WEBVTT

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I really think you all are
so lucky to have the Poetry

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Center.

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It's so amazing, the fact that
you can have this community

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and you can come together,
not just to read here,

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but just to share those
books and that magical place

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in space.

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And it's just such a
communal gathering place.

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It's very powerful.

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So it's really one place
that will be the anti-grief,

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I think, the Poetry Center.

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So I'm going to read
from a little series.

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These are very
short poems, and I'm

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going to read five
or six of them,

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and then two more
poems at the end.

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These poems came out
of after Ferguson.

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I kept a journal in
which I just wrote out

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of frantic dismay every
day in my journal,

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and I was just so
unhappy about what

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was happening in our country.

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But I feel like-- as you can
probably tell in my poetry,

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but I feel like spiritual life
and civic life and animism

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and the sense of ongoing
beauty of existence

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can all go together
despite the tragedy.

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And so the thing that I was
studying at the time was--

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well, three things.

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I was studying lichen.

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I love lichen because
lichen is just like poetry.

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It's several layers, and
it's totally neglected.

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No one looks at it.

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So they walk past
it, even though it's

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doing really important
work all the time, lichen.

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It's breaking down.

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It's making soil.

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So it's major.

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So I've been studying
lichen for about 10 years

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and writing about
lichen and writing

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in my journal about lichen.

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And there's over 1,200
species in California,

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and I think there are
as many in Arizona too,

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and you guys have great
lichen here in the hills.

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So anyway, I was studying
lichen during Occupy, and also

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in these protests
after Ferguson,

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and thinking about
metaphor and simile

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as two different but
important functions, where

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you're making a leap
across or you're putting

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things in the same place.

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So this little series is
called "Metaphor and Simile."

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And the other presiding, I
guess, inspiration of it--

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I was reading Rosa
Luxemburg's letters

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and thinking about Rosa Parks.

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So it's like two Rosas,
one completely pacifist

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and the other not
pacifist at all.

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She took part in
lots of rebellion

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and got imprisoned a lot.

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And then Fred Moten and
Stefano Harney's great book,

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The Undercommons, so those were
kind of-- so I'm just going

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to read these without a break.

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There's also some
scientific references.

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I like to mix scientific
stuff without parsing it

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just because I think it's really
beautiful, a lot of the stuff

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that you read, for instance,
descriptions of lichen.

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So I'll read six of the days.

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There are 24 days in all,
but I'll read six of them.

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"Day 2.

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A simile sets up space
for you to doubt ever

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getting past the suffering.

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Rilke Wer, wenn ich schriee,
hörte mich denn staying mostly

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in his room and where
if they cried out, who,

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if I cried out could
hear the children killed.

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A figure of destruction
came to us and said,

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such admirable life forms
on the street as if love

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grew black threads.

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To be with friends
you finally see,

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inside the grief year,
class grief, race grief,

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loss of love and rain.

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Ruffle lichen spreading
near the lake like similes.

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I had not checked my phone.

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We need to talk.

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Wood mind.

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It's not just about
your own little darling,

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the wife of decomposers said.

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Remember summer the poets
read aloud inside their skin

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where the undead meet the dead.

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Voices sliced across
the dusk, black cilia,

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to read to each other
in beauty in the dusk.

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To see black-edged
life forms on fences

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to lean against ovals of
energy while people said

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listen in the modest dusk,
to register the horror

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then to pass energy across.

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Cortex K and yellow, medulla
K-, KC+ red to orange,

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looks like punctuation
while growing along,

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knowing almost nothing, there
are twin sides to everything

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and the beautiful wrong
side is always listening."

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