 Okay, welcome. I can't bear the mutinous anymore. I'm Geoffrey O'Brien, and this is Lunch Poems. We're so happy to have Kelly Garnett here to round out our fall semester of readings. Happy birthday, Kelly. It was Kelly's birthday yesterday, and also happy birthday to this book Wings in Time, which is still new enough to deserve that salutation. I think it came out in September, is that right? So Wings in Time, it's a possibly archaic and definitely not time-stamped title. It could come from many moments and many parts of the world, but this is a book that engages in a really lively and explicit way with the media of our moment and the mediatic environments we move through and which move through us. It even explicitly engages Marshall McLuhan's now what, half a century old area or distinction between hot and cold media. Those media that require so little of you because they saturate you, like film versus those that demand a lot of active participation, like for instance poetry. And I think one of the things that this book is doing in amazing ways is figuring out how to make hot media cool by forcing them to show up in the coolness, sometimes even the frostiness of poetry. And it's still ringing tranquil, small spaces of stanza and line. The poems engage in something that one of the poems calls explicitly scrap craft. And there's definitely this feeling of assemblage throughout catching bits and snatches of material from film, from the internet, from digitally mediated experiences of others, the poetry of others coming in over email, etc. And representing them and letting them live a new contextual life as they get sutured together in the cool space of poetry that demands so much of us. It seems to me that that's why it's no accident that there's a poem said at Noah Purefoy's Outdoor Museum of Assemblage Art, where there are all these cultures and just makings, I don't even want to limit their medium or genre, assembled from other foreign materials suddenly made local and intimate and intense. In lettering the temperature of our interactions with media, I think that we attempt or the poems let us attempt to take that frenzy and inundation. That's so proper to our quotidian now and make it sometimes even philosophical. But certainly we're allowed to bide with it in a way that we can't when it's happening at us as it is in a way right here right now until Kelly speaks. I think that's how I read the title of the book in relation to the poems and the environments that they curate. It's about attempting to open new spaces in real time experience, make something like a museum of ongoingness in which we can consider and reconsider at a different pace than quotidian experience usually allows. There's so much more to say about the book. It's furious wit and lamentation about gender and about alienation and then balancing that a tremendous joy and friendship. But I think it's time for Kelly to open some wings for us. So I give you Kelly Garnett. Thank you so much. Thank you for that I it is wings in time is such you're right it's an archaic title and that was such a beautiful way of talking about it I appreciate that. Thank you Jeffrey and Noah for having me to lunch poems I feel incredibly honored to read as part of this lineup and thank you Alana. I'm going to read song cave for putting out my book which I'm going to read from now. So, I'm going to open with the first poem in the book, which is called serial mom. And it is set in that archaic space of the video rental store. So serial mom. Arrests you in time. Consider me 10. When I turned to mom and said, can we just look in the video store. It was a school night. Movies are a hot medium says Marshall McLuhan. Hi data. High definition highly involving asking little of you. To McLuhan, the telephone was cool. Imagine. In seventh and eighth was easy to case quickly and linger in John candy on the north wall. To the east, a room set off by the curtain of wooden beads. I remember thinking, who are you kidding. I've seen behind the beads, though I never had the cover of last tango in Paris, flesh colored and steamy, somehow like video itself. The cover of the money pit showed a must up couple standing by a big nice house. The house was a money pit. The cover of the Fisher King was such a mystery to me, just a man laughing by a pond with a ponytail. The cover of Steve Martin's, the jerk was almost too good to be true. The jerk himself. The night we chose to take him home. I got a little scared. The cover of bed done up and broomsticks showed children riding a bed through the sky with Angela Lansbury, who's not even trying to hide the fact that she's a witch. Why hide. There's a war on and you've got all these special skills. The cover of I married a witch showed a concerned looking man. A communist, same serial mom, a mom, grinning widely, you had to be careful who you married. Mom actually worked at Sesame Street. There were googly eyes scattered everywhere, matted hair of red and blue, greedy puppeteers. Why is the man on TV pulling apart the calzone? I don't know. There's a lot on TV that doesn't involve you. From a clue in TV is a cool medium. And it seems right that we now should pass the time coolly in a hot context. The cover of the good