>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. ^M00:00:05 ^M00:00:20 >> Rob Casper: Hey everyone thanks for coming out on the lovely, lovely day in D.C. I'm Rob Casper, thanks to Mary Ann and to Diane Abraham and everyone here at Nichols Center Staff for this wonderful series. We couldn't be happier that they host us here. Ron reminded us this is our 15th event. It's gotten to the point where I feel like we have all the various rituals that we have, including me getting up on the stage and maybe we'll actually have a stretch at some point for those of you who have been here a lot, you're used to it. Ron is an amazing guy. What Ron does with our -- >> Move it along. >> Rob Casper: Just blows my mind. I'm not going to say anything more, because he won't let me. Let me tell you a little bit about the poetry center at the Library of Congress. We are home to the [Inaudible] consultant and poetry. We also put on all sorts of programs throughout the year. We have two great programs coming out on the 20th of April we have our [Inaudible] reading with [Inaudible] this year Claudine Marankin and who is the other, Nate Mackie. They make a fabulous pair. And on the 26th our [Inaudible], that includes all sorts of stuff, I can't tell you about until tomorrow. If you want to find out more about our programs, you can visit our website www.loc.gov/poetry. I also just wanted to mention you all see this here? Its a little survey, you should have it. If you don't mind filling it out after the event and let us know how we did, that would be perfect. And now I want to introduce Dana Levin, our 2016-2017 series. Dana grew up in California's Mojave Desert and earned a BA from Pitzer College and an MA from New York University. Her collections of poetry include "In the Surgical Theater", "Wedding Day", "Sky Burial" and "Banana Palace', which was published last year by Canyon Press, thanks. ^M00:02:22 ^M00:02:28 >> Rob Casper: Selecting Levin's manuscript for the American Poetry Review [Inaudible] praised the work as "sensuous, compassionate, violent, extravagant". In the Surgical Theater, also in the John C. Zacharis First Book Award, the Ploughshares and the PEN/Osterweil Award. In 2014, then the US Poet Laureate selected Dana Levin for fellowship from the Library of Congress. Levin's many other honors include fellowships from Guggenheim foundation, the National Dow for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Whiting Foundation. She previously taught at the University of Mexico, Santa Fe University of Art and Design and the college of Santé Fe. She currently serves as the distinguished writer and residence at Marysville University, and she just moved or is about to [Inaudible] St. Louis, Missouri. So, please join me in welcoming Dana Levin. ^M00:03:22 [ Applause ] ^M00:03:28 >> Ron Charles: I'm so glad you're here, thank you for coming. >> Dana Levin: My pleasure. >> Ron Charles: We discovered we have three things I common already. We both love poetry, we both work in St. Louis and we're both Buffy the Vampire fans. >> Dana Levin: Yes, definitely. >> Ron Charles: Not the weirdest coincidence. When I first came to the post in 2005 one of my jobs was to edit a column we used to have called the Poets Choice, a much beloved column. And Robert Pinsky was the poet and one of his columns; this was the first few months that I was here. One of his poems was explaining what an image is. He wrote, "Images can be satisfactorily clear in one way, and excitingly inexplicable in another". Here's an example he said. And then he published one of your poems. Probably the first poem of yours I read. >> Dana Levin: Wow. >> Ron Charles: Yeah. "Six monarch butterfly cocoons clinging to the back of your throat". Will you read the rest of that or the whole part? >> Dana Levin: Sure. Ours poetica. Six monarch butterfly cocoons clinging to the back of your throat. You could feel their gold wings trembling. You were alarmed. You felt infested. In the downstairs bathroom of the family home, gagging to spit them out. And a voice saying, "Don't, don't". >> Ron Charles: No for Pinsky that was an example of an image that makes you feel something that you wouldn't feel through any kind of literal description. Talk about how an image works for you? What an image does for you? >> Dana Levin: I would say an image is a portal for realization and discovery. So, I have always had what I call image fascination. Whether I'm looking at art or seeing something in the world or something that comes into my inner eye. My dreams are very visual. I pay a lot of attention to these images and especially in my early life as a poet; the poems almost always began with an image that I couldn't get out of my head. And often times the act of writing the poem was why can I not get this image out of my head. And so in entering the image, the image just sort of became a constellation usually of all sorts of material. And you know there's a psychotherapeutic idea that the symbol is the most economic way to communicate very complicated contradictory constellations of information. So, which is something I believe. >> Ron Charles: And do. >> Dana Levin: Or try. >> Ron Charles: There are images that make us see something literal, much more clearly. >> Dana Levin: Yes. >> Ron Charles: But that's not what that image was? >> Dana Levin: No, actually sometimes when the image unfolds it's more mysterious than it even was before. >> Ron Charles: But it gives you a feeling that no literal explanation could invoke in you. >> Dana Levin: Yes. >> Ron Charles: When I was teaching English and Poetry I would have students, and maybe you do too, although your students are probably older. And they would say "Well why doesn't the poet just say what she wants to say. Why encode it and then make us uncode it"? Do you ever hear that? >> Dana Levin: Yeah. ^M00:06:55 [ Laughter ] ^M00:06:59 >> Ron Charles: You make a sarcastic crack in one of your poems. You say "We are getting such lovely flourishes from our poets. What's your answer to that student? >> Dana Levin: Gosh, well first I would probably say the world is complicated. The world is not easily understandable. >> Ron Charles: Why make it worse with poetry then? >> Dana Levin: Well because of that experience, you know having the