sentimentality. Her poetry showed me the power of letting carefully selected detail hold emotion. I was I was so fortunate to take a workshop with the thoughtful and generous Denia. And during our time together, she said something that I think is so smart and true, and I think about it often. She said, "Readers want to eavesdrop on another human being having a human experience, something important. People want to feel less alone, want to feel accompanied. People turn to writing to gain a sense of how to survive intact with some kind of joy." So, Denia's poems about her own son's uncertain health and eventually his death and her own brother's death and how to survive intact have often inspired me. Another steady source of inspiration for me has been my mentor Ellen Bass. During the pandemic, Ellen gave a craft talk on a frrastic poetry. That is poetry that's in conversation with a piece of art. And her words stuck with me. She said, "One of the primary reasons you might want to write an ecrastic poem is to allow yourself to say something that wouldn't be as deep or powerful or communal if you'd not approached through the painting." And I'll add to Ellen's quote to say, I think has even allowed me to say something that I might not have otherwise even been able to whisper. So that's what happened for me after visiting an amazing touring exhibition of Georgia O'Keeffe and Henry Moore's work. I was so taken with the exhibit which included a replica of O'Keefe's Ghost Ranch studio that I went back twice. I came face to face with her artwork, yes, but also maybe more importantly for me, the artifacts from her life and studio space. These small details that helped me write the next poem that I'll read. And this poem is titled Late Spring Epiphany after the Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit. I'm always trying to paint that door. I never quite get it, she said of the black square at her winter house in Abeku. Always a shadow shifting, a ladder leading to sky. When she looked through a pelvic bone she picked up in the desert, she saw a ghost moon. And today I'm quiet as her bones and stones and black pearl oyster shells. Once I had a son. Once when he was four, before his tracheotomy, we were invited to float in a warm therapy pool. He was weightless as I swirled his thin limbs in slow circles and lines. He seemed to sleep through it all, but I loved it. his buoyancy, absence of straps and wheels, water flicker on his curly lashes, maybe a quiver of smile. He couldn't say more or m or get me out of here. So, I don't really know. I never really knew him. He kept himself to himself. Maybe grew very small to survive. He was a dark a dark door, a box of bones, a soft gone tabernacle. Ecfrais was a gift for me with this poem. It invited me to be in Abeku and Ghost Ranch and the world of O'Keefe's paintings, her obsessions, in order to explore details of my own obsessions. With the ongoing mentorship of Ellen Bass, I began to more fully understand how the reality of uncertainty could be held without sentimentality or explanation by pressing, testing, and interrogating detail, syntax, imagery, and diction. Ellen also taught me that each poem needs to work toward discovery and leave space to invite readers into discovery as well. She demonstrates this in her poems over and over again with both precision and generosity. And I've particularly fallen in love with what Ellen calls the longarmed poem of this form. She says, "A certain kind of poem reaches out long arms and sweeps desperate, unexpected things into its net. It doesn't hug the shore. It doesn't walk a narrow line. It retains a kind of wildness. And yet all the elements have enough magnetic magnetic attraction, enough resonance that the poem feels organically whole. The next poem I'm going to read is both a longarmed poem and an ecrastic poem and it was written in response to a beautifully intricate jigsaw puzzle of Vaseli Kandinsk's painting titled dominant curve. This is ways to wear it. Put your arms through the sleeves of this bow house swirl. Let it drape from your shoulders. A shawl of distraction in abstraction. Kandinsk's dominant curve. Feel the fine seams of your private morning. The silky sway of teaag brown, sage green. Let yourself be satin amidst bicting angles and arcs. You might find a hidden pocket. You might hold on to what isn't. When my son was young, no one knew why the toggle of his jeans didn't fit. I kept slippering down hallways to brush my teeth in fluoresence, the smell of hospital soap deep in my skin. Each day a moving staircase of dread with a hair's breath handrail, a repeating pattern of unpredictability cut on the bias salvageed. His small misshapen head, tiny useless feet curved like liars, little hands always infant dimpled. When he died 26 years later, he was still surreal. But let me tell you about his eyes. Blue riders, blue mountains, blue roses. He was the dominant curve of my life. Somehow Kandinski painted it all. So I clipped a jigsaw of it together over and over after the after. The dining room table like a wall at the Guggenheim. this canvas, my favorite kimono. If this piece feels soft and worn to you, too, pull it closer. Shrug it up around your neck. It's quiet inside these colors. A place you can hear how things were. All those sharp pins and needles tacked these shapes together to be basted, then stitched, hemming in what I couldn't believe. I was going to live a life impossibly imperfect, full of chaos, full of not knowing, full of my son's suffering. I was going to live a life designed by a dominant curve. Kandinski said, "Everything starts from a dot." This takes me back to Jane Hersfield's essay, Uncarryable Reainders: Poetry and Uncertainty. And I'll close with this quote from her. She says, "To exchange certainty for praise of mystery and doubt is to step back from hubris and stand in the receptive, both vulnerable and exposed. Thank you so much for including me today, Melissa. That that was just so beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. We're we're going to move right along. Although it's hard to hard to absorb that and move right. Uh but that's what we do. And so it is my great pleasure to introduce Diane Seuss today. And when Mark suggested that we invite Diane to be part of today's reading, I was bowled over. Of course, I said yes. I had heard Diane at the Dodge Poetry Festival online and read her work over the past few years, but had no previous connection. So, I'm excited along with all of you to have a reading talk with us today. She'll be reading from her latest book, Modern Poetry, published in 2024, that was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her previous book, Frank Sonnetss, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, amongst other honors. She's a visiting professor at the Helen Zel Writers Program at the University of Michigan and at Washington