WEBVTT

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I promised this afternoon to
read a poem about Lott's wife.

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It was my third try at writing
a poem about Lott's wife

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who absolutely fascinates
me for some reason or other.

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She has no name-- no first name.

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She's Mrs. Lott.

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[LAUGHTER]

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And she turned and looked back
at the destruction of Sodom

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and Gomorrah and she turned
to a pillar of salt. Now,

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what does that mean,
a pillar of salt?

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What does it mean?

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And I used for my--
oh, I should say

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that I didn't find a
version of this poem

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that I liked at all until
I put it in her voice.

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And I didn't-- certainly did
not have in mind this terribly

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corny pun.

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But it turned out that I made
her a rather salty character,

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as you'll see in her speech.

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I didn't have that
in mind, believe me.

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But I did think toward
the end she really

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is the salt of the Earth.

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This kind of woman is
the salt of the Earth.

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I used for this interpretation
the older interpretation

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of the destruction of
Sodom and Gomorrah,

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which was that they were
destroyed because there was

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so much homosexuality around.

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And there's a later
interpretation

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of that Bible story which
goes something like that.

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The reason Sodom and
Gomorrah were destroyed

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is because the inhabitants
failed in keeping

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to the sort of Greek piety.

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I mean, the piety which is like
the Greek piety of offering

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perfect hospitality
to the stranger.

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So I don't want to impose
my interpretation on you,

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but that was the one that
was useful for the poem.

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And this poem people have
called my gay lib poem.

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This is called the
Cities of the Plain.

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Their sex life was their
own business, I thought.

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[LAUGHTER]

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And took some of the
pressure off women who--

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[LAUGHTER]

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Who were treated
most of the time

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as merely a man's way of
producing another man.

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And there were plenty
of the other kind.

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The two older girls got
married when they wanted to.

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The riot in front of
our house that evening

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when a gang of young
queers, all drunk and horny,

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threatened to break
in yelling for the two

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strangers, our guests,
handsome as angels,

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to come out and have
some fun, was not

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intelligently handled by my
husband, to say the least.

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[LAUGHTER]

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An uptight man, he
opened the door--

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he got so frightened
he opened the door

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and offered to send
out our youngest girls

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if they'd quiet down
and leave us alone.

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Two little virgins,
he told them.

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Now, fellows, wouldn't
that be nicer and more fun?

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That made them wild and they
would have dragged him out

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and mounted him in the
street if our guests hadn't

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managed to get the door shut.

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The two strangers, it
turned out, were inspectors.

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Don't ask me why for the sake
of a perfect idea of love

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or human community.

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All the innocent eyed babies and
beasts and birds, all growth,

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both food and flowers, two whole
cities, their fabulous bouquets

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of persons, frivolous, severe,
rollicking, wry, witty, plain,

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lusty, providence,
every single miracle

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of life on the whole plain
should be exploded to ashes.

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I looked back and
that's what I saw.

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Nobody knows my name.

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My husband and our
two adolescents

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kept their faces
turned to the future.

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Fled to the future.

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Sarah, everyone
knows, whose life

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past menopause into
the withered 90s

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was one long obsessed
attempt to get pregnant.

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To establish the future.

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As for me, I lost all
sense of human possibility

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when the cloud rose up like a
blossom over all that death.

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I stood for nameless
women whose sense of loss

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is not statistical.

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Stood for a while then vanished.

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Men are always being turned
to stone by something

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and loom through the ages in
some stony sense of things

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they were shocked into.

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I was not easily shocked.

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But that punishment
was blasphemous.

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In piety to the world as
it is, things as they are.

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I turned to pure mourning, which
ends the personal life then

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quietly comes to its own end.

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Each time the clouds
came and it rained,

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salt tears poured
from my whole being.

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And when that
testimony was over,

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grass began to
grow on the plane.

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[APPLAUSE]

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