>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> I'm Rob Casper [assumed
spelling], I'm head of the Poetry
and Literature Center at
the Library of Congress,
and I want to welcome you
to this very exciting panel,
Why Literature Matters.
The center is home to the poet
laureate consultant in poetry.
If you are free at 5:20
and you have a child
of any age you should go
here, one Felipe Herrera,
our 21st poet laureate consultant
in poetry will read from his book,
Portraits of Hispanic Heroes,
Portraits of Hispanic
and American Heroes.
Before I begin, if you don't
mind turning off the cellphones
or electronic devices that
might interfere with the event.
I also want to let you know that
the event is being videotaped
for subsequent broadcasts on the
library's website and other media.
There are microphones up
where you can ask questions
at the end of the event.
If you do so, please be
advised that your voice and
or image may be recorded and later
broadcast as part of the event,
and you're giving us
permission to do so
and keep it forever
and ever and ever.
So now onto this exciting,
exciting panel.
To my mind, the National Book
Festival is the perfect venue
to hear the nation's best writers.
It is also a venue in which
they can champion the art
that they have devoted
their lives to.
Today's panel, Why Literature
Matters, is our attempt to make good
on the latter for all of you here.
In their most recent book,
each of these writers,
and I'll go down the list, it's
Jane Hirschfield, Azar Nafisi,
and Jeffrey Brown, makes the
case that poems in stories,
filling the convention center today,
are essential to the
world outside it.
The panels begins to my mind with
Ralph Waldo Emerson saying quote,
fiction reveals the truths
that reality obscures.
Or William Carlos Williams
saying quote, it is difficult
to get the news from poems,
yet men die miserably every day
for lack of what is found there.
I'm eager to hear how this
trio will continue to --
what is really a conversation about
life and living and bolster us
in our reading and
writing going forward.
Please welcome our panelists
and Why Literature Matters.
[ Applause ]
>> Jeffrey Brown: Well, thank you.
I'm going to start only because we
three were just coming from a talk
that we were having
for the PBS webcast.
And I -- in that role I was
the moderator, my normal role.
So -- and we decided that
I would just say hello
and start this conversation.
But really it's a continuation
of a conversation
about why literature matters.
It just occurred to me that it's
a kind of a funny subject, I mean,
we don't have to tell you
because look where we are.
We're at a book festival, right?
And for goodness sake,
we're in a poetry
and prose part of the book festival.
So I think you understand
why that literature matters.
We can talk a little bit about
why it matters in particular to us
in our lives and in our work.
My own work is as a journalist,
very much daily news, fact-based.
Poetry is another way of
looking at the world for me
through a different --
some different eyes,
with a different voice.
That's what it became.
I'm not sure I love --
Rob brought out the --
and then we can pick up on this,
Rob brought out one of those tropes
that one hears about poetry all
the time, right, that it's the news
that stays news, or it's the, what
was it, the William Carlos Williams.
I worry about those
things because it put it --
it almost creates a hierarchy to me
of poetry tells you reality
and the news doesn't.
I think the news tells reality, too.
That's my world.
But I think poetry --
>> Azar Nafisi: Well.
>> Jeffrey Brown: Tells
you a different kind of,
some other side of the reality.
Go ahead.
>> Azar Nafisi: No, go ahead.
I was just thinking of Fox News.
But that's beside the point
[laughter and applause].
Not your news, Jeff, that I
watch every, single night almost,
except when I'm at poetry meetings.
It is fantastic to
be here with you two.
And I kept thinking that
I should shut my mouth
and just listen to these two.
You know every time before
I write I read poetry,
because it immediately cleans
your eyes and makes you look
at the mundane through
the eyes of imagination.
And so, you know, it is a great
honor to be with both of you.
What I was going to say
was that, you know, this --
the title of my book is
Republic of Imagination,
and everybody asks me what
is Republic of Imagination?
And coming to a place like this,
being here at the National
Book Festival, I always say,
this is the republic of imagination.
