Well, I'm here in Wexler Studio and Debbie is here. Hi, Debbie. Hi, Al. Lily. Hello. Anna. Hey. Ujwala is here. Hello, Ujwala? Hello. Good to see you. Nasser Hussain. Hi. Who has traveled here from Leeds via somewhere in Ontario, Windsor? Windsor. It's great to see you, Nass. It's really great to see you. It's great to be here. We're excited and we're going to be talking mostly about a book, a new book published by Coach House Books, which is headquartered in Toronto, although, Anna, and Zack, and I got to hang out with you in Montreal at the launch party, which celebrated this book among others. It's called SKY WRI TEI NGS or Sky Writings. The constraint which we'll talk much more about is simply this, "No word in the book is anything other than a three-letter airport code." How do you write with that? So we've picked out three poems from among these many interesting, clever, funny, biting, constraint poems based on that constraint, picked three poems out. Three poems that will resonate as a response to, maybe a critique of, maybe a nod toward, maybe an acknowledgment of poems that are familiar to people who care about the ModPo poems. One, it's a response to Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein. Another that is responsive to Christian Buck, his Eunoia, and the third response to Walt Whitman. So Nass, would you be willing to read the three poems and then we'll just talk? Certainly. I feel like I should take them in chronological order like by poet. So we'll start with Walter Whitman. This is a creative interpretation of Song of Myself. For Walter Whitman. Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, barbaric yawp. Me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Any snaps for that one? Thank you. Then we'll move into this high-modernist strain with Tender Buttons for Gertrude. Roast a cow, mutton, breakfast, sugar, cranberries, milk, eggs, apples, kales, lunch, cup, rhubarb, single, fish, cake, custard, potato, asparagus, butter. End of summer, sausages, celery, veal, vegetable, cooking, chicken, pastry, cream, cucumber. Dinner, din din. Eat, salad, sauces, salmon, orange, cocoa, and clear soup and oranges and oatmeal, salad dressings and artichoke, a center in a table. Finally, for Christian Buck, Eunoia. Unfettered the sentences repress free speech. The texts deletes selected letter. So we see the revered eggs it rejected meat vice versa. The says cat, the terset, even the sons [inaudible]. He rebels. He's at new precedence. I want to collect first responses to the project and then we'll get into the poems. Invite each of you to say one thing and then Nass you can respond and then we'll start looking at the poems. Debbie, what was your first response to this constraint in the experiment? My first response was- sorry Al, two responses. One of which. You get two, Debbie because you have lots of license around here. Thank you. One was being curious about whether this constraint turns air transit officials into poets or vice versa, does it turn poets to air transit officials? The other was to. That's your first thought? Yes. That was pretty extraordinary. That was like my seventh thought. My other was to think about the weather. I think about the weather because the IATA codes were developed in the 1930s by National Weather Service. So I was curious to think about how talking about transit, and about place, and about travel is a procedure of talking about weather. We can talk about that or not. I'm sure we'll talk about both those points. That's great. Lily, first response? Yes. My first response is how much of the original- I don't know, do you want to say original work but originally by the people for whom the poems are in like Christian Buck and Gertrude Stein. How much is. Not so much Whitman, though. No, Whitman also, I think. Maybe a little less. Me, me, me, me, me, me. It's more like, I, I, I, I. Well, yes. How much is present of the original work? How much you can hear more than see, I think, like you've really brought out from Nass' reading? When you just look at this, even if you're familiar with this chapter in Eunoia, you might not see it immediately, but then to hear someone try to pronounce it, you can hear how similar it is to the original text. Cool. Anna, first thought? My first thought is so much less sophisticated than Debbie's or Lily's. It's just pure joy. This makes me so happy to read and to hear. The inventiveness, the language play, the wonderful map that we have that's actually that reproduces the flight path. So I'm showing the map, which is along with Eunoia. What is it, Nass? The map? The map, it's a fictionalized flight path that describes the set of airport. So you write the poem based on words that are available to you through the airport codes and you take this giant field of airport code choices, you make words, you make poems and then a journey comes from it? Yes. Okay. Anna? What's so crazy about that journey is that, in a way, it reproduces the distances that this language itself has travels and that how much we've traveled as readers. Did you say that was not as sophisticated? Yes. Well, I got there. You definitely. That was really terrific. It took me a sec, but I got there. Writing is an aid to thinking. And speaking. So I've heard. So I've heard. Anyway, that's very cool. [inaudible]? For this particular poem, I think my first thought was especially for [inaudible] ,this was already a book that came to so much