I think that may be a perfect way to end the afternoon. Thank you. No, no, no. Thank you for your patience. Im aware of the fact that we live in an age with fewer and fewer readers, fewer people who have taken on the difficult text. Aware for you are if you are more my age than the age of the young and you dont exactly belong to that civilization Steve Johnson was more my age than he was your age. Whatever there is in this room that still holds references to the text remember those of us who are christians, jewish, muslims we are people of the book and if i ever go to a bar mitzvah where the kid comes in with a kindle i am leaving. [laughter] thanks very much richard rugg rugg richard rodriguez. We will be signing books upstairs. [applause] [inaudible conversations] iraq war veterans kevin powers is next on booktv. From the 2014 san antonio book festival treat you presents second book of poetry, letter composed during a lull in the fighting. [inaudible conversations] all right. I think we are ready to begin here. The doors are closed. The mic seems to be on. Can everybody hear me . There we go. That sounds good. Im Jake Silverstein the editorinchief of Texas Monthly and im going to be your moderator here today for what i think will be a very interesting interesting hello . Interesting and memorable afternoons with kevin powers who was the gentleman here to my left. Kevin, and i will give you brief introduction to kevin but before he do that went on a makeup couple of reef announcements and one is to please remember to turn off your cell phones. I see some people doing that. Two is we will have time for questions and answers, questions from the audience and answers from questions at the end. Kevin is going to regal bid in addition to questions in the end for you. This is a wonderful book of poems that kevin has i wanted to make sure that you guys get a chance to hear that. The last thing is there will be books for sale afterward and thats going to happen upstairs. You should buy two or three copies apiece. As i said on the editorinchief of Texas Monthly and kevin is here on my left. First of all its important for yall to know that we as texans can kind of claim cabinets our own because although he is a native of richmond, virginia kevin graduated from the writers of the eutzy. He wrote a believe some of the poems in this collection many of the poems in this collection as well as much of his first novel the yellow birds which im sure most of you have heard of because its one of the best books and most well known frankly books of the last couple years. The book came out in 2012 and when the pen hemingway award. It was a finalist for the National Book award and it won the guardian first book award. It was really has gotten a lot of attention. The guardian which give it the cop pulled first couple of awards wrote while few expected the war in iraq to bring forward the novel that could stamp assigned all quiet on the western front the yellow birds does just that for our time is those books did for theirs. Praise that is in no way overdone for what was truly and what is truly a magnificent novel. As i said kevin was born and raised in richmond virginia. He graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University and got his mfa at i35 at uta. He served in u. S. Army as a machine gunner in iraq in 2004 in and 2005 and experienced this first novel yellow birds draws upon as well as this collection that we are going to hear from today, letter composed during a lull in the fighting a collection of poems that is out. I believe this is actually the First Official event of this book. So i am seeing some nods. This is an important moment for everybody. This is the launch of what is i think going to be one of the great collections of poetry that take stock of the experience of these wars in iraq and afghanistan but also of war in general. Its my great pleasure to be sitting here with kevin powers and please lets give him a hand. [applause] thank you very much. Appreciate it. Csa said we are going to hear some poems in a minute but i thought maybe we could set them up kevin by just a couple of questions. In the last year and a half has been a whirlwind for you because the yellow birds has gotten so much attention and a lot of people felt that kind of answered, it met a need that people had to try to understand whats going on over there. What is it like for young men and women who are serving overseas and these wars and the book i think spoke to that. The book is so immediate and speaking out in yellow birds so immediate and so transporting. I guess i wanted to start by asking you both books are in some ways trying to accomplish the same thing which is to render the experience of war, render the experience of combat for many readers who have never experienced it before. That seems to me to be almost an impossible task. Well i think thats true. One of the reasons i have always turned to the imaginative literature as a reader and a writer is because it seems to be one of the few forms of human endeavor that are quick to reckon with that in possibility. They talk about even trying to develop a vocabulary to talk about these kinds of issues is very difficult and very challenging. For me the imagination is an essential component of that. Its a requirement for me to begin to kind of conceive of how to talk about it, how to address it, how to find some area of common understanding. They seem to be inclined to focus on the emotional aspect of that experience and inexperience as an attempt to open a door so other people can gain access to it. Can you just sort of give conversation to those in the audience who have not read anything can you briefly explain what your military service was . Yeah, sure. I was enlisted soldier in the army. I served Northern Iraq 2004 and 2005. I was a machine gunner in a combat engineer unit. Is that better . Okay, great. Primarily our job was driving the highways and byways and looking for bombs among other things but that is how i spent a great deal of my time over there. In the book the yellow birds comes out of that experience. I wonder now you have another book which comes from that experience but obviously a very different book and that is a different form turning to poetry now. Was there something you felt obviously you are trying to render your experience in of both books so it something you can do in poetry that you