I'm supposed to begin this assignment
and I'm going to try to just go into it.
It's not a lot of time.
I am happy and grateful to be here.
I'm going to warn you, this is a work of the imagination.
It's neither fiction or non-fiction.
It is actually what you take it to be.
So there's that.
And it'll seem--
I won't explain first.
I'll do it then explain.
And I'll do it in [? each ?] sections
that made collage and transition right into each other.
So give it a chance.
[MUSIC - BARBER, "ADAGIO FOR STRINGS, OPUS 11"]
"A Poet's Guide to the Assassination of JFK.
The Assassination of Poetry.
Or, how I learned that I was writing a cover story poetics.
Air Force One.
Yaddo.
American Rifleman.
American Poetry Review.
Anti-Castro Cubans.
Cave Canem.
Arlington National Cemetery.
AWP.
The Assassinations Records Review board.
The Paris Review.
Autopsy.
Diving into the Wreck.
Autopsy photos.
Disembodied poetics.
Autopsy photos (altered).
Exquisite corpse.
Back brace.
Back issues.
Badge man.
William Logan.
"Barber's Adagio for Strings."
Come all Ye Ghost.
Big oil.
The Nobel Prize.
Brains and eggs.
Contributors bio.
May Russell.
Grace Cavaleri.
George.
H.W. Bush.
The Yale Younger.
CIA.
PSA.
Poetry Society of America.
The CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center.
Kinko's.
Cabinet plane over the Pacific.
The Cloud Corporation.
Camelot.
Favor and favor.
The president lancer.
The first lady lace.
Caroline Kennedy.
Lyric.
John F. Kennedy Jr. Lark.
Jack Ruby's the Carousel Club.
Best American Poetry.
Casket, bronze ceremonial.
First edition.
Casket, metal shipping.
Second printing.
Fidel Castro.
Amiri Baraka.
John and Nellie Connally.
Kingsley and Kate Toughs.
John Connolly's wounds.
"Four Quartets."
Conspiracy realists.
Harriet.
Conspiracy Theorists.
Scarriet.
Counterfeit agents.
Contest judges.
The cover up.
Language.
Walter Cronkite.
Robert Pinsky.
Dallas.
The triggering town.
Dallas police.
Publishers Weekly.
Dealey Plaza.
Page.
31 motionless people.
Poetry reading audience.
The decision to go to the moon.
Delilah Belle Wallace.
Double arrest.
Oswald.
Double take.
Elm Street ex.
Scansion.
The eternal flame.
Robert Frost.
FBI.
Invoices.
Paper trail.
Fake defectors program.
The baffler.
Jim Garrison.
New directions.
Grassy knoll.
Stage.
The Great Society.
Po-biz.
The Hertz clock Atop Dealey Plaza.
Noonday.
Hotel Texas. .
10 house J. Edgar Hoover.
Richard Howard.
Illuminati.
Lanham.
I am just a Patsy.
Mexico City Blues.
JFK's brain.
Received forms.
Joseph P. Kennedy.
Ulysses.
Rose F. Kennedy.
Ariel.
Kennedy compound.
The Fine Arts Work Center.
Kennedy half dollar.
The three penny review.
The Kennedy Johnson ticket.
The prolific and the [? derived ?]..
Nikita Khrushchev.
Peter Sellers.
The kill zone.
Index of first lines.
Mary Jo Kopechne, Government girl.
Lamb chop puppet.
Anaphora.
Lone nut.
Iowa.
Love Field.
The MacDowell Colony.
The magic bullet.
The Pulitzer Prize.
Marilyn mailer.
Norman Monroe.
The military industrial complex.
Bomb.
Eisenhower warning.
The cantus.
The mob.
Poetry Foundation.
Moscow.
Washington.
Hotline.
The KGB bar.
Motorcade route.
The road not taken.
The Murchison mansion.
All the vise President's Men.
My God, they're going to kill us all.
Lit crit.
The new frontier.
The internet.
New Orleans.
Louisiana.
Marfa.
Atlanta.
The Newman family.
The new school.
9/11 Commission Report.
Poetry writing sample.
571 pages.
Richard Nixon.
A local storm.
