[APPLAUSE]
I don't know if this becomes a spectacle conversation.
But what I would say is I don't even
think I could write that poem.
You know, now, but I wrote it then.
So I'm just going to do one from each book, I think.
So there's "Hip Logic."
And there were other poems to choose in it,
but what I thought, especially after that one, is like, oh,
I could do slapstick.
So inside the book are these small 11-line poems,
and the anagram poems.
I do like forms and making them up sometimes.
So this one is called "Bowling."
And so, without going through the context
for this particular form, the basic rule
was like whatever word I got, I got them
randomly out of the newspaper.
Whatever the word it was, that was going
to be the subject of the poem.
So I have one like "Segregate."
That's easy, you can imagine what that's about.
Or "Careless," or "Corporal," so when I got bowling,
I was like, bowling?
And then, the other rule is that you have to use--
I like Scrabble quite a bit.
They call me The Scrabbler, so anyway.
So this is connected to it.
So inside of the poem is like, blow is in bowling.
You can hear that if you shuffle around boil.
So the words have to have bowling,
have to be made at the end of the line out of bowling.
Anyway, but here's violence, again,
slightly different angle on it.
"Bowling."
He got home late.
It's in the voice of a woman, it's
what I should say, like, a housewife.
And her husband's like a bowler.
OK.
He got home late and lingered in the kitchen.
And when I heard his wingtips shuffling down the hall,
I imagined a lion entering the bedroom.
I lit a candle and began to glow.
I was in the same fire pink gown I wore on our wedding
night, the one I won playing bingo.
I said, "Let's not talk about those glib pins
at the edge of a lane," and stretched as his long fold
out fingers approached.
But when he asked me to blow on his chicken noodle soup
to cool it down, my sweat began to boil.
Yes, I threw the soup on him your honor.
Then, I threw the bowl.
[LAUGHTER]
All right.
I don't have to explain that.
OK.
"Wind in the Box," so in "Wind in the Box,"
there are several poems with that title.
There are six of them.
So people will say to me, this is a suicide note.
This is not about spectacle, or maybe it is.
Why "Wind in the box"?
Why do you have six poems?
And I'm like, because it's a cube.
A box actually has six sides to it.
But it's an old book now.
No one's still figured it out, but that's what's going on.
So here's one of those poems.
And again, I guess, I'll say this.
So spectacle, as it relates to a kind of personal sense,
maybe that's the first poem, spectacle
in terms of a kind of imaginative sense, I think,
is maybe the last poem.
And then here, in the next book, it
has something to do with a sort of the political notion
of the spectacle of violence as Americans, watching that how
we relate to the things that America does bearing witness
to it while also being a member of it.
So this one is called "Wind in the box."
Even the dirt dreams of it now.
It is two roads along two rivers.
The sky, above a mother's face, the day her husband
leaves for war.
No blood and stars, but the blood and stars.
Let's find it and break its fucking neck.
Let's break its fucking jaw.
Let's break its fucking ganged-in vessels.
And if it pushes back, and a tiny blue rises on its cheek,
let's break that, too, until stars
dance in the corners of its eyes like white seeds.
And let's break those, too, until all the words we know
are split into.
No power but the power of need, let's get up ready to feel.
God bless the rage in us.
It's how we know each other.
We who keep vigil by the windows, we who pour ashes
from the windows into the wind, skin passing over skin, let's
walk up the hill and along the rows that do not ask questions.
Near the white and yellow flowers,
strangers are moored in size.
Soon, it will rise without kissing anyone goodbye.
It says we will not be renewed.
We will not be filled like the birdhouse.
It says, we will arrive unwashed.
Aren't you tired?
Let's lie down.
Let's cry out and rest.
What is it?
Don't ask me.