Transcriber: Amanda Chu Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
I hope everyone's seated comfortably.
Seats in an upright position.
The tray tables folded up.
I'm going to start with a poem,
called "Eva and Bob."
"Eva and Bob (Her mad cow boy toy)
Ate all the pie
Cut and run, kid
The lad lay low
But his Mrs Mrs him
May Jah let him off."
Hold your applause.
(Laughter)
I can see why you didn't.
I'll forgive you for thinking that's not much of a poem.
Where are the great themes of literature -
love, God, death, betrayal, friendship?
The message seems kind of thin.
If we push a little bit,
maybe we could say that Eva and Bob are in a clandestine relationship
with all of the intrigue and thrill that that might entail.
Perhaps the pie is a symbol for something more precious.
What is the threat that makes Bob cut and run?
The poem does not develop these ideas.
There is a reference to the divine in the final line,
but we're a long way from Paradise Lost.
Maybe you'll notice the form:
all of the words are three letters long.
This may create a staccato rhythm.
But that doesn't necessarily bring us any closer to the message of the poem.
But there's a little trick here.
This map of the world has a fictional flight path on it.
And if you could make all of those connections
in the order that is described in this poem,
you will have flown this document.
Every word in Eva and Bob
is an airport code somewhere on the face of this earth.
This is what I call a sky poem,
and a form that I call sky writings.
I'm not the first person to notice this.
In 2013, Expedia ran an advertising campaign
that also capitalized on this happy accident in language.
[BON VOI AGE]
And I know that many of you have done it too,
in a large international airport, bored and exhausted.
You noticed, as I did in 2016,
that those three-letter airport codes sometimes make little words.
The difference is I stayed with that,
and I asked myself a question:
How many airport codes make little words?
And after two and a half years
of poring over lists of every single airport on the planet,
I can say my best answer is about 1,000.
I learned a lot in the process of writing this project.
I learned that there were a lot of words that I needed and wanted and found,
like A-N-D, "and,"
which is Sandusky Griffing Regional Airport.
I think it's in Ohio.
T-H-E, "the," a key word for me,
is a tiny airport in Teresina, Brazil.
I thought I knew all the three-letter words in the language,
but there were a bunch that I didn't know,
including "jor."
J-O-R is a short instrumental interlude
in Indian classical music.
There're words for pennies in Polynesian currencies;
"Anu," a Babylonian sky god;
Or "dzo," D-Z-O,
which is the offspring of a yak and a cow.
(Laughter)
I learned that Papua New Guinea
has the highest concentration of word airports
per square mile on the planet
and that Canada, my home, has the fewest.
And no one will ever explain to me
why Toronto Lester B. Pearson Airport has the code YYZ -
it's a complete mystery to me.
But aside from some trivia and a slightly enhanced Scrabble game,
what else did I learn?
I think I learned something really important
in the process of this project,
and that's how to notice things.
In 2015, James Wood, who's a critic for the New Yorker magazine, I believe,
gave this interview called The Art of Persuasion,
and he said,
"There's a pleasing amateurism about literary criticism,
despite the fact that it's now enshrined in university programs.
A professor of literature at a fancy university
is not necessarily a better noticer than an ordinary reader."
He says we have to train our noticing.
And in the process of this project and creating this form of skywriting,
I learned that boredom and exhaustion are prime tools
for helping us notice things that we would easily overlook.
So let's talk about boredom for a minute.
In 2007, Kenny Goldsmith, a conceptual writer in America,
wrote an essay called "Being Boring,"
and in this essay,
he claimed that he was the most boring writer in history.
And he makes a strong case.
Up to that point,
he had transcribed a commentary
from the longest baseball game ever played,
a month's worth of weather reports,
long weekends worth of traffic reports every 10 minutes,
a 600-page book that transcribed every word he spoke for a week,
called "Soliloquy,"
and the granddaddy of them all, "Day,"
which takes every single character in a single issue of the New York Times
and transcribes it into a novel, 800 pages long -
it's a monumental work of boring literature.
All of which is to say that the man knows his boring.
And in "Being Boring," the essay,
he makes a distinction between boring boring and unboring boring.
Boring boring is enforced boredom -
the staff meeting,
the spreadsheets.
Unboring boring is voluntary.
Knitters, needlecraft workers, you're hearing me now.
The best metaphor I have
for the difference between boring boring and unboring boring
might be around driving.
It's the difference between your morning commute and an aimless drive.
It's the same set of actions,
but one is taken in a spirit of drudgery
and one is taken in a spirit of joy and exploration.
And I don't care how exciting a socialite you think you are,
an airport will crush any joie de vivre
that you brought with you to the security gates.
Airports are the architectural expression of boredom.
And it's funny to me that that's the case.
Airports on the surface should be transformative spaces,
hundreds of thousands of people all crammed into one building,
a polyglot of languages, cultures, customs,
every single person on a journey
from the tragic to the most joyous.
This is the stuff of stories and literature,
and yet what do I do when I'm in the departure lounge?
I slump on a bench,
I put my headphones on,
I half-heartedly browse the duty-free shops,
I constantly glance at the departure boards,
waiting for my gate to be revealed unto me.
