[APPLAUSE]
Thank you guys, so much.
And thank you, so much, Katie.
Katie is a great editor.
I was explaining-- I was doing a little interview
with the Wildcat, earlier, and just explaining, I mean,
the benefit of having a really strong editor is that they
save you from embarrassing yourself
on the page in many ways.
And it can be humiliating, to sort of have
to confront that, some of your own texts and so on.
But it's great to get those kind of worked out,
before you guys have to confront them.
Oh good.
Excellent.
So I'm going to read two poems from, that
is sort of like inspired by, such as it is, the movie,
Predator.
[LAUGHTER]
There we go.
Coming back.
OK.
I've been working on this project
about the movie, Predator, which is an amazing movie, that I
hope you all see, if you have not seen it, 1987.
Two future governors, not the only movie
that has two future governors.
I mean the other one is The Running Man, of course, which
has the same future governors.
And the odd thing about the movie, Predator,
is, if you read the novelization for the movie, Predator,
it was written by the poet, Paul Monette, who's
a really pretty brilliant poet.
And he did it for the money.
But he's a gay poet, and it's a very erotic.
It's an erotic movie, to begin with,
and it's a really erotic novelization,
which I recommend.
So this first poem is called, "Predator Versus Alien Versus
Predator," which is a book by Michael Robbins, who's
a pretty good poet.
And it has a little quote from that.
"Praise this world, Rilke says, the jerk."
From Michael Robbins's, Alien Versus Predator.
This is predator, talking back, "Your language is not
trivial for me, but I read the book.
It didn't seem to get it right.
The poet doesn't care for the inner life, such
as it is, of my foe, my kind, or the quality of strife
between our worlds.
What is it like to be the other creature?
What is it like to be anything at all?
To have a fist emerge from your mouth
and punch right through a skull, to require a human host
to reproduce.
I've traveled long to bring you here,
to bring you news from another world.
The news is that you are not alone.
You are also not entirely good, or very good, or good for much
at all.
You're good for mulch, for sieving the incredible muchness
of your world into waterless hand sanitizers, that
erase disease and vanish from your palm.
In the roasted pistachios, open just
enough to finish with a nail.
To drones filling schools with hellfire
meant for militants followed by apologies.
For the ergonomics of electric switches,
clicks, the magic of turducken, sonatinas and sestinas,
hiccup fetishists on the internet, a pale peach slip
slipping off a girl in Budapest, and then again in Marrakesh,
as I watched her through an open window.
As she stripped, I wondered what heat her clothes and thoughts
concealed.
Your Edvard Munch, he could illustrate a scream.
He knew, how under duress, the throat opens like a flower.
I once dreamt of meeting him, tracing his canvases,
so like a skin with just the tip of a mandible.
Then taking him as a souvenir for the trophy case,
but I understand I am too late for that.
Another of my kind claimed him years ago.
Before he died, I would have asked,
what else the mouth is good for, where the inner life is kept.
The spinal column doesn't hold it, nor the skull for long.
That a song heard on your radio can induce in me
a state of mind, it means there's something here
beyond the spectra I can see.
If I could open you and enter, I would.
You, too, are perishable good."
So the image behind me, I have a bunch of images.
I want to have visual aids, so as to upstage Kate.
And so this is a screenshot.
I've been watching predator over and over
and kind of going frame by frame through it
and kind of picking up some of the more interesting frames.
And this is one of them.