sundown poetry center and this lecture series just to give you a little bit of background information grew out of it out of a desire to have a dialogue with poets about the many aspects of poetry that we so often don't you for helping us create the series we'd like to thank the many books store owners of course and the managers around the state including jenny lyons and becky dayton here from the vermont bookshop here in middlebury we need to thank music on that television programming and of course all the poets who have agreed to share their time and expertise but thus we thank you too for coming this evening and for supporting supporting poetry as an important i have to do a little bit of minutes now introducing david hubble is a challenge for so many reasons foremost his works of fiction and nonfiction in addition to press in twenty sixteen and the poetry collection dreams senator from louisiana state university press in the fall of twenty three in addition to all for being here see familiar faces a few that i had in class is a while back i think some of you probably were with me when i wrote some of the things that i might be reading with you tonight being formal poetry received forms like that but it is come to my attention that all through my life of writing poetry have been making formal choices that are just little ones that are made within the context of free verse and really it's sort of the decision of where you're going to break a line at a certain place or whether you're going to use the three line stands and how they might be arranged on the page it's a little kinds of things that you make as you're making a point but you don't pay much attention to it the first book i published a book of poems that published was called paper boy and i think when it came out seventy eight seventy six  there but here's a point from that book you'll see is just a little modest little point it's very much a paper boy poem mrs green that's a screen door a pretty woman just married and in shorts on a saturday in may she was sweet to me when i came up to collect offered me something cold to drink which i refused for the sake of dreaming the whole summer i was twelve about what it would be like some morning to walk softly into that lady's kitchen and there's a form of choice that i made here and i'm sorry you don't have a copy of this but you could probably see it that there's a break right in the middle of that point after offered me something cold to drink and then it drops down which i refused for the sake of dreamy and i don't think i thought of that as anything other than just the way i wanted that to be so that's a formal choice early on i'm going to ask some of my formal choices have been more consequential than that and i'm going to ask you to look at this book of mine copies of which i have lit to some of you but called stopping by home and we're going to go over to pour i'm sort of in the middle of it and i need a cough drops i'm going to get you to do my reading for me a little bit over to page twenty seven and this is a sequence of poems called stopping by home and it has to do with when i got my job in vermont i junior to see my parents but often i would go on down to north carolina two or in recent college where i did some teaching so quite often i would be stopping by home going somewhere else are stopping by home on my way back to vermont and during that time my father was  read on page twenty seven most anzus of that poem at the top of the page is about time since july so there are some formal choices here one of my thoughts about formal choices is that they are just for the writer to help him or her write the point so the reader does not have to notice it it's a device that i use to get my point so in the piece that nancy just read there's a rhyme scheme that it's completely invisible until i call it to your attention and now when i call it here tension you'll see that it's desk and risk rhyme so i did that in order to give myself some limits something to push a button to push to get some way to focus me into the point and that particular there's also a formal decision in that one that is deliberate in that i think has to do with the poem and i suspect i would wish you to notice that and that's the end jemmott in the next to last line to the last line and as i read it they rang for the nurse but he passed through something you couldn't see to register the passing through but also he's fighting for his breath but he that need to catch a breath there doubt during this time i'm sure my father was having a hard time with it and my mother was having a hard time with it and i was having a hard time with it but when i have a hard time emotionally i don't show it in a sort of keep my wits about me so when i'm writing about it is when i kind of work through what i need to work through is one that work through over and over again and if you do that kind of thing do they use the same pattern again and again something in you cries out to do something different so with this one that we're encountering here the difference here is that it starts with a fourteen line syllable and works its way all the way down to a one syllable line and then works its way from a one syllable and back out to a fourteen syllable line and there is still a rhyme scheme here but i'm not going to try to point it out to you this is the most obsessive compulsives form that i've ever done it gets don't get any worse than that i don't think it does maybe it does so pat will you read that first one all the way down to mit and then i'll read the last piece of it away and write myself back home why not look for a job down there try to find some tell me close enough to say i'm going to see them through of over there and walk in