You know, you know to be in a
place where all the limitations
that reality puts in front of
us, like geography, nationality,
language, gender, race, all of them
-- all of them are transcendent
and we immediately come into
a space where we all share,
no matter what background
we come from,
and no matter where we come from,
and it transcends the
limitations of even time and space.
So I hope through this conversation
we'll talk about the state
of imagination in this
country right now.
You know, because a lot of people
talk to me about [inaudible]
and the state of imagination in a
repressive country, and the question
that I have to put to you is,
can we have a Democratic society
without a Democratic imagination?
That is the question that I
would like to point to you.
But Jane, are you going
to read a poem or what?
>> Jane Hirshfield:
Well, I could do that.
I -- and we're going to get
Jeff to as well before the --
he's been very reluctant.
You know, one of the questions is
do we -- do we talk about the thing
or do we give you the thing itself.
And I think there's
enough time for both.
But I just want to add that I think
one of the things we need literature
for is to serve as the usher of
the unfathomable into our lives,
and why literature is a necessary
and essential augmentation
of the factual news is
because it allows us to respond
in the unexpected way,
the subtler way.
And for me, one of the
most important roles
that reading the poems of others
and attempting to make the poems
of my own plays in my life is
the expansion of the possible,
that what you feel so much
of the time as the pressure
of conventional thinking,
the agreed-upon,
and just as investigative journalism
is a way to discover what isn't
yet known, literature
is both the discovery
of what has never been thought,
said, seen, or felt before
and it is also the acknowledgment of
what often goes invisible, unseen,
ignored, and these are
the parts of a human life
which our current culture,
in the overt, large way tends
to suppress or distract us from.
And so I think a simple case for
interiority needs to be made,
a case for the private life's
support of the public life.
And I think these things are not
separate, they are interconnected
and that in fact it is by
our empathy, our compassion,
and our capacity for larger vision
that we all understand
our fates are shared.
And the sense of shared fate is
something I've been exploring
in my poems since I
was 18 years old.
So you want me to read one.
You know, the choices -- I
came with three things to read,
and I suppose I'll
do one from the --
from the new book because
it's from the new book.
I could have done others.
You're not hearing about
optimism, and you're not hearing
about possibility, but you
are about to hear a poem
about the preservation of
astonishment and wonder
and the balance of the scales of
suffering and beauty and the art.
The title is Fado.
Fado is a kind of Portuguese
song invented by the dockworkers
of 19th-century Lisbon, but drawing
from the music of all over the world
because this is the job of sailors,
is to bring the news from everywhere
and the musics and the
syncopations from everywhere.
And fado are poems of longing,
of love, and also most simply,
I learned this very late, the
word fado is actually the simple
Portuguese word for fate as well.
So Fado. A man reaches
close and lifts a quarter
from inside a girl's ear, from her
hands takes a dove she didn't know
was there.
Which amazes more, you may wonder,
the quarter's serrated murmur
against the thumb or the
dove's knuckled silence?
That he found them, or that she
never had, or that in Portugal,
this same half-stopped
moment, it's almost dawn,
and a woman in a wheelchair is
singing a fado that puts every life
in the room on one pan of a
scale, itself on the other,
and the copper bowls balance.
>> Jeffrey Brown: I like -- I
like very much the idea of the --
[ Applause ]
>> To me the bridging of the private
and the public is so important
in my life and literature
is what does that.
It did that from the beginning for
me, before I was in the news --
the world of the news,
I was a bit, you know,
wayward youth as many people are.
My first way into the world
was really through literature.
And then in a -- in a kind of
disciplined way the first thing
that I really got into was classical
literature, reading classic,
learning -- was a classics major.
And so, Homer [phonetic], we
were talking about earlier,
as you know giving
the news of the world.
That's what he, she,
whoever, was doing, right?
In an oral -- in an oral tradition.
It's not that that -- that
the Iliad is a precise,
it's not what I would do on
the news every night, right.
