WEBVTT

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So the first poem I'm going to
read is called For The Poets.

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And one of the things we
talked about in my class

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are our haibun, which
is this hybrid form that

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comes from Japan, which
in its classic form

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is a paragraph or
two of travelogue.

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Today, we went to Mount
Fuji, and we saw this,

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and this happened,
and this happened.

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And then at the bottom
would be a haiku

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that would be like a
distillation of the journey.

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And I got very
interested in haibuns

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where the journey
part was interior.

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So this is a haibun, and
it has all these allusions.

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It quotes from Beowulf and The
Iliad and the rock group, The

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Who, Tommy, the opera, Tommy.

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There's a reference to
Miss D, who is Dickinson

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and Uncle Walt, Walt Whitman.

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And I'm telling you that
because I'm a teacher,

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and you must provide
your citations.

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For The Poets.

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To post, to share,
to tag, to tweet,

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to have an audience
for feats, Beowulf

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granted the glory of winning.

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Grendel driven under the
fen banks fatally hurt,

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and the whole panoply
of insulted Greeks.

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Agamemnon, the most
grasping man alive.

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But who, if I cried
out, would hear me

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amongst the angelic orders,
is the common condition.

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If only three people like
a tweet, does anything

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you offer sound in the forest.

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The history of civilization
is replete with selfies

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from pharaonic monoliths to
portraits hanging in the Louvre.

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Lucius was here, scratched
in Latin on Coliseum walls.

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Even the earliest handprints
in the famous caves.

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We've always been Tommies.

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See me, feel me,
touch me, heal me.

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Climbing platforms
to sashay the wealth.

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Not plunder now, but
diamond contacts, accolades,

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and golden news.

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The flashy bling of being seen,
such dread and hope and fear

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to hope that the work
will live in some greater

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way in other minds.

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The confrontation with time
and wanting to matter while

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inside it.

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I'm nobody.

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Who are you?

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Miss D's morning cleanse, or
uncle Walt's Jupiter tonic.

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I celebrate myself,
which is to say,

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I was heading into
one last student

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reading at a college
I was leaving

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to hear first poems about
Earth and sex and blood

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and stars, about the great
forces, and the dispossessed.

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Parents, harm, and
the boot of the state.

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Why, I thought, do any
of us do any of this?

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And then verse came,
such as it was.

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I was here.

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I lived in it.

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I died in it.

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This shit Paradiso.

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