WEBVTT

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This collaboration was done
with the poet Olga Broumas,

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as Lois mentioned.

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Olga, if you don't
know her work,

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is from the Mediterranean.

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She's a Greek poet and has
written several books of poetry

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and also has translated
very beautifully the--

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What I Love: The Selected
Poems of Odysseas Elytis.

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And I had the great pleasure of
traveling to the Mediterranean

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with Olga.

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We spent a year there,
during which time

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we wrote these prose poems.

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Actually, we
started out to write

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something quite different.

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We were away from
our own language,

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our own English language.

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And one day, we went for a walk.

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It was dusk, and we
weren't quite writing.

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We weren't doing anything.

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We thought, my God, we
should do something.

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What should we do?

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And she turned, and she
looked straight at me.

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And she said, well, let's
make a lot of money.

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Let's write a porn novel.

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And well, anyway,
this is not that.

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It's a far cry
from that, I hope.

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And I thought all the way, I
decided I couldn't possibly

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collaborate with someone.

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Oh.

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I'm an artist.

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I couldn't possibly do that.

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And anyway, it's not
as hard as you think.

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It can be very rewarding.

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I enjoyed it very much.

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Some of these passages
are very lyrical,

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and others are more narrative.

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And I've selected
a couple of each.

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"She liked to be in the middle.

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One of them was taken by
how close her heart beat

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to the surface like
a robin's and how

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she landed with a light touch.

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If the sheets were white,
and the sun glanced on them,

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blonde had more red.

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Another was olive with almond
eyes, who liked to wake slowly

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and fall back.

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She lay beside
the row of windows

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and rolled out into the night on
their long, wooden oven spoons.

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Sometimes they came
for her and woke her,

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kissing the corners
of her mouth.

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The long hairs in the bed--
the very curly, the weighty,

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and the subtle--

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lit in arabesque.

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When they were wet, they
were very, very wet.

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And when they were
dry, they were funny.

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Excited, the candle burned
like cry breath, who called out

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and where answered and
when became thirsty.

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She reached for the lucky
pitcher sailing across the sky.

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Tissue, tissue, kiss you."

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