(New Season) Navigating the Complexities of Poetry: Politics, Language, and Cultural Impact with Bianca Stone

This episode navigates the intricate relationship between poetry and politics, featuring insights from poet Bianca Stone. We discuss the nuances of non-didactic poetry, the historical implications of literary voices, and how poetry serves as a vessel for personal and collective experiences. Bianca Stone is a Vermont-based poet. Stone’s newest book is What is Otherwise Infinite, (Tim House 2022). She is the host of Ode and Psyche podcast. 

Stone’s poems, art, book reviews, and essays have appeared in a variety of magazines including The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and many others. She returned to Vermont in 2016. Bianca houses the Ode & Psyche Podcast.




• Examining the tension between political and poetic expression
• The impact of didacticism on modern poetry
• The philosophical discourse surrounding poetry through Plato's lens
• Individual voices in poetry reflecting collective narratives 
• Analyzing Larry Levis's poem on Lorca
• The importance of ambiguity and interpretation in poetry 

Explore this thought-provoking dive into the complex world of poetic expression and its implications for understanding our human experience.

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 0:49 Exploring Ambiguity in Poetry
• 14:59 Poetry, Language, and Ambiguity
• 23:40 The Intricacies of Poetic Syntax
• 31:13 The Poetic Power of Creation
• 37:00 Exploring Poetry and Politics
• 53:20 Interpreting Law and Poetry
• 1:01:46 Exploring the Intimacy of Poetry
• 1:16:14 Exploring Poetic Interpretation and Translation
• 1:24:33 The Complexity of Language and Poetry
• 1:38:19 The Role of Poetry in Society
• 1:50:17 The Value of Poetry in Society
• 2:03:24 The Self and Poetry's Collective Unconscious
• 2:21:14 Navigating Poetic Politics and Personal Taste
• 2:25:13 Examining the Cultural Impact of Poetry
• 2:36:08 Appreciation for Creative Influence

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 0:49

Welcome to Vaughn Blog, and I'm here with poet Bianca Stone, author of collections such as what is Otherwise Infinite, which I have around here, the Mobius Stiff of Grief, someone Else's Wedding Vows also, sort of. I believe the first time I actually heard of you and I didn't even realize it was the same person that Daniel Tutt was interviewing a couple months back was your work with Anne Carson as a visual artist, and I and you also have an interest in psychoanalysis, which is, I believe, why Daniel had you on. Um, mm-hmm, I am always interested in getting poets to talk about political poetry because, to be blunt, I think most political poetry is overly didactic and bad. Um, but, and it may be also because now that I've left the, I've been out of the MFA world for both didactic but also very thin Like as politics, I'm often like I don't know what I would even do with this politically. It's like a political moral sentiment more than it is a political statement, and I was thinking about that and I was contrasting that in my head and while I was thinking about interviewing you and we were going back and forth on what we would thinking about that and I was contrasting that in my head when I was thinking about interviewing you and going back and forth on what we were talking about, with Plato's utter hostility to poetry.

C. Derick Varn: 2:41

As you know, the myth is the creation of a political delusion for him. Um, now, some of that may be the age old. Uh, I'm a former poet and I want revenge. Uh, that that we have a Plato, if some of that's to be believed, yeah, uh, but, and I also have always found it funny and it may, just because of what we have from Plato that survives, uh, his dialogues are awfully poetic. Have from Plato that survives, his dialogues are awfully poetic and also, like, ridiculously didactic. Like I remember as a young philosophy student that was my other gig philosophy and anthropology on one side and poetry on the other. Reading Plato, I mean, like this is really majestic, except that your interlocutors are so fake I can't even think through. Like who would be this dumb to walk into your trap? Like this question is obviously a trap.

Bianca Stone: 3:43

You mean he already had. He was pushing you towards something already and you could see it coming.

C. Derick Varn: 3:50

Oh, definitely, the dialogues are so didactic that you're just like pushing you towards something already and you could see it coming. Oh, definitely, yeah, like like the dialogues are so didactic that you're just like by engaging in the question the way it's been framed to you.

C. Derick Varn: 4:04

you're already doomed and I I remember thinking about that not just as an annoying trait of like dialogues and dialectics in classical and early medieval philosophy, but also as a bad poetic. It's a poetic that really, really thinks it already knows where it's going and when. Plato's most interesting is when he allows Socrates to actually not succeed in his obvious question leading, like when Socrates runs smack dab into Parmenides or something like that. It's just textually those are more interesting. So, as a person who works in poetry and I guess I was reading a lot of your work and I was like would I categorize your work as political or not, and I realized with your work that I couldn't answer that question.

Bianca Stone: 5:17

Good.

C. Derick Varn: 5:17

And yeah, which I think is probably a good place to be. Yeah, so I wanted to ask you like, as a person very familiar with the classics, how do you respond?

Bianca Stone: 5:31

I wouldn't say that, but yeah, why with the classics? Well, how do you respond? I wouldn't say that, but yeah, well, some somewhat familiar and, of course, like growing more and more familiar as they touch everything I'm reading across different genres and as a poet, as a poet looking into the poet theory and history of poetry, it's I mean, it's so important. But go on with your question.

C. Derick Varn: 5:56

Well, yeah, this is like a very front-loaded question. The question that I had is you know, what do you make of the philosophical ambivalence, let's just say, let's put it that way to poetry, particularly poetry that is not didactic, that somehow, for a lot of political thinkers and philosophical thinkers, that scares them. Why do you think that seems to be the case, and do you think that I'm even being fair on that?

Bianca Stone: 6:39

Non-didactic poetry, poetry, I mean, let's back up a little bit In terms of poetry, posing a question that already has an answer or that is leading you towards an answer, or that is trying to make an argument in a certain direction. Already you've left the realm of poetry. I think of this idea, of it's kind of an idea that I was, you know, elizabeth Sewell talks about in the Orphic Voice, which is that the incredible thing about and she's talking about the myth of Orpheus and poetry, but poetry as formulating the question.

Bianca Stone: 7:50

Let's see the ambig Right right, the ambi right right. So the the, the method in poetry is to formulate a question that doesn't have one answer and that has multiple answers, and that it. I mean that's what poetry is right. I mean it's, it's a, it's a mode of interpretation and analyzing. Um, it can hold several truths.

Bianca Stone: 8:12

How can you come present a poem that has only one truth that it wants you to have? It's almost like, I mean it feels more like propaganda at that point or something Like the poem wants you to think with it. Right, if the poem wants you to think with it and to grasp a kind of truth within it that isn't even present yet, it's something else when it has the truth already laid out beforehand. And I think that's why one would keep coming back to a poem, right, like why do we keep coming back to myth? Like, why does we keep coming back to myth? Like, why does one keep going back to the myth of Orpheus or the myth of Oedipus, you know, in terms of classicism still being relevant? Because I think that they do hold truths, but they don't come out. Presenting this is what it means. So, like, let's think about how that leads to your second, the second part of your question, which is why are?

Bianca Stone: 9:21

Why is anybody wary of a poem where they don't understand the meaning right away? It's like an uncomfortable place to be to say I don't know what this poem means and I don't know where it's pointing me towards and I don't know what, what, what its stance is, necessarily truths about how thought works. It can be kind of terrifying to have that unknown part of thought exist in the poem that can't be grasped. But why have that anyway? I don't know. I think that's a good question. Why have a poem that is open to interpretation? What does that do? It seems like for a philosopher it would be fertile ground.

C. Derick Varn: 10:24

You would think so, but it is fascinating the number of people I know who are into. It is fascinating the number of people I know who are into philosophy and who can't deal with poetry at all, ranting on on uh, on x or slash twitter about you know poets giving up their, their propaganda power, and I was just like poets giving up their propaganda power yeah, because you mean poetry gives up its propaganda power yeah, and he thinks that's useless and I'm just like no, that's an interesting one.

C. Derick Varn: 11:14

It's an interesting idea of use, um, what, what the use of that is for and to. Um, I suspect what he's what he's referring to is like the fact that particularly early poetics because it is tied into to sound in a way that relates to memory, um, as anyone's ever got a poem stuck in their head, our song lyrics or anything can kind of tell you, uh, that that would have a lot of didactic power.

Bianca Stone: 11:43

But I'm like how would that have didactic power though?

C. Derick Varn: 11:50

I'm not sure.

Bianca Stone: 11:50

It's not like a song has ever changed my politics like yeah, I mean, I think change is interesting because it what is something that could pose the possibility of change and to change somebody's heart, um, when I think didactic, I think somebody wants you to change in a certain way that they want, right, and there's it. This is a, this is a distinction, as I mean, there's lots of different kinds of poetry, right, but I think in in a way, and there's like poetry historically situated in response to certain things that are happening historically. Then there's a sort of core event of poetry that feels linked to something very ancient and somehow aligned with language and groups of people communicating. But also, it's not just that, it's like our relation to the world and like being actually in the material world, among nature, you know, wondering why we're here and all these things, right. So, yes, I think a poem, you could think of a poem as something like you could lull somebody into with your, with your beautiful song, into listening to what you're saying. But does that really? Does that really happen? Like are are you talking people into things with your beauty? You know um beautiful song, or are are you almost like creating? Um, it almost is like something else is happening, when, when I feel like I am lulled into the musicality of a poem. I'm at once actually listening to language and not listening to language, like there's some sort of element of being, of participating in a poem, where I feel like in that moment there's like an immediate presence of being in the world, being seen by another person in their language and consciousness. But then there's this other sort of ineffable event happening with the music, where I feel and we can even say this was what happens when we're swept up with music that you know doesn't have any words or something like an orchestra or something, um, that we're having an experience, we're having a lot of sensations at work and there is a sense of like, um, it's not just enjoyment but like cause. Sometimes it can be very upsetting, even right, like what's happening to me, something's happening to me, like something is being like loosened up or or like evoked in the psyche and like one feels a little bit like they're becoming more into the world. Um, so I worry about things like trying to talk someone into something that's already set in stone, which would presume that we know, even as the writer, what we want, because I don't.

Bianca Stone: 15:00

I think a lot of of the writing of poetry too, for the on the poet's part is an act of sort of like self just, I don't. When I say self-discovery I mean like more like a construction of the self begins to become in the poem. That is paradoxically too outside of the self and has nothing to do with Bianca right investigation into what it means to be a thinking person in the world and to interact with different parts of my psyche in the poem itself and to invite the reader to participate in that and in that we sort of construct the poem together. So how could I go into the poem knowing what I want to say to the reader and what that means? And it's like a very subtle difference.

Bianca Stone: 15:51

Because the thing too I think that's that could be persuasive in poetry is that it invokes passion and feeling. And if you're a person who's been, who's experienced hardship or marginalization, or you've lacked voice or something like that, and the poem evokes a heartbreaking experience that you've experienced and it can show somebody else on a emotional level, like what it's like to be you, I don't know. I mean maybe that's, but I wonder how effective that is in terms of swaying people politically. I don't know. It may, I don't know.

C. Derick Varn: 16:43

Well, it leads me to one of the concepts on Plato that I actually think is useful for poets to sit with and, um, one of the things that maybe, uh, contradicts what I was characterizing the platonic dialogues is doing is that they, they end in aporia, which is this inability to you know, for doing this for my audience, but this is an inability, um, to fully deal with a paradox or an impasse, are some kind of like, seemingly opaque realization, where the realization is not so much a positive realization but the realization is a potential realization, which I know that distinction is probably difficult for people, but, like the, the sense that there is a productive confusion at the end, because the signs that you are having to deal with have reached some kind of limit, like there's semiotic clarity, start to fall apart, and the I you know, the better platonic dialogues really do this, where you're just like I don't know what that word means. Now, you know, I don't know, I can feel it, I can tell that there's something here, right, uh, but I, I often I can't analytically go forward with it in a place where I can just like oh, I can like define this term in the analytic sense of philosophy and move on, because I have now problematized that idea to a way that I have to kind of feel my way around it, not just reason my way around it Although, as we both know, that binary is a little bit fake. But but you know the way we're taught to deal with signs, and when I, when I deal with a lot of students, and even you know, I often have people tell me like, well, how do you understand poetry? And sometimes my answers to them it's just you don't Like. That's part of the point.

C. Derick Varn: 18:50

Not in like, not in this obnoxious mystifying like oh, it's just very confusing way but in like a lot of these poems are trying to get you to, to look at something that it is almost impossible to say in words, or or that the word. When you look at the words hard enough, they start getting so fuzzy that like you have to, you have to feel them, not not define them, and that's that's a big ask for a lot of people who want most communication to be somewhat linear, although I say that and I think about like, even like the meta textuality of means, memes and stuff on the internet that like they also kind of work. Similarly, if you like, a lot of them are not actually cognitively. There's so many references in them that they're not actually cognitively clear.

C. Derick Varn: 19:35

Yeah, yeah, yeah so you know um well, the.

