Line / Break | Season 3 with Forrest Gander

Interview Transcript

Ryo Yamaguchi (00:00):
Hey, everybody. 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, life, that we simply had to keep this series going. Thank you for tuning in.

(00:28):
I have been waiting for today’s conversation for such a long time, the amazing Forrest Gander, who’s maybe one of the smartest, most incisive poets I know. And prodigious Forrest, a translator, an editor, and interlocutor with four books out this year, two of which we are really, really proud to publish here at Copper Canyon. We will get to it all perhaps, or some of it. We’ll see. Right now, I just want to say hi Forrest, and thank you so much for taking the time to be here.

Forrest Gander (00:57):
Hi Ryo. It’s really nice to be with you. This is our first Zoom time. I’ve really enjoyed your physical presence when we’ve met, but good to be with you again.

Ryo Yamaguchi (01:09):
Yeah, I did too. I was going to say, this is the first time we’ve Zoomed, but we’ve been really fortunate, too. We had that wonderful dinner for Arthur’s reading, so it was really spectacular. I still think about it a lot. Folks might not know, but we’re going to air this part in February as Marisa said, this is the first week after Thanksgiving. So I want to start asking you if Thanksgiving’s a holiday for you, if you take any special time, have any rituals around this time of year?

Forrest Gander (01:36):
Marisa and I were just talking about that too. I love Thanksgiving. It’s my favorite holiday, but I separated from its false origin and repurpose it as just a day of giving thanks for friends and family and the good things that mark my life, our lives. And so it’s a particularly intimate and warm holiday for me. How about yours?

Ryo Yamaguchi (02:14):
Yeah, absolutely. Similarly, I was talking to some of our staff, but I’ve also tried to separate it from the usual things and what sort of become culturally… My wife and I are longtime vegetarians, we’re not real big into football. I associate a lot of thanksgiving with both of those things, so we do a lot of wilderness trips now on them, so it’s usually just the two of us and we’ll go backpacking or something. So this year’s actually pretty not too far from you, we’re in Big Sur over Thanksgiving, so that was really wonderful. But yeah, I was curious how you feel the time moving for yourself, you’ve had a lot of books going on this year and moving into winter and just where you’re at psychically too, just transitioning seasons and thinking about next year also what you’ve got on the horizon. I guess the, “What’s in the future?” question should come at the end of the interview, but I’m going to ask it right now.

Forrest Gander (03:08):
Yeah. So 2022, after the people began traveling again, I had a whole lot of backlog travel plans. So I’ve been in constant motion in 2022, and I’ve been to Canada, and England, and Korea, and Mexico, and Bolivia and other places. And when I come back, I’m also visiting my sister once a month. She lives on the East Coast, so I fly there and rent a car and drive three hours from Dulles to see her. She is ill, she has ALS and I don’t know how much time I have to be with her, but we’re very close and so I go every month. So it’s been an exhausting year and I’m cutting back all the travel in 2023 except the monthly trips to see my sister, and I’m really looking forward to being here at home where my library is and where I expect to do a little more reading and writing.

Ryo Yamaguchi (04:35):
Yeah, absolutely. It seems like every time I write with you, you’re from afar somewhere in Bolivia and things, and I know that schedule of travel gets really exhausting. I’m feeling that way too, I’m coming off of a fall of a fair amount of travel and it feels good to feel good to be home. I don’t know, there’s something about it and you’re saying the space of your library and things. You bring up Korea and I know you’re spending time with one of my old friends, Don Mee Choi, and I was just curious how that time was. It sounded like you were really enjoying yourself there.

Forrest Gander (05:08):
It was a fantastic time. It was the second time I’ve been, the first time was a more traditional setup for international readings. It was in Asia, they tend to be very male dominated and that’s what it was like the first time. But this time with the Captain, Don Mee Choi, evidently having some serious influence and Kim Hyesoon, the great feminist and internationally influential Korean poet, the festival was completely different. And there were a lot of women involved, and there were a lot of poetries that I hadn’t heard translated before that in translation I found myself very excited about. And then I got to hang with Don Mee and go visit where she grew up and the bridge where she dangled her legs and watched the river, and the little hill that she would wander as a little kid. It was a blast to be able to do that with such a good friend.