restraint. I mean the whole book for me, that was my first thought that this is possible. Then coming here and being like, "Oh, this is possible too." With the bit one-one, I was just like, I had fun. I was like, "Oh, look what he did." That's your Walt. Yes. That's your Walt. What are your reactions to the reactions? I didn't know about the weather thing. My very shallow dive into the history of the IATA, actually, I think positioned it round like the end of the First World War when it became a- sorry, at the end of the Second World War, when a global sense of thinking came into play and the need to codify the planet in a way became really important. So in that sense, a global climate thing is baked in there. Yes, that's really interesting. The sonic value of the poems is quite a challenge. I cheated a bit with [inaudible] or I'm forced to cheat or I don't know if cheating is the right word, but I have to dive in and out. What readers and I think what you're picking up on here the sort of multiple reading strategies, where sometimes the word is what the word is and sometimes you have to piece it together, and sometimes it's doing both at the same time. It's a challenge in performance, which I find really fun. It's going to be hard to read these poems the same way twice ever, which was really unexpected. You mean, it doesn't perform? Yes. I like to say it out loud to perform is the fact that I can't get into a rut with them. As I read them is really interesting to me. I didn't expect that as a result. It's a natural thing, at least for someone like me, to see a poem referring to or in honor or influenced by or under the sign of another poet without thinking of not in the Harold Bloom agonistic sense, but we're all poets and we have different poetic stances sense, and you have a very different poetic stance from that of Walt Whitman in those respects. So let's take that poem, for instance. Sure. I want to ask my colleagues here for responses to what whether Nass meant it or not it's a critique of Walt Whitman. What is that critique? Who wants to start? Really, what's that critique? Well, I think just to hear outside of home if you would hear someone say the words, "Me, me, me, me," you would think that it's a stereotypical thing someone would say. You would make fun of someone for making everything about them by being like, "Oh, with you, it's always me, me, me." So it feels you can take the tone from that comma and maybe Nass can say if that's the critique here mean to be putting on Whitman. So that's a good critique, egocentric to say the least, narcissistic. So that's one reading of "Me, me, me," it's "Me, me, me," but the second reading is the eager beaver "Me, me, me," which Walt definitely is also. Then, finally, the "Me, me, me, me, me, me, me," Walt is always throat clearing, there is a lot of throat clearing. I've thought about that. The throat clearing in preparation for the barbaric yawp. That's really good. Davy, I'll throw one out and you throw one out possible critique and you can respond and [inaudible] as well. All of these poems take their subject matter, in some cases, other poets, and they turn them into journeys that are potentially treacherous, journeys that will be actually difficult to enact. In fact, the author, Nasser Hussain, despite his UK and Canadian passports, because of his name in, let's just say, '11, '12, maybe 2018 maybe 2019 coming into the United States, would have a little trouble making the trips actually works. So there is that disparity. I don't want to just stipulate that we can talk about that later, but the point is that for Walt Whitman, there's no map, and the reason is because Walt never goes anywhere. That is just a fabulous irony given Walt's claim to a transatlantic and also international passage of India, a way of being everywhere always, and Nass may be intentionally has him stay more or less still. What's the airport MEE? Do we know? It's in New Caledonia. It's in New Caledonia. So Walt is just there. What do you think of that point, Davy? It also helps. Something that was super useful to me about the airport codes is that they're taking poets who we might not read within a global frame and certainly not within a frame of thinking about colonialism and thinking about relations of power and really demanding that we do that. Whitman's funny because we don't always take him seriously as someone who's interested in implicitness in really thinking about the blab of the pave as the pave not being like a stage for human interaction, not just the social like a real materials space that we don't- I don't know how much we take him as an urbanist but something that I just. He may be a fake urban. I think he might be a fake urbanist. This is demanding that if he's interested in an expansive colonial appropriation that we take him at his word and think about what it would look like to locate him, to ground him in specific locations that are- I mean, these are municipal codes that are part of state power, and there's something really lovely about you making experimental poetry out of nonsense framing designed to facilitate systems of state power, and there's also something really lovely about taking someone who has a mix misuse of power look like generosity, which I feel like happens in Whitman's work a lot and hold him accountable for that. It's super cool. Good. I'm glad you're interested in that idea and I'm not surprised. [inaudible] , what's