Thank you for that, both of you.
And thanks, everyone, for coming and for staying.
And thank you, Tyler, for everything
that you've been doing, even printing this out
for me to read from.
And thanks also to Charlie and Barb and Matthew and Joshua
and Heidi and, of course, to Alan for everything
that you've done to make this possible.
And thanks to all of my colleagues
who've been at this podium before me.
I'm just going to read a little bit of a longer lecture
that I wrote.
I wrote three, and they all got quite long.
One of them's very, very long.
And the writing of them, I found--
while writing them, I found I was able to just include
almost anything I wanted.
And to me, that was a very liberating and also kind
of gutting reality because I couldn't really tell what
belonged and what didn't.
And so then I had to come up with a reason or something that
would make things that didn't seem to belong
feel like they belonged.
And the experience of working the material in such a way,
finding points of connection and overlap,
was really a breakthrough, a revolution for me.
I found that I was really drawn to things
that look like coincidences or places
where very disparate elements have
this little bit of overlap.
And this is where I think we come up
with where we get our metaphors for is our ability
to perceive these little places where there is kind
of an overlap and whether they share the same color or maybe
just they sound similar.
They've got a similar sort of usage.
And you'll find things that are very disparate,
but they've got this place of overlap and connection.
And this particular lecture that I'll read from today flirts
with that.
But I'm mostly interested in the rhetorical device known
as catachresis, which is the deliberate misuse, deliberate
wrongness for particular effect.
It's usually a type of metaphor, but a metaphor that can draw--
because it's got the substitution,
one thing for another.
But a metaphor that draws so much attention to itself
that it kind of derails logic, and it creates sometimes
as much trouble as good.
And one example might be-- although we're--
I was trying to think of one while I was sitting
in the chair, a new one, one that people sort of might
be familiar with would be to say "it's raining cats and dogs."
I mean, this is one that we're so used to,
it doesn't actually derail anything.
But why do we say raining cats and dogs?
And if we take that seriously, what it
suggests, what it conjures is something
that's absolutely absurd.
And yet, somehow in that absurdity
it manages to be quite expressive.
And so I also talk a good deal about Dickinson
in this particular lecture--
talk, I should say.
And I call it "The Lip of the Flamingo: Poetry
and the Misuse of Language."
A friend of mine in college once told me
about a dream she had in high school.
This was over two decades ago, but I remember the dream
with what I'll call, I guess a little boastfully, remarkable
clarity and detail, especially for a dream
that I myself did not manufacture.
Such clarity and detail, in fact, that, as I write this,
I'm beginning to think I've either embellished it
significantly over the years or else maybe I was already
reimagining it as she told it to me the first time.
Mirthfully exaggerating what grabbed me,
omitting what I couldn't relate to,
staging the whole thing in my backyard, so to speak,
but also literally and rephrasing its dialogue
into my mind's own idiom.
It might be that humans are always doing this
to some degree, deliberately or not, to whatever they
experience, translating reality into what we prefer
or what's familiar so that if someone steps out of nowhere,
grabs us by the shoulders, and says bathroom mirror,
we're likely to picture the same mirror we brush
our teeth in the morning or most mornings,
or if told instead that a tenor sang in a vehicle,
we might imagine the well-known Pavarotti
singing "O Solo Mio" in the passenger
seat of one's very own car, ourselves behind the wheel
if we happen to own a car.
I, for one, do not, nor do I drive.
Instead, I walk.
And when I walk, I remember.
For example, I remember my friend's dream
and how in it she receives an unexpected invitation to a pool
party thrown by the most popular girl in the whole high school
class.
It's a huge deal.
And if she plays it right, it could totally
bump her up a rung or two on the social ladder.
My friend is at first beside herself with excitement,
but then anxiety and dread start inevitably inching in.
What if she blows it?
The party could just as easily be her ruin.
Suddenly, the day arrives.
With trepidation, she makes her way
to her classmate's sunny backyard.
As she shuts the gate behind her,
she finds a mix of familiar and unfamiliar people clustered
in various groups along the perimeter
of the rectangular in-ground swimming pool.
A number of guests stretch out on beach towels, sunning
in silence, while others chatter on bright yellow lounge chairs.
Some are horsing around with each other in the water,
while still others stand nonchalantly,
withdrawn into the shade of a very large aquamarine
and white striped patio umbrella.
I think the concrete square of the patio
itself is bordered on two sides by
magenta-flowered rhododendrons.
