Hello.
[LAUGHING]
This winter, 55 inches of snow have fallen so far
in Central Park and the average snowfall for the whole year
is 25 inches.
So I love being here.
[LAUGHING]
And when I was invited to read by Cybele probably a year
and a half ago, she says, when do you want to come?
I said, February.
[LAUGHING]
Thank you Cybele and Tyler.
And I'll say just a few people.
Richard Siken, Boyer Rickel, and my former student
from Bennington, Jia, who drove from Phoenix
to be here tonight.
It's a real privilege to be able to write poems
and to read them to people.
And there are not very many organizations
like this Poetry Center.
I can only think about maybe I've been to the Poetry
Foundation building in Chicago.
There's Poets House in New York City.
That's about it.
And so you guys know you have this amazing poetic treasure
here in the desert.
And so thank you.
I'm going to read a couple of things.
First from a book that's coming out this fall called
Don't Go Back to Sleep.
In 2007 I had a cat of 14 years who died.
And after she died, I didn't read and write for five months.
And I also didn't listen to any music
because those activities just felt too intense.
And we all mourn in our own weird particular ways.
But when I started to write again, I didn't write poetry.
In fact, I wrote a novel.
And during that time, I only worked on one poem
for two years.
And I'm going to start tonight with that poem.
My mother, she died in 1998 of pancreatic cancer.
She was also paranoid schizophrenic.
And even though it was a really sad time,
I was really relieved that she died
because her life was such a torture, to me, especially,
and to many people.
So it's a very mixed thing.
But it was the only time in my life
where I didn't listen to music for six months.
And that was the one thing that we shared, was classical music.
And so when my cat died, I was surprised
that I had a similar reaction.
So that's a very weird thing to realize
that the person who brought me into this world and this cat
had a kind of similar value.
And I didn't know what that made of me.
And so I did start becoming curious
about who this woman was separate from her role
as a mother.
And so this is a long poem.
So it's called "A Requiem for the Homeless Spirits."
"There is no language to adequately describe
the Japanese crimes.
Ma Xiuyi, survivor.
[BELL RINGING]
Head of a Chinese soldier with a cigarette butt in its mouth.
Taken by whom, given by whom?
Who never got to see the image he'd
become in the papers, in textbooks, online.
An image that has outlasted whatever
grave he did or did not get to have in this life.
This is not how anyone would want to be remembered.
Future generations thumbing through the pages,
the files, printing them out on desktop printers,
printing off the same screens they
use to check email, surf porn.
The winner of this contest will get his photo
on the front page of the paper.
The heads of Chinese men taken off
with one stroke of a broadsword left nameless
as a pile of rocks.
Nameless as a headless corpse with hands
bound behind its back.
Only the names of the winners on the front page of the Nichi
Nichi Shimbun on December 13, 1937 in a language I cannot
read garlanded the photo of the smiling winners in uniform,
each propped up on his own sword,
an image someone else who knows the language will have
to explain to me.
And my hairstylist Akiro reads to me,
"Contest to kill first 100 Chinese with sword
extended when both fighters exceed mark.
Mukai scores 106, and Noda 105."
[BELL RINGING]
Soon sleep will be taken away, appetite taken away,
as that which clutches Akiro's throat starts to spread.
A cloud that began from just two cigarettes a day,
no insurance for the $800 price tag
attached to each procedure, which may or may not
save his life.
He who has already lost half of his voice refusing radiation
for fear of losing what remains.
Still recognizable as he takes an electric razor to my scalp,
sculpting something that will last for weeks at best.
He who's been doing this for more than half his life, who
tells me he can still eat, still sleep eight hours a night,
while handing me a card for the next visit,
a date that suddenly seems further away than ever.
[BELL RINGING]
In a speech made in Nanjing seven years
after the rape of Nanjing, Emperor Hirohito's youngest
brother Prince Mikasa detailed the extent
of the military atrocities against the Chinese.
Copies of his statement suppressed, buried
by the military authorities.
A single copy exhumed five decades later
in the parliamentary library by a Kobe University professor.
Order Number 119, Western Front battle operations,
16th division.
20th regiment, 1st Battalion, November 16, 1937.
All provisions to be levied locally in Nanjing, i.e.
rape, loot, pillage, destroy.
And what do American textbooks say about first nation genocide
beyond all those blankets laced with smallpox?
And what will American textbooks say
about Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, waterboarding,
and extraordinary rendition 50 years from now,
when history as we all know, is written by the winners?
[BELL RINGING]
This is not how anyone would want to be remembered.
Reverend John G. Magee, chairman of the International Red Cross
Council, racing through gunfire to rescue
disarmed Chinese soldiers being led off to the slaughter.
Reverend John G. Magee, an amateur photographer,
who obtained a permit from the Japanese authorities,
the stills from his 16 millimeter movie camera
largely responsible for what we're able now to see.
His camera and film deposited at Yale,
where he became a chaplain after the war.
Photos exist.
Some were rounded up with barbed wire in groups of 10
and herded down by the river where
the machine guns were waiting.
And some were forced to dig ditches, forced again
to lie down in them while the next group shoveled dirt on top
of them, muffling their sounds.
Others buried up to their necks only
to be beheaded, bayoneted, flattened,
by the treads of a tank.
Some were burned alive, gasoline igniting communal pits.
Photos exist.
Bayonet wounds on the back of a woman's neck,
severing muscles down to the vertebra column.
Some 80,000 women raped, ages 8 through 80.
Some of them stripped with their legs tied
to a chair, some passing out.
Others bleeding to death, still others gang
raped week after week, until they
contracted venereal diseases and were taken out to be shot.
Objects inserted into the vaginas of corpses
before they were posed for photographs,
the souvenir film sent by Japanese soldiers
to be developed in Shanghai, where extra prints
were sometimes smuggled out to news agencies across the ocean.
[BELL RINGING]
Memo to the 66th regiment 1st Battalion December 13, 1937:
kill all captives.
Few of the survivors in 2014 remain alive.
Few of the perpetrators in 2014 remain alive.
Some of their stories have been recorded; many of their stories
will never get told.
What should any of us do, while they are still alive?
[BELL RINGING]