Conspiracy Simile.
One-- all poets assassinate poetry.
Two-- and all similes contain at least one conspiracy
that you can see if you look beyond the cover
up of sentence, intent, and enforced form.
Three-- there were more poets, far more poets,
than there were shooters in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
Actually, they arrived at least two weeks in advance.
There were also spare patsies, spare stanzas,
and spare assassins.
Four-- sometimes the singular difference between being a hero
and being the patsy is facial hair.
I thought that was funny when I wrote it.
This side of the room thought it was funny.
This side of the room, [? I don't know. ?] When I
wrote it, I didn't have facial hair, either.
Did Oswald?
Do you remember?
No.
Not really, right?
But before the Dallas Police took him into custody
at the Texas Theater for allegedly shooting Officer JD
Tippit, Lee Harvey Oswald resembled something
of a junior beat poet.
Yes, someone who was about to see
the best minds of his generation destroyed by--
we don't know.
He was beat and sharp.
They always portrayed Oswald as a loser, don't they?
Don't they?
He got a t-shirt on.
He even said, it's not fair for me
to wear this t-shirt in a police lineup.
He's like, let me change to a shirt, you know?
He actually spoke six--
close to six languages.
So he wasn't dumb.
He knew what was happening-- very smart.
The cut over his eye, beat, because they beat him.
Five-- in most poems, there's a speaker who is not the author,
but who was governed by the author.
A 2 in one, but not a full doubling.
While in police custody, who said this?
Lee or Harvey?
There was a Lee.
And there was a Harvey.
Some people saw-- some people saw
Harvey go out the back door at the Texas Theater.
Some people saw Lee come in the front.
Crazy.
Who said this?
The colored people in Russia have
it better than the colored people in America.
We don't know who said it.
But one of the Oswalds said it at the Texas jail.
[INAUDIBLE] interrogation, just out of nowhere.
Just to fuck with the police, pre NWA.
Oswald said they were asking no questions.
They hadn't charged him with anything.
They had already beat him up.
They had to put the Band-Aid over his eye.
His handlers knew who he were.
He knew who he was.
He knew he was taking the fall.
Some people say, some of the books about him
say, he thought he was going to stop the assassination.
Tricked him.
He turns to the cop who's interrogating him and says,
the colored people in Russia have
it better than the colored people in America.
And there wasn't a damn colored person in the room.
Oswald.
It's like, meta.
He knew I was going to be standing here one day.
What was Oswald's zodiac sign?
Anybody?
Libra.
We know that because of who?
DeLillo.
Don DeLillo.
What's the-- what's the zodiac sign of the person sitting
right here-- standing right here?
Libra.
What about the person sitting right there?
Libra.
What about my faithful assistant over there?
All the Libras, raise their hand.
Fellows Oswalds.
Six.
I would like to worship--
workshop the narrative progression of that day.
But I cannot, not without becoming an assassin, myself.
I believe that the word collaboration is a better
fit than the word conspiracy.
There are documents to prove and disprove this.
But there is no body or brain.
The body of the slain poem is the best evidence.
But what happens when the autopsy
occurs before the poem is written, or finished
being written?
What do we know about the au-- tangent.
What do we know about the autopsy?
We know a lot about the autopsy.
We know that they don't match what happens in that film.
We know that they don't match the photos,
don't match the witness testimony.
We don't know whose body that is.
Sometimes it looks like JFK.
Sometimes it doesn't.
At the beginning of this talk, I said they were--
I was going to try to do it in three parts.
We're in the second part.
I don't know what part I'm on.
Who cares?
Three parts, whatever.
There were three assassinations that weekend.
Who were they?
Come on.
Who was the first person killed?
JFK.
Second person?
[INAUDIBLE]
Who?
[INAUDIBLE]
[? M-hm. ?]
Tippit
Tippit.
Officer Tippit.
Third, Lee.
What if they were all planned to happened?
The narrative is that Tippit tried to arrest Lee.
And Lee shot him.
You have to believe that.
Because if you don't believe that, there's a problem.
Where was Tippit shot at?
Like where on his body?
[INAUDIBLE]
Temple.
Same place you saw in the Zapruder film--
same wound, close range.
Look at the autopsy photos again.
What was Tippit's nickname?
Anybody know?
He had an ugly nickname.
He would be what we would call now a dirty cop.
