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I realize I've been reading
poems of setting forth

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origins of in some ways
irremediable departure,

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and it was a joy
to meet somebody

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around dinnertime
who is designing

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the future of Poetry Center.

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And it made me think that
the relation to poetry

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and architecture is very much
alive in the material as well

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as a metaphorical sense.

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Of course, we call
stanza stanzas

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because it's Italian
word for rooms.

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And so the idea of somebody
designing rooms for poems

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sounds entirely
appropriate and wonderful.

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And I'd like to read one
poem, which is called "Head".

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It's in response
to an African head,

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which is placed in an art
museum in Yale actually.

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And Yale asked a
number of its graduates

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poets to write poems in response
to works of art in the museum.

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And they have a fantastic
collection actually.

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Great French
impressionist works up

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to the contemporary
works, Rothko and so on,

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and Renaissance works,
and they sent me

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up a list of all
of reproductions.

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I saw this African head and
immediately just established

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its permanent claim on me.

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And it led me to think about
the inevitable question of what

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one is doing when one is
looking at African art out

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of its original context.

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What museum is?

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What ritual objects are when
they're moved into museums?

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What is the space
that we inhabit

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when we're in the
presence of works of art?

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And so too when we're in
the presence of poems.

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So the head became
an interlocutor

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that allowed me to
explore what the space was

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that we want to share.

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And it was an African
mosque from the Congo

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and was made out of the
solid block of ivory

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that looked like wood.

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And it was carved after
the experience of slavery.

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This is written in
very long lines.

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"Head".

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Simply to hold back
the fraying stem,

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bundle, scale, blur,
winged, tooth, I flat

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water that will burn before
the other signs give way.

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Earth-beaten carved
into the single route

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your eyes now looking back
at my shelled sockets.

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Shallow ships
drowned out to carry

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their own cargo stripped and
hunted, here search a harvest.

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Wind comes over us unsung
if not for other sounds

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ancestral laboring the
memory of river water blades

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of quick tension led away.

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That battleground you
fastened over you, your skull,

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your face of fiber hearing it
if you can listen far enough.

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There is a continent
before the gods.

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There is a cure of
bone between behind you

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now the field is opening
its jaws below the ridge.

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There is no hollowness through
which this whispering can fall.

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No peace filled re-imagining
now it is yours.

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Repaid a monument through
which no bird calls seep.

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You have to see it here.

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The place reserved
for craft for prayer

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in which you pause unknowing.

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So these pieces of
the tree not life not

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replication grow around
us thickening however

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much we cut them back.

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The branches of black ivory
the leaves that open elsewhere

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to descend ungatherable around
another generation's thirst

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for everything between
itself and its own end.

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Do not come home they say.

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Begin again, take all
the time that's left.

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Take Africa.

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