WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.820 align:middle line:90% 00:00:02.820 --> 00:00:05.150 align:middle line:84% I'll switch gears a little bit and read 00:00:05.150 --> 00:00:09.240 align:middle line:84% a few pages of this long poem at the end 00:00:09.240 --> 00:00:13.140 align:middle line:90% of this book, The Undressing. 00:00:13.140 --> 00:00:17.100 align:middle line:90% I've been most of my life-- 00:00:17.100 --> 00:00:21.808 align:middle line:84% wow, actually, it began here when I was-- 00:00:21.808 --> 00:00:22.725 align:middle line:90% it must be the desert. 00:00:22.725 --> 00:00:25.815 align:middle line:90% 00:00:25.815 --> 00:00:34.470 align:middle line:84% I spent a semester here, and I began to be harried or troubled 00:00:34.470 --> 00:00:38.820 align:middle line:90% by a voice, decidedly feminine. 00:00:38.820 --> 00:00:44.640 align:middle line:84% And I began to hear it, and sometimes, it was loving. 00:00:44.640 --> 00:00:46.335 align:middle line:90% Sometimes, it was accusing. 00:00:46.335 --> 00:00:49.930 align:middle line:90% 00:00:49.930 --> 00:00:55.450 align:middle line:84% And about 30 years after I left here, I 00:00:55.450 --> 00:01:03.390 align:middle line:84% started to work on this poem, and I thought, maybe if I 00:01:03.390 --> 00:01:06.600 align:middle line:84% write down her words or try to write down her words, 00:01:06.600 --> 00:01:09.990 align:middle line:90% I would kind of exorcise her. 00:01:09.990 --> 00:01:13.725 align:middle line:90% And that didn't work. 00:01:13.725 --> 00:01:16.440 align:middle line:90% 00:01:16.440 --> 00:01:17.550 align:middle line:90% Maybe I'm lucky. 00:01:17.550 --> 00:01:18.120 align:middle line:90% I don't know. 00:01:18.120 --> 00:01:22.170 align:middle line:84% This is called "Changing Places in the Fire," 00:01:22.170 --> 00:01:24.090 align:middle line:90% and this is in her voice. 00:01:24.090 --> 00:01:29.640 align:middle line:84% She was particularly accusatory in this poem. 00:01:29.640 --> 00:01:34.170 align:middle line:84% I'm going to try to get the modulation right. 00:01:34.170 --> 00:01:36.720 align:middle line:90% 00:01:36.720 --> 00:01:40.020 align:middle line:84% I don't know how loud I can be into this, 00:01:40.020 --> 00:01:45.610 align:middle line:84% but this is called "Changing Places in the Fire." 00:01:45.610 --> 00:01:51.430 align:middle line:90% 00:01:51.430 --> 00:02:00.550 align:middle line:84% "What's the word, she cries from her purchase on the iron finial 00:02:00.550 --> 00:02:04.900 align:middle line:90% of the front gate to my heart. 00:02:04.900 --> 00:02:11.770 align:middle line:84% The radio in the kitchen is stuck in the year I was born. 00:02:11.770 --> 00:02:16.450 align:middle line:84% The capitals of the world are burning. 00:02:16.450 --> 00:02:20.710 align:middle line:84% And this sparrow with a woman's face 00:02:20.710 --> 00:02:27.520 align:middle line:84% roars in the burdened air, air crowded with voices, 00:02:27.520 --> 00:02:33.100 align:middle line:84% but no word, mobbed with talking, but no word, 00:02:33.100 --> 00:02:37.150 align:middle line:84% teeming with speech, but no word. 00:02:37.150 --> 00:02:40.630 align:middle line:84% This woman with the body of a bird 00:02:40.630 --> 00:02:47.110 align:middle line:84% is shrieking fierce buzzed volts in the swarming babble. 00:02:47.110 --> 00:02:48.490 align:middle line:90% What's the word? 00:02:48.490 --> 00:02:51.070 align:middle line:90% 00:02:51.070 --> 00:02:56.000 align:middle line:84% This evening is the year of my birth. 