Thank you, Barbara, for that beautiful, enormously generous
introduction.
And thank you Gail for this series and all
of the staff at the Poetry Center.
A series like this takes a whole lot of people to put on,
and we have one of the best in the country
because we have the best people in the country
to put it together.
I feel very lucky to be here and to be reading again
after a number of years.
And I'm delighted to read with Ander.
I heard him read a year ago when he
was among the finalist candidates for the position
which he now holds.
And it was a terrific reading.
I seem to remember a funeral of Gerald Ford and karaoke,
and a lot of things came together in a magical way.
So you'll hear from him in a few minutes.
I'm going to start out by reading a few poems
from a series that led me into the work of remanence, which
is a new book.
I had taught a forms course some years ago,
and we always conclude, in the syllabus that I teach,
by writing sonnets the last few weeks.
And I always fall in love with the compression
and the shapes available.
But I don't often have the nerve to spend
a lot of time writing sonnets.
So this time I decided I would write
a series for a year or a year and a half of 15 line poems.
I would see what I could do within that shape,
that distance.
I tried to keep them seamless and continuous.
I tried to go far from beginning to end.
And I didn't title them because I
thought it might be interesting for a reader or listener
to follow the trajectory I followed in discovering
what the poems were about.
Ouch.
Oh, I could use that.
So let me read a few of these first.
And they're untitled.
"In Homer's time, psyche could mean many things--
self, underworld ghost, butterfly.
Today, I think of them in flocks, selves, ghosts,
butterflies, and of those blue nights in Corsica,
a lovely rhythmic phrase, but so-called
because of homemade bombs that lit the night
sky in a time of resistance.
In that inevitable colorful sparks
at the collision of words and circumstance such as I'm
thinking now of you what passes between a man
in love and the one--
But I have to stop.
Today, I think of them in flocks because
of the pale schoolchildren laid in rows on grass whose
particulars it would only make them beautiful to name them.
Efface me.
Efface all of us.