Thank you, Sean.
My love for you truly knows no bounds, well, maybe
a couple of bounds.
Love to thank the University of Arizona Poetry Center which
is a truly phenomenal special place.
I live in Seattle.
There's a variety of great things going
on but there's no site, there's no space
that exists like the Poetry Center in Seattle,
much to the loneliness of hearts in the Northwest.
So thank you to everybody here.
Thank you especially to Phillip and Akila
who are two poets who are doing truly
legitimately significant work.
It's very serious significant work.
And so it's really wonderful to be able to open up
for the two of you.
I'm going to read three poems.
I'm going to read a poem that's about a month old,
I'm going to read a poem that's about a year old,
and I'm going to read a poem that's about two years old.
And I'm going to read them in that order.
So this is the month old poem.
I spoke-- we had a little meeting with a class today
up there and I was saying that I tend to write serial work
or everything I write fits into one long poem that never ends.
That was somewhat of a lie because I've
been writing poems recently that at least I
hope are somewhat discrete.
And it's very exciting to actually sit down and write
a poem that begins and ends, and then I
can get up and do something else with my life so.
This poem is called "Poems for the people."
If we are all characterized as colors and colors were
insatiable, still we would be nervous
and the colors insufficient to express
what could not be properly explained
in a tent of company or indolent, variations of yellow
or red in the corner eyeing brown or black across the room,
and who would be the field gypsy, the handler
of the blue and green?
How would a length of one color slide
into the whiskered gulf of another
without splitting the seams between colors?
And how would that look to even the simplest outsider?
Do these people want to live in my drawers?
They are despicable.
How is anyone to trust the color sitting next to them,
as stable or workable in the guise of a woman heaved
among bishop trees, conforming to her accent,
and commanding wish to talk forever
through the relationship between children and art,
shining across each wrist, an undulating strap of seamless
green moving in an amoebic pool beneath swinging heels
and increasing motion of seamless green
and rinsing against an immaculate nape,
a shard of serrated pink?
Children need art to better express the things that
are caught within them.
No, children need art to better understand
that there are things that require expression.
No, children need art to better think their way
toward understanding their faults not
that of their broken supplies, not
the embodiment of the bisexual vegetable.
No, children need art to frame the battling
crests of contemporary motion.
No, children need art to commandeer a sense of history
for their own senses outstripped by the elemental zapper
in tight pants.
No, children need art to outpace the bullish avalanche
of history.
No, children need art to abandon the idea that history
is an expression of things, the saucers
look nice, as do the Whigs and German guns.
But history as shown in this gelatinous castle
is nothing if not infinitely replaceable.
Art however, is eternally salient
and gives not color to history but history to itself.
And is what we have to suggest both the radiation
and shadow of history.
And children love art.
And children love themselves.
And when large hands take children's hands
and protect them with the advent of overbearance,
this is not the beginning of the soul
but it's suffocating diagram, a way
of living in the lingering heat of Soundview.
When the majority of the people have developed debilitating
addictions to the reptilian bait of a droning local anesthetic,
have been incarcerated in the suffocating
extremities of the reptilian bait
of a droning local anesthetic or are dead,
a few have moved to the beach.
There was always the beach.
And people who balance layered carcasses of color
on their heads on the way to the beach
find color between their toes and between leavening bodies
of colored animals, trees rising in the distance
for the scrutiny of the neighbors.
No, children need art, but children love art.
A single touch of art can motivate
nothing less than total self annihilation,
begging for the barest layer of carcass
to be something inscrutably hard like a biscuit.
Give it to me, anyway.
If you are cold or if your dog is 112, my mission is art.
To teach art to children.
Teach them to create what it is about what they create
that makes what they create art, which also involves how to talk
about art with many kinds of people,
artists, people who are not artists,
people who stand behind trees and peer out from behind trees.
At children, bouncing out of big yellow works of art
in exactly the way the Dark Man had
dreamed, if he could shorten the distance between himself
and the children, he would do so by teaching them art, which
is in effect their origin.
For the time being, he presses himself
to the thickly divided wood and all
lumps cease to be decorative, become instructive.
As the children go bouncing out, the big yellow
works, one by one into colors what come.