the door and not even surprise them sit down with them and talk maybe stay for lunch say an easy goodbye and leave without feeling like i've betrayed them and i will never find my way back home so that's a that's a little more than halfway through the four border stop there we will stop there in if you have questions or if you want to say anything about what we've read so far i'll be happy to do that and if not i have a plan for my next and my next i did not want an hourglass shape i didn't want that but and i think i originally kept the margin straight on the left hand side but somewhere along the way either i changed it to that shape or an editor suggested it or something and i think it's ok but i'm not i'm not really a fan of those shaped poems that and that i don't think i am although i might as well be committed all the other atrocities that poets commit so i think they often the shape is much more the point than the content and even if they match up which they should match up so if you write one in the shape of a swan and then the point needs to be about a swan that makes sense but then you say oh i mean i think it should be a poem that moves you in some way rather than just look at this little trick that i can do yes or well because i lived through those experiences well i think i guess that's what poets do if they live through something quite often you there's something in you you know it stick it stays with you but you don't really know what it meant to your how you're going to think of it in the future poetry is a little bit of a help it's a way to kind of put something that may be troublesome to you so i put it behind you so you can move on we're going to go to page forty nine and let me see here wonder who needs to punishing the worst year among you all right so let's try w you and you and i will trade stanzas say for instance will get you to read the first stanza read the second you read the third and so on like that and we'll see how long we can make it work with this one of a form involved in the writing of it that meant the same stanza repeats itself it's a two syllable line a five syllable line a ten syllable  five syllable on a two syllable line so that there's this kind of starting out small expanding shrinking small extent and this is really about my father's death which occurred while i was here in vermont and so my way of knowing about it had to be from what people told me through the time of go in there for the funeral and so on but it also meant that i had to imagine make up a lot of it because i wasn't there there is something about a death of a family member that requires us to take hold of it to sort of fix it in some kind of way so that we can carry it with us and go on at the door when she went realized it wasn't just dark out there there was a fog so thick thought going to the hospital to be with my husband who was dying she took one more step and closed i am going she turned back and in four steps she could see the porch light she went in and made coffee see but he was not alone there were nurses dr rhoda walked up there to the hospital knowing coming to die do i know if they'd say that i have to see them there beside his bed three of them watching  own life what words were spoken then when they had to turn away from what they had witnessed what their words to be common do you want some coffee is it still foggy out there even i've got to take a  who she is my brothers my children my nieces and nephews even older grandma so you see that poetry serves a function for me of working through difficult things in my life not all my poems are that way i write some frivolous silly stupid points but i also write a lot that are like th and you see what i mean by a formal decision a formal decision of the syllable that shrinks and expands and shrinks and expense is the only way i could have written that poem and it i think of it a little bit as the  the accompaniment for a jazz musician who's improvising whereas the accompaniment is often just a steady rhythm or part of maybe some chord changes and stuff like that where is the improvisers weaving all this kind of the story of a thing with his music so it serves that function of something steady and solid underneath allowing me ender all over the place it as you're writing it you figure out what the form is and then the form helps you figure out what the poor me is and then the poem it's sort of they play against each other and i have to while you feel almost like you could step back and say well you're diskeeper talking to yourself here the form and the line your can your can do this which is a good thing to happen i do believe that all that inspiration for me is when that happens when i am writing and suddenly you put down a word or two words a sentence a line that i had no idea i would write so that it comes out of the being in the writing that something comes to me is a form that i deplore because it usually it's like those poems that weddings that you know you make fun of the groom in with a rhyme couple of points so i really don't want you to hear the rhymes here and there are so approximate and so silly that you won't hear them like in the first and then had who would say that's a right or afternoon ballroom it's sort of a ride or serious in a s so there are rhymes there but the thing that i did hear that most egregious is that i tried to make all of the lines come out exactly the same length in typewriter spaces so you can see were i wasn't able to do that but you can see where i did do it that's the part so so let me see what we can do here reading this david are you good for reading a little bit of this so would you read all the way down to  maybe in the one two three four five six stanza that sentence in as with