Trying to make sense of the traveling the poems inside that
experience, I started to gather them together in sections,
but they wouldn't hold.
I had been traveling everywhere trying to understand it.
I split them--
I split the poems into regions, poems
from New York in New York, Seattle in Seattle.
These are the places I lived and the places
I had been writing the poems from.
The poems from the desert calling them "The Desert,"
and the poems sort of contorted to fit.
Even a poem obviously and comfortably located
in the desert is strangely altered
by having the word desert before it
and having a group of other poems sharing
that location and the strange reality of locating
the other places, New York and Seattle.
These poems all traveled back and forth with me for years.
And it maybe strikes one as odd, but even the slightest shifts
in language register.
A line break or a change becomes an invisible notched
marking so that some part, some energy
is from a different place.
But to no place at all was about a kind of truthful human
presence and grounding.
So that eventually the fact of their basic itinerancy
made it too uncomfortable for me to designate them this way.
And it took months for them to shake back out
and seem next to one another untethered by their locales
and opened up again to a grounding as much
in time or body as place.
Not disloyal or cruel, my sorrows
are the body I'd say, a down red pain in my knee I walk along
and sit in pain.
New fable of little yellow mouth opens up on window.
Grasping lots and waving fragrant plumes, I most lonely
have been everywhere walking streets and island water drops
in eye.
Sleep-- a fitted sleep, I lay there in my bed
a kind of dried out me, this high plain to the cactus
and the heat, but quickly they flower their roots I read.
In all the different places, the search
seemed to be for the most private, intimate.
I was saying I didn't want to separate
from the physical experience of writing them,
of them coming to be even in sharing,
handing over a small pile standing nearby.
Those being the only copies and not
other paper sized even or just reading them aloud
to people or with them or them to me.
When people ask what your poems are about,
it's confusing and overwhelming, and it's easy to--
out of a desire not to be reductive--
to flail and not really answer.
But I found I wanted to answer.
I found the poems were so present I really
needed to answer.
I'd hand some over.
I'd say bits of presence and experience.
Sometimes I'd say they were like abstract moments of sunlight
or voice, the gleams, the reflections.
And there were always some poems there
in the pile that felt like the answer to the question,
helping me and others know the work.
Clouds on cloud top now above the actual town
in the mountains pooled up water where people sometimes live.
This arching bit of tumult too, too smoothed, like a man
propped against a wet glass wall unpresent.
Twist of eye and, yes, I walked my dog in the cold park
today beneath the sprouted trees, colored finely mustard
green, thinking capture maybe in yourself
a few simple thoughtful things.
And these had felt really at the core
always in the pile with others constellating around them.
There are poems to which others are attracted,
around which others grow.
There are poems that lead and poems that gather,
poems that propel and construct the ones around them,
and so for me these were, in a real way, they are,
they remain at some center of things.
But none of these poems, none of the ones
you've heard this evening, are actually in the book.
I wrote hundreds and hundreds of poems.
Also I made that book, which is something else.
And the lives of these poems are just different.
Not better, not worse, not something more
or less successful.
Their lives just continue in a more private fashion
except for maybe moments like this when they poke out
their heads and say hello.
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]