The Archive Project

Portland poet and essayist Doug Marx moderates this lecture between former Poet Laureate Robert Hass and Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. Hass and Milosz read and discuss a variety of their poems. Marx periodically asks questions about each poet’s inspiration and their composition process, and Hass and Milosz’s answers often lead to the reading of additional excerpts.

“When I said ‘pleasure,’ what I really meant was ‘work,’ which really is the deepest pleasure.” – Robert Hass

“It seems to me that reality is a great cure against despair. In general, you can see in the poetry of our time a very strong movement toward subjectivity, but there is another kind of poetry which honors reality.” – Czeslaw Milosz 

In an interview for the Chicago Review, Robert Hass said, “Poetry is a way of living… a human activity like baking bread or playing basketball.” Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and is recognized as one of contemporary American poetry’s most celebrated voices. He is also a leading translator of the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz and Japanese haiku masters Basho, Buson, and Issa. He has been awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship, among others. He currently teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

Czeslaw Milosz spent World War II in Warsaw, Poland, under the rule of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. During this time, he worked with the underground Resistance movement, writing and editing several books that were published in secret during the occupation. When the war was over, Milosz aligned himself with the new communist government and was stationed in Paris, France as a cultural attaché. Sensing the new communist leadership as more of the same, Milosz refused to return to Poland when summoned, staying in Paris as a translator and freelance writer before moving to the United States in 1960 to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. Milosz has published dozens of books in his lifetime, including collections of poetry, novels, and works of nonfiction, many of which became modern classics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. He died in 2004.

“Well, the problem is, of course, of the evil in this world—which is so immeasurable, so enormous—that to maintain faith in a good God is almost impossible. And that’s the curse of historical experience. The only theological solution is that God suffers because of the world.” – Czeslaw Milosz

Wright begins his lecture by elaborating on his recent journalistic investigation into the history of Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard. Wright seeks to answer two overarching questions: 1) Where do new religious ideas come from? and 2) why would anybody believe them? Although he focuses on Scientology, Wright also emphasizes the fundamental needs that drive people to all organized religions: hope, play, purpose, community, and structure. He credits the unique appeal of Scientology to a potent mixture of therapy, celebrity, and science.

“Perhaps these are all revelations from God, in which case I do wish he’d get his story straight. Or else they are hallucinations, frauds, or products of a diseased imagination. I think in the case of L. Ron Hubbard, we see all three of these factors at work.”

“But new religions will come along, whether Scientology exists or not; they always do, especially in America where you can believe anything you want. And if you don’t find a belief you like from the smorgasbord of beliefs that are laid out before you, you can create your own.”

Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, and playwright. After graduating from Tulane University in New Orleans, Wright completed his M.A. in Applied Linguistics in Cairo. He then pursued a career in journalism, writing for publications such as Rolling Stone and The New Yorker, for whom he has been a staff writer for two decades. He is the author of one novel and eight nonfiction books, including The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, which was nominated for the National Book Award and shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Wright is the co-writer of The Siege (1998), starring Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis, and Annette Bening. His one-man play, “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” was adapted into an HBO documentary film directed by Academy Award winner Alex Gibney. In addition to his writing career, Wright is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the keyboard player for the Austin-based blues band WhoDo. He is currently writing a series for HBO called God Save Texas.

Barthelme begins his lecture with a series of readings, including a story about his family’s quest for a dog, his reflections on being a father, the study of angels, and a conversation with Goethe in which he compares music, art, and nationalities to common day objects. Barthelme also previews a selection of excerpts from his forthcoming novel The King, a retelling of Le Morte D’Arthur through the lens of World War II, which he had not yet decided on a title for and which was posthumously published in 1990. He returns to the short story form following this, tackling the subject of life in New York and revisiting the subject of parenthood. His Q&A sheds light on some aspects of his personal life, including his life in New York and his own work alongside that of his family.

“It is a curiosity of writing about angels that very often one turns out to be writing about men. The themes are twinned.”

“You must not confuse the monster in the story with the monster you see before you; they are two different monsters.”

“It seems to me that in the contemporary world we suffer from something called information sickness; that is, the point is to push away experience, much of it unwanted vicarious experience and much of it synthetic and contrived by other people to manipulate us. If I thought there was any authentic experience to experience, I would probably recommend that—but I’ve seen very little of it.”

Short story writer and novelist Donald Barthelme is considered one the most important American writers of the 20th century and critical to the post-modern school of writing that includes John Barth, John Hawkes, William Gass, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon. His writings are known for their technical experimentation and melancholy gaiety. He first rose to national prominence when his debut novel, Snow White, was printed in its entirety in The New Yorker, taking up virtually the entire issue. He later received the National Book Award for his 1972 children’s book, The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or the Hithering Thithering Djinn.

