Female Speaker: I'm here to introduce the lovely Diane Thiel. Diane is the author of several books of poetry including Echolocations, winner of the Nicholas Warrick Prize. She's also authored several books of nonfiction and creative writing pedagogy, including Crossroads: Creative Writing Exercises in Four Genres, Open Roads: Exercises in Writing Poetry, and Writing Your Rhythm: Using Nature, Culture, Form and Myth. Her work has appeared in numerous journals such as Poetry, Best American Poetry 1999, Sewanee Review and more than 30 anthologies. She's traveled and lived in various countries in Europe and South America, and is fluent in Spanish, German, French, and speaks pretty good Greek. In fact her translation from the Greek of the Alexis Stamatis' novel, American Fugue, received the 2007 NEA International Literature Award. A recipient of the Robert Frost and Robert Jeffers awards, and a former Fulbright Scholar in Odessa on the Black Sea, Diane is currently an Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico. Echolocations, the title of Diane's first full-length book of poetry, refers in part to the sounds whales send out to find their way, not unlike the sounds of poets. She writes, "The poet uses his or her voice to find and touch things to recall them. A poet's impulse to write all so often comes from a sense of loss, a hollow place which echoes inside. Poetry, perhaps, is that constant searching for wholeness, alignment, kin." How lucky we are that Diane continues on that constant search. Please welcome Diane Thiel. [applause] Diane Thiel: Thank you so much, Amy, for that lovely introduction. I'm very honored to be here reading at the National Book Festival. Thank you very much to the NEA for making it possible for me to be here and also for making the Poetry Pavilion possible, in general, so thank you very much. I'd like to open today with a poem from Echolocations. It's a poem which -- I grew up in Miami Beach, and it's called "South Beach Wedding." And it's kind of a poem about what a scene, I suppose, South Beach is if anyone has been there, where things are really not always what they seem to be. I suppose living in DC you can relate to that concept. This is "South Beach Wedding." On Saturday, we walked Miami Beach, together searching any quiet streets and came upon a church tucked in between the Deco, where a little garden wedding was being held. We couldn't help but move a little closer. We must have been in love, the way we neared to hear their vows - CUT! CUT! Stop the scene! What's with the two of you? Can't you see we're filming here? Security! The groom began to curse the summer heat. The bride said she was melting in her dress. Escorted firmly from the premises, we heard the words ring out - The Wedding Scene take twenty-nine. Let's get it right this time! I suppose this is another poem about perception. It's called "Perception." It's a poem I wrote after a friend was describing -- he had actually brought the painting to show us -- it was a new painting of his, he's an artist friend, and he was describing what he had done with it. It was a long row of trucks and cars, and at the very end in this painting there as a little spot of paint and he said, "This is a painting of my wife." His wife was there and she looks at the painting and she said, "I'm so small," and she then left the room. After she left he said, "You know, that was how long I would watch her when she would leave the apartment until she disappeared down the street." I thought, "Come back, you have to hear him, hear him say this." I wrote this poem for them; it's "Perception." All she saw was how small he painted her disappearing down the street, through a dark valley of trucks and cars- all she saw was how small he painted her. Her tiny form blurred, but central like a fire, burning long after the eye's heat- what he painted was how long he watched her disappearing down the street. This poem deals with a project I did when I was 12. I was part of a strange Great Books Program. I'm calling it a strange program because we were reading things like Dante's Inferno when we were 12, and doing odd projects like building the Parthenon out of popsicle sticks and things like this. I chose to do my project on Dante's "Inferno" of The Divine Comedy, and decided to draw the circles of Hell and paste them up all around the room. My brother I refer to in the poem as il miglior fabbro, which is the term Dante used for his fellow poet, Daniel Arnott; it means the better craftsman, the better artist. But in my poem, il miglior fabbro is my brother because he could draw tortures much better than I could so he offered to draw all of the gory, gory details in the project. It's called "Memento Mori in Middle School," and memento mori is that moment of recognizing our failures and mistakes. Memento Mori in Middle School When I was twelve, I chose Dante's Inferno in gifted class-an oral presentation with visual aids. My brother, il miglior fabbro, said he would draw the tortures. We used ten red poster boards. That day, for school, I dressed in pilgrim black, left earlier to hang them around the class. The students were impressed. The teacher, too. She acted quite amused and peered too long at all the punishments. We knew by reputation she was cruel. The class could see a hint of twisted forms and asked to be allowed to round the room as I went through my final presentation. We passed the first one, full of poets cut out of a special issue of Horizon. The class thought these were such a boring set, they probably deserved their tedious fates. They liked the next, though- bodies blown about, the lovers kept outside the tinfoil gates. We had a new boy in our class named Paolo and when I noted Paolo's wind-blown state and pointed out Francesca, people howled. I