Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Stephanie Burt on Allan Peterson ("I thought all life came from the alphabet")
1.8k Plays9 months ago
Very few scholars have as much enthusiasm for poetry as Stephanie Burt, and so it was a delight to have her back for this episode. Steph has been in the news of late for offering a (very popular) course at Harvard on Taylor Swift, and we begin this episode by talking in fascinating ways about the long history of the relation between popular music and poetry.
And then we move on to this episode's poem, Allan Peterson's marvelous "I thought all life came from the alphabet." Peterson was a new poet to me, and I was totally won over by Steph's framing of him as a poet of science, of intellect, and of fun. This is a poet thinking in surprising ways about the match and mismatches between the world as we find it and the consciousness with which we receive it. He is, in that sense, an epistemological poet, but also at his core a naturalist, a poet whose mind grows in relation to the world he describes.
Stephanie Burt is the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. Her most recent book of poems is We Are Mermaids (Graywolf, 2022) and her most recent book of criticism is Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems (Basic Books, 2019). You can follow her on Twitter.
Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you're enjoying it. Share it with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get occasional updates on the pod and my other work.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Close Readings and Stephanie Burt
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and I'm very happy to have back on the podcast today a repeat guest, one of the earlier guests that we had on the pod, Stephanie Burt.
00:00:18
Speaker
who devoted listeners will remember came on probably about a year ago now to talk about the poet Randall Jarrell.
Discussing Alan Peterson and His Poem
00:00:27
Speaker
Today, Stephanie has returned to talk about a poet who is less well known to me, and I'll bet to many of you, but deserving of our attention for sure, a poet named Alan Peterson.
00:00:39
Speaker
And the poem that Stephanie has chosen for our discussion today is called, I thought all life came from the alphabet. I want to remind you that there will be a link to the text of that poem in the episode notes. So for people who'd like to look at it as they listen to us, you can do so there. I told Stephanie before we started recording that I would keep her intro brief this time since she was on once before.
00:01:08
Speaker
And since I'll bet many of you know who she is already, but let me just remind those of you who don't or who need the reminder,
00:01:18
Speaker
that Stephanie Burt is the Donald P.
Stephanie Burt's Academic and Literary Background
00:01:20
Speaker
and Catherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. Her most recent book, which is a book of poems, Steph is a poet and a critic and scholar. Her most recent, I think this is the most recent book, Steph is We Are Mermaids, which came out in 2022 from Grey Wolf.
00:01:42
Speaker
Press and is a marvelous book of poems that I highly recommend to you. I will supply links in the episode notes to other publications, so if you want to check out Steph's critical work, you can do so there. Steph has been in the news most recently, I think, because at Harvard she's teaching a course right now on Taylor Swift.
00:02:09
Speaker
Taylor Swift alongside and with respect to literature. And that course, once word got out about it, caused quite a buzz. Maybe it's something we can check in on a little bit today.
The Relationship Between Song Lyrics and Poetry
00:02:29
Speaker
Stephanie, welcome to the podcast. How's that course going? Are you enjoying it so far?
00:02:34
Speaker
Hasn't started. First lecture is Monday, and I'm really hoping more people add it than drop it after that lecture. Really my network for success there. Yeah, no, I understand. I'm sure it's attracted a lot of attention on campus as it has, I can tell you, off campus.
00:02:56
Speaker
I am curious, and maybe just before we dive into the poem in question today, about the question that it raises, which I'll bet you have interesting things to say about, namely,
00:03:12
Speaker
You know, this is a podcast that's devoted to the close reading of poems. And there is, of course, a long tradition or a long history of the relation between song forms, popular song forms and poetry, you know, what we sometimes call lyric poetry, depending on
00:03:32
Speaker
the kind of poem we're thinking of and the moment in time in which we're using these terms. How do you think of the relation between something like popular song and lyric poem? How do you think of the question of
00:03:54
Speaker
whether song lyrics sort of reward close reading in the same way or in analogous ways to the ways poems reward close reading. How has that informed your design of this course on Taylor? I'm going to give you the short answer, the medium answer, and the long answer. Oh, all of them. OK. The short answer is that, of course, pop song lyrics aren't the same thing as modern page-based poetry.
00:04:24
Speaker
And neither of them is the same thing as a screenplay, a comic book script, an opera libretto, a stage play or a novel. Those are all art forms that use words. They're all art forms where you can study how they use words and how the words work emotionally, narratively, intellectually. They're all art forms that I think ought to be studied by people who do literature. I enjoy them all.
00:04:54
Speaker
But they're different. And of course, you can try to study the words in a Lanford Wilson play using the same tools you'd use for a Walt Whitman poem or an Elizabeth Bishop poem. But I don't recommend it because plays are different from page-based poems. That's the short answer.
00:05:18
Speaker
And so songs are too. Yeah, the medium answer is that poems are different from one another too. And the magnifying glass and the sort of calipers and compasses that you use for a Langston Hughes poem
00:05:37
Speaker
aren't exactly the same as the toolkit you'd use for a James Merrill poem. In fact, when you just named Elizabeth Bishop and Walt Whitman, I found myself thinking, oh, I think I probably read those kinds of poems differently. Right, right. Those are all people who mostly write page-based, read them at home. You don't need to hear the voice of an actor or the voice of a poet.
00:06:04
Speaker
Lineated works they write modern page based poetry, but they write different kinds and we don't Examine them using exactly the same tools. So yes song lyrics aren't Poetry in a certain sense, but you know poetry isn't always poetry. I've read a book about that Yeah, and the long answer Which fascinates me?
Evolution of Poetry and Song Across Cultures
00:06:30
Speaker
More and more as I sort of do this
00:06:34
Speaker
longer and longer, is that these relationships among kinds of poems, ways of being in the world and using language, ways of using your voice and playing music and singing, change
00:06:56
Speaker
over time, as well as differing from one creator to the next. So that right now, in terms of the experience of the art forms that we have right now, there's very little overlap between what the greatest, for me, the most interesting and most emotionally resonant songwriters are doing. People writing,
00:07:27
Speaker
Words to be sung by particular singers with melodies on the one hand and what various page-based poets are doing But if you go back far enough, you can find times and places when that's not true both in English and in other languages Right. There's a tradition of ghazal singers who are singing in Urdu and in other West Asian languages and
00:07:53
Speaker
where those are quite self-consciously being written to be read and to be sung. Sonnets develop in the Western world as sonnets, partly in opposition to stanzaic lyric poetry that is being written to be sung. Sonnets, 14-line units that don't have a chorus, are not primarily written to be sung.
