WEBVTT

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Towards the end of
the last century,

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I was writing a series of
poems called A Book of Witness,

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and miraculously, I think,
it was a series of 100 poems.

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The first 50 came in 1999,
and the next 50 came in 2000.

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So it was like turning.

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And what I was doing
here was I wanted

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to overemphasize-- to emphasize
the first person singular which

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had come into some repute among
certain poets that I knew.

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And the first person singular
is the pronoun of witness.

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So, yeah, I wanted it-- but
it didn't have to be me.

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So I incorporated a number of
short first-person statements

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by other poets, particularly
contemporaries, and, of course,

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I could say true or I can
make fiction and still use

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the first-person pronoun.

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So I'll read two poems
from A Book of Witness.

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Oh, yeah, and I started
it out with a quote

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from the great Mexican
Mazatec shaman--

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shamaness Maria Sabina.

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She refers to the
sacred mushrooms

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that she uses as
the saint children,

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and she says language belongs
to the saint children.

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I didn't say it.

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They said it.

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They speak, and I have
for ALTA people, ALTA,

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they speak, and I have
the power to translate.

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That's my acknowledgment
of the ALTA conference.

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Maria Sabina, they speak, and
I have the power to translate.

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"A Cruel Nirvana."

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Half dead is still alive,
and half alive is, too.

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So keep it rolling I declare.

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The others mingle in a room atop
the city where a fire burns.

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They sing.

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I sing among them, then I push
my way through with my thumbs.

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I eke a living from a stone.

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Hard knocks are bound to follow.

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I can hear a water
song close by my ear

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and track it where it leads me.

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It is summer, but
the trees are dead.

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They vanish with
our fallen friends.

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The eye in torment
brings them down,

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each mind a little
world, a cruel nirvana.

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