WEBVTT

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From the get go, Blacks--

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It hadn't rained in
three weeks and my jaw

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is so tight it clicks
like my mother's

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heels in the early
morning kitchen

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every time I try to take a walk.

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Indy and summertime's
disreputable shimmer

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of salt and red
spray paint is all

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over the recalcitrant drones in
this sweaty space, each August

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day redoing its former, cooler
zones in Section 8 brick,

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fatherless masculinities
mustached and colorful

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progressions of gutter and
grin, exhaust pipes hardly

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hung out again, scraping
glitter from the potholes

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unrelentingly, like a
refrigerator door in the heat.

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And later, when it
gets even hotter,

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the corrugated
need for direction

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makes facsimiles on the
ball courts, discotheques

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of sweaty arms and
high top sneakers

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is broken and elbowed in
some other city's name, one

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with air conditioning
and deep ended

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swimming pools, whistling
lifeguards, and four water

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fountains even.

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I'd swim there, if I knew how.

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So my idea of spectacle
is decidedly analog.

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The personal epiphanies
that we used to have

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and used to use to
anchor poems now

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appear in 140 characters,
or as GIFs, or Tumblr posts

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before they've been given
the kind of scrutiny

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they might have received to
become a verse in a poem.

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That's not a bad
thing necessarily,

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but I think maybe
part of spectacle

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involves being reckless and
being at risk, emotionally.

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And it's hard to be the hero
in a poem without revision.

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I'm talking about taking
what the great Nigerian

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novelist, Ben Okri,
referred to as all

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of the secret and public
domains of our lives

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and presenting them for
scrutiny and interrogation.

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In other words, we
poets and readers

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are participating in the
spectacle of confession

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and myth making, the very thing
that Hannah was talking about,

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in some ways.

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Some of the participation
is voluntary.

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I can choose to edit, conjoin,
or re-imagine, or simply

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omit those secret
spectacles of my poems

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to create a more austere
or comfortable narrative.

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I can make things up
and I can attribute them

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to other speakers.

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I can make a minor
spectacle of myself

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and make it more
enticing or surprising.

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No one says that
my spectacle needs

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to be an accurate or honest
account, it just has to be,

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housed in some shape that might
create pathos in the reader.

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