A Poet on the Road

I.R.F.
Well first off I was wondering what is the day to day of doing a poetry tour?

K.G:
You know you get up in the morning you think where am I where am I going. And then you think, ‘Oh yeah. Oh my god how many miles do we have to drive. What time is the reading? Can I get there on time, please today as I have not for the past three days.’
You know it’s just trying to get to the place on time. I always do a different set list for every reading because, I don’t know why. I try not to but I can’t help it. So I’m always doing that stuff in the car and then trying to time it and… you know, we share the driving. It depends…sometimes…You know, there’s always something. You’re on the road, so you know, roadwork. (Laughs.) You know and it’s all just a form of roadwork then. It’s interesting because it’s always the same and yet it’s always different. You know, you get to the place and you know some of them. Some of whom you’re really looking forward to seeing and other people you meet when you’re there. It’s nice, you know. It’s nice.

It’s amazing to think that in every town you go to there are a couple people who are interested in poetry and one of them might even be interested in you. But then if you have a really good gig where, like one of my first ones in Cambridge was really good. The room was really packed and we sold books to half the audience and everyone was so enthusiastic and you almost start to think, ‘It’s going to be like this all the time.’ But of course you know that’s insane, it’s not. So you have to have a fairly high tolerance for, not exactly disappointment. The anti-climax. Some time’s it’s just like that, but usually I try to keep it in mind that all I have to do is reach one person. If I reach one person, especially if that’s one person I don’t know, one person who’s not read my work. Then it’s like, I’ve done the job of the night, what I’ve come out to do.


I.R.F.

Related to that; the day to day of doing a tour, with the traveling so much. How much new writing do you get done? I noticed that the DVD’s along with the new book were very transitory in nature. I’m wondering if that’s a reflection of doing these types of things.
(We both talk a bit here.) Trees, movement, cars, buildings.


K.G:

Well I took a lot of that footage when I was out last time, with Case Sensitive. That was the first video I ever did. Um, you know I swore to myself that this time when I was out I would write everyday and I would exercise everyday and I haven’t done either, not one day. This is day 25. Ok, so that didn’t happen, yet.
But, what I do is I kind of, I’ve got the book. And I’m kind of basically reading from the book. Sometimes I read from other things because either the students have read Case Sensitive and not the new one or someone wants me to read from the last chap book or something like that. Basically I read from that. But in order to make it interesting to me I make a new thing out of it, make a new poem out of the poems. So, to do that I read parts of things. You know I’ll read on my set list and it’ll be, ‘first paragraph second sentence.’ Then I’ll flip through the book and I’ll just make new poems out of the thing and by re-ordering it changes it. So that’s the closest thing I’ve done to new writing.


I.R.F.

I notice that that happens in the DVD too. It’s not consistent with the book.


K.G:

No, it’s not consecutive with the book.


I.R.F.

I was watching it yesterday and trying to flip through and catch up. But this kind kind of segues into the next question. The difference between something that’s made to be viewed as a mixed media or multimedia kind of thing with something that is strictly on the page. How do you approach something that you’re making both for film and page differently? Or how do the two relate?


K.G:

Well, the first part of, The Last Four Things, I basically wrote years ago. So that was written for the page. You know I did change it of course. But that was done and that was basically supposed to be the book. The sanitized version is I decided that it needed a second part. Then I wrote Fifty-Six Days. I had fifty-six days for writing, so that’s just where the title came from. And I wrote it in fifty-six days and when I wrote it, as I was writing it, I made the movie. So those two things happened simultaneously. And that was a different kind of movie because I was just taking, you probably read the author’s statement, I was just taking a piece of text. One piece of text I would say and one piece of text I would use as a subtitle. Just to work with that dialogue/subtitle, all in the same language, idea. It was a little bit more like a real film project in the sense that it wasn’t a transcription of the book.
The other one, I’d been doing these experiments. First I made a whole recording of the book. Then I was just fooling around with all the junk I had on film. And I just, I felt like I really quickly tried to make some little parts. Some little parts, some little pages, they’re not poems. But just pages that I liked the best. You know, I was learning Final Cut. It’s pretty steep so the first whole part I was just learning and acting like I had time. But then all of the sudden I was out of time. I don’t know if that’s a good answer.


I.R.F.

No, no it is. Within those two, The Last Four Things (the film version) seems to have a lot more experimental kind of feel.


K.G:

They’re all experiments, where as Fifty-Six Days is just one experiment.


I.R.F.

There even seems to be more of a score to it.


K.G:

Well we did a lot of music for it. We hadn’t intended to. And Max, (her partner) he used to be a musician. Used to play a lot. But he like played for… I don’t even know how long. I can’t remember, it might have been like twenty years. But we were learning garage band together. I was just learning all of these programs all at once.
Did you ever hear of Lynda.com? You should put this in your thing cause you know, it’s great. It’s such a cool place where you can just, for 25 bucks a month, you can go and learn any program for as many hours as you want to spend, you can learn it. So I learned Final Cut and Soundtrack and Garage Band and all these different things. So yeah, we were surprised. We were moving notes around in Garage Band just visually. It wasn’t really like music. It was like that doesn’t sound right, that’s wrong. And we want to have some wrong notes absolutely, but that’s too wrong. Let’s move it to the left. We were amazed it worked as well as it did. Which is still debatable.


