-In partnership with the friends of the UNH library.

This is the New Hampshire Authors series from the Dimond Library at the University of New Hampshire.

♪♪ Hello, I'm Rebecca Rule, and welcome to the New Hampshire Authors series.

In a few minutes, I'll be going upstairs to talk about poetry with Mekeel McBride and a live audience.

If you are a poet, if you're interested in poetry or just curious about it, come on up.

Mekeel will have some words of inspiration for all of us.

Mekeel McBride is the author of seven books of poetry.

Her latest, Dog Star Delicatessen, brings together a selection of poems from her previous books, as well as 20 new poems.

She's been teaching here at UNH since 1979.

Mekeel received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

She was a Bunting Institute fellow and a resident at MacDowell Colony.

She's not only a professor, though.

She volunteers as a wildlife rehabilitator, and she used to work part time, and not that long ago, as a floor guard and birthday specialist at Happy Wheels Roller Rink.

Welcome, Mekeel McBride.

[applause] Pretty impressive.

-The roller skating part’s impressive.

What wildlife have you rehabilitated lately?

Let's get right to the... Let's get right to the... - Imagine how incredibly wonderful -Imagine how incredibly wonderful it is to be asked that question, really, -Is it?

-Yeah.

-Well, I'd like to know!

-Red-tailed hawk.

I haven't been there in a couple of months because school has been very busy, but, I've worked with, great horned owls and possums and porcupines.

I've learned that you can pet a porcupine.

I've kissed a porcupine on the nose.

But it is one of the most wonderful things to take something like an injured, red-tailed hawk that's been hit by a car and nurse it back to health, and then be the one to release it.

It's really amazing.

-And are you writing about those experiences yet?

- I've got lots of notes.

- Yeah?

So down the road, that red-tailed hawk will appear in a poem?

-I’m sure.

-Yeah.

Well, I wanted to ask you to start with a poem, and I picked out, Mekeel asked me to pick out the poem she would read, which is very interesting and kind of a lot of pressure, what if I picked the wrong one?

But we've talked and I picked some good ones I think so we’ll, so the first poem that I'll ask you to read is one of my favorites, The Truth About Why I Love Potatoes.

I also love potatoes.

Would you read that for us?

Would you read that for us?

- Sure, what page is that?

-That’s on page, -Sure, what page is that?

-That’s on page, let’s see, it's early on.

It's on page 51.

[pages turning] -Of everything you get for dinner, they're the most fun to play with.

Gravy lakes, soaking deep into the soft white alps of the mashed ones.

French fries, good for fences to keep your fork safe from lima beans, the baked ones perfect for pounding down into pancakes from the moon.

I guess I forgot to mention how much I used to love globbing mashed potatoes into a ball, then hurling it at my brother, so it seemed he was the one who had made the mess.

Now I know grown ups do the same thing too, but usually not with potatoes.

If a potato were able to turn into a person, I'm almost certain it would be someone you'd like for a friend.

It could teach you to understand the language of animals who live underground.

Worms and woodchucks, foxes and bears.

On rainy Saturday afternoons, it would take you to funny movies.

When you were feeling sad, it would remind you of all the good things you'd forgotten about yourself.

There might be dozens even more in the garden without you ever knowing.

Fat moons blooming, a secret night sky right under your feet.

If I could have my wish, I'd want my poem to be just like a potato.

Not afraid of the dark.

Simple and surprising at the same time.

You'd have to dig a little to get it, but then you'd be glad you'd made the effort.

And maybe after you were finished, something in you that had been hungry for a long time wouldn't feel so empty anymore.

- Thank you.

- Welcome.

-Thank you.

I wanted to start with that because of, because I love potatoes, and because I also believe that if a potato were able to turn into a person, it would be someone you'd like for a friend.

But also because at the end, you talk about poetry.

If I could have my wish, I'd want my poem to be just like a potato.

Not afraid of the dark, surprising and simple.

And I wonder if you would talk a little bit more about, about what, what a poem is for you?