They gave him a hero's welc-- a hero's sending off,
because he sacrificed.
His nickname was Jack.
[INAUDIBLE]
Jack Kennedy was hated in Dallas.
Hated.
And Dallas was like Thug City.
It was like Detroit now.
I mean, there was money.
But it was like, you didn't fuck around in Dallas.
They passed out treason pamphlets the morning
of the assassination.
And the draft.
Jack-- they called him Jack the--
how do you earn a nickname Jack?
Well how do you earn any nickname?
[INAUDIBLE]
Semblance.
Resemblance.
Body type.
Height.
Handsome.
To them, closest thing they had to look like JFK.
You don't see very many pictures of Tippit on internet anymore.
Why is that?
Erasure.
I'm speaking about the assassination.
But I'm speaking about erasure.
Anybody know what erasure poetics is?
Seen erasure in poetics?
You've seen the poetics that the kid is doing grad school now,
where they write the word and they cross it out?
But they leave it on the page so you can see it.
They want you to know, well, it's there.
But it's not there.
They think they're just little Zapruders.
Jackie, why is that word there?
You crossed it out.
Well, in abstract expressionism, sometimes the painters
paint over the word and leave a piece
like Rauschenberg and Basquiat.
They want you to see it.
But it's not really there.
Take that out your damn poem.
That's me.
You're no assassin.
A lot of things that are there, not there,
left in, to fool you, to trick you, to hallucinate you.
Where was I?
What happens when the wrong poem is used for the autopsy photos?
If you stay away from the poem long enough while writing it,
you can actually get its drafts to disagree.
You can.
There were a different set of doctors at Bethesda navel
than the doctors at Parkland.
The Parkland doctor saw one thing, said something else.
Body goes on a plane.
Or maybe he took the train.
Maybe they faxed it.
Who knows?
Time travel, aliens, I don't know how it got to DC.
Jackie said she never left the casket.
But we know that's not true, because she's
being photographed next to Lyndon for the swearing
in on the plane.
The casket's not there.
It's in the back.
Something happened to the body.
She turned her back.
But I always advocate that with poems.
Turn your back on a poem for a while.
Most poems change their own wounds
while you are away from them.
That day, all the poetic evidence was made to conflict--
films, photograph, witness testimony.
They built in the conspiracy.
I love it when people say, you're a conspiracy theorist.
And now, there's a new camp of people-- the conspiracy
realists.
It's like the camps of poetry--
realist versus the romantics versus the images
versus the surrealism, the conspiracy theorists.
I don't know what I am.
But I always look around what I'm told.
That day, our memory was edited.
You can't have a conspiracy unless you first
have a social network, I said earlier.
But the media isn't imaginative enough
to talk about the role, that social network.
We think it was invented by, well Facebook anyway,
some kid at Harvard.
And maybe time travel played in the Kennedy assassination.
But it was in fact, the greatest organizing
of pre-social network social networking ever displayed.
Imagine what that says about the role of social networking
in your life.
The conspiracy of the self, maybe little conspiracies
it's happening all the time, especially
in confessional poetry, right?
Confessional poetry depends upon conspiracy of the self.
The assassination of this--
like this.
We always like.
I like that.
Like, like, like.
Dislike-- vanished.
It's all agreement.
You can't disagree in English unless you agree first,
grammatically.
The assassination of JFK also could not
have happened without poetry.
I read a lot of books of poetry in the past 30 years.
And none of them, let me tell you, the way it dest-- not even
The Waste Land, damn it.
The way it destroys truth, the very thing
that social networks live and die to imitate and eliminate.
The Stemmons freeway sign, the freeway sign
that JFK goes behind, they used that wisely,
broke one of the lines of fire, broke one of the lines of fire.
I see the clock.
The poet is aging and cannot pay attention to or waste anymore
commissions.
He turned 50 on October the 5th, 2013,
and was only 45 days old when he first
encountered the guns of prose.
The poet is a Libra, just like Oswald.
Whose fault, fault line, fault line break, is this?
This is Don DeLillo's fault for inventing the truth effectively
on top of another truth.
There are a few quasi lyric moments in the poem Zapruder
that cover the lie with an attempt at nuance.
But where was nuance on November 22, 1963?
It was everywhere.
In her memoir, Lady Bird Johnson writes,
it all began so beautifully.
One wonders if she eventually noticed the umbrella behaving
like an angry verb.
