WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:01.930 align:middle line:90% Yeah, thank you all for coming. 00:00:01.930 --> 00:00:06.150 align:middle line:84% And I realized when I got here earlier 00:00:06.150 --> 00:00:10.560 align:middle line:84% that this was the place where I both read 00:00:10.560 --> 00:00:13.620 align:middle line:84% and wrote the last of the lectures 00:00:13.620 --> 00:00:16.320 align:middle line:90% in the series of lectures. 00:00:16.320 --> 00:00:21.450 align:middle line:84% And that one of the things that was 00:00:21.450 --> 00:00:25.530 align:middle line:84% consistent throughout the experience of writing 00:00:25.530 --> 00:00:27.480 align:middle line:84% the lectures and thinking about them 00:00:27.480 --> 00:00:32.940 align:middle line:84% and thinking about my own work and the work I cared about 00:00:32.940 --> 00:00:35.280 align:middle line:90% was an idea-- 00:00:35.280 --> 00:00:40.900 align:middle line:84% was something about the experience of poems aloud, 00:00:40.900 --> 00:00:46.840 align:middle line:84% of both hearing and speaking, and poems as they exist aloud, 00:00:46.840 --> 00:00:50.860 align:middle line:84% partially because I was making that happen and thinking 00:00:50.860 --> 00:00:53.390 align:middle line:90% about making that happen. 00:00:53.390 --> 00:01:01.450 align:middle line:84% So what I'd like to read now is a part of a lecture, which-- 00:01:01.450 --> 00:01:03.670 align:middle line:84% well, I think it became about that, 00:01:03.670 --> 00:01:09.820 align:middle line:84% or that's what eventually happened in the lecture. 00:01:09.820 --> 00:01:12.940 align:middle line:84% I'll read you the beginning of it. 00:01:12.940 --> 00:01:16.300 align:middle line:84% It's called "Friendship, Porousness, 00:01:16.300 --> 00:01:18.655 align:middle line:84% and the Intimate Experience of Poetry." 00:01:18.655 --> 00:01:24.630 align:middle line:90% 00:01:24.630 --> 00:01:27.180 align:middle line:90% "I was on Cape Cod. 00:01:27.180 --> 00:01:29.850 align:middle line:90% I saw a boy on the beach. 00:01:29.850 --> 00:01:31.410 align:middle line:90% He had a fishing pole. 00:01:31.410 --> 00:01:33.930 align:middle line:84% He was sort of walking around, and he 00:01:33.930 --> 00:01:36.840 align:middle line:84% had a kite attached to the fishing pole, 00:01:36.840 --> 00:01:40.320 align:middle line:84% I guess so he could hold it up, and so he could 00:01:40.320 --> 00:01:42.390 align:middle line:90% reel it in and let it out. 00:01:42.390 --> 00:01:45.810 align:middle line:84% And he looked like a little English boy with his shorts. 00:01:45.810 --> 00:01:49.050 align:middle line:84% And even now, I just sort of picture him 00:01:49.050 --> 00:01:54.030 align:middle line:84% like two old etchings drawn together, the kite flying 00:01:54.030 --> 00:01:57.090 align:middle line:90% above him out of the picture. 00:01:57.090 --> 00:02:01.890 align:middle line:84% I walked around, reading Cape Cod, the being alone 00:02:01.890 --> 00:02:04.440 align:middle line:90% and in actual space. 00:02:04.440 --> 00:02:08.400 align:middle line:84% The actual space and sand and water-- 00:02:08.400 --> 00:02:13.770 align:middle line:84% all those bodies washed up on the beach in 1849. 00:02:13.770 --> 00:02:18.480 align:middle line:84% Coldness, vastness, and presence kicking sand around 00:02:18.480 --> 00:02:21.660 align:middle line:90% and looking out at the clouds. 00:02:21.660 --> 00:02:24.660 align:middle line:84% The sense of form that finds itself 00:02:24.660 --> 00:02:28.320 align:middle line:84% constantly rearticulating in them. 00:02:28.320 --> 00:02:31.500 align:middle line:84% Flying a kite, you provide attention, 00:02:31.500 --> 00:02:36.000 align:middle line:84% attempts at something physical, familiarity and awareness. 