Well thanks very much, and it's actually rather fantastic
to be here.
It's a wonderful place, goodness.
You're very lucky to be here all the time, [INAUDIBLE]..
That very, very nice introduction
makes me want to start with this piece from Virtual Reality.
It's called "Chapters of Verse," and there's
bits of Wordsworth's language stuck in here,
but it's really sort of saying what I want to say, I hope.
"Chapters of Verse."
Let's see how many chapters there are of this verse.
There are 26.
So there's no drama about when it's going to end, you know?
One, there are no poets in the natural order of things.
Two, a world in which there are no last names and no families.
Three, each generation comes into existence
by its own efforts, not through the sexual activity
of its ancestors.
Four, the physical present, death, eternity, type.
Five, the kineticism of childhood
seeks its own salvation behind society's back.
In public, suffers shipwreck and kitsch.
Six, we are the moonlit sea.
Seven, we beat with thundering hooves
that level limiting conditions of a broadly legible
social rhetoric widening itself on all sides, which
sees or thinks it sees the roof above instantly receding.
Substance and darkness making up a canopy
of shapes and tendencies to shape that shift
and vanish, and shortly work less and less
until without effort or motion, the scene
lies in perfect view, lifeless as a written book.
Eight, the scene lies in perfect view.
Nine, it is only in its resurrection that meaning dies.
Ten, subjective workers kiss, not as
lawyers, doctors, Coast Guard cadets, astronomers,
sex therapists, or psychic healers.
Eleven, political language will get
nothing but a mixed reception.
Twelve, we the public, with our dearest domestic ties,
adopting our unseen hands as a free ride.
Thirteen, human happiness is an image of relations in blood,
binding up the Constitution with fashion,
melding close impossibilities into a timeless whole.
Fourteen, I do not believe poetry and prose
will continue seven years longer.
That's the refrain that's hundreds of years old, right?
Fifteen, when we, the 250 million personal poets
of the United States of America have
children whom we scarcely know what to do with,
we make poets of them.
Sixteen, images in blood.
Seventeen, the fact that the poet characterizes poetry
as a church leads in a straight line
to the founding of a language that goes beyond revolution
towards a career of revelation.
Eighteen, a glimpse of an apostate son of a Quaker
going to see at 16, but the events of his biography
lead in a straight line to the resurrection of the activity
of his ancestors.
Nineteen, experience is an accumulation
of something like capital, but it is always information.
And if it is spent, it leaves the wind and sleeting
rain, the single sheep, the single tree dead from the wind,
the bleak music of the old stone wall,
the mist advancing on the intersection of two roads.
Twenty, uncommon language, loose, parasitic body
by centralization, acquires a range
of daily content and real legibility,
not in utopia, in fields under the Earth,
or as some secret liberty of bypassing
the objective conditions blocking our path.
Not as textual change in the world.
As usual, prostitution is sacred and universal.
Twenty one, there is not enough money
to buy all the small press books.
And while there are more than enough
diamonds to be the best friends of the eligible singles
in the new releases, there are not
enough releases to justify the building of the buildings
of a new society.
Thus, poetry and music limp along like agent friends
against a backdrop of real estate,
under a sky of pure speculation.
Twenty two, co-consumers seem perfectly willing to order
from a diversity of catalogs.
Omnisectarians of desire ride the continent in search--
in search of appropriate accreditization, creeds
and schools in abeyance.
Twenty three, to export need is to speak like a native.
Twenty four, except for single words,
there are no objects standing between the poet
and revolution, and not just of literature
alone, but of society as well.
Twenty five, the poet's mind when writing poetry
is a mass of social individuals all using words
at different times.
Twenty six, poetry begins not between individuals
within a community, but rather at the points where communities
end at their boundaries, at the points
of contact between different communities.