Line / Break | Copper Canyon Press Anniversary with Michael Wiegers

Interview Transcript

Ryo Yamaguchi (00:00):

Hey everyone! I’m Ryo Yamaguchi, the publicist at Copper Canyon Press, and you are watching season three of our interview series Line / Break, which goes off the page and into the homes and minds of our beloved poets. We began Line / Break as a way to connect during the pandemic, and we’ve had so much fun seeing poets on screen, hearing poems, talking about writing, books, and life that we simply had to keep this series going. Thank you for tuning in.

(00:29):

Dear viewers, I want to welcome you to a very special episode of Line / Break with our own executive editor, Michael Wiegers, here to celebrate our 50th anniversary and with it this extraordinary anthology that we are just now publishing, A House Called Tomorrow. Today’s episode, I think it should be the easiest, but it might be the most difficult. I’m not really sure since I get to talk with Michael, both a colleague and a friend every single day. Michael, thanks so much for scheduling one more Zoom this lovely Friday morning. What do you think? Do you think this is going to be the easiest or the most difficult of these interviews we’ve done?

Michael Wiegers (01:06):

I think it’ll be the easiest for you, the most difficult for me-

Ryo Yamaguchi (01:10):

Okay. Excellent.

Michael Wiegers (01:12):

… since I’ve not done it before. But no, thank you, Ryo. This whole series has been just really fantastic. And your energy and intelligence always just comes shining through and I’m sure our viewers all see that and appreciate it.

Ryo Yamaguchi (01:31):

Oh, thanks Michael. Okay. This is pretty easy so far. I can accept this conversation as it is. No, that’s really wonderful. Okay, so we’re filming here. It’s February 24th. We are on the eve of AWP. For viewers who don’t know what that is, that’s pretty much the largest writers’ conference in the US. It’s a place where nearly every American writer has convened in the past. It’s the most important opportunity for us as a press to interact with our poets and our audience all kind of in the same place.

(02:03):

This is our first AWP we’ll be attending in person since the start of the pandemic. And here’s a kind of quick story, Copper Canyon, like many folks, pulled out of going to AWP last minute March 2020. That was right as the seriousness of the pandemic was settling in. We left all these pallets of books just kind of sitting unattended at our booth as many other publishers had to do. We are about to return, Michael, in large part, to celebrate our 50th anniversary, and I’m wondering what you are most looking forward to and also what you might be like most apprehensive about at AWP.

Michael Wiegers (02:39):

I’m most looking forward to being among our poets and among our colleagues at the press. It’s really something that I think we’ve all missed. And one of the things that I’ve tried to get across with this anthology and with its subsequent companion book, Come Shining, is that we’re really about community, and the gift of this place is its community. And I want to be in that gift-giving space with my colleagues, with our poets, who I’ve had the privilege at least with our poets of spending in some cases the last 30 years with them. So that’s a good homecoming, if you will, and it’s right here in our own home in the Pacific Northwest.

Ryo Yamaguchi (03:39):

Yeah, I’m really thrilled. I mean, we have so much planned. I mean obviously we have the Space Needle celebration that’s going to be great. We’re going to get to partner with one of the best bookstores in the country, Elliot Bay, and we’re going to get to be there I mean in the convention center in Seattle, standing at the booth. And like you’re saying that it’s that sense of community and there’s so much I want to talk about with community in the poems. Yeah.

Michael Wiegers (04:04):

Yeah. And I was going to also say the other part of your question, the misgivings, I think, probably because we’ve been isolated and in our own homes and I’ve been working in my little cubby here for the past couple of years, just learning those social skills again. That’s probably the big misgiving, just how to be, I hope, graceful and amiable in person when we see people that we haven’t seen for years. So that’s probably the biggest misgiving.

(04:40):

But certainly we’re all looking forward to the opening night party at the Space Needle which I had dinner last night with one of our poets, Amanda Gunn and she wasn’t so certain when I explained to her that the top of the Space Needle, the floor is all glass, so you’re looking down several hundred feet through the glass. So it’s going to be an extraordinary way to celebrate the Press. And they’ve even made a special cocktail for the Press that is called the Copper Canyon Comet, and it features edible gold leaf in it. So they’re celebrating us well at the Space Needle.