University in St. Louis. and her seventh collection, Altha Poems, is forthcoming from Greywolf Press in 2027. So, I hope Diane, you'll come back and read from that when that's out again. I'm so pleased to welcome you to the Poet's Corner. Uh thank you so much and uh thank you to Melissa too for that beautiful reading and those comments. Um today I'm going to um we're we're talking about influences and so I decided to um read um a couple poems from modern poetry that focus on uh John Keats and his influence on my way of thinking about poems and my my way of thinking about poets lives, my my own life and my father's life. Um, and I'll just dig in. Um, I just I want to thank Meg Weston. Um, and uh, Mark Dodie and Melissa McKensry for sharing this space with me and of course all of you who showed up on a Sunday afternoon. Thank you. So, this poem is called Romantic Poetry, and you'll see it's very fluid. It's It takes me to Keat's deathbed. Romantic poetry. Now that the TV is gone and the music has been hauled away, it's just me here and the muffling silence. A spider wraps around a living morsel and at times often the unbearable. I bear it though just like you. Long ago I bore a suitcase filled with books. Bore it far on city streets to sell I guess at some used book place. One of those doorways down steps into darkness and dankness. The scent of mildew doged fingered pages. The suitcase big and square and sharp cornered covered in snakes skin bought at Goodwill for a dollar knowing I had some traveling to do, some lugging. And I was right. What books I sold, I do not know. Maybe that's where modern poetry went. The cover cherry red and blossom white. I can see its spine in my mind's eye, pointing downward beneath the dank and the dark to the water tunneling under the city and making its way to the river. poems sliding down the book's spine into water. The shock of the cold and dank down were my uterine lining. My blood and cast off ovulations cast off fetal tissue swims below the city. The micro deadad ride modern poems like swanboats in the park. From the park to the river to the sea. I'm thinking now of PJ Harvey and Nick Cave. Balladers, lovers, Vita and Virginia, Frank O'Hara and Vincent Warren. Somehow we ride our lost loves out to sea. Or they ride us. It doesn't matter. poet or poem or reader, the same ectoplasm. The modern in time becomes antique and the stone faces of the dead convert to symbols ripe for smashing. Come to think of it, symbols are terrible. As the tyrant shouted to the masses, part of his brainwashing campaign, "I know it, and you know it, too." I was 23 when I sold off modern poetry and sailed to Italy, seeking romantic poetry, which was at one time modern, and found my way to Rome and Keat's death room. his deathbed a faximile. Everything he touched was burned to kill what killed him. I lifted his death mask from its nail, cradled it, closed my eyes, and kissed his lips until the plaster warmed and stained his face with a lipstick on my lips. red as the cover of modern poetry. The color of the droplets of arterial blood he coughed onto his sheets and viewed by candle light. Then he knew he was done for his death warrant. He called it. After those many kisses over his face and eyes, and the reticulated eyelashes cold and tangled, my lips were blossom white, my face chocked like I'd caught something from him. And I don't just mean consumption. Though my lungs burned for years, they still burn. This is the danger of the ecstasy of kissing the dead or dying poet on the mouth. The disease you'll catch, well, it changes you. The tingle in the spine, the erotic charge will be forever married to poetry's previous incarnations. It's why marriage itself never worked for me. I kept wanting to get to the part where death parts us, and I could find myself again. Keats made such a compact corpse. Only 5t tall, shorter than prince, and intricately made. Always he was working it, working it out. The meaning of suffering, the world his own, the encounter with beauty nearly synonymous with suffering. How empathy could extinguish him, and he could set down the suitcase at last, or finally deliver him to himself, distinct as the waves in his hair and the bridge of his nose. How apicious, rare, lush, bizarre, kinky, transcendent, romantic, to be young, just 23, and to cradle him in my arms, as we listened to the burbling water of the Fontana dela Barkia from the open window. I want to be very aware of time. So I think I'll just read one more and it's called High Romance. Um that's from Ait's poem and um he's um he's revisiting Fanny Braun, the love of his life. and um reconsidering as a ghost what love might be high romance and then Keat's ghost found that he could no longer love Fanny Braun he'd escaped the body like a love letter from its envelope and he'd flown like a love letter in a windstorm he'd seen mean that the words formed from ink melted in the rain. Words he now knew, and he'd once been such a devote, didn't matter, or didn't matter so much as he believed they'd mattered. Something mattered, he knew, but whatever it was, he couldn't put words to it, or he didn't have the heart to put words to it. He did feel love, but it was an arrow without a target. It was diffuse, like an atomized perfume, or stars, as the poor see them who cannot afford glasses. He saw that Fanny, as she was known, was a concept, just as he had been a concept. They each inhabited the same amount of space like a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of lard. In a single book, they would each occupy a single page. Their brains encased in cranial bones and flesh and heads of hair could each rest on a single silk pillow. Ideas he found don't die. Even notions fly like cottonwood seeds through the air, and love had been a notion. He saw that Fanny in time would slip free of herself. Everything does in time, even roses, even stones, foothills, fleas, and poems. Rhyme he saw existed on its own behalf. He could catch it like a bird catches an air current. From above, he could see that Fanny was not trifling. Nothing from above is trifling, nor more compelling than anything else. His love for her, he saw, had been an invention of the mind. Only belief could sustain it. But he could no longer sustain belief. Now and then he'd try it on again. Love like a fancy hat he could not afford, and now appeared ludicrously overdesigned. Once his ghost managed to look at her again through the gauzy curtains that hung over her bedroom window. His gaze was too objective to find her beautiful but objectivity itself that was beautiful. Thank you. Wow. Wonderful Diane. Thank you so much for reading these poems and and maybe if there's time at the end we'll squeeze in one more because I hate to not get them all right. Um, so moving right along, I get to introduce Mark Dodie. And um, it's wonderful to do this because Mark was I just finished