Ryo Yamaguchi (06:28):
That’s so cool. She was so generous to me when I first moved to Seattle and she introduced me to Kim Hyesoon’s work in this wonderful world of contemporary women’s Korean poetry. Black Ocean has a really good kind of series that’s going with this now too, and starting to really unveil or really give a lot of visibility to some really important voices. I want to maybe hold that thought, because I want to talk about Shuri Kido with respect to this. Japan, man, different, but an Asian voice in translation to the US. But let’s maybe hold that question for a second. So, talking about Don Mee and the place where she grew up, and I love this detail about the feet dangling from the bridge and it makes me think about origins for us. And so I want to get back to this sense of your own origins. And my predecessor Laura, she really likes to ask this question in this interview series. It’s one that I ask every single time, and that’s when you first recognized yourself in a work of art, if that was a poem or something else.

Forrest Gander (07:36):
So I was raised in a house of women. My mother, my two sisters, my grandmother, and my mother, her father who was a Swede, loved poetry. He was of that generation where everyone had memorized poetry, my grandfather’s generation. And he would stomp around the house, reciting these old 19th century poems, “You call me chief and you do well to call him chief, who for 12 long years fought and faced every form of man or beast the Roman Empire could provide. But today I met a man,” blah, blah, blah. So my mom, when I was really young, was reading me poetry and mythology. And I remember, you know what, when I was six, seven, eight, my mom reading me Carl Sandberg and Edgar Allan Poe, and the rhythms of that language really caught inside of me something central. And I began to write my own bad poems. But by the time I got to high school, I thought I was a pretty hotshot poet. And that lasted until my first year at William & Mary, where I met with a professor, Professor Jenkins near Wren Chapel, he had a little hut where he met students. And I thought since I was new on campus, just go ahead and blow him away with my poems and handed him some. And he read two of them and he looked up at me with these sad Bassett hound eyes and said, “Forrest, these are terrible.”

(09:35):
And then was the transformation. Then I thought, oh, this isn’t just something that I do on my own. I need to learn about the art of this, the substance of this. I’ve been reading poetry, but not that much contemporary poetry. The most contemporary poetry I’d been reading up through high school was really Dylan Thomas. I had a teacher that had turned me onto Wallace Stevens, and I’d written a paper on “Sunday Morning” in high school, but I hadn’t been reading poetry widely. And that was the point when I began to be serious about learning the art. But it had caught in me early on from childhood, and that was the main form of contact with art, with any kind of art that was a huge early influence.

Ryo Yamaguchi (10:35):
It’s so cool to hear. Well, it’s so cool to hear about being raised in a family where poetry is there. What I really latch onto though is the idea that, this has been true for myself and it’s been true for many friends that I’ve talked to where it’s like, it’s the one person who gives you the criticism that you need, who holds you to a higher standard. I’m particularly in the world of the arts, there’s a lot of encouragement and I think that’s wonderful and we need to do that. There’s enough harshness of in the world, but when you have that one person who says, “No, you can do better.” That’s an incredible thing.

Forrest Gander (11:06):
That’s what made my wife CD Wright such a great teacher, is that unlike a lot of professors who feel pressured to coddle their students, CD was just resolutely honest. She would give people her honest take on things and even honestly say, “I’m not sure I’m the right teacher to help you forward on this trajectory. You might want to work with somebody else.” And I think for those students who really want to become better and not just have their egos massaged, that is the kind of professor who’s the most influential. And it was certainly important for me. That’s what I want from my close friends is not any kind of praise, but really the sharp criticism that might help me take it a step further.

