WEBVTT

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Now then a more
depressing newer book.

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It's entitled Death and
Friends because when

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I put the manuscript
together, I noticed

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that at least half
the poems in it

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were something like death poems.

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Very few are dramatically and
precisely death poems, but--

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and I was sure some critic
in reading it would say,

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well, he's got a
fixation on death

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and he's writing death poems.

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So I thought if I called
it Death and Friends,

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it'd make it obvious
that I was aware of it.

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And the friends
part of the title

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comes from the sense that--

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the sense of alienation
or the sense of death,

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or loss, or whatever
in the poems

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is balanced somewhat
by some poems, which

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talk about friendship
as a saving grace,

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human companionship as
that which balances death

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at least for a time.

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I'm going to do something
too, which perhaps I

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shouldn't do in order
to explain what I think

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the nature of these poems is.

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Because I do feel strange
writing a lot of death poems.

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I am not that terribly
fixated on death

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as a catastrophic event.

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When I sent in the
manuscript for this book,

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the publisher asked
me if I would make

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some statement about the book.

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And I wrote this
up very hurriedly,

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but it may give you
some perspective

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about some of the poems that
may sound pretentious too.

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I don't know.

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It's fairly honest though.

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Death and Friends is inescapably
the product of life conditions

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that require
responsibility for others,

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political and social apocalypse,
marriage and teaching.

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But as a poet, the moral
ground I'm most familiar with

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remains within myself.

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I can only confront injustice,
both private and social when

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I'm-- out of some
honest sense of self.

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I'm not a man of action.

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Therefore, I'm out of the
mainstream of revolution.

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What responsibilities I
bear, I bear with confusion

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and constant crisis.

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I find myself-- maybe
this is important.

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The only thing that's important
in describing the sense

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of death within the poems.

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I find myself thinking
of death daily,

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or maybe I should say
partially experiencing it,

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I hope, without morbidity.

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The reasons are complex.

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Some of them are particularly
the mood of America.

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But the outcome is a value of
life, friendship, and pain,

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especially pain which alerts.

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It helps me too toward
that kind of solitariness,

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which informs
responsibility and which

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is more and more
difficult to obtain.

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Well, so much for that.

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