doing a week-long workshop with Mark and it was so incredible. So I just want to thank you, Mark. it. Um, you know, I know him as the author of poetry and pros, including memoirs like Doge Ears, Firebe, Firebeat, Heaven's Coast. Um, I haven't read yet a book of criticism, The Art of Description, World into Word, but after this week's workshop, I've ordered it. um and his booklength essay that's a favorite of almost everyone I meet, Still Life with Oysters and and Lemon and a memoir that centers on his poetic relationship with Walt Whittmann entitled What is the Grass? He's also just happens to be the author of nine books of poetry, including Deep Lane, Fire to Fire, which won the National Book Award in 2008, and others. his deep knowledge and familiarity with so much poetry that he can recall on his fingertips on almost any topics that we would raise. As well as his generosity in giving feedback and sharing insights and willingness to follow this group of students wherever wherever it led for a week. I feel quite privileged to have um spent that week getting to know him and then to follow it up with having him on the poet's corner today. So, please join me in welcoming Mark Dodie. Thank you, Meg. Um, I feel honored to be here, to be in your good company and to reading with Diane and Melissa who are marvelous, really extraordinary poets. And uh, I I guess I think that poems never exist in isolation. Every poem has its links and ties to the other poems. How do we know what a poem is or what it can be except by reading them and checking them into ourselves and in through some kind of alchemical process you know we we choose or we find something like ourselves the kind of poems we want to make and begin to craft them. Uh so I think were there uh you know a sort of medical research device where you could put in a poem and uh you know turn it around and find it separate the strands of its DNA, you could uh ascertain where poems come from and to some degree. And this one uh comes from an early influence who I honestly as an adult never thought would be an influence and that's EE Cummings who uh I loved when I was about 15 carried selective poems around with me everywhere. And in retrospect I think what I loved about him was the passion, the certainty because never doubts himself. He makes very plain unambiguous statements and adolescence loss. Uh and also of course the word play which is dazzling and uh kind of inherently rebellious. You know it breaks syntax as we know it. It makes meaning in new ways. Uh if if you know his poem grasshopper marvelous little thing which rearranges the letters of the word until ultimately it arrives at resemblingly grasshopper spelling incorrectly. It's a marvelous game. So this poem uh is about or emerges out of being newly in love uh in New York City, in love with the coming of spring, in love with the uh incredible energy that that comes from a new relationship and um is interested in breaking up language in a way that has something to do with comingings. Lots of interruption. It's called Bodega. Tulip to bunch 12 at the bodega corner of 19th Street. January just begun. hand inked signs above metal tubs sporting this paniply of shades whose curve and surface rhyme with the skin of his shoulders. Two of the uncounted places on let's call them you where my hands like to rest. I've studied the spectrum of possibility displayed beneath a striped rainlazed awning and made my choice. Three branches of plum decked their tips with spherical green ideas of bloom. To purchase a bud is to buy a prospect to entertain belief. He'll be at my place in an hour just off work. The bit of future I'm carrying homes bundled in clear wrapping and jeweled with a little rain. A gift given as much to myself as to let's say you. Unwrap these and open unexpected early in the year later in my life. Long and coming though sudden still and splendid spring. So some years later, like just a couple years ago now, um I left New York City after 21 years and I I moved to a farm uh in upstate New York way up in Hudson Valley and that landscape has just now after two years really begun to show itself in my poems. It's like u you know when you move somewhere your dreams stay in the old place for a while and I felt that way about my language and I'm just now finding a way into speaking about this place that is a complete change for me. So this is called aftermath. Even before the storm passed I could see what became of my emblems of permanence. Two century old maples split clean down the middle, fall in half, sprawled on the grass like ruined steeples. And my two lindons paired domes so densely leaves they seemed made entirely a shadow. That morning wind bent each into a huge dark green sail and bent the trunks till they snapped right to the ground. And the bees city of their hopes disordered boxes half unstacked under an elderly apple tree stripped bare now a skew branches a kimbo the hives white roof blown where a single drop of rain can end a bee 6 minutes of low ceaseless thunder absurd wrong 11:00 in the morning blind swirl of heat tearing at the garden only my second summer here how could I have assumed any measure of ongoingness. Outlive me, I said to the sentinels, the elder maples who shade one side of this house and knew their answer. We already have. Then, after a moment, and we will. How could I have thought of these trees as mine? I turned toward the hive. All those ancient cities, dwellings cut from rock and live flanks of mountain sides. If they were empty now, what if dwellings of wax? I know what happens to such mansions. One drop can finish a bee, and for a few endless minutes, rain sheeted, hostile, and stinging down into the open frames. But the damp weight of the air shifted slightly, yards from the wreck, skittering wind, and last droplets giving away to an unsteady humming. The suggestion of a sound mounting and falling, lifting again a wave, maybe a thousand bees, more stirring air with their wings, drying the hive, not flying, but holding in place, producing a vibration disproportionate to their size. And not unlike that background static astronomers record in silent airless regions buzzing left over from the origin of time, the bees were at that moment chorusing a future into being, making more of time. Can a sound be said to glow? So what's in the DNA of that poem? I I think um certainly Elizabeth Bishop who produced this this marvelous kind of hat-tick of showing us how she feels and what she thinks about by how she sees really paying such close attention to how the world looks to her and through that look comes so much understanding and so much information comes meaning really. So, I didn't know I I knew I was thinking about time, but I didn't know I was thinking about where the future comes from when this or or how much I need a future until well into composing this poem. So, this next poem, last