WEBVTT

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This poem-- by getting
this abstract-- has revived

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in my mind a link back with
the tornada of the earlier

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book of "then comes
the pale figure,

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animated inchling of light."

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Here we have this
barge of light.

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This wish to
somehow come outside

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of the liminal boundaries--

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which on the human
body is the skin,

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which separates the
inside from the outside.

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But the question of
this book got to be,

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does making love on paper count?

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Does that count?

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Does a book ever make
a very good suitor?

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Books lasts longer than
individual people, but--

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[LAUGHTER]

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And so, but by the time
I finished this book,

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I was soberer about the
prospects of being a writer

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and of being a human being.

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And so, I chose for the
epigraph this time something

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from George Oppen.

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"Not altogether alone in a lone
universe that suffers time--

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like stones in sun.

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For we do not."

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I thought it might be nice to
suffer time like stones in sun.

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But we do not.

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And instead, for us the
paper and the skin somehow

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have to be resolved
or conflated.