What you try to make a poem into?

-That's a good question.

This poem in particular was a real turning point for me I was reading at a grade school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to a fourth grade class, and I had other poems about potatoes, not this one.

This one hadn't been written, and I was passing my books around and they were thrilled.

Kids are thrilled to touch books that real people have written, you know, and they were reading through and they couldn't understand anything, you know, and they finally saw the potato poems and they picked those up and they couldn't understand them either and I realized something was really wrong with what I was doing.

That, that, if, if fourth graders couldn't understand them, why, why was I writing this way, you know?

And it was then I decided I wanted to become much clearer and wanted to be more available.

I wanted them to know why I loved potatoes.

So I wrote this poem, and that was a whole shift for me.

It was a real desire then to make myself available, and before that, I had been kind of in the surreal camp, very, full of mysterious, intriguing incomprehensible, images.

They’re fashionable, you know, but, they're incomprehensible.

Well, you wrote about that and this is another, I tell people that you taught me how to read poetry, and I never took a class with you, but I learned, I think, from you, how to read poetry, although it may be questionable if I do know how to read poetry, but I think I do.

But you said in, in UNH magazine you talked about understanding poetry, and you wrote, do you worry you will not understand what is written here in the poem?

I've never stopped worrying.

It's a fear instilled as early as grammar school.

And then you say, how do we shift from literal knowing, from fact based logical thinking into a kind of river drift dreaming?

It’s a matter of accepting that you might not understand trusting imagination, reading until the river's soaked far so far into you there's no need to say what it means, and you're left feeling rinsed, enriched, reoriented to a world that's a good deal more interesting than it was before you started.

I love that.

- It sounds good.

- Yeah, you wrote that.

-I don't even remember writing that.

-But do you agree?

Is, do you... - Yes I... - That riv... that, the whole idea of the, river drift dreaming to go into a poem and sort of drift through it and dreaming.

Is, does that work for writing poetry as well?

Is there a sense of drifting and dreaming or?

-Oh, absolutely, that's what writing poetry is.

I never start thinking I will write a poem about, well, I knew I wanted to say something to those kids about potatoes, but I had no idea what I was going to say.

It's getting into this frame of mind where there are no boundaries.

Logic doesn't really matter.

You can say anything you want to say.

It's very much like lucid dreaming.

The poem, The Well, would you read that for us?

The child falls into a well, far away hole at the top gives her a day that's round all azure, and at night inky with a slight stain of stars.

That little bit of glitter makes her think of seeds she used to plant with her mother.

The wonder of sunflowers coming from something small and hard.

Sometime much later, a mouse brings her a petal.

It could have brought a golden kernel of corn, a grain of rice.

That part doesn't matter.

She presses the pedal to her chest and sleeps a day, a decade, half a century.

Who knows?

Who really ever knows?

Sometimes when she wakes, she is safe at the edge of a soft green field, sometimes still deep in the well, forgotten by everyone, even the mouse.

-Thank you.

Now, that poem is a little puzzling to me.

I mean, I could, I can sometimes she seems safe and sometimes not safe, and I love that ambiguity.

There is definitely ambiguity, and I'm not...

I don't, you know, some of these I don't even remember writing, even though this is fairly recent I don't remember writing it.

I don't remember where it came from.

I don't remember, whatever the inspiration was for it.

I do know that, I think sometimes you feel like you've fallen into a dark place with only a little light to go on, and something rescues you, like the mouse with the pedal.

Sometimes comes even in that state, you feel like you're in the meadow, and sometimes you're back in the dark place.

And children maybe are more likely to admit that than adults.

-Yeah.

Are there poems that remain inaccessible even to you.

You write them and you know, they're they're working.

They make you feel, they make readers feel but you don't quite know what, what's what they're saying.

The interesting thing is I deliberately tried to take all of those out of the new and selected, on purpose.

So I was able to only find 1 or 2 that were borderline like that.

And I realize I did too much of that, too much of that taking out because sometimes poems.