one, touches upon the future, too. And and this is a a poem that um has its roots in all kinds of places. One of them is Gerard Manley Hopkins whose beautiful sonic textures sing towards the core of things towards what we might call sacred or divine. Another source are uh those incredible images that came back from the the web telescope and how how haunted everyone I knew was so struck by those images. We want to talk about them and think about them. Incredible photographs from so long ago, so far away and such ravishing beauty. It also grows out of Bishop who's who's quoted here that gone by and I like this idea of planting quotations from poems poets you love in your own poems. So you'll hear that I think it's from the moose. Um there's a little bit of quote from Hayden Kuse in here. Wonderful underread poet. And finally there's a piece of an old dance song uh which those of you who are going out in the 90s will remember. It's a song called Finally that was sung by CC Penniston. Finally, it's happened to me. And there's a line of that song I love so much that it's in this poem. One more thing. Uh, you are familiar with the poetry in motion, the the program that puts poems on the subways, buses, and trains. That gets in your drink of water. Immortal diamond. Those gorgeous photographs the new telescope sends back feel consoling now. grand processes happening without us on the edge of this era and every other beauty. How long ago, how impossibly far away. Which may be why the lit up announcement on the signboard parked outside my corner bodega wrinkles so the nearest galaxy like ours is 15 million light years away. A sudden window opened on vastness we won't ever cross. Which may be why a guy on the A train off his meds are fueled on liquid oblivion is pounding on a poem framed under plastic on the car's metal wall. Really wailing on it, backing up, hurling himself forward, forearms and fists smashed against the text over and over while he moans with such abandon we've seated half the car to him. Maybe he read that sign, too. And knowing it's 15 million years to light at light speed before you're any place remotely like home makes any poem worse. I don't dare get close enough to read it. But I admit I'm starting to hate it, too, for what it probably doesn't do. We're just trying to hold the morning a little steady here. Get ourselves to work nearly on time. And somebody writes a poem that doesn't make the distance between a stanza and the stars feel one bit smaller. And somebody has the nerve to publish it on the train where you can't help but read it. Even if it isn't brave or reckless enough to name our situation or say why we feel we all feel so singular and discontent. I can't write that poem either. Nothing commensurate with the misery of a citizen who beats a hless lyric to pulp and shatter his hands cut by shards of plastic. Scraps of text falling to the floor. Is the poem better? Marked by the blood of a reader who demanded the best of it. I want to tell you what I learned looking at photos of ancient starlight seven decades into my life. What reconfigured the night for me? An immense telescope traced the origin of waves from far out. A brief stream of pattern beats that would vanish, then begin again. Intentional, a code announcing the presence of what might wish to say hello across a black rippling distance we can barely imagine. The source, the flicker of starlight interrupted as a huge planet closely orbited the star. A planet entirely composed of carbon, compressed by its own weight and by the proximity of that star. You know what happens to pressurized carbon? One vast diamond surface blackened by debris from the winds of space. And beneath that, an immense clarity shot through with those flaws and stresses that write any gleam more visible. A grand poem containing the light of its star and every other. And thus all of time held a sphere endless. Here I stop. How can I in the warm and private cavern of this body? How can I describe this? Do you remember that superb dance song years back when the diva sings that love has come to her finally? Her voice swooping down as if flashing across dismissible realms toward the single term of arrival, announcing what seems unsayable and of the spirit. And though we know flesh to the And though we know spirit to the agency of the body, the flesh cannot circumscribe it. Which is why she sings enchanted, my two lips can't describe it. As if to say, here I am in the limits of my skin, but the limitless is not far from me. I speak from this body that tears at the palm until my hands bleed. But I am no stranger to the sway of those grand courses along which time makes its music. Even if my tongue shapes only the vague outline of those sounds, it doesn't matter that no one will ever go there or see inside that pulses source or read that lie to the end should it have one diamond intact close enough to forever not ours. And if it signals it's only to tell us or anyone it's there. It is there. is so you and I wherever we are proximate. Thank you. Wow. Thank you, Mark. Ah, geez. This has just been so wonderful to hear all of you read. And now we're going to gather the four of us on the screen. Uh if we can do that and have a bit of more conversation and um we'll we'll start taking some questions from the chat um around 5:00. Um so think about what you want to ask and and go ahead and put it in the chat. Well, there there was one mark that somebody was asking if all these poems were in one collection and I I don't believe that's true. I know one has not yet been published, right? None of those poems are in a collection yet. Okay. I've been I've been holding on to poems for a long time and uh I've now just about finished a book of poems which you know it's difficult when you work on on a book for forever because the poems don't feel so connected sometimes. But this book is geographically connected. The poems all have to do with New York City. And then the the newest poem here, which is the um the one of the storm Aftermath is not yet published. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Well, we can't wait till till that book comes out, right? That's great. Well, I I'd love to just open up this conversation about sort of that DNA that you spoke about, Mark, that comes into us from other poems and poets that we read and how it works our way into our own poetry. And Diane, I might start just with some questions about how how you discovered John Keats, like how old were you and and why did that why did he or his life become such a profound influence for you? Yeah, I can't remember um where I first heard this name, but I think it was when after my father died when I was seven, my mom went to college and she ended up getting an English degree um to teach. And um she brought books into the house that would have not been there otherwise. And one of them said the romantic poets and then it said Byron Keats and Shelly I believe. And I had no idea what any of that meant but I thought romantic you know I knew what that meant. Um so that's probably where I first heard of him. But um I think reading the passage uh that Melissa read um about negative capability is and then um reading what some say was the last thing he wrote or toward the end and it's a little fragment in the margin of a longer poem he was working on. Some call it this living hand now warm and capable of earnest grasping would if it were cold and in the icy silence of the tomb so haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights that thou wouldst wish thine own heart dried of blood so in my veins red life might stream again and thou be conscience calmed See, here it is. I hold it toward you. And that um that got me where I live, you know. I mean, the dead body of my father and my father is sort of an artifact of um of my childhood. His body itself is an artifact of our relationship. And the fact that I love the anger in Keat's fragment that he's he's pissed that he's dying. And he's saying, you know, listen up reader. I like that firmness. You know, it is within your power to give me life again by paying attention. read the poems here. Here's my hand. I hold it toward you. Well, he can hold it all he wants, but we have to touch we have to touch back by by reading him. Something about that um generated all that in in modern poetry and and poems that came before. Um, I I feel like my connection to him is more imaginative than from sort of actually studying him. You know, I studied him a bit in college. I think I say in one of the poems in modern poetry, when I needed Keats, I got him. And when I'd gotten what I needed, I left the rest behind. I mean, that's how a self-educated person operates. And um so I got what I needed, but really what I needed was him. It was just him. His, you know, dying young and his um his anger and um his his despair that he would not be remembered. and my father had that same despair. So they they resonate for me, you know, as Frank O'Hara resonated in my book before this one, Frank Sonnetss. Um for for in some ways for the same reason, in some ways not. I love how how visceral how alive that relationship appears to be for you with the Franco Herod with the with the Keats and the Romantics and and that it's it's not I think you said what I when I needed you, I got what I needed from you. And I recall something that you said to me, Mark, when I said, "I don't have a huge background in poetry and in, you know, past poetry." And you said, "You will discover that you go and you find what you need and you absorb it because you needed it." So, but you have this vast, you know, collection. I mean, I think there were three or four different poets you mentioned from Whitman to Bishop to E. E. Cummings and um another one that you mentioned all weaving into these poems. Can you talk a little bit about how that happens for you? Well, um, well, first before I do that, I I want to respond to something Diane said because I was thinking aboutation to readers next to Keats and this living hand. Whitman's, you know, Whitman assumes that you're going to you're going to agree. He he just there's not that that element of of anger. It's just, you know, stop with me this day and night and you shall possess the secret of all poems or, you know, I stop somewhere waiting for you. It's a really interestingly different gesture because it's not um it doesn't push us away. Exactly. He just assumes our complicity which some readers kind of can't stand about him. You know, it's too too uh familiar and too certain that you know he'll draw you in. So, uh so where did all that reading come from? Um I started writing poetry really caring about it in high school. I stumbled upon uh Cummings, Blake and Gia Orurora and those poems just lifted me out of the everyday and they um lifted me out of the particular circumstances at home which were not a place I wanted to linger at that point and uh I I just lucked out. I had a high school drama teacher who uh said uh that we should perform something that we had written and I brought in his poems and spoke it and he said no it's something you wrote and so he wound up showing my poems to a wonderful poet named Richard Shelton who taught at the university in Tucson where I lived then and and Shelton invited me to come down to the poetry center and it was it was sort of a magic territory or or vunder congreg you know it was this little Odobi house and you open the door and there were photographs of poets and recordings and books walls and walls full of books. Couldn't sort take them out, but you could stay there and read anytime you wanted to. And it was such a refuge to me. And there was a person who embodied the human capacity to center your life around the practice of an art. And I he was holding a door open to me and I sort of never looked back. You know, I had been welcomed into a community and I've sort of felt that ever since. So rereading poetry is just a way of feeling part of of the your times and feeling part of the times before you and feeling that ongoing coursing life of mind and heart which is is so thrilling. It's history without the dates and the facts and the battles. You know some of those are there but it's history of of the heart and of our our struggles to make sense of things. Wow. Melissa, would you talk a little bit about how this community of poets and poetry influences your work? And yes, yeah, I think you know there's this generosity of spirit whether we're communing with poets who are still alive or not that their very work is inviting us into considering our own work a new and how we might um you know grow and learn and expand from that. I think that being in this rather small community, having the opportunity to be in this low residency MFA program at Pacific University really invited me into the confidence that um a literary ecosystem can bring that we can buoy each other up that we can celebrate each other's words and learn from each other's words and borrow as I think we've all done from poets whom we admire so greatly Everything we read today had snippets of the you know this this flare the other's words the others um thoughts perhaps their their way of seeing the world and it's it's just so rich and I think something else that I just want to know is that when co happened and things were so shut down this weird world of zoom you know became this conduit for poetry that I just I I don't know could any of us have foreseen the way that we can be together across time and space and be able to celebrate poetry the way we do, whether it's participating in a workshop or a reading or zooming in to hear something or tapping back on a recording of something. We just, it seems to me that the ecosystem of poetry has grown in this way that's just almost without limit nowadays, you