>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. ^F00:00:04 ^M00:00:18 >> I'm Jane McAuliffe. I'm the director of National and International Outreach here at the Library of Congress and the Poetry and Literature Center falls under part of our national and international outreach and I'm delighted to be able to welcome you to this afternoon's event celebrating our new Witter Bynner Fellow. Let me say a word or two about the fellowship itself. It's a program by which the library's Poet Laureate consultant in poetry selects one or two poets to organize a reading in their home states and then to travel here and participate in an event and a recording session. We have a pretty illustrious list of previous fellows in this position including Heather McHugh who was a MacArthur Foundation awardee, the Pulitzer Prize winner Claudia Emerson and Carl Phillips who was an Academy of American Poets Chancellor. Our new fellow Allison Hedge Coke is a wonderful addition to that list and to this fellowship and we look forward to hearing her read and to participate in a moderated discussion here this afternoon. Also later this spring on April 28th she will give her State reading in conjunction with the Oklahoma State Center for the Book. The 21st Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry Juan Felipe Herrera is here to introduce Allison Hedge Coke to you. Juan Felipe has added immeasurably to the Laureate ship with his tireless travels across the country and his online project La Casa de Colores. Thank you, thank you very much Juan Felipe for breathing new life into this position's historic role. I also want to thank the Witter Bynner Foundation and its executive director, Steven Schwartz because the support they have provided for this wonderful fellowship is so important to the Library of Congress. Mr. Bynner, the namesake of the foundation was himself an influential, early 20th century poet and translator and this fellowship continues his work and that of the foundation to perpetuate the art of poetry and to expand awareness of the very positive effect that it has on society. And finally a word about the Library of Congress which is, as I think many of you know, the nation's first federal cultural institution and the largest library in the world. Our mission quite simply is to promote knowledge and creativity for the benefit of the American people and programs like this one really embody that mission. The library is a home for literature in so many ways with our historic readings, with books, audio recordings, a wealth of manuscript collections, collections that also include the works of outstanding American novelists and innovative poets such as Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks and Muriel Rukeyser among many, many others. Of course you could find all this on our website. I urge you to go to the Library of Congress website and particularly to the site of the Poetry and Literature Center which has worked for almost 80 years to foster and enhance the public's appreciation of poetry and literature under particularly the direction of our consultant Poet Laureate. You know this is the only federally-mandated position for a literary writer and we're very, very fortunate to have that housed within the Library of Congress and now I would like to welcome our Poet Laureate to the stage, thank you. ^M00:04:26 [ Applause ] ^M00:04:33 >> [Inaudible] thank you, thank you so much, it's an honor to be here once again to see good friends that I met recently within the year as Poet Laureate of the United States and once again I'm very humbled to be in this position. It's such an amazing role, a magnificent role to travel around the United States and to speak to so many audiences, to meet so many inspired human beings, to meet so many people that love poetry and literature and books at book signings and to listen to poetry and also to write poetry. I've met five-year-olds, 11-year-olds, fathers who bring their children to meet me at the signing table and they say, son or daughter, I want you to meet a poet. I want you to meet a writer. I want you to meet the Poet Laureate of the United States. And their child is there and they go, oh hello, hello and we shake hands, so it is like that and young teachers, young teachers. I just started my teaching this year, they tell me and I'm so excited that we have poetry that we can use and thank you so much for writing. So then I meet the new teachers, brand new ready to venture out to the school to teach and that is how I also met Allison, Allison Hedge Coke, teaching in Vermont and she was getting her MFA. This is the 90s and I noticed what a talent she was and I noticed her deep insight into things, things that some of us may not have seen, things that we have seen and maybe kept on driving or walking or just didn't take notice that