Oliver Sacks begins his lecture by sharing a series of anecdotes about his patients, such as one man who could not recognize faces or objects and mistook his wife for a hat—the inspiration for the title of one of his books. Additional stories include a man with a head injury who lost his sense of smell and a woman who had no left-sided sensory perception. He discusses the relationship between neurology and the soul, including the sub-cortex of the brain, the most primitive part, which affects will, action, desire, feeling, contact, engagement, and the animation of a person. He proceeds to show vintage video clips about his past medical diagnoses, talks about the patients that inspired characters in his novels, and examines the moral and humanist dilemma of bringing back to consciousness people who have been mentally absent for years. He expounds on the idea that medicine does not rely solely on physiology, but also on a patient’s place in society and the world.

“One tends to take one’s experience for granted. One tends to think that the world is given to one, full of depth and color and movement—and sometimes one needs a neurological mishap to understand that nothing is given to one, and that we live in a world of constructs, starting with rather primitive constructs, like color, and moving on to narratives and theories about which we live our lives.”

“A man who has had a head injury and who has lost his sense of smell thought this would be absolutely trivial; who needs smell? In fact, he finds that this undercuts his sense of reality and of the vividness of the world to an extreme degree. He comes to find that smell is an unconscious accompaniment, an undertone to all one’s experience.”

“Disease is a social construct.”

Oliver Sacks was a physician, a best-selling author, and a professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine. The New York Times has referred to him as “the poet laureate of medicine.” He is best known for his collections of neurological case histories, including The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain and An Anthropologist on Mars. Awakenings, his book about a group of patients who had survived the great encephalitis lethargica epidemic of the early twentieth century, inspired the 1990 Academy Award-nominated feature film starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. Dr. Sacks was a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. He died on August 30, 2015.

Former Executive Director of Literary Arts Julie Mancini gives a speech about the early days of Literary Arts during our 30th birthday celebration on September 8, 2014. She shares memories from her fifteen-year career, including the ways in which she helped convince world-famous writers such as Joan Didion to visit Portland. Sharing feedback from visiting authors, Mancini chronicles how Portland Arts & Lectures grew to be the largest literary lecture series in the nation.

We begged writers to come here. It’s hard to imagine a time when writers and publishers didn’t care about Portland, Oregon.”

“We finally got Joan Didion and John Dunne to come because Calvin Trillin called them and said, ‘OK, go out there, I promise you. Stay at The Heathman and eat the salmon hash.’”

“Sometimes it worked best when people didn’t know who they were going to see. After a few years they started to trust us. That was the case when we presented Maya Angelou in the eighties. . .or Jane Smiley before she was a Pulitzer Prize winner.”

Mark Doty reads from his new book, Deep Lane, and discusses his poetic influences, including Walt Whitman and Deborah Digges. These mentors, and the themes and ideas from their works, appear throughout Doty’s poems. Other themes include animals and observations on the natural world. Doty also shares several poems about New York and concludes his reading with a generous Q&A session with the audience.

Mark Doty’s Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. His eight poetry collections include School of the Arts, Source, and My Alexandria. One of his four volumes of nonfiction prose, Dog Years, was a New York Times bestseller in 2007. The Art of Description, a handbook for writers, was published in 2011. Doty’s poems have appeared in many magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, The London Review of Books, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The New Yorker. Widely anthologized, his poems have been published in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and many other collections.

Doty has been honored with the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. He is the only American poet to have received the T.S. Eliot Prize in the U.K., and he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, the Ingram Merrill and Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts. (source: www.markdoty.org)

You will remember Manichaeism, which is the heresy that suggests the world is equally divine and into forces of good and evil, darkness and light, and that the outcome of the struggle is not yet known.”

“This is what young poets need to do—borrow from everything until you become yourself.”

Mitchell S. Jackson begins with a round of thanks, sometimes unconventional, to all those who influenced his journey to stand before thousands of people in his hometown of Portland, Oregon, as a successful author. He mentions that after he was incarcerated as a young man, he began the process of revision, and he goes on to discuss the differences between editing and revision. “Editing is fixing the small things . . . it is minding convention.” Revision, on the other hand, “is to re-envision.” He talks about being grateful for the opportunity to revise his life and shares various examples of people that he knew who got caught up in gang activity and crime, saying he wishes he could give them the opportunity to revise their lives, too. He also confesses that he use to feel inadequate as a writer when he compared his education to others, but he came to realize the value of his experiences and his gift to hear poetry in the language of the streets. He encourages the audience to help those who may be on a path to “a headline that makes their moms cry” to revise their lives, explaining that “revision is not just for those who want to be writers and artists.”