I would not say, you know,
speak [inaudible] and flow
through me [inaudible] but
that is in a sense the news,
and it is a kind of, in some
elements of that incredibly public
and epic poem that's
grounded in history and myth,
there are such deep moments
of the personal even
in something like that.
And then, of course, when you
get lyric poetry from Greek times
onto our own, it is
the most personal.
So I always felt that
even when I was doing,
and we call it public television,
right, so it's very public.
I mean, I'm very conscious of
living in this public world
where we are going out into the
world and telling large stories
about what's going on in the world.
I always -- frankly, when I travel
I read the poetry of the place.
I read the novels of the place.
It's my way into those places.
And sometimes I find my own way in.
So I will read one of mine.
>> Jane Hirshfield: Good.
>> Jeffrey Brown: I'm not
that reluctant actually.
I was just reluctant before
when I was playing moderator.
So, this is one example
of what I tried to do,
where it is directly tied
to my work as a journalist.
So this is about a reporting
trip to the Middle East
and this poem is called Beirut.
And it begins with
a direct quotation
from somebody that
I was interviewing.
Beirut. This is the
family tradition.
My father killed by his bodyguards.
His father killed.
They chose sides, chose
right, and then wrong,
and he longs for the
security of death
in his bed must leave this country.
My son knows this and his will too.
Within the same frame,
the eye deceives,
meanings hide when you
stand outside this history.
What I thought was construction, a
building with views toward the sea
on the rise was its opposite,
destruction, pockmarked,
see-through, gun wrecked, holiday
in monument against forgetting.
Restaurants filled, kebabs on
the grill, and on this day jets
in Gaza, far to the south.
In the south of this city,
craters from other jets left again
unfilled while a billboard totes the
party of God.
Permission required to aim the
camera, granted by Hezbollah,
watching us, watching them,
watching them, watching us,
and all know who controls
these streets.
Later I walked the corniche in
this Paris of the Middle East.
Was it ever so?
Two decades of war from Little
Mountain we were looking
for the sea, look again.
So close, here, and there.
Can it be?
The familiar choice of
chocolate or glazed.
No wrong or right.
Hezbollah by day, Dunkin'
Donuts at night.
Odd inside in Bruegel's Icarus
within the same frame tragedy plus
a girl eating ice cream, strawberry.
This is what we encounter, too.
Memories that encompass
craters and bombed hotels,
faces red with hate
at the jets overhead.
But also the sound of the
[inaudible], the light in the park,
nervous fathers watching for falls.
[ Applause ]
>> Azar Nafisi: That's wonderful.
>> Jeffrey Brown: So, there's a
little there of, thank you, there's,
you know, there's stuff
very much that I reported.
There's Hezbollah.
We were there, you
know, with Hezbollah.
And there's jets overhead and,
but it's also trying to get
at the person that I'm not
telling in a news story about oh,
look over there, there's a father
with his daughter eating ice cream.
You can't get all that into the
news story, but it's the reality.
It's the world.
>> Azar Nafisi: It is that.
And you know, since I don't
have any poems to read,
and I don't like to necessarily
read from my own books,
I reserve the right to
talk about both of you
and your poem [laughter].
I mean, I --
>> Jeffrey Brown: As long
as it's nice, I don't mind.
>> Azar Nafisi: Well,
I can't guarantee that.
But the point is that why am I
was sitting between the two of you
and what that means
to me, specifically.
But before doing that I also
wanted to tell you that, you know,
I call my book Republic of
Imagination because of the fact
that before I ever started knowing
the world, I was about three
and a half years old or so,
and my father every night
would tell me stories.
So before I got to know
the world I started to get
to know the imaginary map
of the world, you know.
And, you know, he was very
democratic because I think
that imagination by
nature is very Democratic.
You know, and so what would
happen was that one night we were
with our great epic poet
[inaudible], by the way,
these publishers are here if
you ever want to know anything
about great Persian poetry
or great Iranian literature,
or great Iranian food, you
have to go to [inaudible].