Ryo Yamaguchi (12:16):
I think you’re starting to touch on another topic that I wanted to really, really talk about today, and that’s collaboration and having close good readers or close artistic relationships, how important that is. And I think especially important for you. But yet again, let’s hold on that thought because I think we’re coming to a good time maybe to hear a poem if you’re feeling ready for that. I think I ought to do the customary move here. So we’ve got two. One is from the wonderful Shuri Kido, Names and Rivers and your co-translator here with Tomoyuki Endo. And then of course the beautiful Knot, which is collaboration with Jack Shear and the photographs. And I assume that, would you read something from either of these, do you think, for us? What do you think?

Forrest Gander (12:59):
Sure, yeah. Let me read a poem from Knot, so these poems, as you know, obviously Ryo, really are directing. They’re ekphrastic, they’re very engaged with the photographs of Jack Shear and the photographs of Jack Shear in this book, are of men who are naked men wrestling with this huge black cloth in various… Oh, great, great. Yeah, there’s a wonderful example. So they have this very mythic haunting quality for me, and in the past, in my work with other photographers with whom I’ve collaborated, which we might end up talking about, I’ve worked differently. In this case, I tried to enter the characters that the figures, what they might be thinking in my mythic reading of the photographs. And so the poems are meant to go with the photographs, I guess there’s no way to describe it except by reading it. So here we go.

(14:23):
I stripped off my clothes on the backseat of the bus and kicked out the emergency door, dragging this blanket full of lice after me. I ran right past the rusty pickup following the bus. The old farmer had his window down and his radio was playing Ode to Joy. This is right where I want to be, I said to myself as I lifted the blanket and it poured out around me like sorghum from a split barrel. They set the dogs after me, of course, but my heart is a horse. This is right where I want to be. I noticed a tiny whirlwind of dust keeping pace on the side of the road, the smell of coming rain. I could hear dogs barking and I felt thirstier for everything. I wasn’t slowing down. I passed a street corner, empty except for one man leaning back into all those faded papers stapled to the telephone pole. He was wearing dark glasses playing a clarinet. He didn’t even notice me. I’ve got a voice like an ice pick, and I didn’t say a word though I wanted to shout, “Hey look, it’s me. I have inherited the earth and not a single shadow. I will never be lonely.” But I hadn’t come to speak my mind. I’d come to be spoken of.

Ryo Yamaguchi (15:54):
Oh, that’s great. I want people to read this so badly, to understand all the different energies and the way that you enter into each idiom of the photos. This is a piece that’s so exultant to me, and it’s got kind of a jazz to it. I don’t know, I’d be curious of how you would describe it. But it brings to mind, Tobi has this really excellent question about this, and I’m really happy that you prefaced that poem by talking about that it was a little bit of a different process for you and that you wanted to speak the characters. So let me read Tobi’s poem verbatim, because it’s really written so well. Toby has such great questions. So these could be called persona poems, because many of them inhabit the voice of the photographed subject. In another sense, they could be described as dramatic, since they often contain two voices in dialogue. Can you talk about how much world building each of these poems has required of you, and also how the milieu of characters allowed you to flesh out the voice of the individual?

Forrest Gander (16:56):
Thank you, Tobi. Your question is more articulate and answers more articulate than any response I might give. But each photograph, despite that each photograph depicts a single person wrestling with this black cloth that seems to take on different meanings and different photographs, and the energy of each photograph is very distinctive. So I wanted to catch in each poem the specific energy related to the specific energy that I was reading or feeling from the photograph. And sometimes that was by hearing the voice of the single human figure in the photograph, but other times I was hearing a dialogic, these two voices, a conversation with perhaps the reader who is making inquiries of the photograph or of the figure in the photograph and not simply the figure himself. So it’s like Simone Weil talks about prayer as not an asking, but a deep listening. Miles Davis says you have to listen into something. Not listen to, but listen into.

