WEBVTT

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This is one of the--

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I'm back again to
the theme of poetry.

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One of the first that
I wrote to clarify

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certain points for myself.

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You must realize that the
openness liberality and variety

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in poetry and today was nothing
at all that way, nowhere

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near that way, in
the '30s and '40s

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when this poem was written.

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And I wrote this in
defiance of the highly

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formal and constricted manners
and methods in which poems

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were written in those days.

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But the spirit of
it, I think, has--

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I think we've all caught
up with that spirit now.

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Anyway, here's the poem.

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"Get the guys works
in a poem, and you've

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got the smoke and smokestacks.

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The mottled red and
yellow tenements

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and grimy kids who
curse with the pungency

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of the odor of gas,
you've got America, boy.

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Sketch in the river and
barge is all dirty and slimy.

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How do the seagulls stay
so white and always cloying

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like a little mad geniuses?

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You've got the
kind of living that

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makes the kind of
thinking we do--

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gasworks, smokestack,
whistle tooting wisecracks.

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They don't come because
we like it that way,

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but because we find that
outside our window every morning

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and soot on the
furniture and trucks

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carrying coal for gas,
the kid hot after the ball

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under the wheel, he gets it
over the belly all right.

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He lies there.

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So the kids keep tossing the
ball around after the funeral.

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So the cops keep chasing them.

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So the mamas keep hollering.

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And papa flings his
newspaper outward in disgust

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with discipline."

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[APPLAUSE]

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