It's just so boring.
The thing about boredom is
it's not the lack of distractions.
That's one of the reasons why we stare at our phones
and pull out our trashy novels in the airport -
because there are too many distractions, we need to isolate ourselves a little bit.
Being bored is not the absence of distractions;
it is the distraction itself:
I am bored;
it fills my consciousness;
there's no other state of being possible for me in the moment of boredom.
However, I think we need boredom
because that's the space
in which the idle thought -
like "How many airports make three-letter words?" -
that's the space in which it is possible to have this kind of idea.
So I took the most boring thing I could think of,
airport codes,
from the most boring place I can imagine,
the airport itself,
and I made it unboring.
It became a challenge, a spur.
I put energy and interest into it.
And I took this very boring thing and made it unboring.
And in the process, I learned a lot about my writing process itself.
Rather than waiting for some spark of genius
or a purple laudanum haze
or like a flash of inspiration,
I realized it took work -
hard, long, repetitive, drudge work.
And in order to make this project work, I had to build a spreadsheet.
The most humble, boring document I previously could have imagined
has now become the most interesting document I've ever made.
Here you have the airport codes, the city,
the name of the airport, the country, the longitude, the latitude,
and 1,000 entries long.
I spent three summers compiling all this data,
and every time I sat down to this task, I had to ask myself,
"Am I even a writer anymore?"
"Is this writing?"
"What am I doing here?"
Kenny Goldsmith asks himself the same question
at the end of his essay in Being Boring,
"Is this writing?"
And we both came up with the same answer:
Yes, it is.
I think it is writing because out of that spreadsheet -
and I'm going to take a moment here to thank Matthew Stevenson,
my collaborator on this project,
for plotting this map.
He took the time to translate this spreadsheet into a global map -
this is a detail from a much larger map -
and he's plotted every single airport that qualifies for my project
on its geographical location.
And this spreadsheet is available to the public,
can be downloaded.
You can write your own sky poems,
pin this on your wall,
and trace wonderful new sentences across the world.
And that's kind of literally what's happening here.
Just through this simple observation,
this humble little thing,
the world changes, we look at it differently.
Teresina, Brazil, is now my favorite place on Earth,
not London, Tokyo, Paris.
What this does is it inspires more writing.
I'm sharing my process with you in this,
and you can all engage with it.
Because writing, if it is to be anything, should engender more writing.
And if I'm doing my job as a poet and as an artist,
then you will notice this the next time you're in an airport.
And that thing that was seemingly devoid of interest or joy or wonder
and easily overlooked,
now you will notice it too.
The other thing I'd like to talk about, then, today
is exhaustion, boredom's cousin,
lives in the airport too probably.
There are three senses of the word exhaustion
that I'd like to explore just very briefly.
First, the obvious one is tiredness.
Exhaustion is tiredness.
Chris Schaberg is a wonderful critic and writer and thinker about airports,
and he has this term called "airportness."
Now, I think I'm a pretty relaxed guy,
but something about air travel releases all these inner neuroses in me:
I pack my bags carefully,
I double and triple check my itineraries,
I pat my pockets
looking for travel documents that I absolutely know are present.
Schaberg calls this "airportness,"
and he says that it is the sense of air travel
that extends beyond the boundaries of the airport itself -
it becomes almost a state of mind.
And I think in that sense,
this is why we arrive at the airport already exhausted.
As a conceptual writer,
I think of exhaustion in terms of my constraint.
I wanted to use up all of the airports in this project
and have the final word,
be the heroic sort of figure,
and leave no space for anyone else;
to exhaust to the constraint was my initial thing.
And that proved impossible, for a couple of reasons.
The first was that it's just impossible to do.
It became a puzzle with no solution and kind of ruined the project.
I got tired of trying to be exhaustive.
The second reason is because it was fun to share it.
I've had messages from people all over the world
writing back to me in airport codes.
I saw a classroom of students at the University of Windsor last year
who did things with this constraint that I couldn't have imagined myself.
And we're back to that idea of writing, engendering more writing.
I think that's a really powerful thing.
The sharing of the work and not exhausting it
leads me to this third sense of exhaustion,
which is frustration, right?
I'm fed up, I'm tired, and I'm exhausted of things.
Because poetry has a bad reputation.
It's exhausting and frustrating and boring to read,
or so they say.
In my little corner of it, then, I'm trying to create a change.
I dislike that perception of poetry,
and so my work is an attempt
to change people's perspectives on what is and what isn't poetic.
And that's born out of a sense of frustration with poetry itself.
And I'd like you to kind of transfer that concept to your own practice:
Where if you think things aren't as they should be,
there's a spur to action there.
I want you to think about that
the next time that you're bored and exhausted.
Because at that point, you are in the departure lounge of your soul,
you're in the layover of your heart;
and if you can just turn the switch
and make boredom into an active and interested engagement,
and turn exhaustion into a desire to change the status quo -
in that moment, if you take a deep breath and look around you,
I think you'll find that you have to hand all of the materials you need
to innovate,
to find joy and wonder in things that are easily overlooked,
and to become the agent of change in a changing world.
Thanks for flying.
(Applause)