Is there some way to make this a little louder?
Someone controlling the sound?
No.
I could put it closer to my mouth without eating it.
[LAUGHING]
It has been, you know.
Right here?
OK, thank you.
I'm going to read some poems from The Errancy
and then, if I have time, poems from a new book that will be
out this summer, titled Swarm.
I'm going to try to--
what is it?
Did I do that?
[LAUGHING]
I'm going to try to read some poems I haven't
read before from this book.
They're a little bleaker than some of the others in the book
and will therefore lead effortlessly into the new book.
This book was based on a sort of idea I had of the Baroque
as it came to me from both philosophy and the visual arts.
In terms of its structure, well, I
imagined I was questioning the status of the speaker, which,
of course, is just one way of just writing poems.
But I did write poems from three different vantage
points in this book.
Can you hear me in the back?
And the vantage points, if you just
imagine any Baroque Italian painting,
the sort of vertigo-ridden different points of view.
One of the sets of speakers in the book
is a series of guardian angels who speak.
They seem to be speaking from somewhere
above the ordinary human speaker in the book.
And they are creatures that still
have a certain amount of power.
I think of them as victims of downsizing.
And so they have the power to witness and not really
the power to help or provide even anything other than almost
inaudible admonition.
The other point of view is the point
of view of a series of lovers in the book.
And they're all in motel rooms or hotel rooms.
And they're desperately, I think,
reading what's left of literature to them
and foraging through each other's bodies trying
to figure out where utopia might still reside.
And the third speaker is the poet in the book.
So I'm going to read one of the guardian angel poems.
This is "The Guardian Angel of Self-Knowledge."
"How razor-clean was it supposed to become,
the zero at the core of each of these, mingling with
leaves as they fork up in wind, bright yellow, distillations
of uprising, evidence of this one world's gigantic curvature.
How clean, how denuded of their foliage
these desperate aimless ones and twos along the built-up paths,
and ones in corridors, these ones so skillfully
grouped up in liquid clutches of impermanence
now taking the long way back along the lake,
now in the auditorium beating upon by wind
and then a little rain.
They look in their envelopes.
They look on their paper calendars under their tongues.
Stare at the shadows their bodies cast.
Stare at the shadows they're folding chairs cast.
With each glance, something like a leaf let loose.
I watch it float, each eyelash lurching forward, each horse
and giddy self-appraisal.
I watch them let it go, each owner standing so stilly now
behind his words as they are given up on lunch break
beside the phone booth where one's crying softly now
into the glistening receiver beside the bookseller.
The fruit seller, where one comes
right to the warm brink of a yellow pear.
Oh, from here, it looks so like a dream of shelter,
the way that reaching hand mimics the eye,
romancing, the way it quickens at its root, desiring.
The other one now rooting in a pocket for some change.
The other one's now touching a chin, a lip, an index finger
rough on a cheek as if to wipe away a glance.
Down there, oh, how much must I see?
How clean did they want to become,
shedding each possibility with gusts of self-exposure bubbling
up into gesture, their quaint notions of perfection?
Then letting each thought, each resting place
get swept away, because that was not what I meant,
was not at all.
And since the future isn't real, is just
an alarm clock where the last domino can finally
drop wearing a street address around its medicated neck.
Oh, that, of course, the wound we cannot medicate.
You know, the room of icons so preserved--
we move them round to fit the furniture, opinions nestling
in them.
Down in the folds--
the inlays, opinions, and calculations and bits
of stardom right down in there in the grain of the icons,
some truth in there too now maybe in the form.
Who can tell?
Maybe even some ecstasy, some little monstrosity,
though it doesn't matter, since we can't tell the difference,
since it's all prerecorded or something like that.
Who will they be when they get to the bottom of it,
when they've stripped away the retrospect, when they've
peeled away the orphan hood, the shimmering merriments
of consolation?
How will they feel the erasures erase them?
Who will they resemble when they're done with resemblance?"
[APPLAUSE]