Bianca Stone: 19:41

It is interesting with um, you know, with, with poetry, our way of understanding how. You know that language is a kind of like transaction in which one can uh, like, like uh Badu was talking about with the mathemey um, and and the sort of like following the um, was it Dionea or um, right, so being able to traverse, uh, between ideas and thoughts and make deductions from that, and that poetry dissolves that, that there are certain points in the poem. Always, if a poem is successful, in my opinion and I think this goes across the board in terms of what poetry is is that, like, you can't link together and deduct a clear answer out of it. Now, it's interesting because isn't. Doesn't that reflect in a way, being because isn't, isn't there so much about? I mean, even when we talk about the unconscious that is unknowable, untranslatable beyond language, at the same time, we use language and poetry specifically to intimate these things. I would say, like, poetry always comes up in these moments and for plato it was too right. He had to revert to the images of the sun and, you know, images from different myths in order to grasp and and and and um, elucidate and enlarge on those moments where language was failing or something Right, um, so right, in a sense. I always think of too, like allowing for the, the mystery and the unknowability of experience in the poem allows for us to keep knowing, right, so it's in the service of continued knowing and in this sort of like unfolding of knowledge and truth as we go on. So you know, and this stretches across time, if we can still go back to poems written hundreds of years ago that posed the question but don't give the answer, or have multiple answers or two truths, then we have this sort of like question posed across time that keeps giving.

Bianca Stone: 22:38

And I think this is interesting in terms of talking about translation too, because when one is like having so many issues translating roka over the years, or avid or whatever, it is like we continue in the context of our history, in the context of our psychical movements as species, you know, in in context with the political, let's say, to language changes, language evolves, language has its own sense of consciousness. It's not some stagnant thing in the past, right I? It would, it would have to, right I, want I. Clearly some part of that is about the unknowability or the untranslatability of, um, I'm afraid to say, ideas but, like you know sort truths, I guess I would say in the poem, um, but it's, it is so fucking interesting because, you know, I have a couple of friends who are like you, like they've deep read stuff.

Bianca Stone: 23:40

You know that they're like deep in the philosophy and, uh, you know, or in the um psychoanalytic discourse. That's like when I creep on it on Twitter X, I'm like I don't understand what they're talking about most of the time and I find it like kind of fascinating and fun to like watch, right, but it's so, um, let's say like incredibly, like deep into theory and seems very complicated and hard to understand. And then I'll send them a poem like I, I don't understand this poem and I'm like this is amazing that like you're so smart in this one way, but like you can't surrender to this because it's also not like the poems nonsense, right, I mean, and I've become so good at analyzing poems and analyzing for meaning in poems that, like, when I read a poem, it's not like I'm just, you know, sometimes I'll read a Ashbery poem and I'm not analyzing it for like the overall meaning of it. Right, it it works differently than that, but you know, but I can still glean meaning from it everywhere and it's conscious and unconscious on the poet's part, right, um.

Bianca Stone: 24:57

And then there's these moments where it feels untranslatable, like I, and it also would be like terrible and would ruin the poem if I could translate it. And but yet one experiences it anyway, right? So I think to that, like it's kind of a, like a surrender to not knowing and like not having to explain what freedom that is like. Wouldn't it be great if we could? Just you know, this is where psychoanalysis comes in too is like oh, what happens when we like free, associate or listen to madness, or listen to nonsense, and like what, what? Yes, there's a lot of like madness, right, that that means nothing in there, but always there is meaning at some point that that creates change in the moment between people, um, and, and one furthers themselves psychically, I think.

C. Derick Varn: 25:52

Yeah, I mean we're. You mentioned this use of Plato and Badiou and I was. You know.

C. Derick Varn: 26:02

This part of this conversation is reminding me of something he says in there about syntax specifically that, like you know, poets have to be I'm paraphrasing here but poets have to use syntax, but syntax itself is unpoetic.

C. Derick Varn: 26:15

That like, because you know, for because what syntax is is, like you know, a boundary gate of a kind of logic, right, like we're inscribing the logic down with with these, you know, punctuation and word order depending on the language and particles depending on the language. And yet there's a way in which even poetry that doesn't seem like it's obvious you know that is ancient poetry that doesn't immediately seem, quote, weird, the way that people assume my poetry does still is in tension with that Like. And I also think about, you know, this thing about translatability, like I'm trying to get when a poem breaks syntax for a reason in ancient poetry, like you know, I think there's some of this in Homer, and you're just like dealing with what the meaning of that break is, even in the break in the logic, what the meaning of that break is even in the break in the logic, like, and that makes a lot of linear thinkers really uncomfortable, the break in the syntax and they're like what the hell does this mean, right?

C. Derick Varn: 27:45

Yeah.

Bianca Stone: 27:46

Yeah, I mean it's hard. Yeah, go on.

C. Derick Varn: 27:51

No no go ahead.

Bianca Stone: 27:52

Well, I think as a poet, you become more and more obsessed with syntax and the construction of the line itself, which is a very subtly complex form of you know way of approaching writing, right? So we have different rules and laws about how grammar and syntax and structure works in our writing in terms of how it's taught in contemporary Western culture. But the poem upends that. Of course, the problem I have with a lot of my students is they're sort of like doing it randomly, they don't have any, they're experimenting, which is great, but at the same time like, unfortunately like. One thing I could say for the Greeks too is like they were. So poetry was such an integral part of their culture that everybody studied it from the beginning and it was like interwoven in their lives completely as a way to like understand their lives and their beliefs, right, and their and their spirituality and everything. So, um, people studied the way that poetry was written by people in the past who had written poetry, and the structures of language and how to do it. Right, so we can think about form. When people talk about, nobody really writes in form anymore, right, we're not writing. When people write sonnets, they're not an iambic pentameter, they're. They may be like 17 lines, not an iambic pentameter, but we're just calling it a sonnet. You know, nobody's writing villanelles, right, nobody's even scanning, right. So it's more intuitive nowadays. But the Greeks knew that study of the form was very important, but they also knew that breaking it and creating newness out of it was important. And a lot of that came from like it and creating newness out of it was important, and a lot of that came from like, um, a lot of that came from an appreciation of the unseen forces at work within the self and like the gods moving through us or something like that Right, so like one becomes sort of like uh, um, a mouthpiece for something beyond the self. And in these ways, like that is really dangerous to have an individual speaking truths through their poetry as if, as if the gods were speaking through one Right, so it would be like an important role to have.

Bianca Stone: 30:28

Anyway, I say all this to come back to the idea of syntax now, which is that syntax we don't study the importance of, I guess, the history of construction of the line, but then also are important decisions on where to break that. But we do focus on things like okay, I'm going to break the line here for a certain reason Maybe I half know it, maybe I don't. Sometimes we can sort of see that it creates double meaning and things like that. It creates expectations to the reader oh it means this. And then we get the other line. We see it doesn't mean that it means something else. So we're kind of fucking with the reader a little bit.

Bianca Stone: 31:14

Um, I it's when I was reading to about the idea of logic being important for the philosophical um structure, obviously, and it not. It is very important for the poetic line to, syntactically, we create our own logic within the line. And so when I'm working with students too on their poems and like the line is too obfuscating and it's not speaking to me as a reader, it's because they're not creating a kind of logic within the images and metaphors that they're exploring. And I think we're a little afraid of the power that comes with creating our own logic and syntax. But that's how the poet is a maker and poesis is a kind of like power to create out of nothing, seemingly nothing.

C. Derick Varn: 32:17

Something Seemingly nothing.

Bianca Stone: 32:20

I think nothing is supposed to come from nothing, but it's like creating something out of seemingly nothing.

C. Derick Varn: 32:28

Yeah, it's when you think about the way people would approach didactic poetry. We've talked about other stuff in syntax and all that poem. If it works as didactics, it's not going to go into the kind of liminal spaces of creation that poems probably should. I'm very hesitant to say always should, but probably should. It seems like. It seems like honestly, it seems like honestly. It seems like a weird use of the form, like like you're using a form of communication that's ill suited for this.

Bianca Stone: 33:19

In some ways, I think poetry, yeah, you have to understand in a way, when we're approaching poetry, that it's a relational event between two people not present to each other.

Bianca Stone: 33:31

In that way, when we're approaching poetry, that it's a relational event between two people not present to each other. In that way, the reader is a co-creator in the poem. It's just to reiterate again, like if you're telling somebody how things work and what they should understand and do, you're not giving them any chance to create the poem with you. And this is the secret of poetry is that it's not about understanding it, it's about participating in an experience with it and seeing what you can know from it. There's a place for didactic education, but I wonder if one is. You know, maybe it is closer to what my understanding of sophistry is is like using the poetic methods in order to convince somebody of something, which is a kind of, in a way, like this idea of the lie. Um, in poetry, which of course plato was this was important to him that, like, poets lie and we can't have lying for the masses, because most of the masses don't understand only on one hand. He was like most people. Most people aren't smart enough to discern what the lie is actually doing. They only understand the surface level of the lie. It makes me think of the way people interpret the Bible right to myth, which is that, like, language and narrative and is is like is used in order to, like, encode in word hidden, esoteric truths that cannot be looked at directly. That, in a way, it is a lie, right, because you're telling the story that didn't happen exactly that way and you're and you're making things up right, you're putting on a personas and all these different things in poetry. Why, right? This is another issue with the political right. Does the political, can a political poem hold room for a persona? Can it hold room for, like?

Bianca Stone: 36:10

I was reading Elliot Weinberger's essay on poetry of witness, right, like, what does it mean to write a poem like having been a witness to something? And then, why does that give you the authority to be? Why does that make it political that you have this, this like journalistic eye on things, but doesn't? How can that? How? What does it mean to hold witness to something? When you're in a mask? You know when, when you're, you're talking about unknowability and paradox and ambivalences and two truths and the unconscious, like how does that? How does that work, right? So, and who are the people deciding? Um, what makes somebody able to talk about one thing and not another, you know. So all these issues come up with.

Bianca Stone: 37:01

I think, hairy issues come up in talking about the political poem which is, you know, you could even say that the act of writing a poem in general is a political act, because it's a radical act of an individual speaking in their voice and presenting their own, the world, against and at odds with what might be acceptable morally. For, you know, I don't, I don't know so, but when we think about what makes something political, we would say what that it's it has to deal with a group of people, or it has to it, or it has to embody an element of what a group of people want or don't want, right? Um, when you think about the Russians back in the day, who all had to write political poetry, or they were out, you know, writing about your personal life was an act of defiance to the political poem.

C. Derick Varn: 38:33

Oh, yeah, that's. I mean, you know, we were talking off air about one of the ironies of the two great communist leaders, and I use that with all appropriate scare quotes. We were talking about mal being a poet, but I was also like stalin was a poet. Stalin was actually a good poet, even um uh, which is, yeah, I know, um mal poetry is like yeah, but like stalin's poetry is actually pretty good and marx's poetry, if you've ever, there are some marx poems in there, yeah, some Marx poems, and they're the most yeah, they're not good and they're very gothy, to use a modern term, but Stalin's poetry is, like, strangely good.

C. Derick Varn: 39:19

And I was thinking about this tension you know we've been talking about, we've been referencing kind of obliquely from the vantage point of the M Naimul Babadu. But I was also thinking about this tension that you see in Zizek. Not that I Zizek's kind of a bet, nor I actually don't love Zizek, but one of the things about Zizek is he talks about basically that that poets are almost always statusized in a way that makes them closer to authoritarians and that maybe Plato was right. And I find this very funny because I'm like well, I can think of a lot of authoritarian leaders who were poets, absolutely nationalist. However, there are infinitely more who were not.

Bianca Stone: 40:22

Yeah, yeah, I mean Freud said, you know, freud noted that poetry was indigenous to the very mind. We're all poets, right? Some of us wield it as a profession and are more apt, or we become poets, right? Um, but I don't, I don't know, I mean I, you can't say that only one kind of person is a poet, right? I mean, a poetry might be our, our way of dealing with, um, working through, you know, I'm not surprised, in a way, that these, you know, massive and controversial leaders dabbled in poetry at one time because they were probably working through a lot of complex thoughts that had also an important like wrestled with their inner, private, formative experiences as a person in the world. And it's like you're drawn to poetry in order to do that which is a kind of necessity, in order to get you have to get, you kind of have to get through it. But well, let's see, here's the problem, here's the problem Now.

Bianca Stone: 42:07

Jung talked about this and everybody, I think, should read this book called the Undiscovered Self. It's very short, it's actually a long essay, but made into a book by Jung. The Undiscovered Self, which he wrote in reaction to World War II, was emphasizing the importance of a fierce and honest and, of course, painful inner gaze at oneself and in order to be able to live honestly and in in a mass society. Because if we don't do that introspective work, we start projecting that stuff onto everyone else and saying you know the shadows out there, over there and on that side, and everybody you know, for you know the, the political like wave, wave of popularity or tone or whatever it's, the divisiveness of it, everyone's going to be like that's the shadow and no one's going to be looking inward at any sort of culpability and it's all just going to keep perpetuating itself, I believe and he's talking about psychoanalysis, of course, situating itself, I believe, you know, and this is, you know, he's talking about psychoanalysis, of course, but I think poetry in a way engages with a similar fierce and individual introspective gaze and I think that is an important element to the political because we have to balance it out.