experience of discovery, which means you have to wade through things. Now not everybody has tolerance - well everybody has a different level of tolerance for how much time they want to spend wading through information, or not information, let's say an image. And poetry, one of the reasons why it's such a subversive art form is that it has the capacity to really ask you to just slow down, and be with your discomfort and your uncertainty and you're not knowing and your confusion. And one of the things I always tell my students is I got this from the critic, Helen Vendler who said, "Instead of reading a poem and saying "What does this poem mean" it's better for the first question to be either "How does this poem make me feel" or "How does the speaker of the poem seem to feel"? And I think that 80 to 90% of the time you can tell what the feeling is even if you are not quite certain what the narrative sense is or the intent is and that kind of stuff. >> Ron Charles: And you may never get that. >> Dana Levin: You may never get it. >> Ron Charles: In one of your poems you write, "I would be disingenuous if I said "Being understood were not important to me". Between the ceiling of private dream and the floor of public speech, between the coin and the hand it crosses, mercantilists and governors and preachers alike, the imagination and its product so often rebuff purpose and some of us don't like it and wanted to make it mean, I would never shoot you even if you were the only meat around". ^M00:09:05 [ Laughter ] ^M00:09:09 >> Ron Charles: I love it because it so demonstrates what you're doing. I'm with you right at that top line. It's totally explicit. I know exactly what you mean and then by the end you have the surprising witty metaphor that is arresting and surprising and funny. >> Dana Levin: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Tell me more. >> Dana Levin: About that poem? >> Ron Charles: Yeah. >> Dana Levin: So actually this poem came out of - I have a long correspondence with a poet named GC Waldrep. And well I'm somebody who hoards scraps and failed poems and journal entries and I'm constantly going back into that material and seeing if I can smash it together and make something happen with it. And with this poem I just started to like how I sounded when I was writing to GC because it seemed like language that didn't often make it into my poems. So, I actually took about 25 pages of our correspondence and I just started to highlight anything that didn't sound like how I usually sound. ^M00:10:08 And the I whittled down to 10 pages and I whittled it down to three pages and then - so these are all things I said to GC. >> Ron Charles: Excellent. And how important is it to you really to be understood? >> Dana Levin: Well, it's going to sound ridiculous. This is probably the torture of all poets. It's deeply important to me. >> Ron Charles: Because you are the - and I say this with complete respect, you are a difficult poet. >> Dana Levin: My mother would agree. >> Ron Charles: You're worth it; you're totally worth it. >> Dana Levin: Thank you. >> Ron Charles: But it's not two roads you know diverged in a wood. >> Dana Levin: No, I mean I - yeah and it's actually a current despair at mid-life, it is. You're like "What am I doing". Shouldn't I just say it? But I - what I tell my students, I keep going back to this because I feel like this is where I articulate my thought that I don't even know I think. But I told my students that you - and you have to determine what your relationship is to a reader. And for myself it's poem by poem; so there's certain poems where I'll just love a weirdness that's developing or a turn a phrase that's developing. And I know that somebody else may not necessarily understand or get what I see in it. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Dana Levin: But because of the tactile quality of the language or the image I just want to preserve it. And so then I'm just like "Meh the reader can figure it out". And then there's other [Inaudible] if I'm successful at those moments of clarity or not, but and I love mystery, and I love puzzles and I love being disturbed by something and not knowing why I'm disturbed. And so that quality I think comes back into the poems and I guess a reader of my work will either like being in that state or will be like I'm throwing this book across the room. >> Ron Charles: I'm sure that does not happen often. There's a poem you've written called "Last Heart", which is a poem about teaching poetry. >> Dana Levin: Yes. I haven't read this poem in maybe 15 years. >> Ron Charles: Are there any words you can't pronounce? >> Dana Levin: Who knows? We're going to find out. Tell me if I'm laughing too loud. And this poem ended up - there's stuff about my grandparents that came into this poem that I didn't expect. >> Ron Charles: It's surprising as a reader when you hit it. >> Dana Levin: Okay. Glass Heart. "Could the west creep into your idea of happiness? Abundance, which gave no comfort, in which your loneliness was spared. The student wrote, she wipes tears from her heart. Forgotten on the kitchen table, glassy, beaded with sweat. "The line is too sentimental" said the teacher unless I see it literally. Taking a sponge to the anatomical heart, wiping and wiping the tears off it. Glass heart, so transparent. The tears drove around its Autobahn. Then the kids came home and found it pulsing there, like in a washing machine. You could see the grief go round and round. The student wrote, "Sucking tears out of her aorta with a straw". A bitterness so pronounced it was kind of ammonia. A world in which one could lose one's parents and be put on a train alone. Her grandfather had owned a little store for years. They can shoot out the windows he would say wagging a finger, as long as they don't set the street on fire. Glass heart, so transparent. Was it their mothers, their fathers? It lay weeping in the heat. But they had to leave to help deliver groceries. The student wrote "In my left, my heart. My right, my bone. Beating my heart like a bloody drum". Ovens the grandfather muttered, in Russia they ate us raw. So, transparent. Meal after meal no one claimed it. After a while no one saw it. Though it ticked at the center of the table like