[APPLAUSE]
Oh, TC.
That was the nicest introduction ever.
Yeah.
You got my bra if you want it later.
We'll talk.
Yeah.
I don't want it.
I mean, I'm not using it.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm deeply honored to be among this [INAUDIBLE] company.
I am deeply honored to have been invited here.
Incredibly grateful to Laynie for making this astounding book
happen.
Very, very grateful to everyone involved in the Poetry Center
for making this miraculous place continue.
I'm going to read some poems from the anthology
and then I'm going to go off road a bit.
I'm going to read a poem--
at least one poem from Dark Archive and then some
poems from the seventh book that's coming out
from Otis Editions this June.
A book about weddings.
And I'm not going to say too much in between because I want
to keep to my time and because there's an introduction
stuff in the book and, yeah.
"I wandered lonely as a cloud," oh, wait, no.
That's not mine.
I'll just say that after the man-made disaster that
followed Katrina, there was a whole lot of looting going on
and I did some.
"I wandered networks like a cloud
that floated over my couch.
Remote in one hand drink in the other
a crowd on the screen wounded in rage
fleeing the tanks beneath the leaves
fluttering and dancing in the trees.
Continuous as the stars that shine,
these wars, these displaced refugees filmed in never ending
lines along the margins and at Bay 10,000
saw I at a glance hurrying nowhere like frightened ants.
The waves beside them danced but they
bend weeping over loved bodies.
A poet could not but be gay far from such desperate company.
I gazed and gazed and little thought what wealth to me
the show had brought.
For oft when on my couch I lie in vacant or in pensive mood.
They flash upon that satellite dish,
which is the bliss of solitude.
And then my heart with pleasure fills
to be so far from the world's ills.
Cloud as lonely.
And verb with the nouns and my sullen heart
and the bliss of the eerily violent.
Description of memory as a sort of IED
in the home entertainment center.
Are you in an adjective or pensive mood?
When I lie following me, sick of the mention of flowers--
the stench of flowers--
when for the dead.
What bail out the show had pronoun verb,
conjunction verb, and little thought
such a company could not be.
But that the cost of this out- did the sparkling waves waves
beside them but they displaced the local industry tossing
their heads.
Storyboard it.
"Do you see them casting their heads into the air
or to each other?"
Just asking.
"Do you follow?"
Shadowed the man describing a live section of landscape.
His pretence he'd been there alone the main thing.
"Did you see me dreaming this on your inward eye?"
If you're reading this.
Oddly specific number and weird syntax
torqued for the rhyme's sake along the margin
of a never ending line.
Anyway continuous as withered darkened number,
line about motion and location as cause, gerund and gerund
in the breeze, preposition the noun, preposition the noun,
verb location and preposition and nouns when all at once
I saw a host golden."