WEBVTT

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"The Crisis."

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"Let me say in anger, that
since the day we were married,

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we have never had a towel
where anyone could find it.

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The fact, notwithstanding,
that I am not

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simple to live with, not my
own judgment, but no matter.

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There are other things.

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To kiss you is not to love
you, or not so simply.

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Laughter releases rancor.

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The quality of mercy
is not strained."

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Now, let me make this a
little simpler for you.

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Let me simply begin at the
beginning of these poems that

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are on this sheet.

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I don't honestly
think that, say,

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someone, at least
as myself writing,

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is always precisely, or
even in any actual sense,

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conscious of what
he is going to say.

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For me, the writing of a
poem is very much involved

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with that kind of discovery
of what I am going to say.

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I remember Duncan's
qualification

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of the sense of
it as saying, it's

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akin to feeling that
you want to take a walk.

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You feel like taking a walk,
or you feel something imminent.

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And you feel, in that
way, like writing a poem.

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You don't know where the
poem is going to take you.

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You don't know that
you're even going

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to be successfully involved
with trying to write it.

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But you do feel this kind
of, as he would put it,

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readiness for the writing.

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Now, in this first poem,
"The Immoral Proposition,"

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the actual content of
the poem was, obviously,

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not actually conceived
of prior to the writing.

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In other words, as
I wrote, I began

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to realize that what
I was saying was open,

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as each statement occurs, it was
open to obvious qualifications.

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And so, as I was
writing, I tried

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to get these qualifications
into the actual statement.

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And I end with
what is, after all,

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a kind of ironic resolution
of the whole problem.

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