And I'll just maybe tell you--
I don't know.
Do you want to hear a little bit about how
the images, some of the images came into the book?
Yeah?
I don't know how to back up the images,
so you won't hear about them.
Well I'll tell you, some of them--
so I did a lot of research into photographic archives.
So some things come from the Bancroft Photographic Library
at Berkeley.
I gave the poem to a couple of, three artist friends,
and asked them to make work in response.
So you saw some collages by Isabelle Pelissier,
who's actually married to Jonathan Skinner, who was here
recently.
And then you saw some things by Nancy Davidson.
She did a kind of series.
I was thinking a lot about keys in biologic texts and guides.
I love those keys where you have if two wings, AA.
If, for wing, so anyway, she did a kind of sign language
that doesn't really quite correspond
to kind of indicate that.
The piece that's behind you--
I wanted to, when the LA insurrections happened,
I had a friend, actually a poet, Akilah Oliver,
who was living in South Central.
And we went down, right after the insurrections and--
just to be with her, and all these storefronts
were broken out.
There was ash everywhere.
And the person I was traveling with is a sculptor.
And he gathered a number of the mannequins that
had been burnt in the storefronts
and made sculptures out of them.
And he ended up destroying the sculpture he made,
but just recording them in photographs.
And I wanted to have a note on those events.
But I didn't feel that it could be done by me in a poem,
so this holds that place, just this image.
You might not necessarily-- so there's no language to it,
but this is what is left.
And that's one of Nancy's drawings.
And this ended up being one of the markers
for the end of a poem.
This is also by Peter Cole, the same sculptor.
This is an oak sapling in one of the canyons I grew up near.
And one of his projects was to take matchbook cars
and thread them into oak saplings, when
they were very, very tiny.
And as the tree grew, they would grow.
The car would grow into the tree.
Sometimes the car would explode, and sometimes it would just
become a part of the tree.
So this is one of those.
And then, when the forest got too dense,
sometimes he would cut them down.
And there would just be the branches and the car
that he could show in, say, a gallery.
This is a picture of just one of the roads
I used to ride my bike on every day.
It looks like Tucson, doesn't it?
No.
No?
It doesn't?
I haven't been to this place.
It looks more like Tucson than Boulder.
Also by Isabelle Pelissier, a painting
that she gave me for my birthday,
of beautiful palm trees.
And this, this is one of the original images
I was traveling around with.
And this is by a man named Merle Porter, who
spent his whole life, or much of his life,
traveling around in an RV, taking photographs
in California for postcards.
And he was called the Postcard King.
And I think he took, I don't know, over like,
at least 1,200.
He made at least 1200 postcards.
And I was--
I don't know if you guys have ever
been to the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles?
If you haven't been, you should go.
It's wonderful.
And right next door is this little place called The Center
for Land Use Interpretation.
And there's very rarely anything actually up,
or there didn't used to be.
One day, I wandered over there, and there was a postcard show
of Merle Porter's postcards.
And so I bought a number and was traveling around with them,
and realized that this would be, this should go into the poem.
And this is a plank road.
It's the Jornada de la Muerte, so the road of death,
that the pioneers used to cross the Mojave Desert.
And so, this was probably taken in the '50's.
I don't think that road is there anymore.
And Janice was just telling me that she
remembers seeing some of these.
And her mother called them corduroy roads, right,
which I love.
So I had, I tracked down--
Merle Porter was no longer living,
but I tracked down his widow and talked to his widow,
and got the right to print it, and heard about their life
together.
These are from the Bancroft.
This is an image after the 1906 earthquake.
So you can see what the earthquake
did to the middle of the road there.
Tracks through the Mojave from 1926.
And this part of the Mojave, they
called The Devil's Golf Course.
This is outside of the Museum of Natural History in my hometown.
A postcard somebody sent me.
And it's a postcard from somebody
who visiting Los Angeles.
And I forget what year, but I think the '40s.
And that's it.
So I'm going to--
oh.