It's a pleasure to be reading up here with Reg, man.
You know this is a good thing.
We've always threatened to do this.
I always tell people this story.
It's Regie Gibson and Reg Gibbons, right?
And people would show up to my shows looking for him.
They would show up to his shows looking for me.
And they're like, whoa.
I never pictured you look like that.
You know what I mean?
And--
They certainly said that to me.
Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
It's like, wow, you did all that stuff and how old are you?
I was like 27.
You're the editor of TriQuarterly?
I'm like, I can't even get in TriQuarterly.
They wouldn't even publish me in TriQuarterly.
It's what put me in the mind of Reg.
I've been writing a book on Hendrix, Jimi Hendrix entitled
Footprints-- at least it's entitled now,
Footsteps Addressed in Red, the Ecto Poetic
Libretto of Hendrix.
There is a couple of pieces in there
which are Zeitgeist poems, poems that
attempt to manifest to what was happening at the time
that we probably didn't have language for.
I didn't live-- I guess I was alive during this,
but I didn't march in things.
And this is from the libretto part.
"Zeitgeist zero, and zeitgeist one 1963 through 1969.
When the voice began singing was when the fist opened,
was when space felled between hammer and anvil,
was when something lifted our hands to our faces,
was when the scales fell and we named
them, was a querulous light then aching our eyes,
was verb exacting the length of our ears.
Was our feet religioning their way
through intestine towards some fearful Damascus,
where messiahs danced atop smoldering
textbooks and oracles spoke of the fire to come.
Like an embryo prophecy, nascent and lumbering its way
toward insurrection.
But there was no word yet for insurrection.
No word for a breathless at last.
No word that enchanted let killers
be fearful as faith in a church built by slave-owning men.
Our books wouldn't translate a barren Constitution
or teach us to the phonics of bulleted speech.
No blueprint would show how to build
a new brick to stitch a new tower from us to the voice.
All we knew was we needed a tower of stitching of brick
back into the voice.
It was the hour of tear gas and napalm.
Of monks immolating into huts of saffron straw.
A red fear quaking in the grassy knoll.
The bullet, the balcony Audubon and Allah.
It was our cities become crucible
of ash and hurricanes of cock ripping rice women open.
It was the hour of knife and womb razor.
The hour of hope impaled through the rib.
How did we come to this high place of lonely.
What solitary role did we travel to this stone.
What are the names of the scars of our anger.
What do we call this ineffable moan?
We were the great comet come to extinct all dinosaur.
Watch them fossilized in the after of our impact and all
that escaped our fire would be captured,
and stuffed, and displayed in museums so posterity
could see what once ruled.
But the doubts found us again.
Kept finding us.
No matter how our tribe urged onward,
it hunted us like a madness slow and hereditary.
A deliberate and bitter alchemy speaking the monsters
back into our knowing.
What is the poem of a splintering anything.
What is the prose of a backward tier.
Is there a color for a hijack alphabet.
Why does hope name her immigrants blue.
Where is the scale that tells what blood weighs.
What are the increments of nothingness.
Is there a flower named future forgive us.
What is the smell of a doubting hand how
do you say 30 pieces of silver.
How do you say my country is torn.
How do you say my eyeballs keep melting.
How do you say 13,000 miles from home?
How do you say the amendments are aching?
How do you say the students are dead?
How do you say the nightsticks keep bleeding?
How do you say there's a gun in my god?
Ours was a wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Ours was escaping to a narcotic haze,
the time of the fist, and the faith,
and the gun in the mouth, and of tanks
rolling into our learning.
It was the hour of the crossroads,
when pacifist and fascist share the hour of the tolling bell,
of soldiers returning their faces
made zero while banners burned a ghost of mangled stars
into our hands.
There is the child who burns like a flag.
Here is the flag which sleeps like the law.
There is the law who laughs like a racist.
Here is the racist living like a martyr.
There is the martyr dying like a president.
Here is a president falling like shrapnel.
There is the shrapnel singing like a woman here is
the woman weeping for a child."