Thanks, Ari.
You know you're screwed when the introduction is
better than the poems that you're going to read.
And thanks to everyone at the Poetry Foundation
and at the university for making this possible.
And I'll begin by reading some very new work
and then working my way backwards to the book.
I've been spending a lot of time recently
with the memoirs of Kurt Waldheim.
And some of you are probably too young to know
who Kurt Waldheim is.
I love being able to say "some of you
are too young to remember."
That's a new thing in my life.
But Waldheim was Secretary General of the United Nations
from 1971 to 1982, I think, and as Secretary General was
in some way, in a certain sense the spokesperson for all
of humanity, for all of the dispossessed, all the hungry,
all the downtrodden.
A few years after his tenure at the UN,
he fell from grace because several Nazi hunters accused
him of collaboration in some wartime atrocities
during World War II when it was discovered Waldheim actually
had been an intelligence officer in the German army.
So learning of this fact and becoming
more and more interested in the story of Waldheim, whose
voice incidentally is on board the Voyager spacecraft bearing
greetings from humanity to whatever is out there.
I began to read his memoirs very carefully
and for complicated reasons I began to cross out language
from his account of the world and of his life
to try and find a hidden story inside his own words.
So what I'll read to you is from my new work which is basically
a series of cross outs and retrieval
of language from what remains in Waldheim's memoirs.
These are a series of about 400 propositions about the world.
I won't read 400, I'll only read a few.
War interests the attention distracted by war
is disinclined to view the failure of form as the issue.
Thus, sink each day's dead softly in the hearth.
"The world, the world," he said.
Moral law is the field of gestures open to formal rule.
Some suffer within flagrant circles.
Some take refuge in the avenues of the cross.
He was seeking an interpretation of arms and the man
that would not further legitimize the regime.
Autumn was in pieces all across America.
Death may be a change of style but surely not of substance.
Human means weakening vehicle, his countrymen have forgiven
him his mistakes, of course.
He considers evil in the world.
He's convinced himself that evil is a number.
There's a school of thought that sees constraint
as the basis of relations with other people.
Believe facts, not myths.
Facts may be formally demonstrated by every citizen.
The book of the is taken apart and put together again
with relation to a.
Over the centuries, the oceans have remained unshattered.
The good interpreter shifts ever on.
The world is a world, constraints on the self
and in faith.
It would be tragic if the line were to disintegrate.
Everybody watches the wheel as it turns.
There is, on the outskirts of a small town in Vienna,
the gutted remains of a house.
It was built of desire.
Overcome all emotion.
Wherever possible alleviate the misery of others.
There is nothing in victory.
The silent alone lie united.