son with Macaulay Culkin. You just knew he wasn't good. Dear mom. It's so upset you when rumors went on wholesome rumors spread about Mr. Rogers neighborhood. Fred was a saint, you said, and we wept when he addressed the Senate subcommittee on communication. Children's television as a kind of religion. Often you could have a Muppets carriage easing through the house like Prairie Dawn or a rock snail reaching son. That rare Saturday you slept in. I might take out your broom, my broom, while I watched cartoons. Cartoons are cool media, as you will gather by now for I swept the living room through them. Wings in time. This is a four part poem. That took root as an email correspondent correspondence with my friend Eric. One. In Eric's latest missive to me is a Terset that chills me to the roots of my hair. Every mother is famous and hated if they don't beat their wings in time with the infant. I wonder if he's right when he writes flame mothers, surely mother's arm in flame. I hear Henry's new kitten Sabine is fearful and moist from toilet condensation. My mother is ruminative. Only in my dreams do I become untuned. And there, how gross. I long for what I know. All of my desires felt overused and sterile like a diesel pump, like a man soaked in cheap brandy. The desire to be looked at naked, to be taken in, warmed. I slept too much and fitfully. More dreams of Chicago, that broad and empty city of many invisible bros getting invisible blowjobs. In one dream, I just replay a familiar scene from the blue line, where a boy we thought was blowing himself gets knocked back by the jostling and is blue. At the station, after the medics come into that mood of hypocrisy and cynicism pouring score and all over my fellow writers and I fall. I am happy for my poems, my blood to have a local circulation. I like talking to you. I like talking to you to little jukebox with an outer water sign. This wanton scatter of lines isn't poetry. If I die and live again, I'll say it again. I am a media child. I speak in the language of movies and TV. In one video, Kermit and Elmo act out happy and sad. They keep switching places, like pugilists. Kermit's bearing stays the same, while Elmo swings wildly, maniacally, somebody could lose a hand. When they added slo-mo and grainy close-up, the truth settles on Elmo. How somberly, how curtly my little niece says more when EIEIO we sing for the last time as if punishing the food pellet button. I washed with the chemicals that I gave me to wash with. I know the feelings I was given to feel. I know you think I'm addicted to the chemicals, the feelings, but truly I'm not. I'm not. The conifers behind the house move for the wind. I only care because you would, because you go mad. You must go mad for that sort of thing. How will I spot a bird without you? How will I know what's pregnant in nature? How will I be ever pregnant myself? Not by sitting inside, reading Hopkins. Googling Matchbox 20 to prove my little niece looks like Rob Thomas. Scowling like it's 3am, I must be lonely. How will I know if a poem is any good without you? No one will tell me, or they'll tell me too straight. You are my out of doors. My name is sweetheart, I said, waking on the gurney. I know my first name is sweetheart. Three, Eric and I thought we'd try a correspondence, the kind that poets do to help each other right. But Eric, it's just this, the conifers behind the house move for the wind. I have nothing to look at in my quarantine. I can't even stand out there. I stumbled on a word yesterday, panagiric. And I really had to wrap my brains. My brain said, I don't know. I didn't look it up because what's the point? Everywhere you go, there's more words. Perhaps panagiric is a horn, gyre like litany of praise such as desperate poetry slobbers. Great panagirics to the unsuspecting dead and lost. And perhaps again turn the other way too, making you cry in the shower thinking, where should I go? Why am I not a don dillier or a fisherman with a little Latine? The earth is large, but I already know I'll exhaust every road. I'll empty every scene. In the end, Melody will know me better than I know myself. Four, a picture of me from before I knew you. I'm sitting at a computer at the record store, a bit of North Lynn Street behind me. The owner, Craig, wears black, a long white ponytail, goatee, violet tinted glasses and a beanie. For every CD in the store, he has me print a representative. So I scan the cover and back cover of the CD into a dock and size them. This I print, cut and slip into a stiff laminate. And that goes into the browsing crates by genre. Such analog shopness. It's backwards, I thought. I like this. And besides, I didn't invent it. It fits into the customs. Craig had two or three shop girls. To one of the younger ones, I remember saying, it's not in media array, it's in medias rest. You say it with the S. As I said it, I knew I was wrong. And in her frustration, her acne, her angry eyes, I saw us both losing grandly, comically to education. It's funny how ground down I love. I pity myself for not knowing you yet, except as passing through. How I hate the idea of now like the merch that came with new releases every week. A little poster of some dipshit Mumford and his sons. Five. Craig