Hello.
Thank you so much for coming.
Thank you to the Poetry Center for having me,
Frances, and Gail, and Renee, and Bonnie Jean.
And it's such a pleasure to share the podium
with such fine lady poets, fine poets in general.
A little bit before the book came out,
I got an email from my marketing director.
It's kind of funny about poetry, marketing director,
asking if I would kind of write a little profile of myself
to help sell this book, like along the lines of my hair,
it's curly, have green eyes, because that's really
what sells books.
Anyway, that was confusing to me.
So what I wrote is this and it's a--
call this a syntax virus, but I've
had some conversations today in which other people call
these things different names.
Negative inversions, syntax maps.
I have a friend of mine calls them egg and yolk.
But what it is I've stolen the exact syntax of a Sylvia Plath
poem, changed all the words.
So her poem is Your, and this was my attempt
at my introduction for my marketing director.
It's called I'm.
Undertaker, melancholy of mouth, asked
to the curb and some nerved, lungs like a hummingbird.
A nonsense thumbs up on the don't don't ode,
a thread unraveled from its bobbin.
Skimming the planet as comets do, loud as a pin drop
from a prison cell on no fools night.
Oh, low leaner rod butter pat.
Clear as day and forgotten like rent,
closer than a heartbeat, upright itinerary.
Our stay-at-home king.
Loose as a gosling went away.
Like a trap that catches a goose, a murder of crows.
No wings, still as an American dream, wrong like not from not.
A dirty bird with my shame face on.
Needless to say, they didn't use it.
And you'll be the judge of whether it sells any books.