WEBVTT

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I'm going to turn now
to some new poems.

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A number of these are
hybrids, like the title poem

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of Candy Necklace.

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That is to say
parts are in prose,

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and parts are in verse lines.

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So they really speak to the
eye as much is to the ear,

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but I'll just read them straight
through without indicating

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where the lines come in.

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The first poem is
called Active Rhythm.

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It refers, again, to a mission
of the French composer,

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and there's a quotation from one
of Jane Austen's novels, "rain

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is junk atmosphere."

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I love getting Jane
Austen into this poem,

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where she'd be most
surprised to find yourself,

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I think, and I
understand this poem.

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It's very ambivalent about
modern art, active rhythm.

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This artist, if you
can call him an artist,

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was squirting blue
paint out of his anus

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onto a canvas on the floor.

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I'm glad my mother
wasn't there to see it.

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It's what Messiaen
calls active rhythm,

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as when one character
punches another in the face.

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There was a long pause.

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I have your order, Pieter said.

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Where would you like it?

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He went very still.

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Don't wear the earrings,
leave them on the table.

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Classical art is the
last car of the train,

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the one that goes by silently.

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It's like the hundreds
of silver crosses,

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too, that flash on the
lake without touching it.

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As for you, you paint with
appalling carelessness.

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The road in your painting,
if you can call it a road,

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looks like chopped, rotten wood.

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That does it.

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I use the word
crapulent against you.

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Tear my heart out,
why don't you?

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I have reviewed eight
canvases this size

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and concluded "rain
is junk atmosphere.

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It makes one detest all
one's acquaintance."

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Sometimes, amidst this
decadent modern art,

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I tremble all over myself.

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A blind hairless dog at the
base of a mountain of fleas,

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decomposing in 12
angles of fall.

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You look surprised, you who
feel at home in your air hangar

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studio, hearing each up
in the corner of speaker

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howling the same meat
head theory of art.

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Lose modulation, paint
between things, not things.

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Be a dove, paint Venus
pupping on your laundry

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bag, careless love.