cold today it's where you start there and i'll read the title you're ready april saturday nineteen sixty grinned at her one day in the hall for she had me in band practice or history but we've never touched fingertips let alone tried to dance when you serve would you read a sentence so it's no wonder we began an capsule floating in the sleet toward unknown galaxies of eternal mid afternoon light with berkeley and me in orbit around the ridge hot bobby judy planet well the boxed it goes tiresome if you step out box number one thousand and four berkeley shifted in position she gave a side and snuggled in close and no income and searching for a reader or would you read a couple sentences policeman when we still had her clothes oh no we didn't collapse to the floor there that was so mental and over so quickly that the annals of sexual history don't even mention it all right maybe it was no more than a tight embrace w remarkably intense kiss and maybe the bar of body movements of accomplished lovers like bobby and judy may be a favorite habeas hobby of theirs was leading near a casual friends into situations of carnal possibility berkeley  into each other parts of a clock moving perfectly perfectly moving sitting perfectly moving in time and would you ma'am please pick it up from there we were just kids really sixteen and seventeen we hadn't we just stood there reading chattering together maybe another sentence embarrassment set in very quickly but it was of the bonding variety and of course we couldn't go back to the box down we tried to chat and stand where read ok well i don't know what you mean i don't know why they kept you from having a handout at a certain emotional pitch the tone of voice the tone of a voice is all that matters somebody just croon to me please and i'll be ok soon ten thousand days have flown away since that small piece of a sunday afternoon berkeley's had her life of had mine and who can say if what happened made any difference to either of us her remembrance may bring her a twitch of a smile but that's all sometimes i feel i'm a sliver of dust in the great pattern of creation i think vast intelligence but then i recall blips of cosmic nonsense like that afternoon with berkeley galactic energy started crackling along the stratospheric periphery with in their graves and a boy and a girl in a virginia town by their whimsy of chaos the theology of random chance were flung body against body bless their hearts they played their ludicrous parts so you know and standing in place you can see that point went on and on and the secret about that is i couldn't get the damn thing stopped so it had to keep going till i got it st there's a piece of prose here a little chunk of a sheet of a short story which is part of a novel and we're not going to read it but i'll just tell you about it and i think that's all you'll need of it to know about it's c hannah in and the form of the poem you can see one the first section is justified to the left margin in the second section is justified to the right and margin it goes that way through the whole story the first section is in third person point of view and the second section is in first person point of view so you get somebody talking about the character and then the character talks about herself and then talks about the character talking better so so making that particular formal choice was a way of actually pursuing this story that she has to tell until the telling it really from two points of view it's a story that's both third person and first  so we're getting over here to new points my new poems and rid asking you to read any of these things with me  she likes granite or marble she prefers heroic athletes males with rounded buttocks or the of percherons female sweeties who modestly cover virginal breasts and their regions or perhaps posed as archers but m hicks turns ecstatically silly when she encounters stone alligators turtles or even bunnies she has been heard confiding in them or besieging whatever deity it is that looks over them oh please let me be one of you make m next life be brainless and still give me a garden felt all the trees shade some grass and a very few visitors to smell that me before going somewhere else she's not very friendly  is not and i had a really great english teacher in high school who taught me how to diagram sentences taught me punctuation taught me parts of speech all of that stuff so i know better than to road right like this where a jam sentences together and use no punctuation and all of that and i do it well in part because she's dead so she can't come get me now so but also i think it leads to a day aspire to narrative that is readable and comprehensible i think it's very challenging to to read it first time so i wonder sir do you fancy do you think say that you could read of form like this you guess or is so maybe you and i could trade stanzas of mystics avoids the old goat i'll read a title you read the first stanza will go like eyes brightened as if she'd brought up a favorite historical figure and he pronounced her name as if she was his adored dead mother or to be dear lady as he started to gather so near it three times before it so if you're if you're writing one of the poem like that and you know you go to come out it has to end at a certain point that will force you to come up with it in that works out that way and for this one i was very grateful for th approximately true i think that's a i think that's exactly where that point wanted to want to be and so this last one we're going to look at is a long one and i'm going to get us to read a stand just walk along i might go back there where i knew people who have it but you don't have it do they have handed us one of those ones right beside you