(18:45):
And so these were the different forms of what I heard when I listened deeply into the images. I like how images aren’t just visual, but they speak to us of something and in a language that’s sort of beyond words at first, but that calls forth words. So it’s that wrestling match with that listening, and with the images of people wrestling with the cloth that brought forth these different responses from me, which was very new. I’ve never written these, I try not to repeat myself from book to book, but I noticed that these poems are quite different from anything that I’ve written in other books.

Ryo Yamaguchi (19:46):
Yeah, I was curious, you mentioned other collaborations with other photographers, and I was curious if you could maybe describe a little bit of some of that previous work as a form of contrast.

Forrest Gander (19:57):
Sure. So I love collaboration, it seems to me to model a way of being in the world, a sociality that I admire. Getting rid of that old romantic notion of the genius artist who produces the great work in, usually, his garret, when really, as Cormac McCarthy says, books come from books, that all of our language is shared and in dialogue, the writers are in dialogue with other writers. And for me, collaboration is the greatest example of that, when you have to give up all or at least some of your authorial control for someone else’s vision. And what that has unleashed in me is the opportunity to do things that I wouldn’t come to on my own if I was working on my own. So it’s been an expansive relationship that involves a kind of humble stance to begin with, because you’re listening to your collaborator. Now, what was that question, Ryo?

Ryo Yamaguchi (21:28):
Yeah, that’s the question on collaboration.

Forrest Gander (21:32):
Oh, other examples? Yeah. I’ve also collaborated with a lot of different artists and with photographers, with Sally Mann, with the great Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide with a wonderful politically and socially ethical photographer, Lucas Folia. And in each of those cases, writing about the photographs, I wanted to have a critical dimension where I was also talking about what made the photographs interesting to me. So with Sally Mann, for instance, I’m talking not only about what I see in the photograph as it’s ostensible subject matter, but what’s happening at the level of the photograph itself. The smudges, the warped areas, the other things that are technical. So I wanted to have a critical dimension where I’m might be combining sort of essay and poem, but with these poems, for the first time I wasn’t trying to talk about the technical aspects of the poems, of the photographs at all. I was simply letting myself inhabit what I saw, what I heard in the photographs, to become something else, to be open to a language that came from the photographs straight to me without passing through my technical reading apparatus.

Ryo Yamaguchi (23:27):
It’s so wonderful to hear you describe this process, and you describe the process along working with different artists. You caught me at this point, I’m really torn between two different questions I want to ask, so I’m going to maybe try and meld them. And this is going to be a total mess, but this is going to be great. I’m curious, so you mentioned earlier that the poems in Knot that they’re really meant to be paired with the photographs. So I’m curious, I’m trying to really visualize collaboration and also visualize collaboration with the audience or the reader in mind, too, and how you triangulate all of these relationships. And I’m curious if you think of collaboration as additive and layering or more dialogic like you’ve mentioned. But that’s really a question about whether or not in ekphrastic work, if you think that the two pieces are really totally inseparable. Could the poems in Knot, could they stand alone? You read them alone.

Forrest Gander (24:27):
Of course. Yeah, that’s a really incisive question, Ryo. Of course, I do want the poems to work separately as poems, to be able to be read as something complete in themselves, but I’m very aware of how they work with the photographs. So far in giving readings from this book, I have asked for the photographs to be shown behind me on a screen because I also really interested in the whole hog of the art of poetry. I don’t believe in some form of purity. I’m allergic to notions of purity and think that they’re dangerous. And so I don’t mind poetry that’s become a film or poetry that draws from other arts. I’m really especially interested in just that. And at the same time, I’m really moved by how, in our age of spectacle, the age that we live in, where we’re constantly bombarded by visuals that come faster and faster, that are cut quicker and quicker.