Ryo Yamaguchi (05:34):

We’re nothing if not fancy or at least golden as we’ve been.

Michael Wiegers (05:38):

You are.

Ryo Yamaguchi (05:39):

Well, yeah we’ll wait till we get in person. I’m hearing in this Space Needle this kind of metaphor for, I mean I share with you a social anxiety really. I mean it’s an anxiety, but it’s the getting back on the bicycle thing. You’re like, “Did I forget how to pedal? I am going to bump into someone and not how to comport myself?” But the social aspect of poetry also, I love the Space Needle thing, there’s this kind of risky adventure to get up above the city and have this perspective and have completely unobstructed views. And isn’t that sort of what poetry’s trying to do also or something like that.

Michael Wiegers (06:20):

Yeah, I love that idea. I hadn’t thought of that. And it’s also the top of the Space Needle is always moving, so it is changing its view and I suppose that’s apropos of poetry as well. It’s always moving and inviting us to look anew at what’s around us.

Ryo Yamaguchi (06:44):

Yeah. Yeah. That’s really beautifully put. So part of our conversation today and what we’re kind of celebrating this year, 50 years, there’s this very chronological context to a lot of what our mindset has been 50 years. And if you don’t mind my noting here, Michael, this is also an important year for you as an editor at Copper Canyon for 30 years. And so I really want to tap on your perspective over those past couple of decades. And I have a few questions for you specifically about what your experience has been in what has been a really important 30 years, just culturally, socially, politically, of course all kinds of things I don’t even need to mention, but there’s some specifics around the history of publishing I want to get into around that.

(07:33):

So be prepared for that. But I’m going to use this as a segue to ask a question I like to ask everyone who’s on the show. And working back in your own life as an editor, as an artist, as someone who has been involved just in the arts, who’s made a career out of the arts, about the first time that you interacted with the arts as a young person, I mean as a kid or even as a young adult, the first time that you recognized yourself in a work of art in a poem, in a movie. Yeah, the first time art really triggered in you.

Michael Wiegers (08:05):

Right. Oh God, there are so many ways now that I look back that I can ascribe to, those moments of beginning. The first poetry I was a young kid into music and I would be telling my mother that these songs were so philosophical, they’re so important. And she started handing me books. So early on when I was probably 12 or 13, she gave me a copy of the complete collected e.e. cummings and then gave me Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s, A Coney Island of the Mind as just these entries.

(08:48):

And so I’d say in a lot of ways, she may not recognize this, but she was really influential to my development and how I look at the world. And using the word “look,” she was blind. And I remember before she had completely lost her eyesight, and I think I may have told you about this recently, before she had lost her eyesight she took me and my siblings to see Monet’s Years at Giverny. And I saw those paintings and they became kind of part of a visual cliche for me. So fast-forward just this past year, I saw a show wherein they had Monet’s Giverny paintings alongside Joan Mitchell’s paintings.

(09:48):

And suddenly in this new context, the Joan Mitchell paintings, which are just stunning, they made me see the Monet paintings in an entirely different way and made it new. And there’s an element of that that I like in the anthology that we’re doing. By bringing forward newer, maybe more radical or more expressive, I don’t know what the word I’m looking for, a more modern sensibility, you can see the old within the context of those. And I think that the other thing that’s part of my artistic awareness was I went to high school really close to-

(10:34):

I grew up in St. Louis. I went to high school, close to a free art museum, the St. Louis Art Museum, which is an extraordinary museum. And I was kind of a lonely loner kid. And I would go and hang out in this museum and then later would take my mom with her blindness and I would try and explain to her what I’m seeing. I took her to see a Jim Dine exhibit and trying to explain these big hearts and gates and tools and things like that, and with my limited vocabulary. And I think that that’s something that is at the root of what I do as an editor and publisher is to try and translate that what is, for me, very personal experience into something that others might embrace and hopefully understand and love as much as I do or more.