know, and it's it's such a gift to us wherever we are. Yeah, absolutely. Um, I'm want to invite people to put questions in the chat if they'd like to. And you know, I do really agree with you, Melissa. It it's opened up a world to me. I I started this on Zoom in, you know, June of 2020 because I was feeling so isolated and I had just retired and wanted to delve into poetry, but I just have expanded my world in this way. Um, so I think um, oh, somebody in chat is asking you, Melissa, if you have a collection of poetry coming out soon. There's a manuscript submitted out there in the world. So hopefully, so we're hoping there's a publisher on this chat that's looking for it. Um, Mark, you said that you and Diane had wanted this conversation to happen about these past poets. Can you talk a little bit to me about what it is that you were looking for to delve into together? It's hard to name exactly. It it's when we respond to po a poet so strongly I think it's because we feel so much of what we want to know and what we want to gain some perspective or understanding about ourselves and it's a talking to someone else about it somebody else who loves that work can be a way of unpacking it have you seen this have you thought about that and bringing forth whatever questions we carry or I thoughts we carry about the work of a figure of the past is a way of getting closer and you know the history of how people dealt with being mortal, how they dealt with love, how they dealt with loss, how they dealt with frustration didn't exactly start, you know, with us. And so this great treasury of all the things that people have thought and felt and given shape to, you know, that's ours. And it's it's unfortunate that it u sometimes seems to to gather dust in, you know, the sort of codified homes of the academy when it really should be part of our exchange. It's our heritage, you know. It's what was it's one of the great things was left to us. A lot of, you know, not so great things were left to us, too. But that is something we really can give each other and work with and share. Mark is one of my zillions of influences. And even though we're probably about the same age, um he I taught his work um every year. And the poem that you did on um poetry in motion, the that part of the longer poem, I believe, isn't it? What was it? I don't know what it was. Oh, okay. So you're naming the it was about um AIDS and all the losses and you're naming this hand and this hand and this hand that um just had a huge impact on on me and my students and the connection um I think of the work that you were doing writing about AIDS in New York and that I experienced as well um with similar losses. Um you know it gave me a pathway. I mean why do we read each other? It it plowed a a pathway for me to walk. Yes. you know, my own voice enters the picture, but you lit the way and um you know, and and for my students, too. I also remember um the book the the source book and the po the title poem and this sense that through language alone you could locate and tunnel your way to this source. Um you know these are things that had a profound impact on what I thought a poem could do. Thank you, Dian. I I remember uh in it would have been about 1990, I gave a reading in Cambridge. It was a group of people who were writing about the AIDS epidemic. And Marie How was in the audience. And we just met Glancingly, but that night we really met. And Marie says that she found out that she could write poems about her brother's dying on that night. And what I found out listening to Marie was you can have your friends walk into a poem and say something and how potent that is. You can quote that dialogue. It has so much to do with it reveals so much about character and the moment and what matters to people. So you know that kind of uh exchange really makes poetry go away. There's an interplay that's happening sort of like um what you talked about Melissa with Denia Lamaris and her talking about her her child and how that opened up a permission in you. We know that interplay can happen in the present and it also can happen in relationship to the past. I mean, you know, distance avails not, time avails not. There is a question from Bruce Spang here. He says, "I'm wondering as I listen to each of you how you found a space or a person who allowed you to be in the poetic language as the language was in you. How the poets or mentors imbued in you a way to live and speak poetically. I think once one slips into loving language and what words can do, one would find will find it impossible to extract themselves. Good question. I just I'll quickly just mention that this idea of the longarmed poem that Ellen Bass often talks about and and often lifts up Frank X Gaspar, one of her um good friends and and his work. The titular poem of Late Rapturous in particular is a great example of this. But a lot of poems by Frank and particularly in that collection called Llay Rapturous have these giant long arms and they're sweeping so much in. And I think that there's something about relishing the language of something like that for me at least that has invited me to not just relish it as a reader but to practice it as a writer. You know what is happening syntactically on the page? What about the diction? what's going on here between one line and the next that is making this kind of forward motion that's so compelling and so inviting. It's not just the long arm details, but there's this sort of rhythm that happens with this kind of stream of consciousness um speaking on the page that I think has really been something that's fascinated uh me lately and and that I'm you know fully engaged in swimming in as you know Bruce is saying I think where's that line where we're we're in it so deeply that we kind of can't do anything but be in it. you know, I'm just going to swim around in this forever and and and that is something that really has been inviting um for me. Yes, I see people putting Frank's name in the chat. He has quite a few poems at the New Yorker you can find online and then um his collection late Rapturous is one that is a particularly great example of what I'm talking about. I think that we maybe don't always get that from one person, but that you find bits and pieces of it everywhere and you take from all these examples what you can use and what you need. You know, the permission to be one's idiosyncratic self, the permission to sound like you. The permission to make the mess if you're going to make a mess before you make something better. Um, you know, to to screw up, to um yeah, to boldly go. Are you saying Captain Kirk was an influence, Mark? You know who was a great influence was Stanley Cunit. And what particular it was? It was becoming friends and walking around his garden together and Stanley looking at his little glade down the rocks and the shadows and saying that's where Pphanie entered