your response to this whole question about the "Me, me, me, me, me, me," other than humor. I know you enjoyed it. The placement of Walt Whitman in a certain place represented by the airport code, that was something that I hadn't been thinking about. But, yes, that not only just points him out like "Oh, you talk a lot about yourself but also like hey, let's put you in one place." With the barbaric yawp though, I mean, maybe this is me because I like some of the works by Walt Whitman, the barbaric yawp that disturbs the "Me, me, me," it says something about maybe positive here. That it says something about, maybe it's not all about "Me, me, me, me," and grounding myself [inaudible] maybe the barbaric yawp is like opening up, go to other places as well. Thank you. Nass, before we turned to Stein, I want to invite you to say something about Walt, your relationship to Walt. I'm just going to say again, I think, and you can react to it. I think you're saying Walt is not so free and easy. Everyone is constrained here. I'm going to show you how writing about you can be constrained. Welcome to the club or I don't know what you're at it, if you are helping him along. Do you want to say something about you and Walt? Yes. Do you have a relationship with Walt? I think I do. He is one of the first poets that I really started to understand what poems are for and what they can do. This is going to sound terrible, and almost, yes, that undergraduate naive kind of like, "Oh, this is what poetry is kind of mold." Because he can do that, he is incredibly powerful. To word is sophomoric. Sophomoric. I was literally a sophomore when I discovered how great Whitman is. Yes. Since those days, I think my relationship is shifted or changed a little bit into different kinds of weirdness about privilege, and power, and that almost egotistical claim to a kind of total identity. So he's complicated. He's still good. There's a baby in the bath water, I don't want to dispense Whitman entirely, but I do have to, yes, I do feel I'm calling him out here a little bit. Yes, a little bit. But there's love in it. It's not harsh. The love in it is the way in which you succeeded in making the barbaric yawp fresh. Barbaric yawp is really a fresh take on the barbaric yawp. Yes, because it calcifies so quickly. Barbaric yawp. Yes, everyone's doing their barbaric yawp and we don't really think about it. That's part of the bigger project of the text, in general, is to refresh, be familiarized, look again. Definitely. Make us pay attention. Pay attention. All right, Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. So Lily, we'll start with you. Sure. This is a rewrite, remake, rethinking of Tender Buttons. It's more aligned with Tender Buttons than Nass is aligned with Whitman, so it seems. You want to say something about any of that? So if we think about this would be a butchering peripheries of one of many possible goals of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, would be the kind of think about naming and referentiality on objects in a more open expensive way, almost like she said to herself like, "I want to define or talking about objects using as many words that don't directly name the thing as possible." So then it's very funny to me than this is doing a similar talking around but with a constraint. I feel we're still trying to name objects but there's something getting in the way. It's cool how you can still feel that something is impeding language from making direct contact with the thing it's trying to name. But the thing that's getting in the way is all the things we've already talked about like whatever, airport codes, capitalism, but all the things that dictate what language makes up the airport codes. Anna? I love the relationship between the fact that your title for this section is Slight Delays. It might be an interlude. It is a side section? Yes, I got to hop in there. It's part of the larger framing device. Got it, okay. Yes. So slight delays, chicken or pasta, sorry for the inconvenience, thanks for flying with us, and buckle up. Oh, I read those more as section titles. Okay. So I'm wrong. But I loved that these two get to share a page space, Slight Delays and the Tender Button that stood one, because there's two things that you can do with a delay, right? You can spend some time with a poem or you can eat. It gives me both of those things right in this moment. You know what? I'm going to start calling those Section Titles. That would actually make those two in the middle infinitely short section. Which is great. Sorry for any inconvenience. Yes, that made [inaudible] section. Yes, that's really funny. No, I just love that. It does take an awful lot of time both of these poems, right? It reminds us that it takes time to do the work of actually composing this poem. It also takes an awful lot of time to read Stein, you know? Yes. You can read Stein quickly or you can take your timeless Stein, and this is as Alex to quote that great John Ashbery poem Just Walking Around, "The longest way is the most efficient." It is really relevant in this case, isn't it? Yes. This is a long way around. Yes. Yes. I think this poem really does remind you of that. It also reminds me as a reader, if it takes a little while to read something, that's okay. I want to ask Davy, then [inaudible] , then Nass himself the following questions, kind of a difficult one. Looking back at Tender Buttons from the point of