just came in they got handed i'm going to come up come back there and get them to read that you can get lost in the store is very funny why did you set it up this way it wasn't anybody she was close to or knew very well it was her aunt wilma ransom and homemade they said she was and she'd asked the family to let her come do her dying with her own people she wasn't particular which ones took her home just didn't want to have to die with strangers being paid to watch or do mistakes was thirteen difficult for herself him and right away the only looked over and didn't quite manage to smile but nevertheless the two of them let each other know they they remembered the other and those iced tea that actually speaking aloud would have been a come down from what they could manage by moving their eyes their lips their eyebrows on moment became her out of body of the body instructor really she was her in the body instructor because so much  like she was a school girl schoolgirl silently memorizing her multiplication tables ms hicks once thought she saw her lips move ever so slightly but maybe she just imagined it and truth was she sat with not so many hours and even took to sleeping there on a pallet beside the bed and it felt like they were becoming the same person like ah well mother was just dissolving into her mystics was doing the thinking and feeling orders talking you're in again and again but it wasn't the kind of fear that kept her useless brothers away and it wasn't that she didn't want her own wilma to die wilma at all alone made her understand death was what she yearned for one day old lady had said aloud out of nowhere not heaven just death please and yes she could have been just trying out the words but ms hicks was right there by the bid and so she knew out wilma had wanted her to hear what she said and ms hicks liked it for they had that like that they had that gold between them for some reason it made everything easier miss hicks expected there be some church a talking when death did finally arrive and she wasn't about to pick a fight with a pastor or their uncles aunts and cousins who were inclined insert praise jesus into anything they said like praise pass the salt praise jesus what wilma saying just death please did for ms hicks was make her ready to let all that foolishness wash over her like rain off a duck's back as her father had liked to advise her back when her brothers tried to tease or into crying but now she was pretty sure they wouldn't do that any more she felt wildly strong this one sunday morning she decided just to lie in the bed beside wilma because her breathing had got to be so slow she needed to be close to her to know just exactly winter on his body would change from something alive to something did she get given a wilma her bath the night before and put lotion on her skin all over and brushed her hair and made it look nice and when she saw it will most face this morning she'd known it was just about to happen the way her out of it had just released themselves down over her eyes excusing those eyes from ever wanting or having to look at the world any more it made perfect sense to music since she knew it would wouldn't to anybody else who saw them in that bed together that's where she needed to be it wasn't even anything she had to think about she didn't pose even a second after th to her and she told herself she'd never confessed anybody as long as she lived that if she could have had her way she did go right over with wilma she'd have stayed with her where ever or she was about to go so there so there you see we got to the end of that thing like it would never get there what questions can i had for you what can i talk with you about what comments would you like to m the most radical thing that i did there and i think that david thank you for asking me this i think those long stanzas with fairly long lines and little transition into the next sort of kept it going it's going to it's go momentum it just keeps it rolling right along in my opinion well i could probably take his the end if you list the sin the range in you know county syllables for him and all of that of that is the easiest to answer that kind of a natural storyteller so if i put four words in sequence i'm already thinking about what how's this story go you know in pursuing story so most of my poems are narrative poems for me i stopped making major distinctions between the two a long time ago there are pieces of writing you know we could call them whatever we want to their pieces of writing so that the the project or the writer i think is to sort of is to find the form they want to be and i have had i wrote a poem i struggled with a poem that pages and pages into it before i realized it really did want to be a story and then it suddenly became a novella that i did published as a novella and when i look at that book now i think how in the world did i think there was a poem here so i sort of had to write through a lot of writing that i didn't keep in order to get to the writing that what was going to keep yes yes well i think it's for true is when he was a young man he wrote that stuff and i think he was being very literary i mean it doesn't sound like we have fog or sounds like somebody wanting to be like keats or i don't know who else and he wasn't that person but he probably had to write those poor ins in order to get to where he was to who he was just when you're writing eventually i do and so and i think i hope my fake try to keep my family at some distance or also try to pretend i'm not doing what i'm doing when they come around but i always shaping my sentences as i'm reading them in see things that need to be changed because they don't sound so great i've been a great audience thank you so much