00:02:56.000 --> 00:02:59.560 align:middle line:84% The country has just gained its independence. 00:02:59.560 --> 00:03:05.140 align:middle line:84% Social unrest grows rampant as the economy declines. 00:03:05.140 --> 00:03:09.370 align:middle line:84% Under a corrupt government of the army and the rich 00:03:09.370 --> 00:03:15.280 align:middle line:84% come years of mass poverty, decades of starving children, 00:03:15.280 --> 00:03:18.100 align:middle line:90% and racially fueled mayhem. 00:03:18.100 --> 00:03:23.830 align:middle line:84% Word is armed squads raping women by the hundreds. 00:03:23.830 --> 00:03:29.380 align:middle line:84% Word is beheadings, public lynchings, and riots. 00:03:29.380 --> 00:03:33.730 align:middle line:84% Word is burning, looting, curfews, 00:03:33.730 --> 00:03:36.910 align:middle line:84% and shoot-to-kill orders, and word 00:03:36.910 --> 00:03:41.110 align:middle line:90% is more deadly days lie ahead. 00:03:41.110 --> 00:03:46.210 align:middle line:84% Today, tomorrow, and yesterday, the forecast 00:03:46.210 --> 00:03:52.570 align:middle line:84% calls for more misery, more poverty, more starvation, 00:03:52.570 --> 00:03:55.660 align:middle line:84% more families fleeing their homes, 00:03:55.660 --> 00:04:00.520 align:middle line:84% more refugees streaming toward every border. 00:04:00.520 --> 00:04:03.430 align:middle line:90% More horror is to come. 00:04:03.430 --> 00:04:04.720 align:middle line:90% That's the word. 00:04:04.720 --> 00:04:07.600 align:middle line:90% More scapegoating is to come. 00:04:07.600 --> 00:04:09.040 align:middle line:90% That's the word. 00:04:09.040 --> 00:04:14.170 align:middle line:84% More violence is to come on the roads, in the streets, 00:04:14.170 --> 00:04:17.860 align:middle line:84% in the homes, violence in the churches, 00:04:17.860 --> 00:04:23.080 align:middle line:84% in the temples where they preach who to love and who to hate, 00:04:23.080 --> 00:04:26.770 align:middle line:84% how to get to heaven and who to leave behind, 00:04:26.770 --> 00:04:30.040 align:middle line:84% how to don the fleece of the blameless 00:04:30.040 --> 00:04:33.010 align:middle line:90% and prosecute your neighbor. 00:04:33.010 --> 00:04:36.640 align:middle line:90% All against all is to come. 00:04:36.640 --> 00:04:37.630 align:middle line:90% That's the word. 00:04:37.630 --> 00:04:40.700 align:middle line:90% 00:04:40.700 --> 00:04:44.450 align:middle line:84% Who hasn't heard that, she spits. 00:04:44.450 --> 00:04:47.210 align:middle line:90% You call yourself a poet? 00:04:47.210 --> 00:04:52.310 align:middle line:84% You tame high finisher of paltry blots. 00:04:52.310 --> 00:04:56.120 align:middle line:84% You publish doubt and call it knowledge. 00:04:56.120 --> 00:05:01.700 align:middle line:84% You destroy the wisdom of ages to gratify your envy. 00:05:01.700 --> 00:05:06.320 align:middle line:84% You murder benevolence and virtue with condescension. 00:05:06.320 --> 00:05:10.970 align:middle line:84% You pretend to poetry and destroy imagination. 00:05:10.970 --> 00:05:16.370 align:middle line:84% Your words mystify, mislead, and misdirect. 00:05:16.370 --> 00:05:22.160 align:middle line:84% You ape the word made flesh with words made words 00:05:22.160 --> 00:05:26.960 align:middle line:84% to multiply more words and words about your words, 00:05:26.960 --> 00:05:33.170 align:middle line:84% and you ritualize these sterile pleasures, miming joy, delight, 00:05:33.170 --> 00:05:34.550 align:middle line:90% and generation. 