Hi.
[CROWD HELLOS]
How are you all?
Good?
Thank you for being here.
It's great to see so many people.
I do know two mimes in Tucson, but Tyler knew them first.
[LAUGHTER]
I should give that credit.
So I'd also just like to thank Tyler, Laura, Brian, Hannah,
Aisha, Wendy, Julie J, Sarah K, Sarah G, Gail, Frances,
Julie L-C, Cybele, Christine, Michael, Annie, Rodney, Bonnie
Jean, Allie.
These are all the people that I work with,
that I've ever had the chance to work with here at the Poetry
Center.
Which doesn't even count the volunteers, the artists,
the poets, the docents, interns, students, and committee members
that I get to interact with every day.
So thank you for making the Poetry Center
such a great place to work.
[LAUGHTER]
So this is a book length project--
Can you hear me OK?
Yeah?
Is this is right?
OK.
This is a book length project, and so I'm
going to just read it with little commentary
between pieces.
"I am the bastard great-great-great-grandchild
of Joseph Smith, in search of a text line not a bloodline.
I affirm the manner in which durability and transience
are imposed upon the world of objects.
I believe the imaginary takes place on a surface that is
real, and cannot be repeated.
I believe a leaf of grass is no less
than the journey work of stars.
My dedication is no longer comprised of belief,
redemption, conversion, fact.
I dream of becoming anonymous.
The electric libraries set past and future.
My suspicions arose from a story told to me by my grandmother.
Joseph Smith was a visitor in the home
of her grandmother, Rebecca.
I superimposed the idea of sex.
Other motives were mingled with these as the work proceeded.
The opinions on which spring from the character
and situation of the hero are by no
means to be conceived as existing always
in my own conviction.
Nor is any interference justly to be
drawn from the following pages as prejudicing
any philosophical, or religious doctrine of whatever kind.
My chief concern in this respect has
been limited to the avoiding the interbreeding effects
of the novels of the present day.
And to the exhibition of the amiableness
of domestic affection, and the excellence of universal virtue.
I further probe the self-fulfilling fakery theory.
If you can give your body a temperature,
can you not give it the word of God?
And that being the case, we must speak
in degrees of imposter-ship.
I am too organized to wander, too practical to pray
in a way that wants answers.
Perhaps this want from answers is in fact a pheromone.
Perhaps this want of answers is indeed a pheromone.
I want answers.
In any given story, who is the fake?
Is it the mother that does not protest enough,
and therefore fails to protect her daughter
from the lies of the father?
Is it her father, who we are not sure is lying
in the first place?
Is it the daughter herself, who could never
know what her real interests are or what is before her
each morning?
In this story, we never learn of the parents.
Of the so-called policies they set
for themselves to govern the decisions that need
to be made about the daughter.
Where is their resentment?
Since a lie does not belong to anyone, we can say it insists--
or perhaps a better word resides--
with those who love it.
You don't have to believe a lie to think it true.
But to love a lie is one of those rare instances
of transformative love, so that what floats out before you
a hand, a pair of lips, can later betray.
There are objects, people, whose socially formed countenance
leaks the lies they live with.
For this daughter, that happened when she told the father,
in front of everyone, that she did not paint the green canvas.
The work the daughter had done.
The thing the daughter had made.
The vociferously intricate way she
put her eye against the magnifying glass
and shut down the better part of a day.
In this subtle way, your troubles
get forced into your therapist's mold
regardless of what you say.
I come from a long line of narrative poets.
I come to suck your blood."