It's this band of girls, the tall, slender, slightly
mysterious shade lovers who seem coolest and most intriguing
to my friend.
And she begins to walk towards them cautiously.
As she approaches, she notices that they're
standing very close to a large plate of candy placed
on the patio table beside them.
And not just any candy, but the impossibly sophisticated
Brach's Candies Neapolitan coconut sundaes.
As she draws closer to the patio,
my friend realizes that the candy
is going to be her way in, her ice breaker.
Neapolitan coconut sundaes, she infers
must be the cool girls' theme candy, their totem
or shibboleth or something, given how they gather around it
like yellow jackets at a puddle of spilled syrup.
To her great advantage, she has always
been downright fanatical about Neapolitan coconut sundaes too,
in her dream as well as in her waking life.
They already have this important trait in common.
They have a connection.
She has figured it all out.
I, too, had loved them for as long as I can remember.
The Neapolitan coconut sundae was,
to my mind, the star of the whole Brach's
Pick-A-Mix display, whose supermarket
bins were filled with chewy caramel squares,
rich butterscotch disks, old folksy starlight
mints, and the vaguely religious or medicinal cool blue mints,
and of course, the somewhat out of reach Brach's Royals,
which were like logs of soft caramel filled
with pasty fondant and chocolate, vanilla, orange,
raspberry, butter rum, and my favorite flavor, maple.
Wrapped in somewhat luridly colored foil
they seemed like Tootsie rolls for people with hot tubs.
Second place went to the jelly nougats, so classy and urban,
but nothing compared to the Neapolitan coconut
sundaes which featured four distinctly colored, equally
thick layers of treat, white vanilla, dark brown chocolate,
a lighter brown chewy caramel layer, and most importantly,
a bright, flamingo pink, strawberry layer.
Not everyone remembers the caramel layer,
but it was there.
And then, one day it wasn't.
Somewhere along the way and without reason
or for any reason-- for no reason than I can possibly
imagine, the caramel layer lifted off.
And the Neapolitan coconut sundae
was reduced to a mere three layers, the vanilla, chocolate,
and strawberry of Neapolitan ice cream,
whose name derives from the fact that spumoni,
the Italian molded ice cream dessert that also tends
to come in three different colored layers,
originated in Naples.
It wasn't the same, this new version minus the caramel.
How could it be?
But it was close enough.
And having left more to enjoy than to complain about,
I ate it.
The eponymous coconut was still present and very much
at play, hiding out in little shreds like sawdust
somewhere in the candy's midst.
I think it might have resided primarily or entirely
in the pink layer and not, if my studies were accurate,
the white which is where one might reasonably
expect to find it.
You couldn't really experience the layers separately
if you put the whole thing in your mouth
at once, which if I'm honest, I most often did.
But rather, you had to come at it slowly, one layer at a time,
nibbling away with care, savoring the differences.
I often tried.
And it was a challenge to end with pink, the odd one out
among the neutrals, because even when
it didn't stand for strawberry or strawberry coconut,
as it did and may have here, it still promised that it might.
And that promise alone was enough to recommend it.
And although I remember it as being more stingingly
sweet than the brown or the dark brown or the white,
the pink was also a little tart too, a little pungent,
surprisingly citric.
And this made it interesting to me,
more complex, possibly even slightly dangerous,
and almost alive.
It was the pink that seemed to set the whole candy in motion.
When my local supermarket closed down,
my access to Brach's Neapolitan coconut sundaes
was seriously compromised.
But up until the time I left New England to go to college, I
could always find them downtown or at the mall
or at the nearest CVS, acronym for Consumer Value
Stores, a popular chain of drugstores I've grown close to
over the years, in part, I think out of nostalgia
because they're based in my home state, Rhode Island, which
isn't true of most things.
Even Dunkin' Donuts, of whose pink and orange stores
there are more per capita in Providence
than in any other city, even this,
even Dunkin' Donuts was founded and headquartered
in Massachusetts.
A couple of years ago, a friend of mine from Ireland, a poet,
asked me what particular franchise I would
be if I had to be a franchise.
It was as if I had been waiting my whole life
to be asked this question.
Without thinking, I said CVS.
And right away she bounced back, yes, absolutely!
I was on top of the world.
But as far as Neapolitan coconut sundaes go,
I didn't remember the last time I saw and I don't remember
the last time I saw them.
And it looks like I'll never see them again except in pictures
on the Internet and in memory because Brach's, which
was founded in Chicago but is now
based in Dallas, decided to discontinue the candy in 2012.