You will find amazing things there.
But apart from that, I also
give myself the right to talk
about others in the audience.
So anyway, the whole point was
that one night I was in Iran
with an Iranian mythology, I would
go 1000 years, 2000 years, you know,
into my own country's history.
The next night I would be
in Italy with Pinocchio.
The next night I would be
with little prince in France.
The next night I would be in Denmark
with Hans Christian Andersen,
or in England with
Alice in Wonderland,
or in America with Charlotte's Web.
You know, that is how I realized
from very early childhood
that there is a place in our
backyard, like Alice's backyard,
where you can go -- you can leave
the daily life in order to go there
and come back and know
the life better,
because you see the
world more clear.
And I also realized that I can
sit in that small space and yet be
in the whole world, you know.
And that was my first lesson.
But soon enough, as soon as I went
to England, I realize that how --
we talk about poetry as
being useless or fragile but,
you know, reality is fickle.
Everything you call home you
can lose at the blink of an eye.
And this is what I
learned through, you know,
being sent to England first
of all at the age of 13,
and then a revolution
and a war and exile,
you don't have to go through that.
You could go through a
hurricane and lose everything'.
So life, in fact, is very chaotic.
It is very unknown and it is very
fickle, and you need something,
you need a portable world that you
can take with you everywhere you go.
And that portable world
for me was three class --
three books of poetry [inaudible] by
one by a feminist poet, [inaudible],
when I went to England, and I tell
everybody at the time when I went
to England, the place was very
cold and you had these heaters
where you put shillings in.
And if you were too close to it
you would burn, if you were too far
from it you would freeze.
And I learned from early
childhood, I mean I was 13,
to go under the blankets
with a hot water bottle,
and at that time there was this book
written about how to be an alien,
because the British felt
that everybody else was an alien
no matter where they lived.
Like they would tell Polish in
Poland, oh, where are you from?
You know, and it said that --
>> Jeffrey Brown: Have
you looked at the --
have you looked at the headlines?
>> Azar Nafisi: Look at the
headlines in today's paper?
No, I haven't.
But you can tell me.
>> Jeffrey Brown: Well, no,
it's -- nothing's changed.
>> Azar Nafisi: But anyway.
>> Jeffrey Brown: Is all I'm saying.
>> Azar Nafisi: No, nothing has
changed because, what I was going
to say is that something has changed
because I would go with the --
to bed with a hot water bottle,
and this book it said Continental
people have [inaudible] life,
the British have the hot
water bottle [laughter].
You know, and the British, believe
it or not, that was very essential,
you know, to -- and I was going
to says things have changed
because now they have
air conditioning.
But apparently that hasn't --
>> Jeffrey Brown: Well, I just
mean the alien part about.
>> Azar Nafisi: Yes, oh yeah,
about everyone sort of comes.
And anyway what I mean is that what
I could bring with me from Iran.
I couldn't bring those mountains,
the snowcapped mountains.
I couldn't bring the sun -- the
way the sun played on the leaves.
I couldn't bring the
voice of my parents.
But I had the memory.
And the best safeguard and guardians
of memory are these two
people, to my right and left.
The best safeguard of memory is
literature and art and music and,
you know, it's poetry
and novels and fiction.
Those are the ones that make us not
only withstand the cruelty of man,
but they make us withstand
the cruelty of time, you know.
And that is why we need poetry.
And to make this very long
story short, I went back to Iran
and discovered that home
was really not home anymore.
And the fact was that the
only thing I had of Iran was
that portable world, was [inaudible]
and the things that remain.
As [inaudible] says, governments
come and go, only the trace
of genius remains, you know.
Only things that endure
after we're all gone.
And [inaudible] cruelty
and brutality
by this regime was very obvious.
You didn't need to talk about
it because when they flog you
for the way you look, you know,
you don't need to say anything.
I want to now, very shortly, and
I will end here, but I will talk
about the two of you before I end,
the point was when I came back here
and one of the first things
that happened to me was
that I could talk,
that I could talk.
