Sorry.
So I'm going to read from "The Maybe-Bird,"
and I thought I would start with--
if I move over a little, I thought
I would start with some poems from the first section, which
is really kind of what happened when
I did a layering of voices.
The situation was I was taking a documentary poetics
class at University of Denver.
And so I gathered a bunch of-- so I'm
Muskogee through my mother's side,
and I gathered a bunch of books written
by explorers and Indian agents to the Southeast ranging
from 1527 to 1828.
That's 300 years of--
these are all men writing about the Southeast.
So I scanned through all these texts, and I thought,
why am I even doing this?
What am I supposed to find here?
And I got more and more sad.
There's nothing to find there.
In over 300 years, they all kind of sounded the same.
Nothing that's recognizable.
Nothing that's Muskogee.
Nothing that even speaks to what the land was and still is.
It's just hidden from sight these days.
So I ended up doing an experiment where I just wanted
to fracture apart the books.
Sorry.
Should I step this way?
Maybe.
I don't want to hurt all your ears.
Where I took all the books, and I just took a bunch of words
from all the books, and I typed them
all up, not thinking about what they were, what they meant.
I just highlighted random pages, and I typed up
16 pages of language that was not associated with any one
book or any one theme.
Just language as stuff.
And then I took the 16 pages, and I cut them up
into 16 pieces.
And then I made 16 new pages by taking a little square
from each of the pages, and I taped them with Scotch tape.
And then I gave myself a rule because rules
can be really helpful, especially when you're sad.
And I had to write a poem for each of the 16 pages,
and I can only use the words on those, what I call,
text quilts.
I couldn't even add a pronoun.
Definitely no articles.
And you know what I found were very different voices.
It kind of came through, and I don't know who they are.
But they became like teachers.
So I'll read three of those.
Exhausted from the violent order of hours,
we took shelter in the country of Cusa, a deserted village
with thin deer, flint roads.
We learned to navigate painted margins, fence the fields,
plant stones, make of nothing, bred enough.
Did not resist the music of the swamp, old dances raising
the river's black dress, her perfumed cane,
rum skinned fruit.
In the mouth of March, we were swimming in flowers
and lived in this manner without men or wars
on the left banks of the Earth.
People used to say to expel the honeyed thorn of that cancer,
one must keep a lung of briars, the grace
to last through anxious rain and purpose, the burn
of the panther's mouth that those weary of fighting
have never seen the captives of God.
After the disease was brought to the nation,
we folded our fish nets, deer skins, hands.
Our flutes and arrows rent in pieces.
Long governed by destruction, we were a sovereign madness,
piloting knights, imperial bowels,
scraping stiff canoes through the streets.
We had little idea of the rushing effect, the scald
of rattlesnake weather, how ash would thread
raw wounds into blankets.
People used to say a great way off
is the dominion of the North, a vast beach
painted black where people live in bolts of trees,
stealing prickly trinkets of lightning.
Should their world be a patient country as the seed
to its shawl of crimson horses?
I don't know why I chose three with wars in them, but I did.
[LAUGHTER]
The war appeared to be coming to an end.
The no name people not yet taken left their crops
for summer's drought.
A bow in the mouth, they passed unseen.
Forded the river for rock trout, crystals,
the eastward hillside dense with vines.
Eyeing the sunrise, they traveled for days,
and lost in the reeds, heard everything: earthworms,
thunder, yesterday's moss, the patient banks of mourning.