a clock, singing oh, this sack of water swaying on its hook of bone. >> Ron Charles: That makes me want to teach poetry again. Because what the poem does so brilliantly is demonstrate you teaching poetry, while teaching us poetry. You move from the students flat, cliché, bland images to your own arresting, surprising images. Moving back and forth. It's a little more clear when you read it yourself, parts are in italics and set off. But I think you read it in a way that we could follow it. >> Dana Levin: Oh good. >> Ron Charles: Yes. Too sentimental, unless I see it literally. How does that guide your work generally? >> Dana Levin: Well you know - ^M00:15:31 ^M00:15:36 >> Dana Levin: For myself, like for instance I remember auditing a class with Charles Simmick when I was in my 20's and he went off on how the moon was a dead symbol. And I was insulted. I was 22. I wanted to write about the moon. How can the moon be a dead symbol? But I think what he was trying to say was that you know, how many poems have had the moon in it? And later it made me - as I was like reading actually a lot of Haiku, I was thinking about the Haiku masters and how for them the classic Haiku masters like Basho and Issa. Their mastery was displayed by how well they worked variations of tropes, like if you were going to write a Haiku about autumn, you had to have the harvest moon in it, or you had to have cider in it or these things called Keego. And this idea about variation rather than originality, the west is very focused on I'm going to invent something out of nothing. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Dana Levin: Which of course doesn't ever happen. >> Ron Charles: It gets harder and harder. >> Dana Levin: I don't think anything is source less, so the Haiku masters were really interesting to read about in terms of that it wasn't about - that the originality was inside variation. So I feel like the - I'm going around this. This is what usually happens to me. If I want to write a poem about the moon and I'm trying to avoid all of the clichés about the moon, or if I want to write about the heart. This is even better, and I want to avoid all the clichés about the heart, well most of the clichés about the heart have to do with sentimentality or kind of modeling feeling or cutesy or so for me the best way to bypass that was to actually look at the anatomy of the heart. I actually got a book - I actually got Grey's Anatomy when I was in grad school and I wanted to actually look at the heart. And could I bring that language, that anatomical language back into the image of a heart and somehow renew it for myself. And also do other weird things to it like a glass heart, that has an Autobahn inside it. If you think about blood cells - >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Dana Levin: Blood cells moving through - >> Ron Charles: A washing machine. >> Dana Levin: Exactly; yeah, why not? >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Dana Levin: Don't you want to put your heart in the washing machine? There's many of us who would benefit. ^M00:18:06 [ Laughter ] ^M00:18:10 >> Ron Charles: Does it work with the students? Do they see that? Can they hear how startling that is compared to their own bland word? >> Dana Levin: In defense of my students, I've had really amazing students in my time. I don't think talent is a rare commodity. I think discipline is a rare commodity and vocation is just something that happens. But I think talent is everywhere. Yeah with some students, yes. But sometimes you have to trick them. Like you have to trick them into discovering their own idiosyncratic vividness and that's where exercises, assignments and stuff can be really helpful to get them to have to skirt around what they think a poem is. >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Dana Levin: Or what they think a poem can do. >> Ron Charles: We have so much language on the shelves just waiting to be brought - >> Dana Levin: Absolutely. >> Ron Charles: Like last week's shirts and worn again. Read a poem about poetry. You write really good poems about poetry. >> Dana Levin: Thank you. When this book came out some people were unhappy that there were poems about poetry. Well it was kind of fashionable to write poems about poetry during - >> Ron Charles: I've read a lot about - of them and I think yours are really exceptional. I can't pronounce this title. >> Dana Levin: Quelque chose. >> Ron Charles: What does that mean? >> Dana Levin: It's French for something. It's kind of - >> Ron Charles: That's not very helpful at all. >> Dana Levin: It's - if anybody here speaks French, please correct me if I am incorrect. It's kind of like a French version of whatever, sort of. Is that correct? >> Yes. >> Dana Levin: Excellent. I think there's also a cuss word in here. >> Ron Charles: There are some, its okay; we're all adults here. >> Dana Levin: The entire field of language is available. Okay. Quelque chose. "You want to get in and then get out of the box. Form, breakage, form. I was at the fish shop wondering why being experimental means not having a point. ^M00:20:01 Why experimentation in form is sufficient unto itself. Is it? But I needed a new way to say things, sad, tired, I with its dulled violations, lyric with loss in its faculty den. Others were just throwing a veil over suffering, glittery, interesting. I don't exist. All over town I marched around ranting my jeremiad. Thinking what good is form if it doesn't say anything? Any by say, I mean wake somebody up. Even here at the shores of Lake Champlain mothers were wrenching small arms out of sockets. Not just the mothers. What were the fathers doing, wrenching small arms out of bedside caches? How could I disappear into language when children were being called fuckers by their mothers? Who were being called cunts by their boyfriends? Who were being called dickheads, behind their backs? It wasn't that I was a liberal Democrat; it was that bodies had been divested of their souls like poems. Trying to get in or out of the box. And the scallops said "Neulle idees que dans les choses." And I said "I'll have the Captain's special with wedges instead of fries". And everywhere in the fish shop the argument raged, its baroque proportions. The conflict between