And one of the things
that my mother said
to me before I left was
tell them, you know.
And one of the things
that people in countries
under pressure tell
you is tell them,
because somebody else hearing you.
It is like that tree in the forest.
Someone has to observe
what happened to you
so that you know you have conclusive
evidence that you have lived.
And I started telling, but one
thing that scared me to death,
and it still does about here and
that is the center of my book,
is that okay, as Saul Bellow says,
those who survived the ordeal
of holocaust, how will they
survive the ordeal of freedom?
Because freedom is an ordeal.
And he responds to
that and many writers
and poets respond to
it the same way.
He says that in the west, what
will break us in the west,
what is dangerous to us is
our sleeping consciousness
and our atrophy of
feeling, you know.
And that is what scares me about
our system of education today,
about how they're taking
art and literature and music
out of the schools, about how public
schools are broken, about the cost
of going to college, [inaudible],
and about thinking that people,
ordinary people like you and me,
don't need the higher
things in life.
So private schools get it.
We don't get it.
And these are the things
that worry me.
And that is why I want to
end with these two here,
because one of the arguments they
bring is that poetry, you know,
poetry and art that's
all for -- for what?
For poets and artists.
What use are they?
I mean I'd like to ask the
Congress what use are you,
but that is beside the point
[laughter and applause].
You know, I mean, you know,
what you guys do in there?
And you are telling me what use
are books to these 100,000 people
who come to the National Book
Festival, the people who go
to the Smithsonian, the people
who come here, the people who go
to Texas, Miami, all these
other book festivals,
they are not members of Congress.
They are not among the 1%.
They are ordinary people, and
every democracy has the duty
to give every citizen the right to
public education and public health.
This is the fight today [applause].
Now, I'm shut up for a long
time because I want them
to read -- I want them to read.
Jane and Jeff, when you read that
poetry, it brings you so much
of the reality that you are feeling
within you, but you can't explain.
They bring, what you said, that
invisible, and I want to say
when I was reading Jane's
poems I thought they tell you,
even our president
tells us, that science
and technology are
separate from humanities.
They tell us that [inaudible]
is important.
They tell us what people
in China are doing,
which people in China don't
want to do by the way.
They only engineering and math.
They segregate science
from humanities.
You read Jane's poetry, you read
that relationship towards nature,
and you discover that what
[inaudible] used to say was
that you need the passion
of the scientist
and the precision of the poet.
This woman here has the
passion of the scientist
and the precision of the poet.
There is a poem I love by you.
It is called, as old flesh is
proud of its wounds wears them --
>> Jane Hirshfield: For What
Binds Us is the poem, yeah.
>> Azar Nafisi: And you read that
and you realize it is a crime
to segregate science
from literature.
Both are based on curiosity.
Both are based on articulating
the world and we don't need that.
You read Jeff --
>> Jeffrey Brown: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
>> Azar Nafisi: You read
Jeff, you read Jeff.
>> Jeffrey Brown: Now
I am reluctant.
>> Azar Nafisi: Okay, okay, read the
dedication he has, to [inaudible].
You know, just from that very first
moment how the ordinary is no more
the ordinary.
You know, how all of a sudden
you realize that there is --
everything is enduring because this
man saw not just the [inaudible]
who also write poetry.
And I love the one where
you go to the museum,
the one you [inaudible] there's
a person named [inaudible]
in your life.
>> Jeffrey Brown: Yes.
>> Azar Nafisi: Yes,
I love that one.
>> Jeffrey Brown: You
know her, yeah.
>> Azar Nafisi: Where is Paula?
>> Jeffrey Brown: She's out there.
>> Azar Nafisi: I love that, too.
>> Jeffrey Brown: Did
you bring that --
do you have that poem
that she's referred to?
>> Jane Hirshfield: I
might have it memorized.
>> Jeffrey Brown: Oh, wow.
[ Inaudible ]
That sets a high bar [laughter].