Bianca Stone: 43:47

Right, we have to make decisions for the many in the political sphere in the city, but how can we live as a faceless of like outlet for that? But the and the irony is is that in psychoanalysis you're, you're in conversation with another person in a deeply intimate way. That's also boundaried, obviously, but like, even in an individual way, you're in relation. So it's in a way it's like a microcosm of a cosmic relation to others. So it it. It seems it's not isolated in the self alone, it's never. It's in relation to the other, in that space, and then one sees themselves honestly in with the other. And then, I don't know, in poetry is this is similar.

C. Derick Varn: 44:56

I think I can pull many themes from this and maybe we can turn to a specific poem, but I want to pull the themes. I think poetry is in most cases and I'm always hesitant to say all poetry to excellent. I'm going to find a poem that doesn't that. I think of Bakhtin, emin Bakhtin and the Soviet theory of really prose, actually way more than poetry and I'm speech-driven than it is. But the reason why I think of it is that poetry makes this dialogic nature of how language works and how the self works. If you go to the self, that like, if you go to the self, you're not just talking to the meat being and the unconscious of the meat being that you are, you are also dealing with the social being that has given you all the codes and all the utterances, uh, that, that give that any meaning. That could you know. The encounter with other people is actually the only way that self has meaning at all, and I think the insight you made about psychoanalysis actually ties into this too. It's a conversation, and the way in which the self gets understood in psychoanalysis, the way you can even get to ordinary unhappiness, is actually. It's an intimate process but it is a social process. At the same time, it's a relational process. So the poem is this interesting site where you have a relation to someone that you don't have a relation with In the case of like poems and translation, for example. This is an interesting thing to think about. I have a relation to what is probably a poetic tradition that we deem a dude Homer. I'm encountering that poem which, once you kind of unlearn everything you learned about it in ninth grade it's a way fucking weirder poem than you think it is.

C. Derick Varn: 47:15

The Iliad and the Odyssey are strange even for Greek stuff. It's just like, okay, we got to narrate, even in its construction. I'm like, okay, so half this is a flashback, told to this other queen that we haven't even mentioned, that it's in a frame story. And then like we kind, okay, so half this is a flashback, told to this other queen that we haven't even mentioned, that it's an in-frame story. And then, like we kind of know that the speaker that we're talking to is a liar and he's told us he's a liar over and over and over again. And also when he comes back home and he gets what he wants, he fucks everything up.

C. Derick Varn: 47:46

And the language in this is also really weird, if you actually get to start digging into the Attic Greek. So it's like, yeah, and so I encounter this and I, you know, there's, you know, with a poem that old and it was that central to culture. I mean, people forget people used to read Homer like they read the fucking Bible. There's, you know, obstinately, almost 3,000 years of interpreted tradition and also in almost in hundreds and hundreds of languages like it's not just in.

C. Derick Varn: 48:20

you know Greek and English here and we're coming to that, and yet when I come to that, some of those fragments of the tradition of Homer that I've picked up somewhere, just socially, is there and I can't undo that that's already there in the, in the consciousness. But also I have to recreate this and make all these fragments make meaning. Every time I encounter that poem and I pick. I pick the Odyssey or the Iliad. You can pick either one of them, because they're so ubiquitous. The Bible's another one, All these biblical I mean. One of the things that I find fascinating is when you start learning all the poetics in Hebrew and Koine Greek that are in the Bible and you start learning genre traditions that show up and you're just like I had no idea that this stuff had other meanings. This syntax is foreign to me. I've been told to read this like linear and straightforward and it doesn't work.

C. Derick Varn: 49:17

But there's also no way that I can undo these various interpreted traditions, like I'm not even a Christian and yet Christian, necessarily come into my head when I hit, you know, trying to understand something in the Canuck in the old Testament, because I live in that culture as part of the dialogic world that I live in, and I think poetry if you let yourself be okay with the fact that you have to deal with recreating this unnameable like to use a popular term today almost a vibe that you have to interpret and create with the poet A person who is in most cases, since there's more poetry by dead people than a lot of people, there's more dead people than a lot of people you can't even access. And then, if you can like, if you ask me about a poem, I'm gonna unintentionally lie about its meaning. A lot of the time I'm not even thinking like I don't. I'm not intentionally lying, I'm just like you mean your own poem or somebody?

C. Derick Varn: 50:24

else my own poem particularly.

Bianca Stone: 50:25

I mean no poet wants to talk about what their poem means. No, it doesn't feel a little bit like the the pro, like when, when, if, if somebody does demand meaning and you you could be like. Well, I can tell you what prompted this poem, what I thought I meant, and it so cheapens it. It's like the narrative, like autobiographical stuff that one mind in order to create this poem like is irrelevant a little bit. You know, it's fun too. Like we love talking about the context of poets lives and I think you know, especially with like roka or something right. But but in terms of our intention and our one should hope that the poem knows more than we do after we've written it.

Bianca Stone: 51:09

I don't want to know exactly what I meant, if I've, if I know everything that I was trying to do in the poem. Like I don't like the poem, like the poem sucks. I want to be surprised by my poem. I look at my poem. It's like that greek idea, right, who wrote this? Like if I have this feeling of like surprise at any moment of my poem, an unfamiliarity, and I don't know exactly what this means, like I feel really good about it, like it's a win, like I've achieved what I wanted and I can move on.

C. Derick Varn: 51:42

Yeah, I've sat through. You know I'm lucky to be known more as a political figure and a philosophical figure than a poetic figure in some ways. Um, and the reason why I say I'm lucky is I no longer get asked as much to explain my poetry as I used to. Uh, but when I I have done interviews recently where people like can you tell me what this means? And I'm just like I could tell you, but I mean, frankly, I'll be bullshitting you yeah, like I don't really remember or even know where all this is coming from and like and also it.

C. Derick Varn: 52:20

It, I think you're right, it cheapens the poem as a social experience, because you're coming to me as an authority and the poem is more like, no, you have to make something out of this and and like, you have to do that with all language actually experience, because you're coming to me as an authority and the poem is more like, no, you have to make something out of this and like, you have to do that with all language actually.

Bianca Stone: 52:34

But it's really obvious with a poem Like um but you can see why there's anxiety in terms of the political, where it's like one doesn't want the law, like the interpretation of law is a huge issue, right. Who gets to interpret the law? Oh the, you know issue, right. Who gets to interpret the law? Oh, the you know. The supreme court gets to interpret the law. Who gets to be on the supreme court is obviously like, like a huge choice because these people are interpreting it um, whereas right there there's no, uh, no incontrovertible set of principles laid down in the poem. In fact, it was like Rimbaud who said that poetry alchemizes the word. Right, so in the political, you wouldn't want to alchemize the beliefs of the group. All of a sudden, you know like, uh, though at the same time like we do it all the time though we do, we do, it changes on its own.

Bianca Stone: 53:52

The way that our Constitution, for example, is interpreted by a mass amount of people in this country is like I don't know if that's an alchemy. That's not the same thing as alchemy, but it's certainly interpretation.

C. Derick Varn: 54:07

Well, one of the interesting things. I studied English and philosophy and anthropology off of the idea that it would help me initially in law, and then I fell in love with the poetry part and thought, well, I was stupid.

Bianca Stone: 54:26

You thought it would help you in law.

C. Derick Varn: 54:28

Yeah, with law it probably would. Yeah, well, it does, um, but but you, you also start realizing that, like, for example, um, I think it's pretty well known amongst most lefties and liberals that originalism is bullshit, and I think it's even pretty well known now amongst most conservative.

Bianca Stone: 54:51

Originalism, like what people originally intended.

C. Derick Varn: 54:54

Right, because you can't actually know. Right, you can only you can only like build a proxy representation, maybe, sort of, and when it gets hard or when it gets politically inconvenient, I'll be frank with you. All those justices I mean some of them go further than others about how far they'll take that. But those justices all break at a certain point where they're just like fuck it, now, we're just going to go with our current political biases, right?

Bianca Stone: 55:24

Well, also like why does this one person like intent, why is that? Is that set for eternity? As like a moral purity? Like is there some sort of like objective moral rightness that we can cling to because somebody wrote it in like 1700? You know, it's just probably not, but I interrupted you.

Bianca Stone: 55:47

Go on no, no, um, I think that's actually a fair point, I mean so if you can't, so how can you write laws that make room for change, and in an evolving society? In an evolving society, or rather, how can you make a society that is able to change with its laws or something you know, like? Something has to be, sort of.

C. Derick Varn: 56:23

Well, in the US experiment, and obviously there are huge, huge problems with this. I could go into the myriad of ways that the left-winger I think is problematic, but one thing I will say is that even if you go back to the Constitution, the so-called bourgeois values in the shrines are both self-contradictory and difficult, and if you try to make them not so, it is almost always a dishonest move. Um, because, and even in the history of the country like um, it seems to me like we talk about originalism and I'm always like well in in some ways that the, the document that you're being originalist about, abrogates itself. So, for example, like the civil war, amendments um literally undo the, the fact that the bill of rights never applied to States and States could have religious tests and racial tests or what the fuck ever until the civil war, and they all did.

C. Derick Varn: 57:28

No, all did not all, like Virginia didn't, but most of them did, and even to the point, like before, even with just with dealing with like quote, like the white men who were allowed to vote in the 19th century, trying to figure out who they were, in what area and in what state, is almost impossible to do. So like, and that doesn't seem like a poetic problem, but it's actually related because all these things are interpreted and if you try to freeze them, they become super fragile. You know, legal interpretive traditions, the ones that stand, and most of the ones that stand are religious, but like, if none of them are interpreted so generously on their own. If you, if you, if you approach like the Islamic law, you have to interpret it through Hadith, which is a tradition relationship. If you approach Halakha, you have to interpret it through approach halakha, you have to interpret it through um uh, rabbinical commentary, which is not in agreement with itself and is extremely social. If you, I mean christians might deny it, but if you approach the bible, you have to interpret it through an interpretive tradition to even make those law make any sense. And most of them are abrogated.

C. Derick Varn: 58:45

So it it's just when you look at law systems that survive and you know, we think of laws with governments, but I'm not even sure that we should always do that. You can see that the ones that survive are almost infinitely flexible. Like I could, you, you know, I could go into, you know scholarship about islamic or jewish or christian law and be like they have reinterpreted this like every you know, probably generation and a half, uh, for thousands of years, and it changes. And the people who try to tell you that it isn't, who try to make, make it like this, to bring it back to Plato, this geometric form, those people are usually A dangerous and B lying.

C. Derick Varn: 59:37

So I think poetry makes that obvious. Like, if you just start, you deal with, like the fact that we're dealing in the same, I mean from the human perspective, the kind of technology that we're dealing with, and put that in quotation marks that we're dealing with in law and that we're dealing with in poetry is remarkably similar, but they seem entirely different. And it's partly because the poem makes it obvious that you have to co-create this and you know, and I also think that is for a lot of people, that's a major anxiety, right, like co-creation is like oh no, I have responsibility for the meaning. Oh shit, yeah, and there's probably a right answer, because they're traumatized by some like ninth grade English teacher somewhere.

Bianca Stone: 1:00:27

Well, we, we don't have, we don't grow up getting that opportunity, like it gets squashed out of us, to make meaning with language that we're presented with.

C. Derick Varn: 1:00:46

I wanted to turn this to a poem you sent me by Larry Levis, which is about Lorca, and I was thinking about the way, you know, you mentioned going all the way back, you mentioned the way poets use masks or deflections, and if you wouldn't mind reading the poem, and then maybe we can use that to kind of concretize and problematize everything we just said.

Bianca Stone: 1:01:10

Yeah, let me grab it. Okay. So this is from Larry Levis's selected, and it's from the book the Dollmaker's Ghost. It's called Garcia Lorca, a photograph of the Granada Cemetery, 1966.

Bianca Stone: 1:01:47

The men who killed poetry hated silence. Now they have plenty. In the ossuary at Granada there are over 4,000 calm skulls whitening. The shrubs are in leaf behind the bones and if anyone tries to count spines, he can feel his own scalp start to crawl back to its birthplace.

Bianca Stone: 1:02:16

Once I gave you a small stone I respected. When I turned it over in the dawn after staying up all night, its pale depths resembled the tense face of Lorca, spitting into an empty skull. Why did he do that? Someone should know. Someone should know by now that the stone was only an amulet to keep the dead away.