Ryo Yamaguchi (11:29):

Oh, that’s fantastic. I remember talking about the Giverny exhibit with the Joan Mitchell paintings, and I mean, there’s so much here that you’re describing. It’s this interaction across eras and across art movements. I love this idea that maybe Monet’s paintings were waiting for an interlocutor that hadn’t existed yet. And could we say that about. . . ancient Chinese poets who are in this anthology waiting for Shangyang Fang to come around or something like that.

Michael Wiegers (12:03):

Right. Yeah. And you’ve heard me say this I think a couple of times, and I’ve been thinking about it more and more, but another formative book for me is Lewis Hyde’s, The Gift. And in that book he talks about being good ancestors. And that’s the role of the artist, is to be a good ancestor. And so, you are laying the groundwork for future generations. And I hope that that’s what we’re doing with our work at the press, is we’re being good ancestors. Yes, we’re looking backwards 50 years, but there’s a reason it’s called A House Called Tomorrow, because we want to look forward and do so it’s just, okay, how do we responsibly make art, make poems, make books that will be read years hence? That’s, I think one of the goals that I would like to pursue as an editor and publisher.

Ryo Yamaguchi (13:03):

Yeah, I love that. I love this groundwork. And of course, we’ve talked a lot meaningfully about how we think in these temporal horizons in the past, in the future, in this kind of conversation. I think you’re getting into this kind of forest here that our colleague, Elizabeth, wrote just a really fantastic question about the anthology that gets on this. And so I think I want to kind of use this question as an opportunity to maybe open up this discussion a little more about this, about the anthology in particular.

(13:36):

Let me go to it really here because I ought to just read it verbatim. So Elizabeth asks, in the anthology’s preface, you lovingly describe your office bookcase, which holds the entire Copper Canyon backlist. Does A House Called Tomorrow feel like a microcosm of that bookcase or is it something else entirely? When this anthology joins its companion CCP titles on that case, what will its 50 years of voice contribute to it?

Michael Wiegers (14:05):

That’s a great question. Thank you, Elizabeth. I think that when I look at that bookshelf, the anthology is the work of many hands, many minds. And I think that bookshelf is what contributed to this anthology. So when I look at that bookshelf, I just think of all the people who have made those books beyond me. The people who have chosen them, designed them, edited them, copyedited them, proofed them, promoted them, et cetera, the artists who were on all the covers. And I think that bookshelf is what prompted me to pursue the editorial decisions that I did with A House Called Tomorrow.

(14:57):

In that I turned to that community, to the poets, to board members, et cetera, and just said, “Hey, this is the opportunity for your voice to be a part of the history of the press and maybe more recognized.” And maybe the anthology is trying to state that more overtly than the individual books over various years. There are books where I or a previous editor may take credit for having edited them. And so the attention accrues there, but really even those books were made possible by many, many hands. By our donors, by our readers, I mean, it just really spins out in so many ways. And what is publishing if not at its root making public? And all of our books do that. And I think that the anthology that’s celebrating the place intends to do the same thing. It’s let’s make this public.

Ryo Yamaguchi (16:10):

I love that. I love your discussion of the etymology of publishing and making public and the importance of being in a public space and for poems and yeah, of course the community.

Michael Wiegers (16:28):

Yeah, particularly I mean if you consider the act of the book, it starts and ends in solitude. It starts with the solitude of the writer who may have a community that they’re working with, and it ends in the solitude of the reader sitting under their lamp or whatever. And that book may have been handed to them from a community of friends, but in between there’s the public-making that’s happening, which is all the hands. I think of David Calegari in Minnesota copy editing. Alison Lockhart in South Africa proofreading it. And every time I name a name I’m thinking, “Oh my God, there’s somebody I’m forgetting to leave out.” Because there’s so many people who have been a part of these books that we make. And I’m hoping that we can celebrate over and again during this anniversary.

Ryo Yamaguchi (17:24):

Yeah, that’s wonderful.

Michael Wiegers (17:25):

Sorry to interrupt you there.

Ryo Yamaguchi (17:26):

No, no, no. This is great. This is great. Here’s what I’m feeling. I’m feeling that we have a sort of texture and this kind of network of folks who have been involved in the life of all of these poems. And there’s this membrane, and I’m feeling a poem pushing through this membrane right now. So I don’t know, can you read something from the anthology? What do you think? I know it’s hard to pick from half a thousand pages or whatever.