the underworld. God, new move to a different kind of inhabitation of the garden there, you know, um knowing you paying attention to creative people and being lucky enough to meet a few as a child and I was really looking for some difference and I think especially in you know a little queer kid you know you don't fit in this world who does who who is a place where you feel like some sense of possibility and freedom you know so you know my mother's art teacher who did outrageous deco self-portraits with Afghan hounds and yep yep who loved uh the colors of the yarn she sold and making molten glass and stretching it. You know, I didn't define that. You know, I come from a very different world. Um I come from a rural workingass family and town. Mhm. There weren't poets for me to meet until um Conrad Hillbury, who many people haven't heard of, but I think Mark, you've met him, right? Um but he should be heard of. He a great Michigan poet, but he came to my high school in a poets in the schools thing for rural rural underserved schools. And he had seen a poem of mine from my guidance counselor and he said, "Where's this Diane Seuss character?" He came to my school to find me because he wasn't in that he wasn't doing his gig in that school. it was nearby. And he said, "Do you have more of those poems?" And I said, "Well, yeah. They're in my dad's old briefcase." My dad was a teacher. And he said, "Well, let's do a reading." And so we did. And then he started sending me books. And he didn't let up. He didn't stop there. He helped me get money to go to college. So, I'm talking at the sort of dirt level, bottom line, school in a cow pasture level of, you know, it was always in me. That's why I think so much of my work takes off from the imagination because I had to find it, you know. But he um he made space for me. You know, there's so many of us who exist outside the margins of the academy and of the literary world who um so many people who will never have been heard from because they didn't have one of those people who who shoved away the weeds and helped them come in um to learn something. you know, so I try to do that for others, especially for people who don't have traditional access to those wonders that we're talking about. Charles Simmit came to my high school when I very he was quite young then and we were an early beneficiary of fellows in schools and he my creative writing teacher in high school said, "Mark, read Mr. to make one of your poems. And I knew his work. I was reading him. I loved him. And so I did. And he looked at me with his round glasses and he said in his lovely um Eastern European accent, "Read me another one." No better thing could have been said, you know. And it was it's one of those things on his part. Maybe that's just a casual gesture of of, you know, recognition that's meant the world to me. It still doesn't. You're a gift to be seen in that way. and and that somebody reaches out a hand because we all have the potential gift of the imagination and language that we hear. It's it's not a a a a unique thing to only a few. But not everybody gets nourished to to grow that and and in many cases I think education does the opposite. It's a very vulnerable time too. Um especially for people in the margins, a person can say a a person a well-known poet for instance can say something that just dashes their hopes. Mhm. They're we are very powerful, you know, and um I mean I heard things that would make your hair curl, you know, that just made people feel terrible about themselves. So, we can do both. It's a It's an extraordinary position to be in. There there's a woman in the chat, Mary Moholland, asking, "What poetry advice do you wish your young self had received?" [Music] Well, I would say it it what we need to do is follow what we love and what pulls us and we don't have to explain it and we don't have to justify it. I I think in some ways I got encouraged to do that. Maybe I heard more shoulds than I should have, but I also felt uh I could really make my own way and um maybe of course there were times that it didn't work or or it wasn't interesting to anybody else, but or or interesting to editors, you know, but I felt uh some faith in doing that like it was a necessity. And I don't I think that comes from having been around artists who were going to do what they were going to do and and seeing some beauty in that dedication that was not that that was available to me. I was very grateful for that. I don't know if I have a better answer than do I mean that's a sense of getting a permission slip. Yeah. you know that you could write yourself a permission slip to be yourself and have to perform to be somebody that you weren't. Writing anybody else's poems is not going to be a very satisfying thing to do. Yeah. And and I think Diane, you're so right. It just takes the small gesture sometimes to encourage someone or to shut them down maybe forever. And there's so many people you both talked about people in your lives who gave that permission. That's so huge. And I was lucky enough to have that too. One of my grandfathers in particular would say when we went to Sunday dinner at their house, "Choose a book off the shelf. Take one book home, you know." And I also grew up in a small farm town. And it it was such a gift to be able and and he wasn't interested in censoring me either. I was a reader as a child. I think it was kind of a bit of an invitation into imagination and escape. and I could read for hours, you know, and and he would be someone who would say, "Take whatever you want." So there there I was reading Edna St. Vincent Malay that I probably wouldn't have met for years until college or, you know, taking home a book Whitman and and trying it on, seeing, you know, how does this sound? How does it feel? And the football coach at our little rural high school was taught electives in Shakespeare and poetry. And you know, everyone wanted in because he was the football coach and he was giving everyone permission to consider these things, you know, and and I think it was just this gift to so many people who might not otherwise have ever, you know, taken a class called Shakespeare and there we were reading it all together and and it was it was great and it it did, I think, influence many people. You know, another thing that I think is very helpful to young writers is if you can go past that's great and say, "Look how you did this." You know, recognition and praise aren't the same thing. And recognition is really naming. Here's a way that you've made something wonderful. And the more people can show us that, the better equipped we are to keep making. Yeah. I think, you know, um, when the question was, "What's poetry advice I wish I'd gotten as a kid or as a young person?" Yeah. I probably very concrete stuff like um find a way to make a living that doesn't do you in. Yeah. you know, and doesn't extinguish your