WEBVTT

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I think I'll now
move, and then I'll

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come back to read a final
poem from that collection

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to work that I've been writing
over the last couple of years

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that's more or less
centered in West Texas,

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or the Rio Grande Valley, which
is the space of composition,

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but also the space
of the imagination.

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It's entitled
"Carbonate of Copper,"

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and the title comes from
that marvelous little book

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by the art historian
Michael Baxandall

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on 15th century Italian
painting, in which he talks

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about the difference
between carbonate of copper,

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which was a lesser
blue than aquamarine

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for painters at the time.

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And I like this idea
of the materiality

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of carbonate of copper.

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And I'm also thinking of
the poet Allen Grossman

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and his idea of the
beloved companion.

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And in a sense,
the book was begun

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during the COVID pandemic.

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But one can think of
the beloved companion

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as this kind of widening
circle, as Grossman points out,

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a family of affiliative
kin of neighbors,

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of the known and unknown,
the human and the nonhuman.

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And for him, the poem
is a kind of unforgetting,

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and this is, to me, the drive
behind some of the work.

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And I've been influenced
as well as the participants

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in the class yesterday known
by the work of Pauline Oliveros

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and the idea of listening--

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to listening as a kind
of full embodied practice

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that turns one into that
other person that evaporates.

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And also to Jane Bennett's
idea of vibrant matter

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when she says that, that
which is nonhuman or material

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also has a kind of
agency, that it's active

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and has an earthy, not
quite human capaciousness.

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It's that impersonal life
that surrounds us and infuses

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us that has that kind of
painful nagging feeling

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that something is being
forgotten or left out.

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"Carbonate of Copper."

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"In the hours, I was
left to the elements.

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Sorely colorless labor
evolving facts of a day.

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Days now deficient
in matters of fact.

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So many attachments of the
tribe to the stupefying circle,

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it burns a new
image of the Earth,

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disabling the view from nowhere.

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Am I unsheltered and so
out of time as to wonder,

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does my face defy
its aim on end?

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Am I the architect of
this very small thing

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I derive or refuse
from seven descendants?

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Does a landscape
here obtain as when

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there was food, the field,
abundant, sun, summer,

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Green River Valley, chestnut,
little bomb, border, milestone?

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Came the builders of a
sudden identical twins

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at the sugar mill.

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It was a window overlooking
the carbonate of copper

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on shapes, predictive
in the wireless ether."

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