WEBVTT

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My plan is to begin
with some older work

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and then read from the
book Proverbs of Limbo.

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And I hope there will also
be time for me to read

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some recent poems, poets--

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a vanity that the
poets here know.

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We always like to have
something we just worked on

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because you're a poet
while you're doing it,

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while you're working on it.

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But it's not like being a
financier or an orthodontist.

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When you're not doing it,
you feel like you're not it.

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So the recent things matter.

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I'll start with a
poem that I chose

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to make first in my selected
poems a few books ago now.

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This is the poem I
chose to make first.

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It's called "Rhyme."

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A review I liked, a very
favorable review of this book,

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said, it's so like Robert Pinsky
to write a poem called "Rhyme"

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that doesn't rhyme.

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[LAUGHTER]

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It does.

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It doesn't rhyme like it
does that it was with fuzz,

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but it is tongue, instrument,
body, spirit, song, containment,

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ready inheritance.

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Anyway, not important.

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"Rhyme."

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Air an instrument of the tongue,

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The tongue an instrument

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Of the body, the body

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An instrument of spirit,

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The spirit a being of the air.

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Each bird the
medium of its song.

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Each song a world, a containment

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Like a hotel room, ready

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For us guests who inherit

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Our compartment of time there.

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In the Joseph Cornell box, among

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Ephemera as its element,

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The preserved bird-- a study

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In spontaneous elegy, the parrot

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Art, mortal in its
cornered sphere.

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Each room a stanza rung

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In a laddered filament

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Clambered by all us unsteady

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Chambered voices that share it,

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Each one reciting
I too was here--

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I too was here

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In a room, in a
rhyme, in a song.

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In the box, in books.

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Each element

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An instrument, the body

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Still straining to parrot

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The spirit, a being of the air.