imagination if you can. And um you don't have to get married, [Laughter] you know. Um there are other ways of being in the world and um yeah you know just really concrete things about how to function in the world as a creative person cuz you know it's it ain't easy right out there. Um, you know, if I reverse that question to what I want to say to young writers now, one thing I feel really um, pretty strongly about is to stop getting their influences on the internet. um and you know the poetry world has become and believe me I'm not talking about these experiences but this kind of circle you know um daisy chain of influence of of contemporaries listening to each other and approving or disapproving and then following the the approvals and I think it's a very dangerous way to come into writing. Um, so I'm maybe I'm a little old school in saying, you know, pull the book off of grandpa's shelf if grandpa has books or um find find the book in the library and read the old stuff and learn, you know, who your elders are and what you came from. Um, and then from that foundation, there's so much to do. There's so much you can do. I mean, I'm talking about, you know, punk rock and, you know, my son's addiction and all kinds of realworld present day stuff. But my foundation is in the people I needed that I found, you know. So I I wish for them maybe that sort of innocence or evil innocence of being a kid who has to find has to be a detective to their literary needs and influences. Do you think what do you think was the best advice? Did you get any piece of advice that that stayed with you or that that mattered in some way? I'll let Melissa go. Ellen read some of my early poems when I was first working with her and said, "Melissa, be precise with your language." And that made a big impression right away. You know, um, William Stafford said to me, this is I 17 or something. He said, um, well, I have a feeling these are poems in heaven, but they're not poems under us yet. It's so fine to me because he sort of he he saw something I was trying to do or something I I could conceive, but he just showed me I didn't have the chops to do it. And and it didn't that didn't hurt. That was like really useful to me. Say again what he said to you. Said, "I have a feeling these are poems in heaven, but they're not poems on earth yet." What a thing to say. That's that sounds like him, too. You know, from what I've read of him, of his work, well, it was very complimentary. You know, these are poems. These are poems. They just need body. They still made their way. They made their way to earth, Mark. You know, and heaven. Not those are, but some of them did. We're all grateful. Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to think um of a really good piece of advice. Yeah, my mentor Conrad Hillbury, I got mad once because somebody um was sort of imitating my my work. Um somebody in college and I said to him, you know, she's faking quoting lines of mine and saying they're hers. and he just sort of wasn't having it. He said, "Get over yourself." Basically, and it's a compliment. Move on, you know. And I think he really he was a very humble person. And I think just his air of humility, he was humble, but he wasn't a pushover, you know, and that taught me a great deal. You know, get over yourself, die. Nice. conference with a poet who shall remain nameless who and the night before my cat had gotten hit by a car and I was it was really heavy carrying that and was upset when I went to the conference and I told the poet this and that person said well I just think it's un a waste that people too it's too bad that people waste so much love on animals that they could be giving to other people and immediately I thought I don't care what you think it does not matter to me what you think about my poems that's an instruction you this is a moral art right and If and I want to be able to see your the humanity of of the critic or the reader. I I if if you're going to tell me how to practice this art, you want to be a decent person in the process, you know, or I believe you. Yeah. Yes. Wow. Yes. Decency. Yeah. And you can be indecent in poems. Believe you me. That could be all right. It's just don't don't you know don't hurt. Just don't be a to other people. Yeah. Well, there's a bunch more questions in the chat and we only have a few more minutes. So, I'm trying to kind of scan through there. There's one from Carla Sarah that I think this is to you Diane. Um, she says, "When I read Modern Love, when I read Modern Love, I was stunned by the line, but objectivity itself." That was beautiful. It seems the antithesis of romanticism and would you comment on that? It it is in ways, isn't it? But I do think you know Keats saw the night and gale finally for what even though he languaged it, he saw it. He looked very closely at the world and um but also it's his it's his ghost in the poem. He's learned some stuff from being dead and um he has come to the realization that a lot of the sort of traps of the flesh that he fell into even his thing with Fanny, which you know he was a kid, he was a kid, you know, um even his his love for Fanny, it he was able to see with the wisdom of death that um he could be objective about her, that he didn't have to fall into sort of gloppy romanticism, but that there is still beauty. Truth is beauty, right? and beauty, truth and um the truth objectivity that comes through an objectivity in the concrete in being objective about other human beings. Um through the process of this book during the pandemic I did find that there was a lot you know I really was questioning is poetry viable? Can it do anything? And I think that poem among a few others as I chipped through this book said um it can even especially maybe if um what it helps you to do is to come to something objectively beautiful um that you're not um overpersonalizing. Maybe it it it was really kind of tempering my own soul. It's beautiful how your poem High Romance really enacts what you're saying, Diane. I'm so glad that you read that. Thank you. Yes. So, we're we're at 5:30 already. Then there were other questions that we didn't get to, but I want to thank everybody who came and engaged in in that way. Um, and I particularly want to thank the three of you for coming on and reading and and talking about these influences and poetry. And I just feel so enriched by this reading and this conversation and that ability to connect with each of you. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Magg. And Melissa, can I just say I love your work and your poems about your son. It's so hard to write about children effectively and you did it beautifully and with a lot with a great deal of um love and power and even objectivity. It's beautiful. Thank you so much Diane and thanks to all three of you for including me in these Thank you Mark. Thank you all so much. Thank you. Bye all. Bye.