(26:02):
And when languages being sort of reduced to Twitter feeds and emojis, I’m really astounded that people keep finding their way to poetry in this age of spectacle because poetry, reading a poem just on the page in your room alone can give you a transformative experience that other stuff doesn’t always touch at all. And I think that’s why there’s been this tremendous increase in poetry audience in the last 15 years as the polls have noted, that the Academy American poets did this big survey, and there’s been a logarithmic increase in poetry readership, and largely among the young and people of color. And I think it has to do with poetry’s salamandrine possibilities, that it can go with film, it can go with music, it can go with photographs, and it can also totally blow your mind just as text on a page.

Ryo Yamaguchi (27:28):
Oh, that’s really so amazing. I’m so heartened to think of it. Well, what I’m hearing too is something like the oddity of this particular predicament that we’re in, and I share your acknowledgement and celebration of poetry as having this rising force or this rising presence. What’s so strange to me about that I think we’ve touched on in the past in this series and that I’ve certainly had many conversations with people, is that poetry is so ancient and it’s so simple. It’s the simplest art you could possibly imagine. And I wonder if you could explain away this a phenomenon a little bit more. Is it because of its simplicity that it stands in such contrast, that it gives a solace from a world that is vaporizing us or something, that moves so fast? Is it that sense of solace? Or maybe in contrast that is it because poetry can actually have social and political action to it? Where does it belong in the world, I suppose, if you can answer that question?

Forrest Gander (28:37):
Well, I think it’s belonged in the human world as long as there have been humans. The anthropologists say that in almost every culture ever studied that the three commonalities are that humans seem to make some special formality about the death of other humans. We don’t just walk over our dead. We have rites and burials or burnings, different ways that we handle those of us who die. And almost all human societies develop some kind of awareness of even if they don’t have the science behind it, of incest, and they’re usually some kind of prohibitions about incest. And then every culture, every human culture had poetry, has had a form of poetry, often connected to shamanism, to healing, to visionary practices. And this is the first time, really the 20th century and 21st century now that human language has been almost entirely based on reason and transactional needs.

(29:59):
Whereas we’ve always had a language for the articulation of the felt, the intuitive. And that’s been what poetry has offered. And I think that people are desperate for that kind of articulation of their inner selves that doesn’t happen with science, or with the language of pure reason, or with our transactional need to know who killed who or what we can buy here. And I think that poetry is important, and also when I mentioned that our language is being reduced often, which is true, the computers are correcting our typing, the computers are correcting our syntax into conventional patterns. And letters, long epistolary has been reduced to Twitter feeds and emojis, but those are forms of language too, and can be used by poets and are being used by poets. I don’t think that there’s, like Malcolm X says, that I think by any means necessary you use, that poetry has that salamandrine capacity to become other things.

(31:26):
And I’m totally in favor of that, but I think what draws people to poetry now and what poetry offers is an articulation of the soul of our inner selves that we need a language for, and that it’s easy to lose a language for so that we live in habits of language, in codified responses to codified questions. And that the human is more expensive than that, and that poetry articulates that more expansive interior of our beings.

Ryo Yamaguchi (32:12):
You bring up anthropology and talking about the global aspect of poetry, and so let’s talk a little bit about translation and bringing other voices in. At the outset of this conversation, we were talking about Don Mee and Korean poetry and Korean women, and I’m very excited by this kind of movement, but I’m excited by it from my perspective as an American who can only access it through the English. So I’m curious from your expertise as a translator, what you’re most excited about, maybe particularly with Chinese and Korean and Japanese poetries now from Asian poetries, and what’s being translated and being brought over, and in particular how Shuri Kido fits in this. Tell us about Shuri Kido.

Forrest Gander (32:54):
Good questions. I would bring some of those terms that we’ve been talking about like prayer, which I think of in a secular way for myself, but into a discussion about translation because I think that translation is a humbling of the ego, a disappearance of the ego. So in the absence of your need to control the reading, you disappear so that the reading can present its own music, which is the music of someone else’s mind. That’s as intimate as we ever get, to listen to someone else so intently that we hear the music inside their mind, which is a different music than in our mind. I think of that as a spiritual activity, and I think of translation as a spiritual activity very closely related to what Simone Veil talks about as prayer, as a profound listening. And also it’s connected to collaboration, which we talked about earlier, especially if you actually have the opportunity to speak to someone that you’re translating. I’ve translated both dead authors and living authors, and dead authors, you feel much more responsibility for those decisions that you’re making because you can’t bounce them off the author.