Michael Wiegers (17:48):

Yeah, my gosh. I’ve been a part of so many of these books that I can tap the brakes just about anywhere and find something that I love. And so I’m looking around frantically and it’s like, “Oh sure, why not this?” And this is by my dear, dear beloved friend who we lost too soon, several years ago, C.D. Wright. And it’s like, “Oh wait, is this the best C.D. Wright one to read? Now I want to go.” But this is from her book, The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All, which sometimes that can be a drinking game.

(18:46):

Try to remember that title when you’re in a group of poets. It’s like, “Okay, who can remember the whole thing?” So that one was done in 2016. And it’s actually really prose rather than poems, but it kind of toes the line of what both poetry and prose can do. And this is from “Concerning Why Poetry Offers a Better Deal Than the World’s Biggest Retailer.” “Poetry digs through. Its castings make some growth possible even on contaminated ground. Though forced to make due with shrinking day-length, though forced to go the worm’s way, poetry ensures new shoots.

(19:34):

It could be that an international vault will have to be established for poetry, to ensure the renewal of the greatest variety of voices, of lines capable of challenging the uniformity of thought. The vault, that must by definition of its mission, reject the Walmart cheer. Spring clings to poetry. It brings forth possibility, ‘the greatest good.’ That the poems we snatch from the language must bear the habit of our thinking. That their arrangement strengthens the authority on which each separate line is laid. That the extend line into perpetuity. That they enlarge the circle. That they awaken the dreamer. That they awaken the schemer. That they rectify the names.

(20:21):

That they draw not conclusions but further qualified doubt. That they avail themselves of the shrapnel of everything: the disappearance of cork trees and coral, the destroyed center of Ramadi, the shape of buildings to come, the pearness of pears. That they clear the air. That they keep a big-box sense of humor at the ready (like an ax in a glass case). That they bring the ship nearer to its longing. That they resensitize the surface of things. That they resonate in the bowels. That they will not stand alone. This is our mind. Our language. Our light. Our word. Our bond. In the world.” Damn, she’s good.

Ryo Yamaguchi (21:10):

It’s so good. I mean, that’s a poem I’ve spent so much time with. I mean, it’s thinking of this anthology, but even from when that book published and yet C.D. Wright’s ability to surprise still after all this time or after so many sittings with the poem is just really remarkable to me. And yeah, I miss her greatly.

Michael Wiegers (21:32):

Yeah. And just spoiler alert, we’re going to be doing a collected/complete C.D. Wright coming up.

Ryo Yamaguchi (21:42):

Oh yeah. It’s the row there on the title status doc. I’m seeing it, yeah, yeah. Michael Wiegers (21:46): That’s the next big project. It’s had to get the anthology done. Now I get to work on C.D.’s.

Ryo Yamaguchi (21:51):

Yeah. Oh, it’s so amazing. It’s so amazing. I was thinking of, were you at the Lightning Field trip? It’s here in New Mexico. I was just thinking- Joseph was telling me a great story about being there.

Michael Wiegers (22:04):

Yeah. No, I mean, that’s a long story. Again, going back to origin stories and art and what have you for years, I would go to different land art places to celebrate my birthday. And one year, and it was a pretty bad year for me, and I decided I wanted to go to the Lightning Field, and I called Dia and asked if there was an opening on my birthday, and they’re like, “Oh, actually we’re closing for repairs the day before and we’ll be closed for the season.” And I just spontaneously and maybe stupidly said, “What if I buy all six places? Will you allow me to come?” And that didn’t go over so well with my partner at the time. It’s like, “What did you just do?”

(23:00):

So anyway, I had six spaces for my birthday, and I just decided, okay, I’m going to call five people whom I love and say, “Hey, I’ve paid for the Lightning Field, you can get yourselves there if you want to join.” And C.D. was one of them who I called and she flew out, and we all met in New Mexico and went to the Lightning Field. So I think that’s probably what you’re talking about. But I just remember both C.D. and Joseph walking out trying to figure out what this is. And Sherwin Bitsui was another one, and he just sat on the porch and made some beautiful comments about lightnings and sunflowers in his family’s tradition. And yeah, so it was an extraordinary trip. But yes, was there a question there? I’m sorry, I just started bloviating.

