Thank you so much Meagan.
That was amazing.
I think you should read my poems.
I should just sit down and see you because it's really
something special.
Thank you really, really very much.
And thank you so much for the Poetry Center.
To Cybele, Renee and Gail, this is an amazing place.
I'm really, really thrilled to be here.
And also I'm thrilled to be sharing
the bill with Bhanu and Ben, two poets who I deeply respect.
I will read tonight from the book Public Domain.
And I'm just going to read you two pieces.
One I thought was very apropos because I
happened to be in Arizona and you'll
see what's happened about it.
And also I just wanted to start by saying that sometimes I
think that when poets introduce the poems that they're
about to read they reach an artistic level that sometimes
they don't reach with the poems that they read.
It's like a genre in itself like the introduction to the poem.
So in a way this book for me it's
really about striving for a space where poetry can happen
amidst the barrage of information and text
and language that surrounds us.
So it's really like striving for poetry and searching for it.
But maybe doesn't necessarily find it you know.
It's about that search.
So that said I will begin with this first poem called
"Is to Travel Getting to or Being in a Destination."
One.
The next poem was inspired by something
I overheard at the Buffalo Bill Grave and museum and lookout
point in Golden, Colorado.
My partner and I were on a road trip to the Grand Canyon
and came across a sign for the exit to the grave
so we decided to check it out.
All I knew about Buffalo Bill came from the Beatles song.
ShowBiz wasn't off the mark.
On display at the museum were films and posters
advertising Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress Rough
Riders of the World featuring Cowboys and Indians,
Mexican vaqueros, Arabian riders, Japanese soldiers,
Irish Lancers, South American Gauchos, and Russian Cossacks
engaging in marvelous feats, sports, and pastimes.
A group of tourists was standing next to me.
Miran hijos, nuestros paisanos, the father said to his kids.
He was happy to show them pictures of his countrymen.
Buffalo Bill died in 1917.
The poem called "The Hand Man Game"
is a couple made of 19 letters in the first line
and 17 in the second.
The next poem is called "A Place is a Container of Places."
For this road trip I was telling you about,
we had a very good map of Colorado
that ended right at the four corners.
I looked up driving directions from Durango
to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon
online instead of buying them from Arizona.
When we actually got to the Canyon
we had to get off at Arizona 67 and take
road 212 portions unpaved for about a mile and a half.
At the end of the road, we were to turn left
on road 282 portions unpaved.
We never saw any numbered roads.
We'd been on the gravel road for over 20 minutes when
we realized that the area's majestic woodlands were
completely charred from a recent wildfire.
What had I typed on MapQuest, my traveling partner asked.
The North Rim, I replied.
A place is a container of places, a monument,
a landscape, a rock, a gorge.
A point of interest is a chamber of echoes.
Three, I overheard a guy at the Grand Canyon lodge say,
I figured out this trip is all about erosion,
who likes to overhear things.
This next poem is about overhearing.
Four, I was at the corner deli one night
when I noticed that one of the legal workers was hurt.
I asked what happened to him and the guy at the cashier
shrugged and said, nothing.
Another Mexican worker came running from across the street
and tried to punch the worker whose eye was bleeding again.
I left the store empty handed as an ambulance and a police car
were arriving on the scene.
Someone in the street oblivious to what was going on
was asking his friends what's the best place we've
ever been in your answer here.
So now I will read you an abridged version
of this long piece called "The crush".
It begins with an epigraph taken from a Werner Herzog film
that I really like it's called The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.
And the epigraph is the music feels strong in my heart.
The first.
This piece is therapeutic.
I was told by a number of people my therapist
included that if I could only put my obsession
into my own work I'd be a much happier and productive person.
This piece might not seem transformed enough to you,
but I intended to be transformative for me.
This is a piece about reconciliation.
This is a piece about air.
This is the type of thing I gave up
when I decided I was a realist.
I'm trying to rescue my imagination, which I've
neglected since I was about 13.
If this piece seems adolescent to you, there you go.
It's the return of the repressed.
When you grow up in Mexico City it's
not OK to live in your head unless there's
no padding in it.
The same could be said of many other places.
This won't sound like music to you.
This won't sound like music to me either.
There in lies this project's quandary.
Lists are a form of problem solving.
This is no beautiful music.
This is no calm music either.
No danger music, no discrete music, no drip music,
no driving music, no elastics music, no incidental music.
No living room music, no music for a revolution.
No music for airports, no music in Union.
No music for changes.
No music with changing parts.
No Musica Elettronica Viva.
No musicircus.
No noise music, no pendulum music, no theater music,
no water music.
Therein lies this project's quandary.
Lists are what you write when you
think you've got everything in your head
but you've started to become suspicious of what
that could possibly mean.
More facts.
I have a crush on a musician or is it his music, go figure.
I'll call him Blank to protect him from stalkers.
Blank seems like a real nice guy.
He seems the type of person who you encounter
at the dog run doing his groceries
or on an insanely crowded subway train any day of the week.
I've never fallen for the unapproachable Antonio Banderas
type although I did dream once that he
was in my living room trying to kiss me behind the couch.