00:08:18
Speaker
but that's a little bit weird. One of my favorite books of literary criticism is a book by a medievalist at Stanford named Marissa Galvez. I recommend it a lot. You know that book. I was talking to Marissa the other day, but go on, please. I've met her once in a car for 10 minutes. I would love to talk to her more. She made a really important discovery, which is that Western notions of
00:08:45
Speaker
the lyric poem as something that's like a song but not a song develop out of literal song books, books of words to songs in Western European languages in the late medieval period, which at first are written down so that people can remember or learn the lyrics to songs
00:09:14
Speaker
And then they start sharing the lyrics without the music. And then they're like, hey, we can go somewhere with this. And we can build on this and make it into a page-based art form.
00:09:23
Speaker
So the kid who is studying Taylor Swift liner notes, let's say, while listening to an album, reading the lyrics or reading them on her phone or whatever, as she listens on whatever streaming service. Let's update the image here. And then starts experimenting in her journal
00:09:46
Speaker
at writing her own words down in some kind of imitation to a relation to the song lyrics she's been studying and who winds up writing not songs but poems, something you and I might more easily call poems, is doing something very old. Yeah. Yeah. And I
00:10:09
Speaker
I am a historicist enough to think that you can follow this progression, sometimes in people's lives and certainly in culture. I am anti-historicist enough to think that this is a progression or a development or differentiation that happens repeatedly and you can find it happening in non-western cultures as well, where people
00:10:39
Speaker
write down songs and the words to songs that are meant to be sung and then as literacy spreads and it becomes easier to read words and to circulate words that are not being recited. The people who are writing the words, the people who are reading the words say, hey, there is something song-like about this.
00:11:05
Speaker
There is some figurative relationship to the human voice and to emotion and disposition and interiority. And maybe even structures, structures of refrain. Well, I mean, a lot of other things have structures, chess games and structures. This phenomenon is, I think, specific to expressive communication and language.
00:11:31
Speaker
There's something about voice and expression and inwardness where pieces of language written down to be read by people who aren't gonna sing them figuratively resemble songs. And you see this in the reception of Sappho.
00:11:55
Speaker
I don't read Korean, but I'm pretty sure you see it in the history of early Korean poetry and song. You see it in Western Europe. And you see it anywhere that people are writing down the words to songs. Eventually someone's going to say, hey, I kind of like this, but what if I made it so the words didn't need the music?
00:12:24
Speaker
And that's the big difference between modern song lyric writing and page based poetry writing. I should add that
00:12:36
Speaker
Hip-hop lyric writing is neither of those things. It's its own thing and it's kind of in between. And I defer to Adam Bradley and other scholars of hip-hop on how that works. But it's hip-hop lyric writing and performance looks more like pre-modern orature, like long poems that have oral formulaic aspects, like the Iliad that are meant to be recited
00:13:06
Speaker
but are not primarily short-form melodic entities. I have all kinds of thoughts and I know we want to get on to the poem at hand today, but one thought just as a kind of passing observation is that in Farsi, the verb for to sing is the same as the verb for to read.
00:13:29
Speaker
you know, hundan, which I've always thought is a very interesting thing. Is there a separate verb for recitation or is singing reciting? No, that's the same thing. You'd use the same verb for saying a poem or for singing a song or for reading silently. Wow. Yeah. The other thing I just sort of am noting in passing is that
00:13:57
Speaker
You know, obviously history doesn't proceed ever quite as neatly as we schematically sometimes want to represent it as proceeding.
00:14:07
Speaker
But I'm thinking, okay, so let's imagine in some sort of crude history of things, there are song forms, and then somebody, as you say, having written down the words to songs, thinks, oh, this is kind of fun to do, even without the musical accompaniment or without the intention to sing it aloud. So in this way, you know,
00:14:29
Speaker
poetry would develop as a kind of closet drama version of the dramatic arts. But the further point that I want to make is once that has happened,
00:14:41
Speaker
And now poetry exists as a page-based genre, let's say. Presumably, there are kind of feedback loops that develop where it can now influence songwriters and sort of on and on we go, right? That's right. Anything that influences songwriters. And this is the other part of this development and this sort of differentiation of art forms as more media become available.
00:15:10
Speaker
is the poetry becomes its own thing and starts to develop when you have a separate from song once you have writing. And it changes again once you have print.
00:15:22
Speaker
And it changes again once you have cheap print, which means you get the right of the novel, which means people are less interested in narrative poetry, which means that people who are serious about arranging words with a great deal of attention to sound and being poets are more likely to focus on lyric and expression rather than storytelling because you have to keep papers so you have novels. And then you get recording, right? Yeah.
00:15:47
Speaker
because it's what happens when you get these differentiations of genre over centuries and over decades. It's not just that people who want to only use words and write for the page no longer have to think about singability unless they really want to. It's also that people who are doing songwriting, no matter how, well, it's people who are doing songwriting once there is recording.
00:16:16
Speaker
Get to write for individual voices in the way that certain 19th century composers are writing for particular performers. List writing for Paganini or something. You can write a song for your own voice or you can write a song for somebody else's voice. And you can use as many cliches as you want if they sound right. You no longer have to be.
00:16:45
Speaker
if you ever had to be a memorable user of words to write song lyrics where the song works. But you can. The history of songwriting in the era of recorded music gives you songwriters where
00:17:12
Speaker
You really can put a lot of pressure on word choice. And I think that Taylor is one of them and also songwriters where.
00:17:24
Speaker
the words to the song are much more conversational and less interesting in terms of close reading. The first figure that comes to mind is Pete Shelley from the Buzzcocks. The Buzzcocks albums are great, and the words do exactly what they need to do when they're moving. And, you know, ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn't have fallen in love with is a wonderful question to ask, and it's the linchpin of Pete Shelley's, for Mighty Money, greatest song.
00:17:53
Speaker
But it's not terribly interesting in terms of. Diction and imagery. It works because it interacts with the song construction and. Modern songwriting lets you do that, especially modern songwriting in the era of recorded music.
00:18:17
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. That's great. Well, I'm glad I asked. I'm glad I asked you the question because I knew we'd get a fascinating answer. Today we have, you know, I want to say at first, and I'm obviously in some kind of literal sense, this is true, a poet who writes for the page. Yes, very much so. I have to note sort of
00:18:40
Speaker
I hope not too pedantically, that my encounter with Alan Peterson happened not strictly speaking on the page, but on my screen. And I wonder also, as these sort of new technologies come in, Stephanie, and put different kinds of pressure on genre formations, what the internet, if cheap paper
00:19:00
Speaker
did something to the way we think of or to the way people produce things like novels and poems, what has or what is the internet doing to our generic conventions right now? Oh, I love that question. So that question has two answers, neither of which affect the poetry of Alan Peterson.