they and maybe the next day we did. Perhaps they were tractors. Perhaps they were tobacco leaves or perhaps they were just workers sweating in the fields working away, living their lives under that harsh sun and women covered in whatever they could put on to protect themselves from pesticides and that hard work that we all value and yet sometimes we don't see in books or poetry books. And it's not there for us at times, and yet Allison has taken the time to notice that as a worker in those particular tobacco fields as a worker and those barns where the tobacco is tied up and hung up to dry under flames and heaters and burners. She knows that world and it's the same perhaps in her poetry where she burns and where she lifts things up and where she unravels leaves, leaves of time, leaves of family, leaves of workers and perhaps leaves of consciousness. And it's a beautiful work. It's a very compassionate work. And I just enjoy it so much because I notice the colors and I want to get on those tractors. I see those tractors in the morning, you know painted by dawn. I see those fields the way my father must have seen them in Cheyanne, Wyoming in the early 1900s when we first worked in the United States from Mexico. So there are many landscapes and also internal landscapes as Denise Levertov said 'the outscape' and 'the inscape' and we have both with Allison Hedge Coke. We go out there and we also go inside and she does it in a keen set of translations and with beauty, with great choreography and with a beautiful voice you know and I just enjoy the moments and the materials in her poems and for me that is good enough. Of course there is much more going on. We were talking this morning about her horses. She has a mustang called Spirit that she has on a 10-acre piece of land in Oklahoma and then she has another horse called Sister that's a Medicine Cap horse, a warhorse and she has a little house made out of rocks and that, where she lives and I find that, you know kind of the way, the way to live. How can I tell you? The way to live, I remember my own parents' little trailers and that my father made with whatever wood he could find, built on top of a chassis of a [inaudible] car that he managed to put all together like a puzzle and it was a very simple life, a life of simplicity and also a life of warmth, storytelling and of love. And this is what's all in, for me, in Allison's work and she has a big voice, you know she's been writing for decades as you know. I made a note of some of the things. I know that she has seven books and I'm just going to mention a couple of them for you. "Streaming" is her most recent one, Coffee House Press 2014. ^M00:10:00 And next she has another, "Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer" and that's a Bison Books 2014 and "Blood Run" by Earthworks Series, Salt Publishing 2007 and "Off-Season City Pipe" and that's the one, that's the sort of poems that I remember seeing for her MFA thesis I believe from "Off-Season City Pipe". And you could run into those fields and those tractors and you feel them turn on and the engines at dawn and the rain and the fire in the burning of the barns and the small granules and the pigsty. And I encourage you to read them and enjoy them and ride that tractor. She has many awards you know, lists and lists of awards and let me just mention the Pen Southwest Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award for a Native writer from the Circle of the Americas, Native Writer Circle of the Americas and also the Endowed Chair in Creative Writing, the Distinguished Paul W. Reynolds and Clarice Kingston Chair at the University of Nebraska. And of course she writes in various journals you know, poetry, creative non-fiction, song, lyric and critical essay. And this list ends with this note, her mom put her poems in a cedar chest when she was a child and back in the middle school and did you ever get those poems back? And she got those poems back. >> We found them when she passed. >> So she found them, we found them when her mom passed away so this is how deep and how beautiful and how meaningful poetry for many a decade and many a working field under the scorching sun and the scorching pen has been for Allison Hedge Coke. Let's give her a beautiful hand. ^M00:11:57 [ Applause ] ^F00:12:07 ^M00:12:14 >> Thank you all for coming out, it's a real honor for which to be here especially with Juan Felipe. I'm just so happy that he's here for the country, thank you Juan Felipe, thank you. It's a huge honor. I'm going to start with "The Change", Looking for Anya [phonetic], okay, "The Change". "Thirteen years ago before bulk barns and fifth-gear diesel tractors we rode royal blue tractors big enough to hold a six-pack on ice. In the one hundred and fifteen degree summer heat with air so thick with moisture you drink as