WEBVTT

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Hi.

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Thanks especially to Louise
for picking this book

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and inviting you
to come here today

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and this is about
the largest audience

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I've ever read poetry to, so
thank you very much for coming.

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Especially thanks
to the Poetry Center

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and to Jim Paul and
Frances Sjoberg.

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It's really nice to be here.

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I'm going to read five poems.

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I tend to write a little long.

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Four of these poems
are long, one isn't.

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Four of them are in
this book and one isn't.

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One's new.

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And I usually like to frame
my poems a little bit.

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So one of the things
I was thinking about

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was, the title for the book
is In the Surgical Theatre

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and it was a title that
came late to the book.

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I called it all sorts
of different things.

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And so, I was thinking about
the word surgery recently

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and I decided to look
up its etymology.

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And I was interested in it.

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It comes from the ancient
Greek and my Greek is horrible.

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So correct me "kairo ergia".

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"Kairos": hands.

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"Ergon": work.

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So that surgery
actually means working

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with the hands with scope.

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And the modern
definition is of course

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to open up the body to cut,
extract with the impulse being

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to heal.

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And I realized that actually
really informs my approach

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to poetry.

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Each poem feels like
an act of surgery.

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An attempt to open up some kind
of outer surface or outer body

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to find what has been hidden.

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In the act of poetry
the outer body

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is poetic as in a central
metaphor or image.

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And what has been hidden for
me is psychological, i.e.

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the motivation for the image
or metaphor coming to mind.

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In colloquium
today I was talking

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about how most of my
poems begin with an image,

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and I don't know why
it comes into my head.

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And so for me the
act of writing is

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trying to encounter the
unconscious reasons for why

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the images, often surreal,
come into my head.

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And this has bearing on the
first poem I'm going to read,

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which is called
personal history and I

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feel like I have to give you
some autobiographical detail.

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A lot of this book has--

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was driven by-- when
I was in New York City

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I became sort of
a surgery-filiac.

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I became really just
my mind was inundated

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with images of the open body.

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The chest being open and for
some kind of Revelation of I

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wanted to get into
hospital rooms

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and look at open heart surgery.

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I just became fascinated
by this and I kept

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thinking what is wrong with me.

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And I realized and
it seems obvious.

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But at the time, it
was not available to me

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that I had surgery when
I was six days old.

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I had part of my
intestine removed

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and I was in an incubator
for the first two months

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of my life.

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And I began to think
that maybe I should

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do some writing about it.

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So the first poem was
called personal history.

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And one of the difficulties
in writing about this topic

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is the difficulty of
writing autobiographically

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about pain, which almost seems
like a cliche at this point.

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So I was trying
to find other ways

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of talking about personal pain.

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And I became interested in--

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I was born in 65, which is
the year that the Vietnam

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War was escalated.

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And so I became interested
in the relationship

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between being on a
surgical table in 1965,

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at the same time that soldiers
and civilians were being killed

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in this place that was
far away from Los Angeles

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where I was born.

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So this poem moves in and
out of a hospital nursery

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and a battlefield in Vietnam.

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Personal History.

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Like lifting a curtain.

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Magic chest.

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Open it up.

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See the baby inside?

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The tubes twisting out
of the wrists and ankles,

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trickles of blood where
the needles go in.

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Soft machines inhale, exhale.

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The plasma bag
dripping the minutes.

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Moisture beading on
the rim of the glass.

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The drip bags hang heavy
as flowers, droplets

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collecting like dew, like time.

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The bodies of fruit,
the baby's inside it,

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ripening in its own steam.

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Follow the yellow food
flowing in like water.

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Bruises flowering round
the entering tubes.

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Reach in with your latexed
hands through the humid air

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and lift the skin
over the belly, where

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the intestines coil in the
brackish water, rot running

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through it, a blooded green.

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The rotting wood, the
moss, dripping luminous

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to the jungle floor.

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A fever of banana decaying.

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Plains.

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Orange smoke billowing
from the napalmed river,

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flaming and slowing to the sea.

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The plasma bag
bleeding the minutes.

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If you'd listen to me before,
you'd know what I was saying.

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You'd know that I was
saying the upraised scalpel,

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a glint in the light.

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The upraised scalpel, the
brush of a wing, invisible.

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Because I have this
compulsion to lift

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the shirt over my distended
belly to show you the scars.

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Like a revealed
religion, the cross,

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the X slicing into the
skin, ave doctorus,

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ave angelus, white caps
floating like wings on the air.

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Reach in.

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Do you expect to find light
here in this windowless room,

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digging your thumb deeper
and deeper into the hospital

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nursery, to the dark
stink in the bowels?