00:19:22
Speaker
Yeah, so maybe we should give them briefly and then and then move along or what do you think? Do you want to answer them briefly? Alan Peterson's great should be famous isn't famous yet.
Alan Peterson: An Underappreciated Poet
00:19:32
Speaker
We are working to make him famous. Stay tuned. If you've tuned in to Alan Peterson's poetry, thank you. Yeah.
00:19:38
Speaker
If you've tuned in and you are an editor or publisher and you have some interest in publishing Alan Peterson's poetry, get in touch. There's at least one book that doesn't have a publisher yet that's quite recent because his people are silly and don't realize he's great and he deserves to have the same career shape as A.R. Ammons.
00:20:00
Speaker
uh who is someone who's they're both tremendously intellectual tremendously brilliant and fun fun writers who are discursive and conversational and science oriented and philosophical and unmystical and who've lived their entire lives outside the giant cultural centers where you get to have drinks with someone who then offers to publish a poetry book
00:20:26
Speaker
which honestly is the reason why he's not already published by one of our favorite publishers. You have the opportunity to show that he is the AR Ammons of our time. I am entirely serious. If you're not already an Ammons fan, maybe...
00:20:46
Speaker
We can work on that if you are in Ammonstan. Stay tuned, because we're going to get to Alan Peterson. But first, I'm going to answer Cameron's question, which is about the mediation or the, in some ways, disintermediation, the new media effects of the internet on new poetry. That was the question, right? I think so, yeah.
00:21:11
Speaker
Okay, so short answer. If we define poetry as a whole bunch of words arranged so that they can be read aloud by anyone or read silently. They don't need expert performance by an actor or singer. In a way that is structurally and acoustically interesting and emotionally expressive.
00:21:38
Speaker
The internet makes it easier for people who aren't already publishing books to circulate the poems that they write, especially young people who are online more on average. And that has had an effect, an obvious effect in that you get sort of insta poets, people who write very popular poetry who are often quite young and their readers are quite young.
00:22:05
Speaker
And it's not terribly subtle. It's not terribly interesting to me, except as a matter of sociology, but it means a lot to people. And it takes its place in the line of extremely popular, but maybe doesn't hold up under repeated listens. Poetry of
00:22:27
Speaker
past generations that circulated in newspapers and in printed books and on records, right, Rod McKeown and James Whitcomb Riley and so on. However, the ease of circulation in particular among young and online readers
00:22:49
Speaker
of poems by young and online writers has also done much more interesting things for poets I do like who I do think reward repeated attention about immediacy and neo-confessionalism and always feeling slightly off and having no boundary between public and private and trying to keep readers engaged all the time and hold people's attention and has generated
00:23:17
Speaker
I think especially in the twenty teens rather than you know the second number of writers who came up in the twenty teens who are unimaginable without the culture of people being very online without tumblr and twitter and fan spaces. I'm thinking in particular of Patricia Lockwood and of Hara Lindsay Bird and her cohort in Aotearoa in New Zealand.
00:23:42
Speaker
Yeah, I was thinking of both those names as you were talking. Good. Yeah. Yeah. Any minute, there's going to be a second Hera Lindsey Bird book and I am looking forward to it. Good. Me too. Yeah. And there's other other discussions to be had about
00:24:02
Speaker
whether people still read and to what extent the advent of the web and people living in our browsers and TikTok and Instagram have encouraged the rising generation to rely more on images and less on words, more on video and less on audio.
00:24:28
Speaker
I hope that I'm overstating it and overthinking it because I am such a word girl and a girl who wants audio to be more important than video unless I'm actually reading your comic book. Well, setting aside audio and video, there's also a lot of text online after all that we... Even if it's on my phone, I spend a
00:24:51
Speaker
I may spend more time reading now that I have a smartphone in any given day. Yeah. Well, I'm reading all kinds of things. Yeah. Yeah. The thing that I'm seeing not in, in us, like we're on our phones too much. Like people of our generation, more or less, I know you're younger than me, but like you're over 25. Yeah. By a bit. Yes. Yes. So my, uh, you know, people of our generation like are constantly checking our phones unless we are very, very mentally healthy.
00:25:21
Speaker
But we didn't grow up watching video essays. I want to learn about something complicated. I am going to try to read about it. I think that a lot of Zoomers can read, and they even read novels sometimes. But if they want to learn something, they're much more likely to look for a video essay. That matters a lot.
00:25:53
Speaker
I don't know where it's going. I think we've already seen in terms of how the dominance of video and of amateur video and of small circulation video affects poetry. We've seen that because when it was the 90s, slam poetry, stage based performance based poetry was just a different thing from the kind of poetry that I enjoy reading and writing and writing about.
00:26:24
Speaker
that is obviously no longer true, right? The rising generation, the generation that has risen at this point, the Dan and Smith generation are people who start out as performance-oriented poets and keep some of that performance orientation as they write books.
00:26:52
Speaker
And I wonder whether the video essay generation is going to keep some of that as they write.
00:27:00
Speaker
books if they write books. Wow, I suppose the sort of trivial answer is inevitably and we'll see what it's like, you know. Okay, so Alan Peterson, Stephanie, you've anticipated an early question I was going to ask for you, which was just to sort of situate the uninitiated
00:27:23
Speaker
with respect to the site. Your example of A.R. Ammons, I found interesting. Could you tell us just a little bit about who Alan Peterson is, sort of biographically, but then also with respect to your understanding of sort of poetry movements or schools of poetry or what? Yeah, he's so good. I used to spend a lot of time in bookstores and in record stores.
00:27:51
Speaker
And in both of those places, I was happy to find work by people I already admired, but I was really looking for discoveries. And I would go through poetry shelves in new bookstores in new cities and used bookstores and just pull out deliberately random things to see if I liked them.
00:28:14
Speaker
And mostly I didn't. And mostly, honestly, I would take things home and listen to them or read them and then say, you know, this. The luster has gone off this. It is, as Merrill says, like adding silver to quicksilver. The shine vanishes overnight. But every so often you find someone who's really good.
00:28:36
Speaker
And Peterson's first book, which came out in 2001, is called Anonymous Ore. It was published by an upstate New York press that no longer exists. And it turns out he'd been publishing in magazines for some time before that, during the 90s. And I found myself just going back to this book and getting more and more out of it.
00:29:05
Speaker
And I found out who he was when I realized that I wanted to write about him. And during the late 2000s and. Twenty teens, he published, I think, five more books. I think there hasn't been one since 2021. I knew it was a long ago. We're not long ago, but but Stephanie Burt.
00:29:28
Speaker
I think he writes poetry faster than I write poetry because I spend a lot of time taping essays about how other people's poetry is good. That's right. You're busy. There's a backlog of books that he's written and that haven't appeared in the world yet because he's had a pretty interesting life, not like an adventurous, he was an astronaut life.