harmony and invention. But then brilliance, the movement of her gloved hands as she laid the haddock out one by one. The sheer transparency of her latex fingers in and out of the lit displayed case as if they were yes, fish. Laying haddock out in a plastic tub on a bed of ice. Her lank brown hair pulled back from her ace with a band. Yes it was true she had to do this for the market, but there was such beauty in it. She was the idea called tenderness. She was a girl who stood under fluorescent lights making six bucks an hour. And she looked up at me and held out a haddock with both her hands saying it was the best of the mornings catch. Neule idees que dans les choses is a French version for no ideas, but in things which we get from William Carlos Williams. And this was my poem against [Inaudible]. I don't think anybody knows. Now I've told you. >> Ron Charles: It does seem like a pretty broad attack on the blandness of modern poetry. >> Dana Levin: Well yeah or just the idea - this book was written at a moment when poetry world was very enamored of what we now call the elliptical poem. It seems so dated now actually. The world has moved in such interesting ways. But after 50 years of the hegemony, of the confessional poem and plain style confessional poetry, suddenly people remembered about the tactility of language which was exciting. And ideas about post structural philosophy started to come in and mess up people's minds. There is no author text, speak to other text, blah, blah, blah. So, I found this poetry, this - a lot of the time surfaces were gorgeous and fascinating and they were empty. >> Ron Charles: They didn't wake anyone up as you say? >> Dana Levin: They didn't wake anyone up, so that poem was a direct response and all the French is in there because I was mad at [Inaudible]. >> Ron Charles: And you say how can you write poems like that that are just experimental but are just clever, that are fascinating. When so many people around you are physically suffering. >> Dana Levin: Yes, today that poetry will go nowhere because we're in a different moment. It's very interesting to be alive for a while and see this stuff change. >> Ron Charles: Yeah. Let's talk about the body and the soul. Many of your poems explore these profound and ancient questions between the material body, which you call throughout your books meat and the soul. The soul that crammed a dark thing in the body, bitten and chained. In another poem you write "Mine's an accident of bio-wiring", that's one line of thinking. We're animals that shit out consciousness, that's another. It's frequently an impatience to be disembodied in your poetry. You write in one, who will help me avoid my meat suit? Your latest book opens with the ironic lines "We used our texting machines to look up the definition of soul". >> Dana Levin: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: You didn't find it there? >> Dana Levin: We found a definition. It's all theoretical. >> Ron Charles: Your first book begins with a really weird poem, Lenin's Bath. >> Dana Levin: Yes. >> Ron Charles: That was a daring, daring choice. Do I have the right one? Yeah. I'd also like to know why you opened with that poem. >> Dana Levin: Oh I felt like - >> Ron Charles: Nobody knows who you are. You're publishing your first book and you open with this poem. >> Dana Levin: I think it's because it just set the terms for the book. >> Ron Charles: I think it sets the terms for your whole career. You couldn't have done that then. >> Dana Levin: I didn't, no. So this poem, it's called Lenin's Bath and it came out of - this book was published in1999, but a lot of the poems were written between the late 80's. No, like early 90's and the wall had just barely come down; so all these things were happening and the former Soviet Union like what do we do with Lenin's body that's been embalmed forever and is like in this mausoleum and there was some article in the New York Times that talked about the doctor whose job it was to care for Lenin's body and it was pretty fascinating to me that they had kept this body going for I don't know - >> Ron Charles: Decades. >> Dana Levin: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: In really good shape. >> Dana Levin: Yeah, well, oh my God. >> Ron Charles: They spent so much money on it. >> Dana Levin: Poor Lenin. Poor, sad Lenin. And there was a quote in the article, the future of the body, that's a purely political question. Which I found fascinating at the time because no, at least not this body. So it's called Lenin's Bath. The assistants lift him gently, gently. For a moment, the one lifting under his arms is in the attitude of an artistic sorrow-- It is the Deposition, the taking own of the God. But then one of them wraps his limp body around him like a coat, marches around to the laughter, saying, "Comrades, comrades--" He is dead, he is so dead he is nothing, he is a cloth to tend. When Debov walks in, disheveled, yawning, the assistants are all business, filling the vat with the secret fluid that makes him supple, that makes him clean. They are so tender, lowering him into the tub. Their gloved hands come away fleshy pink. When they've gone, Debov sits watching. He imagines the sheath of bacteria he knows is there, incessant, biological, seeking a way in. They push and gather at every pore, but the flesh is sealed-- His doing. Soaking in his vat of embalming fluid, Lenin looks restful, meditative, a high official in his bath in his dacha, far away from the controlled air of the mausoleum, the schoolchildren filing past him unblinking, the veterans who stand, expressionless. Debov watches as the germs crawl up and down the length of the body, scouring, sniffing for that open hole-- The cold windows in the laboratory condense with his breath, and the flies lie hungry in the snow. ^M00:28:49 ^M00:28:57 >> Ron Charles: It works so well because it raises this issue about what is the body and how does it relate to identity in a very macabre, comic way in this poem. And then other poems it's very serious. >> Dana Levin: Yes. >> Ron Charles: Why is that such a compelling issue for you? >> Dana Levin: I've never felt at home in my body. My body has been a source of difficulty for me both physically and aesthetically. You know and