And that was the end of that.
That's not the end of the lecture, though.
In her dream-- could be--
in her dream, the plate of candy has given my friend
the hope and courage she or really anyone
would need to speak to the tall, elegant, slender girls
with whom she dreams within her dream to be associated, and not
only for the duration of the party
but for the remainder of her human career.
I don't remember if she impressed upon me
the exact phrases that ran through her head
as she glided through time and a charmed state to the patio
where they radiated, but I imagine
it had to do with the mysteries of friendship and chance
and how funny but also how beautiful
it is that a random shared passion of some interest
in common can provoke so strong a wave of sympathy
that it will transport two or in this case
several strangers-- or rather, one stranger and a handful
of powerful confidants into a diagonal rhapsody
upon the same island.
What?
OK, this, I don't remember writing that--
where they can pupate in the celebration of whatever it
was that brought them there before moving
onto further things like music and cruelty.
At some point, she determines that instead of merely praising
the candy, she should make a bolder move
and ask if she might not be allowed to eat a piece, which
is to say consume it with her mouth right there at the party.
Something was going on.
As she readies herself for the encounter,
she notices for the first time that the candies have all
been unwrapped.
And she considers this unusual, but perhaps also sophisticated.
Although without their plastic on,
they have been sweating out their chemical wetnesses
and growing sticky in the heat.
Do you mind, she begins gesturing to the plate of dark
brown, brown, white, and pink, flamingo pink Neapolitan
coconut sundaes, if I eat one of those?
The party pauses.
And then I suppose it's the tallest of them,
if there is a tallest, an unmistakable touch of scoff
and a drop of pity in her expression,
who looks towards my friend whose hope had seemed
so well-founded, so certain.
And the tallest girl says, well, you can eat one if you want to,
but they're really for your hair.
Only now does my friend notice through curdles
of shame and adrenaline that each of the tall, slender girls
has a head full of long braids that
sway behind them like vines and that each of the braids
is ornamented with a regularly spaced row
of unwrapped Neapolitan coconut sundaes.
She's figured it all wrong.
She has no choice but to quit the dream and wake
back up, back into a world where we
agree candy is meant to be eaten and not to decorate hair.
What I like about this dream is what's
off with it, how it takes something commonplace
and recontextualizes it, puts it to strange new use resulting
in that mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar
we call the uncanny.
The uncanny simultaneously attracts and repels.
Or as Emily Dickinson once said of Nathaniel Hawthorne's work,
it entices and appalls, creating a measure
of cognitive dissonance that I, for one, can't get enough of.
The term uncanny derives from the Anglo-Saxon word ken,
meaning knowledge or perception, which appears most often today
in phrases like beyond our ken, which turns out
to have been a popular BBC Radio program starring comedian
Kenneth Horne, the account of the title,
which aired from 1958 to 1964.
Many of us probably most associate the word ken
with Keats's sonnet, "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer,"
his tribute to Renaissance poet, dramatist, and translator
George Chapman's version of The Iliad, which Algernon
Swinburne would later praise for its inextinguishable fire
and for its barbaric grandeur.
Later still, George Steiner would
claim it makes the English language know itself.
I like the idea of a language coming
to know itself through translation, which
seems like learning who you are by acting like someone
else pretending to be you, an experiment in the uncanny
if ever there were one.
Keats's immortal lines go like this.
"Then I felt like some watcher of the skies
when a new planet swims into his ken--" as a side note,
I'll mention that even though this is the passage that
will always bubble up when I think of the word ken,
I think swims is the real MVP here.
And it's probably what propels ken into such memorability
for me in the first place.
Keats's watcher is often identified
with German-born British astronomer, Sir William
Herschel, George III's royal astronomer who
in 1781 discovered Uranus, the first new planet found out
about since antiquity, which he originally
named Georgium Sidus, the Star of George,
in honor of this patron.
He had at first mistaken it for a star
and then a tailless comet.
The name wasn't very popular outside of Britain.
But it took on an--
but it took until 1850 for Uranus' name
to be changed to Uranus, the Latin form of Uranus,
the Greek god of the sky, the grandfather of Jupiter
and father of Saturn and hundreds of Beavis
and Butthead-style jokes, like hey Butthead,
do you think a man will ever land on Uranus?
But it's hard to know what to call anything,
much less something new.
Take Brach's Neapolitan coconut sundaes.