couldnt do in the novel that drove you to the second second book . In the way, yes. Because i was working on many of the poems and the novel at the same time it was really almost a practical hoping that if i used all the forms available to me that perhaps i could get close to approximating the experience. So because as i said i have always turned as a reader to both poetry and fiction in particular the novel i wanted to make sure that i kind of wasnt leaving any stone unturned in terms of what i could how i could use my writing to explore those issues. What the take a moment now to hear some poems. Im not exactly sure which ones youre going to read and maybe you can take it away for little bit. We will hear some poems and we will return to some discussion about it. Im not exactly sure which ones im going to read either so thats good. I am feeling a little the experience of being back in texas and they did actually started a poem today. I was walking on the river walk in reading some ballot. Green, i want you green. If youll indulge me i may just just. I think we definitely will. I actually wrote it on my phone. So we will see how this goes. It may go in a whole. I think this is the texas book festival burst. Im going to have to scroll and im going to turn my phone off after this i promise. I guess its a san antonio poem. You can make so much of the world, what can you say of this the green gate that opens on a stone staircase, a Stone Landing were a runner waits to run, a river still as a piece of seized machinery. I can sing nothing. My tongue is as still as a douse flame. You have make so much of the world, tell me what to make of this and i will. So that is that and im turning my phone off. [applause] so that is that and there is this. I am going to read i hope a representative selection of the book to give you an idea but i think i will start with the title poem which is called a letter composed during a lull in the fighting. I tell her i love her for 10 minutes of sleep beneath the low rooftop wall on which my rifle rests. I tell her in a letter that will stink when she opens it of burned powder and the things it says. I tell her how private bartels says offhand that war is just us making little pieces of metal pass through each other. So some of the poems deal with you know the war and the experience of being a veteran and a more oblique way. This is not one of those poems. I will get to one of those in a minute that this one is more directly addressing the difficulty of coming home as we talked about, the difficulty of really developing a vocabulary that is even capable of identifying the problem. So this is called after leaving the Veterans Hospital for the last time. This is the last place you will ever think you know. It would be wrong of course. There is time enough to find other rooms to be reminded of, other windows to look out. Chip sales to lean against to rub your elbows raw. January is not so cold here as it is elsewhere. What a gift. When the wind blows its music you remember not its chill but the empty branches as the wind arrives. Go there. Follow the long and slender black top as it struggles east along the banks through fog not destined to survive its movement in the morning toward the sea and toward sea the sound of wind ceases silence beginning to sputter and the cough is the driver of the truck he hitchhiked and pulls off in one marc cloud of dust in your life of clouds of dust disintegrates as evening settles in. What song is this . You remember the immigrant clinician asked in now again along the shoreline at night you realize your life is just a catalog of methods. Every word of it in effort to stay sane. Count to 10. Whenever you begin to shake with pain of any kind take whatevers around interior hands and squeeze, push your feet as far as they will go into the earth. Ariel is likely but after anyway. If its unseemly these thoughts with the fact that the last unstained sure did you war was on tuesday a week ago or more, do not apologize. If you have earned anything it is the right to be unseemly why you decided what point the baby comes the ocean. What is the calculus of change required to find what is lost if what is lost as you. Is that a song you hear out there where the reeds begin to end of every curvature of the coast . As its refrain asking what you will remember or is it saying n. You will realize you were clinging to a tree island in the midst of a see a bull rush the call of whippoorwills and all the emptiness you asked for. No reply. The novelist repeats its patters on forever as you enter them. Somewhere a woman washes clothing among the rocks. It was true what you said. He came home with nothing and you still have most of it left. And so this one is more oblique i promise. Part of i guess the process of writing these poems was delving into my memories and much of that excavation led me to places that didnt directly deal with the war but sort of influence the way that i thought about my life before the war, kind of losing innocence and reflections on where that loss of innocence against for all of us. This poem sort of addresses an introduction to mortality and its called cumberland gap. I first realized i was evaporated when i was 12. Having heard for the first time the word embarcadero from some void leafing through a battered copy of the aaa road atlas tucked under a shelf. One volume in the series of books of maps that had for a long time composed the section of the library devoted to geography. It was a place but not in any real sense except the one i guess that, the exotic newness of the word that finished with a foul and a library of a worn out already rule of school created in my mind a picture that could be called a fair approximation of the place as it existed. The long line falling off into the distances. Perhaps the fine gray of the pacific reaching through the uncertainty of vogue and then at night the book of maps now left open on a table that could create the bustle of a group of stars that never were. I would be called lucky or just wrong and for a moment motionless i would be clearly drawn to scale up on the page with just a clarity that i had hoped for, not knowing the fearlessness of having clarity among ones hopes. When the library and called my name my name was made into a kind of spell disbursing everything i could identify her claim as being part of one certain undisputed me. The