>> Azar Nafisi: It is about wounds.
It is amazing how the wounds turn
into love in poetry and everything.
>> Jane Hirshfield: Thank you.
What's odd about it -- so it's
the earliest written of my poems
that still stays in my life
and that I still often give
at poetry readings.
It goes back to 1982, so quite old.
[ Inaudible ]
And it does have in it,
which I think is what you
were also referring to,
it talks about strong
forces and weak forces,
and those are the forces in physics.
And since then I have
continued to have more
and more science flooding
into my poems.
Why it came to me in 1982, a poem
of the devastated end of a love,
but also the knowledge
that it would continue.
I don't know why physics
came, but anyhow,
here's the poem if I can do it.
For What Binds Us.
Oh, I'll add, it was also used as
a poem of diplomacy when I went
through Syria and Jordan and the
Palestinian territories in 2007.
I was -- I was sent with a
small group of American writers,
another of whom is the next one
on this stage, Daniel Alarcon was
on the same trip and they made this
poem up as a broadside and gave it
out to people who seemed
rather puzzled to receive it,
but the idea that it was
about this shared sense
of inescapably interconnected
humanity.
For What Binds Us.
There are names for what binds
us, strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them, the
skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into
the places they join,
joints dovetailed on
their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down,
and gravity, scientists
say, is weak.
And see how the flesh
grows back across a wound,
with a great vehemence, more strong
than the simple, untested
surface before.
There's a name for it on
horses, when it comes back darker
and raised, proud flesh, as all
flesh is proud of its wounds,
wears them as honors
given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest.
And when two people have loved each
other see how it is like a scar
between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes
of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.
[ Applause ]
>> Jeffrey Brown: Well I'm tickled
that you brought up the first ded --
the poem called Dedication.
>> Azar Nafisi: It was beautiful.
>> Jeffrey Brown: Because I
don't usually get asked about it
and in some ways it was one
that motivated the whole effort.
Not the writing but
the idea the one --
that I, not one, I could put
a book together of poetry.
And this is because I agree with
everything Azar has been saying --
>> Azar Nafisi: But?
>> Jeffrey Brown: No,
no, there's not a but.
Well, there is a but.
There is a but, yeah.
You know, you can see that we're
old friends here so we kind
of finish each other's
sentences with contradictions
and you know, blah, blah, blah.
So if she could shut up for a moment
while I finish my [laughter] --
so, no, because we
discuss this all the time.
And I -- and I feel very
strongly about the devaluation
of literature and arts
in our culture.
My way of dealing with
it is really by example.
It's a, I think, a
quieter way perhaps,
because that's what I'm
doing, I think, in my day job.
And the example is to make
sure that even in the context
of a news program that there is
a place for the arts and culture.
Simple as that.
It's not that simple a thing
actually when you get to it,
when you're looking at the
daily news and you're saying,
well what do you --
what's the news of the day?
What's the news of
any particular day?
And we would all sort of agree
on the main news of the day,
but somewhere in that newscast,
in my case, or in the newspaper,
you want to value the culture.
So that's all I have tried to
do as part of my job, is to --
and I like the way I like to put
it is you would look at a program
like ours, and you're familiar
with the idea that you're going
to see newsmakers, and we
know who those newsmakers are,
it's the President, and it's the
Senators, and it's the and generals,
and it's the CEOs, and it's all
these, you know, you expect that.
And I honor that, too, right.
So I don't go with you to --
>> Azar Nafisi: Congress.
>> Jeffrey Brown: You
know, to congress.
But I -- because I honor
what they try to do, too.
But, my point is just to make --
to make the argument by example
that the writers, and the musicians,
and the actors, and the dancers,
and the thinkers, philosophers,
and the historians, they should be
valued as much too, and they're part
of the news of our world
as much as the rest.
So, that's what I -- that's
what I try to do in my day job.
So one of the -- we were
talking about this earlier,
one of the most gratifying things
to me is when somebody comes
up on the street and say --
and recognizes me or says I watch
your program, the best thing
of all is when they say that we --
that I love the conversations
with writers and artists.
