WEBVTT

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I was very lucky to get to know
Kenneth Koch in the last six

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years of his life.

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He is very, very
important to me,

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as a poet, which is
incredibly obvious.

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I think most of the time I get
the sort of figmentive portion

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of [INAUDIBLE].

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And when he died, I felt
like I should write.

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I wrote an elegy.

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It was an impossible
task for me,

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so I tried to make
it very, very small.

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It's called "Elegy
on Toy Piano."

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"You don't need a
pony to connect you

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to the unseeable or an airplane
to connect you to the sky.

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Necessary it is to die if
you are a living thing, which

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you have no choice about.

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Necessary it is to love to
live, and there are many manuals

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but in all important
ways one is on one's own.

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You need not cut off your hand.

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No need to eat a bouquet.

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Your head becomes a peach pit.

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Your tongue a honeycomb.

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Necessary is to live to love,
to charge into the burning tower

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then charge back out, and
necessary it is to die.

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Even for the grass, even
for the pony connecting you

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to what can't be grasped.

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The injured gazelle
falls behind the herd.

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One last wild enjambment.

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Because of the
sores in his mouth,

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the great poet struggles
with a dumpling.

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His work has enlarged
the world but the world

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is about to stop including him.

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He is the tower the
world runs out of.

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When something
becomes ash, there's

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nothing you can do
to turn it back.

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About this, even
diamonds do not lie."

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Thank you.

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[APPLAUSE]

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