WEBVTT

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I like the manuscript better,
but what I'm going to read next

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has no title.

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It's in three sections.

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Each of the sections
has a title.

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The titles are taken from--

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There's actually quite a bit
of quotation in the poem.

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The titles are taken from
graffiti from Paris 1968,

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which was--

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I was only 6 at the time.

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It seemed like one of the
great events of my life.

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It's the only Western revolution
that seemed really exciting

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that I felt like I had any
sort of cultural access

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to in my life.

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I'm sort of fascinated by it.

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And one of the things, it was,
of course, a failed revolution,

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in fact it ended up being
more of a riot in a few days

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than a revolution, although
that has its appeal as well.

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But one of the things
that was striking

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was that for three days, or
a week, everyone in Paris

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was a poet.

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That is to say that experience
that you have writing poetry

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where if it goes right, if
everything's working perfectly

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you feel like the words
you're writing down

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are about the world and
can affect the world

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and can make magic.

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You know everyone in Paris,
everyone with a spray paint

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or a can of paint and
a paintbrush or chalk,

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was just writing down
the stuff they thought.

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Most of it was pretty
didactic: "People will never

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be free until the
last bureaucrat is

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hung by the guts of
the last capitalist."

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A fine formulation,
but a bad title

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for a section of the poem.

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The three sections of this
poem are called, in order,

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"I come across the
paving stones."

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These are painted by three
different people in three

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different places in the city.

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"I come across the
paving stones,"

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"Under the paving stones,
the beach," and "Beneath

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the abstract lives
the ephemeral."

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In the French there's no doubt
about which kind of coming

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they're talking about.

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"I come across the
paving stones."

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"The brief capital
of disturbances.

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And within that
city lies the city

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Utopia with its little
sojourns and orange sodas.

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Utopia with its watermelons
and televisions.

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Inside city that holds
the happiest disturbances

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of my youth behind gold facades.

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Staggering up from the
river, full of forget,

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in the flare of
evening one sees a city

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where the negative
held it's court.

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And inside that, city which
is little more than a theory

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of red in everyday life--

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red suburbs, rouge nostalgia,
series of scrawled changes."

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"Under the paving
stones, the beach."

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"And so on, as one
always arriving out

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of the faraway-far.

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The city, where we rose
slick into the rude rafters

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of the second story,
dazed after sex.

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Inside that hangs
the famed Somnopolis.

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Purenight city
leaking Seconal light.

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City under the sign
of the Ferris wheel,

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bullet-pocked clock tower.

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City which is a love letter.

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Interior to that, a city
about nothing, and then a city

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emerging naked from the white
indifferences of winter.

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You cannot remember whether
at this corner, years before,

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you turned left or right."

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"Beneath the abstract
lives the ephemeral."

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"Inside that is a
pocket-sized city map

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that is space in
the form of rules.

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City that's a love letter
to reach the post office

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has long been an
opening passage.

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City traversed like one passes
that never got to that point.

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First of all, you do not
look at it whilst it comes.

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And then you discover
it reaching its zenith,

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and you have to
agree that it was

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built thus and not otherwise.

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And the city called the
Antipast toward which

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you travel and travel,
where rain is falling

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across the grammar of skyline.

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Rain is filling the April air
with silver quotation marks."

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