One wonders what she would think of-- harp.
The weather was beautiful.
One wonders what she would have said
about the hurricane that was approaching
New York City on 9/11.
It just turned around.
Someone turned it around.
The official story-- a single gunman
fired three shots from a building
that housed a poetry festival.
You ever think about the School Book Depository?
Talk about what that building was.
Supposedly, Oswald was having lunch and reading.
Having a Coke on his lunch break,
photographed downstairs while the assassination
was happening.
One of the three shots was so Pulitzer,
it was called The Magic Bullet.
It was like the dancing bullet and shit.
Long before the first shots was fired,
it was clear that the Academy of American Poets
had chosen to pen the assassination of poetry
on spoken word.
They do demonize.
Spoken word is such an Oswald.
What if, as many have suggested, the Zapruder film
is fake and filled with re-timed footage, missing frames,
switch frames?
What if the back of the president's head,
were countless witnesses say the wound was,
has been blackened out?
Didn't even think to look at the back of his head.
You will next time.
Magic, blackened out.
What if the famous, brightly-colored wound,
the wound that changes shape--
oh it does, the wound in the front temple--
think about what happens to a metaphor in a poem,
is an animated forgery?
Metaphors require destruction, violence,
to work, similes, especially.
You can't make a good simile without killing up something.
Something has to become.
They give you that like or as definition in the encyclopedia
of poetics--
a comparison using like or as.
They don't say, a comparison using rifles and knives
and destruction.
You have destr-- best similes, they say, I can see it.
But a new thing has to be born out of an old one.
Something has to die.
Is an animated forgery, an hallucination, and partially,
a painting.
Parts of what you saw were a painting.
That would make the film a poem.
That would make this poet ask, who
were the poets and poetry institutions
involved in the cover up?
That would make this poet ask, did Abraham Zapruder really
write with his camera, [? le ?] camera - stylo,
the Zapruder poem, Or did Thomas Sayers Ellis?
A cover up occurs in a poem when the line, which the Princeton
encyclopedia of poetics defines as a unit of sound
and unit of meaning, behaves in a linear fashion,
such as simply stacking lines grammatically to make stanza.
A cover up occurs in a poem when the technical devices
of the poem, the operatives, are forced to operate
in the poem in secrecy--
oh, yeah, JFK made that great speech
about secret societies and the threat of them--
in secrecy and without the aid of the human senses.
Nothing fuels a metaphor, rhyme, repetition,
et cetera like sight, taste, smell, touch, and hearing.
William Stafford once said, a line is a breathing walk.
And shame-- Seamus Heaney once told me
that a quatrain should behave like
its own respiratory system, pushing
in and out like an accordion.
But what of the back brace?
Many of the most obvious breathing
walks in Dallas that day occurred immediately
after the last shots were fired.
And this includes Secret Service agent Clint Hill's
amazing, breathtaking run, not walk.
You can't catch up with a speeding presidential limousine
unless what?
It stops.
[? Lest ?] it say [? jurors. ?]
By the time he reached the presidential car,
the first lady was already in shock
and had climbed onto the back of the limousine.
Agent Hill then violently, per his testimony,
shoved her back into the seat.
Agent Hill then violently, per his testimony,
shoved her back into a seat.
You didn't see that.
She even said it.
He never touched her that way, she said, violently shoved her.
No, no, no, no, no.
TSE's Zapruder poem does not--
Zapruder poem does not show this because Zapruder's Zapruder
film does not contain it.
Poor TSE.
He got paid for that poem, got a job,
was considered better than other poets, a voice.
Like in any effective simile, a truth must be invented.
A truth must be destroyed.
One witness, a lyric poet, says JFK stood up in the car
after the first shot hit him in the back.
A cover up occurs in a poem when the speaker of the poem
solely performs the duty of a secretary to reality.
This is what the late Reginald Shepherd once complained to me
about in a phone call in 1994.
He wanted to know why everyone was publishing and writing
what he termed eyewitness news poetry.
I asked him one night, why you going to like that book?
I don't like eyewitness news poetry.
I already saw the news.
He had a point.
I hung up with him.
My Zapruder poem is eyewitness news poetry.
A cover up in a poem occurs when the facts of the poem
exist before the poem has been written.
The facts of the poem exist before the poem
has been written.
And the poet writes his way toward a known ending,
or one that is merely an exercise in approaching
a pre agreed upon truth.
