Red Wheelbarrow 2008 text FINAL REVISED.indd - De Anza College

BT: I’m glad you’re not. But what I’m thinking as I look over America,
from what I’m seeing so far, there’s a kind of silence. It’s very quiet on the
artistic front about the war because people feel they don’t really have the
authority to write about it. I think it’s starting to change, but it’s hard for
a lot of writers here who weren’t there to approach it. There’s some sort
of authority issue and they don’t feel connected. What I’m telling them,
though, is that they are connected to it. Maybe if they feel disconnected,
then that’s their subject. That’s their inroad into the war. Right now,
where’s the war? There’s a war going on at this very moment.
It sounds kind of odd, but what’s beyond that wall? That’s not a
trick question. Does anybody know?
Ruth Rabin: Restrooms.
BT: Restrooms? And then beyond the restrooms the building ends at
some point, then what’s beyond that? Outside. Does anybody know what’s
there? Is there grass?
Adam Spohrer: A walkway.
BT: Is there a walkway? Those mountains in the distance—that’s our
horizon right now? And I have faith that if I turn left there, there won’t
be an abyss. Like in Columbus’s day, he showed the map and somehow
the water doesn’t go over the edge. But we have to believe that horizon
continues along over America, over the Atlantic, over Europe. It continues
on… and there really is a country called Iraq. That connection is really hard
to make sometimes. There are millions of people alive there right now,
and it’s evening—it really is evening. There really are Iraqi people going
about their lives. Somewhere there’s an explosion; somewhere there’s not.
How do you get connected to that? What do you have to say about it? Or
Afghanistan, nobody even talks about Afghanistan.
Adam Spohrer: Back to the poem—what made you incorporate Woody
Guthrie’s lyrics from “Black Wind Blowing” in “Autopsy”? Woody
Guthrie’s lyrics are about oppression, hard labor, scarcity, and always
the “buzzards” of death circling. It’s a blues song. Is that what you were
after—a dark blues?
BT: I had to pay $50 for those, for five years. There’s a texture in that song
sung by Billy Bragg & Wilco. With Woody Guthrie, those are lyrics that
he never made into a song. He has lots of those. Bragg and Wilco went to
his archives, they made a compilation and they took the song. My buddy
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