00:29:54
Speaker
But a life of very serious artistic creation lived apart from the large cities where trade publishers and fancy parties happen. And you can make personal acquaintances with gatekeepers and where, you know, Nepo babies get their poetry published. And I recognize that some of my favorite poets are Nepo babies.
00:30:23
Speaker
But he's really not one. He's someone who has been serious about writing poetry since I believe the late 70s, but whose training and whose career has been as a painter.
00:30:39
Speaker
and as a teacher of painting. And I believe that for a great deal of the 80s and 90s, he was the chair of the Department of Studio Art in, I think, Pensacola Community College. He was the chair of a visual art department and he was a painting teacher.
00:31:05
Speaker
in a community college, a two-year college on the floor to Panhandle. Not because he's from there, but because that was where he got the job. And he's been extremely interested in the life sciences and in ecology and plant and animal biology. And those are kinds of information and kinds of observation.
00:31:36
Speaker
that enter the poetry in a way that is tremendously minute and detailed, cold, dark, deep, and absolutely clear to quote an earlier poet we both like and who he likes. His wife is
00:31:52
Speaker
a conservation activist and did a great deal of work fighting environmental racism and doing habitat protection in Florida. And now I believe does that work in Oregon where they have they've retired. They live in Oregon most of the year now.
00:32:09
Speaker
And so there are Pacific Northwest landscapes along with Gulf Coast landscapes in Peterson's work. Gotcha. He's tremendously observant and descriptive and detailed and understands in the way that Hopkins and Bishop did the multiple feedback loops that perception and putting perception into language.
00:32:38
Speaker
make for people trying to observe just what's around us. He understands, as Bishop says, the way that the observed world is a moving target, but the archer is also moving. He's just super smart. And the palms are beautifully observed
00:33:02
Speaker
and full of feeling and introspective and somewhat shy. They have convictions, often ecological convictions, but they're never a speech to a crowd. They really are introverted or intimate. And they never sound like Ammons, largely because Peterson is a poet of
00:33:29
Speaker
visual art and studio art and of the life sciences, where the point is to really describe everything minutely. And the life sciences tend to proliferate vocabulary, right? You use a lot of words. And Ammons, who was trained as a chemist, is really more of a poet of the physical sciences. He looks at trees,
00:33:55
Speaker
But he's more interested more often in laws of physics and in large patterns and in weather patterns. Ammons is a poet of physics and chemistry and sort of ontology. And Peterson, who really
00:34:20
Speaker
Everyone who's an Ammons fan should be reading Peterson and Everyone who has the power to publish Peterson should be doing so because he's not gonna show up and make connections for you and give you a fellowship and judge your manuscripts and Generally
00:34:42
Speaker
exert institutional power. You've made a strong case, but I have a feeling the poem will make its own case. The poem is the basis of everything else. I just feel like it is literally my job. It's the reason it's worth being me anything.
00:35:04
Speaker
I'm oversimplifying, but not much. If it's worth it to the future of literature for me to have a job, which it might not, it's not because I love John Keats more than
Analyzing 'I Thought All Life Came from the Alphabet'
00:35:16
Speaker
you. No matter how much I love John Keats, he doesn't need me. I need him.
00:35:23
Speaker
It is my job to yell at the world until more people publish Alan Peterson's books because they are wonderful and they will make your life better and they are quiet and they are subtle and they do not fit the prevailing narratives about where poetry is going any more than Ammons did.
00:35:55
Speaker
or Niediger, honestly, for a while. Niediger appeals to certain kinds of interest in extreme compression, which is not, I mean, Peterson actually writes wonderful six line poems, so he's sometimes compressed also. He doesn't have the same kind of like relationship to the avant-garde, he doesn't need it. But
00:36:16
Speaker
You know, it frustrates me that Alan Peterson is not already famous and I want to do what I can to make him famous. And that means sending people not just to the poems in a book like Fragile Act, which is published by McSweeney's something like 10 years ago, which is a wonderful place to start with him. Good.
00:36:34
Speaker
Um, or to his book from a few years ago published by salmon in Ireland, which I think is called as long as as much as as much as, uh, but also to what he's publishing right now in our leading literary magazines. We're going to talk about a poem that I think is an excerpt from a longer poem because Ammons does this too. He's a discursive poet who is easy to quote and easy to excerpt, but he does just go on thinking.
00:37:01
Speaker
Wordsworth did this, too, where you can take slices of the prelude and say, hey, here is a slice that works on its own. Was it for this or nothing or something? Yeah. But it is someone who thinks, going back to your earlier question, not in song forms, but in beautifully expressive and detailed and intricate discourse. Correct.
00:37:24
Speaker
Yeah, so this poem was originally was published in Poetry Northwest, and I take it, Stephanie, that you suggested it seems to perhaps be from a longer work because below the title appears the sort of subhead from, and then capital P, capital C, Pleasure Centers, which sounds like it might be the name of a longer work.
00:37:47
Speaker
I have not asked Ellen Peterson, but I suspect that is it. It may be. It's a great title. It's a great title. And if you are the sort of book publisher who would like to.
00:38:03
Speaker
make an impact with a book length poem. Find Alan Peterson in Oregon and say, hey, can I publish pleasure centers? You'll be glad you did. Great. Well, let's let's let's hear the poem. Yeah. Stephanie, would you would you please read? I thought all life came from the alphabet for us. I would be honored. So this is Alan Peterson's newish poem. I thought all life came from the alphabet published recently in Poetry Northwest.
00:38:32
Speaker
I thought all life came from the alphabet, from numerals, peptides, counting petals for love, hallucinations, platelets stacked in the break front, that word smoothed over irritants with pearl, that salt over my shoulder, seasoned danger to taste.
00:38:56
Speaker
That a glass door might close and trees and islands might rush by soundlessly like remembered lives, like silence we have other names for. Guilt was one that made threatening worlds by itself. That everything was true. Even a lie was a real lie. That a name we made up was like remembering in detail someone we never knew
00:39:27
Speaker
My own examples arriving nightly as if contracted with dream trucking of Stockbridge and Locust Grove, Georgia. I could get up early from another world and listen, study the bird books, the songs and calls rendered phonetically the way my turn signal says frisky frisky as I wait.
00:39:54
Speaker
I expected the purpose of consciousness was to recognize poignancy as an antidote to the cool neutrality of space and the flaming stars like bouquets shipped in from Amsterdam and Oregon, the spider that dropped on a silk thread and struggled in the tub. It is written, it was said as a finality.
00:40:15
Speaker
Even if the writer worked for the Black Duke or the Chamber of Commerce, you have my word on it, hand on it, a book, a note, a dying sun behind a cloud. Sometimes I thought, what was there left to talk about? Then Wisteria fell on the cushion and my condition was upgraded from swell to ecstatic. That's great.
