WEBVTT

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Last night at the
lecture that I gave,

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a couple of high school students
came up to me afterwards

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and said, what do you do when--

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when you read a poem and
you just don't get it?

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And of course, my
first response was

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to think, well, drop and roll.

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I don't know what you do.

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Do whatever you want to do.

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But it came up
again this morning

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in the class that
I visited here,

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and I was thinking I
read not long ago at Penn

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State in Pennsylvania and there
was a graduate student who

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asked me during the Q and
A about a particular poem

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in my second book and
said, what does it mean?

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And I said, I don't know.

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What do you want it to mean?

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And she was outraged by that.

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She said, you
defrauded your public.

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I'm thinking, I have a public.

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You put a poem out there and you
don't even know what it means?

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And I said, well, it's only
been four or five years.

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Give me another 5 or 10 and
I might know what it means.

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But after she had calmed
down a little bit,

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there was some spittle
flying in the air.

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I did say there's many
ways that poems mean.

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I mean, they mean in
a paraphrasable a way

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and they mean in the
sense of an image.

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Often I walk away from a poem,
I can't tell you what it means,

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but I can tell you the image
that it left in my mind.

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Sometimes they mean
in terms of music.

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And for me that's important.

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I didn't train as a writer.

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I didn't train in literature.

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I trained as a singer.

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I was a countertenor, and
a tenor for many years.

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So for me the logic
of a poem is often

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the musical logic of a poem.

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This is a poem called
"Anthem" and it's

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an elegy for an
American expatriate

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poet named Gustaf
Sobin, whose work I

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have loved for many years.

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And it's a little on the long
side and it's a little on the--

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if this makes no sense
to you, that's OK.

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It goes by very
quickly in the voice.

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But I want to read it as a bit
of an homage to Mr Wilkinson

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because I don't think I could
have written it without having

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had his poems in my life.

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He's a different poet than I am.

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Dean Young, do you
know who Dean Young is?

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He's a poet.

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He used to say that
for him writing

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a poem was about taking a
bunch of disparate objects

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and throwing them up in the air.

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And he said when you do that,
the odds are that they will

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then all come crashing
down on your head

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and you will be harmed.

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But he said every now and then
when you throw those objects up

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in the air, some of them begin
to revolve around each other

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and they form a kind
of little solar system

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up there, moving around.

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And that's when you
know you have a poem.

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And that's actually
how I feel when

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I traveled with Joshua
those three days in Ohio,

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in Indiana, and Wisconsin.

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That's how I felt that
continually that everything

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that Josh threw in the air
stayed up there and became

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a poem.

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And there were two
consequences of this;

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one was that life became very
beautiful all of a sudden.

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And the other is
that then you never

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could get any of your
things back because they

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were all up there in the air.

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This is called "Anthem."

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Palmate, like glass
darts, the skin

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had prophesied stray
sheen of imperceptibly

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and unconjugated the weft
tight driven hard against what

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instrument, oscilloscope.

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The body draws tuned
from wax, straw, sprue,

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breath single brace.

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The body is conservative,
is the fact of it.

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Caudal and broken, the
earliest vocal bulls consist.

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They un grammar,
even the fresh coals

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of the viridian, the lip
or any plausible bridge

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descends blanched into
its own pale arithmetic.

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The fire they're struck by
the plows metallic flange

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against the fields wheat
stone was not session though

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held blunt against
the appropriations.

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Systole, diastole,
in mimetic profusion,

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manacle- prow, marrow.

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To harvest, stinging the
wounds, thuggish empathies

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as surf it over and against the
night's pristine ingratitude.

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In that it saves.

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It serves to propagate.

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And trapped as
ambiance recommends,

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we pick up her muddy lymph.

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A Republic gathers and
profess the brief sugars

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of some first blood
demonstrate sign here.

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The lilac, interceptive
and insensate, silver foil

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to the mind's
unbending polynomial.

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Base of hand from which
the fingers ovulate,

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as soot and grain it
takes the breath away.

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Seen from outside,
circumstance splashed

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across the field say, this time,
it was your child gone missing.

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Or to sound that first alarm.

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The self declines in parenthesis
towards fluent endings.

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The cleft hearse, nervous
altars of passage will remain.

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And else, kitted out as gods,
each miner rift as master,

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suckers green chain at
the iridescent route.

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The flash in the distance,
unstumbling Sweeney.

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Really nothing more or less.

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The dream embargoes, and
to see the displaced organ

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registers of metaphor
and interval.

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And the loss of an external
world strikes us hard.

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Grazed, celibate, ark
creoles and the body

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turning into that small
ocean, dolmant, peach light

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moral, you it wants to cup and
chafe the muscling memory--

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the meat of you.

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Ricochet ambulance,
textile wash of moon glory.

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As a nation, as
a shape in glass.

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Someone carries flowers
into the building and then

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back out again, unspeaking
the body as if it were music--

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a parallax of
chords and dressage

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meant this time to call--

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be called home.

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What is unified suffered
within the figure.

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Blister of light in the
wheat of my body's harvest.

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As forge, as or very, very
lustrous sheath of fear's

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prescriptive urgency as
in our first morning.

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Salt to salt, the Saints
present their long mucilaginous

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scrolls.

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So forged say the
double distance.

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The lungs inscribed
towards meter.

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The rippling meats we share.

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Our lady, orthogonal of the
crossroads, lathe and pink.

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Lines of trucks enter the
field, bearing men and water.

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Plath's hysterical elastics,
the fractured constellations,

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hid now in matter's
prescient folds.

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The airline motion,
the slow drift

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falling bodies of
whales permits.

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After, an odor in the
beard growth static,

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herb margin rank in
Queen Anne's Lace.

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Because the body-- it was
always salt, or mostly.

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Light weighs the same as
every imaginary organ,

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yea whose to some
deeper cognizance

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flickering systrom stutter,
oh, paraphrastic ambassador,

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the lyse, the petioles, the
sheer enormity of air pressure,

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each ear or jaws unlatching
in the abstract traceries.

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It was all so beautiful
in its moment.

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And how the friction coiled,
quickened at the bud's base.

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All backs turned to
labor's vigorous monophony,

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restless epithelium, native
allotment, torn, visible,

00:08:05.550 --> 00:08:09.330 align:middle line:84%
shifting, acrylic,
pericarp, hunger canceled--

00:08:09.330 --> 00:08:13.470 align:middle line:90%
running towards us.

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Cinder psalm, residual blood
apse, the high of windows,

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on legs better
meant for sparrows.

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