Bianca Stone: 1:02:42

And though your long bones have nothing to do with Lorca or those deaths 40 years ago, in Spain the trees fill with questions and summer. He would not want tonight another elegy. He would want me to examine the marriage of wings beneath your delicate collarbones. They breathe, the ribs of your own palms breathe. And here is our dark house, at the end of the lane, and here is the one light we have kept on all year for no one or Lorca. And now he comes towards it with the six bullet holes in his chest, walking lightly so he will not disturb the sleeping neighbors or the almonds withering in their frail arcs above us. He does not want to come in. He stands embarrassed under the street lamp in his rumpled suit, snow lullaby, anvil of bone that terrifies the blacksmith in his sleep. Your house is breath.

C. Derick Varn: 1:03:51

Yeah.

Bianca Stone: 1:03:53

It's like the wind is like coming in my window and my lawnmower is going. As I read this, the poetry is coming in the room. It's, it's breath.

C. Derick Varn: 1:04:05

Yeah, it's breath, this poem. Yeah, it's rough, this poem, and I realize that I've read it before because I probably read the Selected Levis like three times. So good, it's a poem that does a lot and is very okay with negative capacity and ambiguity about what it's doing. But I would, I think we would both agree this is probably a political poem in so much that it is about a specific event kind of, although it's also about events that we don't know. I mean, the you in this poem is is contemporary to, to Levis, I assume, and while you know I do a lot myself with like playing with the idea of the constructed you and lyric poems and like being, you know, fucking with people about what that means, it's clearly not Lorca.

Bianca Stone: 1:05:09

Right.

Bianca Stone: 1:05:09

Right, there's a yeah, yeah, go ahead well, there there's an intimacy with the, with the you, this giving of the stone. It feels a little bit like it. It feels like it's definitely a person, right, maybe a lover or something like that. Um, but it feels too like a little bit like the reader, right Right, being given a stone and the stone reminds him of Lorca, feels like the poem itself too. I like that. It's a stone to the inert, the dead, which Lorca is. But there's something living in the inert in this poem, in Lorca as well, seems to come back to life.

C. Derick Varn: 1:05:48

Yeah, in this poem in Lorca as well, seems to come back to life. Yeah well, I mean the act in that stanza with the stone reminding one of the tense face of Lorca spitting into an empty skull, which also is just a great fucking image.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:03

But, it's also, in some ways, this is one of those times where I'm like. It's also, in some ways, this is one of those times where I'm like, if the author is giving you anything, they might model how you're creating meaning in the poem. And this one does that Because it's like we're dealing with an inert stone that we already have this association with, with a Granada graveyard that is full of dead, not just from of an inert stone that we already have this association with, with a granada, uh, graveyard that is full of dead, not just from from you know, the spanish civil war, but from centuries and uh, of which the spanish civil war is a 40 year old instant, uh, at the, you know, at the time of the poem's writing. And yet the stone is also like that's an act of creation to take that stone and see in it this image of Lorca spitting into a skull and then wondering why he would have done that.

Bianca Stone: 1:07:07

It's very meta in the poem too, because why would he do that? Okay, why would a poet do? It's a little bit. It feels like a poet doing something like that and it feels highly symbolic and significant, but we can't know what it means. It's also like the living interacting with the dead and the inert and spitting one's own body into the dead. There's such this back and forth between the dead and the living in this poem.

Bianca Stone: 1:07:38

But two with the opening line the men who killed poetry great line break here. Hated silence. Then in ellipses, and interesting, I always think of how bachelard said that in ellipses is always an analysis. Now they have plenty, right, um, hated silence, right, the men who hated. To hate poetry is to hate silence, to hate negative capability, to hate the lack of language and speech. And irony here which I think we've touched upon already, which is that, like the poem always contains that unnameable, unspeakable and unknowable thing, negative thing, zero, that it's almost like, defines it and it speaks around, which in this poem too, in terms of the political, how glorica was assassinated. I didn't think his body was ever found. It's interesting, he says six bullet holes.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:35

So it's very specific, um yeah, I was like it's very specific and yet also made up what yeah, yeah, there's that line, there's that line.

Bianca Stone: 1:08:50

But it makes right and to the aesthetic too, like a poet. There is such importance of aesthetics over, maybe, ethics or morality in poetry. Right, because somehow the beauty gets at the truth, but like a poet would be like six bullet holes in the chest sounds better. I don't know why, but it does, and like it sounds better, like right after that M dash too Right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:18

Right, I mean, I think it's interesting. I mean there's a, there's a way in which this poem itself is also mad, because Larry Levers is also dead.

Bianca Stone: 1:09:30

Also dead right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:31

Right and that when.

Bianca Stone: 1:09:34

I stayed up all night. I was like on meth Larry, but yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:41

Yeah, I was about to say, given that we know how he died drug overdose and heart attack, cardiac arrest, drug overdose that, like there's also hints here about himself right, right, very personal uh, and it doesn't hide that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:58

I mean the way the eye function in in here, um, but the the tension between observation and creation runs throughout this poem, and I was to tie this back to the unnameable essay that we've been referencing, which I would tell people to go read, for those of you who want to know where it's at. It's in the age of poets, by Badu. He talks about the where was I looking at?

C. Derick Varn: 1:10:50

That that the enamel of Mattheans that meta poetry is kind of impossible, yeah, which I find interesting because I'm like, but it's also all over poetry, and I was thinking about this here, that, like, one of the things with meta poetry is that the poem about the creation of poetry, if it's any good, almost can't stay just about that, like um, like you know, and there are meta elements to this absolutely, but it seems to be that, like that they get reincorporated back into the poem as an act of creation itself, and I think that's what ben is trying to get at there. Like that, like, if you try to write a poem, it's just about the construction of a poem. It's going to be about something else too, and so the pure meta poem is not totally possible they're hard, they're much less fun to read yeah, I would.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:48

My response to meta poetry is like if, if it's just about writing a poem, I'm not sure that I care. Yeah.

Bianca Stone: 1:11:59

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:12:00

Um, but that tension there it's interesting because I don't. I do think without the the over elements are like the modeling in the poem. This poem is almost impossible. I don't think it's impossible to understand, but if the poem does kind of walk you through what it is doing with itself, in the images that it's giving you, that second stanza is almost like a key to what the poem is doing. So that tension is interesting to me and I was like what do you make of that tension and why would it be so frightening to people when they're like, oh, poetry is useless because I'm like, hmm, why would you think that? I know?

Bianca Stone: 1:12:43

it's yeah, it's strange to me, I can own could, because I grew up reading poetry like I just don't understand what it's like to not switch your brain a little bit to this. It's just like a small pivot, right. It's like just let the poem happen to you, like, just surrender to it, like you don't have to like. It's not about like approaching everything, saying what does it mean, you know. It's like when people say to, to like. It's not about like approaching everything, saying what does it mean, you know. It's like when people say to me what's your tattoo mean? I'm like, if I like, oh, it means you know strength and resilience, you know, like it's. It just cheapens meaning so much like I'm like meaning is so like, okay, do you have 45 minutes? Like let's have a conversation. I don't know like it's so fun to think about meaning, right, but we get to uncover it together, like you and I right now with this poem. But I think there is I mean you said it looks like terror of. It might have something to do with the unconscious, because I think poetry stirs the unconscious experience, right, your personal experience it. It makes it very. It's a very intimate, it's actually a very intimate overlapping of consciousnesses, so it can feel you can put a wall up immediately right Cause you don't know how you're feeling a little bit, and that's scary and it stirs up negative feelings too. Like scary, like shadowy things, death, love, all right up. If death, if death and and joy are in the same poem. Like people can't handle ambivalences a lot of the time and they spend 10 years in therapy trying to. You know it's like um, but actually it's so much more satisfying to I think um now. Now, god, it's almost like a dream to a little bit.

Bianca Stone: 1:14:54

This poem and I think of how, uh, people think of dreams as this sort of like biological necessity and like weird oh, that's weird and quirky, but like you can glean so much about what the hell is going on in your life and like truths about what you need to face. And look at that Once you do. Like it opens you up more to experience and being in the world and like I feel, like I'm like, why do any of this, derek? I was having this feeling. I was like why am I doing any of this? Like any of this, derek? I was having this feeling. I was like why am I doing any of this? Like, why am I on this, like pursuit of, like poetry and philosophy and psychoanalysis, and like song and all of it, like why, and I was like there is like working toward like a kind of goodness or something, or a kind of like being in the world that that feels more full and more like it's has something to do with, almost like it isn't, it is, it is joy, right, I think joy is a result of it is like an excitement about it, but like understanding a bit more of the goodness of being in this world, which includes the ugliness utterly. And I don't know.

Bianca Stone: 1:16:14

When I read poems like this, where it's like, you know, lorca comes ambling down the dark street in his you know rumpled suit and stands embarrassed under a streetlight, I feel like better about being in the world, because I feel a sense of myself as humiliated in life and fearing death and and I I will, you know, I'll be forgotten or something. And like here in this poem is like Larry Levis is dead, lork is dead, this horrible you know war happened, like war's happening right now and like this poem somehow sees me and and they all live on, or something like the consciousness is contained in this poem. I'm still interacting with something greater than myself, historically, is present, will keep happening this ending line your house is breath. This poem is breath, right there the meta moment. He's not in a metaphysical exploration, it just happens. And the meta poem happens on its own, it doesn't need your intention.

Bianca Stone: 1:17:21

But the poem is breath. But it's not just the poem. Our body is a house. That is breath. It's the sort of architecture, the, the containment. The breath I think of is wind. Wind I think of as indicative of the unseen, what flows through us, what continues on life on this planet. Um, I don't know.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:43

Song there's yeah, I, I, I, I've been. I mean, I keep on getting hit by the contrast within the first line, the men who killed poetry hated silence.

Bianca Stone: 1:17:53

Yeah, I lived these.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:56

Now they have plenty, which is like. I'm also like oh, that's a, that's a mean ellipses and they deserve it. But the contrast is the men who killed poetry. Skip to the end of the poem. Your house is breath. I mean, even the act of reading the poem makes you breathe you have you have gone through this.

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:15

Uh, the dead don't breathe. So if your house is breath, this is the negation of the, of the men who kill poetry. But and like you know, as a poet, I'll just say, like I have no idea if levis actually set out to to to do that intentionally. I often find those kind of circular, you know, when people talk about the neat, like clicking, because that's a very click in, like the ending touches the beginning, like that um, so satisfying when it works right but it is a lot of unintentional Right, and you feel it does not seem a moment's thought.

Bianca Stone: 1:19:10

All our stitching and unstitching has been for naught, because you don't want to see. You just don't want to seem like it should seem like a moment's thought, a breath, like it's happening right now. But I think to your point, though, is it? Did Larry Levis like begin this poem knowing where it's going to end, whereas like it's interesting because you could kind of think of the philosopher being like, I've worked out this idea about the house's breath and silence and I'm going to write my way to break it down into a way to understand how we interpret being. Larry Levis is just engaged, he's just letting it happen in the poem and see, you know he's just. He probably started with the first line, you know, or maybe he started with the stone, that memory of the stone, or something like that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:20:11

Yeah, I often find I mean, it's always dangerous to deduce from your own method other people's methods, so people take that with a grain of salt. But I often find with myself that if I find a perfect click point in a poem like this, it's, it is deliberate in that I chiddled a bunch of shit away or moved all this kind of stuff around so it would happen. But I I I've never been able to be like I'm gonna start a poem here. Yeah, I'm here and it's just gonna work.

C. Derick Varn: 1:20:41

I've never written a poem like that in my life like yeah, and if anyone can, and it also seemed natural like this awesome, amazing, I can't do it. I don't think most poets, I know they find this stuff. They don't. They don't, you know, through the act of actually writing it and then chiseling it, you know, chiseling it away, or or expanding it out yeah, and editing. They don't find it like in this preconceptualized poem in your head um before you write it down right.

Bianca Stone: 1:21:13

It's almost like you have like an inkling of something that's and in the writing is the discovery of it's. Like even thinking about roca doing something like wanting to engage with the myth of orpheus and wanting to reimagine an interpretation of it. I can right he may have set out with the not like the more he read that text, the more he started to be like the interpretation sort of blossoming in his head. It was like wait, why did Orpheus turn around and look at Eurydice, like maybe it was a gift, you know, maybe it wasn't a mistake. And then like knowing that you want to include that in the poem. But it always makes it harder when you know you want to include something. Or if there's like a story you know people are like I want to write about my trauma or something Like it always ends up being like so hard to do and feel so stilted and awkward because poems are just harder to plan.

Bianca Stone: 1:22:12

I find personally right Finding a way into something you want to say yeah, yeah, it's like something crazy happened to me and I want to write about it, but usually the best moves for that are are well, one move is just to be very plain about it. This is what I'm doing, but, yeah, once I gave you a small stone, I respected I mean, that could have been something, you know a very important moment in his life that he boiled down to this one line and he had to let go of all the narrative in order to get at the real truth of that interaction. One line, and he had to let go of all the narrative in order to get at the real truth of that interaction.

