WEBVTT

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Thank you, Jena.

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And thank you, Prageeta, and
everybody at the Poetry Center

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for putting this on.

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I'm getting a cold,
because it's so hot here.

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And it was 40 degrees back home,
so the change in temperature

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is--

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I'm going to read
from the manuscript

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that Jena mentioned,
"The Golden Book."

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And as she said, it's a
rewrite of a 1926 grammar book

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I found from a
Dartmouth professor.

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I often go into shops
and find ephemera.

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And that's become-- my mode of
writing is to rewrite things,

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translate them,
and to either being

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about cultural or relationships,
or both cultural and

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relationship, which
is the case in this.

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And when I was reading
this book of grammar,

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I just started
thinking about the way

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that we use grammatical
terms and how

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they could be used to basically
describe the three most

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important relationships
in my life to this point.

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So the title of--

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the poem titles are actually
the titles of the sub chapters

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in "The Golden Book."

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And it begins with a chapter
called "A Warning."

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No bark scroll of
rhetoric but skin

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writ in darkness and
personal conference.

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Your eyebrow licked smooth
by a tongue to a pointed tip,

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lips come pressed through
your downy temple, heave

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and aftermath.

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The slurry of symbols
writ across the thigh,

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wrestled by the man trying
to capture his own ideas.

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He touched your hip.

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And you were dislocated,
limping toward new sensation.

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Clear thinking required
not the clarity

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of my skull and finest cut
crystal, not a mastery of rules

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and the memory
flow difficulties,

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but clear thinking.

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To stop, to think about
form in mid-career,

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the form of this encounter,
when it isn't every encounter

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a cross to bear, a cultural one,
the small battles, the volleys,

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the flag raisings,
the arrows stuck hard

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in the door post or yard, your
foreign skin and foreign touch.

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How differently
the customs come.

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Do I swaddle in your
striped bathrobe?

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Do I lift your cap?

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The man who writes with
one eye on rhetoric

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is the man who can't tell you
whether to take off his hat,

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or to use fork or spoon
without consultation.

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These things must be
instinctual and unselfconscious

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before they prove of value.

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