Yeah.
No, it switched off.
There we go.
Now you can hear me, I imagine.
I have developed your famous Tucson allergies I heard about
before I came, so I hope you don't.
I will probably take this candy out of my mouth at some point.
I'd like to thank, before I start,
the wonderful people who made this possible, Alison
and Frances and the Poetry Center, which
I think is one of the new wonders of the world,
and also especially profound thanks to Jane Miller
for thinking of me.
Thank you, Jane.
I never met her until this evening,
and I'm extremely happy to see her face.
So I'm going to run you through a lot of different projects,
and I'll tell you a little bit, maybe,
about each one before I go into them.
The first thing I'll start with is "The Book of Tendons"
which is two long poems or sequences.
They're actually individual poems that make up the larger
poem, and the two are related.
"She almost sexed her hair aflame,
mixed blood of north and noon.
Here is the book of her tendons, built by a hammer of light.
In the river's cream, as if milky then could mean anything.
Via Lactica, the road we tore out of summer,
foot split on Eden's damp edge, limbs ghastly, and a glass
of something's water.
At June's door we could not drink it.
The atmosphere's a wall of glass we could not open.
Asteroids glanced off the eye corners.
There was grass for a shrapnel bed in the magnum amnesia.
Lay me down, Lord, my little boat gun gone dim.
Say a man who's built a house on someone else's hand
to find what good came of thunder:
the ode in geode, agate pits, earth's sung dirt dark sprung,
in the rock the human stalk.
The story is, once a man set out to eat a bird,
but found instead they're better heard, unless it's a chicken,
I suppose.
Slipping between atoms on the walkable air,
because the best attitude to take
is not always one of falling.
The materials heat animal and un,
a kind of sexiness in the way numbers add up,
one, one sliding into another one.
Rocks, reptiles, thunders and wings, even the ideas,
heads and distance from one point to the next
in all is part of everything I can comprehend.
Stars mar no man light as a bone feather,
therefore his shoulders gather light up.
See these handy calves walk among black hawk consonants,
and light's intention to light, say,
the sky, where he and her sex intersects,
a movable type divine, a creamer among the cavalry,
hence minerals of blue, oh miracles of G,
we have received feelings, last summer's night transom,
and the sun of four fold hands, flesh of teeth,
teeth of sun, sun.
I leaves, I do cry down the act of touch, artless,
throat of flame, led with blood for a thread, door to door
to the blank house led.
Dream, we will exchange simultaneously music
for a heart, vacillate between de and un-, sire,
I have cleared myself away of all materials I am not."
And I'll read, I think, just one poem
from Blue Guide, which is actually from a longer--
excuse me for blowing my nose between poems.
This just came out, the first time I'll be reading from it.
It's from a longer manuscript which is also sequential,
but a little bit less so.
The poems are more individual and yet I
don't think of them as separate from this manuscript.
The whole is maybe two or three times as big as this chapbook,
and they are very influenced by science.
I was also living in Paris at the time
that I wrote them and had a lot of time to myself, which
was wonderful.
"Thus speak the chromagraph, saying,
one night in a cloud chamber I discovered a thing,
that a thing I used to have, a crown of light,
a thing could be more than true and more again than false.
A thing could carry its name with a ticket
of light called possible.
In a cloud chamber particles are betrayed by movement
and water vapors leave trails discovered
when matter and its antithesis come together,
a disappearing flash of light, our share of night to ear.
I mean what I say.
In contempt of the law, of all excluded thirds,
laws are not symmetrical in the forward and the back of time,
on which side are they stacked, and the sky also
is what made Hart Crane so crazy in the heart.
Continued to pile clouds without a count,
a mass of gases with nothing scribbled under them, a song
in the middle of the crystal pistolet, a cavatina.
We hardly had any bones then.
Did Hart Crane have bones?
If so, which kind and how far down?
It was written in the boned hours, the book of weeds,
a treatise on leaving the house at dusk when all buildings have
already had time enough to fit themselves back into shadows,
as if there were only this dusk to dusk, dusk and dust,
where no animals asserted themselves
as separate from the day, and the night comes again
as it always had done.
The fact was that I could not follow the map
because the book of nature was written
in math's uncertain language, author of black rains,
why the naked eye unclothed can see between math's limits, why
a baby's bones are soft as pudding
when first let out of the water and take a long time to harden.
You can flatten a newborn skull by placing it on a board.
The death hole of the cranium takes six months
to close, and then grow brittle.
In describing the last arc of the last circumference,
I missed that halo.
How long it took to understand rivers run toward the sea."
Actually, I wrote a poem in Tucson,
which I'm not going to read, but since I wrote it here I
thought I'd read you the first two lines and the last two
lines, and when the middle is ready, if I ever see you again,
I'll read it.
