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So I'm going to read some
poems from this new manuscript

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I'm working on called
"Via Negativa."

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And if you're not
familiar with the term,

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it's often used in
talking about theology.

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And it's the process
of describing a thing

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by describing what it is not.

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I was very interested
and very interested

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in this idea of writer or
poet as conduit to the divine.

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But then physicality, my own
and the physicality, of others

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kept getting in and the world
and our country's politics.

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And, well, I let them.

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So the manuscript
begins with an epigraph

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from AR Ammons's Coast of Trees.

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So I am going read the epigraph.

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"Then with nothing, we turn
to the cleared particular,

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not more or less than itself,
and we realize that whatever it

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is, it is in the way, and
the way in it, as in us,

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emptied full."