WEBVTT

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I'd like to turn to the first
part of the book, which carries

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with it a quote by James Baldwin
that goes, though we do not

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believe it yet, the interior
life is the real life.

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And the intangible
dreams of people

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have a tangible
effect on the world.

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And I always kind of
liked that statement.

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And I'd just like to
read some poems that

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essentially deal with some
kind of an American context.

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I'll do that by talking
about something,

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well, a progression of poems.

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I wrote a poem.

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And for some strange reason,
this is the nature of the poem.

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The poem goes Our
Lady of Congress.

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The title of it is
Our Lady of Congress.

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The opposition likes dry poems.

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No storms that are
holding hands the same way

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it begins to rain when
we suspect our lives.

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The answer to everything
is a just peace.

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So we elected him president
or better umbrellas.

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So we elected him president
or better umbrellas

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that are not afraid.

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It is an aesthetic
form history has

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taken to adjust
time to a seashell

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when strong water comes.

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So we go back on our lives
reliving all our curves

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when we were worms.

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Caution inside never learns.

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No poem is listening
to our lives this way,

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not even the Earth.

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Justice is in
stones with thirst.

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Large storms live on
weight and look our way

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when the seals are broken.

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Water is success whispered
in stone like slime.

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What we are behind our faces
is a crack that's leaking,

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a yell that's lost
its body in a shell.

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There are no more words for
old Yankee faces like ours.

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But the luck, we have left.

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Now this is the first time I
ever wrote a poem like that.

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And the nature of the
poem really confused me.

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And I thought it
was an accident.