Clearly the same refers--
the name refers to the well-known Neapolitan ice
cream, itself named for, again, its supposed origination
in Naples, a mainstay in every grocer's freezer,
its pink, white, and brown bands instantly and internationally
recognizable and essentially an example of, again,
spumoni, from the Latin meaning foam which
happens to be one of the two words
you can count on finding on practically every page
of the collected poems of Swinburne,
the other being lips.
It's all foam and lips, and usually like the ocean
foam and--
yeah.
Neapolitan is the preferred flavor
of freeze-dried ice cream for astronauts
according to the online astronaut ice cream shop.
Other flavors include chocolate, chocolate chip,
and mint chocolate chip.
There is also an ice cream sandwich.
But what to make of the word sundae?
I have to admit, when I first heard the expression a month
of Sundays as a child, I assumed it
meant 30 consecutive days of ice cream with assorted toppings,
and for good reason.
The word Sunday and its homophone sundae
are in fact and certainly unsurprisingly related,
the day of the week having given its name to the specialty
dessert which appears to have been served at first
only on the Sabbath, a Christian Sabbath, a kind of ice cream
soda minus the soda.
But whether it all initiated at a soda fountain--
yeah, in Ithaca, New York in 1892 or one
in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, in 1888
remains a matter of hot debate.
In 2016, the town of Two Rivers actually
passed a cease and desist order formally charging
Ithaca's claim to be the birthplace of the sun--
challenging, sorry, formerly challenging Ithaca's claim.
Ithaca responded the way anyone would with a song
sung to the tune of Henry Mancini's "Moon River."
And its lyrics include, "Two Rivers, why live in denial?
The story you compile won't play."
I think it's good.
Emily Dickinson loved things that could fly,
birds, bees, butterflies, and her own imagination.
That's so corny.
One of the many birds-- that's really--
of the many birds she mentions, in particular
the robin red breast appears in her work perhaps most
frequently, often as a herald of spring,
or as she puts it, a Gabriel in humble circumstance.
Elsewhere, he's fancier, the one in red cravat, some come
show thy Durham vest--
Breast, excuse me, to her who loves the best,
she writes in one poem.
And part of which she included in the letter
to Higginson in 1882, accompanying a gift she
sent to his infant daughter.
The word Durham here refers to a rosy or rusty hue
associated with the shorthorn cattle of Durham, England.
Elsewhere, she declares the robin my criterion for tune
because I grow where robins do, a poem
in which her speakers states she sees things New Englandly.
Bobolink numbers are steadily declining,
but they're everywhere in Dickinson.
Sometimes you get the sense her interest in them
lie partly in their irresistible name.
Here one appears as a figure for a whistling passerby.
It's almost impossible not to imagine
this is based on an actual event with Dickinson
at her window in the family home on Main Street in Amherst,
the Dickinson meadow across the way providing
the long grass cut for hay and stacked twice yearly
that bobolinks favor.
This is the Dickinson poem.
Heart, not so heavy as mine wending late home--
as it passed my window whistled itself a tune--
a careless snatch-- a ballad--
A ditty of the street--
yet to my irritated Ear an Anodyne so sweet--
it was as if a Bobolink sauntered this way,
carolled, and mused, and carolled-- then bubbled
slow away!
It was as if a chirping Brook upon a toilsome way--
set bleeding feet to minuets without the knowing why!
Tomorrow, night will come again-- perhaps,
tired and sore--
O bugle!
By the window, I pray you stroll once more.
This early poem isn't one of Dickinson's more complex.
So it doesn't require all that much unpacking,
but there are a few things worth pointing out here.
The first is that the poem begins--
poem's beginning two quatrains serve to set up
the occasion of the poem.
The speaker, heavy-hearted, presumably at home,
overhears a whistler whose ditty of the street
has a surprisingly cheering effect on her.
These two stanzas are matched by another two in which she
captures-- that captures something of the character
of what she heard, rather than just
referring to it generically as a tune, a ditty, or a ballad.
Her first impulse is to compare it to a bird, a bobolink,
specifically.
And given the tune is whistled, this
is a relatively logical comparison to draw.
Things get a little less expected
when she relates the movement of the bird
as having bubbled slowly away-- bubbled slow away, excuse me.
To bubble can mean to brim with excitement or effervesce,
but both words are somewhat at odds with the modifier slow.
It's hard not to think ultimately
that it was the word bobolink that gave rise to bubble,
given the word's sonic similarity.
