Another one of the--
I'm going to stop that.
It was a very dark thing to have to work through,
that section, working on all of those poems.
And this next group of poems, and I'm only going to-- they're
very short these poems.
But we're equally taxing.
But in a certain way exhilarating
because I was working in a collaboration with a composer.
The composer Richard Danielpour had approached me
and asked me if I was interested in working with him on a song
cycle.
And the song cycle was going to depict the last 50-60
years of American history with one standing
witness who would turn out to be the Statue of Liberty.
And the chutzpah of saying, "Oh, we're
just going to do 60 years of history and 12 songs",
was in a certain way the reason why I said yes,
and also the fact to be able to work with a musician.
I love working across genres and that challenge
of not writing songs, but writing
poems that could be sung is a different thing.
And so we pushed and challenged each other.
We had very different writing processes,
so that was hard to deal with, but we managed.
And I really felt that it kind of
taught me stuff too, which is what every writer, I think,
wants to at some point be learning always.
I knew that the voice was going to be a mezzo-soprano.
I knew that Susan Graham was going to sing it.
And so that mezzo-soprano voice was always behind me.
But I never thought, "OK, the music is going to carry this.
The poems have to stand by themselves."
So let me read to you just--
they also all have to be a certain length.
If you're going to sing something,
it has to be the length of a German Lieder, or Lied, that
has to be about the length of a sonnet-- well,
it doesn't have to be a sonnet.
So I will read to you three--
again, three, Which are going to hop through history.
And I'm going to start with this one, which
is the first testimony.
1968.
1968 was a year of great turmoil.
It was a year when I think many thought this country was
going to break apart.
Assassinations King and Kennedy.
And it just it seemed that what it needed
was a villanelle, a broken villanelle,
one that stops before it's finished.
You're tired, you're poor.
Who comforts you now that the wheel has broken?
No more princes for the poor.
Loss whittling you thin.
Grief is the constant now.
Hope the last word spoken.
In a dance of two elegies, which circles the drain?
A token year with its daisies and carbines is where we begin.
Who comforts you now?
That the wheel has broken is mechanics 101.
To keep dreaming when the joke's on you.
Well, crazier legends have been written.
Grief is the constant now.
Hope the last word spoken on a motel balcony,
shouted in a hotel kitchen.
No kin can make this journey for you.
The roots are locked in.
Who comforts you now that the wheel has broken
the bodies of its makers?
Beyond the smoke and ashes, what you
hear rising is nothing but the wind.
Who comforts you now that the wheel has broken?
Grief is the constant.
Hope the last word spoken.