00:40:42
Speaker
Yeah, it really is. It really is. Yeah, I'm excited to talk about it. We've just heard Stephanie Burt.
00:40:49
Speaker
read Alan Peterson's recent poem, which appeared in Poetry Northwest, I Thought All Life Came from the Alphabet. Stephanie, this is a poem whose title is its first line as well. And I thought, well, why not? Let's just take that as this kind of first unit for our attention. What kind of
00:41:15
Speaker
thought is being offered in that first line. What's the kind of view it's expressing or what's the mood of its expression? I'm curious about, just as a starter here, the fact that the verb is in the past tense
00:41:32
Speaker
suggests that it never really asserts, I once thought this, now I no longer do, or something like that. Yes. But what kind of person thinks that all life came from the alphabet? What would it even mean to think that? It's an absurd thought, but it makes a kind of sense. I mean, it's not true, but it's not absurd at all. I resemble that remark. While Stevens often resembles that remark. Yeah. Someone who lives in language.
00:42:00
Speaker
Someone who looks around and sees, as Stephen said, men made out of words. And women and non-binary people made out of words, too, and frogs and dogs and everything made out of words. Someone who loves and is so attached to linguistic systems for ordering things.
00:42:26
Speaker
and finds such beauty in those systems, that rather than moaning on about the prison house of language, is predisposed to believe, and sometimes half believes, remembers believing.
00:42:51
Speaker
that it really is all language, that the world can be thoroughly assimilated and mediated by words and numbers and humanly comprehensible systems with discrete parts and syntax and rules. So thoroughly assimilated and mediated that it seems as though the world is generated by those things.
00:43:21
Speaker
I guess. All life came from the alphabet. Yeah. Yeah. This is someone who really believed in superstition, that a glass that salt over my shoulder sees in danger. Someone who believed in the efficacy of language.
00:43:46
Speaker
Someone who believed that if you say something, children tend to believe this. If you say something, it is in some sense true. Even a lie was a real lie. Yeah. That when you make up a character, a fictional character, let's say, they in some sense exist. That the mind with its meaning making apparatus
00:44:13
Speaker
fits into a world made of meanings. And one of the things I like about this poem is the way that it explores that hypothesis with humor and beauty. If you encounter, if you pass a truck on the Mass Pike that says dream trucking of Stockbridge, which is a town in Massachusetts, then you figure that the truck must contain dreams because words mean something.
00:44:42
Speaker
That is an attitude that is surprising and a bit dangerous because it means even bad, insincere actors, Chamber of Commerce people, for example.
00:44:56
Speaker
say words and the words change the world, the words do something, the word means something. But it's also an exciting way to live because it means that the words that you're comfortable with, the words that you understand, the systems you can move among,
00:45:14
Speaker
have power and consistency and won't let you down. You might be baffled or overwhelmed or frustrated, but you won't be plunged into a kind of abject void of meaninglessness where words don't fit the world. Words do fit the world in this way of thinking. And Peterson at the end, where the lines get shorter,
00:45:42
Speaker
And the vocabulary gets less remarkable some of the time. And the phraseology gets briefly medical. And there's only one word for a beautiful plant or a beautiful thing, wisteria. Poems that imagine a good fit between the system of language
00:46:13
Speaker
and the world, the phenomenal world, the material world, the world outside ourselves. Those poems, which have existed in Western languages at least since Shakespeare's sonnets, probably since Sidney, those poems generally do one of two things.
00:46:40
Speaker
they can do what the Shakespeare of the Sonnets does, and what Thomas Hardy sometimes does, and what John Ashbery sometimes does, which is to say, oh dear, Stevens does this too sometimes, to say, oh dear, seeming is not being, language is not the world, my attempt to make everything make sense has failed,
00:47:08
Speaker
The dark lady lied a lot. My sex drive has gone into the toilet. I'm very sad because the world of reality cannot be captured in organized language. The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream, right? I was going to say let BB finale of scene. I was waiting for you to say that. Yeah. Thank you for saying that. You got to give me a moment. I'm giving you a moment. You can start a poem.
00:47:33
Speaker
with your sense that language fits the world and then get really disillusioned and sad because it doesn't. Or. You can be a rather thoroughgoing mystic. You can be the early Yates or certain parts of Blake. Or I suppose someone like Robert Duncan, who's just casting spells who I don't understand, but like my friends love him. There's clearly something there. Or maybe Marilyn Sandover.
00:48:04
Speaker
Oh, where really the whole life does come from the alphabet, Stephanie, the alphabet arrayed on the Reacher board. Yeah, from God be. Um. We need to do this again and talk about a scattering of salts, because Meryl goes on believing that. No, I don't. That's why I said the Meryl of Sandeavor. But yeah.
00:48:33
Speaker
But say more. So sorry, you said there are two kinds. On the one hand, there's the poet who thinks actually
00:48:41
Speaker
reality is not sufficiently well described by language. After all, there's a kind of disappointment or sadness to the work of that poem. On the other hand, there's the mystical poet, and then we got sidetracked into deciding whether Meryl was or wasn't one. But say more about that type.
00:49:04
Speaker
OK, about mystical poets. Well, yeah, I mean finished. So what how how does the mystical poet, to use your phrase, Stephanie, avoid the disappointment that they believe in magic? Yeah, they believe in magic. They have either a deeply idiosyncratic sense of. How they can arrange the world to their liking. Mm hmm.
00:49:29
Speaker
or they just actually rely on religion. Hopkins tells us that there lives the dearest freshness deep down things because the Holy Ghost brews over the world with bright wings, where secular language won't do the job, but language infused with the presence of Christ who is ultimately responsible for the hesitas of all the stuff we see.
00:50:00
Speaker
Is is there the word made flesh? Well, yeah Yeah The word made flesh stands behind words which and that's the reason words can be fleetingly or semi-adequate to flesh Obviously some Christian poets don't believe that some Jewish totes don't believe that and so on Elliott never believed it But Hopkins really did um But Peterson is neither a religious poet mm-hmm nor a
00:50:30
Speaker
spell casting, system building, idiosyncratic mystic, nor fundamentally a poet of dejection and disillusion and irony. He is, and I love him for it, a science guy.
00:50:48
Speaker
That's great. So I wanna sort of pause here briefly because you unspooled the sort of beautiful reading that was picking up on, if our listeners weren't noticing it, I certainly was, words and phrases from later in the poem as I just asked you a question about the first line. And of course that kind of thing is inevitable and quite welcome.
