WEBVTT

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All right, I'll just
read a few more.

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I think I would like
to read you a few

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because-- so we started
this series with mythology,

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with fairy tales,
Baba Yaga and Demeter,

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and I have yet to
write my Demeter poem.

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But I've got my Persephone poem.

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And I wanted to write a very
irreverent Persephone poem.

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Persephone-- classically,
almost everybody

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writes about Persephone about
her having been victimized.

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And perhaps that's a very
profound part of the story

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as she's snatched away by Hades
to be his concubine and then

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his wife.

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But it's the 21st century.

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Don't we believe
everybody's a little bit

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complicit in everything?

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[LAUGHTER]

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"Persephone speaks."

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My father was the big guy--

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generator, energy spill.

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My mother was cereal--

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corn, matter, sink.

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Get real, I used to tell
them, ditching their dream

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that I would be forever
daughter, picking flowers

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in the meadow while they
made action movies out

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of everyone else's lives.

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What they wanted for me
was never what I wanted.

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So abduction is
not quite the word

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for what my lover did to me--

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for me is more like it.

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Oh beautiful sin of falling
under the rhythm of his need,

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and finding I could
answer stroke for stroke,

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be bad, and claim my loving,
and find the pleasure good.

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How could I have known
the hunger would persist

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once I had left my mother's
threshing floor, my father's

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distant light?

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Pulled into the underworld,
I forgot what lay above--

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the soil drying seedless, unable
to revive, din of lamentation.

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Not even the gods could abide.

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My husband too is a God.

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He struts like a jaguar.

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His sex is an epic poem.

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He loves the dead,
because they tell no lies

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and yield themselves
completely to the future.

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When he fed me the
pomegranate that

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would keep me coming to his
dark bed, I did say thank you,

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my goodness married to
the limbo night inside.

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