And I found one from another book, those are often poems I love to read by other people.

And I have faith that the dreaming mind in other people can make sense of those poems.

I've sort of forgotten that myself as a writer, so I think I'm going to return to some of that.

Well, there's a poem called It Is Ordinary.

And would you read that one for us?

It is ordinary.

I am awake the well on the way through the secret door into sleep.

The one painted the same color every night.

But this time I can see the start of the world that far back.

No, I just light indigo as a dragonfly's wing.

The blue of day.

But farther back than that.

No air, no earth, no sun.

Simply the beginning.

We are making the world.

And there is only one of us.

Though soon we will separate into bodies just for the joy of it.

Anthracite protozoa, tree frog, human being.

I am awake in in corporeal levity as we or I or that one in Indigo.

Vertigo invents air to remind my lungs of the blue treasure they fill with and spill to you, who holds the gift for a heartbeat before passing it into thrushes.

Warble a miraculous alchemy calculated into all of memory, shared equally by breathing among priests half asleep in the dark confessional husks of deep sea dreaming abalone, the truth of it shining even in a forest pebble.

I was awake, but I did sleep later, because I could see how simple it all was, and I knew I would remember.

Thank you, thank you.

See, I wonder I'm not a poet.

And I wonder about words like abalone.

It's such a beautiful, you don't see that word a lot.

And I wonder how.

I wonder how I mean it.

Did you have clam in there at first and then change it to episode?

I'm sorry.

Let me.

I guess I'm asking you about process.

I'm asking you about revision.

The deep sea dreaming clam.

Oh, it doesn't sound bad, but it is.

Yeah, and you do a lot of revision.

I know you do.

Yeah.

And it's this.

Does one word sort of suggest another?

Do you.

How much?

How calculating are you?

You know, do you put it away for a while and come back to it.

What's your process for creating a poem like this?

This one I worked a lot with sound.

I just let sound generate language and if there was a clam it left because the sound didn't work.

There was.

That reminds me of a really funny, typo that happened in a manuscript.

I had written a poem about a policeman.

I interviewed a policeman because I wanted to know what it was like to be a policeman, and in it he was dreaming of looters and wife beaters.

And I was checking, checking the proofs, and it said, dreaming of lobsters and wife beaters.

Fabulous typo.

Which is much better.

I know I had to take it out.

Yeah, yeah, not quite the same as a looter, but yeah, well, it seems to me, and we've talked about this, that intuition plays a big part in how you select your words like abalone and or the length of the lines or, you know, or the shifts in topic, the sort of surprising shifts.

And so what part do you think intuition plays, and how do you talk to your students about intuition?

When you go into a conference and say, be more intuitive?

Intuition is one of the largest parts of writing, and that means letting go enough so that you can trust abalone to come in and not censor it right away, because it's not your first candidate for a word for a poem.

So to let in all those things that that a smart censor would try to take out, but that censor isn't smart when you're writing poetry.

So, a really good friend of mine talks about there being these sort of invisible threads around you all the time.

And you can you can reach for them and, and use them both in teaching and in writing.

And that's true.

And that's a form of intuition that all that is available to you, all the words, everything you need, it's always there around.

You just kind of have to trust it in tune into it.

And writing poetry is full of that for me.

And how do you teach that?

Or can you teach it?

It partly requires teaching people to loosen up and to play and to have fun and to make horrible, wonderful mistakes and open up that area that's so restricted by, what one should write and to make lots of space for everything you can write.

The the River dreaming image comes back to me in that sort of teaching people to dream a dream, and the dreams that you have, do they feed your poetry as well?

Oh, yeah, I thought so, yeah.

You used to keep a dream journal.

I still keep a dream journal.

I have dream journals and journals from when I was 13.

Right up till now.

Would you talk about that?

The dream journals.

I mean, dreams are so amazing.

I they're just so full of information about almost.

What you can't bear to know about yourself.

But if you knew, you would feel a lot better.

