And this goes on with the sort of, confessional moments.
This is a poem about my mother who had a--
she was a curser.
She had a she had a wonderfully--
you know, the euphemism would be acerbic wit,
something like that.
[LAUGHTER]
And so it's just about that.
It's about how-- it's about that activity where
you have to tell the old stories over and over and over again.
You have to remember the wounds over and over and over again.
There's no end to it.
Most of you know that there's such a thing
as confessional poetry and this is, sort of--
which is the tradition I come out of
and this poem is called "The Confessional Mode," sort of,
commentary about telling your worst stories
and, sort of, the dishonor of that.
"The Confessional Mode."
And most of the poem is in the voice of my mother.
They're quotes from her.
"'I wish somebody would take a razor and just slit
my throat'--
[LAUGHTER]
--my mother often used to say.
[LAUGHTER]
At the lovely time of evening when the stars gleamed
like spangles on a corset wrapped
around the broad, ungirlish waist of earth.
'Put a bag over my head, pretty please,
and let me blow my brains out in the sink.'
[LAUGHTER]
The mouth is such a terrible instrument, such
a bloody harmonica, wailing with complaints,
but it's the great insulters we remember,
the ones with a vocabulary of cancer and barbed wire.
'I'm the fucking Jew here', she would announce,
setting down the dinner plates, smiling like a woman invited
to consume a meal of broken teeth.
[LAUGHTER]
And everyone would sigh and shiver over their spaghetti--
[LAUGHTER]
--and wait for that particular Russian novel to be over.
[LAUGHTER]
What strange appetites we have that make us rewind time
and summon up the landscapes of our pain
long after the lips have been unleashed
from the humiliated smiles and the silverware
gone to the graveyard for old forks and knives.
Yet some craving draws me backwards and the words
for telling it march out of my mouth
with a pleasure that is almost biological.
As if the telling was a, sort of, sweet revenge.
As if I had turned into the person in my story,
a little bit more ruthless, old, and capable
of saying anything."