00:51:11
Speaker
When I hear that, but I want to sort of, you know, reel us back in just a little bit here. When I hear that first line, I thought all life came from the alphabet, and then I hear you begin to talk about it, what I'm picturing, Stephanie, in a way, maybe sort of predisposed to do this because of our earlier discussion of science.
00:51:31
Speaker
is like the periodic table of elements or something like that, where rather than having that sort of collection, I mean, on the one hand, I'm noticing that that periodic table of elements is represented by the alphabet. But I'm sort of replacing the elements that are meant to be represented by that chart and instead imagining now simply the alphabet itself. But then I noticed that
00:52:02
Speaker
Well, two things. One is, there is something kind of breathless about this poem, which I think is a function and part of its lacking punctuation, and you read it beautifully. And then also, past that first line break and into the second line, I mean, if we thought the assertion was simply, I thought all life came from the alphabet,
00:52:25
Speaker
we see that in addition to the alphabet, we get a list of other things which are both like the alphabet in some ways and in others, I think not, from numerals, peptides. Peptides are like amino acid. Well, that's a joke about the alphabet, right? Because peptides that's
00:52:48
Speaker
Peptides are molecules that are put together in cells. And ultimately, the coding for everything in a cell is a bunch of letters, the way we understand it, that make DNA and RNA, right? They all come together from, if it's DNA, ACT, and G, the alphabet. And in fact, in that sense, because all life on Earth comes from DNA,
00:53:08
Speaker
All life does come from the alphabet as we understand it. And these things, which are just so beautiful line by line, right? Like Pope Spider and Whitman Spider. Peterson is someone whose poetry really lives on individual lines. It's not just that he's got cool ideas. Every line does something fun. Platelets stacked on the break front is just an incredible sort of almost, it's not totally like Meryl because it's more sciency.
00:53:38
Speaker
But Merrill never wrote a poem of science in his life, even though he believed that he would be able to write poems of science. He's not a science guy. That's a separate podcast. We should do it. But platelets stacked in the break front means both that platelets, which help your blood clot, stack themselves
00:53:57
Speaker
if you have a front brake, if you get a cut in your skin, and it means little plates you might have a pastry on, like something you might need to flaunt off, are gonna be stacked in your brake front. Those are platelets because they are part of the circulatory system of human social life, which has its own codes that are connected to, but not the same as the codes that build cells in your body.
00:54:24
Speaker
I should confess, I didn't know what a brake front was as a piece of furniture. I looked it up, though, and I now do. It's a word that could be used to describe a cabinet that has a curved front to it in which you might stack your plates. Yeah. Right. Right. Because my platelets is such a good kind. Yes. Right. The individual words here are so good, and the things that other
00:54:52
Speaker
philosophical poets tend to do with syntax and sound. Peterson sometimes does with word choice because his mind is so much a mind conditioned by
00:55:09
Speaker
observing a very fertile, crowded scene world in the tropics of subtropics in Florida and a mind conditioned by, and I don't know where he got this, he's not trained in biology, but did you ever do a quad rat study? Did you take like AP bio? I didn't take AP bio. I don't know if I did that, but if I did, I don't remember it. So tell us what you have in mind.
00:55:36
Speaker
So quadrats study this is one of my favorite AP bio things I should if he's listening I should think AP bio teacher Bill George from a school in Washington DC you go into a forest or You could do this with the ocean floor if you want you can do it with anything You stake out a certain amount of ground and then you just count all of the living things in that piece of ground if you're doing it with a
00:56:06
Speaker
square foot of beach or cubic foot of beach. You might count the clams and count those little worms that dig into the sand and if you can do the sampling you count the bacteria and you see how much seaweed is washed up and you see if there's any beach grass. Like if you're doing it on the forest floor which is is where we used to do it
00:56:28
Speaker
You're counting worms and beetles and ants and different kinds of fungus and shrubberies and germinating seeds and squirrel feces to indicate there's squirrels there. You're just looking at all the different kinds of life that are there and it tends to expand your vocabulary.
00:56:47
Speaker
I'm realizing that the bell this rang for me was not from bio, but from poetry. The Pope Brian Tear has, in the book, Doomstead Days, has a series of poems called Something Quadrats, I think, that plays on just this idea. Yeah, I don't know that book. I know some of his earlier work. I got to look at that book. But getting back to the
00:57:13
Speaker
philosophical and epistemological disappointment of realizing that the world exceeds your words for it and the world does not fit into any of the linguistic systems for organizing it that we have.
00:57:31
Speaker
That is not ultimately a disappointment to Peterson, nor is it a truth that he denies by casting spells or going to church, although if you like doing those things, don't let me stop you. Instead, he demonstrates, and this is really rare, I want to say Ammons does it,
00:57:56
Speaker
I think you could argue that Terrence Hayes occasionally does it because Hayes is multiply minded in similar ways. What Peterson does at the end is to give us the intrusion of the phenomenal not yet named world of experience before we have language for it.
00:58:25
Speaker
a tiny bit of new experience into the world of systems that this poet has inhabited. And instead of becoming sad because the world exceeds our systems, or instead of insisting that his system includes it all,
00:58:51
Speaker
and instead of feeling deceived or let down, Peterson really models secular joy in observation. He does, and again, this is so sciency.
00:59:16
Speaker
He's thinking about the pros and cons of understanding life as systems and treating words as kinds of power. And then this piece of flower, piece of leaf falls beside him. And he doesn't say everything dies, like in Hopkins' Palm Spring and Fall. He doesn't say, well, I wasn't expecting that. I guess language is stupid.
00:59:43
Speaker
He doesn't insist that there is no ground of being and everything's terrible. He says what could be better than the feeling of play within language, the feeling of play that also exceeds language. There is a kind of ecstasy in realizing that there's always more to learn, there's always more to explore.
01:00:10
Speaker
There's always something that you could harmlessly study and learn that you didn't know about yesterday.
01:00:20
Speaker
Well, the physicist or the chemist might think like everything that can exist does and our science describes it. The life scientist, on the other hand, to go back to the distinction you were making earlier, because the object of study is life and because of the nature of life, there will be something new
01:00:44
Speaker
you know, tomorrow that our language has not yet described. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And Peterson in other moods can point out that we're probably killing off species of beetles faster than we can describe them. And he's very aware of that. Sometimes I think that some of his most sort of nature-oriented poems are what would happen if Merwin liked people.
01:01:14
Speaker
I'm gonna let that comment lie for just a moment. You, I think, quite sort of persuasively keep invoking science and describing Peterson as a poet of science.
Themes in Peterson's Work
01:01:29
Speaker
Yeah. I just wanna say, though, or sort of make explicit a kind of nagging thought I've been having, which is that
01:01:41
Speaker
numerals and peptides surely sort of fit into the scheme that you've just given us, but something like counting petals for love or hallucinations.
