WEBVTT

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Thank you, Sean.

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My love for you truly knows
no bounds, well, maybe

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a couple of bounds.

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Love to thank the University
of Arizona Poetry Center which

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is a truly phenomenal
special place.

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I live in Seattle.

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There's a variety of
great things going

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on but there's no
site, there's no space

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that exists like the
Poetry Center in Seattle,

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much to the loneliness of
hearts in the Northwest.

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So thank you to everybody here.

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Thank you especially
to Phillip and Akila

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who are two poets
who are doing truly

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legitimately significant work.

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It's very serious
significant work.

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And so it's really wonderful
to be able to open up

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for the two of you.

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I'm going to read three poems.

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I'm going to read a poem
that's about a month old,

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I'm going to read a poem
that's about a year old,

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and I'm going to read a poem
that's about two years old.

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And I'm going to read
them in that order.

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So this is the month old poem.

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I spoke-- we had a little
meeting with a class today

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up there and I was saying that
I tend to write serial work

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or everything I write fits into
one long poem that never ends.

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That was somewhat of
a lie because I've

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been writing poems
recently that at least I

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hope are somewhat discrete.

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And it's very exciting to
actually sit down and write

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a poem that begins
and ends, and then I

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can get up and do something
else with my life so.

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This poem is called
"Poems for the people."

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If we are all characterized
as colors and colors were

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insatiable, still
we would be nervous

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and the colors
insufficient to express

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what could not be
properly explained

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in a tent of company or
indolent, variations of yellow

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or red in the corner eyeing
brown or black across the room,

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and who would be the
field gypsy, the handler

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of the blue and green?

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How would a length
of one color slide

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into the whiskered
gulf of another

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without splitting the
seams between colors?

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And how would that look to
even the simplest outsider?

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Do these people want
to live in my drawers?

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They are despicable.

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How is anyone to trust the
color sitting next to them,

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as stable or workable in
the guise of a woman heaved

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among bishop trees,
conforming to her accent,

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and commanding wish
to talk forever

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through the relationship
between children and art,

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shining across each wrist, an
undulating strap of seamless

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green moving in an amoebic
pool beneath swinging heels

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and increasing motion
of seamless green

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and rinsing against
an immaculate nape,

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a shard of serrated pink?

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Children need art to better
express the things that

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are cut within them.

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No, children need art
to better understand

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that there are things
that require expression.

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No, children need art to
better think their way

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toward understanding
their faults not

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that of their
broken supplies, not

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the embodiment of the
bisexual vegetable.

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No, children need art
to frame the battling

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crests of contemporary motion.

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No, children need art to
commandeer a sense of history

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for their own senses outstripped
by the elemental zapper

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in tight pants.

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No, children need art to
outpace the bullish avalanche

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of history.

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No, children need art to
abandon the idea that history

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is an expression of
things, the saucers

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look nice, as do the
Whigs and German guns.

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But history as shown in
this gelatinous castle

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is nothing if not
infinitely replaceable.

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Art however, is
eternally salient

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and gives not color to
history but history to itself.

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And is what we have to
suggest both the radiation

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and shadow of history.

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And children love art.

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And children love themselves.

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And when large hands
take children's hands

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and protect them with the
advent of overbearance,

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this is not the
beginning of the soul

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but it's suffocating
diagram, a way

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of living in the lingering
heat of Soundview.

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When the majority of the people
have developed debilitating

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addictions to the reptilian bait
of a droning local anesthetic,

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have been incarcerated
in the suffocating

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extremities of
the reptilian bait

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of a droning local
anesthetic or are dead,

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a few have moved to the beach.

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There was always the beach.

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And people who balance
layered carcasses of color

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on their heads on
the way to the beach

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find color between their toes
and between leavening bodies

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of colored animals, trees
rising in the distance

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for the scrutiny
of the neighbors.

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No, children need art,
but children love art.

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A single touch of
art can motivate

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nothing less than total
self annihilation,

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begging for the barest
layer of carcass

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to be something inscrutably
hard like a biscuit.

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Give it to me, anyway.

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If you are cold or if your
dog is 112, my mission is art.

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To teach art to children.

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Teach them to create what
it is about what they create

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that makes what they create art,
which also involves how to talk

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about art with many
kinds of people,

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artists, people who
are not artists,

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people who stand behind trees
and peer out from behind trees.

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At children, bouncing out
of big yellow works of art

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in exactly the way
the Dark Man had

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dreamed, if he could shorten
the distance between himself

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and the children, he would do
so by teaching them art, which

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is in effect their origin.

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For the time being,
he presses himself

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to the thickly
divided wood and all

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lumps cease to be decorative,
become instructive.

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As the children go bouncing
out, the big yellow

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works, one by one
into colors what come.

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