WEBVTT 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I see the moon 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the moon sees me 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the moon sees somebody 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that I don't see 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 God bless the moon 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and God bless me 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and God bless the somebody that I don't see 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 If I get to heaven 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 before you do 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I'll make a hole 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and pull you through 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and I'll write your name 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 on every star 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and that way the world 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 won't seem so far 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The astronaut will not be at work today. He has called in sick. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 He has turned off his cell phone, his laptop, his pager, his alarm clock. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 There is a fat yellow cat asleep on his couch, raindrops against the window 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and not even the hint coffee in the kitchen air. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Everybody is in a tizzy. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The engineers on the fifteenth floor have stopped working on their particle machine. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The anti-gravity room is leaking, and even the freckled kid with glasses, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 whose only job it is to take out the trash is nervous, fumbles the bag, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 spills the banana peel and a paper cup. Nobody notices. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They are too busy re-calculating what this will mean for lost time. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 How many galaxies are we losing per second? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 How long before the next rocket can be launched? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Somewhere an electron flies off its energy cloud. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 A black hole has erupted. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 A mother finishes setting the table for dinner. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 A "Law and Order" marathon is starting. The astronaut is asleep. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 He has forgotten to turn off his watch which ticks like a metal pulse 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 against his wrist. He does not hear it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 He dreams of coral reefs and plankton. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 His fingers find the pillow cases, sailing masts. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 He turns on his side, opens his eyes once. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 He thinks that scuba divers must have the most wonderful job in the world, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 so much water to glide through. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Thank you. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 When I was little, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I could not understand the concept that you could only live one life. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And I don't mean this metaphorically -- 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I mean I literally thought that I was going to get to do 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 everything there was to do and be everything there was to be. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It was only a matter of time. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And there was no limitation 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 based on age or gender or race or even appropriate time period. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I was sure that I was actually going to experience 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 what it felt like to be a leader of the civil rights movement, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 or a ten-year-old boy living on a farm during the dust bowl. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 or an emperor of the Tang dynasty in China. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 My mom says that when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 my typical response was princess, ballerina, astronaut, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and what she doesn't understand is that 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I wasn't trying to invent some combined super-profession. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I was listing things I thought I was going to get to be, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 a princess and a ballerina and an astronaut. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And I'm pretty sure the list probably went on from there -- 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I usually just got cut off. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It was never a question of if I was going to get to do something, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 so much as a question of when. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And I was sure that if I was going to do everything 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that it probably meant that I had to move pretty quickly 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 because there was a lot of stuff I needed to do. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So my life was constantly in a state of rushing. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I was always scared that I was falling behind, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and since I grew up in New York City, as far as I could tell, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 rushing was pretty normal. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But as I grew up, I had this sinking realization 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that I wasn't going to get to live any more than one life. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I only knew what it felt like to be a teenaged girl in New York City, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 not a teenage boy in New Zealand, not a prom queen in Kansas. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I only got to see through my lens, and it was around this time 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I became obsessed with stories because it was through stories 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that I was able to see through someone else's lens, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 however briefly or imperfectly. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And I started craving hearing other people's experiences 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 because I was so jealous that there were entire lives 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that I was never going to get to live 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and I wanted to hear about everything that I was missing. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And by the transitive property, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I realized that some people were never going to get to experience 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 what it felt like to be a teenage girl in New York City -- 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 which meant that they weren't going to know 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 what the subway ride after your first kiss feels like 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 or how quiet it gets when it snows, and I wanted them to know. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I wanted to tell them, and this became the focus of my obsession. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I busied myself telling stories and sharing stories and collecting them 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and it's not until recently that I realized that I can't always rush poetry. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In April, the National Poetry Month, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 there's this challenge that many poets in the poetry community participate in. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And it's called the 30/30 challenge. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And the idea is, you write a new poem 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 every single day for the entire month of April 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and last year, I tried it for the first time 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and was thrilled by the efficiency at which I was able to produce poetry. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But at the end of the month, I looked back at these 30 poems 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that I had written and discovered that 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 they were all trying to tell the same story, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 it had just taken me 30 tries to figure out the way that it wanted to be told. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And I realized that this is probably true of other stories 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 on an even larger scale. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I have stories that I have tried to tell for years, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 re-writing and re-writing, constantly searching for the right words. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 There's a French poet and essayist by the name of Paul Valéry who said that 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 a poem is never finished, it is only abandoned, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and this terrifies me because it implies 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that I could keep re-editing and re-writing forever 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and it's up to me to decide when a poem's finished 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and when I can walk away from it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And this goes directly against my very obsessive nature 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 to try to find the right answer and the perfect words and the right form. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And I use poetry in my life 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 as a way to help me navigate and work through things 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 but just because I end a poem doesn't mean that I've solved 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 what it was I was puzzling through. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I like to re-visit old poetry because it shows me exactly 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 where I was at that moment. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 What it was I was trying to navigate and the words that I chose to help me. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now I have a story 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that I've been stumbling over for years and years, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and I'm not sure if I've found the perfect form, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 or whether this is just one attempt, and I will try to re-write it later 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 in search of a better way to tell it. But I do know that later when I look back, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I will be able to know that this is where I was at this moment. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And this is what I was trying to navigate, these words, here in this room, with you. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So, smile 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It didn't always work this way. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 There was a time when you had to get your hands dirty. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 When you were in the dark for most of it, fumbling was a given.. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 If you needed more contrast, more saturation, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 darker darks and brighter brights, they called it extended development. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Meant you spent longer inhaling chemicals. Longer up to your wrists. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It wasn't always easy. Grandpa Stuart was a navy photographer. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Young, red-faced with sleeves rolled up, fists of fingers like fat rolls of coins, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 he looked like Popeye the Sailor Man, come to life. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Crooked smile, tuft of chest hair, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 he showed up to World War II with a smirk and a hobby. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 When they asked him if he knew much about photography, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 he lied, learned to read Europe like a map 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 upside down, from the height of a fighter plane, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 camera snapping, eyelids flapping, the darkest darks and brightest brights, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 he learned war like he could read his way home. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 When other men returned, they put their weapons out to rust, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 but he brought the lenses and the cameras home with him, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 opened a shop, turned it into a family affair. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 My father was born into this world, a black and white. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 His basketball hands learned the tiny clicks and slides 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 of lens into frame, film into camera, chemical into plastic bin, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 his father knew the equipment but not the art. He knew the darks but not the brights, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 my father learned the magic.