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BN: Yeah, so unless there's other questions on Yellow Door, maybe you could continue to the second book, or the one that came right after, Basic Vocabulary.

AU: So this is Basic Vocabulary, and those are supposed to be drones if you don't know what they are. Because I have a feeling some people wouldn't know they were drones. This book, the main... well, I think the main ingredient of this book is the title poem by the same name, "Basic Vocabulary." Because this is one of the longest poems I've written, it's got thirty-five sections, and it is an antiwar poem. And it has sort of an interesting backstory. I saw an article by a linguist who said there are essentially thirty-five words in every major human language, or something like that, and then they gave the list of words. And that kind of really got me interested, those words. And so I took the words, and then it became a project, is try to write a poem with those words. So that's the major piece in here followed by quite a few other pretty heavy hitting political poems, or one that's really against the use of drones by the United States. I called that poem "They're Called Mosquitos." I wrote a poem that is actually very mathematical even though I was writing it in the style of Juan Felipe Herrera, had written a poem called "Fuzzy Equations," and I used the format which was either saying something equals something or less than or greater than. I used all those ideas in talking about the political landscape of the time. So that was kind of fun to write for this book. I also have some prose poems in here which were a little different for me.

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AU: Basic Vocabulary also has a whole section kind of dedicated... well, it's called "the necessity for stone," so here we go on the stones. [Laughs] And I also had gone through a bout with breast cancer in 2010, so the last session of this book has the title "Mysteries: Medical and Celestial." So I talk about my breast cancer in several of the poems, and then I also talk about ideas like infinity or looking up at the stars with my grandson, topics like that. And it also includes a poem based on our visit to China back in 2013. My husband and I went to China and Tibet, and in Tibet we got to see a place called the Jokhang Temple. And people were coming there and doing a pilgrimage, very, very moving. So that ended up as a poem in this book. So it's interesting, I find some of my most extreme political pieces are here as well as some of my most extreme, the other direction spiritual pieces, kind of interesting. Do you have other questions for Basic Vocabulary?

VM: Brian, is this a good time to return to the question about spirituality or would that be better later? Amy, since you brought it up, one question is, because there is such a, I mean, your first book wins this major prize set up by the Nicholas Roerich Foundation, which is, and he was a mystic. And there is this thread throughout your books of spirituality. And I was wondering if, or we were wondering if you could talk about the evolution, your own spiritual evolution through these books, and perhaps with regard to, perhaps, vis-à-vis Buddhism?

AU: Yeah. I don't think there's any way it's not a result of my working with Peter Levitt and his workshop for fifteen years. Spring, summer and autumn, right? Sitting in there in these sessions and hearing talks about spirituality and Buddhism. I didn't get to the point of some of my fellow poets in the class started to meditate with Peter. So I never did that, I don't meditate, but I think I've been very affected just by the, there's a certain tone of compassion and awareness that I think I've learned from being around Peter and these other people that are Buddhists, they are Buddhists. And one of the things that really applies both to life and also to writing a poem, is to really pay attention to what you're doing at this moment. How can you really enjoy it and savor it, and realize that whole experience, if you're not giving your full attention to that thing. So Peter would talk about that in terms of if you're eating dinner or writing a poem. The same kind of idea, it needs the attention. And once you give it that attention then the eyes see so much more. It opens out and opens in, everything gets bigger. I don't know, does that sound Buddhist? [Laughs] I did marry -- you know, my ex-husband was a Buddhist, so when I got married in 1970, it was at the West L.A. Buddhist Temple, but he never tried to teach me Buddhism.

VM: Thank you. Because that was such a strong thread and maybe we can move back to the next book?

BN: Yeah. Well, actually, before, I wanted to ask one other question with this one, too, and actually in, was it the one right before? Or a couple books before, where you start to write about aging and about, as you mentioned, about your cancer diagnosis and so forth. I'm just wondering, are there aspects of your own life that you, I don't know, are off limits? Or is there any sort of self-censorship going knowing that this is going to be read by a lot of people? I mean, how do you approach these kinds of very private sorts of issues?

AU: Interesting. I didn't have problems writing poems about my cancer experience in 2010. I didn't have any problems seeing that in a book. In fact, it seemed to make sense at the time. But I wouldn't say that I would talk about absolutely everything. There are some things I may be shy about, especially when it involves other people, and I would tend not to write about it, or that might be something that ends up in the journal, but not in a published poem.

BN: Or do you write poems about them and just don't publish them?

AU: That's happened just a few times, just a few.

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