Mitchell S. Jackson is a Portland, Oregon, native who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He received an MA in writing from Portland State University and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Urban Artist Initiative and The Center For Fiction and is the former winner of the Hurston Wright Foundation’s award for college writers. Jackson teaches writing at New York University. He published the e-book Oversoul: Stories and Essays in the summer of 2012.  His novel The Residue Years was released in the summer of 2013 and was praised by publications such as The New York Times, The Times of London, and O, The Oprah Magazine. The novel was a finalist for The Center For Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the PEN/ Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for best fiction by a writer of African descent. It was also long-listed for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and the Chautauqua Prize and named an “Honor Book” by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. (source: www.mitchellsjackson.com)

Editing is about minding convention. And if you’re minding convention, you’re also minding the power.”

“Revision is to re-envision. Revision is a philosophy. Revision is seeing the work as a whole.”

“I grew up with pimps and hustlers. Don’t grow up to be a pimp or a hustler, please, I’m not advocating for that. But one thing that I learned from them is that they speak in poetry. You hear the average slick-talking dude—he’s a poet. And if you can take that voice and use that ear, that is a gift. That is me mastering what I had. I don’t have Latin, but I have this guy over here who sounds like Oscar Wilde.”

Kazuo Ishiguro begins the interview by talking about growing up in a Japanese family in England and watching the British with “amused distance,” stating, “I was taught to respect British customs, but they were just that: values and customs that the natives adhered to.” His family finally decided that they would not return to Japan when he was 15, but he says that he first began writing novels with the idea of “this Japan that I never went back to.” He goes on to discuss the real-life places that writers build versions of in their imaginations. Ishiguro also answers questions about being an international writer in translation, saying, “My idea of an international story isn’t someone who gets on planes a lot; it’s universal because it’s something human that people of all cultures can relate to.” He goes on to discuss experiences from his life that have motivated him to take up specific themes.

“I feel quite at home in big cities.”

“I would hope that something like The Remains of the Day would be universal, because essentially it isn’t, as a few people suggested…a study of the British class systems or anything like that, specifically. It might be that incidentally, but I always start with a fairly abstract idea about human beings and people. And I had certain actual themes that I wanted to express.”

“I know that a lot of writers write very fine books by taking a kind of alter ego of themselves and putting them through the story. Now, there’s a long tradition of that, and I know a lot of writers feel happier doing that. But I’m at the other end. I feel terribly inhibited if I try to work through a character who is, on the surface, like me.”

Kazuo Ishiguro’s seven published books have won him numerous honors and wide renown. His work has been translated into more than 40 languages. Both The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go have more than 1,000,000 copies in print across platforms, and both were adapted into highly acclaimed films. His most recent novel is The Buried Giant. (source: Random House)

Joyce Carol Oates takes the audience on a dreamlike, philosophical journey as she discusses the origins of art and stories. She poses several hypothetical questions, touching on the purpose of human existence and the reasoning behind our desire to create art. Oates explores these questions by tracing the evolution of the writer: the writer as a child, the writer in school, and so on. She is fascinated with how people progress with the craft of writing and how they contribute to the evolution of literature.

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller, The Accursed. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. (source: HarperCollins)

Literature is a culture, not a cottage activity. It’s a mysterious evolutionary process, where all participate in the evolution of culture. We don’t know why . . . our species does this—it’s one of the qualities of our species.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being normal, but nobody wants to be average.”

“All truth is illuminating and helpful. No truth should be paralyzing.”

Carlos Fuentes gives a talk titled “After the Cold War: The Rise of a New Agenda.” It is the keynote address for a conference intended to help Oregonians put into a global perspective the cultural, economic, and political significance of the emerging Hispanic population of Oregon and the United States. Fuentes discusses the changes taking place in the world since the end of World War II, mainly focusing on the increases in technology and economy brought on by rapid globalization. Because of this globalization, he says, it is incredibly significant to bridge the gap between “us” and “them.” He makes the case that the solution to many of the divisions in the world lies in coexistence, collaboration, and understanding.

“The problem that is rushing forward to meet and embrace us is that of the other—learning to live in our new multi-polar world with he or she who is not like you and me.”

“Melting pots are now either unmelting or brimming over, for the city of the 21st century is demanding that we not only assimilate the foreign, but that finally we accept its continual cultural personality.”

Carlos Fuentes was a Mexican novelist, playwright, critic, and diplomat referred to by The New York Times as “Mexico’s elegant public intellectual and a grand man of letters, whose panoramic novels captured the complicated essence of his country’s history for readers around the world.” His novel The Old Gringo earned him international acclaim in 1985 and was made into a movie featuring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda. It was the first book by a Mexican novelist to become a bestseller in the United States. He received the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious Spanish-language literary award, as well as the National Order of Merit, France’s highest civilian award to a foreigner, and was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times.