C. Derick Varn: 1:22:57

Um, yeah, I mean, I think about the, the way that we don't know why he's giving this person a stone, we don't know who this person is. We, we have the inclement, we have the definite information of intimacy and we also have the, the way in which the poetic you almost always functions as a way to be like trying to fuck with the reader, and that the reader is both the you and not the you almost always. It's interesting. You bring up Rauka, because I was thinking about this in poems and other languages. I am totally.

C. Derick Varn: 1:23:36

It's totally funny that you mentioned trying to translate Rauka when I, when I first got into poetry translation, I was obsessed with translating Rauka and Pazarnik. So because also, german and Spanish were the two languages I was studying and and they're both relatively in language scales, they're relatively close to english. Like it's not. Like you know, I have dabbled in translating poetry from like korean and I'm like no, I can't do that. I have no idea. Like like anything I feel like I'm going to create is almost a completely new poem, um, uh, and I've never translated poems for publication, I've just translated them for me but, uh, even a poet like raucca, uh, who I think is not.

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:29

I mean, he's difficult but he's not like super difficult. And German is not English, but it's also one of the more closely related languages to English.

Bianca Stone: 1:24:41

Yeah, listening to Germans talk, I'm always like it sounds like people talking nonsense English.

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:46

Right, yeah, exactly, even more so with like Dutch. I'm like that sounds like a drunk German speaking English. I mean, uh, it's no, but, but you right, listeners, but but, but you have trouble.

Bianca Stone: 1:25:04

Did you have trouble with? Absolutely yeah, because I've heard multiple people say that roca is one of the hardest, especially especially the Duino Elegies to translate period.

C. Derick Varn: 1:25:16

Yes, it's so hard and you always feel like what a testament to the poetry.

Bianca Stone: 1:25:22

You know, I love it. I love looking at all the different translations, though, and how it shows that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:25:29

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think the reason why it's a success with Pizarnik and Rilke, and there was also Nicanor Parra, the Chilean poet. Parra should be easy, by the way. Parra's like anti-poetic straight statements. You know, it should theoretically be easy to translate into English, and maybe I'm an overthinker, but I'm like, no, it isn't, I can't do it, like I can do it, but it's not very good. And when I read so many of the translations and going through them, like oh, many of these are great poems, but it doesn't have all this in the original, and then it got me so paranoid. I mean with German, that was like, do I even understand German? Like, yeah, I understand German. Maybe I don't like that. I'm like do I even understand English?

Bianca Stone: 1:26:16

Right, right, yeah, I mean right Right. Even writing in your own language is like, wait a minute, do I understand? Do I understand? It's almost like the capacity of my language, I think it was Stevens. Like you have to write poetry, you have to like fall in love with words with all your capacity to love anything at all. And it's like another thing people completely forget when they're writing a poem because they're always thinking about, like the narrative or like their message, right, and they can get carried away with how they're coming off and, like you know, trying to be seen a certain way or to like convey a certain message, that didactic idea, to be seen a certain way or to like convey a certain message, that didactic idea, whereas like it's, it's like poetry is concerned with words and language and like, if you focus on how length, the length your language you're working with works and sort of, I mean it's as to reiterate for the billionth time, like it half conscious, half intuitive or unconsciously born, somehow something happens without you know by not focusing on what you think you should focus on when you're conveying information through language.

Bianca Stone: 1:27:30

I was thinking about something I was reading, um, this book kind of about wittgenstein and um roca and wittgenstein really liked roca's thing poems that were like, exploring, looking at objects, um, and he was trying to be, I think, more like, slightly more objective in terms of like, how can I you know, blight talks about this too in a lot of his work but I was like, can I just like write about an object in the world like and and see it so intensely, without informing it too much, with my like personal inner world, or something like? For roca it was very important for him to do this. He wrote like the arch Archaic Torso of Apollo and the Panther poem and all these things it was like. Of course he always ends up bringing the inner world more fully into being through this paradoxical act of looking outward. But Wittgenstein apparently hated later Rilke with his Duino elegies, um, and you know, similar to like, or Adorno saying that, like you know, writing after you know, auschwitz was barbaric and that like looking inward was like escapism that discouraged political awareness, right, and um, there's a couple of things I'm getting at in this, but like, oh, but the important element here is that it's not just about language.

Bianca Stone: 1:29:08

There's something you know, for Wittgenstein it seemed like it was more right. He's so obsessed with words and language. But, like for the poet, for Rocha roca, so much about embodiment, right, the body and landscape and world. Um, I can't remember what I was connecting with that at first, but, like, I guess, the importance of words and obsessing over words and loving words. But it is a little bit too, of course, about, like, how we embody words and how we use words in the context of objects in this world. It's like the relationality between those things in the constellation like become the poem, and that too I think of that. The house's breath, right, that breath it's what makes the poem and that too I think of that. House's breath, right, that breath is what makes the poem. So that is important too.

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:00

Well, it's interesting to me that Wittgenstein would have had an issue with the Duino analogies, in so much that I think of Wittgenstein as this philosopher who kind of gets the problems of language in a way that other philosophers often don't, particularly from that analytic and and like a logical positivist tradition which Frankenstein isn't in but is adjacent to, and the reason why I bring that up is he's one of these people who points out that, like, yeah, good luck defining anything or seeing a clear relationship with a word like, like, like you, you, you know, uh, you'll get these, these relationships of resemble, of like resemblances, and you can see how the metaphor strings.

Bianca Stone: 1:30:48

but you know, go ahead well, I think the resemblance is. Probably what was painful for him for those later Roka poems is that he probably did see himself a little bit more in those poems maybe, and one doesn't always like to see that inner world and it's wrestling with. You know different depression and spiritual crises, you know. You know different depression and spiritual crises. You know for an intellectual that might be hard to to look at. But again, I think of Plato protesting so much about poetry and it sort of in itself being very it's almost like he wasn't wrong and it elucidated a lot about poetry. That's helpful today and in the end you know he was a poet too or something. You know like he. Just like people, we can hate things and have it still be something we love, but we just don't say it out loud.

Bianca Stone: 1:31:59

But later we all get to be like we're like the new platonic, like rebels who like took Plato and like ran with it, and that's what he kind of wanted.

C. Derick Varn: 1:32:13

Yeah, it's, it's actually funny, um, this realization, uh, when I was in my 30s, that, in addition to all the weird esoteric shit in Plato, which I think people underestimate and has been cleaned up, but because I'm like no, there's all kinds of weird theology and stuff in here and there's hidden. But aside that, let's set that aside for a second that Plato really wanted to be geometric.

Bianca Stone: 1:32:45

What is that Like mathematical or?

C. Derick Varn: 1:32:48

Not just mathematical, like the way geometry works, like you find forms and you define the forms and you operate from that point forward and the forms are assumed, they're axiomatic and aprior and, like you, you get that there's this attempt to head towards the geometric way of thinking.

C. Derick Varn: 1:33:10

You know that there's like the math, the Pythagorean, but it doesn't. He can't get there, like it actually ends up being very poetic anyway and in the sense of like there's a lot about words, there's a lot about aporia, there's a lot about what words can't do, um, he, even though he's trying to get to the form the only way he can get to the form is through weird metaphors and allegories Is this the same as the Cartesian issue that we're dealing with today, where we want the provable, measurable scientific method to win out in terms of what's reality and what's worth focusing on and what's worth focusing on, and if we're eradicating the humanities from our educational system because it's not practical and has no use in our culture, are we saying that things must be more geometrically understood or scientifically provable in terms of to make it valid?

Bianca Stone: 1:34:17

And does that? Does that connect to Plato's idea of the real versus the mimetic, or something?

C. Derick Varn: 1:34:28

Yeah, I think it does. I mean, I would say it's not exactly the same, because our notions of science aren't Plato's notions of geometry, but it's the same impulse that, that that ability to say we have a universal system. The thing is, anyone who studies the philosophy of science and actually empirically ties it to what scientists do, realizes that, like there isn't a singular scientific method, that is barely an agreed upon set of definitions of what science is, scientific method.

C. Derick Varn: 1:34:57

There is barely an agreed upon set of definitions of what science is, and, yes, there are things that are clearly kind of not science at all, but that you know the people who are the. I always thought you know, you and I are roughly the same age and I, I w, I was in my twenties during the, the height of the new atheist movement, and they would just talk about reason all the time. And I remember, like hitting those people up with, like what do you mean by reason? What? Like, what is logic for you? Like you realize there are different logical systems, right, even in western culture even if I'm blacking out world culture here, and we're just talking about Europe and America and the anglophone world like there's multiple systems of logic and none of them can actually adjudicate whether or not their axioms are true, and you know. And so what do you mean by reason? And they're like oh no, science is just like codified common sense and I'm like there's nothing commonsensical about, about a quark like yeah, yeah, right um, so it's so what?

Bianca Stone: 1:35:59

yeah, go ahead well, it always makes me wonder, like why, why, you know, what are we like feeling? I feel like the sort of like black and white or absolutism, and in terms of these beliefs, and not seeing the like and not seeing the like wider subtleties of, and meaning and things behind words, like logic and reason, like why, why is it comforting maybe to have this, like?

C. Derick Varn: 1:36:25

this is my idea, this is the truth yeah, I mean it would, uh, well, one, I mean just cycle, like, um, the most vulgar form of cycle analysis I could possibly do, to feel like you could absolutely know the truth on your own deduction from your own. Like that's super, super, super gratifying, but also like I can't think of many things that are more hubristic, like I know how everything in the universe works because I can figure out these, these laws, um, and I am always fascinated, uh, you know, as a person who's very interested in science, and I do have some training in anthropology, which is also may or may not be a science, depending on who you talk to. In one day, um, uh, it's you. You hit these walls where you're, you know, I remember, uh, talking with a physicist when I was in graduate school and and they were talking about the math leading to this, but I was like, but how do you know that? Like, how do you actually know that, like, what you're mathematically deducing, like I, I don't know dark matter is real, because we just historically, we have magnetically deduced all kinds of shit that has been totally made up and we just deduced it to make the math work like ether, um, you, know, I can go through all kinds of concepts uh

C. Derick Varn: 1:37:52

ptolemaic astrology, which is actually astronomy, which is actually other boats kind of boat, but was actually more predictably accurate than actual, than you know, model correctly Astrology, astronomy, for a long time, you know, because people just fiddled with the observations to make it work and yet the basic substructure was entirely wrong, you know. So I just I find that I find that interesting and it's funny because you know I deal in Marxist land and Marxists really want to collapse the normative and the descriptive. Like just you know it's the great German idealist dream to like get rid of the distinction between the normative and the descriptive. Uh, uh, like just you know it's the great German idealist dream to like get rid of the distinction between the normative and the scripture. We're all just want to like tell Hume to go fuck himself. And I find that both like an interesting thing. But I'm like it almost always fails.

C. Derick Varn: 1:38:49

And what's like even Marx, when he tries to do it, a lot of his more interesting things, even politically, is when he can't. Um, when he tries to do it, a lot of his more interesting things, even politically, is when he can't and he kind of knows he can't and it leads to whole projects like some of the most important projects in Marxism are him trying to reconcile that tendency. Okay, so in Marx there is this kind of assumption that, for example, communism is a necessity because these are the ways the law of history works. But he's constantly revising, in his letters and whatnot, the fact that his early predictions don't hold out. Predictions don't hold out and eventually, like das, capital is basically a project in response to the fact that his initial assumptions and the 1850s didn't hold um. And so, you know, the most important document in like left-wing political economy is him in some ways trying to work out in a systemic way how, why he was not correct in his initial assumptions about what was going to lead to an immediate revolution in Europe and start leading to the overthrowing of capitalism. And even there, you know, capital is a very fascinating book, and I get very, you know, as a poet who's also kind of a Marxist, when I read stuff like the poetic reading of Marx's capital. I do kind of want to throw those books against the wall. But I will say it is interesting to me, though, that even in a book like that, he has to reach for metaphors all the damn time and like there's no way out of it, even for someone who's trying to systemically work this out.

C. Derick Varn: 1:40:37

And I find that fascinating and an interesting problem and it's a tension in Marxist and I think you know that tension in the Western Marxist tradition. I hate that term, by the way, but I'm just going to use it today for simplicity's sake. They often turn to psychoanalysis to deal with the kind of a priori there, the weird tension between these social movements that they want to put in laws and the fact that even Marx doesn't think they're explanatory of individuals. And there's a tension in that and the way the social world is creating the individual but also can't be reduced to it, like Marx admits. Like I can talk about class politics but I also know in the individual person their social class will not dictate their politics. Like I'm only talking about the way this works in aggregate and when people hit that, they have to try to reconcile that difference.