(34:48):
I’ve been interested in Asian poetics also for almost my whole life, certainly my whole adult life, and studied Japanese in college and can sound good for about a minute. But all my translations from Japanese are co-translations where I’m working with wonderful friends who are also translators and pretty fluent in English. So those become collaborative activities, again, sort of giving up control and listening hard to someone else while you’re both listening to a third person, the one that you’re translating. In my life as a translator, I focused on translating women. One, because I grew up with women, I feel like my mind was really marked by living with, by growing up with women, and also because of the historical reasons that they haven’t been translated as much. And there’s often this fantastic body of work that hasn’t been revealed in English or celebrated even in its own language. So my translations from Spanish have tended to focus on women. My translations, my co-translations in Japanese have so far been focused on men. Maybe that’s because of a little circle of poets that I’m particularly interested in.

(36:35):
Gōzō Yoshimasu, Shuri Kido, and Kiwao Nomura who all know each other and work with each other. And I think there is right now a really interesting thing going on across Asian cultures, in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese culture, in their poetries. I don’t know if I want to try to define it, but there’s something different, a kind of strangeness and humor that is alien to most of American culture, and which I think can befuddle Americans, but which is really interesting and that I see as sort of part of the contemporary Asian scene. Shuri Kido’s work has less of that in it because he is more of a philosophical poet and he’s someone who was very influenced by Ezra Pound. Actually, that whole group was, and is profoundly influenced by Buddhism also. So he has a combined Heideggerian interest in the difference between language and what language represents, and a Buddhist sense of the passage of things and the sort of timelessness that we really exist in. So, his poems have a particular mystery that I think is singular.

Ryo Yamaguchi (38:34):
That’s really amazing. And I know we’ve talked about Shuri Kido’s work in this way and in this blend of Buddhism and modernism, or very particular kind of modernism, that is. Bringing up Heidegger and then of course I’m thinking of that whole trajectory then that goes through Derrida and this idea of language and representation and how the dynamics between them. And I’m going to ask this technical question, but I’d also really like to hear maybe a poem from Names and Rivers too here soon. But the technical question is, as you’re describing your process as a translator, I’m really curious about its challenges and in particular how you translate idiom. Shuri Kido, I know when we’ve been dealing with this, Shuri is an idiomatic poet and language is finicky, two languages have different kinds of finicky to them so that creates problems. And then just poetry itself is resistant, is it not? So I’m curious what you think maybe one or two really primary challenges are in this particular work that you faced.

Forrest Gander (39:43):
So, it is precisely that. Well, there is no such thing as a literal translation. I was going to say, if you look at his poems literally, but in his work, the most conventional translation of his work would appear awkward in English. Awkward both in the way that his mind works, and awkward in some of his syntactical structures. Tomoyuki Endo, this wonderful modernist scholar and my co-translator for this, and I talked about what we could do with this. And one obvious thing to make a successful translation, successful meaning in the terms of successes, could sell better, would be to smooth all of that stuff out and to make it more lyrically appealing to an American ear for lyrical contemporary American poetry. And we both agreed that we didn’t want to do that. We wanted to allow some of the syntactical strangeness, the image associations, and most importantly, the movement of his mind. Which if we read a poem after this, we’ll have an obvious example of that. To allow that strangeness to come into English, and I think that’s the ethical way to approach the translation.

