"By the Way."
See that's part of it.
Perfectly timed.
"By the Way."
I've been teaching a class called--
about poetry ancestors.
It's a 400 level poetry workshop,
but all our poems have ancestors.
I have saxophone ancestors, we have ancestors,
the clouds have ancestors.
You know who came before.
And so this has been a class about where
they discover all the influences in their poetry,
and the poems they like.
And discover how it all works as a whole network.
It's been really kind of exciting to develop it,
because I'd only done it for a short little workshops,
and we've done a whole class.
And so this is--
it's important to acknowledge those ancestors,
to acknowledge those gifts.
So this is for one of my ancestors, Adrienne Rich.
The poet Adrienne Rich, who is a mentor.
And I read, was it the New Republic.
There was an article, I forget who wrote it.
Talking about-- acknowledging Adrienne,
and I was in a hotel room and I just wrote most of this poem
down roughly, but I remember how much she gave me.
And I guess her voice is so important now.
It always has been important and that's--
I think that's a sign of a true poet is that, that voice is--
there's always-- it lives in so many places.
And she's always, she's so important.
So this is "By the Way" for Adrienne Rich.
"I've given it time as if time were mine to give.
There was a dam, larger than Hoover, or the president,
or the patent for the metal creature
that sucks up all the dust.
Words had to stop and ask permission
before crossing over.
Oh, sometimes they were wild with the urgency of sweet
and leaped.
Mostly the rest were kept in the net of swallowed
a forbidden language.
I want to go back and rewrite all the letters.
I lied frequently.
No.
I was not OK.
And neither was James Baldwin, though his essays were
perfect spinning platters of comprehension of the fight
to assert humanness in a black and white world.
That's how the blues emerged by the way.
Our spirits needed a way to dance through the heavy mess,
the music a sack that carries the bones of those left
alongside the Trail of Tears when we were forced to leave
everything we knew by the way.
I constructed an individual life in
this so-called civilized world.
We all did.
Far from the trees and plants who had borne and fed us.
All I wanted was the music I would tell you now,
within it what we cannot carry.
I talk about then from a hotel room just miles from your home
in the East, before you fled on your personal path of tears
to the West.
That worn out American dream dogging your steps.
You lived on a pedestal for me then,
the driven diver who climbed back up from the abyss.
Venus on a seashell with a dagger in her hands.
I had to look and followed your tracks
in the poems cut by suffering.
Aren't they all?
We're in the apocalyptic age of addiction and forgetting.
It's worse now, but that dam, I had to tell you,
I broke it open stone by stone.
It took a saxophone, flowers, and your words had something
to do with it.
I can't say exactly how the trajectory wasn't clean,
even though it was sure.
Does that make sense?
Maybe it does only in the precincts of dreams and poetry,
not in a country lit 24 hours a day to keep dreams stuck,
turning in a wheel in the houses of money.
I read about transcendence, how the light came
in through the window of a nearby traveler,
and every cell of creation opened its mouth
to drink grace.
That's what I never told you."