Thank you.
Thanks, everyone, for coming out.
It's great to be back here.
It's been a while.
It was a different building when I was here last.
And spent an amazing part of the day
today looking through books, and also remembering
when I was here last, getting--
being introduced to people I had never
gotten to hear or see before, because there
was a recorded archive.
And this was before things were so available online.
And it's just, it's a pleasure to be back meeting friends,
seeing friends.
OK.
The title of my lecture is The Lives of the Poems.
What I'd like to do today is to introduce you to some poems,
tell you about their lives, experiences, and ways.
I would like to tell you about my life with them, our lives
together, the social space we occupy and share.
And to some extent, I hope, how we have come to be the ways
we are.
I was working on this pile of poems spread out on my table
at a coffee shop.
The waitress walked by.
She said, without even slowing for an answer, "Haiku?"
[LAUGHTER]
So I should say my answer.
The one that almost came out of me
was, "Yes," not exactly because I think of them as haiku.
Or, not at all because I think of them
as haiku, but because there is something
in the experience of making haiku,
of reading haiku that is important to me, a way
I'm close to.
The experience of the haiku poet as itinerant,
traveling, and making a kind of document, time, and movement,
and the experience of the haiku poet as daily practitioner.
The moments, all of them--
the small scales of time, the spaces they make.
The constant presence of the poem.
The poetry in the world.
The world in it.
That it can happen at any time.
That it can happen in any place.
I met a haiku poet once, and I didn't know any Japanese.
And he didn't know any English.
And we couldn't have been together 5 minutes
before I pulled out my notebook to write something down.
And he started smiling, and pulled a very similar one out
to show me.
And from that point on, and really before that point,
without us knowing it, we were writing poems together.
And the experience of haiku, its history,
is a collaborative one.
It began as a collaborative form of longer linked parts that
demanded a social practice.
And even after it was refined down
to the way we now commonly think of it,
it maintained, at its core, a practice of sharing--
of sharing one's own and others',
of traveling and making with other poets
the number, the quantity, the constancy
of presence in the life of the haiku poet-- of the poem,
of poetry.
The haiku poet would write easily thousands
of poems in even a short life.
And what is important about this is
the necessary relation such a process has
to the poet's daily life--
its saturated qualities, poetry passing in and out of you.
Think how such a practice allows for the presence of language
in its fragmentary vibrancy.
Think of how the imaginations and things of the world
are activated--
the constant realizing of the world in language, ways
that can come to have a gestural quality--
witnessed, iterated, felt, resolved
necessarily and somewhat immediately
into other movements, gesture.
And that happening all the time.
I want you to imagine a poem, an individual poem,
as part of some greater span of poetry--
like a shock from some expansive energy--
static and flash from the living world.
Ashy cataracts as plastered sign on my just got up why.
Balanced lasing like with me and sunshine on the street.