Ryo Yamaguchi (24:01):

No. No, no, no, no. I think my mind had just wandered to- wandered out into the Lightning Field and thinking about C.D. And this idea of her in this slight dangerous feeling space, but one full of electric possibility, I mean, again, the metaphors abound, right? So C.D.’s poem is, I mean, it’s a love letter to poetry, but it’s so much more than that too. And I’m thinking tonally about different kind of tonal elements to this. I mean, of course, we’re in this mode of celebration, but there’s challenges around poetry challenges too.

(24:39):

And I kind of have this question. So can we pose this question to you from your perspective? Which, so poetry to me it’s this superlative, in many ways, it’s our simplest, most fundamental art form. In your introduction you talk about semantic scribblings on a cave wall. I mean the very beginnings of language. I mean, poetry is just language. That’s all it is. I hazard that the simplicity has also made it pretty subversive throughout pretty much its entire life on the planet. And I’m wondering what you think in its role, in its tenacity to be simple, what its largest obstacles are that it has to overcome to reach a reader, to reach someone’s heart?

Michael Wiegers (25:26):

Well, I think one of the biggest obstacles is probably that because we are using something that is almost universally shared, spoken language, that fact that we all have it within us, have these languages within us, maybe might lead some people to question, well, it’s kind of seeing a Piet Mondrian on the wall and somebody saying, “Oh, my kid could do that.” There’s this sort of dismissive perspective of what’s happening in a poem. And particularly when you get to poems wherein the main thing is less visible, then I think that it might cause some people to just assume that it’s nothing. And at the same time, poetry isn’t just rhetoric, it isn’t just charged language. It’s something more and less than that.

(26:49):

And I think that there is a tendency sometimes to see charged language as being poetry, and I don’t see them as the same. There’s a line from a Hayden Carruth poem that I’ve put in here that I’ve always loved, and it’s actually on the back of my business card or a part of this poem is on my business card. But I’ve always liked the idea that he says, “A poem is neither object nor expression, yet somewhat partakes of both. What a poem is is never to be known for which I’ve learned to be grateful.” And I love that idea of poetry right there. That it’s not just this made thing, kadunk, kadunk, kadunk, and it’s not just cut a vein, I’m in pain expression, but it’s both. And they intertwine marvelously in the poems that I love.

(27:55):

And of course, my definition of poetry is going to be different than somebody else’s. And that’s okay. But I think that’s also where the challenge is. So what does C.D. say in this? Oh God, there’s something about confusion is part of the business of poetry, uncertainty, mystery, doubt. Those romantic notions or Keatsian notions are part of what poetry is. That we’re not going to poetry for certainty as much as we’re going there for uncertainty or methods, or not methods, something that will help us celebrate the uncertainties. And that’s part of why I go to poetry. And as soon as I try to put my thumb on it, it’s just like, “Well, it’s not that either.” So it’s neither, but partakes of both.

Ryo Yamaguchi (29:02):

Yeah. That’s excellent. This makes me ask this question that I’ve been thinking about with this too, which is, of course we all want poetry to be popular, we want it to touch as many lives as possible, but is there a risk? Should it always be kind of underground, should it always be a little cool too cool?

Michael Wiegers (29:25):

That’s been the ongoing conversation. I can remember, God, it might have been Richard Howard or somebody, when I was coming up and I was in my 20s and reading that he is like, “Oh, it should be just like during Soviet Russia. It should be, how was it? The Velvet Revolution.” Or whatever where poems are just passed around secretly and no, we’ve got to protect it. And I recoil a little bit at that because I do think that as Roque Dalton said, and then Pablo Neruda then stole, “Poetry, like bread, is for everyone.” And I believe that wholeheartedly that it is.

(30:15):

But again, and maybe this is because of the position I hold at a poetry publisher, I want poetry to be more than just accessible. I want it to be doing tricky, weird, strange, unexpected stuff. And the unexpected is sometimes not accessible. And so I don’t think that our goal should be just accessibility, but it’s something that I want everybody to appreciate it. And because, I mean, you’ve heard it probably many times in your life, and I have also, where people will say, “I don’t understand poetry.” My own father would always say, “I don’t understand what you do. I don’t understand poetry.” And I was like, “Yeah, you do.” He is like, “No, I don’t.”