C. Derick Varn: 1:41:38

Like how is it that this can be vaguely true in aggregate and I would agree that it mostly is and yet in the individual it's not super predictive at all? And how do we handle that? Like, how do we deal with that ambiguity in our own lives? Like we all know people who have politics that seem against their interest or whatever, and not just in the obvious ways that, like, liberals talk about that I think is usually false anyway but in other ways that are complicated.

C. Derick Varn: 1:42:12

You're just like, okay, well, that are complicated. You're just like, okay, well, why is that? Um, I can't totally explain it in terms of even just raw self-interest. What is going on here, or at least the self-interest, isn't obvious in a way that it is in class aggregates like what, what, what in the self? Is this appealing to? Um? And to tie that back into poetry, it's interesting to me because Poetry makes this to me Really, really obvious. Because in one way, poetry is Historically an elite institution and yet also, when you look at oppressed peoples and oppressed Communications, poetry is super vital to that like.

C. Derick Varn: 1:43:00

So you know, there's like a double position even in that like like yeah, you know like, yeah, I mean, I think about this today and some kids and maybe I'll.

C. Derick Varn: 1:43:12

This is another way where I think that didactic poetry is often misleading, because some of them want to speak for you know a political truth that's absolute and we can just state it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:43:22

And yet also, there's usually an irony of a position from a working class background. When I went through the MFA system, I will admit like, oh my God, there's so many like upper middle class dweebs that I have to deal with in this scenario and some of them, ironically and I hated it, I used to really resent it actually are really good poets and actually say things that move me, even though I'm like, oh God, they're an upper middle class dweeb. And yet there's also a way in which some of the poetry that is most about politics seems to be about erasing that tension, because I'm like, well, you know, for a lot of people this is something that you can come through organically. I think about the African-American Black poetry tradition, which is super big and has a long tradition going back to slavery, and yet also the tension in like, yeah, but there is a lot of social codes in poetry that you have to have a lot of leisure time to do, yeah, but isn't a lot of leisure time to get trained for the poetry.

Bianca Stone: 1:44:44

I mean, there's a lot of issues you're bringing up and I feel like there is a lot of tension of this idea of poetry as elitism. It's funny because whenever I I had this like I was thinking about it this morning when I woke up, actually that when I was interviewed in my local free paper, um, about becoming the vermont poet laureate, like the interviewer focus, I was talking kind of like a lot of like kind of what we're talking about, like in like the sort of metaphysical exploration like that that poetry like delves deep into, you know complex relations with the psyche and with the other and and you know it's, you know my personal history within all these things. But like this like angry guy like wrote to the paper that like I wasn't writing poetry for the people, that I was like, so I was like some like, even though he wasn't talking about my poetry, it was like kind of just talking. I was just talking about like my relationship to poetry, not necessarily my poems, right, which I find are fairly accessible, um, but this, you know, his sort of like caveat was like poetry should be enjoyable and poetry should be for the people and like you're in some elitist and in a high tower and I'm like I'm really not, like I, you know I grew up on food stamps and like I'm self-taught, like I don't have a PhD or anything you know.

Bianca Stone: 1:46:05

So there's this and I and I, the more I thought about it, I was like, first of all, it seemed very generalizing about what the people want and what the people can handle and I was wondering, like, is this? Like who are? What is this idea like poetry? Is this this idea of poetry, as, like this elite leisure thing is? You know, it's hard because I'm talking to you who's like deep into the marxist theories and all of it, you know like which I'm not so right, so I can't really speak to the idea of like but I'm also a poet.

C. Derick Varn: 1:46:39

I'm also a person who chose to be a poet, who grew up on food stamps, so like, so you're kind of perfect yeah, you're kind of perfect, right.

Bianca Stone: 1:46:47

So this, this idea of like things you write have to be useful and like you have to be seen as working to be like a good person or something, or are not like morally selfish. I wonder, like this poetry like goes back to, like the unfathomable roots of a human past. Right, it has somehow endured all this time. And like, even talking about the history of poetry is very difficult, right, because of that and because of its globe, it's globally manifested differently in all these different cultures and people. And, um, I think, yes, like having time to write poetry is a luxury, but like there's plenty of poets who were in Russian prisons who wrote poems on toilet paper too, people will write poetry no matter what, and I think we should prize a kind of being. I think we should have a society where we see the leisure time needed to make art as important for the workings of the society and the culture, because it actually is still work, even if it looks like leisure to other people. It is work. It's just different kinds of physical labor, but that's one thing.

C. Derick Varn: 1:48:13

Although I will also add in our society like, yeah, only about 16 percent of the population does physical labor right, exactly, it's like I mean, you know, um, it's, it's one of those things. Um, I was joking with someone and I was like you know, you think as a teacher I wouldn't be doing that much physical labor. But actually, when I moved from being a teacher in person to a teacher online, I first gained 30 pounds because I didn't even realize how much physical labor I was doing.

Bianca Stone: 1:48:46

You were moving.

C. Derick Varn: 1:48:49

Moving around all the time and lifting up stuff. I mean it's just yeah. And yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:48:59

I think about that a lot and I also think about, like these assumptions about who speaks for the quote workers or who speaks for the people I mean the people's even more nebulous, but like cause, I'm like, okay, I get the poetry should be enjoyable, but like I don't know that we always know what people find enjoyable. My, my, my grandfather was literally like, was a bricklayer with like an eighth grade education and he read Blake like for fun, right, right, like, so it's just, and actually he was one of the people got me into poetry as a child and I'm just like, so this notion that it's just this highfalutin thing confuses to me.

C. Derick Varn: 1:49:42

And while poetry books aren't cheap, I just want to like point out poetry is a cheap activity to do. Like, like it's. It's hard to master, but it's like I just need paper and some writing utensils. Or today I don't, I just need paper and some writing utensils, or today I don't even necessarily need paper. Like it's, it doesn't. I mean, that's what's the weirdest. That's like, like, okay, if I'm a sculptor, right like, there's a lot of equipment I need and that costs money. If I'm a poet, I actually don't need that much equipment, you don't.

Bianca Stone: 1:50:12

And in terms of money as well. Our culture isn't able to comprehend work that isn't about making money. This is an issue with poetry because people are like I don't understand how you're a poet because it doesn't make money. If I have to hear this again, like I mean it's actually a great, I actually embrace it now because I have an opportunity to talk about why that's bullshit. But like, yes, I mean a poet will do anything they have to to make money and I'll never be rich. That's fine. You know, I like not here on this earth to make money.

Bianca Stone: 1:50:57

But it's interesting too that people will say, well, poetry on the best-selling New York Times bestseller list, that's making money, is now seen as legitimate, whereas poetry that's not on the bestseller list, that's not making money, is not seen as legitimate. And what that poetry looks like's not on the bestseller list, it's not making money, is not seen as legitimate. And what that poetry looks like that's on the bestseller list oftentimes is me, is. People might say it's political, like amanda gorman, for instance, or something like that. Now the problem, the interesting problem with someone like her, who she, she actually can write, but the, the politicization of her poetry has watered it down to what you were saying in the beginning about what you hate about political poetry was that it's so surface level and doesn't really take stances in terms of like clear visions of, like, what's happening here. It's more like, oh, this was like needed for, like, the biden administration to have like, look, like you know a certain way, as they were like entering into this you know bullshit phase of our democracy, right?

Bianca Stone: 1:52:11

Um, yeah, what I'm saying is is that like it's, it's, it's, it's like bourgeois, like it's, it's like made not too dark, not, you know, not too joyful. It's got a little bit of emotional edge and like suffering, but like it doesn't, it doesn't, it's not not complicated, it can be liked by a lot of people, it can be liked by a mass society, and then it's a bestseller. Right, it's, it's difficult. And now and it's understandable, right too, there's that problem with people. It almost makes me want to cry, derek, because I'm like people think that not being understandable right away in terms of what we were talking about with meaning, means you're elitist.

C. Derick Varn: 1:53:01

Yeah that that is weird to me and I funnily enough, but I do find it kind of not. You can't overgeneralize here but, I, will say a lot of the people who say that to me are middle so it's just like.

C. Derick Varn: 1:53:15

It's like I'm like yeah I don't get that a lot like I teach uh, I teach high school, I teach creative writing online to an impoverished school system. Um to like, I mean way too many kids at a time. But uh, in a demographic set that goes from uh, mckinney, vento homeless to upper middle class, there's not a lot of like real, really, really rich people in Utah, but that's the bracket in which I deal with and I can tell you that it's a lot of the poor kids who can get into this stuff and they don't really care if they understand it or not.

C. Derick Varn: 1:53:54

I mean that's like, once you give them permission to have fun with it, and I'm like, no, really they're. I'm not. It's not that you can't be wrong in an interpretation of a poem, but it's kind of hard, like if you can find it in there at all. If there's something you can latch on to to justify what you're saying, you can do whatever, and also this is true when you write your own poetry and is everything that kids write amazing.

C. Derick Varn: 1:54:21

No, but is it all? Interestingly, is it all comprehensible? Only when they use chat GPT to do it. So, like it's an interesting problem and I find that will tell. I will tell you what I think about when people tell me if they want all their poets to understand it. I'm like and to be like enjoyable or use form perfectly. I'm like Chad GPP can do it and those things are soulless.

Bianca Stone: 1:54:51

Like.

C. Derick Varn: 1:54:51

I always know when a student is cheated and used because I'm like this, like I always know when a student is cheated and used because I'm like this. This is both pristine and meaningless. Not in that it's meaningless in that it doesn't have semantic content, but it's meaningless and like it's the most generic semantic content I've ever seen in my damn life. No human being would be just boring like um, and I find that fascinating um uh, because it does illustrate something about that ambiguity.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:21

It's like okay, if I give you like we have a technology that can give you exactly what you want without even a human being being behind it, and I'm pretty sure you don't actually want it like right um so I know it's like you like why, why cheat when you can do anything?

Bianca Stone: 1:55:41

Yeah, anything doing anything is is inner, but but some some, you know it's not. I've learned to like I'm I don't need to like have everybody read poetry, like I don't need everyone to get it. It's always going to be slightly marginalized and I think it kind of has to be that way and I'm okay with that. And I think this anxiety of getting everybody to like poetry, you know, maybe, yeah, maybe in the future we will have like one of those like Greek societies where it's integrated into our belief systems and our politics and everything but like, for now, I just doing things like this, you and I like small groups of people I've, you know, I I go around, I do these little, you know talks around vermont, like in libraries and stuff, and these just, yeah, a lot of the middle class, upper, upper middle class there, let's say, and older people. You know that soul, that part of the soul that needs and embraces and wants that, and those, even in these small groups of people in my small state, in this country, like I feel like it makes a difference, it works its way out, it works its way out in, not to connect it to a psychoanalysis which feels like would be like who cares about your little problems in this? You know it is a privilege to have a good analyst. It's really hard to find one Right and it's expensive. You know there's scales but like that is a privilege, but if you can get one, but if you can get one, it seems like the more that you become willing to do that work, and a lot of it is poetic, you know, and personal. It bleeds outward, it makes a difference on a wider scale. I know it does. And it's like sometimes you do have to start with that.

Bianca Stone: 1:57:58

I think, right, the individual, you know, in talking about the social and the political, it's like the individual came first, right I mean. Or in the beginning was the relation, as martin buber says, like in the beginning was an individual and another individual, and like how are we going to communicate and deal with and live together? And like we're infinitely right. You and I are infinitely separate and unknowable. I can't know your mind, I can never really know your experience. The only way to capture it is in art. It's like that's that moment where I feel this overlap in consciousness. I don't think the political, the city, the beliefs catered to a mass of people can ever do that. But I think the individual is first and then comes the societal.

C. Derick Varn: 1:58:47

Yeah.

Bianca Stone: 1:58:49

But, like you were saying before, like the society could deal with the issue of the individual, like the society could deal with the issue of the individual, or that it breeds an idea of the individual, which is what we see happening in our in America, is like every man for himself, don't you know? Like pull yourself up by your bootstraps and like don't ask the government for help, and you know that kind of shit is just lies.

C. Derick Varn: 1:59:15

But yeah, I mean, I find it. I mean I find it fascinating. I think about the you know. So it's funny if people, when people listen to me, they think my background is historian, which is actually kind of hilarious because I've taken like two history classes in my life. I read a ton of history, but like I am, and I've even spoken at history classes in my life, I read a ton of history, but like I am, and I've even spoken at history conferences and like pissed off historians by admitting that like yeah, I took two classes in college and I've really like I just write about this stuff and also what you do is not that different than what I do as a literary scholar. No, it's not. It's not that different.

C. Derick Varn: 1:59:53

You deal with, you know, you deal with archival text in like material culture in ways that I don't necessarily, but once you get into stuff like intellectual history, we're almost doing the same thing. A lot of what I'm interested in and in regards to this stuff in language is the way self emerges, and one of the things that I can tell you that I feel about, uh, american culture is, on one hand, there's this obvious paradox that everyone who talks about individualism all like would love. Their idea of society actually is not individualistic at all. It's like a church, community, um, which is hilarious to me. But the the other thing is that I think the whole binary and this also shows up on the left between the individual and collective is the exact wrong way to think about it, like there's a dialectical relationship there, and I do think in a very real way that dialectic is relational, that the relationship is primary and that what the social is is the aggregate of relationships.