In the next quatrain, the comparison
is to a brook, something we have no trouble imagining bubbling,
as of course, one meaning of to bubble
is to make a sound resembling that made by bubbles in boiling
or running water.
Remarkably, the sound made by the brook
itself is described as chirping, a verb infinitely more
associated with birds than with running water.
And the presentation of the speaker's imaginative attempts
to give body to the effect of the whistler's tune,
the speaker's slightly overcome, and only slightly
by Dickinson's standards, has jumbled her words a bit,
enacting its excitation with a significant slip that
has the effect of seamlessly fusing
the auditory character of items from disparate conceptual
fields, whistler to bird, bird to brook.
Interestingly, all three share a forward motion,
although the brook is further modified
as toilsome, which has the effect of shifting
its association with the object of the poem, the whistler,
to that of the speaker, or perhaps more accurately,
merging the two as referring to the whistler as perhaps tired
and sore in the last stanza will, and in retrospect,
show the first stanza's heart not so heavy as mine,
how it does that too.
Section has been taken out here by myself,
not by interfering or intervening demon.
Speaking of flowers, some etymologists
maintain that the color pink derives its name
from the flower genus Dianthus, meaning flower of Zeus.
The genus' 300 or so species include the carnation,
sweet William, and of course, the pink, whose petal's edges
appear as if pinked, which is to say,
cut with a regularly tattered zigzag pattern.
It's too cloudy to know for sure,
but it looks like the petal's distinctive shape may
have given name to the flower, that over time
and that over time, the flower gave name
to its most customary color, the pale rose now we first think
of when we hear the word pink.
The verb form of pink is probably best known to us
as a present participle used as an adjective, pinking,
specifically in the term pinking shears which
are those sawtooth scissors used to keep fraying at a minimum
when cutting woven cloth.
I remember when my first grade teacher, Miss Murrell, who
was more of a math and science person, if you ask me,
instructed us to bring a pair of safety scissors
from home for an art project the next day
and how I felt a little panicked that all
I could find the next morning was my mother's heavy pinking
shears.
Time, my enemy even at so early an age,
had run out, leaving me no choice but to bring pinking
shares to school instead of kid-sized straight-edged
scissors like everybody else did.
My mother had done her best to make
me feel like this was actually a pretty exciting departure
from the norm.
But when I pulled them out of my little nylon duffel
bag, one of my classmates, a swivelly, spoiled loudmouth
who wore more turtlenecks than the rest of us put together,
didn't miss a beat.
Ha ha, why don't you have regular scissors?
He taunted me on the diagonal.
I know, you must be poor.
I remember how much my mother had
tried to make me feel better about the oddity
of the scissors, tried to get me to see what
was right in their wrongness.
And not that it ever came close to truly working,
but to see that whatever condition, approach,
and comfort all of those words had managed to build up
could be so efficiently dismantled
had the opposite effect of a joke.
Ease was instantaneously drained for me, as if by a specialist.
I spent the rest of the day in unshakeable embarrassment.
Everything I cut humiliated me.
And to this day, I blame this former classmate
of mine, Gregory de George, by name,
for much of my compulsive lifestyle overspending
that ran from the late 1980s into the early 90s.
Only, I've actually changed his name,
because I don't want (WHISPERING) Gregory--
I don't want to be that much of a jerk about it,
but, only his last name.
It's well known that the pink coloration of flamingos--
I'm almost done-- pink coloration of flamingos,
whose name we know means flame colored,
is a function of their lifestyle.
More specifically, their diet.
They eat little crustaceans, primarily brine shrimp
and blue green algae, whose own pigmentation is the product
of carotenoids, right?
Once ingested, these carotenoids are then
broken down into the pink and orange pigment molecules
by enzymes in the flamingos liver.
These molecules then anchor in the flamingos plumage, skin,
and bill.
Otherwise, the flamingo would be white.
What does it mean that the flamingo's most distinctive
characteristic, the trait for which it has been named,
is not an intrinsic property, but circumstantial?
I'm beginning to think it doesn't mean anything.
I thought it might mean something,
that the flamingo has the odd distinction of foraging
for the food that colors its plumage and gives it its name,
with its head inverted.
So that it might be said, to quote Stephen Jay Gould,
that it lives upside down.
But I don't know what yet.
What I do know is that flamingos have beaks, and not lips.
That's what Dickinson gives them in the following poem.
But that's what Dickinson gives them in this poem.
"How the old mountains drip with sunset.
How the hemlocks burn.
How the done break is draped in cinder by the wizard sun.
