Last night at the lecture that I gave,
a couple of high school students came up to me afterwards
and said, what do you do when--
when you read a poem and you just don't get it?
And of course, my first response was
to think, well, drop and roll.
I don't know what you do.
Do whatever you want to do.
But it came up again this morning
in the class that I visited here,
and I was thinking I read not long ago at Penn
State in Pennsylvania and there was a graduate student who
asked me during the Q and A about a particular poem
in my second book and said, what does it mean?
And I said, I don't know.
What do you want it to mean?
And she was outraged by that.
She said, you defrauded your public.
I'm thinking, I have a public.
You put a poem out there and you don't even know what it means?
And I said, well, it's only been four or five years.
Give me another 5 or 10 and I might know what it means.
But after she had calmed down a little bit,
there was some spittle flying in the air.
I did say there's many ways that poems mean.
I mean, they mean in a paraphrasable a way
and they mean in the sense of an image.
Often I walk away from a poem, I can't tell you what it means,
but I can tell you the image that it left in my mind.
Sometimes they mean in terms of music.
And for me that's important.
I didn't train as a writer.
I didn't train in literature.
I trained as a singer.
I was a countertenor, and a tenor for many years.
So for me the logic of a poem is often
the musical logic of a poem.
This is a poem called "Anthem" and it's
an elegy for an American expatriate
poet named Gustaf Sobin, whose work I
have loved for many years.
And it's a little on the long side and it's a little on the--
if this makes no sense to you, that's OK.
It goes by very quickly in the voice.
But I want to read it as a bit of an homage to Mr Wilkinson
because I don't think I could have written it without having
had his poems in my life.
He's a different poet than I am.
Dean Young, do you know who Dean Young is?
He's a poet.
He used to say that for him writing
a poem was about taking a bunch of disparate objects
and throwing them up in the air.
And he said when you do that, the odds are that they will
then all come crashing down on your head
and you will be harmed.
But he said every now and then when you throw those objects up
in the air, some of them begin to revolve around each other
and they form a kind of little solar system
up there, moving around.
And that's when you know you have a poem.
And that's actually how I feel when
I traveled with Joshua those three days in Ohio,
in Indiana, and Wisconsin.
That's how I felt that continually that everything
that Josh threw in the air stayed up there and became
a poem.
And there were two consequences of this;
one was that life became very beautiful all of a sudden.
And the other is that then you never
could get any of your things back because they
were all up there in the air.
This is called "Anthem."
Palmate, like glass darts, the skin
had prophesied stray sheen of imperceptibly
and unconjugated the weft tight driven hard against what
instrument, oscilloscope.
The body draws tuned from wax, straw, sprue,
breath single brace.
The body is conservative, is the fact of it.
Caudal and broken, the earliest vocal bulls consist.
They un grammar, even the fresh coals
of the viridian, the lip or any plausible bridge
descends blanched into its own pale arithmetic.
The fire they're struck by the plows metallic flange
against the fields wheat stone was not session though
held blunt against the appropriations.
Systole, diastole, in mimetic profusion,
manacle- prow, marrow.
To harvest, stinging the wounds, thuggish empathies
as surf it over and against the night's pristine ingratitude.
In that it saves.
It serves to propagate.
And trapped as ambiance recommends,
we pick up her muddy lymph.
A Republic gathers and profess the brief sugars
of some first blood demonstrate sign here.
The lilac, interceptive and insensate, silver foil
to the mind's unbending polynomial.
Base of hand from which the fingers ovulate,
as soot and grain it takes the breath away.
Seen from outside, circumstance splashed
across the field say, this time, it was your child gone missing.
Or to sound that first alarm.
The self declines in parenthesis towards fluent endings.
The cleft hearse, nervous altars of passage will remain.
And else, kitted out as gods, each miner rift as master,
suckers green chain at the iridescent route.
The flash in the distance, unstumbling Sweeney.
Really nothing more or less.
The dream embargoes, and to see the displaced organ
registers of metaphor and interval.
And the loss of an external world strikes us hard.
Grazed, celibate, ark creoles and the body
turning into that small ocean, dolmant, peach light
moral, you it wants to cup and chafe the muscling memory--
the meat of you.
Ricochet ambulance, textile wash of moon glory.
As a nation, as a shape in glass.
Someone carries flowers into the building and then
back out again, unspeaking the body as if it were music--
a parallax of chords and dressage
meant this time to call--
be called home.
What is unified suffered within the figure.
Blister of light in the wheat of my body's harvest.
As forge, as or very, very lustrous sheath of fear's
prescriptive urgency as in our first morning.
Salt to salt, the Saints present their long mucilaginous
scrolls.
So forged say the double distance.
The lungs inscribed towards meter.
The rippling meats we share.
Our lady, orthogonal of the crossroads, lathe and pink.
Lines of trucks enter the field, bearing men and water.
Plath's hysterical elastics, the fractured constellations,
hid now in matter's prescient folds.
The airline motion, the slow drift
falling bodies of whales permits.
After, an odor in the beard growth static,
herb margin rank in Queen Anne's Lace.
Because the body-- it was always salt, or mostly.
Light weighs the same as every imaginary organ,
yea whose to some deeper cognizance
flickering systrom stutter, oh, paraphrastic ambassador,
the lyse, the petioles, the sheer enormity of air pressure,
each ear or jaws unlatching in the abstract traceries.
It was all so beautiful in its moment.
And how the friction coiled, quickened at the bud's base.
All backs turned to labor's vigorous monophony,
restless epithelium, native allotment, torn, visible,
shifting, acrylic, pericarp, hunger canceled--
running towards us.
Cinder psalm, residual blood apse, the high of windows,
on legs better meant for sparrows.