00:05:34.550 --> 00:05:37.400 align:middle line:84% You celebrate cheap distractions. 00:05:37.400 --> 00:05:41.240 align:middle line:84% Your theories bloom in suicide of the mind, 00:05:41.240 --> 00:05:45.650 align:middle line:84% starvation of the heart, and mass maladies of the soul. 00:05:45.650 --> 00:05:48.530 align:middle line:90% You mock and mimic sincerity. 00:05:48.530 --> 00:05:51.770 align:middle line:90% You read and divine by irony. 00:05:51.770 --> 00:05:53.840 align:middle line:90% You snare the little ones. 00:05:53.840 --> 00:05:57.110 align:middle line:84% You pose stumbling blocks to the lame. 00:05:57.110 --> 00:05:59.420 align:middle line:90% You dig pits for the blind. 00:05:59.420 --> 00:06:01.580 align:middle line:90% You sell desolation. 00:06:01.580 --> 00:06:04.460 align:middle line:90% Your science is despair. 00:06:04.460 --> 00:06:05.585 align:middle line:90% What's the word? 00:06:05.585 --> 00:06:09.140 align:middle line:90% 00:06:09.140 --> 00:06:16.100 align:middle line:84% I can tell she's up to no good, this feathered interval, 00:06:16.100 --> 00:06:23.960 align:middle line:84% monument to the nano, this deciding gram, my Geronimo. 00:06:23.960 --> 00:06:28.670 align:middle line:84% She's out to overturn an empire, to usurp principalities 00:06:28.670 --> 00:06:33.380 align:middle line:84% and powers, just by swooping into the right assembly, 00:06:33.380 --> 00:06:37.310 align:middle line:84% perplexing a senate, baffling a parliament, 00:06:37.310 --> 00:06:40.940 align:middle line:84% or bewildering somebody's crosshairs. 00:06:40.940 --> 00:06:45.620 align:middle line:84% Not worth a farthing and without a cent, 00:06:45.620 --> 00:06:51.020 align:middle line:84% she would own the realm her shrill cries measure, 00:06:51.020 --> 00:06:55.550 align:middle line:90% trading dying for being. 00:06:55.550 --> 00:07:00.350 align:middle line:84% I tell her, I sang in a church choir 00:07:00.350 --> 00:07:06.290 align:middle line:84% during one war North American TV made famous. 00:07:06.290 --> 00:07:11.120 align:middle line:84% I fled a burning archipelago in the rain on my mother's 00:07:11.120 --> 00:07:15.650 align:middle line:84% back in another war nobody televised. 00:07:15.650 --> 00:07:20.420 align:middle line:84% In the midst of wars worldwide, many in countries 00:07:20.420 --> 00:07:26.120 align:middle line:84% whose names I can't pronounce, I tucked Christ's promise 00:07:26.120 --> 00:07:32.000 align:middle line:84% and Adam's disgrace together with my pajamas under my pillow 00:07:32.000 --> 00:07:35.990 align:middle line:84% each morning, unable to distinguish 00:07:35.990 --> 00:07:43.190 align:middle line:84% which was God's first thought and which God's second. 00:07:43.190 --> 00:07:48.560 align:middle line:84% Therefore, I seek asylum in the final word, 00:07:48.560 --> 00:07:54.170 align:middle line:84% an exile from the first word, and a refugee 00:07:54.170 --> 00:07:55.895 align:middle line:90% of an illegible past. 00:07:55.895 --> 00:07:58.450 align:middle line:90% 00:07:58.450 --> 00:08:03.190 align:middle line:84% Who hasn't witnessed the laws of merging and parting, blessing 00:08:03.190 --> 00:08:05.620 align:middle line:90% and killing, she says. 00:08:05.620 --> 00:08:08.710 align:middle line:84% Who isn't subject to the hand that giveth 00:08:08.710 --> 00:08:12.040 align:middle line:84% and the hand that taketh, the change of the guard, 00:08:12.040 --> 00:08:16.630 align:middle line:84% with and without blood, and their own dismembered history 00:08:16.630 --> 00:08:20.410 align:middle line:90% fed to the unvanquished flowers? 