The only truth of the poem is prosody.
The combination of prose and song, or as Robert Hayden
put it, when something patterned, wild, and free,
when something patterned, wild, and free is achieved.
Was the switch from the original and linear motorcade route down
Main Street through the page of Dealey Plaza to a turn--
to a turn on Houston, then a wide turn, neatly
onto the sidewalk on Elm, an example of verse reversing?
Well, I don't know.
You have to ask J Edgar Hoover.
Who is J Edgar Hoover on my list?
Richard Howard.
Neither of the three Zapruder poems,
the one supposedly taken by Zapruder,
or the one altered by the CIA at their own private Kinko's,
or the one written by Thomas Sayers Ellis,
indicates any evidence of either a wide turn on Elm,
or a [? caesura ?] near the grassy knoll.
Damn car stopped for two seconds.
And that's when the head exploded.
Another witness, a post Civil rights--
a post Civil rights surrealist poet says,
the presidential limousine came to a complete stop.
And then the back of the president's head,
not the side or the front, was blasted out,
splattering the face of Bobby Hargis,
a police officer riding behind the limousine on a motorcycle.
The documents do not match.
But that sometimes works in poetry.
The documents do not match, so the poet
is encouraged to engage the width of the act,
not in one poem, but in a very trendy series of poems.
No version of the Zapruder poem except the original one
contains the caesura.
And that has only been seen by a handful of poets and poetry
editors.
I've only met five people who say they've seen that.
They say, and this is true, this is what they say.
They say every time a new president comes into office,
they show them the original Zapruder film.
Why would they do that?
That's why you can't get what you want.
I know if I was Barack and they showed me
that, I'd be like, yeah.
But he already knew.
Can we, by judging the work of poets we've read,
the shape of their content, and their particular and individual
brand of innuendo, take a stab at some
of the poets who may have seen the original z poem film?
I think that some poem-- some poets,
in their talented, visionary way, have seen it.
I think so.
But it's a very short list.
I know my time's running out.
Let me give you a taste of that list.
Here's a-- this is a work of fiction, OK?
I'm judging by what's in the book.
Adrienne Rich, that's why I love her, because she's seen it.
In Diving into the Wreck, she tried
to explain to us exactly what occurred at Bethesda--
at the Bethesda autopsy--
how the body and wounds were altered to support the official
poetics, while the wounds on the photographs
contradict the wounds as described by the witnesses
and as they appear in the z poem film, which
contradicts everything.
Another witness, Timothy Donnelly--
I don't know if you know Timothy yet.
He's a young poet, my age poet, a little younger.
Although he wasn't actually alive at the time--
you don't have to be alive to know.
The truth just floats in the air when you breathe.
The Cloud Corporation, his last book,
explores the limitations of the Kennedy cabinet, most of whom
were trapped in a plane overseas when
the assassination occurred.
They saw it all.
They were put up there not to see, right?
Pierre Salinger and that whole crew,
they saw it all, including the Federal caesura
and the four teams of shooter poets and spotters
from the sky.
I'm going to skip the next two parts because of time.
A cover up occurs in a poem when the poem is governed by story
and when the lyric impulse of the poem
has been removed by a series of complete thoughts
to design to weaken the atmospheric structural
and equity of the poem.
When this occurs, the poem will most likely
fall victim to serious series writing,
to story, to old possums book of practical cats, to Broadway.
I predict that there will be a Kennedy assassination Broadway
play in a few years.
[INAUDIBLE] what they'll call it.
When this occurs, serious drinking, dreaming,
and suspicious witness poetry suicides also occur.
The poets who kill JFK all met at a conference
and were students of textual and spoken social engineering.
The poets who kill JFK all went to graduate school
and studied the uses of free energy,
the leaping poetics of time travel,
and theological alchemy.
The poets who killed JFK all work for politicians--
the infotainment division of the military industrial complex.
Remember Dwight Eisenhower was charged with me--
charged with meaning Ezra Pond--
Ezra Pound-like warning to the incoming Kennedy
administration?
How do we [? identify ?] these poets,
the poets who killed JFK?
Their work, their poetics, is recogniza--
recognizable for its tendency to behave
like a black op within a psyop within a false flag
within an unknowable truth.
The poets who killed JFK are the same ones helping the Pope
collect meteorites.
Why did they do it?
To invent, destroy, you.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]