Departures.
Jackie O. Sharon Olds.
Oil depletion allowance.
"Sympathy for the Devil."
Aristotle Onassis.
Antaeus.
Orville Nix.
Paul Simon.
Orville Nix's film.
"The Sounds of Silence."
Orville Nix's film altered.
"The Sounds of Silence."
Lee Harvey Oswald.
Spoken word.
The Patsy.
How.
Pepsi Cola convention.
Poet's House.
Photograph of LBJ being sworn in.
Plato's cave.
Photograph of Oswald holding rifle.
Images.
Photograph of Oswald being shot.
Unit of sound.
Unit of meaning.
Picket fence.
Fence.
Pink Chanel suit.
Vida.
Pink Chanel suit.
Bloodstained.
Vida.
Pink pillbox hat.
Tinder.
Buttons.
Profiles in Courage.
George.
RFK.
Nick Flynn.
The Enemy Within.
Blind humor.
Dan Rather.
Dan Chiasson.
The camera never blinked.
The afterlife of objects.
Real and re-timed footage.
Leaping poetry.
Rifles.
The lyric eye.
The eye of the lyric.
Rifle report.
Starred review.
Jack Ruby.
David Lehman.
Secret Service.
National Book Foundation.
Shadow government.
The Amy long Travel Scholarship.
Sirhan Sirhan.
Schiavone Schiavone.
The sixth floor window.
Parnassus.
Oliver Stone.
Brian Turner.
Sturgis Frank.
Frank Sinatra.
Texas.
Amazon.com.
Texas School Book Depository.
Dodge Poetry Festival.
Texas Theater.
City lights.
Helen Thomas.
Catalog.
Copy.
Print and electronic.
Officer J.D. Tippit.
Tony Hoagland.
Spent
[GUN SOUNDS]
Cartridges.
Five metaphysical poets.
The three tramps.
ABC, CBS, NBC.
This t-shirt is unfair.
The New Yorker.
Triangulation.
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.
Triple underpass.
Lyrical Ballads.
The tunnels under Dallas.
The tenure track.
12:00 noon to 1:00 PM.
Skunk hour.
UFO Files.
Slush pile.
The umbrella.
Bread Loaf Writers Conference.
Umbrella Man.
Michael Collier.
The umbrella system.
Waiters, fellow scholars, faculty, and guests.
Vietnam.
Squaw Valley.
War is hell.
National Poetry Slam Championships.
Earl Warren.
Robert Penn Warren.
Richard Russell Jr. Richard Eberhardt.
John Sherman Cooper.
Daniel Hoffman.
Hell Boggs.
Reed Whitmore.
Gerald Ford.
William Meredith.
Allen Dulles.
Allen Tate.
John Jay McCoy.
Robert Fitzgerald.
Arlen Specter.
Dana Gioia.
Warren Commission Report.
Self portrait in a convex mirror.
Washington.
National Endowment for the Arts.
Watergate.
The Book of Nightmares.
The White House.
Playboy Mansion.
The white [? oak ?] cliffs Of Dover Beach.
Witnesses.
The nation.
Disappearing witnesses.
Out of print titles.
Witness testimonies.
Uncorrected proofs.
Abraham Zapruder.
Joseph Campbell.
The Zapruder film.
The power of myth.
Freemasons.
Free verse.
Mark Lane.
Mark Strand.
Limousine right rear tail light.
The Autobiography of Red.
Three assassination weekend.
Three assassinated family members.
Acoustic evidence.
Acrostic.
Operation [? 40. ?] Arizona Poetry Center.
Tracheotomy.
Tsvetaeva.
JFK.
You.
JFK.
You."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
So that was Barber's "Adagio For Strings, "Opus 11."
It's supposedly JFK's favorite piece of music.
It's also the piece Jacqueline Kennedy used two days
after the assassination.
She rented out a hall, a symphony hall in DC
and hired an orchestra to play it to an empty hall
and have it broadcast over the city.
So it played for 24 hours to no audience but a radio audience.
It's probably one of the saddest pieces of music I know.
It seemed to fit with that kill list.
And it's a long list, so I had to jump around a bit.
Thank you for being on it.