00:08:20.410 --> 00:08:26.920 align:middle line:84% Lift every clock's face and see the counting angels reckoning, 00:08:26.920 --> 00:08:30.850 align:middle line:84% the killing angels busy at their anvils. 00:08:30.850 --> 00:08:36.010 align:middle line:90% Say what's the word or die. 00:08:36.010 --> 00:08:41.590 align:middle line:84% It's obvious she's accounted for what the wind will take, 00:08:41.590 --> 00:08:45.790 align:middle line:84% what the moths must eat, the ants 00:08:45.790 --> 00:08:50.740 align:middle line:90% carry away, the Caesars keep. 00:08:50.740 --> 00:08:55.840 align:middle line:84% She's a breathing remnant restored to springtime's living 00:08:55.840 --> 00:08:57.370 align:middle line:90% cloth. 00:08:57.370 --> 00:09:01.180 align:middle line:84% She's a pair of scissors trimming lament 00:09:01.180 --> 00:09:05.110 align:middle line:84% to allow for all I don't know, and I 00:09:05.110 --> 00:09:08.140 align:middle line:84% can tell by the markings on her coat 00:09:08.140 --> 00:09:14.440 align:middle line:84% and her black eyes she knows which dreams to parse, 00:09:14.440 --> 00:09:18.520 align:middle line:84% which to heed, and which to bury. 00:09:18.520 --> 00:09:21.700 align:middle line:84% And look at those prehistoric feet. 00:09:21.700 --> 00:09:25.090 align:middle line:84% No doubt, she's realized the secret 00:09:25.090 --> 00:09:31.750 align:middle line:84% to surviving her own tribe's slaughter and dispersal. 00:09:31.750 --> 00:09:36.460 align:middle line:84% Pocket dictionary packed with signs in another language, 00:09:36.460 --> 00:09:40.300 align:middle line:84% blazing shard of the original emanation, 00:09:40.300 --> 00:09:44.830 align:middle line:84% Precambrian spark deposit, igneous jot 00:09:44.830 --> 00:09:49.000 align:middle line:84% of infinite magnitude, fiery iota, 00:09:49.000 --> 00:09:52.840 align:middle line:84% something about her precise little beak 00:09:52.840 --> 00:09:59.560 align:middle line:84% convinces me she grasps degree and knows which Is to dot 00:09:59.560 --> 00:10:05.020 align:middle line:84% and which to leave large and alone. 00:10:05.020 --> 00:10:11.080 align:middle line:84% There are words, I say, and there is the word. 00:10:11.080 --> 00:10:18.650 align:middle line:84% Every word is a fluctuating flame to a wick that dies. 00:10:18.650 --> 00:10:25.610 align:middle line:84% But the word, the word is a ruling sum and drastic mean, 00:10:25.610 --> 00:10:30.400 align:middle line:84% the standard that travels without moving. 00:10:30.400 --> 00:10:36.670 align:middle line:84% Words move, but the word is fixed, the true blank. 00:10:36.670 --> 00:10:40.670 align:middle line:84% The word is the voice of the lamp, 00:10:40.670 --> 00:10:45.550 align:middle line:84% and words are soot blackening the glass. 00:10:45.550 --> 00:10:51.290 align:middle line:84% The movements of words engender time and death, 00:10:51.290 --> 00:10:56.140 align:middle line:84% but the word lives outside of time and death. 00:10:56.140 --> 00:11:00.190 align:middle line:90% Inside time, death rules. 