you breathe. Before the years that dusters sprayed malathion over our clustered bodies. We perspire while we prime the bottom lugs those ground-level leaves of tobacco and they clung to us with a black tar so sticky we rolled eight-inch balls off our arms at night and Cloroxed our clothes for hours and hours." "Before we were poisoned and the hospital thought we had been burned in fires at least to the third degree when the raw oozing hives that covered ninety-eight percent of our bodies from the sprays ordered by the FDA and spread by the landowners before anyone had seen the automated machines that top and prime. We topped the lavender blooms of many tiny flowers. The blooms gathered into one, gorgeous. By grasping hold below the petals with our bare, calloused hands and twisting downward quick, hard only one time snapped them off." "Before edgers and herbicides took what they called weeds we walked for days through thirty acres and we chopped them out with hoes. Hoes made long before from wood and steel and sometimes, even longer ago, from wood and deer scapula. Before the bulk primers came we primed all the leaves by hand, stooped over at the waist for the lower ones and through the season gradually rising higher until we stood and worked simultaneously as married to the fields as we were to each other, carrying up to fifty pounds of fresh leaves under each arm and sewing them on to sticks four foot long on a looper under the shade of a tin-roofed barn made of shingle." "To be caught by a hanger who poked it up higher in the rafters to another who held an even higher position and so they filled the barn. And the leaves hung down like butterfly wings so sometimes the color of lunar moths or Carolina parakeets when just an hour go they had been laid upon the old wooden cart trailers pulled behind the orange Allis-Chalmers tractor with huge round fenders and only a screwdriver and salt in the toolbox picked by primers so hot we would race through the rows to reach the twenty-five gallon jugs of water placed throughout the field to encourage and to satisfy our insatiable thirst from drinking air which poured through our pores without breaking through to our need for more water in the sun." "The sun we imagined to disappear and yet respected for growing all things on earth when quenched with rains called forth by our song and drumming. And leaves which weeks later will be taken down and the strings pulled like string on top of a large dog-food bag and sheeted up into burlap sheets and smashed down with our feet and bundled over the hundred pounds and gently smashing them thrown up high to a catcher on a big clapboard-trailer and pulled behind two-ton trucks and taken to market in Fuquay-Varina and sold to Philip Morris and Winston Salem for around a buck a pound." "The leaves were cured to a bright leaf, a golden yellow with the strongest aroma of our tobacco barn curing and the hand-grown quality before the encroachment of the big business in the Reagan era and the slow murder of our method from a hundred years before. When the loons cried out in laughter by the pond and the bass popped the surface early on next to the fields before that time when it was unfashionable to transplant each, individual baby plant the infant tobacco that we nurtured to transplant those seedlings to each hill in the field a space for that particular plant and we watched as they would grow." "Before all of this new way I was a sharecropper in Willow Springs, North Carolina as were you. We were proud and would make camp in winter and be free of tourists and filled with snow and those of us who held out forever with our people would be home again. Remembered before Europeans worked shoulder to shoulder with descendants of slaves that they had brought from Africa and they sold ancestors as slaves into the Middle East, that the tobacco was sacred to all the people and all of us and we prayed when we smoked and did not smoke for pleasure and I was content and free." "And then they came and changed things and you left me for a fancy, whiter girl and I waited on our land until you brought her back in that brand new white Trans Am purchased from our crop you gave her, left her waiting in a motel. The nearest one was forty miles away but it was near enough for you and for her and I knew though I never spoke a word to you about it, I knew I kept it to myself until this day and time and I never let on until I left you on our anniversary." "I drove the pickup down the dirt path by the empty fields and I rented a shack for eighty dollars one with cardboard windows and a Gillespie house floor design and torn and faded floral paper on the walls and linoleum so thin over the rotted wood that the floor gave if you weighed a hundred pounds. And then I did not and with no running water of any kind or bathroom, the one