WEBVTT

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Next poem is from my
book "Mere Mortals."

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It's called "Obscenity."

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The anthropologist
E.E. Evans-Pritchard

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founded the discipline
of social anthropology

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on a study of the Nuer.

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They were the people
that I lived with.

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And he wrote a lot about many
other people in the Sudan.

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And this one seemed
very timely in the '90s.

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I mean, my poem seemed timely.

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He was timely for a long time.

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The quote is,
"Obscenity is not often

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an expression uttered by an
individual under great stress

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and condemned as bad taste,
but one permitted and even

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prescribed by society."

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"Among the Ba-Ila, among--

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as if swarming the Petri dish
of the British imperialist,

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there exist expressions
used collectively,

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that is, in the presence
of women and children,

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in fact, in chorus, since
these obscenities are sung,

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not scrawled across
a riverbank where

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innocent boaters of
Victorian persuasion

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might encounter them.

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His great penis is a
size, a thing without end.

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It must have a long unwinding.

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That, the female mourner's song.

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The translation
arch, as if the words

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themselves might make the gourd
warrior rise in tumescence.

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Sometimes it's just what they
do with their hands, singing,

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writes the patrician scientist,
who considered obscenity

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a privilege, a way to spur
routine labor with ardor,

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or to invoke life at
the moment of death.

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I drag in the anthropological,
so one can reject

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the paradigm of the primitive.

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We, who have no physical labor
which requires our neighbor,

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nor sustained interest in
creation, except in art,

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that work to ward off death.

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There will always be those
in the boat who slow down,

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who listen and transcribe
in their tiny script."

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