If you would be brave enough so.

And there also just some inexplicably beautiful images that come to you.

And I read a book over and over called Dream Work by Jeremy Taylor.

He's a Unitarian minister, and it's a book that tells you how to work with your dreams.

His one of the things he says is that in dream, we all dissolve into the same world together, the same consciousness, which I kind of believe.

I woke up from a dream this morning of lying on a beach.

And I couldn't sleep in the dream.

And so I put a was lying on the on the sand.

I put a shoe over my ear, one of my shoes.

And I woke up, and I was like, what the what the.

Wow.

What an incredible.

In the dream, I thought, this is a strange seashell.

And I realized that what what I wanted to do with that image was to listen to travel, listen to journeys, listen to where I'd been and where I wanted to go.

But dreams put images together in that beautiful way, and I learned from that poem in your dream poems.

Think.

See, I dream stories, I dream narratives, do I dream novels night to night?

Do I dream plots?

And that's the different.

I mean, you're a poet and I'm a fiction writer.

We dream our work should be easier than it is, shouldn't it?

Some of your poems are about.

There's one called loneliness, but the the the subject of loneliness comes up in many of your poems, even in this selection.

And I was wondering if if loneliness is a part of your inspiration, is it necessary to be lonely?

And I know there's a difference between loneliness and solitude, but it seems to be an important part of your work.

Do you want to read that poem?

Do you want to give it a shot?

Oh, what new way can I finish last poem.

Michaela.

What?

What page is that?

Page 94 for Adele's poem.

I always start by saying I wrote this poem and I didn't know what it was about.

I had no idea.

So I called it The Enormous Pig and which is also a good title, except that I read it in Iowa, which is the pig capital of the world.

And so, of course, somebody raises their hand and says, what is this poem about?

And I was about to say, I don't know when somebody else raised their hand and said, clearly, it's about loneliness.

And I said, yes, it, it it is, it's about loneliness.

They know they're pigs.

Loneliness.

At first the pig is as tiny as a walnut and so intelligent it answers the phone, taking messages in polite soprano.

She lets it move in, fills its bureau with acorns, peppermint candies.

Its eyelashes are so long, she has to comb them daily.

The pig grows quickly.

Pink moon never quite full.

It eats the dictionary, a kitchen chair, her favorite hairbrush.

Even so, she allows for it to stay, saying a simple case of domestic hunger that has its limits.

The pig continues to eat quilts, cooking spoons, the wedding dress that she has not yet worn, eats and eats until it has to eat the living room the entire place.

Picture this a pig as big as a five room apartment, grinning, a woman wondering what to do next when a little door in the pig side swings open.

It is her dining room.

She sees inside the table, neatly set for one, a candle and a rose glass platter of, cracked acorns.

Toy telephone.

This wonderful bad pig.

Poetry right from the start for me was about connecting, it was about talking to somebody else, or having a message for somebody else, or a gift to give somebody else and, early on in my life, there was tremendous amount of loneliness for a lot of different reasons.

And poetry was the first place I realized you didn't have to live there forever.

And I would imagine that most people would say they're lonely some of the time, even in the midst of maybe especially in the midst of groups of large people or small people, but, the longer I've lived, the more I write, the less lonely I feel.

-Well, Mekeel, thank you so much for talking with me.

We're going to open it up to the to the audience to ask questions and I'll tell you, the audience always has better questions.

-Do you have other people read your poems while you're in the process of writing them?

Or do you do most of the editing and reading yourself and rely on your own intuition about your poems?

-Oh, I have to have people read because you know, you get so excited writing a poem, you think this is it, this is really great.

I'm going to send this off to the New Yorker, and it's going to be in there within a week.

And, and then, of course, if I were to give it to Becky, she'd read it and she'd say, Mekeel, -It's clams.

-Clams, yeah.

[laughter] They’re clams out of the third stanza right, and so I need that, I need people outside of me to calm me down and talk some sense into me and offer perspective.

Absolutely, yeah.

