OK, you guys, back to misery.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm going to read a few poems from my first book.
This is going to be the French period of the reading.
I'm going to read a poem called Seurat, which is a prose poem.
And it's after Seurat's painting, La Grande Jatte,
which is in the Chicago Institute,
although there are studies for the painting
all over the universe.
Seurat is a pointillist and the particular painting
that I chose to write about is a very famous painting.
It's a Sunday Bourgeois stroll scene
by a river, where people carry umbrellas
and there's even a little monkey in it,
although there's no monkey in my poem.
I don't let monkeys into my poems.
[LAUGHTER]
Slight prejudice, I have.
This prose poem is written from the point of view
of a figure in the painting.
So it's a persona prose poem.
Seurat, it is a Sunday afternoon on the Grand Canal.
We are watching the sailboats trying
to sail along without wind.
Small rowboats are making their incisions on the water,
only to have the wounds seal up again soon after they pass.
In the background, the smoke from the factories
and the smoke from the steam boats
merges into tiny clouds above us, then disappears.
Our mothers and fathers walk arm in arm along the shore,
clutching tightly their umbrellas and canes.
We are sitting on a blanket in the foreground,
but even if someone were to have taken a photograph of us,
only our closest relatives would have noticed.
We seem to be burying our head between our knees.
I remember thinking, you were one of the most delicate women
I'd ever seen.
Your bones seem small and fragile as a rabbit.
Even so, beads of perspiration begin
to form on your wrist and your forehead.
If we were to live long enough, I'm
sure we would have been amazed at how many clothes we
forced ourselves to wear.
At this time, I'd never seen you without your petticoats.
And if I ever gave thought to such a possibility,
I would chastise myself for not offering you enough respect.
The sun is very hot.
Why is it no one complains of the heat in France?
There are women doing their needlework, men reading, a man
in a bowler hat smoking a pipe.
The noise of the children is absorbed by the trees.
The air is full of idleness.
There is the faint aroma of lilies coming from somewhere.
We discuss what we want for ourselves abstractly.
It seems only right on a day like this.
I have ambitions to be a painter,
and you want a small family and a cottage in the country.
We make everything sound so simple
because we believe everything is still possible.
The small tragedies of our parents
have not yet made an impression on us.
We should be grateful for this.
But we are too young to think hard about very much.
I throw a scaling rock into the water.
I have strong arms and before the rock sinks,
it seems to have nearly reached the other side.
When we get up, we have a sense of our own importance.
We could not know, taking a step back, looking
at the total picture that we would occupy such
a small corner of the canvas.
And that even then, we are no more
than tiny clusters of dots, carefully placed together
without touching.
[APPLAUSE]
Pretty good, huh?
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
My best audience is between two and three.
Or is it in the oral stage, I don't know.