Actually, all the part in the middle
is where Tucson is, so you won't recognize anything from--
"Where do I winter with Chopin's chopsticks in devilish socks?"
Oh, I'll read you the last three lines.
"When the dark tail began loosening
the lake, the tiny bottle of Mars Black
that you hold in your hand will write your story now."
Maybe I'll call it "Tucson."
I'm going to read you some essays which are actually
poems, and they were inspired by Michel de Montaigne's essays
and his idea of what an essay is, and also by Proust,
reading a lot of Proust.
I am continuing to do so, and there are about 90 essays.
I'm just going to read you maybe three or four.
Some of them are histories, some of them
are letters, so "Histories."
"A woman was constructed in 20 ounce antiquity,
certainly she existed.
It is true that blank discovered the clitoris in 1544,
key to heaven and hell, viewable to the naked eye
like a man in the forest or birds, they spoke Latin.
I itted it.
What did you it?
'That,' he said, pointing.
The body is a well-oiled machine made for doing things.
'I forgot what I can do,' she said, talking, talking.
She has taken the care to change her necklace for the domination
of anyone, a female revolutionary
all jellied into action, a living organism
with sizzling feelings.
Right in the middle of something really beautiful happening,
your frontal lobes are scraped out with a nail file.
The beautiful thing that was happening
was happening between us.
It was the highest friable branch of the apple,
like a glass chassis in the glove of a chandelier.
Dear, dear reformer, do I really have
to become familiar with the ways race and class inform
cinematic representations of relations between the sexes?
I am looking at a man on the train at dawn.
He is wearing a red uniform and I am only interested in him
as a representative of the uniformed species.
The train pulls in underground.
He crosses his ankles when a church goes by,
and when we come out, oh, I am sorry.
You will have to wait until another history
when short butt cracks have come back into favor.
I-- she-- had never contemplated the length of butt cracks till
she met him--
you.
Before I met him I never thought about butt cracks.
This is my testimony.
I now know he needs a quarter so he
can hide it in there along with the American movies."
[LAUGHTER]
All right, I see what you guys like.
In that case, I'll just surprise you with it.
I won't read it now.
Essay: "Trains."
"She's fine till work lets out.
Then the conversation begins, the many bags, heavy rumblings,
cardinal questions, a cardboard box somewhere,
the lower versions of cities flattened
under her watery feet.
Susan Queen crosses the river in a flowered skirt.
She is floating, flawless and dead.
The hood of her sweatshirt spreads out
of the ears, the hole crowned head.
A seagull peels back into the gray sky of its wing,
and the sky gray on top of the river below such a.
How many bridges did you take?
Two, I made two, but Queens is still on this island.
If I ever accidentally left all my books,
if I ever left my body in Queens, Long Island,
to see columns of Queens, to paint columns of Queens,
five minutes of furry heart, five minutes of furry heart.
You can't tell the difference, but one's
a furry Valentine-shaped heart.
The other is human."
I actually did see a dead woman floating in the East River
which is where that poem started.
Essay: "When I Think of Sex, a Moist Fog."
"When I think of sex, some people think of seals barking,
but I think of shrimp and bleach.
When I think of sex with some people,
I think of cones and rods, but they think of flywheels.
When some people think of sex, they
think of plastic and rubber and Frisbees,
but when I think of them and sex I
think of international Ultimate championships
and of grass stains on the knees, and flies and zippers,
and X's over their eyes, and they are dead.
And when I think of them and sex, I think,
I do not want to have sex with a dead person until I am dead."
[LAUGHTER]
You should think about that.
So how are you doing?
Doing OK?
Good, good.
I'm going to now read from a long poem for the next 90
minutes or so.
If you have to go to the bathroom,
actually for about 10 minutes.
It's nice to know what the person up here is doing.
It's called "The California Poem."
Alison mentioned it, and I'm not reading all 74 pages.
I'm going to kind of skip around.
It starts with a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson,
"Melons and plums and peaches, eating and drinking,
and the bugle, all the day long.
These are the glorious occupations
which engross a proud and thinking being, running
his race of preparation for the eternal world."
"I want to tell you about the dream.
The California is a paradise lake
with colorful animals dream.
The when I go back to my homeland,
California is a paradise, I am happy for you, dream,
in which Alexander the Great invented
the caterpillar personally.
We were going ever so through the dusty eucalyptus.
The dusty eucalyptus and shadow road, and the opposite
of blindness, and relinquished speech,
and focusing on my mother's throat
like taking a picture of it when it's interesting, thinking.
The lake is to the left.
On one side, a tall, pink bird invented by space and time,
called 'heron,' and there, other small and medium birds,
shiny and loose with pockets of durian, ash, gold,
what can be lit, oh, light that, oh, light that for you, dream.
A kissing everything goodbye and the lyric pelt,
and an eye of spit, a throwing gutter full of vowels
out of the battery, and ground in the teeth,
death in the hand, death in the bush, two in the hand.