Bianca Stone: 2:01:14

Yes, yes.

C. Derick Varn: 2:01:14

Which has patterns and meanings, and they go beyond those individual relations. But if you try to understand a collective society versus an individualist society or something like this, that's not a completely meaningless claim, but like.

Bianca Stone: 2:01:33

Individual society.

C. Derick Varn: 2:01:36

Our collective society, I'll give you.

C. Derick Varn: 2:01:38

we're always taught, for example, that East Asian societies are are collectivists and that collective good is prioritized, which is true, but also, like individuality and individual relation is actually still super important, is actually still super important and, um, and if you don't believe that, uh, then you have to deal with like, well, why are there so many honor suicides? That's not about collective good at all. That's about individual uh status and not being able to deal with the loss of it. Um, so clearly there is something still individualistic in these collective relations. Um, in these societies that you view as more collectivist, Um, they also tend to like poetry, as a side note but, um, it is.

C. Derick Varn: 2:02:28

It is something there that is relational, and bracketing off the collective from the individual, as if the two do not inform each other, seems to completely lead you to some very weird places. Because, you know, we talk about poetry.

C. Derick Varn: 2:02:47

Lyric poetry in particular, you know we are is always presented as like oh, that's an individual art and in a way it is like you're dealing with the emotions and feelings of one human being, but you're dealing with it, you're approaching it, like the fact that I put it on paper and put it out there in the world to be socially engaged with has made it an approachable thing that is no longer in my control. And you go back to the so-called collected poetries.

C. Derick Varn: 2:03:15

Uh, homer I was gonna say the sort of romanticism versus classicism right, well, but the classical poetry is a pretty fucking individual and idiosyncratic too. I mean, that's like the thing like going through homer and I mean not so much homer at all, because I don't think homer's one person, probably, but like but there was like specific people's names where it was like this was you know his deed that he did you know.

C. Derick Varn: 2:03:40

It was like very yeah, yeah, yeah, it's very individual and very idiosyncratic, like like uh, there is a voice to the odyssey, there is a voice to the Iliad, and they're kind of specific, like even compared to other classical poets, like I can tell the difference between Homer and Ovid. So are between, like Lucretius, who's kind of a poet, is also kind of a philosopher, and like Heraclitus. Yeah, heraclitus, we can kind of.

Bianca Stone: 2:04:26

And can you imagine, if, right, so people talk about the poetic voice. Right, the persona, not the speaker, the one in the workshop, also the speaker In one in the workshop, also the speaker In acknowledgement of the fact that poetry is out of the self. Right, especially, let's say, like the modern poem too, versus the collective poem. Right, right Back when, you know, one was like a gleam in writing poems for the rich. You know, mayor and his tales.

Bianca Stone: 2:05:10

But yeah, I think the poetic voice is yours and not yours, and I think it gets exactly what you were just saying, where it was like the individual and the collective are in an intra-psychical relationship. Right, that they are opposites and the same at the same time. Right, not the same, but there's something about them. That is one thing, and it is interesting to think about how that's embodied in the poem, that this is a larry levis poem but, like it's in, larry levis adopts this voice of larry levis to write these poems in the speaker's voice, mining his autobiographical experience. But he's also in conversation with history and he's also in conversation with other poets and right.

Bianca Stone: 2:06:01

So it's like, yeah and it's. You know, I always say this when I'm sort of like getting people to like forget what they think they know about poetry. But I love to emphasize the fact that, yes, it is an autobiographical, let's say, nonfiction genre, but it is also utterly fiction and neither at the same time utterly fiction and and neither at the same time. So it's unique in that way. It's sort of the original genre of no genre, um, and I think it almost like and you would ask me in an email, in the email like, maybe even like, what classical poetry can offer contemporary poetry, and maybe it is something like about this, like, maybe too much.

Bianca Stone: 2:06:49

You know, I see us clinging to our ideas of like the self and like the autobiography and like what I've found getting out of reading um philosophy and reading classical literature is that engaging with a greater collective literature and world is like that looks at first, like has nothing to do with me, taps into something that actually gets closer to me understanding myself than I would, plumbing these supposed, almost like photographic idea of Bianca and I and autobiography and experience, because I think and I this why I'm, one of the reasons why I love reading young too. Is that, like it does tap into a sort of collective unconscious that is ancient and these symbols and images that continue to come up and and are shared between us are. You know, when I read a poem and I see that too in the poem I think, ah, I'm an individual and I am shared in this experience, that's sort of innate, like with the other right, and then we're a collective, we're born a collective. Maybe it was like we're born of it. We're all one person.

C. Derick Varn: 2:08:21

Well, I think about like I don't go too much into Lacanianism, because Lacanian psychoanalysis is a psychoanalysis I admittedly don't understand, and that's after studying it for years informally and being self-taught in it. But being like going through it and being like I don't know, this may be meaningful, but I'm not quite sure.

Bianca Stone: 2:08:44

I think that's how you should read it.

C. Derick Varn: 2:08:46

I think you should read it like poetry. Yeah, exactly.

Bianca Stone: 2:08:49

That's the only way to read Hegel, too, for me.

C. Derick Varn: 2:08:54

There's some Hegel scholars who you just deeply hurt, but yes, that was how I got through Hegel. I actually was like my big freeing moment was Hegel was being like. If this thing seems like it's a pun or a metaphor and it's invoking the religious and the rational at the same time, it's because it is and just go with it hell yeah, I mean, that's the paradox as the poet's paradoxes right, right, yeah, and it's just, you know, and, as I was like, having that poetry gift makes hegel a little bit like, yeah, he means everything you think he means, and probably stuff he doesn't even know.

C. Derick Varn: 2:09:26

He means like um, but it's really freeing in that way. Uh, there are philosophers you can't do that with, but yeah, hagel's not one of them well, yeah, and and lakhan either.

Bianca Stone: 2:09:39

Very fun if you read it like that yeah, I mean but.

C. Derick Varn: 2:09:43

But to your point yeah to my point to get to actually stay on topic for a second is that there is this way, in the Lacanian mirror phase actually and this also goes back to Hegel Hegel's encounter with the other like the self, the unhappy consciousness tells you what the self is, and the unhappy consciousness is not possible until you realize there's an other in the world who is not you.

C. Derick Varn: 2:10:04

You don't have a sense of you as an I until you encounter the other as a not I oh my god yeah yeah, yeah um, and it is the very instantiation of encountering the other in a relation that makes the eye possible, like, and thus the self is both absolute and contingent simultaneously, and that's hard for people to deal with, I feel like.

Bianca Stone: 2:10:32

I'm in that right now.

C. Derick Varn: 2:10:33

Right, like you just think about, like, like the reality of the fact that, like you and I can be very sincere with each other and have a conversation, and you know, and it is, and we were dealing with selves, and I think it can be completely organic and honest, and yet I go have a conversation with someone else and that is going to change the nature of the eye, it's going to change the nature of the mask I use, and that does not necessarily mean I am being inauthentic in videos like engagement isn't that free.

Bianca Stone: 2:11:07

I mean that we are multiple selves and that we are constantly changing every second. I mean there's, there's something incredibly freeing about that, but you have to keep, I have to keep remembering that. I forget it all the time because I think this, I this like feeling. Uh, I have these moments of feeling such profound inauthenticity and that I'm fake or something, and like usually it is in relation with the other that I really care about, maybe too, or like I want to be authentic with, or that like, maybe it's you know, moments like this or something like that, although I feel very authentic with you right now. Um, but these these horrible moments of like, actually in private right, where I'm like wait a minute, what if I'm a big fucking fake liar, like this is me, I'm never me, I'm never me. Where am I? When? When can I be me? And it's so chilling. But then you're like, yeah, that's probably true, you know, and that's okay. Like we keep falling in and out of so-called authenticity and inauthenticity. Maybe is part of an authenticity right.

C. Derick Varn: 2:12:14

Well, the I think the character mask is important. I'm not going to get too deep because I can go all modern social criticism on this and talk about like the way people present themselves and confuse their character masks with themselves in some fundamental way.

Bianca Stone: 2:12:27

That's where it gets dangerous, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:12:30

Right, but I do think, like I don't think character masks are necessarily being unauthentic or fake and I, like you, know I guess they are constructed. I will say that, but then you don't always know when you're constructing something either, like yeah.

Bianca Stone: 2:12:50

Yeah, you know, which is why analysis and introspection is important.

C. Derick Varn: 2:12:54

Right and I think, to tie it back to poetry a bit, poetry is where that construction I mean literally, it's in the word we are construct, we are making it's poesis, we're making stuff Right, but the what we're also often doing is we're making stuff that that is beyond us and often doesn't have like, doesn't have an obvious reason for being, and I think about this all the time.

C. Derick Varn: 2:13:29

You know, to bring it back to that idea of of the art is useless, or the art as elite and I'm like well, I don't know, man, Every every human culture I've ever encountered, going back to like before the European paleolithic, seems to have some kind of art and are useless seemingly useless thing that they are doing that indicates some sort of meaning, even if it's only, like you know, putting ochre and color on dead people um right, but right you know, and that's, and, and the reason I bring that up is because it's what we have evidence for. But like it seems like that's universal, Like even hunter-gatherers would like low surplus, do that shit.

C. Derick Varn: 2:14:23

I don't know like why you don't like, why this idea that something is not totally utilitarian seems so foreign to people. That's baffles me. It does seem pretty. That does seem almost uniquely modern.

Bianca Stone: 2:14:34

It does seem modern. Yeah, it does seem modern. I think a lot of our ideas about language, too, seem very modern. Now that I, now that I've learned more, it's like, oh, this was not the way it always was. Like people didn't think like this, but you know, like this, this changes. Like there's something right now where we think, oh, this is the way this is, this is the good thing, this is the good way to live. That's universal and has always been that. We must keep working all the time. Well, who's telling us that? Um, are you doing something useful?

Bianca Stone: 2:15:08

yeah are you contributing? Are you doing you useful? Yeah, are you contributing? Are you doing? You know we don't want you to sit around thinking about if you know the nature of living and being in a society and what it means to be an individual. We don't want you contemplating that in a chair outside in front of a tree, you know, thinking about the importance of trees, thinking about, like, our relationship to nature and if we should be treating nature the way we are treating nature. You know it's like I mean it's political to even engage your consciousness with nature in a way. You know it's like because it risks, uh, or it shouldn't be political, but it's being made political because you know. But that's not what I wanted to say. I can't remember now.

C. Derick Varn: 2:16:03

I haven't made it.

C. Derick Varn: 2:16:08

It was something about what you were just saying um I think it is actually kind of fitting that when we go to describe the relationship between poetry and political like and I think we're both doing it we're like, we're like running around in recursive circles because there's, because there's like not a it is both obviously relevant and obviously a political act and obviously not, and what that means, um seems to be a point of constant slippage, like when you say the personal is political and I will. I personally will go no and also yes.

C. Derick Varn: 2:16:53

Yeah, and that and and that you know that answer really pisses people off. Actually, look on all sides of that equation, cause I'm just like, well, in some sense, absolutely not, and in another sense, you know, of course it is like course your, your, your politics can't be removed from your personal stuff and vice versa. And also, when you try to, you're usually hiding things that are uh deeply contradictory about yourself and your politics. And the origins of that term and the feminist movement was just like all the dudes who had good, uh, public statement about women, um yeah, and we're, we're good on that rhetorically or are even really good at it publicly in terms of policy, but then we're like wife beaters and shit um yeah, that's the origins of the term, and um yeah, god

Bianca Stone: 2:17:48

yeah, you know um I feel, like you know, in thinking about, like the personal is political, but even that became a political. That was a political movement of people that wasn't actually a person, a person, I see, I see what it. Of course it was a necessary movement for exactly the reasons you're saying, but like it's, I guess what I'm getting at it was like there was almost something depersonalizing about making it political, or something you know. Again, I feel like there's so much, um, I can't help but constantly come back to this uh, avoidance, that that we can use the political to avoid the personal or something like, or we can use the political in order to continue to like be didactic or like point the finger at the other and like make things uh, divisive at the same time, like there are real political stakes at work and that the poem is a voice and it, like I was saying at the beginning, like it's it, it holds emotional resonance for people and so it is an opportunity for unheard voices to find voice and um that can sway people, that can have, that, can make change. You know, like there's so many, it's hard, let's say, let's say this too it's hard to write good political poetry, it's hard to write poetry in general. Right, people say they don't like poetry. I'm like, I don't like most poetry either.

