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Thank you.

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Neil Diamente.

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When I heard about Steve,
I was here in the library.

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It was the day after he died.

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And Wendy, I believe,
had put together

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a quick tribute,
a memorial which

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was there for a long
time, of all his books.

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And I started to
flip through them.

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And I was struck by
some of the language.

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And I just started
to put them together

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in that way of using
his words to honor him.

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So this is called, "The
Great Wheel Turns."

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And it has this little
epigraph it may be Edith Piaf.

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It's in a poem of
in his last book

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and says, "I do
not regret anything

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at all, either the good that
has been done to me or the evil.

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Everything is equal to me."

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"Cigarette ash fills the urn
outside the English office,

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where he sat and wrote
almost every day,

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no matter whether the lines of
light fell into place or not.

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He knew if we could
look, only look further,

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we could see through
to the other side.

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He knew we live in the
heart of each hour,

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making refusals into art.

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He was nobody's Jew, a one-man
band, the elephant's child,

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one of God's mistakes.

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He gave us permission to speak
about this particular eternity.

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He offered a place at the
table, where a bridge of sighs

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unites us.

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He once wrote a poem against
ideas, in which he wished

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to be punched in the mouth.

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How disagreeable he
could be, yet how

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he fought for the
cause of free verse.

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The great wheel turns like
the heavy polishing machine

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of the night, spinning, swish,
swish just outside his door,

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and the 1,000 and 1,000
threads unraveling.

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[AUDIENCE APPLAUDS]

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