long walk down the hall but she held my hand deferring every question i might ask until a later time and i remember the bright red dust of driedup clay that swung in liquid looking rivulets as i sat in the parking lot and waited for my father chevy to appear. Knowing only that someone was dying thinking only of the word embarcadero and a place other than the place i was forced to occupy in time and space, any name of any town whose weight could be abandoned with enough repeating. And giving up that last the last of the other children gone, hearing in my fathers voice his philosophy of living always buy a chevy son. Those boards are designed for obsolescence. The plan is in five years it will break down and youll have to buy another. I asked if it was like a broken bicycle he had bought for me do we had repaired one piece at a time and teleworked or brenly screwed the last old into the new sprocket, the old bike was no longer there. Everything was replaced. The broken pieces set aside and what did it mean . In his face which i remember over everything lined with a map like certainty of shame because he had no answer, offered none and then the tracks of the chevys tires turned up the dust again. The pine trees bright and luminous with their late spring blanketing of pollen underneath, the unreal quality of light in which we lived. Until i climbed into the seat beside him. He had by then begun to rest on his knee. And then just maybe one more. This one also is a kind of, i guess they think of some of these poems in a relationship toward someone who went to war. Theyre not necessarily explicitly about that but the experience does color it the way you see things whether its love or loss, where you are from, kind of inattention to the landscape certainly. This poem is you know kind of like i guess a desire to have ones person recognized, to be acknowledged in a way i suppose. It and its called the importance of coincidence. Look out there that lame horse kicks up just the most recent of the newly dusted snow which forms into a pattern, a small. Underneath the lightning under the dogwood tree we tried to mend with wood glue, bandages and this pool of rusty bailing wire. The end result of which was nothing more than a dead tree adorned with the trappings of some godawful human injury. You are out back by the barn now hammering nails into 80 worth of shoes for the horse he said should have been killed. I tap my finger on the window and see myself nearer than the nails you drove already and in the manner of the dash who ran in circles of the snow this afternoon and made, iii turnup returned to the snow a little brown. The one you always lectured me about, never trying to ride. I remember when we had a horse. No pasture in which it could trample earth into a name or if not a name something that would instigate my thinking at the time i said your name over and over again. As if it might be made into a kind of destiny, destiny of saddam being sad as if a pale. Could have its own accord resists its being covered by a lame horse turning up the dirt a little more. And so i write your name now against the glass, the need for tapping gone, the surprise long past from staying in the night. Not names for something else. Not dusted the bat hell. If i was anywhere but here i would be just as much in love with someone else. So i breathe again and coverup your name for i am not anywhere and i am not else. Thank you. [applause] thank you very much. You are very welcome. We could have just kept going. The rest of the book is just as good as those poems but kevin lets go back to the Veterans Hospital. Its just an amazing poem. The temptation of course reading this book knowing about your experience to read biography into these poems. Can i ask some of the stuff you talk about in the poem tend to deal with the pain and struggling with that sort of stuff. Is that stuff that you yourself have struggled with for you extrapolated from your experience working with. Certainly my experience colors the work a great deal. I guess probably the honest way to talk about it is to say you know well what is represented in the poems isnt necessarily my experience i could see it from where i was and so i think like almost every soldier you check in at the va hospital and get your check up and say how are you feeling and you say im feeling great. There is a kind of recognition but maybe thats not entirely true and you say well let me particularly with poetry often take it, try to take it to the illogical conclusion and see where that train of thought will take you. We allow the line of music to open up things that even as a writer you may not be aware of. For me i feel like even as i am rereading these poems i hope that the discovery that i had in writing them i hope that is one of the things that is transmitted to the reader. I almost feel that its a collaborative process that the poem is not complete until its read by somebody else. The outline, you talk about life is a collection of methods. A catalog of methods. I wonder to what extent poetry itself is a method for you personally. My entire life i have used poetry and fiction novelist stories as a way of i guess is a way of trying to kind of unravel the confusion that the world presents me and all abuzz with and it seems like that is particularly with poetry poetry is not always thought of as a particularly useful thing. I find a great deal of utility in reading poems like when i got back i discovered cowan jacob who writes beautifully about every subject he writes about but particularly about war. You served in vietnam . Yes, thats right. He writes all about vietnam so you are finding again talking about this opening up the shared experiences and there is an old saying that many hands make light work. Theres something about sharing these experiences whether its with other authors, whether its hopefully with readers who are kind enough to pick your work up. Yes, there is something about it that i do sort of use as a method and a tool. Im curious, when you were deployed was the sort of poetic mind sort of silenced for you because of the stress and the focus that you obviously render or was the poetic mind kind of a life in doing its work even as you were doing your missions . I dont know that i was conscious of it. For mind for me, my experience of writing poetry and the poetry that i read, the only prerequisite is a capacity for