(31:13):

And he was a religious man. I was like, “Okay, tell me a psalm.” It’s like, “You understand poetry, it has moved you.” The Bible is poetry that moves you. And so I think that… No, I’m off on a tangent here, but I think that everybody has access to poetry. And so we don’t even really need to think of it in terms of accessibility. It’s already there. It’s already in our lives. And I hope our job as publishers to help people realize, “Oh yeah, I’m part of this. I get to partake in it. Whether or not I’m writing it myself or reading it, I get to be part of the making and remaking of language, of the gift.”

Ryo Yamaguchi (32:16):

Yeah, that’s really wonderful. And I love the way you’re talking about balancing that accessibility and challenge and that part of what makes poetry exciting is that a reader has to attain it, a reader has to meet the poem where it is or something like that. Yeah. Oh, let me concretize this idea of accessibility. And accessibility is kind of a fraught weird word, but I’ll concretize this a little bit and wanting to take a little time to talk about the history of publishing.

(32:45):

The Press is 50 years old and you’ve been in the scene, just alone with Copper Canyon for 30 years you’ve seen a lot happen. In your introduction, again, you mentioned certain technologies that have really facilitated publishing. I mean, it’s Gutenberg stuff, cast type. I want to think about our more present history and the technology of the internet, of digital publishing, of blogs. The idea that you can create a magazine today by just going to WordPress and creating a blog, and now you’ve got a magazine and also sort of the rise of MFA programs.

(33:25):

The kind of institutionalization of poetry and proliferation of magazines and proliferation of discourses around poetry, all this stuff that’s kind of happened over the last few decades. It’s made poetry really more accessible, and it’s done a lot of other things to it. And so I’m kind of curious from your perspective, what you think, how have these recent technologies and these recent social institutions impacted poetry in the last 30 years, just in your time as an editor, do you think?

Michael Wiegers (33:53):

Right. Well, so first of all, you alluded to it just in the history of Copper Canyon Press. It arose out of essentially a discarded but accessible technology, suddenly accessible. So during the transition from letterpress to offset printing, letterpress equipment could be had for a song. And so you consider the do-it-yourself sort of artists of the late ’60s and early ’70s gobbling up this equipment and starting to play with type and make books. And so there were no restrictions and no gatekeepers, a term that I have problems with.

(34:42):

So that allowed people who weren’t multimillionaires with access to big publishing franchise to start making books that they believe in, start elevating voices that they cared about. And so fast-forward, when I was coming into publishing, I was doing letterpress work and working in a bookstore and got my first job in publishing with our colleagues over at Coffee House Press. And just I remember when we got a computer there and Coffee House had a letterpress shop, but I just remember the first time I used a mouse and I was like, “Oh my God, this is incredible.”

(35:36):

And at the time, I also poo-pooed Amazon, it’s how the hell is this company going to make any money? The margins are so slim in publishing and in bookselling and what have you. I just didn’t quite understand at the time. And I also thought that in email, I love writing letters. Are we going to use email? So these are all ways of exchanging the written and spoken word, and I’ve seen them evolve. At the same time that we’ve seen the proliferation of MFA programs. So as I look at technologies, now the thing that we’re all Twitter-pated by is AI.

(36:26):

And it’s like okay, is AI going to replace writing? Is AI going to be the next doom? Going back to Gutenberg, there’s that joke that the second book that Gutenberg published after the Bible was a book about the death of the publishing industry. And I look at conversations about AI and I’m reminded of Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and I’m just kind of paraphrasing it here, but my own belief is that the human mind and the human imagination is always going to be able to exceed its own creations, its own inventions. So I believe that poetry plays a role in this. It plays a role in subversions.

(37:34):

And I’d love to… Oh gosh, I’m ready to go off on a tangent here. I’d rather not. But in that Faulkner thing he’s looking at Cold War, the potential destruction, nuclear destruction of the earth and he’s like, “I believe in the human experiment. I believe in the capacity for humanity, not only to survive but to thrive.” And the place where I start to lose that hope is probably around climate change where in our thriving, we are doing so at the expense of environmental and climate collapse. But yeah, I think I probably should just leave it there. But I mean, I just have some more mind versus the machine sort of thoughts that we can talk about offline.