01:01:54
Speaker
doesn't seem to fall quite as easily under the kind of, and I'm playing the straight man here so that you can expand my sense of what should count as science, but doesn't sound scientific in the same way. It sounds instead, I don't know, superstitious or childish or what have you. So what's the view of science that you feel committed to here, Stephanie,
01:02:24
Speaker
that can account for something like counting petals for love or hallucinations or hearing for that matter. I don't want to just stay with the first lines forever. We can skip around, obviously, and we already have. But hearing, for instance, in the sound of the turn signal in my car, the word frisky, frisky, which I just loved. That's such a great
01:02:47
Speaker
onomatopoietic good year that's how it sounds frisky frisky frisky yeah so yeah so what what's the view of science that can accommodate those kind that kind of observational mind
01:02:58
Speaker
I am happy to let you play the straight man, as it were. So the view of science that can accommodate those kinds of phenomena, those kinds of feelings and games, is the view of science taken by Stephen Jay Gould in his great essay, Non-Overlapping Magisteria.
01:03:23
Speaker
in which he says, it's a couple decades old, Stephen Jay Gould is no longer with us. If I remember the guess correctly, Gould is arguing that if you think science and religion conflict and are at war, you need to change your understanding either of what religion does or of what science does, because when they're understood properly, they simply do not conflict. If you are going to do
01:03:52
Speaker
observational science and do the natural sciences and do things that can be confirmed by independent observation or experiment and that are at least somewhat friendly to mathematical systems or verifiable systems, you need to understand how much of human lives exceeds those systems.
01:04:17
Speaker
And conversely, if you're going to talk about people's ineffable experiences of the divine, which you should if you have them, most of my friends I think have them, you should understand that your ineffable experience of the divine doesn't change the second law of thermodynamics. There are just different ways of describing the world and they can coexist
01:04:41
Speaker
in one moment in one person having experiences and making observations, even if they fit uncomfortably or paradoxically together in the same proposition. And those kinds of paradoxical propositions are what Peterson is doing in a poem like this. Hallucinations are absolutely the province of science. It's called brain science, right? Or it's called the science of psychedelic drugs.
01:05:07
Speaker
Why is my brain creating this thing that I know? You know doesn't exist and weighs nothing and you aren't seeing counting petals for love on the other hand is the first eruption or entry into the poem of The traditionally poetic and emotive and also demotic counting petals for love is something children do Taylor Swift does it and
01:05:37
Speaker
The interesting thing there is the counting. Even when Peterson thinks about romantic and erotic attachment between human beings, he kind of likes the counting part.
01:05:52
Speaker
Yeah, it's a funny way to describe that ritual, which I assume is the, he loves me, he loves me not, or she loves me, whatever. That's the thing. Is that idiomatic to call that counting petals for love? I don't know who it is. No, but it builds on the idiom that Peterson expects us to be familiar with because he builds on every register of language available. He uses really every stop on the organ.
01:06:21
Speaker
This is one of the reasons I take this poem among other recent poems. It shows you how good at deploying vocabulary that doesn't, how good at deploying vocabulary that doesn't even belong together, Peterson is.
01:06:40
Speaker
Counting petals for love. They love me, they love me not, they love me, they love me not. Kind of just tearing petals off a daffodil or something. Daisy's, it's supposed to be daisies, isn't it? Because they have a lot of small petals. Goes with platelets, goes with a break front, goes with the way that pearls are made in oysters, goes with common words like trees and islands, goes with
01:07:06
Speaker
detachable propositions like even a lie was a real lie goes with vernacular observations like dream trucking of Stockbridge and then we get words like phonetically or neutrality or finality. Something else Peterson is really good at
01:07:28
Speaker
is making abstractions make sense by dropping them amid sensory experience. Give us an example of that. It was written, it was said as a finality. What that means in context is that the previous Peterson who put his faith in linguistic systems treated all propositions as in some sense efficacious and true.
01:07:57
Speaker
And he says that, and he doesn't give us an example. And he doesn't give us anything to see or taste. And it takes a little while, he immerses that in narrative. It seemed to him to the pre-wisteria Peterson, as it were.
01:08:21
Speaker
that everything that mattered belonged in a linguistic system and everything in a linguistic system was in some sense important and valid and true and made its own truth. It's the language magic that children believe in. It's the kind of attitude that helps people write poems sometimes. And the
01:08:44
Speaker
An alarming thing about that belief is it means even when someone odious whom we know lies a lot says something. It feels true and it changes the world. We now know a lot about propaganda.
01:09:00
Speaker
We know that when an extremely odious person gets on TV and says something a lot, it changes the world. Even if this person is a liar motivated by the most predatory versions of capitalism or by a wish for personal power in a feudal system.
01:09:23
Speaker
And Peterson knows exactly how far he can take those kinds of arguments before he needs to give us something else to see. A book, a note, a dying sun behind a cloud. And just when you think the palm is gonna end in this very Merlin way,
01:09:50
Speaker
where humans have soiled the world with language that we can no longer have faith in, and we may as well get off the stage, which isn't the only thing Merwin does, but it's frankly the dominant note in Merwin in many of his books. Just when you think that we're going to hear humanity denounced as liars,
01:10:19
Speaker
which, you know, that is a creditable position. And when I haven't had enough to eat, I feel that way myself. Peterson tells us what someone as available to equanimity, someone as observationally gifted and as flexible and as capable of calm as he is.
01:10:46
Speaker
can do with this confirmation. Then wisteria fell on the cushion and my condition was upgraded from swell, I was feeling okay, pregnant as Hopkins says with words, to ecstatic. I was very happy. I was able to go outside my body. I was able to realize that I don't even need to leave my couch to have
01:11:16
Speaker
an experience of the world being more marvelous than I expected and of strange new worlds appearing that don't fit into my systems. Why wisteria? Why wisteria? Yeah. It's brightly colored and I believe it tends to be yellow. I think lavender. I think we can. Wisteria and Robert Lowell that is yellow.
01:11:42
Speaker
Okay. This is what happens when you learn your botany from poetry. No, no, I'm actually, I'm thinking of Robert Lowell's poem, The Drinker, that ends with oil, skin, yellow is forsythia. Let's take a look, I was curious. Yeah, forsythia for sure is yellow, but no. Which theory is in fact lavender?
01:12:00
Speaker
Yeah. Well, there's something about the way the word sounds, too. Forget about what the thing looks like, right? I mean, if all life comes from the alphabet, then presumably we're inclined to care just as much about what the word sounds like as we are what the flower looks like. Or maybe we think, moreover, that there's some correlation that's real and not just arbitrary between what the flower looks like and what the word sounds like.
