Wow, I don't know what to say.
Thank you so much, Susan.
It's been wonderful and great and warm and friendly and
inspiring to be here.
OK.
Thank you for coming for this talk which
I have been sort of wanting to write for a long time
but also been avoiding writing it for a long time,
or thinking about it.
But I will begin with sort of where maybe my interest
in the long poem began.
And I will discuss it as a form and talk about some examples,
and perhaps also talk about some of the aesthetic tensions
in it.
And I'll be quoting a lot of other sources
because this is not a finished essay, if you will,
but a sort of a talk and an essay in progress.
In the meantime, I want to just circulate this book.
People don't do that much.
Just look from page 70 on.
That's where "The Book of the Dead" is.
That's Muriel Rukeyser's "Book of the Dead."
It's a long poem which I'll discuss shortly.