(41:36):
And I think it also ends up adding something more important to English than simply a familiar sounding translation. Our language, English, it has to keep changing. And the way languages keep changing is when they bring in the differences of other languages into English. The way that Chaucer listening to the French hendecasyllable changed English poetry from the tetrameter, which people were writing in those times and sounded like what they thought an English poem should sound like, to iambic pentameter. That came from the French, and that languages that are isolated begin to die. So that one of the things that happens if you translate another language and keep some of the differences, the strangeness of that language is it infects English and it infects it in a good way, like a vaccine. It vaccinates it against the language of manifest destiny. It keeps it changing, it keeps it open.

Ryo Yamaguchi (43:08):
So that’s wonderful to hear, the example of Chaucer and transition to pentameter, which is such a wonderful part, I think, of English poetry history. I love this idea, I’m so charmed by this idea that this can happen with a single poem. A single poem maybe can enter the English language and propagate and infect and create what I’m thinking too, is this idea that of a diversity. We all know the world is healthier in diversity and that a language is that way too. It’s really just super cool [inaudible 00:43:38].

Forrest Gander (43:37):
Which is a wonderful part of Copper Canyon’s tradition of publishing translations from the beginning, and particularly with an interest in Asian translations.

Ryo Yamaguchi (43:48):
Yeah, absolutely. And I’m so happy to work on this. Listen, there’s so much we could talk about in terms of also putting into conversation, ancient and modern voices acro across the translation series and things. Well, I think this is a good time if you, do you think you could read something from Names and Rivers? And maybe we’ll close with that, does that sound good to you?

Forrest Gander (44:07):
Yeah, that sounds great, Ryo. No, I hate to say goodbye to you [inaudible 00:44:12].

Ryo Yamaguchi (44:11):
Yeah, I know, absolutely. Me, too. Me, too.

Forrest Gander (44:14):
Okay, so here’s a poem called “A Thousand Vowels.” Already the focus on language, from Shuri Kido, translated by Tomoyuki Endo and Forrest Gander. A thousand vowels, a long slope. The strong sun dipped and finally sank. No matter how long I walked, I stayed in the middle of the road. The name torn into pieces, just keeping on climbing higher and higher. I’d completely forgotten the name. The west wind shifts the typhoon’s course. The world for a few hours is thrown into confusion. You might name one thing after another, but each loses its name in that same moment into what we call nature. I stood in the middle of nature and something was missing. The natural was draped in a thin shroud. Vowels scattered, the name went missing. When once more, the name nature was applied to the desolate as ever landscape. Immediately the name began to weather away. What is still losing its name, and what has already lost its name. Those two strands entwined around the true name, those who have wings stay put howling out their condition over and over how fragile we are, though no one hears them. Thousands of ripples tell a story of benthic anguish, the ripples beach themselves on the name of each anguish. Vowels scattered by the thousands over the earth. That poem actually has a beautiful relationship with one of my favorite poems by George Oppen called Psalm.

Ryo Yamaguchi (46:27):
Oh, yeah absolutely. Oh, that’ll be good. It’ll be good reading for following this conversation. I’ve never felt more at home in such strangeness, I think, in Shuri’s poem. I don’t know, they just really speak to me in this way, and that was a beautiful reading. And that’s a poem I know so well, I’ve read this book inside and out so many times and it’s just wonderful to hear you, to read it. And it’s just so wonderful to have this conversation. Thank you again so much.

Forrest Gander (46:52):
My gratefulness to you. Yeah, thank you Ryo.

Ryo Yamaguchi (46:55):
So I’ll consider this our own collaboration, this little talk that we got to have today. I think it was really, really wonderful.

Forrest Gander (47:00):
Right, and Tobi and Marisa, thank you too. Thank you, Copper Canyon. You’re the best.

Ryo Yamaguchi (47:06):
Absolutely. Oh, we’re so pleased and thrilled and privileged to be friends with you, Forrest, and to have you on our list of course. Well, thanks again, and thanks to all of you all out there. I hope you got as much of this as I did from today’s conversation. And thanks for tuning in, and we’ll see you next time.

Forrest Gander (47:25):
Okay. Adios.

[End Transcript]