women we have this issue. We never look like what the magazines tell us we should look like. We - you know that kind of stuff, but I think also when I was born my mother - my mother was actually the first woman in California to have amniocentesis. So actually she was in an - like one of those operating theaters where all those people were like watching, so even then in the womb I was like - anyway it's something called Rh factor. So her body was treating me like an invader. ^M00:30:03 So they had to induce labor. I was born at eight months. I weighed four pounds. I immediately started to die. They didn't know exactly what it was, but they knew it was one of my vital organs; so they basically just opened up from sternum to pelvis and they took out part of my intestine and I had a colostomy bad for the first two years of my life. And I was in an incubator for two months, sorry - for the first two months of my life. And I've got these scars all over my stomach still. And I've got scars on my ankles from where they fed me. They put a feeding tube in my ankles. And my nails and my teeth are screwed up because of how many antibiotics they gave me when I was that little. And so - and then alter in life you know, just discovering that like certain posture issues, like a musculoskeletal issues actually stem from that because of how deep they cut in and so the body has been difficult. And also a story like when I was a kid and I'd be like you know, my parents would tell me the story of what happened to me, and it was like hearing a tale about someone else. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Dana Levin: Because I wasn't expected to live. >> Ron Charles: Our bodies are us, but not us. >> Dana Levin: Yeah and you know you just realize incarnation is probably the most heroic thing any of us can accomplish. Because it is really hard in here wouldn't you agree? And so, I think that there's also a dissociative quality to my personality that maybe comes from some of that too where the spirit really wants to get as far away from this as possible. And then I tell my students I - I say the beginning of art and religion is the first time aug found oog dead on the ground and went "oog" like wake up and there's no oog in there. And Aug is like, wow where'd he go. Cause there's his body but whatever he was is not in there. That's it, that's the beginning. >> Ron Charles: Paul [Inaudible] Allen. >> Dana Levin: Yeah. ^M00:32:23 ^M00:32:29 >> Ron Charles: This is what I meant by one of the darker, it's not comic poems. But this [Inaudible] and the identity. >> Dana Levin: Yeah so when I was in grad school at NYU, Sharon Olds had started an amazing program at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island. And Goldwater Hospital, if my memory is serving me correctly was either city run or state run like nursing home, so the people that were there didn't have - I don't think they had money. There were all sorts of people there who were - had all sorts of problems with their body from you know OD's that had gone wrong and messed somebody up to people with really debilitating degenerative diseases. So, she started this writing program for the patients at Goldwater and the grad students at NYU had an opportunity to work with them. And you would - there was a workshop, some of them couldn't speak, some of them were using letter boards. Some of them were just present and you couldn't necessarily even tell if they were participating or not, but they were there. And then you would sometimes come on different days to transcribe. And Paul Ruseau, he spelled his name like the French Philosopher but a nurse later told me his last name was really R-U-S-S-O. I don't know what his physical - I don't know what his diagnosis was but he was in a wheelchair and he could not hold a pen. But he wrote reams and reams of poems. I mean I went into his room at the hospital and there were just drawers full of poems. And I helped him as best I could for the time that I was there. And they were good poems. And I remember one time just hanging out with him eating Easter candy, you know? And so anyway, this is Paul. Paul Roosevelt Island. The broken teeth, the ulcers, eating into the backs of people who have spent years sitting in chairs, in the green tiled halls of a hospital, trying to find a place to read, to think, to find, like Faye, a place to turn one's back and cry, to say, like Faye, When I cry I know it is Jesus crying, because Jesus is in my chest, he's crying for me, for my cut-off legs, he's crying for you Paul, your feet bent like his, your bones stuck like nails through the flesh of your body, pinning you to a wheelchair for twenty-three years, your hands shaped like claws, skin-hard, tremoring, your shirt covered with egg yolk and coffee, your green pants stained with pus and shit- and the doctors, gliding by you like sails, saying Hello, Hello, as you open the stink of your plaque-caked mouth and say Hello, you are beautiful, your soft eyes, your old man smell, the way you stick out your clawed hand to shake mine and say Thank you, popping chocolate in your mouth when we shared Easter candy, the dull brown saliva falling in torrents because you couldn't stop talking about poetry Paul. I see you in a wheelchair, on the weed strewn windswept eastside of the island, the Pepsi sign curling over the banks of Queens, the clouds rolling black in from the Hudson, and you are saying Yes, now, I am giving myself up to the wind, I am a kite, I am a bird, I am weightless and beyond gravity, slipping up and diffusing, the million captive particles of me falling like mist over the hospital, because I am wholly mind, wholly air, I am dropping these wrecked bone shackles. ^M00:36:18 [ Applause ] ^M00:36:25 >> Dana Levin: I should write my first book again. >> Ron Charles: Yeah, we're all eventually Paul. We all eventually want to get out of our ruined bodies by the end. >> Dana Levin: We do. I have a lot to say about what we do with our elderly and dying in this country. >> Ron Charles: Yeah, I am wholly mind he says in the end. Wholly air. I'm dropping these wrecked bone shackles. That's an ancient idea before Christianity of course, adopted this Paul was very much into that idea, but it started before him, right? The idea of