How the old steeples hand the scarlet till the ball is full.
Have I the lip of the flamingo that I dare to tell?
Then how the fire ebbs like billows,
touching all the grass, with a departing sapphire feature,
as a Duchess past.
How the small dusk crawls on the village till the houses blot.
And the old flambeaux, no men carry, glimmer on the street.
How it is night in nest and kennel.
And where was the wood, just a dome of abyss
is bowing into solitude.
These are the visions flitted Guido, Titian never told.
Domenico dropped his pencil, paralyzed with gold."
If we read this poem as a poem that
was never not concerned with something other
than what it never ceased also to be
connected with on the surface.
And if we do so without ever limiting whatever else
it might be also concerned with, because a person feels almost
confident in asserting that that very whatever else
can't be delineated, without distorting or otherwise
compromising it.
Which is to say that the poem itself
functions as a kind of catechesis, in that it offers
a way of referring to that which no word could ever refer to.
I was just kidding with that.
[LAUGHTER]
I really-- that was funny.
Then how the old mountain strip with sunset
does something comparable, and more
simply, but with twice as many words.
The slightly melancholic, but powerfully dramatic,
fact of the sunset is something Dickinson
celebrated at every point, every state, I should say,
in her writing career.
Taking a number of different approaches, but almost always
treating it as if it had never--
she had never seen it happen before,
or it never quite seen it before that way.
I think it was a matter of principle
for not to grow inured to the beauty of it,
or the cosmic enormity of it.
One poem states, in full, "The largest fire ever known
occurs each afternoon, discovered without surprise,
proceeds without concern, consumes
in no report to men in occidental town,
rebuilt another morning to be burned down again."
This is clearly less enthusiastic than
"How The Old Mountains Drip With Sunset."
But its key insight, namely, that an event
of enormous proportion happens daily,
and yet the notice we take in it, because of its familiarity,
because of the routine of it, is far from proportional
to its magnificence.
The poem enacts the mechanical feeling
it means to make us aware of, but finishes
long before the excitement of the initial insight has abated.
"How The Old Mountains Drip With Sunset"
is another of Dickinson's poems that sees New Englandly.
Ultimately, celebrating the beauty of the sunset
by admitting her incapacity to represent, or even
her unwillingness to represent, what the sunset looked like.
Her repeated use of the word "how"
here suggests both the interjective, as well
as a list of actions she would aim to describe,
if she felt equal to the task.
Or in her own words, if she possessed
the lip of the flamingo.
The lip of the flamingo, then, is
that bodily appurtenance, which is not only not
an appurtenance, but moreover, doesn't exist tangibly at all.
But only as a figure for a beautifully impossible act
of language.
Impossible not only because flamingos don't have lips,
but as she says of herself, their messages emerge out
of a mouth that cannot speak.
Now I'm going to read just a few poems
to conclude that, in some way, I feel,
reflect this engagement that I found myself
having, while I wrote these lectures,
these talks, with finding out facts
and finding ways to make them relate, or connect,
or speak to each other.
But I also want to read some poems that I think
of as being related to those poems,
but pursuing a very different kind of technique,
or whatever you want to call it, method, or, kind of,
formal structure.
In another one of the essays--
lectures that I wrote, I talk about patterning,
and repetition, and how it can create,
even if not necessarily a very specific semantic significance.
It can create a feeling and experience of meaningfulness
without specific meaning.
And this is something that I'm very drawn to.
My interest in this, I think, I first
discovered when talking, somewhat extemporaneously,
to a student.
I'd been preparing a little.
I said something to the effect--
I was in my prosody class, and I teach
the from medieval practice all the way up to, like,
Edna St Vincent Millay.
And so I said, well, there's this thing,
thinking a little bit of Sir Philip Sidney saying
that poetry, through its form, distinguishes itself
from language, as it chancibly falls from the mouth.
Which is a phrase that I've always liked.
That if something is patterned, it
suggests that there's been a deliberate intention
behind, an intelligence.
And I think if you walk into the forest,
and you see three rocks, in whatever structure,
you may not necessarily think that they were placed there
and they stand for something or they
have some kind of meaning that you can't really access.
But if you see three rocks stacked on top of each other,
and that there's this formal regularity, or a sort
of patterning there, you think this means something,
someone's been here.
And that experience of a kind of structure, a pattern,
that suggests a meaningfulness, or a meaning,
that you can't access, is something
that I take some pleasure in.