at hilltop where I could see out across all the fields and hunt for meat when I wanted and find peace. I heard you remarried and went into automated farming and kept up with America and I watched all of you from the hill and waited for the lavender blooms to return when it was spring and even the blooms had turned white." "So I rolled up my bedroll remembering before when the fields were like waves on a green ocean and I turned away, away from the change and corruption of big business on small farms and of traditional agricultural people and sharecroppers. Away so I could hold out of this concise image of before that time and it floods my memory." ^M00:19:33 [ Applause ] ^M00:19:43 I'll switch to a different book, thank you. This is [inaudible] on Me. My sister is in the audience. I want to give a shout-out to my sister Stephanie Hedge Coke. ^M00:19:57 [ Applause ] ^M00:20:02 [Inaudible] "Mornings made delirious scrambling into thread out from dreaming. We were rambling ways past delusion into streets unpaved, unproven and unmet. It was a hard over no sunnyside easy and the only yolk was seeded sky. The rows was streaming over the lot of us quickened in some strain no corona could bear resting into the lien. Then the mesa set standing wayside in case some giant made its way back into the mean time and met us here, met us." "We were tabooed, shunned, mocked and on our nettle most any pierced day the principal struck blows to show that we deserved no mercy. They were splintering, the hose bore blisters every smacking wave but we were deserving, wave after wave in first grade took the test out of me. I never did spill again no matter the syndrome. We were anything but beggars though. We were scraping up and held up. We'd flown ourselves into every angle and withheld our curve." "We split loose from whatever held on to us and Motown made our mercy in those days. Only sooth was in Western [inaudible] rounded up in radio waves cleaning out in the insides of the maternal mind, firing, unkind charge, firing synapse beyond her reasoning goal. She moved through it like lightning. The madness charging each wave with a serious challenge but never and nothing made it bearable and hands down was just a game that we called Brad." "The only hands-down we laid was on ball courts home front the daily challenge and there was nothing certain other than every day would be just like that. At least they move you and sent you off fostering again, someone, no one warned you, might [inaudible] sent you streaming, gave you up like paper, tossed and crumpled, straightened out and smoothed out flat and that was that. It was nothing you'd remember but we still do. We do. We still taste that strangeness surrounding ones who go between and move through the other worlds while in this one." "No one lives like we did, least it seems so. We were always in the mind, on the mind and why there was never time to question and we still don't know. The only thing we do know is that we were different and not like you and even though we might try three times harder it never works right. Nothing takes the sting of it or our scent even we look off, we sound off. We give a presence everyone knows stay away and they do. So far from us we walk sideways in vanishing points. We turn to the horizon soaking our sin and distinguishing us, metal in our mouths as well. It's steely and steel we did. We still do. No one's got no more lift." "Remember that breakfast, the real one over at the Pancake House off of forty, dad took us there this Christmas right before seeing her off to the pavilion, the asylum. The little dish of butter looked like ice cream to us kids. It made the eggs slide over really easy just like he did before the madness. Man this is rough country, get that straight. Metal this." ^M00:23:33 [ Applause ] ^M00:23:39 I'm going to bring some geniuses here and we'll have a little bit of fun. I'm a huge fan of both the new musicians that are coming up, Kelvyn Bell, guitars, composer, [inaudible], of a funk jazz band, a program director for Glauster [phonetic] Arts Project. Kelvyn Bell, will you join me please? It's Kelvyn, give him a round. ^M00:24:07 [ Applause ] ^M00:24:12 And Laura Ortman, I'm so pleased. Laura [inaudible] instrumentalist, composer and artist, White Mouth Apache from Arizona, she has lived in Brooklyn since 1997 and is a licensed and really wonderful hairstylist in New York City. ^M00:24:29 [ Applause ] ^F00:24:35 ^M00:24:55 We're going to be performing a couple of parts out of [inaudible]. It's a 30-some-page poem and we're going to read the second section and the fourth section which are both on the CD we did together. Coffee House Press was kind enough to put me in the studio and they bring in musicians of my choice and these are definitely my choice and yeah you guys are going to be in for a real