view of a set quasi-rigorous constraint procedural poem, which falls under the loose category of conceptualism as a process. Looking back at Tender Buttons and working with the Tender Buttons material to do that, do we discover a nascent or latent conceptualism in Tender Buttons? Is there a relationship? Can we move forward from the high modernism of tender buttons to the kind of conceptualism that Nasser Hussain is involved in? I would say yes because if I were to read Tender Buttons as a conceptual project, I would do anything that I think Stein is already doing, which is thinking about the materiality of the objects that are there in the gender politics of the domestic space and trying to think about how do you think through the way that domesticity as a kind of feminized value is portrayed and socialized by means of really hanging out with the stuff and the language around the stuff? How do you break apart and spend time with and think through expectations of the domestic by getting like hyper-close to it and making it weird? I think that the art of what conceptual poetry does is develop a procedure to be able to break apart a social system that's produced in and produces language. The crazy thing that's happening here is that this rigorously, globally located sort of places in these airport codes is the material being used to reinvigorate Stein's domestic. It's like Stein's domestic unpleasantness becomes a global unpleasantness at the same time, which for me is helping to identify what's conceptual about her product. Jeez, yes. I'm getting chills. Now, that, I feel the same way. I think that's exactly right. Wow. The way you went from the domestic concerns and the focus on the sign to Nasser's interest in global. It's just great. I think that's great. You're going to respond happily to this. Well, yes. You're picking up on the thing that I was really hoping that my readers would find, which is an unceasing attention to the geography. That's kind of a thing that I wasn't sure if that was getting in cross by. You've given me faith. I think the maps are doing a lot of outward, just always trying to remind the reader this is happening on a space, on a place, on that endless scale of that is global. Super cool. So thank you. Yes, that's very close to the heart of these tasks. [inaudible] , I'm going to turn the question now toward the geopolitics, global politics of this work. I know you have a lot to say about it because he talked about it a couple of hours ago. Do you want to throw out one or two points about that? How can something that's so gamify and constraint-based turned into a serious contemplation or investigation of geopolitics? So one of the things that we were thinking about especially when thinking about the maps and the poems and all these flights that you fictionalize that you can take, but in the real world, there's so many restriction; borders, and your visa, which country, which color is your passport. So that happens. When Davy pointed out about how all these global codes are bringing up something that is so domestic here, that leads me to this associative thought that there's so much traveling around, there's also the food, the nourishment that each place will have. Maybe we'll not have everything here but so much an orange that can be the orange in the winter suns and about that you're peeling and eating and just oranges here and that I thought was really cool thought that came out of that. That's cool. The underpinning of mass transit of goods, so cocoa only gets to Stein through the infrastructure of- I mean you may not have come on a plane and heard it, but it certainly does to me now much of the food that I get. It has spent some amount of time in transit. So first, we consider the relationship of conceptual poet to what you might call not even a product conceptual book but an anti-conceptualize book. Walt Whitman, who believes, so it seemed, that what he was writing was a description of the world and that the world could be somehow in there and not a super language poet although, obviously, there's a ton of language in there. To a poet like Stein who's showing the way really uniquely among the modern high modernists to a Canadian immediate predecessor, Christian Buck. So this is really remarkable, Nass, because basically, you took the first page of, I think it's chapter E. Correct. You basically found a way to reproduce it French and all. How the hell did you do that? That must have taken a long time, which is very Buck-like in the first place. Yes. It took him seven years to [inaudible]. Yes. I mean one of the things about this book is that it's a constant set of experiments. Like every page, I hope is a new thing, a new attempt. What am I able to do inside of this constraint? I really only came to a constraint writing through Christian Buck. I said this over lunch, my entire career is under the sign of that text. I didn't start thinking about language. It changed the way I think about language and the way one can write. So this was a test, this is the big test, was to see if I could do some Christian's work in the same way that I'd approach Stein. It stops right there, not because I want it to, but because the constraint wouldn't let me go any further. I couldn't get past precedence. I was like, okay I guess that's telling me something. You can get so far with it, but then it ends. The semantic meaning of that part of Chapter E is- Is about the constraint