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It's 1965.

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The world's radiating out of it.

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The tubes like spokes
of a living wheel.

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And are you connected?

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Pale faced hovering over the
incubator glass, pale moon

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through galactic trees.

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Boots tensing in the milk
green mud, footprints, feet

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swallowed.

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It was the doctors,
their scalpels

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like steel green angels
arching the knife that

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could cut the rocks
out of miles of river

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snaked by the silent Viet-Cong.

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Boys in rags up to their
necks in the malarial water,

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holding their guns up high.

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Don't you see how
every time I look

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between the scalpeled
flaps pinned back

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to the sides of the belly,
it's war rotting inside?

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Is this why it's
important to tell you

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how the baby lays strapped
with its belly sliced open,

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doctors plunging
their hands in it's

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six days old to remove
a gangrenous alien?

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And the boys croaking,
don't take my leg,

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doc, don't take my leg.

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And the boys with
their intestines

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sprung out in loops, Mr.
Johnson's can of snakes.

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For so long, I
thought surgical white

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was the color of the soul.

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I've been floating for
years in the Albanic air

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around the hospital nursery,
above the orange smoke

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billowing from the
napalmed river,

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huts collapsed into
palm fronds and fire.

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And the people staggering
away to lie burned

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and bleeding in the soft
haired ferns curling

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around the incubator glass.

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Is this how I can tell
it, how it can make sense?

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By placing it in history?

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Doctor, do you know what
it's like to be connected

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as flesh to machine, to
be fed not by the nipple,

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but by the needle cutting
into the veins of the ankle?

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To never be handled
by a bare hand,

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to never look in a face that is
not masked, to never feel air

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not enclosed by a box?

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And don't we live
this way every day,

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gloved, and masked, and dying?

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I'm trying to figure out why
it's important to show you,

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because I have this
compulsion to rip

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the shirt from my distended
belly and show you the scars,

00:08:57.980 --> 00:09:01.700 align:middle line:84%
like the botched job of a
drunken butcher X-ing drippily

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into the skin.

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Do you know what I am saying?

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Nurses swoop and hover, cold
birds in the tropical air.

00:09:10.370 --> 00:09:14.000 align:middle line:90%


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In the sick world on the
sick day on which I was born,

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sick, and dying, rotting
tuber in a glass,

00:09:25.160 --> 00:09:28.450 align:middle line:84%
was there someone
trying to heal himself,

00:09:28.450 --> 00:09:32.750 align:middle line:90%
sutured dreaming tears?

00:09:32.750 --> 00:09:37.220 align:middle line:84%
That person is the
guiding angel lifting now

00:09:37.220 --> 00:09:40.040 align:middle line:84%
over the stucco roofs
of the white hospital

00:09:40.040 --> 00:09:42.770 align:middle line:84%
where I was born,
having hovered there

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for so very long
while the ghost of me

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kept me burning in the glass.

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Unstitch my deepest
scar, and find the baby

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on the cold chrome table.

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Descend through that
ravine of bleeding flesh,

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and look up at the
people circling

00:09:58.760 --> 00:10:00.860 align:middle line:90%
like gulls in the humid air.

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The medics, the nurses,
the mothers, and fathers,

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generals, and presidents
hovering above the stink

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of ripeness and death.

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If you looked inside them,
would there be suffering?

00:10:11.210 --> 00:10:14.630 align:middle line:84%
The capacity or desire to
heal through suffering.

00:10:14.630 --> 00:10:17.180 align:middle line:84%
If you took the scalpel
and opened them up,

00:10:17.180 --> 00:10:20.540 align:middle line:84%
would there be the
baby vital inside?

00:10:20.540 --> 00:10:24.800 align:middle line:84%
I want to see it arriving now
out of the blood rich sky,

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fat and shining as if
the healing were not

00:10:27.890 --> 00:10:31.130 align:middle line:84%
from the outside in, as
if the world were sick,

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and the tubes radiating
out in a corona of ribbons

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of fiery light carrying
all life's innocence

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through the sickness
of the world.

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Oh doctor, angel,
person healed, do

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you think this is
grandeur to see myself

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as an avatar of healing?

00:10:47.360 --> 00:10:50.570 align:middle line:84%
To see in the sick child
the fever of the world,

00:10:50.570 --> 00:10:53.990 align:middle line:84%
and to say to the people
in the distant air circling

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and circling like
planets caught,

00:10:56.330 --> 00:10:59.180 align:middle line:84%
the fires of their own
history's wreckage,

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come down into the burning.

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Feel it, so you cannot
live it anymore.

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