Ryo Yamaguchi (38:30):

No, I mean, thank you you for that. I mean, so beautifully put this idea that we ought to trust ourselves to exceed our dangers, the things that we create or the ways that we box ourselves in and all of that. And climate change, I mean, yeah, I had an original question that was about the attention, poetry and attention and kind of a mindful space that it creates, particularly in the chaos of the world that we live in now. And I guess I kind of want to think about that as poem is, I mean, well, I want to hazard to say poetry as a form of nature, poetry as an experience of nature or something. I mean, yeah.

Michael Wiegers (39:13):

So in one of my tangents there, I almost went into a similar space as this and I’m refraining from grabbing the wonder killer, the phone to check and fact check and everything here. But a while ago I had read about the different centers of the brain that we engage when we read, and there’s dorsal reading and ventral reading, and I always get them mixed up, but I think the ventral reading is the more superficial like when you see stop sign, and then the dorsal reading I think is more deeply centered in the brain. And I think that to your part about poetry and nature, I think that this more early centered dorsal brain that’s where we read poetry, where we slow down.

(40:24):

And again, that’s something that machines don’t do. Machines are about speeding up. Artificial intelligence is about can we process this faster and faster and more conveniently? And whereas poetry is like, yeah, be the sand in the gears, be confusing, slow things down, make us think, make us pause, make us breathe. I mean, what is poetry if not breath? It’s about measured breath as much as it is about the words that are being said through that measured breath. And so I think there’s that connection to human nature and nature with big end, I guess, that I think is physiological. But then I think when I was coming up I was this teenager and in my 20s and I was concerned about environmental issues back then. And I always thought that, well, poetry is maybe the least extractive art form.

(41:47):

It really just requires, maybe the greatest environmental harm that a poem does is if you’re writing it down with a pencil. But you can make poetry with just your breath and without any extraction really. And I’m sure if I think a little more about that connection, yeah, I do believe that there is… So just like acid rain is global, language is also global. It crosses borders, it moves with the winds, it moves with the shifting of air, breath again. And so I see it as being very much connected in its concerns with the natural world, but I don’t know if that’s where you were going or not, but just to hear what your thoughts are more too.

Ryo Yamaguchi (42:58):

Well, you’re helping bring me to this kind of idea relationship between the two. And I mean, there’s very real things to consider I mean with poetry and publishing and resources, non-extractive. I mean, we had a conversation a little while ago about hemp paper, and I got really excited about this as a sustainable source and things. And I think there are real solutions. But to your point, I love what you’re saying about slowing down and that part of I think what we feel in our lives now is the urgency of capitalism and urgency of technology and of machines and the urgency of climate change and of environmental catastrophe.

(43:39):

I mean, part of what’s so scary about it is this inexorable locomotive feeling of it. And so the antidote is slowing down. And I think it’s one of the lessons that the pandemic certainly has taught us. I mean, I don’t want to understate the horror of the pandemic, but one of the benefits I think for many folks was that we slowed down. People read a lot of poetry. We know they did during that time, and still are and things. And I think of the rewilding of Chernobyl, I mean, again, from major catastrophe, but the result was that it was on people. There was no more activity there and that has been a positive thing. And maybe poetry has some sort of form in that too without the catastrophe hopefully.

Michael Wiegers (44:25):

Right. Well, and how much I love Merwin and I love the Merwin Conservancy where he’s made a practice, a daily practice of poetry and planting trees. And just as you were talking, one of my colleagues at The Conservancy, we argue about favorite and least favorite poems. And there’s that poem of his, “Convenience,” where it has the line, “The only thing we have to pay for it is ourselves.” And I think that, again, during the pandemic, we’ve learned to slow down and do some necessary self-care. And again, that’s reversing convenience. The pandemic has not been a convenient time. And I think we’re learning through various ways to take care of ourselves, to value our individual time. And also, like I was saying, going back to the start of the conversation, value the community as well. And I think that part of that value has come from slowing down.