that he's put himself under the in fettered, these sentences repressive speech, which of course is ironic because it's actually a deeply expressive text and effortless. It appears effortless even though it makes a spectacle of its own labor. I love the attention in Christian's work, that he makes the difficult look so easy and so polished like it should have just fallen there. This is just my stumbling attempt to try and pay homage to the writer that really- Say homage, but also without intending to because you have a positive feeling but Eunoia, trying it out for size, one up being- Oh, yes. There's no to his note. No question. You use a constraint on a constrain, right? So you're really doing it all. Yes. Let me turn to my colleagues on this. Any thoughts? Does this make you think afresh about the Eunoia constraint? What about the aforementioned, First Amendment, the free speech. Not exactly relevant to the Canadian context, so let's just say free speech in our First Amendment. What is Christian alleging about free speech? Basically, that there's no such thing as unfettered free speech, right? Right. Right, but Eunoia exists in a way in this conceptual poetic Utopia, in the sense that it's such a high concept project. It's a project that is super labor intensive, it requires this real attention to language, it requires savvy readers who recognize the lipogram for what it is and how labor intensive it is and it does nothing but inspire. I mean it does a lot, but to my mind, the first and foremost thing that inspires in me is like this incredible admiration of the singular genius of Christian book, and I mean no disrespect. However, what this does is it actually reintroduces in a much more real way that super high conceptual project does exist in a poetic Utopia, and this exists in a much more real space which is that in fettered, these sentences repress free speech and are repressed by travel restrictions and climate change and political uncertainty and all kinds of other sorts of danger. So this in a way, even though it's about air travel, brings Eunoia a little bit back to earth. That's really sports not smart thought, and also I'll just add knots before you respond to this, that if you had to get a grant to enact the trip, this would be the most expensive one. It would be up there. That says something about Christian's achievements that if you actually make this a worldly thing, no one will be able to afford that. What do you think? I mean. Is this the trip you want to take? There's a lot of Antarctic fly over. Yes, that would be really hard. It is a cheeky side goal for me to fly one of my poems at some point, and just to see what it's to make it physical and collect all those luggage tags, and remind me- That would be a hard thing to explain at customs. Yes. You could say that the Canadian government is more likely to give you that grant than either the US government or the UK government, let me just say, and put that out. Well, okay. But they'll be high on my list. I'm going to cancel it first for sure. Yes. I think I'm going to leave the response to the readers in this case. In my heart, I think it was me just signaling where I'm from as a poet. I think all of the collect, if you take the collected inter texts and references, direct references to other poets because Dr. Seuss shows up in this text. William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Christian book. These are in a Lego-like way. The building blocks of how it came to language and constraint. We'll leave it at that except one more followup before we turn to another surprise poem to end with. When you discovered that there's an airport who's abbreviation was EUN and then an airport that was OIA, not to mention FORMBOK, you must have been delighted. What is that discovery about? That's the process. So part of doing this book was keeping an eye out for three, six, nine and 12-letter words, that was immediate, so. In the combination. Just around the world. So as I'm looking around I'm saying, "Go, you know it has six letters, I wonder if I can do." Yes, and then, "Oh, wow I have Eunoia, and I have four and I have booked." If you didn't, then you couldn't do this poem probably, and the world would have constrained you against your- Against my desire is, yes. Which is a pretty cool thing to have the world actually enable you or not enable you. Not too many poets actually care about if the world enables you. Nas as a surprise to everybody, I wanted to ask you to turn to a poem from a new project, and the poem is another Whitman poem. Will you introduce it and then read it, and then my colleagues can talk about it. Including the constraint? Yes. If you don't mind. No, not at all. I think it's worth. No, not at all. I don't want to play a guessing game, though we could. I wonder who would get it first but never mind Well, it depends, this is another Whitman poem. Just ask. Let's ask. Anybody see anything, all these words have in common? Because I already know. You already know. That doesn't count. It's innocuous. There's a very minimal number of letters here. Yes and that's a hint. Is it, what's that called? All the letter's derive from all women. No. No, there is. In case. For instance, I noticed you have a way of holding your pen when you draw. When you were a kid, did you ever get a compass in your protractor set? Oh, yes like this. To get curves in newsletters. Correct. Davy. Davy gets it in one. Davy. So