treat, okay so. ^M00:25:27 [ Music ] ^M00:25:50 "We're still missing one hundred and twenty-five head from the Rock House fire. There's seventy-four from the least poor farmland. The neighbors are keeping a lookout, there's nothing. The [inaudible] are torched up like marshmallow rows. They give [inaudible] of lips curled quick in the heat. There's twenty-nine special rangers seeking out the rest in the fire and anything loose is made clean of herds, rustlers must be. No vultures vortex to slide overhead and no buzzards, contours only smoke belies." ^M00:26:27 [ Music ] ^M00:26:38 "Downtown some flyers offer reward next to a mom and pop chiding their eldest over dropping lit [inaudible] into pathways. There's no room for accidents and no country for old men. There's no room for it where Woody wore belts decked out by Grayville [phonetic] by moonlight's best gemstone and [inaudible] agate and too bad the Shaws [phonetic] didn't display the cut of them, real beauties over sterling silver plate and now the heat plates on the low profile sports cars are tendering the prairie grass ignition cactus wrath anything is at risk, everything is to blame." ^M00:27:18 [ Music ] ^M00:27:32 "Flames follow wind the way that water follows wave over the seabed. The ground is pummeling high [inaudible] high, elevation as sure as Denver but this is a desert scene. There's Chihuahua and [inaudible] and now both are carrying the largest wildfires in colonial history. Both are heeded harder spreading further than pictured in recent times and everything from Tucson to Texas is rage." ^M00:27:59 [ Music ] ^M00:28:09 "Ladybird's roadside flowers are billowing dust. Chocolate flowers are still scenting the straight paths familiar. It is the fury fell, every angle fuming hopping the asphalt and by the time Gage Holland [phonetic] breaks from the roadside rest area Highway ninety is shutdown clean to Martha [assumed spelling] and no one there holds much hope. The rock house is said to still be smoldering. It's all without mercy and without peace. ^M00:28:40 [ Music ] ^M00:28:55 "Dreams come easily branded but no iron rod season is coming this round. We come easily into infused [inaudible] games. Our forearms are stubbed. The spoons are cooked in dosage blues and we shoot burn, shoot up euphoria, the hero flying through a blistered sky, they called it a horse in [inaudible] and now the horses are shot down, burned nine of them. The nerves so frayed tea kettle copper melts to blue and then white ash covers the electric burner on the stove range while the range outside roars, spats sideways on to roofs, roads and branches." ^M00:29:36 [ Music ] ^M00:29:47 "The population is too sparse here for a national concern. They inspire no public radio does spare lives nearby maybe, maybe our own. A measly thrill, a bitter, bitter thing and cover [inaudible] but damn it, they do deserve some attention." ^M00:30:03 "We depend on them. The announcers give them some glory. We'll share in it, our same face, the border patrol, the walk-in, all right now in this fire, a phoenix rise and nothing shares the grace here. A black field crust everything and surviving is our only reason. Look at it, gone. There's no fire climax pines to justify so much loss and rebirth here is a fought thing. Mr. Spanish was buried ceremonially in a shoebox under glory flagpoles, each nina entering [foreign language spoken]." ^M00:30:46 [ Music ] ^M00:31:36 "Char [phonetic] rounds out horizon now, it used to be shadows. There were tall men in saddles shifting through and now shadow men unsaddle blow away and wind on a giant [inaudible] with secrets and untold shutter of what should be proper and what should be here is gone. Char [phonetic] brings looseness, it holds our memory intangible. It blackens the earth in its own beauty, not hollow but kept here. In the evening the vultures scan space and seek remnant, the passing cranes feast on roasted grasshoppers, crickets, larvae, in mourning phoenix rises through the community side opened to opportunity lamenting and we come here hoping for more, knowing nothing surprises those who present hope and what is hope? Field of fortune, opportunity, is it graced?" ^M00:32:36 [ Music ] ^M00:32:57 "In the meantime I'll wade through ashes in a place ash turned to stone when volcanoes came up from the sea floor. It's now a high desert what's left of it, this caldera we're in where putting down the suffering is now our day's work. We put down the beloved and the betrothed burned. Horses, cattle, goats, the chickens they hold a roost with their burned legs, they go as well to our wayside memory now asunder, memory like the [foreign language spoken] skipping in and out and walking upward and falling, the bird fountain motion moving. We were born here someone mentions." ^M00:33:43 [ Music ] ^M00:33:59 "We don't know