00:02:36.000 --> 00:02:39.192 align:middle line:90% You're pulling at it in the air. 00:02:39.192 --> 00:02:42.240 align:middle line:84% Air sometimes forms itself as wind 00:02:42.240 --> 00:02:46.080 align:middle line:84% into winds, winds varying and indiscreet, 00:02:46.080 --> 00:02:48.450 align:middle line:90% so catching causes form. 00:02:48.450 --> 00:02:50.910 align:middle line:90% Attention gives it form. 00:02:50.910 --> 00:02:54.120 align:middle line:90% What stories bear repeating? 00:02:54.120 --> 00:02:57.900 align:middle line:84% News of the day, we demonstrate the motions 00:02:57.900 --> 00:02:59.880 align:middle line:90% of Earth, its shape. 00:02:59.880 --> 00:03:04.800 align:middle line:84% Birds pass through trees or sit watching or in song, 00:03:04.800 --> 00:03:06.660 align:middle line:90% not sounding afraid. 00:03:06.660 --> 00:03:11.190 align:middle line:84% Eyes make walls, dissolving stone but blinded. 00:03:11.190 --> 00:03:17.910 align:middle line:84% The waves, seas-- how forgotten stars dashed in the water. 00:03:17.910 --> 00:03:21.510 align:middle line:84% That's Larry Eigner 50 years ago this week. 00:03:21.510 --> 00:03:24.510 align:middle line:90% What stories bear repeating? 00:03:24.510 --> 00:03:28.260 align:middle line:84% News of the day, we demonstrate the motions 00:03:28.260 --> 00:03:30.930 align:middle line:90% of Earth, its shape. 00:03:30.930 --> 00:03:36.000 align:middle line:84% Birds pass through trees or sit watching or in song, 00:03:36.000 --> 00:03:37.710 align:middle line:90% not sounding afraid. 00:03:37.710 --> 00:03:42.540 align:middle line:84% Eyes make walls, dissolving stone but blinded. 00:03:42.540 --> 00:03:49.200 align:middle line:84% The waves, seas-- how forgotten stars dashed in the water. 00:03:49.200 --> 00:03:52.740 align:middle line:84% In world, a kind of span, in span 00:03:52.740 --> 00:03:55.350 align:middle line:84% a kind of time, a presence and a feeling, 00:03:55.350 --> 00:04:01.860 align:middle line:84% cooperative, simultaneous form realized and released 00:04:01.860 --> 00:04:07.920 align:middle line:84% a temporary state of selfness, a meditation, a shared state, 00:04:07.920 --> 00:04:11.280 align:middle line:90% and a dispersal in that sharing. 00:04:11.280 --> 00:04:15.030 align:middle line:84% Partly just because you're watching the kite move around 00:04:15.030 --> 00:04:18.300 align:middle line:84% in the sky while you're doing it with your hands, 00:04:18.300 --> 00:04:21.690 align:middle line:84% it's a physical thing, like listening or walking. 00:04:21.690 --> 00:04:25.980 align:middle line:84% That responsive presence propelled or just a loafing 00:04:25.980 --> 00:04:29.310 align:middle line:84% and wandering about in it but in it 00:04:29.310 --> 00:04:32.040 align:middle line:84% and not getting there, getting there, or going, 00:04:32.040 --> 00:04:35.070 align:middle line:84% a kind of physical distraction guided 00:04:35.070 --> 00:04:40.980 align:middle line:84% by attractions, concerns, and leanings, like walking. 00:04:40.980 --> 00:04:45.930 align:middle line:84% The poem's free form and moving, access and reflective space 00:04:45.930 --> 00:04:49.800 align:middle line:84% for the constant art of natural formation, 00:04:49.800 --> 00:04:53.610 align:middle line:84% like if a waterfall were made of the earth and rock it 00:04:53.610 --> 00:04:57.930 align:middle line:84% flows over, or just, say, clouds, 00:04:57.930 --> 00:05:02.940 align:middle line:84% the forming and changing of themselves making themselves. 00:05:02.940 --> 00:05:05.730 align:middle line:84% Even while they are existing in a book, 00:05:05.730 --> 00:05:09.810 align:middle line:84% all those words are out there doing other things. 