when you were carving your name, Alice really easy. In a tree. Because it's all straight lines. Nas is really hard because I have to do that lightning bolt to make an s. This is from a series of poems that I'm calling poems I can write with a knife. Cool. So Walt Whitman. My width, my me. Me me me me me. My yawn, my myth, my you, my elm, my tick, my flax, my ivy, hune with flint ax. My wax, my wayne, my thin veil, my hanky when I'm x. I am a new yankee. I am a lazy man. I make little new. I make new little. I like lean, live, a lanky man in a lake all wet. I thaw at that heat like Kelvin, like flame in my flank if I may. Yankee man, we make me many. Layman, laity, all in name I itemize all. Wait a while, we may yet make amity in flame. Wonderful. So let's talk about it for a second. So what Nasser Hussain is doing is limiting himself to words about walt that could be carved easily into let's say a tree. Which is to say making semi-permanent or indeed permanent, as all of us remember when we revisit the wooden benches and the cabins, the summer camp cabins that we, yes. That's pretty permanent. This gets permanently and then this also constrains the choices of words and so forth. So this is really in line with the whole project. Thoughts on this? You laughed at a couple of points. I heard a few. Yes. Those for me are always hot. Which ones? I'd say, I am a New Yankee, I'm a lazy man, I make little news, I make news. Which is really a nice rejoinder to- The whole sentence. -modernism's chant of- Yes, make it new. -make it new. In fact, even though you're trying to make it new, you're constraining yourself and you're creating something that's supposedly permanent. We meet me many. That was something as well. Yes, I am large. I contain multitudes. Right. I also hear translation. Translation into what is allowable by the constraint. So wait a while is Canto 52, look for me again. There you go. Yes. So you're translating into the constraint. I'm trying to do it, and again, right? Out of honor or homage, but also for fun and just to see if it can be done. Yes. Let's get final words from everybody. The four of you first, and then Nas. Davy, final thought on any of this work? Sorry, final thoughts. One is that- I'm sorry. What are you apologizing for? For two final thoughts. Oh, you have two. Well- Sorry. -what can I say? Using latitude. Yes, it's two. He's just that good. You get all the latitude you want. Speaking of latitude, s. Something that SKY WRI TEI NGS is imagining is airports operating outside of scale as though these could all be direct flights. So a lot of these airports are super tiny that you wouldn't be able to get a path in the first line of the [inaudible] poem, from Finland to Ecuador to Ukraine, but that's not- Possible. Please don't go there directly, both because some of those distances are too long for a single commercial flight, and because that's just not how the demand of air travel works. So that's cool in the way that the project is both interested in the kind of global materiality but also perfusing it. Just like imagining airports and aviation without diplomacy or resource use. It's cool. What's super interesting, the thing about this, and I'm so glad to know about the constraint of being able to carve something with a knife is that the late '70s, early '80s vintage language moment is all about thinking about the materiality of language. It's a really different kind of materiality to think, let me carve this into something. I don't want to use it unless I can very easily inflict it on a material surface. I'm sure there's a cool reading of this as a rejoinder to the formation of American experimental poetry or Anglophone experimental poetry in 1970 to the present. Thank you. Lily, final thought? Yes. Something I was thinking about with the SKY WRI TEI NGS poems is that feeling of if you're traveling, and you're going through the airport where you're in the country that the airport is in. But if you're making, say a connecting flight, you're both in the country and also very not. Like the airports themselves create this very weird, liminal, world globalized space or something. Chris Schaberg calls it airportness. Yes, okay. Airportness. Perfect. [inaudible] in a book. Yes. There's a book by the same title. The title of the book is Airportness. It is describing that dislocation from location. Right. Right. It's very weird because there's things that you can recognize that you know don't belong to that country. Not belong to, but aren't part of the culture of that country, but they're part of the culture of the airportness. So I was still thinking about how that concept applies to visiting these various important poets from your past or just important canonized poets. I'm excited to think more about what your work is saying about what a contemporary poet's relationship might be to the canon, if it can be related to airportness in some way. Wonderful. Anna, final thought? Those are both so good. I was thinking about Davy's point about the materiality of language and feeling that especially in terms of how, when you're reminded, as Davy reminded us of language as a material thing, you then also have to adapt your reading practices to the same. I think that these poems did a really amazing job of reteaching us how to read and reinvigorating our attention to language. Not just the language of the poems that we remember. Of course, unfettered these sentences, repress