taught his girls and sound, maybe. I'd sometimes pick him up on the air mid one of his calm, completeness roles on bop. He had a voice for radio. And I could almost work up a longing for him, such as the power of the soft box mastery that does not visibly read from cards. But steals touches of my knee and shoulder and hair through which I too was on the radio in the knowledge. But it was very dinky work. You'll recall I would print the image I just scanned from the disk I just held in my hand. And to find the Deutsche Gramophones was tricky. It's funny how struck down I look. I learned about art pepper. Michael Hurley. These are broken men. Listen for yourself. Now Craig gets to have his storefront girls pipe and cinnamon bun, but soon he'll go online. All this will go online set his wife one day and laying it out for me. And so it did. Her sharp hippie earrings swung like it could grudge never evaporate. I was looking down at her sandal feet, while I felt our cameos collide, and she felt it too. Her costume in mind. And my mind went blank. Mother, I thought, teacher, girlfriend, lawyer, crone, married to a petty nobleman and third rate musician. I was looking at the graph of waters on vinyl for the records were there. They stood for themselves. Occasional poem. This was the occasion. A zebra of a virus showed up on horse feet, showed up differently in each body, the way we all have different shoes. One person infected to two, four, four, eight, and so on. We had to stay indoors. I can't with my family invisible bomb. At that time, perhaps more than any other, I wish to hear myself singing, but a sense of shakiness pervaded and I felt I must appear to clutch at voice. I watched old films instead. Thought about you suffered from many at the time called the folly, or the need, or the folly of the need. Where everything reminds me I won't grow. All the little women films. 1933, 1949, 1994, 2019. Everything reminds me of you, but you don't know. Men never know what little women means. Catherine Hepburn's Joe is nimble and stiff. Alison's is a poor man's loud until she steps out of her home. As if all speech before was spam, the tin peels from her rations can. Only who knows what longing is will know me. The virus possibility is heavy today. I sense a reclamation of the past occurring so remotely. But what past? June's chestnut hair. Her sexual orientation is bearded artist, and I get it. I'm the same. I read about a woman whose life in 90 seconds changed. While mine is changing slowly. A mat and squawk sets off almost no reaction. Just my little niece, not learning to speak, wags her head, wearing invisible mask. She loves the part that you're not supposed to play with remainders and labels. She loves tags, like the tags on Alf and Ralph, her dogs. Grass is sort of tags. She will probably love grass. I'm going to skip ahead a little ways. And read a poem called Macedonia Road. This one goes out to Jess, Macedonia Road. I like music because I like sound that makes me feel, said the Peloton instructor. A former makeup artist, attentive to detail. Who knows not of me, but push me hard and never let me fall. As I crossed the grass, demented from keeping time with my butt, I thought, Is it okay to just say to Jess how much I love her energy? What you drink gets in your mouth becomes saliva. You're alive. And all living drama takes place within a few vertical miles totally scannable by the naked eye. Except for tree frogs, which one rarely sees. I took a long walk out country roads. Down read where I've walked with Jess before. I turned on to Beale where the woods are thicker. Had a little scare when a truck rolled by on her read. It's a little confusing, isn't it Jess? We can now acknowledge to be a woman in her mid 30s with a pretty cute ass walking on the road alone at sundown. Out of your shot. Panic. Shame at the panic. Some driveways have a security system decal screwed to a tree. One called CIA. The display is by subscription. You can just pay for the sign. So happy birthday. Anyway, I turned around, walked back, turned on to Macedonia Road. Suddenly, bits of chat flew out of the quiet. First cocktails after months of isolation. Don't go, said everyone ever. It was like arriving at a party. I made out a small man in hot pink shirt and shorts, shouting with real ire at a pair of geese. Birds were singing on every tree, singing in the woods. The trees were green. The green tannagers mostly lined up on the boughs as the sunset yellowed them the more. All nature seemed inclined for a dimming wall before arrest. And I thought of the 1972 bestseller, the secret life of plants. A work of dubious science. Much beloved by poets. I'm hoping to move out west. Jess continues to appear in my poems. This one's called the great San Bernardino pitch party. And it is after the Noah Purifoy. Outdoor art assemblage museum. I'm interested in feminist oratory. We think just should say. Specifically that. Yellow breasted engine sounds on the Joshua tree. Joshua tree mid shimmy. I think every bird is mad at me. Does that make me an alcoholic? What is the pitch? You might ask. A heart of dryness. It's gritty. It's raw. It's new. It's an underside view. It's a book about a man. Who changed the landscape. That's