00:05:09.810 --> 00:05:11.820 align:middle line:84% While you're reading them in your poem, 00:05:11.820 --> 00:05:16.050 align:middle line:84% they're out there in the world as well, kind of polyamorous, 00:05:16.050 --> 00:05:19.650 align:middle line:84% suggestible, and infinitely occupied. 00:05:19.650 --> 00:05:22.830 align:middle line:84% And I feel as though I am trying to recognize it 00:05:22.830 --> 00:05:27.300 align:middle line:84% as something temporary through the experience of writing 00:05:27.300 --> 00:05:30.270 align:middle line:84% in the same way it appears temporary through 00:05:30.270 --> 00:05:35.220 align:middle line:84% the experience of reading, capable of remaining temporary, 00:05:35.220 --> 00:05:39.960 align:middle line:84% moments of today the way it elevates out. 00:05:39.960 --> 00:05:44.340 align:middle line:84% Sometimes I think of the poem as something discreetly placed 00:05:44.340 --> 00:05:49.350 align:middle line:84% in time, that the appreciable experience of the poem 00:05:49.350 --> 00:05:55.410 align:middle line:84% happens primarily in the moment of engagement and reflection. 00:05:55.410 --> 00:05:59.800 align:middle line:84% But doesn't it happen so many other times too? 00:05:59.800 --> 00:06:01.410 align:middle line:90% And maybe that's not even it. 00:06:01.410 --> 00:06:06.270 align:middle line:84% Maybe it's just that things that are alive or were alive 00:06:06.270 --> 00:06:08.430 align:middle line:90% don't seem finite. 00:06:08.430 --> 00:06:15.090 align:middle line:84% When dead seem gone, sure, but seemed gone at other times too, 00:06:15.090 --> 00:06:21.780 align:middle line:84% and seem here sometimes alive, even now, and poetry 00:06:21.780 --> 00:06:24.940 align:middle line:90% falls into that space between. 00:06:24.940 --> 00:06:29.800 align:middle line:84% When reading aloud, confronted by embraced real presence, 00:06:29.800 --> 00:06:34.930 align:middle line:84% you are there in the poem, among the enacted world, 00:06:34.930 --> 00:06:39.160 align:middle line:84% which happens when poems are getting made as well. 00:06:39.160 --> 00:06:42.400 align:middle line:84% I think of the haiku poets traveling and making 00:06:42.400 --> 00:06:47.920 align:middle line:84% poems, spirit of openness, haiku as conduit, response, 00:06:47.920 --> 00:06:49.570 align:middle line:90% and proof. 00:06:49.570 --> 00:06:54.100 align:middle line:84% So the life of the haiku poet is to exist and integrate 00:06:54.100 --> 00:06:59.680 align:middle line:84% thoroughly and fluidly into that existence the poetic act. 00:06:59.680 --> 00:07:02.740 align:middle line:84% The ways of being in the world are in its way, 00:07:02.740 --> 00:07:06.610 align:middle line:84% through its way, a kind of metabolism-- 00:07:06.610 --> 00:07:10.570 align:middle line:84% social, shared, and this feeling strange, 00:07:10.570 --> 00:07:14.860 align:middle line:84% if you're considering a poem as a singular 00:07:14.860 --> 00:07:21.010 align:middle line:84% thing, some unalterable bit of perfection, finite and resolute 00:07:21.010 --> 00:07:24.820 align:middle line:84% in its completeness, and that's just one way 00:07:24.820 --> 00:07:27.310 align:middle line:90% to think about poems. 00:07:27.310 --> 00:07:30.970 align:middle line:84% But isn't it more organic and changing? 00:07:30.970 --> 00:07:34.930 align:middle line:84% Centuries and centuries of spoken poems, 00:07:34.930 --> 00:07:38.290 align:middle line:84% of stories constructing and happening, 00:07:38.290 --> 00:07:41.590 align:middle line:84% the encounters of people in space and time 00:07:41.590 --> 00:07:44.110 align:middle line:90% they are made to exist? 00:07:44.110 --> 00:07:47.860 align:middle line:84% If people are there, you speak to them, change for them. 00:07:47.860 --> 00:07:52.480 align:middle line:84% That story as you speak to them, various repetitions and highlit 00:07:52.480 --> 00:07:57.100 align:middle line:84% senses become central, a kind of guidance. 