when fire was still when the embers left in themselves nor when rain will visit or come to renew us now, to free us from the burn, the danger and nor do we know what cause this in, the timing of a heat plate on low grass, the nearness of grass to blade in sunlight in the year of the drought though some speculate larger cycles surround about here is intangible and nor do we offer up ideas unless applied with cold lager in the heat here or in the evenings laid out under the fiery stars still gleaming down always lighting the pathways we lean toward in our nighttime escape to the towns down the road and no, we don't know. All we know is we are not alone and yet we are and everything is subject to fire even the water leaves and heated paths and what we don't know we don't search for nor do we attempt to understand, no we deal with it. We muster." ^M00:35:08 [ Music ] ^M00:35:39 "We move through the crust salvaging pieces now, we've become the salvagers. We move through the heat lifting a recognizable source, lifting our permanence from a tempered time, we're lifting our home now, our homes. We tote the burned wire curled into sphere like a story and we surround light with it. We harness the energy and plug it in until the spherical globes rekindle [inaudible] fires once surrounding the livestock and now bordering glow. It is the strand we feel, the obligation. We're remaking stuff from cinder. We're remaking." ^M00:36:17 [ Music ] ^M00:36:59 "Remaking, twins we carry and then laid, one light, one fire, do they rest? Do they feel our burden, the melting iron, wire, shifting wind, funneling across prairie and winding plumes, are they turning? And what of the way that we embraced to conceive them, we held them there like satchels beaded in Cedar Spring holding the floral burst and dense trees, hills, waterways that we come from, they kneel there, now buried and when we bury bring them gifts, make them offerings." ^M00:37:48 [ Music ] ^M00:37:53 "In the burn of your brow when you hastened did you think before belting me? Did you conceive that intent? What were you but burning? What were you but burning? ^M00:38:10 [ Music ] ^M00:38:50 "Yet fire is the birth of life and the spark there and we were with the spark when ignited. My life emptied into the banks below, below, they lie there now within mounds. They were within me and now within our Mother and I sometimes long to lie there but I too mustered. You, long gone to other worlds not over there but a wandering spark burn." ^M00:39:35 [ Applause ] ^M00:39:47 Laura Ortman, Kelvyn Bell. ^M00:39:50 [ Applause ] ^M00:39:53 Magic happening here, thank you. ^M00:40:00 Sure, I'm ready [laughter]. Thank you all for listening, thank you, thank you. ^M00:40:12 [ Applause ] ^M00:40:18 >> That was beautiful. ^M00:40:22 [ Inaudible Comments ] ^M00:40:31 >> Hello everyone, I'm Rob Casper, the head of the Poetry and Literature Center here at the Library of Congress and before we get to the awarding of the fellowship to Allison Hedge Coke I'm going to take the opportunity just to ask a few questions of Allison and Juan Felipe but first I want to thank you again Allison for an amazing performance and to our musicians for coming here from New York to rock it. ^M00:40:57 [ Applause ] ^M00:41:04 I wanted to talk about, it's on? I want to talk a little bit about the power of performance. It was interesting to see how in that musical performance you kind of played off of each other, the musicians and you but of course there are all sorts of ways to use music and song to empower poetry and I wanted you to talk a little about the ways that you both have done that and seen that work. >> Well you know I also have seen Allison do a performance work as well as give feedback to, you know performance of writers and writers that want to be in performance and I really noticed how she responded many a time and they were very, really keen responses on how to do, how to take your work and put it into motion. And I really enjoyed your responses because they were really kind of things that Allison said were the kind of things that you know a writer wants to know what to do with that poem and make it move on the stage or how to go about it and I thought that was amazing. And as I was hearing the great, fabulous, magnificent musicians I thought about the kind of work that Allison does as a person who encourages translations of the First Peoples throughout the United States and throughout the entire hemisphere and you know she has translated, she has led projects and anthologies with translations of many indigenous peoples throughout the entire hemisphere, an amazing task and I'm glad you asked that question because I can bring it up. And in a sense that's what this is in a way. When we hear the music we hear the sounds. We hear the shrieks. We hear the riffs. We hear the