WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.690 align:middle line:90% 00:00:00.690 --> 00:00:03.450 align:middle line:90% OK, I'll read two more poems. 00:00:03.450 --> 00:00:09.220 align:middle line:84% One I'm going to read because we are 00:00:09.220 --> 00:00:15.520 align:middle line:84% dealing with the 10-year anniversary of the Iraq War. 00:00:15.520 --> 00:00:21.490 align:middle line:84% This is a poem that was actually part of what was generated over 00:00:21.490 --> 00:00:25.210 align:middle line:90% at Arizona State. 00:00:25.210 --> 00:00:27.310 align:middle line:84% There was a discussion with Alberto Rios 00:00:27.310 --> 00:00:31.900 align:middle line:84% and some young soldiers who were traveling around the country 00:00:31.900 --> 00:00:34.750 align:middle line:84% and talking about their experiences, and a group of us 00:00:34.750 --> 00:00:37.450 align:middle line:84% were gathered together in the Piper Center. 00:00:37.450 --> 00:00:43.630 align:middle line:84% And all of us realized we had never lived in peacetime. 00:00:43.630 --> 00:00:47.990 align:middle line:90% 00:00:47.990 --> 00:00:51.740 align:middle line:84% This is called "The Warring States Period." 00:00:51.740 --> 00:00:53.810 align:middle line:90% "1. 00:00:53.810 --> 00:00:57.530 align:middle line:84% Studying the list of Chinese dynasties, 00:00:57.530 --> 00:01:01.100 align:middle line:84% I soon come to the Warring States Period, 00:01:01.100 --> 00:01:09.980 align:middle line:84% 231 years from 480 to 249 BCE, paralleling 00:01:09.980 --> 00:01:15.530 align:middle line:84% the time the area of the Parthenon was just a sheepfold, 00:01:15.530 --> 00:01:20.210 align:middle line:84% about 150 years after Sappho was born. 00:01:20.210 --> 00:01:22.310 align:middle line:90% 2. 00:01:22.310 --> 00:01:26.660 align:middle line:84% My birthday places me in the middle of World War II. 00:01:26.660 --> 00:01:30.590 align:middle line:84% I was born in wartime and lived most of my life 00:01:30.590 --> 00:01:34.170 align:middle line:90% during hot and cold wars. 00:01:34.170 --> 00:01:38.030 align:middle line:84% They were never really as far away or foreign 00:01:38.030 --> 00:01:40.490 align:middle line:90% as we used to call them. 00:01:40.490 --> 00:01:43.340 align:middle line:84% Even now there are still chapters 00:01:43.340 --> 00:01:49.790 align:middle line:84% of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the battles of those wars 00:01:49.790 --> 00:01:54.230 align:middle line:84% living inside them and not one soldier 00:01:54.230 --> 00:01:59.750 align:middle line:84% ever able to return to a spring or autumn period 00:01:59.750 --> 00:02:04.580 align:middle line:84% before a warring state became his lot. 00:02:04.580 --> 00:02:06.920 align:middle line:90% 3. 00:02:06.920 --> 00:02:09.800 align:middle line:84% Vietnam was my war because it changed 00:02:09.800 --> 00:02:15.830 align:middle line:84% everything I thought about my country, my 'tis of thee. 00:02:15.830 --> 00:02:18.830 align:middle line:84% Every night, the body counts broadcast 00:02:18.830 --> 00:02:22.520 align:middle line:84% across the dinner table on the nightly news, 00:02:22.520 --> 00:02:27.290 align:middle line:84% Nixon's secret Cambodian invasion leaked, and weeks 00:02:27.290 --> 00:02:31.010 align:middle line:84% later, Kent State students gunned down 00:02:31.010 --> 00:02:35.810 align:middle line:84% while I was teaching a high school English class. 00:02:35.810 --> 00:02:41.960 align:middle line:84% After that war, I gave up on the truth press secretaries tell 00:02:41.960 --> 00:02:45.350 align:middle line:84% as I had given up on Charlie McCarthy 00:02:45.350 --> 00:02:49.310 align:middle line:84% once I was old enough to not look at the dummy 00:02:49.310 --> 00:02:53.870 align:middle line:84% but at the man whose lap he was sitting on. 00:02:53.870 --> 00:02:56.180 align:middle line:90% 4. 00:02:56.180 --> 00:02:59.180 align:middle line:84% Folded in a wooden glass-topped case 00:02:59.180 --> 00:03:04.130 align:middle line:84% in my workroom, the flag under which my father's coffin rested 00:03:04.130 --> 00:03:07.610 align:middle line:84% in the dim light of Lady's Chapel. 00:03:07.610 --> 00:03:09.680 align:middle line:84% The crowd that came to his funeral mass 00:03:09.680 --> 00:03:12.320 align:middle line:90% spilled out onto the street. 00:03:12.320 --> 00:03:15.740 align:middle line:84% Young guys and the retired, best boys, 00:03:15.740 --> 00:03:19.220 align:middle line:84% able gaffers, special effects men, 00:03:19.220 --> 00:03:23.760 align:middle line:84% and some of my father's buddies from 885th Ordnance/China Burma 00:03:23.760 --> 00:03:28.070 align:middle line:90% India, 1943 to '45. 00:03:28.070 --> 00:03:34.750 align:middle line:84% Men of work or war, my father both. 00:03:34.750 --> 00:03:36.460 align:middle line:90% 5. 00:03:36.460 --> 00:03:39.850 align:middle line:84% On my bookcase, I keep a small jewelry box 00:03:39.850 --> 00:03:43.570 align:middle line:84% Dad made for my mother from a cast-off mortar shell. 00:03:43.570 --> 00:03:46.000 align:middle line:84% It opens with a pleasant ring, much 00:03:46.000 --> 00:03:48.910 align:middle line:84% like the chime of the Tibetan prayer 00:03:48.910 --> 00:03:52.150 align:middle line:84% bowl sitting on my poetry shelf that 00:03:52.150 --> 00:03:56.830 align:middle line:84% starts with The Art of the Lathe by BH Fairchild 00:03:56.830 --> 00:04:01.780 align:middle line:84% and ends with Clean Energy Verse, a chapbook of poetry 00:04:01.780 --> 00:04:07.510 align:middle line:84% from 1979, "The Plutonium Ode" by Allen Ginsberg autographed 00:04:07.510 --> 00:04:09.145 align:middle line:90% by him, page 12. 00:04:09.145 --> 00:04:11.740 align:middle line:90% 00:04:11.740 --> 00:04:13.390 align:middle line:90% 6. 00:04:13.390 --> 00:04:17.980 align:middle line:84% All warriors, all flags, all lie down." 00:04:17.980 --> 00:04:20.500 align:middle line:90% 00:04:20.500 --> 00:04:21.977 align:middle line:84% Maybe I'll just leave it at that. 00:04:21.977 --> 00:04:22.810 align:middle line:90% Thank you very much. 00:04:22.810 --> 00:04:25.860 align:middle line:90% [APPLAUSE]