Forrest Gander: September 6, 2018

After an introduction by Steve Dickison, Forrest Gander begins the night reading C.D. Wright's "Casting Deep Shade" from her forthcoming, posthumous book Peak to Beach Trees. Gander then reads translations of poets he admires. First he reads Uruguayan poet Idea Vilarino's "Not Anymore" (translation by Anna Deeny, from Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America, ed. Gander and Raul Zurita). He then reads poems he translated to English himself: Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik's "Memory Near Oblivion" (from The Galloping Hour: French Poems); Mexican poet Pura Lopez-Colome's "Deep Wound" (from Watchword), and finally Spanish poet Olvido Garcia Valdes's "I Search For You in the Streets" (from Panic Cure). Gander takes a moment to talk about his long relationship with poet C.D. Wright and how her passing was the catalyst for his book Be With. From that work he reads "Son," "Beckoned," "Epitaph," "Deadout," "On a Sentence By Fernanda Melchor," and "Stepping Out of the Light." He recites from memory a love poem for C.D. Wright, "Anniversary," from his book Science and Steepleflower, then returns to Be With to read "First Ballad: A Wreath (After St. John of the Cross)" and "Archaic Mano."

Forrest Gander takes questions from the audience. Asked how long it took for him to write in the face of grief, he replies that there was about a year and a half where there weren't any words for what he felt. Recounting how he had to find an environment that would force him to write when he didn't want to or couldn't, he relates that, while teaching at Squaw Valley, where everyone agrees to write daily, "The poems that did come didn't feel like poems; they came out differently." He cites Mexican poet Jaime Sabines on writing from loss. Asked where he went during the interim period when he wasn't writing, he notes he spent a lot of time in deserts, comparing them to "blank pages." Asked what advise he'd give to himself at 25, he recommends committing to what you want, "and do it all the time." When asked (by Denise Newman) how he navigates the balancing act of translating and writing his own works, Gander remarks: "I don't. When I translate I can't write... [and] I love translating." He talks at length about the project of editing Alice Iris Red Horse, a selection in English translation of the "untranslatable" work of contemporary Japanese poet Gozo Yoshimasu. From the audience, Paul Hoover asks further about the act of being a translator, and Gander says it involves sublimating your ego, "you have to disappear." Asked what Gander might recommend for students to try and write next, he notes that quality in classical Chinese poetry is always connected to one's environment, and that environment structures emotion, and he recommends writing a poem of personal emotion connected to a place you love.