harmonies, the [inaudible] harmonies and they kind of go back and they really go deep and that's one of your concerns I think. I think that's one of Allison's concerns in the writing [inaudible]. >> Yes? >> Yeah, I want to thank Juan Felipe publicly as well because he was one of the translators. He translated [inaudible] from Columbia and so he was part of the Project Sing [assumed spelling] which was about 86 poets that we had. It's multilingual, there's a lot of different languages and some of them also could get the [inaudible] and Spanish as close as they could and then of course bringing in somebody like Juan Felipe, a genius over here [laughter] to bring that to our tables, to bring that to somewhere we could sit with the work no matter where people are situated and hear that voice. So it's a phenomenal honor to be able to bring those people to the audience and publish that in the U.S. and as far as I know it's the first time it's ever been done and we did that together in a way, yeah so, yeah and a lot of them are also performers you know because poetry has those older histories with oratories with performance, with theaters you know if you will but also just so you could remember the lines you know, there has to be musicality and a lot of people with their instruments. You got lyrics from that right so it's all connected in that way to performance I think. >> Well I listen to you read and listen to the sort of powerful rhythms of your poems I thought a lot about capaciousness, about the possibility for what a poem can contain and the kind of multitudes it can contain and I wanted to ask you both about doing that in a poem but also shaping that in a poem. I was struck by how your poem is built up through rhythm and theme especially imagery, a kind of force that it then kind of worked out in a magical and mysterious and surprising way. So maybe both of you could just talk about that in your? [ Inaudible Comment ] >> Yeah, a lot of the poetry comes to me as music in my head and I have to seek the words for it and there's always some matter of finding some balance for tragedies that the memory invokes that [inaudible] invokes and finding a way to remake that, to flip it and to turn something so that there's a balance, a harmony reached to some degree and yet we still know the disaster, we still have the tragedy and we understand the realness of it. So the strategy then becomes working for an arc that allows that trajectory to build so that the change can exist and [inaudible] pieces right? It's that same process it's just a longer piece. I'm known for writing long poems because I think in more of a, sort of an epic narrative whenever I'm reaching into ideas. I hope that's helpful? >> I heard people really responding to that first poem. I heard the audience really enjoying that, your first poem about working as a sharecropper, working a sharecropper life and I heard the routine and the audience really respond to that and all that, all those details, kind of the muscularity of and the tenderness of it all at the same time. You know the images, I don't know you know, for me images are key and it took me a while to get to leave images but then I sneaked back into image-land and I grabbed those images again because they say so much and what is the world without images and a mind without images? So, for example Einstein right, he was trying to work on, Einstein was trying to work on that great Theory of Relativity and he got stumped at one point. What was it 1907 around there? And he [inaudible] I can't get it right. I've got the Theory of Relativity, it's almost done but I'm missing something. What could it be? And then he said I'm just going to step out of the room. I'll step out of the room and go out here and I'm just going to let my mind go, you know just going to let it go, see what goes, now I'm very much like what we do right, artists do and musicians do, all of us and poets. So he [inaudible] imagine, I want to get out of this chalkboard room and I'm going to imagine, going to step up and I'm going to imagine an elevator flowing through space and then it goes shoo and I'm [inaudible] somebody in the shoo and it's floating all of a sudden because of the forces of gravity, shoo. So all of a sudden he's working with a notion of acceleration and gravity. So he goes what else can I do here in my little poetic moment? I'm going to drill a hole through the elevator and shoot a beam of light through it. Okay, now what is going into infinite space? [Inaudible] floating body acceleration, gravity okay, there's one more move I've got to do. Let's see what could it be? I'm going to shoot a flashlight, a light beam through those little two holes in the elevator and it bent. Yes, light bends with gravity in acceleration. I'm going to run right back to the chalkboard and then he solved