Well it's pleasant to be here.
I want to dedicate this reading to some poets in the audience.
It's always remarkable when poets show up
at poetry readings.
They-- it's like eating too much cheesecake, normally.
And the poets I'd like to thank, of course Diane Wakoski, whose
work I've read for years, and Michael Cuddihy,
and Bill Roecker, Neil Claremont.
I'm going to read a few books.
Or incidentally, for people who have
an itchy something or another, I read one hour flat, 60 minutes.
At which time a giant picture appears behind me,
advertising nostrums against suspicion and hostility,
also my own soon to appear seven volume history of rain,
or something.
I anyway get tired.
I get a sort of a feedback, like people get out of microphones.
You know, when a microphone screams
like a stuck pig, an actual pig, a barnyard pig,
and I can't read anymore than that.
So a couple short poems from my first book, Plainsong, which
I really don't like anymore.
So I read very little very little from it,
but one little poem called "Credo After Ezra Pound",
a poem I always think about just before I read.
"Credo".
"Go, my songs, to the young and insolent.
Speak of the love of final things.
Do not betray me as a dancer, drunk,
is dumb to his clumsiness."