I really think you all are so lucky to have the Poetry
Center.
It's so amazing, the fact that you can have this community
and you can come together, not just to read here,
but just to share those books and that magical place
in space.
And it's just such a communal gathering place.
It's very powerful.
So it's really one place that will be the anti-grief,
I think, the Poetry Center.
So I'm going to read from a little series.
These are very short poems, and I'm
going to read five or six of them,
and then two more poems at the end.
These poems came out of after Ferguson.
I kept a journal in which I just wrote out
of frantic dismay every day in my journal,
and I was just so unhappy about what
was happening in our country.
But I feel like-- as you can probably tell in my poetry,
but I feel like spiritual life and civic life and animism
and the sense of ongoing beauty of existence
can all go together despite the tragedy.
And so the thing that I was studying at the time was--
well, three things.
I was studying lichen.
I love lichen because lichen is just like poetry.
It's several layers, and it's totally neglected.
No one looks at it.
So they walk past it, even though it's
doing really important work all the time, lichen.
It's breaking down.
It's making soil.
So it's major.
So I've been studying lichen for about 10 years
and writing about lichen and writing
in my journal about lichen.
And there's over 1,200 species in California,
and I think there are as many in Arizona too,
and you guys have great lichen here in the hills.
So anyway, I was studying lichen during Occupy, and also
in these protests after Ferguson,
and thinking about metaphor and simile
as two different but important functions, where
you're making a leap across or you're putting
things in the same place.
So this little series is called "Metaphor and Simile."
And the other presiding, I guess, inspiration of it--
I was reading Rosa Luxemburg's letters
and thinking about Rosa Parks.
So it's like two Rosas, one completely pacifist
and the other not pacifist at all.
She took part in lots of rebellion
and got imprisoned a lot.
And then Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's great book,
The Undercommons, so those were kind of-- so I'm just going
to read these without a break.
There's also some scientific references.
I like to mix scientific stuff without parsing it
just because I think it's really beautiful, a lot of the stuff
that you read, for instance, descriptions of lichen.
So I'll read six of the days.
There are 24 days in all, but I'll read six of them.
"Day 2.
A simile sets up space for you to doubt ever
getting past the suffering.
Rilke Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn staying mostly
in his room and where if they cried out, who,
if I cried out could hear the children killed.
A figure of destruction came to us and said,
such admirable life forms on the street as if love
grew black threads.
To be with friends you finally see,
inside the grief year, class grief, race grief,
loss of love and rain.
Ruffle lichen spreading near the lake like similes.
I had not checked my phone.
We need to talk.
Wood mind.
It's not just about your own little darling,
the wife of decomposers said.
Remember summer the poets read aloud inside their skin
where the undead meet the dead.
Voices sliced across the dusk, black cilia,
to read to each other in beauty in the dusk.
To see black-edged life forms on fences
to lean against ovals of energy while people said
listen in the modest dusk, to register the horror
then to pass energy across.
Cortex K and yellow, medulla K-, KC+ red to orange,
looks like punctuation while growing along,
knowing almost nothing, there are twin sides to everything
and the beautiful wrong side is always listening."