Ryo Yamaguchi (45:38):

So well, in the interest of time, nonetheless, here we’re getting toward it, and I mean, I have six other questions here. I’ve got another one from Elizabeth I would love to ask. We might just have to do another episode of this with you, but-

Michael Wiegers (45:50): I’ll be happy to. I’ll be happy to.

Ryo Yamaguchi (45:53):

But I like where we’re resting here. We’re resting in an actual resting place with the slowness of poetry and the openness and that open space. And I think that’s a good place to stop. And of course, a good place to stop is on a poem if you think you’ve got one other one.

Michael Wiegers (46:08):

Yeah, again there’s so many that I want to read, but I’m going to go back to an early one that I think you know that I love, but oh God, where is it now? I just had the page there and I lost it. And this one is Vicente Aleixandre’s “Who I Write For.” And it also circles back to where I started with mentioning Lewis Hyde. Lewis Hyde, early on before he wrote that fantastic book, The Gift, he did The Selected Poems of Vicente Aleixandre and published them with Copper Canyon Press. And Aleixandre was a Spanish Nobel Prize winner who lived in Spain throughout the Civil War and was kind of this voice against fascism and the dictatorship in Spain.

(47:16):

So “Who I Write For.” “Historians and newsmen and people who are just curious, ask me, who am I writing for? I’m not writing for the gentleman in the stuffy coat, or for his offended mustache, not even for the warning finger he raises in the sad ripples of music. Not for the lady hidden in her carriage (her lorgnette sending its cold light through the windowpanes). Perhaps I write for people who don’t read my poems. That woman who dashes down the street as if she had to open the doors for the sunrise. Or that old fellow nodding on a bench in the little park while the setting sun takes him with love, wraps him up and dissolves him, gently, in its light.

(48:04):

For everyone who doesn’t read my writing, all the people who don’t care about me (though they care for me, without knowing). The little girl who glances my way as she passes, my companion on this adventure, living in the world. And the old woman who sat in her doorway and watched life and bore many lives and many weary hands. I write for the man who’s in love. For the man who walks by with his pain in his eyes. The man who listened to him. The man who looked away as he walked by. The man who finally collapsed when he asked his question and no one listened.

(48:41):

I write for all of them. I write, mostly, for the people who don’t read me. Each one and the whole crowd. For the breasts and the mouths and the ears, and the ears, the ears that don’t listen, but keep my words alive. II. But I also write for the murderer. For the man who shut his eyes and threw himself at somebody’s heart and ate death instead of food and got up crazy. For the man who puffed himself up into a tower of rage and then collapsed on the world. For the dead woman and the dead children and the dying men. For the person who quietly turned on the gas and destroyed the whole city and the sun rose on a pile of bones. For the innocent girl with her smile, her heart, her sweet medallion (and a plundering army went through her).

(49:35):

And for the plundering army that charged into the sea and sank. And for the waters, for the infinite sea. No, not infinite. For the finite sea that has boundaries almost like our own, like a breathing lung. (At this point, a little boy comes in, jumps in the water, and the sea, the heart of the sea is in his pulse!) And for the last look, the hopelessly limited Last Look, in whose arm someone falls asleep. Everyone’s asleep. The murderer and the innocent victim, the boss and the baby, the damp and the dead, the dried up old fig and the wild, bristling hair. For the bully and the bullied, the good and the sad, the voice with no substance and all the substance of this world. For you, the man with nothing that will turn into a god, who reads these words without desire. For you and everything alive inside you, I write, and write. Thank you.

Ryo Yamaguchi (50:41):

Oh, yeah, that was so fantastic. I mean, just the pan across the globe in this, yeah, yeah, it’s a wonderful poem. And I know that’s a favorite of yours too. Thank you so much, Michael, for sharing that and for talking so deeply with me today. This is fun. I mean, it’s a nice reprieve from talking about budgets and stuff like whatever things, which is really, really great. I’m so happy we could do this. And I’m so thrilled to be holding this book in hand. I mean, I have to do the promo for it here with this anthology. It’s publishing just now by the time this airs will be out in the world. Thank you all. And maybe we’ll interact with some of you out there at AWP when we’re there in a few weeks. So-

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