[APPLAUSE]
Thanks, Tyler.
That was really--
I don't feel like I can live up to it.
But you know.
So this is OK?
You can hear me?
OK.
Can you see my shadow puppet here?
That's a deer.
[LAUGHTER]
It's going to read the whole poem.
So I'm going to--
and you've had time to fill it out this thing?
How would you rate this event?
I'm just going to suggest, excellent, you know.
Maybe before we even begin.
Yeah, just get out of the way.
So I'm going to read from a new book
that I'm working on now that is--
I have no idea how it's going.
But I won't really say much about it.
It's a long, long poem, probably too long.
It's called "Underworld Lit."
Yeah, I won't say much about it.
It's in three sections, it's about a year.
The first section is called Fall Term.
Any resemblance to persons historical or--
[LAUGHTER]
--real, is purely coincidental.
And I'll jump around.
So I'm going to read the numbers for each section.
But you'll get a feeling that I'm just jumping around.
One, it's in prose sections, and I'm
going to time myself so I don't outstay my welcome.
In the inky, dismal, and unprofitable research
of a recent leave of absence from the middle of my life,
I came across an inscription on a historical prism
of Ashurbanipal that I found to be somewhat disquieting.
Of an enemy, whose remains he had abused in a manner that
does not bear repeating here, this most studious and exacting
of Mesopotamian kings professes, I
made him more dead than he was before.
Prisms of this sort were often buried
in the foundations of government buildings
and therefore intended to be read by gods, but not men.
Somewhere in the maze of carrels and stacks,
I thought I could hear a low dial tone humming without end.
In Ashurbanipal's library, there is a poem
written on clay that corrects various commonly held errors
regarding the world of the dead.
Pache, Mulian, Odysseus, Madam Blavatsky, and Kwasi Benefo,
it is not customarily permitted to visit the underworld.
No, the underworld visits you.