Whether or not Blank is a rock star
has been the topic of an ongoing discussion
between me and my partner.
I argue that if that were the case,
I would have known him a long time ago.
The basis of my argument is Blank's usual geeky posture.
Except for when he's performing, he's always hunched.
He never seems comfortable with attention.
A few weeks after seeing him play live
for a second time I couldn't stand him
the first I heard his solo music in my living room
as my family was visiting for the holidays.
I felt a psychic connection.
Lines like my memories stored in Zip lock bags
must have done it.
Once I established this connection,
I returned to the images of him performing and latched
onto them.
Otherwise, I hear riffs and drums.
The connection is so intense that often when
I check my emails I expect there to be one from him in my inbox.
I am worried that there's an online girls only worship
center devoted to Blank.
I must be a walking cliche.
Lists are what you need when your thoughts are scattered.
Letters are what is in a name.
Tea yes, meat plus yams plus yeast yum.
Sake más yum.
My eye yé-yé.
My key task.
Say Sky.
Maya skate team yay!
Ey, amas? ¿Y tu kama?
Me matas, me atas.
Súmate.
Tu suma, tema y meta.
My yute tee, me yuky.
Muy musky.
Sema.
Tame yaks meet meek tusks.
Eye will meat my tusk.
Eye may meet my task.
Ask AKA mask ay.
Lists are what they tell you to begin with if you
want to be on top of things.
10 steps to follow the sound.
One, to one of our mutual friends
and an acquaintance of mine wants
to do an interview with Blank to the publication
that I work with--
that I work for sorry and needs to contact him.
Once I have his contact info write
him a letter for every piece of music
that he's ever composed, performed,
or produced each one revolving around the idea of air.
Write it on a surface on which it will disintegrate,
a block of ice, sand, on the sidewalk with a watering can.
Take a picture and fax it to him.
Two.
Go to MapQuest and get driving directions from my address
to his.
For 24 days drive there at a different hour of the day,
leaving at 12 AM the first day and 12 PM the last
so as to catch him at some point by chance.
If this doesn't work, rotate the schedule
until I catch him by chance.
Three, write him a mesostic combining
Werner Herzog's idea on ecstatic truth
and the passage where the following quote by Blank
appears, to get somewhere you have to take a car.
But the journey isn't about the car,
it's about the destination.
Give my friend Rocco to set it to music
and ask DJ Acapulco to play it on his radio show.
Four.
Write a poem called "Have a Happy Day"
where every line contains the word drone.
Search the word and string the results.
Back in the Tulsa drone there was a daily drone
under the drone one heard a Tokyo drone above it
a nebula drone.
An artful drone generated by bagpipe drone reeds
in the drone boot room.
Take the photo drone, dismantle the feared drone project.
Flicker: Rogue drone turns into exdrone dragon drone.
What if a drone virus?
What if the drone armies are coming?
What if drones start border duty?
If Iraqi drones could have dropped chemicals dismantle
defense tech, toughest drone ever to enter the drone zone
generates a dull drone escape, the drone scape.
Go to the drone forest where drone raising
and the association drone seems born to drone.
Dismantle defense tech.
Whirl- a- drone begins to spin, listen to the drone music.
Listen to the daily drone.
Call him and leave the poem on his answering machine.
Five, use Levi Lehto's Google a poem
program to come up with a poem based on the words country
ass--
what Blank's last name means according
to the blog of who knows who, and email it to him.
Skeleton of a country ass.
Does anyone have or know where I can
get the lyrics to Rhett Akins Kiss my country ass.
I can't find them anywhere.
Wolf country, myth and stories, the ass and the wolf.
Irregular goods for progressive resistance.
Country girl Democrat bumper sticker.
Those of us who live out in the country know that
Bush's so-called--
irregular votes for progressive resistance, country boy
Democrat bumper sticker.
Too long the Republicans have taken rural America
for granted.
In the meantime, I'll have my trashy simple minded country
ass at the county club.
Six.
Compose a fake interview of him lifting questions asked
to John Cage in different interviews
and answering the questions with quotes of John Fahey.
Put it online email him the link and fax him a printout.
Seven.
Since meeting him on his own show seems almost impossible,
go to others where he might be.
Go see everyone who is from his hometown, anyone
who has recorted with the same labels as he,
anyone he has ever played with or produced.
Text message him short comments on the performances.
Eight, ask the audiences at shows
if they've ever seen him around, what they know about him,
what they think of him, et cetera.
Record the interviews and put them up on YouTube.
Nine.
Come up with movie plots and send them to him
so he can come up with a few ideas on how
they could be scored.
Possible pitch, a woman in her mid-thirties
and listening to music on her iPad
as she runs to catch a train.
The heel of her shoe comes off and she tumbles down
the stairs.
She suffers a brain concussion that causes her amnesia.
The film chronicles her odd interaction
with people with whom she had close relationships, how
she gets reacquainted with family members and friends.
One day she walks into a local record store
where they are playing one of Blank's songs
and recovers her memory.
Titled the film, If I Could Only Remember my Name.
10.
When I'm around him pretend I haven't recognized him
and casually start singing one of the songs then
he'll surely want to come off my way out
of outrage or camaraderie.