knew that more than one of us not so covertly liked him. It seemed like hours before we moved on to the gluttons, though, where they could hold the cool fistfuls of slime I brought from home. An extra touch. It sold in canisters at toy stores at the time. The students recognized the River Styx, the logo of a favorite band of mine. We moved downriver to the town of Dis, which someone loudly re-named Dis and Dat. And for the looming harpies and the furies, who shrieked and tore things up, I had clipped out the shrillest, most deserving teacher's heads from our school paper, then thought better of it. At the wood of suicides, we quieted. Though no one in the room would say a word, I know we couldn't help but think of Fred. His name was in the news, though we had heard he might have just been playing with the gun. We moved on quickly by that huge, dark bird and rode the flying monster, Geryon, to reach the counselors, each wicked face, again, I had resisted pasting in. To represent the ice in that last place, where Satan chewed the traitors' frozen heads, my mother had insisted that I take an ice-chest full of popsicles- to end my gruesome project on a lighter note. "It is a comedy, isn't it," she said. She hadn't read the poem, or seen our art, but asked me what had happened to the sweet, angelic poems I once read and wrote. The class, though, was delighted by the treat, and at the last round, they all pushed to choose their colors quickly, so they wouldn't melt. The bell rang. Everyone ran out of school, as always, yelling at the top of their lungs, The Inferno fast forgotten, but their howls showed off their darkened red and purple tongues. [applause] Thank you. This is "Love Letters." My mother wanted to learn some German for my father and because her children could already speak it a little. She was tired of dusting the stacks of books she couldn't read, tired of the letters she always had to ask him to translate. He was usually willing to translate the cards his mother had written in German. But sometimes there were other letters, and when he read them to her and the children, she had the same feeling she'd had with books before she learned to read, when she was little. She said it bothered her a little that her own children would have to translate for her, that they could pick up the same books that were as Greek to her as they were German. She started learning it from her children and decided to leave my father letters. She wrote my father daily love letters and carefully placed them on the little table where they put things for the children, next to our favorite set of translations of fairy tales we first heard in German. She leaned one every day against his books, the white paper stark beside the dark books. But my father never answered her letters. Instead he returned them with his German corrections in the margin, his little red marks-hieroglyphs for her to translate, as if she were one of the children. Maybe she was just one of the children in that house surrounded by rows of books. Maybe her whole life was a translation of what she imagined in the letters. The space between them made her that little girl, wandering lost inside the German. Because her own children were half-German, she built her life around those little books translating the lines of her own letters. Some of you may have noticed that was a sestina, which has a very intricate pattern of repeated words. It's not a form I love, but in this poem I think the very closed-in nature of the house and the way everything repeats kind of led me to write the poem in that form. And I'll just tell you one other thing about this poem, I have a little "wink" in the poem which is that line "...that were as Greek to her as they were German," because my husband's a Greek citizen. I think as I was trying to learn to write Greek and leaving him love letters, I said, "Well, maybe this poem is a bit of a warning so you don't give me back my little attempts corrected." So you see, poetry can be very useful in many ways, right? He was running with his friend from town. They were somewhere between Prague and Dresden. He was fourteen. His friend was faster and knew a shortcut through the fields they could take. He said there was lettuce growing in one of them, and they hadn't eaten all day. His friend ran a few lengths ahead, like a wild rabbit across the grass, turned his head, looked back once, and his body was scattered across the field. My father told us this, one night, and then continued eating dinner. He brought them with him-- the minefields. He carried them underneath his good intentions. He gave them to us-- in the volume of his anger, in the form of a stick, a belt, in the bruises we covered up with sleeves, In the way he threw anything against the wall, a radio, that wasn't even ours, a melon, once, opened like a head. In the way we still expect, years later and continents away, that anything might explode at any time, and we would have to run on alone with a vision like that only seconds behind [applause] I'd like to share something a little lighter. This is a poem which is based on the types of books you might not want to have by the bedside, and I walked around for a while with a line of "Bukowski is not my favorite bedside read," but it hadn't found its poem until I realized I wanted to talk about Philip Larkin as well. So my poem has echoes of Bukowski's books Love is a Dog from Hell, Terror Street and Agony Way, and it also has some echoes of Philip Larkin's poem, "Talking in Bed," which starts out so beautifully and becomes this kind of bleak, bleak picture of marriage and domesticity. It also has echoes of a well-known Larkin poem, one which you'll be familiar with, "This Be the Verse." So I thought I would share that Larking poem with you and then my poem