Brian Turner

But the idea that's often, you know.

But for me, I would hope not.

Because I don't really want to limit what's possible, you know.

You know, one of my... I mentioned earlier that I talked to Phil Levine, who was connected to that first poem I wrote here, Bullet.

Well, in one of the classes I took with him, he said at one point, something along the lines, it's paraphrasing him, but he said that if you want people to feel loss...

which is part of what's happening in these books about war.

The word want may not be the right word, but if you want people to feel loss, then you have to give them something of love first and then take it away.

And if we're going to talk about

and conflict and the repercussions of them and think about them, then one of the things I think we have to do back here where maybe we're waging wars overseas is maybe it's important for us to fall in love with those who are involved in what's happening and then experience in some small way the taking away of them.

Yeah.

I think, yeah, especially when it's, for me, when it starts in the writing themselves, in the writer themselves, working towards, from mystery to mystery.

Another way to put it maybe is, I think this is paraphrasing another writer, might be William Stafford, but I'm not sure off the top of my head.

But it's that the job of the writer isn't to pose the solutions to the question, but the job of the writer is to ask the questions more clearly.

And of course, I don't try to do that overtly, but I do try to have a space in the poems where the poems finish in the reader.

I'm really trying to learn how to do that.

So if the poem can finish in the reader, what does that mean?

I mean, it means in many different ways, but one of the ways, directly if we're talking about sort of political action or things like that, it's like, is there a way for the poem to finish with a question, I would think, in the reader, or questions that might help them to solve things that I don't know how to solve.

I mean, I'm trying to learn how to write poems, but I don't know how to solve worldly problems.

But maybe somebody else will.

Oh, sure.