WEBVTT

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Thank you, that was--

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it's just so great to be here.

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I know everyone says
that, but it really is.

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I've known TC for a
while, love TC's work,

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I love Solmaz's work.

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I feel like there's a
real camaraderie there,

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and I only met Solmaz for
the first time last night,

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but we'd been writing to each
other for such a long time that

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when we finally met
it was like, oh,

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it was sort of confusing
that we hadn't--

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like we just sort of
hugged, and then only

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like five minutes later, I was
like, it's nice to meet you.

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Or so anyway, this is great.

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Thank you.

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This is a true honor.

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I'm going to read some new poems
from the book TC mentioned.

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It's called Trebuchet.

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Comes out in November,
and I'll also

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read some poems from
American Barricade which I

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guess I'm still touring behind.

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It's the tour that
wouldn't die or something.

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We were talking about
film a lot today

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and I didn't know that Solmaz
loves film and I love film,

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and I always want to
only talk about film when

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I meet poets who like film.

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So I thought I would
start with a poem that's

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very filmic in certain ways.

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If you are an INXS fan
in the '90s or the '80s

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there's a little lyric
tossed out there for you.

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And it also sort of starts with
this weird three line prologue

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that sort of just bastardizes
a John Ashbery line.

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It's called "Cold Open."

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It was the thought that
if you could watch,

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if I could leak to the
public the film of when

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I needed to reach you,
that would be one way.

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From a little known bluff
overgrown last summer

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with wildflowers, if you could
watch a family of turkeys,

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a mother and 162 poults,
if you could watch them

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abandon their
roost on the lowest

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branch of a cottonwood tree,
and lugging 163 tow cables

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behind them when
they departed, if you

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could watch them dragging
the tree through a field

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overgrown last summer
with tangle head grass,

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and discarding the yellow tree
piteously across the rails

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of the Sunset Limited which was
carrying that day exactly 162

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passengers west to
their sentencings.

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It could be one way,
I kept telling myself,

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to awake in summer when everyone
sentenced and film myself shot

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of those dead to me.

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If the lights came up on my
train in a field overgrown

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last summer with
tanglehead, or if we

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could slow to a halt in
front of the yellow tree

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obstructing our
path, there could

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be a smash cut, an establishing
shot of the bluff where

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you knelt cutting wildflowers,
and off camera the cottonwood

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could start hemorrhaging
yellow termites.

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If you could see the
mites glowing yellow

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having drunk the yellow
blood of the tree.

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And if I could leak to you
what the camera work couldn't.

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In a hand-me-down
suit, an unsavory man,

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he's inside a Renaissance
cherry casket,

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and that casket's buried
eight feet beneath the Sunset

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Limited's engine room,
and that casket's

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rigged on the inside with
a hand crank generator

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with Christmas lights
in five colors.

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If we could leak red
first, then blue, and green

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before we leaked orange and
last yellow, the light of which

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illuminates the interior of
the casket enough for the man.

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He's alive.

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Enough for the man to
watch his face decompose

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in the mirror that's
rigged to the ceiling.

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If we could cut to the
sentence handed down to the man

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many years ago, that any
unsavory man is a man who

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should watch himself die.

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If there was a slow
zoom on a woman's hands

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typing eight words in
first class, and a slow

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dissolve to a child in coach.

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If he opens a text that
says, don't change for you,

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don't change for me.

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If there's no ellipses
and no period at the end,

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if he doesn't even need
to ask who it's from.

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Then and only then, from
a little known bluff,

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you could stand up with
a fistful of wildflowers.

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You could watch the faces of 162
passengers darken unannounced

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as if from a lightning
storm, and the cottonwood

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could stand up from the rails
and dust off her own blood

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herself, and resume her cold
work untangling the grasses.

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And if you could watch my train
resume its terrible campaign

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for the west, then, and
only then, unseen for you

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I could stay buried here
beneath 162 suitcases

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with the rest of the stowaways.

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