And the best of all is
when somebody gets turned
on to something because of that.
So this is -- this
is a poem about that.
I call it Dedication.
It's really like 6 a.m.
in a Tucson hotel room.
Dedication.
To the porter in a Tucson hotel
who took my bag and asked,
do you yourself love poetry?
Uniformed, night-shifted,
a man crossing borders
in the satellites beam, and
now he said, a reader of poems.
Chance and change in a desert hotel.
Imagine him there, the porter
imagining a wider world.
And you in it, you carried in it.
>> Azar Nafisi: That
is gorgeous [applause].
>> Jeffrey Brown: Thank you.
[ Inaudible ]
>> Azar Nafisi: That is beautiful.
>> Jeffrey Brown: So that's the --
I mean, it's also when I said it
was a way in for me it's not just
about the connection with that
man, but it's also making me think
about being part of his world.
You know.
>> Azar Nafisi: Yeah, and you
know, when you say that by doing,
you are in fact making -- try
to do what you think it is best.
I agree, but also I agree that
you as a poet and you and writers,
you know, James Baldwin used to say
that writers are here
to disturb the peace.
And I think that one of the
things that is bothersome for me
in American society is
that the greatest danger
to it is complacency.
>> Jane Hirshfield: Yes.
>> Azar Nafisi: You
know, it is conformity.
It is the fact that we are offered
so many things that are new,
you know, and we have
the illusion of choice
and we love to be entertained.
And nowadays, especially, even our
children in colleges are taught
that we can trigger warnings so
that they won't be disturbed.
You know, the world -- they're
beheading people every day.
We have a report on some sort
of a gun violence every hour.
And yet we are not
preparing our children
to read Huckleberry
Finn and be [inaudible].
That is what disturbs me.
And one of the things that I found,
especially through
writing this book,
was how disturbing the
great American heroes
of American fiction were.
That how against complacency
American fiction went,
beginning with Huck Finn.
I mean, you know, he changes the
word civilized from a c to an s.
And that is what he
does with the world.
He shows how complacency
and conformity is violent.
In that book you see
all sorts of violence,
everywhere there is a civilized
city, Jim and Huck are in danger.
The only place they are really
not in danger is when they are
on the raft in wilderness.
Wilderness is less dangerous
than those Sunday school
[inaudible] houses that they go to.
And what I learned from this book,
and the books that I studied later,
finishing with James Baldwin,
was how the most violent thing
in American society is
explained through slavery.
I mean, race in this country stands
for the greatest complacency of all,
because complacency is blindness,
is the refusal to see the other.
It is the refusal to
accept the other.
And Huck, although he
remains racist on the surface,
in his heart he has changed
because he accepts Jim as the other.
And I think that is
what your poems do.
They turn that night porter not
into a night porter
but into an individual.
>> Jeffrey Brown: Right, but
you were talking to us earlier
about poems coming internally.
>> Azar Nafisi: Yes.
>> Jeffrey Brown: I
mean, as a way of --
>> Azar Nafisi: Yeah.
>> Jeffrey Brown: Learning yourself.
So all I'm -- all I would ask
is, is it really the role?
I mean, that is one
role of the artist,
or the poet, to upset the world.
>> Azar Nafisi: No,
no, you upset the world
by being you, by going inward.
I mean that is the only
way you can upset it,
to be true to something within you.
>> Jane Hirshfield: Well I want
to add something which draws
from deep history, both oral, myth,
wisdom, and also the origination
of writing which allows us to have
these vessels which last and are
like a perfume bottle that can be
un-stoppered over and over again,
because otherwise perfume
is volatile and vanishes.
And since so much of what is thought
in literature is hard to hold
onto because it is
counter complacency,
counter the accepted wisdoms.
Writing was in every culture,
in disconnected traditions,
the Greek tradition,
the Chinese tradition,
writing is invented
by the trickster.