00:07:57.100 --> 00:07:59.860 align:middle line:84% Think of the troubadours coming to town, 00:07:59.860 --> 00:08:02.290 align:middle line:84% wandering around and incorporating 00:08:02.290 --> 00:08:05.740 align:middle line:84% the people they found into their tales, 00:08:05.740 --> 00:08:08.860 align:middle line:84% drawing them toward the spots where they would eventually 00:08:08.860 --> 00:08:14.800 align:middle line:84% perform an audience, now active, visible, part of the narrative, 00:08:14.800 --> 00:08:17.140 align:middle line:84% following to hear what happens to them. 00:08:17.140 --> 00:08:21.338 align:middle line:90% 00:08:21.338 --> 00:08:25.430 align:middle line:84% And it's not just the oral traditions. 00:08:25.430 --> 00:08:28.700 align:middle line:84% Think of ancient fragments anecdotally 00:08:28.700 --> 00:08:30.920 align:middle line:90% kept and written down. 00:08:30.920 --> 00:08:35.720 align:middle line:84% Think of samizdat editions and desperately scribbled copies. 00:08:35.720 --> 00:08:39.320 align:middle line:84% Think of the entire practice of translation. 00:08:39.320 --> 00:08:43.309 align:middle line:84% Think of Walt Whitman changing his one book and many poems 00:08:43.309 --> 00:08:46.550 align:middle line:84% over and over again or Emily Dickinson 00:08:46.550 --> 00:08:50.630 align:middle line:84% leaving countless private variants to be considered. 00:08:50.630 --> 00:08:53.990 align:middle line:84% All the variorum editions of our most esteemed 00:08:53.990 --> 00:08:58.820 align:middle line:84% poets, and most poems never end up in print at all, 00:08:58.820 --> 00:09:02.840 align:middle line:84% private accumulation of drafts to be gone through or not, 00:09:02.840 --> 00:09:06.320 align:middle line:84% but still to exist, variant and real. 00:09:06.320 --> 00:09:11.390 align:middle line:84% And now, in the 21st century, it's basically moot again. 00:09:11.390 --> 00:09:15.890 align:middle line:84% Easy to love the poets, their splendor falling 00:09:15.890 --> 00:09:19.910 align:middle line:84% all over the pages, extorting atomic rainbows. 00:09:19.910 --> 00:09:23.510 align:middle line:84% Easy to love the poets, their splendor falling 00:09:23.510 --> 00:09:26.750 align:middle line:90% all over the pages into my lap. 00:09:26.750 --> 00:09:32.600 align:middle line:84% That's Elise Cowen, published now years after she died. 00:09:32.600 --> 00:09:36.590 align:middle line:84% Easy to love the poets, their splendor falling 00:09:36.590 --> 00:09:40.820 align:middle line:84% all over the pages, extorting atomic rainbows. 00:09:40.820 --> 00:09:44.450 align:middle line:84% Easy to love the poets, their splendor falling 00:09:44.450 --> 00:09:48.050 align:middle line:90% all over the pages into my lap. 00:09:48.050 --> 00:09:52.700 align:middle line:84% I'm trying to imagine now the central experience of the poem 00:09:52.700 --> 00:09:55.440 align:middle line:90% as something temporary. 00:09:55.440 --> 00:09:58.280 align:middle line:84% And so I imagine it as something aloud, 00:09:58.280 --> 00:10:02.060 align:middle line:84% something spoken out, or aloud inside you, 00:10:02.060 --> 00:10:04.730 align:middle line:84% a muscular compulsion, the livingness, 00:10:04.730 --> 00:10:09.830 align:middle line:84% a spell in the space of it as the dancer articulating space 00:10:09.830 --> 00:10:11.900 align:middle line:90% moves around. 00:10:11.900 --> 00:10:15.230 align:middle line:84% Their bodies moving around in what seemed empty 00:10:15.230 --> 00:10:18.890 align:middle line:84% and then are there, or there it is, 00:10:18.890 --> 00:10:23.000 align:middle line:84% or here we are, making spaces too with poems. 00:10:23.000 --> 00:10:26.120 align:middle line:84% We make them, are in them, made by them 00:10:26.120 --> 00:10:29.360 align:middle line:90% a resonance and accumulation. 