WEBVTT

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Hello, thanks for coming
tonight, all of you.

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This mic good for me?

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Closer.

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Yeah.

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OK.

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That's a lot to live up
to, that's all in the past.

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Um, it's an honor to
be reading for you

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at this beautiful center.

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I wasn't in favor of spending a
lot of money on a Poetry Center

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way back in the day.

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But here I am reading
at it, how can I say no?

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Um, it's an awesome
thing, so many things

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go on around here and
education in the schools, which

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is really important to me
and, um, all the volunteers

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that are into poetry and it's
just really a great place.

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I hope you'll come
here other times too.

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Um, what was I going to say?

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First, I'd like to thank
the Mary Ann Campau Memorial

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Fellowship committee
for choosing

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me to receive this award.

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Pamela Uschuk, William
Pitt Root, Tony Luebbermann,

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and Rodney Phillips.

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I'd also like to thank Gail
Browne, who is very sick right

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now and couldn't be here.

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Um, she's the
director of the center

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and Annie Guthrie, Renee
Angle, and Jennie Ziegler,

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and the rest of the Poetry
Center staff for all the work

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to help make this
reading happen.

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I'd also like to thank my
mother for reading me poetry

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when I was a kid.

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[LAUGHTER]

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My big brother, Dean, who's
here for being a Bob Dylan

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aficionado.

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Yay, Bob.

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And my sister, Edie, for cutting
poems out of the New Yorker

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years ago and sending them
to me with her letters.

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And I'd like to start out
by reading two, um, poems

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by Mary Ann Campau.

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One that shows what a
raucous sense of life

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she had and one that
shows how she faced death.

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Yeah, her books for
sale, right over there.

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This is called "At Mel's,
One Mile from Mills College."

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Ice glasses in a jazzed
out bar, shapeless

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room, all sweat, blue lit.

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Dim, dim faces,
rubber stretched.

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Tables tipped to
staggered dance,

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tenor sax, a horny
sound, syncopating.

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Every drink on the rocks.

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Fermented sex, drums beating.

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Body hunger, honey,
baby, take me home.

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My kind of woman.

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[LAUGHTER]

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Take me home right now, please.

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[LAUGHTER]

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