I'm going to read poems recent and poems new.
So I will begin by reading a couple of poems
from my most recent book.
This was a pandemic book.
It came out in the height of the pandemic.
And its publication date, January 6.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah, there was something else happening
that day that drew people's attention away
from my important volume of poetry.
So anyway, so let's just say that every time I
get to read from this book, it feels like a birthday.
So there you go.
I'm going to start by reading the first poem in the book.
And the title of this poem is my last name.
My last name, Wunderlich, in German,
it's pronounced "von-der-lesh."
You will hear it both ways in this poem.
And I'm often asked, does your name-- what does your name mean?
Does your name mean wonderful?
And no, indeed, that's not what that word means.
It's not.
So this is a poem about the meaning of my name.
"Wunderlich."
'The name means 'odd.'
The name means 'queer.'
It can denote an 'odd fish.'
It suggests a 'queer chap.'
Sometimes it means 'capricious.'
It can also mean 'peevish.'
It's a synonym for 'singular.'
It is thought to be poetic.
The Pied Piper of Hamlin was called 'ein wunderlicher Kauz,'
With his colorful clothing, come to pipe the rats away.
He drowned them in the Weser, or so the stories go.
When the mayor withheld payment
He took the children and drowned them with the rats,
Or perhaps they went into the mountains,
Or they moved to Transylvania.
'It is 100 years since our children left,' says
the crumbling book found in the church--
That is what it means to be a Wunderlich.
The name means 'strange things happened to him.'
It means 'he can be disputatious.'
It means he sometimes wears peculiar garments to a party,
That as he aged he seemed younger, less reliable,
More in touch with what he would call 'his soul.'
You might not call it that yourself.
It can mean 'quarrelsome.'
It can mean 'he prefers cats.'
It can mean he has a gnome tattooed
Near the hair underneath his arm.
It means 'he loves Christmas like a simpleton.'
It means 'make sushi out of SPAM.'
The name means 'curious,' as in 'he bought a haunted house,'
And since weaning, he's not touched a woman's breast.
It means 'he loves the color orange.'
It means 'he studied Dutch.'
It means pancakes for supper once again this week,
And that he prefers to knit his own socks.
The name means 'electric organ maestro.'
The name means 'famous botanical illustrator.'
It means the drunken tenor ass-over-teakettle
down a set of Viennese stairs.
It is true there are few of us, that we spread ourselves
thin around the globe;
Find us making wine in Hungary, herding cattle in Namibia,
Captaining a ship somewhere off the Chilean coast.
My Wunderlichs steamed up the long brown Mississippi
In a boat that put them and their peculiarities off
in Wisconsin,
Where the name means a shady farm
Growing a crop of moss on a roof,
An old man with a pistol in his pants,
A child who didn't survive and occupies
A pagan's ashy grave atop a limestone bluff
Where the wind speaks his strange name or worse--
voices, recognition, an attribution, or a curse."
[APPLAUSE]
I love applause, but I will just ask that maybe you hold it
to the end, and we'll--
but do what you want to do.
It's fine.
Do what you want to do.