00:10:29.360 --> 00:10:33.920 align:middle line:84% The poem, more and more an experience, a flash of being, 00:10:33.920 --> 00:10:38.540 align:middle line:84% when I step through the door, everything has changed. 00:10:38.540 --> 00:10:43.100 align:middle line:84% Finally, it is out the door, past homes, down the trail. 00:10:43.100 --> 00:10:47.600 align:middle line:84% The lovely beach draws me into her drawing. 00:10:47.600 --> 00:10:52.100 align:middle line:84% Finally, I am past the fear of life's paucity. 00:10:52.100 --> 00:10:55.460 align:middle line:84% Green Angels, stream in hot California, 00:10:55.460 --> 00:10:58.770 align:middle line:90% and the stillness seeds popping. 00:10:58.770 --> 00:11:00.950 align:middle line:90% That's Joanne Kyger. 00:11:00.950 --> 00:11:05.150 align:middle line:84% When I step through the door, everything has changed. 00:11:05.150 --> 00:11:09.260 align:middle line:84% Finally, it is out the door, past homes, down the trail. 00:11:09.260 --> 00:11:13.250 align:middle line:84% The lovely beach draws me into her drawing. 00:11:13.250 --> 00:11:17.540 align:middle line:84% Finally, I am past the fear of life's paucity. 00:11:17.540 --> 00:11:20.960 align:middle line:84% Green Angels, stream in hot California, 00:11:20.960 --> 00:11:25.490 align:middle line:84% and in the stillness, seeds popping. 00:11:25.490 --> 00:11:28.220 align:middle line:84% A reading and writing kind of closer 00:11:28.220 --> 00:11:31.610 align:middle line:84% to drawing than painting, drawing 00:11:31.610 --> 00:11:37.010 align:middle line:84% its incomplete presence, allowing in its fragmentary way 00:11:37.010 --> 00:11:38.340 align:middle line:90% essential. 00:11:38.340 --> 00:11:41.900 align:middle line:90% It's what it is, time. 00:11:41.900 --> 00:11:45.260 align:middle line:84% Traditional painters, using drawing as a way 00:11:45.260 --> 00:11:49.460 align:middle line:84% to identify borders, by going through them, over them, 00:11:49.460 --> 00:11:53.720 align:middle line:84% by failing in ways their paintings couldn't, in ways 00:11:53.720 --> 00:11:57.470 align:middle line:84% they didn't want their masterpieces to fail. 00:11:57.470 --> 00:12:02.120 align:middle line:84% I think of Emerson, his saying that friendship 00:12:02.120 --> 00:12:04.820 align:middle line:90% is the masterpiece of nature. 00:12:04.820 --> 00:12:07.820 align:middle line:84% Or really, he says it may well be reckoned 00:12:07.820 --> 00:12:10.100 align:middle line:90% the masterpiece of nature. 00:12:10.100 --> 00:12:11.960 align:middle line:84% That this conception of masterpiece 00:12:11.960 --> 00:12:16.580 align:middle line:84% is unfixed, that it is moving, that it will remain 00:12:16.580 --> 00:12:19.280 align:middle line:90% so, always in flux, temporary. 00:12:19.280 --> 00:12:21.650 align:middle line:84% I'm thinking of clouds again and people, 00:12:21.650 --> 00:12:25.280 align:middle line:84% but also that it can only be understood, 00:12:25.280 --> 00:12:29.540 align:middle line:84% that it can only be recognized fully from the inside, 00:12:29.540 --> 00:12:32.510 align:middle line:90% privately, intimately. 00:12:32.510 --> 00:12:35.750 align:middle line:84% So the masters concerned with their masterpieces 00:12:35.750 --> 00:12:38.360 align:middle line:84% would make these drawings, these studies, 00:12:38.360 --> 00:12:41.810 align:middle line:84% seeing the edges of the visible, and to do so, 00:12:41.810 --> 00:12:45.650 align:middle line:84% seeding all sorts of control and accuracy 00:12:45.650 --> 00:12:49.320 align:middle line:84% to something expressive and spontaneous. 00:12:49.320 --> 00:12:52.310 align:middle line:84% How else find the look on that person's face 00:12:52.310 --> 00:12:55.460 align:middle line:84% or the emotion in that stone house? 