the Theory of Relativity so images you know. And when I was bopping around in the Mission District in early days in San Francisco there was a bookstore in Spanish, a Spanish-language bookstore and it was one, I couldn't afford these things so I just walked by them and I saw this big volume of a burgundy leather covered book with gilded gold dusty pages and it said Federico Garcia Lorca [foreign language spoken] complete works so I picked it up and it weighed like 10 kilos and it was just beautiful images and I had to just follow as best as I could. >> Let me just ask you one final question which gets back to Jane McAuliffe's introduction and the Witter Bynner Foundation. Part of its mission is to "Help expand awareness for the positive effects of poetry on society". I wonder if you can both talk about the ways that you work towards that aim in your poems. >> Yeah, everything is about that, really when it comes down to it. I mean that's the whole purpose right, to bring knowledge, to bring what's happening in the world to audience, to the readers so that the readers can leave themselves in their mind for that time that they're transfixed by the poem, moved by the poem. They can learn from it. They can understand something, develop empathy, do something good in the world, get active, get up and move because something has happened in reading that poem. ^M00:50:19 That's why people remember lines because it helps them to cope. It helps them to move forward. It helps them to grow. So I think it's all about that really when it comes down to it. >> I guess so many beautiful things, so many beautiful things and you know I was thinking of playing with the unknown and I was also thinking of one of the early, one of the ancient Chinese writers, essayists and who said there were five pleasures of literature, the five pleasures of literature. It's back in probably 300 A.D. around there and so Lu Chi writes about the five pleasures of writing and literature and he says and one of them is to task the void and I was stumped by that. That one of the delights of writing is to task the void and I couldn't break the word task down. I mean tasking the void, the void. Everything is interconnected atomically, sub-atomically. That's kind of a kindergarten interpretation of the void and then to task it. How do we task totality if we're in totality, so, which is unexplainable except for Einstein [laughter]. That's it right there, so, exactly so what again? [ Inaudible Response ] We're in the portions of, exactly. [ Inaudible Response ] How's that? Making the what? >> Making the [inaudible] yeah. >> Making the place? >> Opening it up. >> Opening it up, making it, yeah making it, making a place and that's the answer you see. [ Inaudible Response ] You know so I couldn't figure that out and then that's it, making the place for the unexplainable, multiple forces of the universe of which we're all one. >> I mean I look at a story like the big [inaudible] in and out of [inaudible]. We get little bits of it over your life. People give you this advice or tell you this story because it means this. You hear this form because you need this. You pick up the song because you need this. You go to this performance because, a little bit at a time and hopefully by the time when you mature [inaudible] we have a handle of what's going on around us, you know. We're moving through it. We're understanding what's happening and then we have something to give back because we can start to fill in that story. The story of culture inextricable from one another, culture builds stories slowly builds culture. They change and transform depending on the generations [inaudible] but that sphere is still there to draw upon and so there's always that return, yeah. >> Yeah. ^M00:53:10 [ Applause ] ^M00:53:15 >> Well speaking of story we've come to the moment in this story of our event in which we honor our new Witter Bynner Fellow by presenting her with her check for $10,000 and we have to do this. The chief of staff of the Library of Congress, Robert Newland I'd like to call him to the stage please. Allison [inaudible] stand up. >> Okay [laughter] >> Yes, yes, yes. ^M00:53:39 [ Applause ] ^M00:53:43 So on behalf of the Library of Congress I would like to celebrate our 2016 Witter Bynner Fellow Allison Hedge Coke, please stand. ^M00:53:52 [ Applause ] ^M00:54:02 Thank you, thank you. There are books which you can buy and get signed. There's also a wonderful reception courtesy of the Witter Bynner Foundation and we ask that you please fill out a survey form and hand to me or put it up here so we can know how this event was. We hope to see you soon. Juan Felipe will be giving his final event on April 13th so please come and check out our website and thanks a lot. >> Thank you >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov ^M00:54:40