In the nape of the napalm of sun, shore, sun,
I am an orphan, I am still Ishmael, dream.
Who was counting the ribs in my grandfather's ships?
My fist versus coastal margins of coconut novelties
which recede and advance upon the shelf like a carved animal
army, razor clams, wentletraps drifting away
from the dream of California, which is dust and light,
and dust being tossed in the white chenille
blanket besides the low, white stucco
barracks with roosters between the houses scratching
at the dust of the light of the dream.
Fantastic, thorny shapes that stand in the desert
as tall as a house sticking up out of the desert
part of California.
Absurd, tiny flowers frozen in the tips,
needles for the poet named Alice, and goats weed.
This poem is therein, in my dream
of Death Valley, a low depression and gloss of surface
lands, gloss of gloss Angeles, and Inyo County
is just dusty in the bus station at the cold night,
shifting from foot to foot in 1973.
Tumbleweeds go by.
In my sleeping nostalgia for the streets of San Francisco dream,
like seeing Michael Douglas in an elevator in California,
not that satisfying, or my dream of a saguaro flower weather
bath, or California, born in the shape of Karl Malden's nose
as it appears in 'One-Eyed Jacks'.
You know that a bodega is a market, that's
what we call in New York City, we call markets,
but there's also Bodega Bay in California.
In California we don't say bodega except for the Bay.
We say market, which is what it is.
We don't say buttercup, we say butter box, or butter cut.
If you say margarine, we bodacious, we don't say you be,
we say I is.
In California, fire hydrant is a way
to say freeway, which in turn turns to freely,
all ye income, free into dust motes, at Lake of Our Lady,
et cetera, by the seashore, and my right hand very
close to the earthly paradise.
California, named for a tribe of ladies
with big feet, Rose Bowl football
and the black hole of Livermore, where the flames
and the tripods expired.
It is all of New York, New England, Pennsylvania
and New Jersey combined.
Laugh for the eucalyptus as an object of pity.
The truth of a Georgia is not to be found here in sushi dinners,
but there is also the dirt bike parade,
and the mud behind subdivision A3, Santa Maria, Camarillo
and so on.
Near the lemon grove is both beautiful and useful behind
the funny farm, and more lemon groves.
My grandmother's ranch was a small pit stop
inside a lemon seed.
My grandmother's gas station was two concrete slabs laid out
in the Mojave, her hair a tumbleweed sprayed
in the shape of a kelp limpet-gilded turban,
and the lemon leaves will brush one's head,
and the spider webs are fresh and dewy.
The mouse turds can be found under the chaparral.
My grandmother spends weekends in ghost towns looking
for scorpions to cast in lucite.
In the dead yard, at Dolores crumbling into dust and light
is California, and California's variegated surface
forgets that dust which came to bequeath them, space and light,
nudibranchs.
Did I say Cachuma's footprints in the ashy mud
of the bones of our forefathers, ground up like pellets?
Did I turn to the bones of mice bones,
and the coyote, fox, eagle shit?
At 13 I acquired a good tan in California
to brush with the gods and god-squeezers,
and boring and smiling compliments, so much
less to rake and scratch the character on,
as I too was raked along the bottom feeders and surface
waters, like El Niño doing a brody through our air hair.
At the Sunday meeting I was myself
a dumb dog who could not bark at the sadness
of early California.
The sado-masos down from the hills and Sadducees,
their desire, denial of everything dead,
and existence of angels.
And the echinoderms give up their radial symmetry,
the laughable echinoderms moving back toward bilaterality
like drunken teens.
California, and the lights of the trees, my hedon Eden.
I rushed to California with my eyes closed.
Bill, our president, was there.
Fire rushed down his snout like a dining rage,
and through the pinelands of banana road
like three light fingers making waste across the ice
lakes of Jupiter's moon, Io."
Guys are making me thirsty.
"Sidewinders and autumn churrascos,
winos tell stories in the back with their hands.
The son comes home from a long trip.
The wino opens the car trunk, and there
is the girlfriend, dead, and the man gets in the car
and he drives.
He buys a shovel and he drives.
He buries her deep in the desert and he never says where.
This he does not say to the son, but maybe he
buries her somewhere near Soda or Cadiz,
under the scurry and rasp of things in the desert.
There is laced coral below laced coral on the hem of a dress.
A skirt skirted in poison coral cyanide.
The colonial animals fasten themselves
to the bottom of the sea where hair waves.
I have not remembered to mention the darkest of series,
the place where I was thinking, California,
or the almonds at Mycenae, sleeping
trees under the sleepy ground, their light strings, dangling,
dream of the fixed trees of all Mars, and all marine.
Mariner, my voice is tangled there
where the phone lines tangle with the sea."
I think I'll stop there.
[APPLAUSE]