WEBVTT

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So yes, I wrote a
whole book sequence

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based on character meter.

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I typed the whole book on cell
phone in a period of 12 months.

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That was-- you know, either
that or I take pills.

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And it became
interesting to me, it

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was just a desire to continue
with the language of poetry.

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And it became interesting
to me to think

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of the notions in all
languages, I think,

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in all cultures of what I
consider relatively arbitrary

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ideation of meter or prosody.

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There is no neuroscientific
absolute unit of language,

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at least that we know of.

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And I thought it was
interesting how we're shifting,

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although, relatively in a
sort of a imperial fashion,

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if you will, to the idea
of the unit of language

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at the character count,
which is associated

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with capital, with capitalism.

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You cannot think of language
as a character count without

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thinking of what you pay for
your phone service on unlimited

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texts, or limited texts.

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So you have to pay
attention for the texts,

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for the character counts.

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If you send a message of
161 you've paid for two.

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And you left 159
orphaned characters

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for absolutely no good reason.

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Of course, we're all
rich enough and they all

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sell us this idea of unlimited
texting but around the world

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most people don't
have that option.

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And so it became
interesting for me

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to actually infuse the idea
of poetry in its wedding

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to capitalism.

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And also in relationship
to science and power,

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or technology and power.

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So this is an underlying
theme to the book,

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but having said
all that, I think

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that hopefully the
pleasure of the poems

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is separate from numbers.

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So-- so what I'm going
to do is I am just,

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since it's a whole book
of 90 some things I will--

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maybe today I will do
something different

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and-- oh, no, never mind.

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I was just going to
read as a sequence

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and sort of get you
in the imagined mood.

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"Immune."

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So the titles, the
spaces, everything

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counts as characters because
that's what the Gods tell us.

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And-- and again,
I said last night,

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but it was really interesting
the arbitrariness of the idea

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of the telex-- at--

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I mean the idea of the text
is 160 characters because two

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German engineers, I think, at
least-- or at least one of them

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was German, who studied, did
sort of a statistical search

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on telex and telegrams.

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And figured out that
so much can be done.

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Humans can communicate
so much data sufficiently

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in 160 characters or less.

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And so they chose that
relatively arbitrarily.

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And then of course,
Twitter teaches us

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with the link and all that
to even do it in less.

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So who knows but I thought
it was an interesting moment

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to document poetry
in this fleeting way.

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And let the IM go to hell.

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"Immune."

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My heart isn't another's.

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Love is no transplant.

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It can be, or when I'm dead, I
will give you my eyes and also

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my liver.

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You must suppress
their memory of me.

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"Commissure."

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Where your lips seem
to end small mouth.

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They extend and flutter, then
dip into your dimpling cheeks.

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In that marionette valley,
I want to rest my lips.

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"Descending Tongue."

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I am a fig of your imagination.

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Fig meant for it.

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You'll care a fig,
give a fig, bleach it.

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My flesh is red, my milk
white, my skin is honey sweat.

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"Iron Maiden."

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We're in the no
reply zone, still

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I will bang my body into
your body's rhythms.

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We know God is OK with
us touching, jamming

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silence with our breaths.

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"Bulb."

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My cyanide love in the pit,
you underestimate the vibe

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of bulbs in your dermis.

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I am wave, you are kelp,
not ninja in bamboo forest.

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We are gardener and tulip.

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"Eurydice."

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Low visibility, midsummer fog.

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You are deaf, cold, your
eyes a grasshopper statute

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of limitations on return.

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Now you are declassified.

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It is about to snow.

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"Ariadne."

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Your thread an odyssey in space.

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Institution's eyes
had subsidized

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before they left you.

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You became Sufi.

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Your God spun you.

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You hanging there spun back.

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"A Thousand and One Nights."

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Surely Penelope had sex
in her husband's absence

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with slave men and
women, the undocumented.

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Folks, In other words,
the blind could not see.

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"Divorce."

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Persephone, your
yearly sabbatical

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was always brief and forced.

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You couldn't begin
or end a book,

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yet you wrote, "not Catholic
and more stunning than Azrael."

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"Because."

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No touch, no lover, except
in the mirror, neuron.

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All lovers betray.

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All lovers pray to the mirror.

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Someone's singing in the
shower, glass of glass of glass.

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"They."

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Lost each other in the war.

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He fled with the
kids to the border.

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Two years later, she made
it to the refugee camp.

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He'd remarried.

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She became the second wife.

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The husband was a pharmacist.

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The multilingual doctor
who delivered the news

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was laughing.

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The worst catastrophe,
he said, makes you laugh.

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I never met the wives.

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The doctor would die later
on from an unknown illness.

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He knew what it was, the risk
of stigma and loss of income.

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A brilliant clinician he was.

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For him death was a
thing that happens.

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As if a country I
had been building

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had come crashing in a
single life, his life.

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Not country exactly but
lots of small lives.

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Mr. Measure.

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Doc took photos
seriously, unlike us

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in the predestined world
our spontaneous poses.

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He posed as if his full
being depended on it,

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as if it were a silent movie.

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"Discipline and Punish."

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Zeus, the first photographer,
often using flash, documenting

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the world, bearing witness.

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It's not his forms so much
as his high tech criminality.

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