This poem is called "Fascination,"
and I just finished it yesterday, "Fascination."
"Raleigh filled his cargo hold with sassafras to carry it from
the New World to England, hoping it cured syphilis,
which it didn't.
But its fragrance was just heavenly
enough to make you think a miracle wasn't completely
out of the question.
Elizabeth, herself, looked out across the blue hypnosis
of ocean, saw infection in the form of 132 Spanish vessels,
and prohibited the setting sail of any one of England's own.
Having awakened to a military need for many hulls,
for masts that tower, for wind loud fabrics,
but bettered with use, for decks seasoned by the tread
of subjects, their finer, British aspects, reserve
and so forth.
Meanwhile, John White, governor of Roanoke, rich in sassafras,
but otherwise an inauspicious choice for the crown's toehold
in the Americas, was back in town
for emergency supplies and aid.
But given Elizabeth's stay of shipping,
isn't permitted to return to Roanoke for years.
Two long years, White pounds his pewter
tankard down, having abandoned wife and daughter to an end
without an author.
His tankard cylindrical, littered with an acorn thumb
piece, and filled with ale, whose froth splatters
on the tabletops in meaningful patterns he can't yet discern.
First the arrowhead of Hatteras, then a crescent of the Armada,
then, at last, a mitten or one or three
lobed leaf of sassafras, frequent thickener of stews
for the Choctaw, who still dry its foliage
and grind it into a powder, high in mucilage.
Which is found also in quantity in okra,
whose seed pods are said to have been taken from Africa to feed
the colony's growing slave population as cheaply as
possible.
High on the list of heat and drought resistant crops, okra
means to live, despite untenable conditions,
and deserves a tribute unique among those
owed to every plant whose leaf, root, flower, berry,
bark or root has gotten us as far as this without complaint.
Aloe, apple, artichoke, asparagus to start.
Then aubergine, a favorite of Alexander the Great,
who carried it from India and into Babylon,
despite his astronomer's warning that
the thunderous local diety, Marduk, had had enough already.
But the Macedonian was pretty sure a promise
to repair Marduk's temple, in ruins since Sennacherib
had at it, and felt by fringe historians
to have been the true tower of Babel,
might serve to soften the god's heart.
But apparently, not.
Alexander's coffin, all gold, filled with rumored honey,
and carried West, far from his deathbed in the palace
built by Nebuchadnezzar centuries earlier,
came to rest in Alexandria, founded by
and named for himself.
Site where his successor, Ptolemy, eventually
built the celebrated library that Callimachus worked at,
and whose fiery destruction was traumatic as a blunt force
to the head of humanity.
You can still feel it today.
Cherokee drank a tea of sassafras
root to dispollute the blood in Raleigh's day,
but knew never to drink it more than a week at a time.
English colonists came, saw, and concocted
a copycat tonic that mutated into the diet root beer
I have here.
Its frothy head no longer an intricate play
of sassafras mucilage, because the FDA determined a principle
in the root was hepatocarcinogenic to rodent
life in 1960.
Now, most manufacturers add extract of soapbark
to parrot the effect.
In his, "Life of Alexander," Plutarch
recalls that the hero was born on the same day
Herostratus set the temple of Diana in Ephesus ablaze,
so that his name would live forever.
Soapbark acts as a foaming agent in many fire extinguishers.
Without his imprisonment, and brace of assistants,
Raleigh would never have produced
"The History Of The World," whose first book states,
"the greatest wonder of the Earth is the palm tree."
I have stood beneath a tall one in LA
and watched its full fronds seethe,
like the mane of a lion.
Diana's Temple, the way the Ephesian workforce fixed it,
is remembered as one of the Seven Wonders of Antiquity.
Its chalk white blinding under chicory blue Turkish skies.
I hear the fingertips of history thrum on tabletops in Roanoke.
And as popcorn bursts, as it spins in my microwave.
When I opened the bag opposite my kitchen window,
the night reflects my face back in at me
through the steam expressed from kernels
to fascinate its way back into the water cycle,
in order to be the rain that fed the sassafras we hid in,
before I had to be human.
I'll read just a few more, they're short.
This-- I think I'll just read one more.
This is called "Diet Mountain Dew."
It's got information.
I said at the panel that we did today, which I loved doing,
and loved hearing the other one, that, at one point, looking
at some of the poems that I had written after starting all
this, my dear friend, Mark Strand, said "I don't know,
these new poems have a lot of information in them."
And he didn't mean that as a compliment.
But I'm committed to it.
