Thank you.
That was a great introduction.
And the fact that you--
for poetry failed or messed up your psych exam,
it's exciting when you think about Freud.
Do you all know this quote from Freud?
He said-- and this is a direct quote--
"Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me."
So there you go, not philosopher, not novelist.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm so grateful to be here.
Thank you so much for having me.
Everybody who makes the Poetry Center--
it's just been an incredible week so far.
We'll see how the reading goes, but--
[LAUGHTER]
--and my friends, Molly and Rebecca, who I just spent
a week with before coming here.
I love Tucson.
It's really-- I can't believe--
this is the most amazing city, and you
have a Poetry Center here.
I know you already know.
[LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE]
I'm just saying.
No, I'm just saying.
I can't believe every city doesn't have one because, I
don't know, it's kind of ridiculous that we don't.
Well, I'm going to start off by reading some of my (Soma)tics.
Just to briefly tell you what (Soma)tics are--
so I come from a working class community
in rural Pennsylvania.
And when I was growing up, I wanted nothing
to do with the factories.
When I was a child, all my family
worked in the same factory.
The Conrad family in Pennsylvania
had been working in a coffin factory
since the late 19th century.
And then when NAFTA went through, of course,
like a lot of factory jobs, it went south to Mexico.
And then I started working in other factories, dental floss
factories, cardboard box factories.
And I just really hated these factories.
My family, they were very creative people,
but they couldn't access it.
They could not access their creativity
after a while from the factory work.
The factory just extended itself through the walls,
outside the walls.
And they just-- they still are kind of miserable people.
And it makes me sad because they're wise, creative people.
But I wanted nothing to do with the factories,
so I left for Philadelphia when I was younger.
And I thought that I was doing pretty good,
living the life I wanted to live, writing.
And then in 2005, I went back to where
I grew up for a family reunion.
And while I was there, I got to hear stories, again,
about the factory, which--
they were all very unpleasant and depressing.
But the thing is-- it was the train ride home.
The train ride home is when I realized
that I had turned my poetry into an assembly line.
And it just-- it makes sense.
I come from that world.
I come from a culture of factory workers, so.
But it freaked me out that I was doing that.
Everything I was-- the way I was writing,
the way I was tabulating poems, getting
ready for magazines, everything was an assembly line.
And I stopped.
I just stopped writing for the better part of a month,
because I didn't want to be part of the factory.
And toward the end of that month,
I woke up one morning and decided
that I needed to figure this out,
because I was either going to stop writing altogether
and take up something, anything, to get out of this factory.
Or I was going to change what I was doing.
And so I decided to make a list of all the problems
with the factory, which was a very long list.
But towards the top of that list was a sentence
that I wrote that said, "The inability to be present."
That was a big deal.
The more I thought about it, the more
I realized-- my father never was in the present.
He was never there when he was there--
ever.
And why would he want to be?
And he hated his job.
So I said, that's what I want to work on.
I want to work on this.
So that's what I decided to do.
I decided to create something, rituals,
where, when I did them, I was living
inside an extreme present, something
that while I was doing them, I couldn't possibly
be anywhere else.
And the first series that I did that are in this book Beautiful
Marsupial Afternoon, were color poems,
where I would eat a single color food for a day.
First was red.
And I wore a red wig that I found in a beauty academy
dumpster.
It was half permed and half straight, stuck
to a Styrofoam head.
You've seen these.
[LAUGHTER]
And it was exciting.
It started working right away.
I mean, just the solution--
I'm so lucky to find the solution right away.
And that solution grew into this enormous--
which I'm considering a lifelong way of living, not just writing
poetry.
TC Tolbert gave this very generous shop talk in this room
a couple of nights ago.
And he-- were we in this room?
Yes.
OK.
Sorry, it just looks so different with the wall open.
Anyway, and he said that he considered me a religious poet.
And I was like, all right.
Well, so the thing is--
yeah, I get it.
I understand why he's saying that.
But the fact of the matter is this living
in an extreme present to write has extended itself
outside of the writing.
And I'm finding just this ease with the present
throughout my daily life which makes me nothing but happy.
So I have a lot of Buddhist friends
who are always trying to say, well, this is very Buddhist.
And I'm like, OK.
That's nice.
[LAUGHTER]
Nothing wrong with that, I suppose.
So anyway, this book-- so these rituals
became more and more elaborate.
And I want to read for you the first piece in this new book.
And I wanted to open the book up with a piece
where I visit the home of Emily Dickinson.
And the reason behind that is Emily Dickinson
was so important to me when I was growing up
because it's a pretty illiterate community where I come
from in rural Pennsylvania.
Nobody reads.
But the library-- while it didn't have a lot of books,
especially a lot of poetry--
they did have Emily Dickinson.
It's the United States, after all.
And I fell in love with her right away.
She was doing something so odd that I wanted to experience.
And then, unfortunately, teachers
started talking about her in this way that just infuriated
me, painting her in the corner as this wilting lily who's
hiding in her house, writing her poems,
not letting anybody publish them.
It's just stupid, that whole argument against her.
It's absolutely impossible that somebody
can have centuries of poetry walking up to their door,
and they reject it all to build something brand new.
That's not a wilting lily.
That's a courageous person.
Emily Dickinson changed poetry forever.
Anyway, so that's my little Emily Dickinson speech.