And I don't send things off right away and I will often do 20 to 30 to 40 drafts and I find the most useful thing to be putting stuff away and then come back to it later on, once I've forgotten I've even written it and so I do all those things, but especially get readers that I trust, I’m careful to pick readers that I trust -By keeping a dream journal and, obviously meditating and working with the stuff that's in your dreams, do you think that causes you to cultivate dreaming?

- Good question.

- Yes, I think because I focus a lot of attention on it and I read a lot about dreams and I use them, that whatever it is in me that makes the dreams willingly begins to work with me, and it changes them, yes.

Just as I think that if you think dreams are stupid and useless and you don't pay any attention to them, you usually won't remember them and, and if you do, you remember jumbled up silly stuff.

So isn't that a new physics thing that if you, that if you look at a atom or something, it starts to respond to you?

You can't, once it's observed, it starts to change, that whole thing.

Obviously I'm not a physicist, but, [laughter] Yeah, I think it changes it.

-Mekeel, thanks for starting me off on my poetry journey 20 years ago.

I still find myself fiddling with the poems that I wrote then, and my question for you was, do you keep revising poems even after they're published?

-To a certain extent.

[Mekeel sighs] Although I stopped a while back trying to rework things too much because, even putting together this book I had the temptation to really revise early poems then I thought, no, that's what they were then, that's how they finish.

That's okay.

I need to leave them alone.

I don't want to turn them into the poem I would write now.

-Mekeel, you're such a generous and generative writer.

I feel like you have to be pretty locked up to not come in contact with you and suddenly go home and start writing a lot of poems and a lot of really wonderful things, so I want to know what your favorite, maybe your top 2 or 3 writing exercises are that you've ever given to people.

-Just a very easy exercise is to do the, you know, one through ten list very quickly.

I am, but use concrete nouns very quickly.

I am a seahorse.

I am a glass key.

I am a handbag.

I am a tennis shoe.

I am very, very quickly and then say, all right, once you got those ten I ams you have to write a poem that's a self-portrait using all of those objects.

-I have a poem I want you to read.

I'm a middle school teacher and they think you wrote this poem about them.

It's called what They Were Like on the Wire.

-Oh!

[laughter] -What They Were Like on the Wire.

One as auspicious as a thunderstorm.

One with a tin lunch bucket under its wing.

One singing for all the world like a Harvard professor.

One with a little piece of turquoise in its beak.

One educated in obituaries.

One not the least bit interested in stars.

One convinced.

One with a strand of yellow hair tucked under its wing.

One with a heart no bigger than a pinpoint.

One veering towards celibacy.

One convicted of being infatuated with out of body travel.

One wanting to cross the road.

One wearing a scarlet eyepatch.

One with several onyx colored wives, and one only one that cannot be described.

[applause] -You're known, I've known for years, and there's testimony here today that your students really appreciate you as a teacher and have for many years.

And I wonder what it is that, you must get some energy from them as well.

Or you couldn't both teach and write poetry because they both, you know, draw a lot on your creativity.

So, what is it that your students give to you, or what do you learn from your students?

-Everything.

[Mekeel chuckles] I'm so lucky to be a teacher, to be constantly in the presence of people who want to learn how to write.

It's astonishing you know, if you really stop to think about it, how lucky that is, and, always the people are new with new things to say, and, I, it would be impossible to say what I learn.

It really is everything.

And it's, I would say I get much more than I give, certainly.

Truly.

-Truly, I'm not sure that all of your students would agree with that, but because they get a lot, but we won't put it on a scale so it doesn't have.

-Well it doesn’t have, [Mekeel chuckles] This cake weighs as much as this cake.

-Well, Mekeel, you've been so much fun.

So wonderful.

We did some river dreaming today.

-Thank you so much.

- Thank you.

- So lovely.

[applause] -Great, it was so great, this is fun.

[applause fades] -This has been a New Hampshire Public Television special presentation.

In partnership with the friends of the UNH library.

♪♪