Bianca Stone: 2:19:44

The fun thing about loving poetry is that you're constantly on the lookout for poems you love, that speak to you and that speak to the issues that you care about. Too right, but there's probably the first poems ever uttered when language came into being. We're, in a sense, political and there's a complex and, like you said, slippery relationship with the political that has been going on since the dawn of man and we know when we say political poem what we're talking about. In terms of genres within poetry, there's specific contemporary political poems that take political stances on issues of usually the oppressed, on the side of the oppressed although I was just reading about some ridiculous Republican conservative formalist poets who are so hilariously cringe, normalist poets who are so hilariously cringe, yeah, but I, I, I, I love. I think thinking about the political and the poem is Derek is is a really important and good discussion that doesn't have one answer. Like we get to keep thinking about what poetry is and does and what the political is and does, and how. You know.

C. Derick Varn: 2:21:15

I think I'm going to end this conversation on a reflection on some poets that I didn't think I was going to bring up, but I always think about the high modernist Pound Eliot. They were political poets. Their politics were by and large, terrible, in some cases outright fascistic, in other cases not outright fascistic, but pretty close. At the same time I think about the Pisan Cantos, which are weirdly you can read them as a moment where Pound does side with the oppressed and there's all these other you know weird historical, bizarro context around that Like Emmett Till's dad is in the same prison as Pound when that's going on, emmett Till's dad is in the same prison as Pound when that's going on, and like there's just all this stuff that shows, that shows up in those poems that can be read in a variety of ways, and that is always like set with me, with when you meet, when you encounter a really good poet that doesn't share your politics at all and like somehow it still speaks to you.

C. Derick Varn: 2:22:32

And then you encounter poets, bunches of Marxist poets, whose politics that you are supposed to agree with, and you're just like, oh my God, just like this is so terrible. I mean, I will mention a poet who I think is actually good but who I don't love, and I should I mean like, and it's Brecht.

Bianca Stone: 2:22:56

I was just going to say is it Brecht? Because I just bought the collected Brecht and I'm like I can't find a poem Right. I was like, oh, this looks perfect. And then I was like, oh, but I don't like anything, but it's so big, I know.

C. Derick Varn: 2:23:14

Yeah, I was thinking that it's so funny I have the collected Brecht over there and I'm like I'm supposed to like Brecht.

Bianca Stone: 2:23:20

I'll even try it in German. I mean, it looks like such a good book, right? It's so well designed, it's got all these intros intros. Like I have that exact same edition, I was like, oh, is this like an issue of translation or something? But there's something in the music that is lost or something.

C. Derick Varn: 2:23:41

I've been told that I speak German, but I do not speak German like a native speaker at all. People who listen to my show knows that I I mispronounce German all the time, so I don't know if there's something I'm not getting. And people who speak German often tell me there are stuff to break. That's really hard to translate.

Bianca Stone: 2:24:01

But so is Rilke.

C. Derick Varn: 2:24:03

Yeah, I was going to say, but I get Rilke and I get.

Bianca Stone: 2:24:07

Holderlin and Nerval Holderlin and and Nerval. Goethe, yeah, I mean yeah it's there's so many great German poets Like I, just the Germans. I don't know what the fuck the Germans really turned them out.

C. Derick Varn: 2:24:21

Shrinkle. Yeah, it's funny because it's also not a language people think about as being super poetic and yet it kind of is.

Bianca Stone: 2:24:28

My Jewish mother grew up, you know kind of shitting on the germans to me and uh and I, I love this new uh opening up for me. I mean it's like when else has kind of started it? Because, um, with freud and young, I'm an austrian but still yeah, it's still german though so it so spoke German.

Bianca Stone: 2:24:50

Yeah, yeah, right. And Rolke, of course, yeah, but who also had such a fraught relationship with his German language, and Salon too. I mean, it's fraught for sure, but yeah, but the German romantics, anyway, I interrupt you, we're just tangent now.

C. Derick Varn: 2:25:03

No, no, it's, it's, it's uh but I too.

Bianca Stone: 2:25:06

I, before we end as well. I was like well, go ahead.

C. Derick Varn: 2:25:10

No, go ahead.

Bianca Stone: 2:25:13

An interesting political poem that everybody was sharing recently was in the New York review, called 82 sentences each taken from the last statement of a person executed by the state of Texas since 1984, by Joe clock. Um, I'm not going to read it because it's too long, right, I feel like dick not reading it. But you know, an interesting, you know different kind of idea was like the found poem being a poem, uh, where's the reader intention? There was the voice there right to adopt all these other voices of people who are dead from, uh, a very, um, politically conservative state which you know executes, you know, more than any other state you know, and this being a very emotionally charged political issue in our culture right now. And then having this poem, I mean I don't know what to say about it except that, oh, and then at the, in the editorial note, has the names of everybody whose lines they were.

Bianca Stone: 2:26:30

Wow, I didn't see that part before, but it's a incredibly, you know, moving poem, for all the scenes and I think you know, in terms of thinking about the didactic too is like it's not telling you how to feel, it's just presenting the language of the people who you know, and interesting too because it makes you think about the idea of a last statement and the way that there's this weird tradition of like giving people a chance to use language before they die and to make a statement in words and what comes out of people in that moment in words. And what comes out of people in that moment, you know, speaks volumes on its own.

C. Derick Varn: 2:27:14

Yeah, it's reading that poem. I'm just looking at it right now. It's kind of actually kind of amazing how, by pairing these statements together, some of them seem pretty profound, some of them seem pretty cliche, and yet when you read them together, they there's an effect they have on each other. Um, yeah, we can't read the whole poem. I agree with your song but I'll like read a like, just a little a snippet of it.

C. Derick Varn: 2:27:41

Uh, this here is a tragedy. They're fixing to pump my veins with a lethal drug the American Veterinary Association won't even allow to be used on dogs. I should not have to be here. I'm not a killer. I know how it looks, but I didn't do it. I didn't kill my life. I didn't kill those drug dealers. I did not murder your loved ones.

C. Derick Varn: 2:27:59

I am sure he died unjustly, just like I am. I have done everything to prove my innocence. If I am paying my debt to society, I am due a rebate and a refund. Everybody has problems. I allowed the devil to ruin my life. I was a kid in a grown man's world. I was sick, afraid and looking for love in all the wrong ways. I messed up, made poor choices, but I am not guilty of this crime, and all those are individual, self-contained statements, but when they're paired together like that, they're in dialogue with each other in a way. That's really disorienting. And I agree with you, it doesn't really tell you how to feel about this. I mean, you know it can be seen as a protest against the death penalty, surely? But actually it doesn't even say that.

Bianca Stone: 2:28:46

No yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:28:49

And I think that's interesting. And comparing that to Gorman, I, like you, I try to give Gorman a break because while I accused her of Biden poem of sounding like a political version of Ruby Carr which I think I still stand by as a statement, having read some of her other work, which is not the work that sells well, um, she's actually not that. Uh, you know, like not in general. And I've actually been told by people who have met her that she has a very like humble and kind of sad awareness of like how being a best-selling poet for being an inaugural poet that's supposed to, you know is going to like color her reception. And even though she's best-selling, she knows too that that's actually an ephemeral thing.

C. Derick Varn: 2:29:35

I mean, one of the one of the funny things about looking at poetry on the bestseller list, like it's not that it's all bad or it's not that it's not of merit I don't want to be that. I think that is an elitist sentiment but like so little of it actually gets remembered. There are stuff that is, but so little of that is remembered five years out. Like I'm just looking at it and like in the 90s, what was the best setting poet? It was jewel, like I remember that.

C. Derick Varn: 2:29:59

I remember it well, a night without armor right, like it's just and it's not, and like I'm not saying that the Jewel poems have no merit, but like they're pretty ephemeral.

Bianca Stone: 2:30:13

Yeah but I thought that went without saying. In terms of the bestseller list, right, it's not indicative, I guess. I guess the point is is like people think that when they think is poetry relevant, they're like is it on the bestseller list and like it doesn't. Actually, I guess it what they mean is is it, are people buying it? Do people want to read poetry on a large scale? But they're not saying is it good poetry, in a way Like that's sort of the next. That's the implication, I guess, is like good poetry sells, but it's not quite. It's not quite that there's like some, there's more at work in terms of like what sells us.

C. Derick Varn: 2:30:58

Yeah, A lot of these people wouldn't want to read Rupi Kaur either. I mean, that's the thing. I know I'm picking on Rupi Kaur but just cause she's so best selling like, it's like okay, what you want exists. I know I'm picking on Ruby Carr, but just because she's so best-selling, it's like, okay, what you want exists. There's plenty of Instagram poetry from 10 years ago that you can go into the Barnes Nobles and find, and it sells better than poetry historically has.

Bianca Stone: 2:31:23

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:31:25

But we don't remember hardly any of it, right?

Bianca Stone: 2:31:30

It's not going to stand the test of time.

C. Derick Varn: 2:31:33

Right yeah.

Bianca Stone: 2:31:37

God, what if it did? What if it was the only thing that survived? And they were like this is what they all read.

C. Derick Varn: 2:31:43

It's just Billy Collins and a rippy car.

Bianca Stone: 2:31:45

Yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:31:47

Yeah, it's funny, I was thinking about that too when we were talking about difficulty, because I'm like, yeah, it's not like poetry that come. Some of the hardest poetry I've ever read has nothing to do with MFA programs, for example. It's just like, if that's what you're associating it with, like difficult poetry comes out of like academic poets, and I'm like, no, it doesn't, like I've read some really hard poems that are not by academics at all.

Bianca Stone: 2:32:19

I mean the, the MFA. I teach in an MFA right now and I love my students so much, but like it's not an elitist situation at all, like everybody is just so, like we're all just so grounded in like being normal people it's. But. But my issue actually having taught over the years and loving teaching in mfas is actually I find one of my biggest issues with mfas is that they're not rigorous enough by far. Like you're paying all this money to just have a total crapshoot of a teacher. You don't know idea how it's going to be actually unless you already have studied with that teacher before. But like I would.

Bianca Stone: 2:33:02

I wish, if you know, my dream is to sort of like I want to start a school that is having these kinds of conversations and creative writing classes and we're reading a lot of different kinds of texts. We're reading a diverse group of poets from around the world. Like we're reading things in translation. Like we're reading philosophy. Like we're reading psychoanalysis. Like we're reading texts that explore different, like spiritual, you know, explore, explore, you know explorations and histories and things like that. And I I think that for what people pay for an mfa and to get that degree, like it could be even more rigorous, and but that doesn't.

Bianca Stone: 2:33:41

I don't know if that has to do with difficulty, like I don't know, like in terms difficulty, like difficulty to whom? I'm not, you know, to the mass mass market. Like, um, shouldn't things be difficult to understand in terms of like who's you know? Like does everybody have to understand everything at all times? And like what does that mean? Like the people? Shouldn't people work a little harder to understand things? Doesn't that? Isn't that about being like the work? Like talk about the work, like the work? Isn't maybe there's other kinds of work? Like we have to work at understanding things and that's the fun part. It's actually not knowing, but moving towards knowing. That's what I've learned anyway. Yeah, yeah, we got to go, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:34:30

That's a good place to stop, but thank you so much for your time. Where can people find your work, bianca?

Bianca Stone: 2:34:37

Yeah, my poetry books, should you know, are published by tin house and the newest one should be available wherever you buy your books. And, um, I am a. I do a lot on Twitter and some on Instagram. Um, I have a website but I also run the Ruth Ruth Stonehouse. Yeah, the, the literary nonprofit I run, is called Ruthuse stonehouse and you know we do classes and I have a. I have my own podcast called odin psyche, um, which is poetry and consciousness sort of exploring, and, yeah, all right, that's awesome.

C. Derick Varn: 2:35:22

I'm actually gonna look up odin psyche because, uh, I'm always looking for good poetry podcast and there were a lot more 10 years ago than there are now, for a variety of reasons. One is the Poetry Foundation making a stupid statement, but another is what did they do? Oh, it was them being too concessionary to Zionism in one of their statements, and then half their staff quit.

Bianca Stone: 2:35:49

Oh, that's right. That's right, you mean when he left? Yeah, yeah, that's so weird you brought that up. I was just thinking about that today.

C. Derick Varn: 2:35:58

Yeah, well, I mean weirdly it also meant like seven or eight fairly established poetry podcasts went away overnight, Like it was too. So I find that fascinating, but anyway, thank you, thank you for coming on.

Bianca Stone: 2:36:18

Yes, thank you for having me. I love what you're doing.

C. Derick Varn: 2:36:21

Thank you a lot, and people should definitely check out your work. We didn't talk about it, but I really like it. I also think I like your grandmother's work too, because I believe I have one of her books that you may have helped edit over there. Yep, when Daniel had you on, I was like I know that name. Where do I know that?

C. Derick Varn: 2:36:47

name and I was like oh yeah, I have all kinds of stuff but Bianca in my house and I didn't even think about it. All right, so anyway, we'll end on that note. Thank you so much.

Bianca Stone: 2:36:59

All right, thank you.