the spirit and the mind that the body and the identity were somehow at odds with one another and would eventually be separated again. >> Dana Levin: Yeah, it's tough because sometimes I feel like they took it way too far the Judao Christians in terms of like the body is evil, you should just be focusing on your spirit. But we have to figure out how to be in here. I mean we have to figure out how to do this. I don't think it's about not doing this, you know? I think it's about how do I have a mind, and how do I have a body. >> Ron Charles: Right you ask in one of your poems, do you think this is repulsive? You're sort of daring us. Yeah. And another poem about being drawn to a movie theater. It's obviously about much more. You speak of the great relief of just not being in the world, just being able to watch. The lights go off and you're not you anymore, you're just as you say to give up the burden awhile, to be an eye, perceiver, God of the Kingdom, to have that emersonian moment where you're just the eye, the transparent eyeball. >> Dana Levin: Yeah for a long time that was my biggest goal in life - >> Ron Charles: Was to be a transparent eyeball? >> Dana Levin: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: It - do you have that disembodied perspective in another poem you right and the poet says "You may not admit to bone or flesh. You must not have nerves in the tip of your fingers. You may say fist, you may say teeth but you may not put them in the same sentence together. You must not put them in the body together". You're obviously mocking that idea in a way. >> Dana Levin: Yes. >> Ron Charles: The opening poem of banana palace, your latest book contains these lines "We had a dream that we could smash the bands of matter and time and still be alive. Was that the soul wishing we would invent the body out of existence? So many of us now enthralled by doom". ^M00:38:51 ^M00:38:55 >> Ron Charles: Let's stand up, turn around and sit back down. ^M00:38:58 ^M00:39:24 >> Ron Charles: Dmitry Itskov. >> Dana Levin: Itskov. >> Ron Charles: That is a funny poem, what a weird guy. >> Dana Levin: Oh yeah. >> Ron Charles: That's not a real person you'd read about in the newspaper right? >> Dana Levin: Actually that poem is a big faker because all of the lines were stolen from articles in the New York Times and Huffington Post except for line four through six. >> Ron Charles: That's not a faker; that's amazing. That is amazing. Wait till you hear this poem. This strange young man wants to basically translate himself into a machine. >> Dana Levin: Yes. He's a billionaire. He's a Russian billionaire. He's spending all of his money trying to figure out how to download consciousness into mechanical bodies. >> Ron Charles: So he's the - it's sort of a non-religious pursuit of this Pauline idea. >> Dana Levin: Well you know he's interesting to read about. He says it's the cure for hunger, it's the cure for so many of our ills. ^M00:40:14 And I can intellectually understand but I think there is a great spiritual purpose to being incarnated and we're just endlessly trying to figure out ways not to have to have it, not to have to do it. And this is - so anyway Dmitry Itskov Cento. Cento is a poem form where you take lines from others and build a poem. So I took lines from an article in the Huffington Post and an article in the New York Times and I reorganized them and lightly edited them and then the lines that I wrote are at the eye level, this is like a cyborg poem. Anyway, Dmitry Itskov:A Cento. Dmitry Itskov, 32, has a colossal dream: an early start for his own mechanical face. He's one of the men with brains, wondering how, to evade the death of meat, he thinks. By 2045 we'll have substance independent minds, the no need for biology at all. At 25, he started to have the symptoms of a midlife crisis. The musical instruments unlearned, the books unread, the more he contemplated the world, the more broken it seemed. "What we're doing here does not look like the behavior of grown-ups, killing the planet and killing ourselves." Decoupling the mind from the needy human body could pave the way for a more sublime human spirit. It could allow paralyzed people to communicate, or control a robotic arm or a wheelchair. It could allow you to start your car if you think, "Start my car". Within a century, we'll frequent "body service shops," choose our bodies from a catalogue, then transfer our consciousness to one better suited for life on Mars. "From the very beginning," he said, "we realized Dmitry was not an ordinary person." He leads a life that could best be described as monastic. No meat, fish, coffee, alcohol, or cold water. Meat gives him an energy he's "not comfortable with." What is the brain? What is consciousness? It contains plenty of terrifying, brink-of-extinction plot twists. It's somewhere between a cellphone call and teleportation. It's speaking with his voice in real time. Get right up close to Dmitry Itskov and sniff all you like. He has the kind of generically handsome face and perfect smile that seem computer generated, complete with all the particulars of consciousness and personality. Yes, we have seen this movie and yes, it always leads to robots enslaving humanity. For now, just acquiring a lifelike robotic head is a splurge. It's - someone from the New York Times wrote that. >> Ron Charles: To evade the death of meat. That's pretty much - >> Dana Levin: I wrote that one. >> Ron Charles: The ideal of almost all the religions on earth. >> Dana Levin: Yes. >> Ron Charles: Another poem, you have the line "You believe in skin", which has such a great double meaning. You believe that skin exists and we believe in our skins. Our belief takes place in - >> Dana Levin: Yes. >> Ron Charles: Sky Barrow ends with a poem about a weird farm. >> Dana Levin: It's a real place. >> Ron Charles: I saw the footnote and went back and read the article in the Times. This is a farm where they study forensics by letting actual bodies rot in the fields. They take pictures of them and they study how they decompose over time, so they can solve murders where they find bodies that have been decomposing over time. And you decided to write a poem, I won't even go into what that means. >> Dana Levin: My perfect scenario. I read