Timer's going off, OK.
Thank you, Whitney.
That was really wonderful.
I appreciate it.
And thank you to the Poetry Center.
Fred, it's a pleasure to have gotten to know you
and to read with you tonight.
And thank you, Annie and Gail and everyone here.
And thanks for coming out to hear this work tonight.
I'm going to read 10 minutes from the book
and then 10 minutes of very new work, because what excites me
as a writer is to test out some new terrain here before you.
So I'm going to get some use out of this as well.
The thing that I want to say is that I
created this form for the book, this "Please Advise Stop,"
before my dad died suddenly of pneumonia, which
to me is an amazing fact of my experience
of the process of writing.
And it became the perfect vehicle for me
to enter the grief and the guilt and the dynamic work
of suffering and sorrow that I needed to do,
but that I didn't have a process to do.
And so it's a book that in many ways saved my life,
and that was available to me as a gift from whatever you
want to say, whomever you want to say.
And so I just want to share that, even
in the struggle with my father's death,
there was a sense of renewal and promise,
that that was possible.
So a few poems--
"Please Advise Stop."
"Pale fingers of inheritance do not
disintegrate until they touch us stop.
Meaning collapses on the inhale, please.
Gestures too quick to catch are the guarantors
of the given stop.
The true keeps calm biding its story stop.
The arsonist's perspiration stains the sky black, please.
The gray-and-white patched cat licks her paw
until value becomes again incalculable stop.
I wasn't traveling westward, only
into the power of it's place names stop.
The water puddle sways like an earthbound kite stop.
The stickiness of this instant seals within it
every expression of its menace.
Please advise."
So that's one of the poems that I wrote before my dad died.
And I was working with attempting
to find a form that would help me
be more concise in my writing.
And so that's what I thought this was.