00:12:55.460 --> 00:12:59.000 align:middle line:84% And there is something about this drawing, this unrestrained 00:12:59.000 --> 00:13:04.430 align:middle line:84% extension beyond, embraced in the poem, the improvisation, 00:13:04.430 --> 00:13:08.960 align:middle line:84% sure, toward art, but also as art. 00:13:08.960 --> 00:13:12.260 align:middle line:90% The act as art as poetry-- 00:13:12.260 --> 00:13:18.380 align:middle line:84% the partial, the social, the bodily, the private, the free. 00:13:18.380 --> 00:13:22.050 align:middle line:84% I feel friendship's continual presence, 00:13:22.050 --> 00:13:24.180 align:middle line:84% the way a poem might stay with you, 00:13:24.180 --> 00:13:27.930 align:middle line:84% a poet, the exuberant passions, the attractions, 00:13:27.930 --> 00:13:31.770 align:middle line:84% the being consumed, and inside of it, everything 00:13:31.770 --> 00:13:32.850 align:middle line:90% in and through it. 00:13:32.850 --> 00:13:37.260 align:middle line:84% I feel the poem unrestrained, sincerely present, 00:13:37.260 --> 00:13:41.130 align:middle line:84% and improvisational at its core and exposure 00:13:41.130 --> 00:13:46.470 align:middle line:84% of unknowing, complex and unanswered, unconcerned 00:13:46.470 --> 00:13:48.310 align:middle line:90% with propriety or etiquette. 00:13:48.310 --> 00:13:53.880 align:middle line:84% The freedom that is friendship, the consent to accept that 00:13:53.880 --> 00:13:57.960 align:middle line:84% allows the friend unrestrained to speak and to be 00:13:57.960 --> 00:14:02.010 align:middle line:84% heard, not immediately designated or judged, 00:14:02.010 --> 00:14:03.930 align:middle line:90% but encountered. 00:14:03.930 --> 00:14:07.290 align:middle line:84% I think it's that I found in the poems 00:14:07.290 --> 00:14:09.930 align:middle line:90% when I found the poems I loved. 00:14:09.930 --> 00:14:13.530 align:middle line:84% Some ecstatic circuit's been joined, 00:14:13.530 --> 00:14:16.830 align:middle line:90% and that's how friendship feels. 00:14:16.830 --> 00:14:20.160 align:middle line:84% I remember a terrible professor in school 00:14:20.160 --> 00:14:25.440 align:middle line:84% saying that if you put a Rembrandt on a cliff 00:14:25.440 --> 00:14:28.350 align:middle line:84% and pushed someone off the cliff, 00:14:28.350 --> 00:14:32.040 align:middle line:90% its expression wouldn't change. 00:14:32.040 --> 00:14:33.071 align:middle line:90% Anyhow-- 00:14:33.071 --> 00:14:35.280 align:middle line:90% [LAUGHTER] 00:14:35.280 --> 00:14:39.060 align:middle line:90% That's one argument. 00:14:39.060 --> 00:14:41.940 align:middle line:84% And, of course, there are plenty of arguments for that, 00:14:41.940 --> 00:14:43.530 align:middle line:90% but I wonder-- 00:14:43.530 --> 00:14:46.590 align:middle line:84% what I wonder is, why accept or demand 00:14:46.590 --> 00:14:49.080 align:middle line:84% that set of values if what you want 00:14:49.080 --> 00:14:53.130 align:middle line:84% is something more communal, if your presence is already 00:14:53.130 --> 00:14:56.760 align:middle line:84% demanding another communal place? 00:14:56.760 --> 00:15:00.120 align:middle line:84% We isolate and individualize, but it is just 00:15:00.120 --> 00:15:04.290 align:middle line:84% a ridiculous notion to propose a separation of one human 00:15:04.290 --> 00:15:06.390 align:middle line:90% from the other ones. 00:15:06.390 --> 00:15:10.020 align:middle line:84% I found you, came in the room, and started 00:15:10.020 --> 00:15:12.120 align:middle line:90% talking and ironing. 00:15:12.120 --> 00:15:13.650 align:middle line:90% I turned on the radio. 00:15:13.650 --> 00:15:15.570 align:middle line:90% The night rose around us. 00:15:15.570 --> 00:15:18.630 align:middle line:90% I forget you were looking at me. 00:15:18.630 --> 00:15:21.180 align:middle line:84% I came in the room and started ironing. 