WEBVTT

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When I was-- this
is my final reading

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making up an event that was
missed because of the pandemic.

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And so when I was
originally scheduled

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to come my most recent book
Ledger was newly published

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and I was going to
concentrate on that book.

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And now there's already
another one coming.

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But I'll read you mostly now
from Ledger and then a few

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of the newer poems.

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This book is not only about
the crisis of biosphere,

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climate, extinctions, but
it is greatly about that

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and it has an opening poem.

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I had been writing about
these things before this book.

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There's a poem called "Global
Warming" that I wrote in 2004.

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But I wrote this poem.

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This was the first poem written
after my last book was finished

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and I listened to it
and it changed my work.

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It made the urgency of
this subject matter step

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forward because I had to
listen to my own poem.

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So it's called
"Let Them Not Say."

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"Let them not say--

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we did not see it.

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We saw.

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Let them not say--
we did not hear it.

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We heard.

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Let them not say--

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they did not taste it.

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We ate, we trembled.

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Let them not say--

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it was not spoken, not written.

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Let them not say-- we were
drowned out by motorcycles.

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[LAUGHTER]

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Let" them not say-- it was
not spoken, not written.

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We spoke, we witnessed
with voices and hands.

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Let them not say--

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they did nothing.

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We did not-enough.

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Let them say, as they
must say something--

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a kerosene beauty.

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It burned.

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Let them say we warmed ourselves
by it, read by its light,

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praised, and it burned."

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This is a poem hoping to
make itself meaningless.

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I'm hoping that this is
not what they will say.

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There's a rhetorical
term for that kind

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of poem, apotropaic, a spell
against its own existence.

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