When I was-- this is my final reading
making up an event that was missed because of the pandemic.
And so when I was originally scheduled
to come my most recent book Ledger was newly published
and I was going to concentrate on that book.
And now there's already another one coming.
But I'll read you mostly now from Ledger and then a few
of the newer poems.
This book is not only about the crisis of biosphere,
climate, extinctions, but it is greatly about that
and it has an opening poem.
I had been writing about these things before this book.
There's a poem called "Global Warming" that I wrote in 2004.
But I wrote this poem.
This was the first poem written after my last book was finished
and I listened to it and it changed my work.
It made the urgency of this subject matter step
forward because I had to listen to my own poem.
So it's called "Let Them Not Say."
"Let them not say--
we did not see it.
We saw.
Let them not say-- we did not hear it.
We heard.
Let them not say--
they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.
Let them not say--
it was not spoken, not written.
Let them not say-- we were drowned out by motorcycles.
[LAUGHTER]
Let" them not say-- it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke, we witnessed with voices and hands.
Let them not say--
they did nothing.
We did not-enough.
Let them say, as they must say something--
a kerosene beauty.
It burned.
Let them say we warmed ourselves by it, read by its light,
praised, and it burned."
This is a poem hoping to make itself meaningless.
I'm hoping that this is not what they will say.
There's a rhetorical term for that kind
of poem, apotropaic, a spell against its own existence.