00:15:21.180 --> 00:15:23.310 align:middle line:90% The night rose around us. 00:15:23.310 --> 00:15:26.640 align:middle line:84% The pinnacles, the far-off spines of trees, 00:15:26.640 --> 00:15:29.550 align:middle line:90% like the lakes under us, hollow. 00:15:29.550 --> 00:15:34.290 align:middle line:84% Stones to go through in the distance, close. 00:15:34.290 --> 00:15:39.300 align:middle line:84% The eye brings the breeze under us, through us, over us. 00:15:39.300 --> 00:15:41.280 align:middle line:90% That's Joanne Kyger again. 00:15:41.280 --> 00:15:44.400 align:middle line:84% I found you, came in the room, and started 00:15:44.400 --> 00:15:46.200 align:middle line:90% talking and ironing. 00:15:46.200 --> 00:15:49.470 align:middle line:84% I turned on the radio, and night rose around us. 00:15:49.470 --> 00:15:51.870 align:middle line:90% I forget you were looking at me. 00:15:51.870 --> 00:15:55.080 align:middle line:84% I came in the room and started ironing. 00:15:55.080 --> 00:15:58.170 align:middle line:84% The night rose around us, the pinnacles, 00:15:58.170 --> 00:16:02.040 align:middle line:84% the far-off spines of trees, like the lakes under us, 00:16:02.040 --> 00:16:03.090 align:middle line:90% hollow. 00:16:03.090 --> 00:16:07.530 align:middle line:84% Stones to go through in the distance, close. 00:16:07.530 --> 00:16:12.210 align:middle line:84% The eye brings the breeze under us, through us, over us. 00:16:12.210 --> 00:16:13.860 align:middle line:90% I'm moving with the poem. 00:16:13.860 --> 00:16:14.700 align:middle line:90% I found it. 00:16:14.700 --> 00:16:15.930 align:middle line:90% I can hear it. 00:16:15.930 --> 00:16:18.810 align:middle line:84% The experience of reading and listening aloud-- 00:16:18.810 --> 00:16:22.980 align:middle line:84% it's something so surprising, more future than past. 00:16:22.980 --> 00:16:26.520 align:middle line:84% You can recognize it, and you can tend to it in a way. 00:16:26.520 --> 00:16:28.950 align:middle line:84% The other things disappear, and you 00:16:28.950 --> 00:16:31.170 align:middle line:84% move through the space of the poem, 00:16:31.170 --> 00:16:35.370 align:middle line:84% in the poem's present, some other present receiving. 00:16:35.370 --> 00:16:38.250 align:middle line:84% I'm hearing and speaking at the same time. 00:16:38.250 --> 00:16:41.400 align:middle line:84% My lips are moving when I write, and this 00:16:41.400 --> 00:16:43.770 align:middle line:84% is what I'm feeling about reading aloud. 00:16:43.770 --> 00:16:47.220 align:middle line:84% Reading aloud, I get drawn to stand up. 00:16:47.220 --> 00:16:48.840 align:middle line:90% I expand my chest. 00:16:48.840 --> 00:16:50.220 align:middle line:90% I move my arms. 00:16:50.220 --> 00:16:52.050 align:middle line:90% I rock or sway. 00:16:52.050 --> 00:16:56.070 align:middle line:84% My head or jaw bobs in some strange rhythmic fashion, 00:16:56.070 --> 00:16:58.590 align:middle line:90% or I whisper, or I mumble. 00:16:58.590 --> 00:17:02.040 align:middle line:84% I close in my shoulders, my body making 00:17:02.040 --> 00:17:07.200 align:middle line:84% intimate my reverberations, just moving my lips to make and hear 00:17:07.200 --> 00:17:12.359 align:middle line:84% the words form physical and sounding out, over and over, 00:17:12.359 --> 00:17:14.440 align:middle line:90% touching my lips to each other. 