WEBVTT

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So I'm going to
begin with a poem,

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a strange poem called "On
Earth" from Blue Hour,

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and I want to read
after that new poems,

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give you a new poems.

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"On Earth" is the bardo
in alphabetical order.

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It's a poem that I
wrote a few summers ago

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in a kind of white
heat of writing,

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and I realized
that it was someone

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dying and their life
passing before them

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and flash, flash, flash.

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And so I found this
form, which was

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alphabetized all the way in.

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The lines were alphabetized.

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Makes it difficult to revise
because you can't move things

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around if they're in
alphabetical order,

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for one thing.

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And I discovered when
I finished the poem

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that there were actually hymns
from Central Asian desert

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from the fourth century that
were written in this form,

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so to be mnemonic.

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And so I decided to take
credit for knowing that,

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and I put a note
in the back saying,

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well, fourth-century
hymns, that's the form.

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But on the day I finished the
book, I finished this poem.

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It turned out to be 42 pages.

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In the beginning, it was 80
pages, and when I finished it--

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I have a practice with my
students of buying used books

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and then drilling into
them and cutting into them

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and making things out of them,
making art objects out of them,

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and playing with them.

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And I had bought such a book
in the women's farmers market

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in Montgomery
County, where I live.

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I paid $2 for it, and
it was called something

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On Death or something.

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And the day that I
finished this poem,

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this book committed suicide.

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It just jumped off the shelf and
landed flat open on my floor.

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So I went over and
picked it up, and it

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was flat open to this page.

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And it was written by
George Burgess in 1850.

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"The recollections of a
whole life, the consciousness

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of spiritual existence,
and all which is mightiest

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and deepest in our nature become
brighter even in opposition

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to extreme bodily languor in
the immediate vicinity of death.

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The mind enters on
an unaccustomed order

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of sensations, a
region untrodden

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before from which few, very
few travelers have returned

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and from which those
few have brought back

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but vague remembrances
sometimes accompanied

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with a kind of homesickness for
the higher sphere of which they

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had then some
transient prospect.

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Here, amidst images, dim
images of solemnity or peace,

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of glory or of
terror, the pilgrim

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pursues his course alone
and is lost to our eye."

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George Burgess, 1850.

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So I thought, oh my god, that's
the epigraph for the poem,

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and so I didn't
drill into the book

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or saw it in half or anything.

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I decided to spare
its life and kept it,

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so I still have this book.

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And I'm going to
give you excerpts

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of this poem from the
beginning, from the As

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through approximately the Ts.

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You won't get to
hear the whole thing,

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but it'll give
you a sense of it.

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And so I selected
these passages for you

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so that you'll be able to move
through the dream of the life

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passing through itself.

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And I began to feel
these aren't just

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remembered events from my life.

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It feels to be a
collective dreaming.

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"A barn loft of horse dreams
with basin and bed clothes,

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a bit of polished quiet from a
locked church, a corpse broken

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into many countries,
a cup of sleep,

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a desire to live as long
as the world itself.

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A field of birds
roasted by the heavens,

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a goodness that must
forget itself, a grave

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strewn with slipper flowers,
a groundskeeper's knowledge

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of graves.

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A hurried life, a
knife on newsprint,

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a lace of recent snow, a
litany of broken but remembered

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events.

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A memory through
which one hasn't

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lived; a parcel of copper
wire, plastique, and a clock;

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a parrot learning its
language from a ghost;

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a random life caught
in a net of purpose;

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a recordkeeper of human
and earthly life."