the same article. Yeah it's called the Body Farm. It's graduate school for forensic anthropology at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. And I have to say that when you read the article the guy who runs it is a weird dude. >> Ron Charles: Oh very. >> Dana Levin: Where he's - you know he's - or the writer made him a weird - he's strange. >> Ron Charles: No he's weird. >> Dana Levin: Artist of death, I don't know. Anyway - >> Ron Charles: He's wandering around actual rotting bodies and saying things like "It's beautiful to me". >> Dana Levin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, honeybees - so this poem is called Spring, you should imagine that you are a graduate student in this program and you are going to do homework. The sun, in shafts and spades. Through the pine and birches, little setting off the leaves. Their golden green increase. Pollen to the air, its colonial dream of a new imperium of trees. Snap against the wrist-skin. And then you press down on the tongue with your gloved thumb to let the honeybee show you the way. The dark tunnel paths from light to light. Flay the face and scoop out the eyes - you'll see. Bees in a cloud round your hand. Egg-herder, your smell synonymous with treasure. Shining a light at the back of the throat. Blowflies in liquid pearls, the bees murder to eat. And all at the ips and nose a yellow dust, pollen they have delivered. You scrape it into a little sack. Ripple and snap. Bend to the O of the rigored mouth - listen. ^M00:46:47 ^M00:46:55 >>Dana Levin: Plastic bags, like souls, caught in trees. What to harvest from the sloughed-off suits of the dead. Like seashells cupping the ghost-tongue of the sea, their black mouths speak. You crouch to the hum with a bag and a blade. You the God it sways. >> Ron Charles: The line from your first poem in your first book to what is also the last poem in that book. People caring for bodies, one body being preserved at the tremendous expense and almost insane effort and these bodies being left purposely to rot in the open. >> Dana Levin: Yes. >> Ron Charles: Makes us think about what we really are physically. >> Dana Levin: Yes. >> Ron Charles: And where the we resides. >> Dana Levin: Yes, yeah. Yeah and you know it's interesting when I was working on Banana Palace the book that Dmitry Itskov is from, I was like oh, finally I'm writing about technology and I'm writing about end times and I'm writing about anxiety about the future. And then really late in the game I was like "Oh my God, I'm still writing about the body. I'm still writing about the body". >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Dana Levin: I think I'll probably always write about the body. >> Ron Charles: I want to talk about angels because they have bodies but they're also immaterial. >> Dana Levin: Yes. >> Ron Charles: So they're a weird answer to the paradox in your poems. This one called the nurse. If you'd read that poem. >> Dana Levin: Sure. ^M00:48:33 ^M00:48:39 >> Dana Levin: To tell you the truth, I don't even know where this idea and image came from. >> Ron Charles: It's kind of comforting and lovely to imagine that the operating room is filled with angels. >> Dana Levin: Yeah but, okay. The Nurse. There are so many now, perched on the headboard, opening and closing their wings like moths. The kidney is failing, and so many are arriving, alighting on the blanket, the pillow, falling around the comatose patient, settling in drifts against the paper gown. You've been seeing this, you've been watching them gather, you've told no one how the buzzing keeps growing around the bed. Now they crowd like a sea around the body, listing and pushing, the pulse of their wings lifting the current, you can feel it, the wind, on the hairs of your arms, making the lamp sway, ruffling the chart at the foot of the bed, they are hanging from tubes, perched on the monitor, pressing and pressing with a rising hum, you can hear it, the whirring, the din of their waiting, as they rustle and jostle and launch with a roar, a roar of angels swarming over the body, burrowing headfirst into every pore. >> Ron Charles: That's comforting. ^M00:50:08 Yeah I heard an angel buzz when I died. >> Dana Levin: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Later in the book you reject the idea of angels. >> Dana Levin: Oh yeah. >> Ron Charles: Very interesting way. It's called banishing angels. >> Dana Levin: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: It's like you considered angels as an answer to this problem and then you realized angels are not the answer. >> Dana Levin: Yeah well you know I was writing a lot of this but while living in New York City and if anything is going to make you realize the incontrovertible fact of bodies, it's living in New York City. >> Ron Charles: The presence of everyone. >> Dana Levin: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Such a crown. >> Dana Levin: And that there's beauty and amazingness there. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Dana Levin: You know, Banishing the angels. And then the cloud passed and a light came rushing down the steps of the subway and blazed up against the phone booth, standing in the corner. And inside it was a girl talking on the phone, all lit up amid the grime of the subway. And when I saw her I wanted her to be an angel. I wanted her with wings inside the station to say the angel on the phone, and see it softly beating. Old newspapers at its feet and no one noticing, white and gold in the dirty class, blazing religious in the piss and exhaust and oddity bright in the light of the phone booth. And angel in a box in the filtered sun where I was straining to look back at the light rushing down at the girl who was not an angel talking on the phone. In the real light of the unmystical sun thinking the girl who is not an angel is something to believe. The phone booth in the sunlight, something to believe. >> Ron Charles: Yeah. So that's your answer. It's your reject all that metaphysical abstraction and goo and just say this is the world. This physical world is what we have to - what we have and we have to love and appreciate. >> Dana Levin: Yes. This is why somebody like Dmitry Itskov. I'm like this is what you want to do with your billions? This