00:17:14.440 --> 00:17:18.930 align:middle line:84% And if I cover my mouth, there, my breath is on my hand, 00:17:18.930 --> 00:17:21.734 align:middle line:84% or close my eyes and hear a line. 00:17:21.734 --> 00:17:24.829 align:middle line:90% 00:17:24.829 --> 00:17:28.359 align:middle line:84% There is this therapeutic practice 00:17:28.359 --> 00:17:32.200 align:middle line:84% in which the therapist touches the patient 00:17:32.200 --> 00:17:35.860 align:middle line:84% or asks the patient to do some physical tasks, 00:17:35.860 --> 00:17:44.110 align:middle line:84% like holding on to the edge of a table or their own hand 00:17:44.110 --> 00:17:48.760 align:middle line:84% and, in doing this, occupies the body of the patient 00:17:48.760 --> 00:17:52.540 align:middle line:84% and directs the conscious mind of the patient 00:17:52.540 --> 00:17:55.210 align:middle line:90% to that occupation. 00:17:55.210 --> 00:17:59.560 align:middle line:84% And reading aloud can be basically the same thing-- 00:17:59.560 --> 00:18:02.950 align:middle line:84% a guide provided, so you are occupied 00:18:02.950 --> 00:18:07.360 align:middle line:84% in the bodily performance of your conscious, critical mind 00:18:07.360 --> 00:18:10.570 align:middle line:84% applied to the task, the self of you 00:18:10.570 --> 00:18:15.210 align:middle line:84% in a cloud of experience, sound, and sense and the performing 00:18:15.210 --> 00:18:15.710 align:middle line:90% of it. 00:18:15.710 --> 00:18:19.540 align:middle line:84% The body pulsing with its own enactment, 00:18:19.540 --> 00:18:23.710 align:middle line:84% the reverberations in one expressive and real, 00:18:23.710 --> 00:18:29.260 align:middle line:84% the space and zone engaged as one might in the world world, 00:18:29.260 --> 00:18:33.700 align:middle line:84% unattributing and human-like, wandering around. 00:18:33.700 --> 00:18:40.030 align:middle line:84% Then the poem experience causing experience in everything else-- 00:18:40.030 --> 00:18:43.800 align:middle line:84% its effective potential on myself of that, 00:18:43.800 --> 00:18:48.520 align:middle line:84% of what, to me, is recognizable or some way bodily, 00:18:48.520 --> 00:18:51.880 align:middle line:84% essentially attended, spiritually present, 00:18:51.880 --> 00:18:55.840 align:middle line:84% a compostable mass always heaving and sprouting 00:18:55.840 --> 00:19:01.300 align:middle line:84% sores and flowers on the pile, things microscopic, the glass 00:19:01.300 --> 00:19:05.770 align:middle line:84% fashioned full, the brutal physicality of actions 00:19:05.770 --> 00:19:08.260 align:middle line:84% and their results after the results. 00:19:08.260 --> 00:19:14.080 align:middle line:84% Or is the poem a reflection of a combination of physical needs? 00:19:14.080 --> 00:19:18.850 align:middle line:84% I need my voice, my body, my spirit to make these sounds, 00:19:18.850 --> 00:19:23.770 align:middle line:84% and so out they come, out to meet those needs, 00:19:23.770 --> 00:19:26.260 align:middle line:84% the result of writing those poems 00:19:26.260 --> 00:19:29.440 align:middle line:84% being that those things got said, 00:19:29.440 --> 00:19:34.320 align:middle line:84% and the experience of reading being I said them. 00:19:34.320 --> 00:19:41.130 align:middle line:84% I saw myself a ring of bone in the clear extreme of all of it 00:19:41.130 --> 00:19:46.380 align:middle line:84% and vowed always to be open to it, that all of it 00:19:46.380 --> 00:19:51.840 align:middle line:84% might flow through, and then heard ring of bone, 00:19:51.840 --> 00:19:55.620 align:middle line:90% where ring is what a bell does. 00:19:55.620 --> 00:19:57.900 align:middle line:90% That's Lew Welch. 00:19:57.900 --> 00:20:05.220 align:middle line:84% I saw myself a ring of bone in the clear stream of all of it 00:20:05.220 --> 00:20:09.870 align:middle line:84% and vowed always to be open to it, that all of it 00:20:09.870 --> 00:20:15.390 align:middle line:84% might flow through, and then heard ring of bone, 00:20:15.390 --> 00:20:19.710 align:middle line:90% where ring is what a bell does." 00:20:19.710 --> 00:20:23.060 align:middle line:90% [CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]