Why don't you?
You want me to start?
OK, so I'll read some of these labor poems.
So this is a manuscript called "Undocumentaries."
The excerpt from this is called "Undocumentary,"
and it was published by Dos Press.
And it's for sale here, somewhere.
It's a chapbook.
And then, "Undocumentaries" is being
published by Shearsman Books in the spring.
So if you're interested, it'll be somewhere.
I'm sure it'll be sold on Amazon like everything else is.
So this isn't really a labor problem, but maybe it is.
It's a very sort of working-class reference,
because nobody hangs their clothes out
to dry anymore, right?
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Oh, they do?
Oh, that's good, that's good.
So this is called "Confessional Poem,"
and this was a response to--
I think it was a poem or something
I read, where this woman invokes her mother,
saying that you can always tell the kind of private life
of a woman by what kind of underwear
she hangs on the line.
And I thought, well, why?
So she has big bloomers-- she may have a great sex life,
you don't know.
How can you tell?
And so I started thinking that in poetic terms.
You read something in a poem and you're like,
oh, I know that person.
Well, you don't, really.
You know the poem.
So this is about manufacturing the truth in a poem.
It's called "Confessional Poem."
The girl next door had something to teach me about what to air.
On the line, somebody's business gets told, then recounted.
It's best to thread a tale for the neighbors,
an orchestration of sorts.
But I am far from modest in my telling of lies.
There are three references I put forward,
each a past lover who liked a different kind of underling
to his genius.
You wouldn't know it from the delicates I roll into the yard.
It's all the same peekaboo lace and stunted imagination.
Of course, all of this is scanty truth.
Who hangs anything out to dry, when
invention has halved the work?