I was rudely editing this last poem
that I'm going to read while Tyler
was speaking because it's crazy, and now it's out of order.
So just give me one second.
So I don't do that crazy thing that I
don't know what's happening.
OK, I think it's in order now.
This is the last poem I'm going to read.
It's called "Planet Hulk."
And I had written a long poem that I
called confessional poem.
And in that poem, there were a lot
of blanks where I had decided I would stop forever
and ever writing poems that had real people's names in them.
And so I just put in blanks for like my boss who did not
like that I was writing about her,
and my editor who did not like that I was writing about him,
and my friends, and I said like mean things
about my children and my husband.
And I said stuff about sex and money.
And then at the end of the poem, the last stanza of the poem,
I fill in all the blanks, which, you know--
I was like, I think I have a problem.
And so this poem refers to that poem,
but I don't think you need to know more
than I've just told you and what you already know about me,
which is probably too much.
And you should see the Avengers movie because it's very good.
I have three sons, so I see all the Marvel movies.
And I would like to say that I do mix Marvel and DC briefly
in this poem, and I know that those are not
universes that overlap.
I'm aware of that.
That's probably the only imaginative thing
that I do in any of my poems.
All the rest is just accurate reporting.
[LAUGHTER]
And thank you so much for having me, and I'm loving being here.
I'm going to wake up tomorrow morning with the full terror
of my task.
But right now, I'm really happy.
"Planet Hulk."
"When I opened my eyes, people were showing me the footage.
There I was destroying the city.
A bystander went down, a citizen, an onlooker.
Or there was no footage.
The footage was my own mind.
I remembered my hand around a tiny throat, the power of it,
the clarity before nothing else made sense.
Was I, I asked, really that bad?
No, said one Avenger.
We love you.
No, said an X Man, you are what you are.
No, said Natasha, I needed you.
I just lied.
They all averted their eyes and said, yes, you are that bad.
Of course, they did.
The lullaby's working, Natasha says
as I become small, weak, and feminine again, as I come to
and grope for my glasses.
My editor says, you made an image of me
at one moment in time reductive like all photography.
No, it is not even an image of me.
It is just your projection of me, and it subjectifies.
Will it help if I add that to the poem?
I ask him.
If I say, you are not you; you are my projection of you?
He says nothing.
I speak wearing the wounded look of Mark Ruffalo playing Bruce
Banner, a look that often reads as false.
When I opened my eyes, I saw excitement
on all the wrong faces.
These were the people who loved me.
When I opened my eyes is not the next part of the poem.
[LAUGHS]
These were the people who loved me.
Wow, said Laurel, great poem.
I love it, says the husband.
Whatever was wrong with me was wrong with the husband,
and with Laurel, and with all the people
who shared my perversity which had become indistinguishable
from my poetry.
You have a triangulated reality writing, shame fetish,
Katie said.
It might be a kind of edging.
Oh, you who I've exposed.
I have stood before you tone deaf and prurient
and asked you to love me.
When I opened my eyes, my body was covered in scars.
Marina Abramovic had carved a star into my stomach.
My face felt slapped 1,000 times.
My back felt raw with lashes.
I was seared.
I was blistered by the gaze of a live camera,
or it was footage of me slapping you, some of you liking it.
Some of you onlookers, bystanders, men,
caught in the crossfire.
And there were casualties.
It was unbecoming, but it was also me.
And in this way and only this way was I furthermore alive.
Just change the ending, says Katie.
The names make it less interesting.
It's not that bad, another person says.
You're taking yourself too seriously.
Meanwhile, Sylvia Plath is making small cuts
on my upper arm with a boning knife.
It will hardly show, she whispers.
This isn't my thing, I say, trying to pull away.
But her eye is inescapable.
There's a fine line between self-flagellation and bragging,
says Katie.
I cover myself in bright blood like a flag.
No poets were harmed in the making of this poem, I write.
Do you believe me?
Then stop reading.
So many things were given unto me that I took as givens--
my sex, my gender, my race, my class.
I never sought to question.
I was born into and became more and more my cis.
Cis this, Cis that, as if life were simply
a matter of seeing oneself more and more in focus.
As if truth were a word an I, like me, could use.
Well, you know what they do to Hulk, says the husband.
Hey, Maggie Nelson, could you come kill Sylvia Plath
before she does herself in again?
No one will know who Maggie Nelson is, says Katie.
Eventually, the Avengers send Hulk away.
Veronica, his self-created fail safe self destruct creation
cannot contain him nor can his Homo hero friends.
He is a weapon too dangerous to possess.
So they trick him into a spaceship
and shoot him into the sky.
Banner always falls for feeling needed.
But it's always Hulk they need.
Gamma, gamma, everywhere, but not a drop to drink.
My shame is a tsunami.
It's time to get up and make breakfast.
David Trinidad suggests I wear a black tourmaline stone
around my neck for protection.
It repels negative energy, he tells me.
This is important when reading poems
about people when those people are present
and the poems might upset them.
Or you could stop writing those kinds of poems, Katie says.
Or you could stop caring about hurting people, says Laurel.
What if I can't get off without hurting someone?
I ask Ariel.
In the poem, I mean.
Everyone knows I am otherwise outside poems rather nice,
on time, considerate, so what?
What if there is no I outside these poems?
By day, I was Penelope waiting and weaving.
By night, I was Penelope waiting and weaving.
But Hulk too also I.
It's our sun that gives Superman his extraordinary powers.
It is the shards of his exploded planet pieces
of the past and home which enfeeble him,
which is to say humanize.
Look how it hurts him to be human.
Hulk, a universe away is less lucky.
He is made of anger, of animal, and is always human.
In some versions, Hulk rarely hurts anyone innocent.
In other versions, he's just a monster.
When I opened my eyes, I saw the footage of my youngest
son saying, I love you so much.
It became a crack in the Earth's core.
And I would throw my body into the molten to stop it up.
But that wouldn't be enough.
There is nothing to save him from this fear.
It is eclipse and kryptonite.
It is the pain of being mortal with a mortal mother.
He is exactly old enough to suspect what
my absence would look like.
I love you so much.
He means I cannot yet survive your dying.
His weakness makes him hate me, and this is love.
I make the husband sleep in the other room.
We have bodies, and mine is keeping him awake.
The tiny tapping of my massive fingers on the keyboard.
This is art, not a court document, Laurel reminds me.
Poems are the agency of desire in a world
of diverse subjectivities, says Katie.
Not to name is to plagiarize.
But to name is to reduce, belittle, harm.
Just put the poem in a drawer for at least three months.
Don't look at it even for a moment, then revise.
No, says another.
Keep going with your noble enterprise of telling
the truth in arresting forms.
A famous poet writes "perp" in the margins of her drafts,
meaning she's a perp, meaning this poem must be sealed
for perpetuity, which in this case
is 30 years after anyone mentioned in the poem has died.
But every description of anything
is reductive, says Laurel.
That's the limit of language.
My editor says what my mother said,
this isn't the way I understood it.
This isn't how I remember things.
But that doesn't mean the story isn't true
or that one doesn't have a right to tell it.
Does Alice Notley worry?
I wonder.
Did Frank O'Hara?
In the Secret Wars storyline, 2015,
Hulk discovers a secret place called Greenland
filled with hundreds of hulks.
I would put my hand on your back, says Laurel.
I would put my hand on your back,
but not know how else to make you feel better.
No, dears, take me to Greenland instead and let
us destroy each other so poetry can be safe again
for the civilians."
Thank you.