00:11:00.190 --> 00:11:03.640 align:middle line:90% Life is death's kingdom. 00:11:03.640 --> 00:11:07.090 align:middle line:90% We live at dying's rate. 00:11:07.090 --> 00:11:10.750 align:middle line:90% Words are a sop for death. 00:11:10.750 --> 00:11:14.770 align:middle line:84% But the word is the mother of thresholds, 00:11:14.770 --> 00:11:18.110 align:middle line:90% regulating life and death. 00:11:18.110 --> 00:11:23.380 align:middle line:84% The word begets presences impossible to confirm, 00:11:23.380 --> 00:11:26.590 align:middle line:84% given the blinding action of time 00:11:26.590 --> 00:11:30.640 align:middle line:84% and the sea and the earth's turning repose. 00:11:30.640 --> 00:11:33.210 align:middle line:90% 00:11:33.210 --> 00:11:35.760 align:middle line:84% And who is that supposed to feed? 00:11:35.760 --> 00:11:38.700 align:middle line:90% Whose thirst would that quench? 00:11:38.700 --> 00:11:43.770 align:middle line:84% She screeches, her voice materializing a greater body 00:11:43.770 --> 00:11:47.670 align:middle line:84% of innumerable birds arriving at dominion, 00:11:47.670 --> 00:11:52.260 align:middle line:84% increasing to overwhelm every mile of my heart, 00:11:52.260 --> 00:11:56.250 align:middle line:84% that bloody aerie branching and leafing, 00:11:56.250 --> 00:12:01.680 align:middle line:84% her feathers become all eyes and mouths, her voice coming now 00:12:01.680 --> 00:12:06.480 align:middle line:84% from everywhere, booming, when the lover is ready, 00:12:06.480 --> 00:12:09.240 align:middle line:90% the beloved will appear. 00:12:09.240 --> 00:12:12.555 align:middle line:84% Say what's the word, or we both die. 00:12:12.555 --> 00:12:16.080 align:middle line:90% 00:12:16.080 --> 00:12:23.550 align:middle line:84% I'll call her my battle angel, this evangelion, seraphic 00:12:23.550 --> 00:12:28.620 align:middle line:84% herald of the ninth echelon, pleromatic aeon demanding 00:12:28.620 --> 00:12:34.680 align:middle line:84% a founding gnosis, her voice electric tekhelet, Septuagint, 00:12:34.680 --> 00:12:38.550 align:middle line:84% a two-leaved door opening onto porches, 00:12:38.550 --> 00:12:43.530 align:middle line:84% chambers, and courts, her voice a Solomonic column 00:12:43.530 --> 00:12:45.870 align:middle line:90% of barley sugar. 00:12:45.870 --> 00:12:48.000 align:middle line:90% She's why I'm crazy. 00:12:48.000 --> 00:12:50.310 align:middle line:90% She's why I can't sleep. 00:12:50.310 --> 00:12:52.890 align:middle line:90% She's why I never sleep. 00:12:52.890 --> 00:12:55.380 align:middle line:90% She's why I avoid people. 00:12:55.380 --> 00:13:00.630 align:middle line:84% She's why I drill the eight limbs with the mud-step, why 00:13:00.630 --> 00:13:05.760 align:middle line:84% I walk the octagon of trigrams inscribed on Wudang, 00:13:05.760 --> 00:13:10.350 align:middle line:84% why I practice the Spiral Ox Jaw and the Tiger's Mouth. 00:13:10.350 --> 00:13:13.440 align:middle line:84% She's why I'm hard to live with and why 00:13:13.440 --> 00:13:19.200 align:middle line:84% I say the bread that rises in a house that fails, 00:13:19.200 --> 00:13:25.020 align:middle line:84% the word, father of zero and one, is our advocate." 00:13:25.020 --> 00:13:28.700 align:middle line:90% 00:13:28.700 --> 00:13:30.210 align:middle line:90% I'll stop there with that line. 00:13:30.210 --> 00:13:33.500 align:middle line:90% [APPLAUSE] 00:13:33.500 --> 00:13:34.000 align:middle line:90%