my draft pitch for Duchamp. Your rhetorical smile. Three hours outside LA under the desert sky. After the great San Bernardino sculpture party. Sparkling toilet pieces lay tiled into the pavilion. Silver flushers to. Comic mounds of bowling balls. Sociable rows of washer dryers. TV piles. I am uneasy. What? No match for the always and and always air. I find a pair of leather pants. Hanging in a hut. And touch them. Definitely not leather. Pitch. It's also a substance. I can see the sunscreen on your face. Not rubbed in. Tears wetting your under chin. Let's get this next pitch right guys. Love Street LA. Sorry, Jim Morrison. I've been learning piano and quarantine. So this is not really related, but I have to say it. Jim Morrison was a hack. Why bury him next to Balzac. His rhymes were bad. His eyes. Unintelligent. Try to run, try to hide. Break on through to the other side. Designed as a woman's retreat. I'm just especially lame for a woman to write about fame now. Confusion about who lived on Love Street. She did. Who lives on Love Street. She does. E flat to C minor. I don't know. I pass even my darlings on. I'm on a roll down the avenue. F minor to D to C. C to D to B flat. Look out Mountain Avenue. You're a movie I can put my hand into. That would be one of my songs. Look out Jim Morrison. You road toad. Dick Flinger. Want to be drawn. Like Geffen, I'll go to work when this is all done. And consider 300 emails. On any given day, I might say both of these. So compelling. I don't have a vision for how to break this out in the market. So a song about cruising really is about my life. All of these poems are, even if they seem quite scrappy, filled with references and anachronisms. I'm going to read one more. Longish poem. Also a serial poem. I'm sending this one out to Jeffrey. Thank you again for inviting me. It's called on the potential uses of television for the preschool mind. One. Ability to name positive and negative instances of tools. Or furniture. Or farm equipment. Tell me something that is not a weapon. A cow is not a weapon. Tell me a gun. Tell me something that is not a weapon. Tell me something that is not a weapon. Two. Ability to apply these concepts locally. Is a crayon a piece of a weapon. Or furniture. No, a crayon is not. Three. There should be evidence that the printed word has some meaning for the child. The same as what is pictured as number has amount. Four. Five. With just a hint at the decade points. 3040. Five. And at least 15 consonants. We. Heard. Off. Six. There should be evidence of reasoning. Is this a thing that goes around. Seven. Ability to produce a word that rhymes with a blank. I had a dog. And his name was able. I found him hiding. Under the. Eight. Ability to describe arrangements. On the between the. Nine. Art teachers have found that children rather well depict abstractions at this point. One child was able to draw. How it feels when it rains on me. And talent gathers about them. 10. Pretendo a skilled and ageless mine showed them how to curl up like little seeds tight on the ground in the winter. Slowly unfold like lentil sprouts in spring. How to grow and blossom in summer. Wilt. In fall. Return to the ground. How to say. How it feels when it rains on me. It rains past me. I forget what I'm watching. That I'm watching. 12. This is not the time to torment them with mechanics. But the concept say a rudimentary account of how to get a rocket into outer space. They should be able to manage. They should be able to manage. They should be able to manage. I'm sure that advantage has been gained from their entertainments. Having no clue where apples come from. Grover is able to build a machine with a mouse. A little wheel. Cooperation. A dusty fan. A slide. A trough. A boat. And some cheese. This is known as scrap craft. Giving life to household objects. Getting rid of trash. You have to want to. Share with. People. 13. Ability to touch the screen. And chair lights up. And after a few seconds. The host says. That's right. Thank you very much. I'm going to kick it over to Noah. I appreciate everyone being here today. Kelly, that was. A phenomenal reading. So many of those lines are stuck in my head forever. The grass is sort of tags. Those records standing for themselves. The melody. How it knows us. And I just want to thank you for. Thank you for bringing us all. Into your amazing performance and brain. Really, really enlivens the whole world around us. And I want to thank everyone for coming. For joining us on another, another Thursday. This is our last lunch poms of the calendar year. But we'll be back in February and March. I want to first, before we. Preview those readings. Thank the library on his funding. This depends. Thank Jeffrey, of course. For your amazing intros and direction. And encourage everyone who's not already on the lunch. To sign up. You can find. The link to. To email on lunch poms. Berkeley edu. And you can also find an archive of past readings on our YouTube channel. To search lunch poms where you'll be able to revisit this reading soon. And so. In the new year will be joined. In February by Sandra Lynn. And in March by Paula Tran. You can find those details here. And thank you. Thank you again for joining us. Be well.