WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.620 align:middle line:90% 00:00:00.620 --> 00:00:03.470 align:middle line:90% "New Year's." 00:00:03.470 --> 00:00:05.270 align:middle line:84% "The end of the year wears its face 00:00:05.270 --> 00:00:06.980 align:middle line:84% in the moon against the disguises 00:00:06.980 --> 00:00:09.470 align:middle line:90% one would otherwise put upon it. 00:00:09.470 --> 00:00:12.290 align:middle line:84% It is the mild temper of midnight that embarrasses us. 00:00:12.290 --> 00:00:14.960 align:middle line:84% And oh, we turn away into reassuring daylight 00:00:14.960 --> 00:00:16.820 align:middle line:90% but backwards. 00:00:16.820 --> 00:00:19.640 align:middle line:84% If it were the forward motion one wanted, 00:00:19.640 --> 00:00:21.440 align:middle line:84% what tempers would not be resolved? 00:00:21.440 --> 00:00:25.910 align:middle line:84% Can one keep the night out of it as or when it was there? 00:00:25.910 --> 00:00:27.200 align:middle line:90% Darling, she had gone. 00:00:27.200 --> 00:00:30.200 align:middle line:84% We speak as if there never were an answer. 00:00:30.200 --> 00:00:33.080 align:middle line:84% We speak to the back, to sleep, to heads. 00:00:33.080 --> 00:00:36.485 align:middle line:84% We are alone in the new minute, hour, or year, or nowhere. 00:00:36.485 --> 00:00:45.070 align:middle line:90% 00:00:45.070 --> 00:00:47.740 align:middle line:84% House, your hand is too far from me. 00:00:47.740 --> 00:00:48.580 align:middle line:90% Tree, speak. 00:00:48.580 --> 00:00:50.380 align:middle line:84% The moon is white in the branches. 00:00:50.380 --> 00:00:52.510 align:middle line:84% The night is white in the mind of it. 00:00:52.510 --> 00:00:53.920 align:middle line:90% Love, tell me the time. 00:00:53.920 --> 00:00:54.820 align:middle line:90% What time is it? 00:00:54.820 --> 00:00:58.270 align:middle line:84% The second, the moment moving in the moon? 00:00:58.270 --> 00:01:01.000 align:middle line:84% Of the strangeness of bending backwards until the mind is 00:01:01.000 --> 00:01:02.980 align:middle line:84% an instant of mind in the moon's light 00:01:02.980 --> 00:01:05.710 align:middle line:84% white upon an endless black desert, the sand, 00:01:05.710 --> 00:01:08.620 align:middle line:84% in the night of the last moment of the year." 00:01:08.620 --> 00:01:11.230 align:middle line:84% We're trying to hold all this pitch because 00:01:11.230 --> 00:01:14.560 align:middle line:84% at no one point in that line is the thing actually gets stated. 00:01:14.560 --> 00:01:19.060 align:middle line:84% In other words, the line there, I suppose, is so extended. 00:01:19.060 --> 00:01:20.968 align:middle line:84% Because at no one point in that saying, 00:01:20.968 --> 00:01:22.510 align:middle line:84% particularly in those last two lines, 00:01:22.510 --> 00:01:27.580 align:middle line:84% that I feel what was imminent to say what was could be said, 00:01:27.580 --> 00:01:29.680 align:middle line:84% could ever be located at any one point. 00:01:29.680 --> 00:01:32.590 align:middle line:84% It was the whole issue of this reaching, which 00:01:32.590 --> 00:01:35.020 align:middle line:84% New Year's means for me, I suppose, sentimentally enough. 00:01:35.020 --> 00:01:37.510 align:middle line:84% The whole sense of what, where are we, and what have we 00:01:37.510 --> 00:01:38.650 align:middle line:90% come to. 00:01:38.650 --> 00:01:42.740 align:middle line:84% And if one complicates it by living in the desert, 00:01:42.740 --> 00:01:46.270 align:middle line:84% we don't normally have time as an endless qualification-- 00:01:46.270 --> 00:01:47.800 align:middle line:84% but I mean, an endless possibility, 00:01:47.800 --> 00:01:50.410 align:middle line:90% but you have space equally. 00:01:50.410 --> 00:01:54.310 align:middle line:84% I suppose it's the truly existential position. 00:01:54.310 --> 00:01:57.550 align:middle line:90% The next poem then is a-- 00:01:57.550 --> 00:01:58.660 align:middle line:90% it continues in part. 00:01:58.660 --> 00:02:01.570 align:middle line:90% 00:02:01.570 --> 00:02:08.229 align:middle line:84% Duncan, who else with Olson, has been a most useful and kind 00:02:08.229 --> 00:02:10.090 align:middle line:90% friend. 00:02:10.090 --> 00:02:16.780 align:middle line:84% This particular poem, I'd like to say, dedicated to him 00:02:16.780 --> 00:02:23.350 align:middle line:84% or wanted to have him think it some kind of offer. 00:02:23.350 --> 00:02:25.908 align:middle line:84% Because of this, you'll see makes of the lady. 00:02:25.908 --> 00:02:27.700 align:middle line:84% And I, coming from New England, have always 00:02:27.700 --> 00:02:33.070 align:middle line:84% been very shy of any kind of use of the figure of this kind. 00:02:33.070 --> 00:02:36.460 align:middle line:84% Except that in Duncan's poetry, this figure 00:02:36.460 --> 00:02:39.040 align:middle line:84% takes on a very, very real character 00:02:39.040 --> 00:02:42.100 align:middle line:84% as it does increasingly, you may notice, in the poems of Olson, 00:02:42.100 --> 00:02:46.665 align:middle line:84% or it does in a parallel sense in the Denise Levertov's poems. 00:02:46.665 --> 00:02:48.040 align:middle line:84% And this particular poem, anyhow, 00:02:48.040 --> 00:02:50.110 align:middle line:84% involved a sense of reality that I 00:02:50.110 --> 00:02:54.300 align:middle line:84% felt akin to what I'd learned from Duncan.