WEBVTT

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OK.

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I'm going to read you one set of
relatively, mostly, short poems

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from this and then a
couple of the newer poems.

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So it is very
important to me even

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as I have become a poet of more
public engagement I ended up

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reading that last poem on the
Washington Mall at the 2017

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March for Science to something
like 40 or 50,000 people, which

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was a very strange
experience because when

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I talk about the bees, a whole
crowd of people in bee suits

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started jumping up and down and
waving their signs and yelling.

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And when I talked
about the Badlands--

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that actually did happen.

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Scientists were tweeting
facts from the Badlands.

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From deep in the crowd
there came this roar

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and I thought, oh, that's where
the Badlands contingent must

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be.

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Very odd.

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But it is equally
important to me

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that poetry continued to
address the private life,

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the individual heart,
interiority, the griefs that

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come to every human
being of every kind

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sooner or later in this life.

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And so I will give
you a set of poems

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that were precipitated by
a diagnosis of glioblastoma

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and three year long illness
and eventual death of someone

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I had known all my adult life.

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Some of the poems speak more
towards his dying, some of them

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speak more about anyone's
mortality, my own mortality.

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All but the last start with
the words "little soul."

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That's taken from the one poem
we have by the Roman Emperor

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Hadrian who wrote a beautiful
little poem on his deathbed

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in which he called his own
departing life "Little Soul."

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And the title of this first one,
"Amor Fati" is the Latin phrase

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"love of fate."

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Whatever your life is, embrace
it because it is your life.

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"Amor Fati."

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"Little soul, you have
wondered lost a long time.

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The woods all dark
now, birded and eyed.

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Then a light, a cabin, a
fire, a door standing open.

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The fairy tales warn you, do
not go in, you who would eat

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will be eaten.

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You go in.

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You quicken.

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You want to have feet.

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You want to have eyes.

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You want to have fears."

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