which has echoes of that Larkin poem. This is Philip Larkin's, "This Be the Verse." They fuck you up, your mum and dad, They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn By fools and old-style hats and coats Who half the time were soppy stern And half at one another's throats. Man hands on misery to man It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can And don't have any kids yourself. [laughter and applause] So not the best poem for the bedside maybe, right? So, this is my "Bedside Readers." Bukowski is not my favorite bedside read I've known one too many men who keep A troubling volume tucked beside the bed In their apartments at the razor edge Of "Terror Street and Agony Way" Where they keep "Love the Dog from Hell" at bay And let no daylight penetrate that lair. And Larkin, there's another to beware Between the sheets for all I like his form. "This Be the Verse" to keep us all forewarned. A life with Larkin would have made me dive Straight off that rocky coastal shelf. Believe me this. Unless you want a timely end Don't read your lover * [laughter and applause] I'd like to share just one new poem here and then a couple from Resistance Fantasies in the interest of time. I have three small children at home. The oldest of my three small children is three, so you can do the math? [laughter] We just brought one baby with us today, our seven-month old. This is for my son and it's a poem, "Counting Two, Counting Two," which began as a kind of anecdotal poem, but I think it became a poem about what it means to have someone in your life. "Counting Two" Suddenly my son can count: one, two! His "one" a calm, tame number His "two" a wild creature, The vowel stretching limbs, Traveling continents, oceans Taking on the World in its primordial twos. "Three, four, five," my practical parent self suggests. "One" he answers authoritatively And then, again, the wildly gestured "two." "One, two," he counts the flock of birds, "One, two," the cars on a passing train, "One, two," a march of ants, drops of desert rain. At night, exhausted from his exponential math, His head against my heart, counting beats, perhaps, to fall asleep, I fall with him thinking of his "two," his wildly gesturing hand Showing me how well he understands, my little son, That two is so much more, twice as much, in fact, Infinitely more, than one. * [applause] Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm going to read two poems from Resistance Fantasies. One is the title poem. This is "Resistance Fantasies." We like to think we would have been Hans or Sophie Scholl Scattering anti-Reich leaflets for our lives. We like to think we would have given our homes, Our future children, for the safety of our neighbors. We like to think we never would have owned slaves Or better still, that we were abolitionists. We never would have paid a factory death wage. We never would have sat at bulging tables While the potato famine harvested the villages Or packed people into coffin ships. We hear of every "Trail of Tears" "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." How could the people come to that solution? And then we close our newspapers, Somewhat aware of what our investments might support, Disturbed to be reminded in the news or in a poem We might quietly recognize ourselves when we hear That all it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing And yet go home to our lives and our silence, That true, rough beast hiding in the hole of our full bellies, So easily convinced there is nothing we can do And each of us continues to dream of having been willing to give anything At that moment in history, of having been, at the very least, an active resister. We were all the heroes in someone else's war. Thank you. I'm going to close with a poem, "Editorial Suggestive," which is kind of an imagined letter from an editor to Edna St. Vincent Millay telling her how to make her poems sexier so that they sell in the 21st century -- because we all know what you have to write in the 21st century to have it sell, right? So, it's called "Editorial Suggestive," and it plays on that poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, "What Lips These Lips Have Kissed and Where and Why." I'll read Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnet -- and then my sonnet in response to hers. So this is Edna St. Vincent Millay. What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten, and what arms have lain Under my head till morning; but the rain Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh Upon the glass and listen for reply; And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain For unremembered lads that not again Will turn to me at midnight with a cry. Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree, Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, Yet know its boughs more silent than before: I cannot say what loves have come and gone; I only know that summer sang in me A little while, This is my "Editorial Suggestive" for Edna St. Vincent Millay from an imagined 21st century editor. What lips these lips have kissed and where and why. A hot beginning. What the readers want. But could the lips be hips, get more up front, To better wake and shock the weary eye. Must it be ghosts that tap the glass and sigh? Why not a well-remembered lad at the front door Or better, at the back, you won't quite let him in But then, no, what have I to say about it, it's your palm, n'est pas? Lain. Lain. Good verb, although the "lay" Could be more tempting, set the reader's cheeks aflame. Bend those boughs, take him up against that tree, Out in that rain. And, one more thing, oh yes, Dear Edna, you must also change your name. * [laughter and applause] Thank you very much. [end of transcript] * This poem's format may be different