It is a hermetic art and trickster's
job in the pantheon of the Gods is
to disturb the peace, to take
the reigning order of all
of the other Gods and poke it in
the ribs and make fun of it and say,
no, no, no, that won't do.
We're all going to change now.
Everything is going to change.
Trickster also invented the
liar by an act of thievery,
by an un-civic act of stealing,
you know, killing Apollo's cattle,
killing a turtle, and so this is
the sort of revolutionary wisdom
which is also part of literature.
You know, as you were speaking
about Huck Finn, I was --
I was suddenly entertaining,
now who exactly is the
protagonist of Moby Dick?
Is it Ahab?
Is it the whale?
Is it Ishmael?
Is it the boat?
Is it the ocean?
>> Azar Nafisi: Yes.
>> Jane Hirshfield: And in
fact, you know, this capacious,
I think of Moby Dick as the last
work of literature in world history
which still partakes of that oral
tradition, holding everything,
holding the entire, you
know, all those chapters
about this is how you render
a whale, this is every image
of the whale which has ever
been seen in the history
of the world onto, you know,
signs over pubs in London
and constellations and mountain
ridges in the shape of a whale.
This is also literature's job.
But the other side of the
hermetic, equally important,
where were you reading
those children's books?
In the privacy of the bedroom,
in the intimacy of the family.
All of us who read under the
covers with our flashlight
after our parents told us to go to
sleep and we kept reading anyhow
because we were desperate, because
we were starved for the saturation
of feeling and story and
image and impossible --
six impossible things before
breakfast in our lives.
And so I think in a way it is
extremely important what you were
saying about the arts
being kept in the schools
and not being denigrated.
On the other hand, there
is something to be said
for the fact that, again, in
every wisdom tradition world over,
wisdom is stolen.
It's in Pandora's box,
it's in an apple.
It is not given to us.
We have to take it, and we take it
by our desperation as human beings
and as cultures [applause].
>> Azar Nafisi: Yes.
Yes, and that is, I
give you one minute.
>> Jeffrey Brown: No.
>> Azar Nafisi: I forgot
what I wanted to say.
No, but I agree and I agree
when you talk about desperation.
Because -- and that is what is --
what makes me anxious when I see
that in our schools we want
our children not to feel
that desperation, not to go --
>> Jane Hirshfield: Yes.
>> Azar Nafisi: Ben Kingsley
was here at the Holocaust Museum
and he talked about
how we're taking --
we're depriving our children
of tragedy, you know.
And the whole idea is that
we want sometimes literature
like everything else be
the Aspirin for the soul.
You know, all this how to books.
You know, when I wrote my
memoire I said, you know,
this is not about how to
make peace with your mom.
I'm not ever going to make
peace, especially with my mom.
No, I'm joking [laughter].
That I am not writing
in order to be consoled.
I'm writing in order to investigate,
you know, and Margaret Atwood used
to talk about writing being
like seeing a bloody cleaver
in the middle of the living room.
>> Jane Hirshfield: Yes.
>> Azar Nafisi: And saying, what
is that bloody cleaver doing there?
Hmm, it needs to be investigated.
And writing and reading is
both about investigation.
I want to end by saying, [inaudible]
used to say, readers are born free
and they are to remain free.
It's not just us.
It is all of us.
The readers should fight for their
rights as much as the writers.
And I think you should
give Jeff a minute.
>> Jeffrey Brown: No,
no, no, no, no.
All I will -- no, because
I'm trained in the, you know,
nightly news that when
time is up time is up.
That means that -- and
she's got a thing that says
over time here and I'm panicking.
Because my God, we're into
the next hour or something.
No, no, I just would say, amen.
I'm so grateful to be
with the two of them.
I'm -- this is -- it's
wonderful stuff to talk about.
It's so important,
obviously to the three of us,
to see a group of --
a crowd like this.
It touches my heart.
So thank you so much.
>> Jane Hirshfield: Thank
you very much [applause].
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.