I was talking to Dorothea on the flight over, flight
here from New York, about how the state that I ended up
finding myself in, while writing the lectures,
and then certain of these poems, was a, kind of,
receptivity to the possibility of things
finding how they related.
I do believe, obviously, that everything does relate.
That this is all, more or less, a closed system, this planet
that we're on.
And things that maybe don't have immediate points of connection,
maybe take a somewhat more winding path.
But it's all-- it is all interconnected.
It's somewhat of a banal statement, I think,
but maybe it's banal, because it's so true.
And I think that what you can do in a poem,
or what you can do in a conversation,
or what you can do with a talk, or what
can do with any work of art, or whatever you might choose
to do, is to find a way to make that simple fact come
alive to you.
And to, sort of, see it as something fresh, and exciting,
and a, kind of, call to responsibility, as well.
But, "Diet Mountain Dew."
I have built my ship of death.
And when a wind kicks up, I'll cut
it loose to do its thing, across an unnamed lake of you.
A firefly's then pulsing through the nonstop estivation
of the verses of our South.
Who, in its larval phase, would feast
on bitter worms and snails, who emerges from its mud
chamber, our planet's most efficient luminescence, who
turns chemical energy into radiant energy,
shedding very little heat.
So will I sail the compass of you,
pleased with my cold light.
I have built my ship of death, aglow in sturdy chemicals
and powered up at night.
Like American Express, I'm all customer service,
only minus the customer, no service
to speak of other than death.
You will know my logo by its absence and slogan
from the past ad for the sugared style of you on TV in my youth.
It goes like this, when my thirst is at its worst.
And then I let it trail off into the unsayable,
or is it just unsaid, because my mouth is full of you again.
A green like no other green in the dale.
A delicate green, or green indecent,
surpassing the fern and sprout in April's optimistic leaflet,
some stop to admire in nature.
They take photographs, non cognizant of other vehicles.
You are too green for pasture.
You are my green oncoming vehicle, usurper of green.
Assassin to the grasshopper and its plan,
I put me in your path, which is the path a planet takes when
it means to destroy another.
I think you know I'm OK with that.
A green like no other green, resplendent in production
since 1940, when brothers Barney and Ally Hartman cooked it up
in Tennessee, private mixer named after moonshine.
Its formula then revised by Bill Bridgforth of the Tri-city
Beverage Corp in 1958.
Year Linwood Burton, chemically inclined entrepreneur and ship
cleaning service owner, sold his formula
for a relatively safe maritime solvent to Procter & Gamble
of Ohio, who went on to market it under the name of Mr. Clean.
Whose green approaches yours, then at the last second swerves
into a joke yellow plays on green to make blue jealous,
till it blows up in its face.
But I can't not love the smell of it.
Citrus reimagined by an extraterrestrial lizard,
which is to say, inhuman.
In the way you say inhuman to me,
a compliment unraveled in the drawl.
Hey, you, over there, you look so unaccustomed to temporality,
I would have sworn you were inhuman.
And time for it after time, I fall, further evidence
of my humanity.
I am at heart no less susceptible
to rot than the felt hat on the head of the rifle toting
barefoot hillbilly, your mascot until the disappeared in 1973.
Instinct says he must have shot his self
in the woods in the mouth.
One sunrise, when a frost was at hand,
and the apples fell thick, and he was way too awake
when he did so not to think there would be another waiting,
like a can of you, in the 12 pack in my refrigerator.
I have built my ship of death and enough already.
Every toxic sip of you preparing for the journey to bloviation.
I leave to return and return to depart, again,
the stronger for a satisfaction being bound to no port
has afforded me.
I have built my ship of death.
So that even when I crawl back down into the hold of it,
alive as what unnaturalness in you can keep me.
It's only to emerge from the other end of it
intact and perfectly prepared to be your grasshopper.
I think I need to be a short one now, called "The Endless."
I saw a yellow butterfly flying, in my opinion, the wrong way,
flying across the sound to Connecticut.
I saw a cormorant, oily looking, flying close
to the sea's surface, precisely as I floated on my back
in the attitude of the crucifixion.
Minerals in my body in conversation
with the minerals of the sea.
About the sun.
How can I possibly add to what's already been
said so well by the ancients?
And said with an austerity I'll never know.
It is an honor to take a backseat to the ancients, who
knew how I was a fat, white fish, dissolving under the sold
out stadium sun, like a God.
But like a God, I could live through anything.
Thanks, everybody.