I.R.F.

We kind of already hit on it but being aware that something is going to be used for film, how does that visual component affect the writing?


K.G:

See it doesn’t because, for the first thing… Well you know it could but it didn’t in this case because for the first thing the writing was done. So then it was just a matter of, what things did I have that I thought sort of worked together. Or what ones did I particularly like. Still in that I really hate the way I say, ‘to leave home without making the bed’ for instance. It’s practically the first thing and I just hated it. It’s so softy. But I jut couldn’t go back and rerecord it. I didn’t have the time so I had to deal with it. I had to accept it. For Fifty-Six Days it wasn’t like the writing was affected by doing the film except in the sense that doing the film changed my general and broad ideas of what I was writing about. In other words I began to feel like there was a character who was writing in a diary. I was just taking that dated thing as a sort of, ‘will this help me?’ idea because I knew I only had so many days.


I.R.F.

The film component then adds that feel of narrative?


K.G:

Yeah, does it have a little bit of a narrative feel.


I.R.F.

Reading it it didn’t?


K.G:

Right.


I.R.F

But then watching it and having read it.


K.G:

It has a little bit of that thing. So that’s guess, working on the film began to convince me that there was…just a…just a thread of narrative. OR more like the smoke of narrative. I just began to feel like, ‘I know her.’ I know. I get it. I get it. I began to feel that I knew what was going on with her. But it didn’t change the writing as such. The writing was just coming the same way it always comes, just be bringing in all the notes that I had and spreading them all over the floor and trying to say it and just walking around and trying to get into a trance of, ‘What is it?’ I hope that doesn’t sound too wispy but that’s how I do it.


I.R.F.

No, it doesn’t. That sounds like a great approach. It’s similar to my piles and piles of notes.


K.G:

Yeah it’s the same. A lot of people work this way and that’s very, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing until it happens.


I.R.F.

I notice that coming across in Four Things a bit. I was wondering about the ambiguous nature of the work through that and kind of elusive identification of the speaker, as far as age, among other things, is concerned.


K.G:

This is in the first part, that part of the book I actually worked on for years. Fifty-Six Days came together really fast, in fifty-six days. But The Last Four Things I really worked on that for years and it went through a lot of changes and a lot of reorganization. So that was, I could say it was really thought out but I don’t know what that would really mean. I think.


I.R.F.

It was delved into.


K.G:

(Laughs). Yeah, or what I like to think, dwelved. Sort of a combination of dwell and delving. So I dwelved into that pretty hard. I think it’s just a sort of basic fact of my life that now that I’m actually 60 years old a lot of stuff that I’m writing… I’m time traveling. It’s not necessarily about my life but I don’t necessarily feel that old. You know, it’s totally normal. I don’t think that there’s a person alive that ever thought they were 60 years old, at least not until they were 90. As far as I know.

So, there’s also just the thing of, sorry I always do this.


I.R.F.

It’s ok, I’ll write it in. It’ll be in the parenthetical.
(Kate was doing much circular had gesturing)


K.G:

I’m just trying to tune into myself I guess. A lot of people by the time they’re my age, they’ve figured everything out already. They’ve had a whole life, they’ve achieved their success or failure and they’re not really, they’re not like me. I don’t know anybody like me, that’s my age. I know a lot of people who are like me who are a different age. So I think that comes into it. When I picture a character that I’m writing about, she might be like 40. She’d still be in the middle of what she’s trying to do. It all combines. There’s a child, a nine year old girl for instance, who’s lighting the fires. There’s a lot of dream stuff. Like that particular one came from a dream from years ago that I put into a painting. I used to put a lot of words into my paintings cause that’s what I used to do. I was a painter. So I just basically took some sentences from the painting so it’s all very intertwined. You know?


I.R.F.

I noticed in a few specific places. There was the line, ‘the sea can’t stay inside you’ and the other section about having a baby but it being a plant and not the speaker’s baby. There’s this denial of ownership over nature.


K.G:

Speaking personally I’ve never been pregnant. That informs it somewhat. Whoops, dead end. Let’s go back to nature.


I.R.F.

Well it’s a baby and it’s not the speakers in on sense but it’s also not the speaker’s because it’s a plant.


K.G:

Because it’s a plant. I hate to sound like an idiot savant or just an idiot but that’s just a dream. It was a dream I had and it was a very powerfully dream. And I often have dreams about babies and when I do, the love that I feel for the baby, is overwhelming. but I’ve never had a child. And it’s not like I think, ‘Oh, gee I wish I had had a baby.’ It’s not like that. In my dream life it’s almost as if I know about it.


Kate Greenstreet's work can be better explored at her website

International Radio Frequency thanks her for her time and patience in publishing this interview.