is it, or anybody that's trying to figure out how to extend our lifespan or make us immortal, what a waste of resources. We're not supposed to be here for a long time, I don't think. >> Ron Charles: There's beauty in what we have and what we are. >> Dana Levin: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: That's a really, I love the way the poem moves too so quickly like that. ^M00:52:28 ^M00:52:33 >> Ron Charles: I want to talk about - we are winding down. I want to talk about a larger kind of death that you approach in this poem called - we'll call it banana palace. It's a long poem. >> Dana Levin: Yes. >> Ron Charles: But we are near the end here. >> Dana Levin: Okay so should I give background? >> Ron Charles: Yeah, whatever we would need. >> Dana Levin: There's a lot in this book that is addressing our world of social media, which is really only 10 years old, shocking to recall. I don't even think we understand what it's doing to us. Many gifts, many not gifts. So, I was trolling through Facebook one day, and then all of a sudden "what is that"? And I saw this image and I just was like "What is that"? And it made me stop. And I looked at it and it was beautiful and then I saw what it was. And I really wanted to write about this image but I didn't know how to write about it without writing about Facebook, which just seemed very dismal subject. Hi Facebook streaming. It just seemed like a really, really dismal subject for poetry. So I let it go for a year and then I was like I really want to write about this image, but apparently how can I write about its effect on me if I don't write about the way that it popped up out of the narcotic of just kind of going like this, you know? And then I was like all right, how are you going to do this? Why would you write about Facebook? To tell people about it. Well who doesn't know about it? Well obviously somebody who was born after the collapse of civilization and had no sense of where we are. So once I hit upon that, I was able to write this poem. So, the speaker of the poem is somebody who has lived in our time and has also gone through what we might call apocalypse survivable and is now on the other side. And is trying to describe to somebody who has never lived in our world about this image and about Facebook. And at the end of the poem it will reveal what this image was. The very first part of this poem, the speaker is both me and this figure, this made up figure of apocalypse survivor but then pretty soon it's just the survivor. >> Ron Charles: Which could be you someday. >> Dana Levin: I don't know. As I have said many times I think my only hope is if you decide I am the Shaman krone woman that you are going to carry around and I will dispense wisdom in exchange for food because I'm old and overweight and out of shape and all I know how to do is this. >> Ron Charles: We'll need that. >> Dana Levin: Okay. Banana Palace. I want you to know how it felt to hold it, deep in the well of my eye. You, future person: star of one of my complicated doom. This one's called Back to the Dark. Scene 1: Death stampedes through the server-cities. Somehow we all end up living in caves, foraging in civic ruin. Banana Palace?-?the last of the last of my kind who can read breathes it hot into your doom-rimed ear. She's a dowser of spine-broken books and loose paper the rest of your famishing band thinks mad. Mine was the era of spending your time in town squares made out of air. You invented a face and moved it around, visited briefly with other faces. Thus we streamed down lit screens sharing pictures of animals looking ridiculous. Trading portals to shoes, love, songs, news, somebody's latest rabid cause: bosses, gluten, bacon, God. Information about information was the pollen we deposited, while in the real fields bees starved. Into this noise sailed Banana Palace. It was a mother ship of gold. Shining out between HAPPY BDAY KATIE! And a photo of someone's broken toe. Like luminous pillows cocked on a hinge, like a house with a heavy lid, a round house of platelets and honey. It was open, like a box that holds a ring. And inside, where the ring would be. ^M00:57:23 ^M00:57:27 >> Dana Levin: I think about you a lot, future person. How you will need all the books that were ever read when the screens and wires go dumb. Whatever you haven't used for kindling or bedding. Whatever made it through the fuckcluster of bombs we launched accidentally, at the end of the era of feeling like no one was doing a thing about our complicated dooms. Helpless and braced we sat in dark spaces submerged in pools of projected images, trying to disappear into light. Light! There was so much light! It was hard to sleep. Anyway. Banana Palace. Even now when I say it, cymbals shiver out in spheres. It starts to turn its yellow gears and opens like a clam. Revealing a fetal curl on its temple floor, bagged and sleeping. A white cocoon under lit strings that stretch from floor to ceiling. A harp made of glass incubating a covered pearl. We broke the world you're living in, future person. Maybe that was always our end: to break the jungles to get at the sugar, leave behind a waste of cane. There came a time I couldn't look at trees without feeling elegiac?-?as if nature were already over, if you know what I mean. It was the most glorious thing I had ever seen. Cross-section of a banana under a microscope the caption read. I hunched around my little screen sharing a fruit no one could eat. ^M00:59:29 ^M00:59:35 >> Ron Charles: The book itself ends with a poet in a cave trying to conjure up a peach with poetry. >> Dana Levin: Yes. It's foolish. And it's a shot out to proof rock. >> Ron Charles: Oh that's excellent, yeah. That works well. >> Dana Levin: They're Elliott's all in there. >> Ron Charles: Yes. That's so typical of your work. It's quite grim and quite funny at the same time. >> Dana Levin: I think it's my Jewish background. I like black humor. I mean you know this world is a veil of tears, it's hilarious. ^M01:00:12 ^M01:00:17 >> Ron Charles: It's been such a pleasure to talk to you; you're just a fascinating writer. Thank you so much. >> Dana Levin: Thank you; thank you so much. ^M01:00:22 [ Applause ] ^M01:00:29 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^E01:00:36