01:12:29
Speaker
I would say that you're overthinking it and that Peterson. How dare you? Well, no, I think Peterson, who probably doesn't like Robert Lowell as much as I do or think about Robert Lowell as much as I do, although he might.
01:12:44
Speaker
and honestly gets outside more. Does not expect me to confuse Wisteria with Forsythia. That's just me being a pathetic creature of words. It doesn't get out enough. What is important is that this is a brightly colored flower whose petals can be high up because it grows on vines and can fall. And the flower petals are not bright red or pink. Why was that important?
01:13:11
Speaker
because they don't look like blood and they don't suggest Valentine's Day or erotic love. I see. So you don't think as I do. You think I'm overthinking it if I say that there's something about the way the word wisteria perhaps echoes a word like wistful.
01:13:25
Speaker
Oh no, it does echo WISF. I'm okay with that. I just think that the Wisteria Forsythia Association is one that I need to get out of my mind. That was your association. That's not me. I thought you were telling me that my association was okay. I think the Wisteria Forsythia Association, it absolutely is there and that false cognate contributes to our expectation that the poem will end in disappointment.
01:13:56
Speaker
And it doesn't. He's doing okay. Not the least of my favorite things about reading a whole lot of Alan Pearson poetry is that while he understands that equanimity is difficult to sustain, just like domesticity can be difficult to sustain, while he understands that as a species,
01:14:24
Speaker
We continue to be immensely destructive and collectively make bad choices and are sort of stuck in the tragedy of the commons and kind of suck in a lot of ways. It's also wonderful to be alive and to listen to other people and to take in new experiences and sustain bonds with the human and the non-human world.
01:14:54
Speaker
And he is a poet of very carefully articulated hope and joy and pleasure, pleasure centers, if you like. And we could use more of that in our lives. And he's so good at that. And this poem represents that ability in his work
01:15:23
Speaker
Yeah. Even as it's so aware of all the things that can go wrong, my condition was upgraded, right? I mean, that points back to things like Wordsworth's daffodils. But because Peterson understands that we talk about our bodies in medical terms as well, and because he likes faking you out, he treats himself very briefly as a body in an emergency room or an ICU. Right.
01:15:54
Speaker
being upgraded from whatever, critical to, you know. Yeah, serious. Right. I want to stay here with these last lines of the poem, but I want to bring some slightly earlier lines to bear on them, which we've referred to in passing, but haven't talked about, I think, as much as perhaps we ought to. I expected the purpose of consciousness was to recognize
01:16:24
Speaker
poignancy as an antidote to the cool neutrality of space. Hard to know exactly where to stop the phrase, but I'll stop it there. That, too, is in the past tense. I expected, right, as the, I thought, first line of the poem was. First of all, talk to us, Stephanie, about that idea that the purpose of consciousness might be to recognize poignancy as an antidote to cool neutrality
01:16:57
Speaker
My mind went back to that moment in part because of this conversation we were having about wisteria and wistfulness and perhaps the relation to poignancy. But I'm curious what you make of those lines that I just read and what sort of continued life you see that position as having in the final lines of the poem.
01:17:24
Speaker
poignancy. So I think that Peterson does recognize poignancy as an antidote to the cool neutrality of space. I think that Peterson, and here I think a precedent might be hardy, I think that Peterson absolutely recognizes that we can have feelings about natural processes.
01:17:55
Speaker
that we can project ourselves into and react emotionally to growth and entropy and flourishing and decay, even though those would go on without us and maple trees don't really have feelings about the fact that they displace other kinds of trees and oak trees in turn displace them.
01:18:18
Speaker
And there's poignancy with that wisteria falling at the end. There's special providence in the fall of that wisteria blossom. However, consciousness does not have a single purpose any more than all of life can be described in a single language-like system. And that's the part of Peterson's expectation that he implies he has given up.
01:18:48
Speaker
but he's not going to stop recognizing poignancy. Why would you stop recognizing poignancy? It's fun. I wouldn't. I'm a sucker for poignancy. Me too. Frisky. Frisky. One of many things we have in common. That's wonderful. Stephanie, you've introduced me to a poet that I love and I'm- Yay!
01:19:13
Speaker
And I'm grateful for it. And I'll bet you've done the same for many of our listeners. So perhaps I could invite you as a way to send us out to read the poem aloud one more time. Would you be willing to do so?
01:19:30
Speaker
This is so much fun. I would, you know, I want to come back and do this with you again and again if if if your listeners can stand for it. Alan Peterson's recent poem, I thought all life came from the alphabet.
Conclusion and Poem Recitation
01:19:46
Speaker
And just so you don't confuse him with other Alan Peterson's or Iverson's or Anderson's, that is A-L-L-A-N space P-E-T-E-R-S-O-N.
01:20:00
Speaker
I thought all life came from the alphabet, from numerals, peptides, counting petals for love, hallucinations, platelets stacked in the breakfront, that word smoothed over irritants with pearl, that salt over my shoulder, seasoned danger to taste.
01:20:22
Speaker
That a glass door might close and trees and islands might rush by soundlessly like remembered lives. Like silence we have other names for. Guilt was one that made threatening worlds by itself. That everything was true, even a lie was a real lie. That a name we made up was like remembering in detail someone we never knew.
01:20:49
Speaker
My own examples arriving nightly as if contracted with dream trucking of Stockbridge and Locust Grove, Georgia. I could get up early from another world and listen, study the bird books, the songs and calls rendered phonetically the way my turn signal says frisky, frisky as I wait.
01:21:14
Speaker
I expected the purpose of consciousness was to recognize poignancy as an antidote to the cool neutrality of space and the flaming stars like bouquets shipped in from Amsterdam and Oregon. The spider that dropped on a silk thread and struggled in the tub. It is written, it was said as a finality.
01:21:41
Speaker
even if the writer worked for the Black Duke or the Chamber of Commerce. You have my word on it, hand on it, a book, a note, a dying sun behind a cloud. Sometimes I thought, what was there left to talk about? Then wisteria fell on the cushion and my condition was upgraded from swell to ecstatic.
01:22:09
Speaker
Well, Stephanie Burt, what a pleasure this has been. Thank you. That was staff reading. Yeah, my pleasure. Staff reading Alan Peterson's I Thought All Life came from the alphabet. It's been a delight to think about this poem with you, and I really appreciate the time and the attention.
01:22:29
Speaker
I appreciate it. This is so much fun. Let's do it again. Thank you so much. Sure. As long as I as long as I have a podcast, you're you're a welcome guest on it. Thank you listeners for hanging out with us. Stay tuned. Please, you know, do all that good stuff like following the podcast, leaving a reading review, the podcast on iTunes and other platforms. It really share it with a friend, share an episode with a friend and read poetry.
01:23:23
Speaker
Be well, everyone.