free speech, or of course the Tender Buttons, Roast Beef, or roast a cow as you said. You got to work around. Work around, yes. So I think that your poems reminded us of the materiality of the language of the poems that we love and the poems in this book, but also reminded us to pay attention to the language that's out there in the world, and the way that Erica Baum, elsewhere in the course, has reminded us of that and other poets. So that's like a really joyful reminder to be looking up when you're out walking in the world, and especially when you're in an airport and dealing with airportness. I'm fond of saying watch your language. Yes, there you go. Watch your language. Everybody, watch your language. Yes. Watch your language is like being heads up about it. So that's a really cheerful, joyful thing. The fact that I could literally find a poem if I just paid a little more attention to the words that I see around me every day. Not just to come up with a poem in terms of in a foul language sense, but like recreate a tender button just from finding language out in the world as I go. So thank you. You're welcome. Joella, final thought? That is exactly what I was thinking as well. One of the things that a lot of people say, and one of the sentences in one of my favorite essays is that poetry is strewn around everywhere. It's just a matter of noticing it and picking it up. A lot of time what that phrase implies, or what I used to take it in as, was noticing a lady bird, noticing this, noticing something that is happening, and creating that images or senses and transmuting it into words. But also both this project and the projects that we've been looking at with conceptual poetry and elegy poetry was like, it's not just by noticing the things that are happening and the images and the sensory details, but also there's so much more. So it was like, yes, you're noticing things around you that could be poetry but also ways of doing poetry. So that's what these projects [inaudible]. Nas, final thoughts? I love what you just said there. Above and beyond just noticing the world, or pretending that objects or food or rooms or politics or other people are in the world, I'm striving to remember that language, too, is a thing in the world and can be noticed. Right now, that's the core of my practice, is to pay attention to language like it's a thing in the world, and to take that '70s L equals [inaudible] lesson as literally as possible. It's yielding stuff. I like to stay naive and have fun as much as possible, as well because that's just as important as anything. I have a final thought. Then I want to thank everybody for this really great session. Final thought. Well, I really enjoy the gamification side of this. I enjoy what the constraint produces in terms of pleasure. I enjoy the discovery. I enjoy the acrobatics. I really like all of it. Enjoy is the word. We've just laughed and smiled, which is good. Good tonic thing for poetry to do. At the same time, I'm terribly moved by the work. Because just in terms of the four poems we talked about today, two of them about Walt Whitman, one about Gertrude Stein, and one about Christian Buck. So here you are in the 21st century, well along in the 21st century. You come along and you have a certain amount of honor, feelings of honor, and indebtedness to your predecessors who'd been trying to break ground, and in all ways those three poets have broken ground in their time. You are setting yourself a high barrier to cross over to get back to them. You are crawling on cut glass or climbing the highest border wall that has ever been built to get back over to these poets whom you honor because they helped make you free. They helped free your imagination. This constraint suggests a world of travel bans and impossible trips and the limitation of freedom of motion, which has been promulgated as a right officially since World War II, some of the Roosevelt ideas, that we should be able to move freely between and among borders. On this very day surely, not to put too fine a point on it, but when I Googled Nasser Hussain, I should have Googled Nasser Hussain poet. Because what I got was a whole lot of people, including a cricket player who's very free to move anywhere, but a whole lot of Nasser Hussain who would struggle to cross borders or be constrained by a certain set of assumptions about us and them. These homage poems are so beautiful because they basically say despite all that, I am going to cross back over to my people. Your people include the poets who came before you. So it's a labor of love and you built the constraint. See, a lot of poets when they honor Walt, they just do the Walt thing without constraint, "because Walt wasn't constrained so we just-" A lot of people who honor Stein will do a Steinian thing. No. You said, "This is what I have to do in order to get back to Stein. It won't be legit if I don't actually do it with integrity, this thing that I am committed to, at the same time as honoring them." I just think that's a beautiful thing. It's an honorable thing. If you can see that in my work, I can't say another word. That's beautiful, and it shows you're all such great readers. They are, aren't we? So are you. Nas, thank you for traveling and hanging out with us. It's my pleasure. It's been great honor and pleasure. Davy, as always, Lily, Anna. Would Joella hang out with us some more? Would you like to? We'd really enjoy that. Thank you all.
