 All right, I think we'll get going now. Thank you all for coming out here this afternoon or early evening. Welcome to the second annual Poetry Walk. Many people to thank for this, which I'll do briefly, notably Karen Bellotti and Sue McMullen, who forged the collaboration between the library and the tutoring center, but also the help and support of our colleagues, Mary Woo, Cindy Jones, Wendy McDonough, Heidi Benedict, and the facilities crew for staking the posts in the ground. But of course, most importantly, we have the poets themselves who get the most thanks for their creativity and their willingness to share it throughout the campus community. And for those of you who had the poems up on the campus, what can you stand so we can just sort of see who you are? I made a note to myself, clap if nobody claps. So you guys did that. To honor our poets and the 2024 Poetry Walk, we are fortunate to have with us Rosanna Warren, an important and significant American poet. In reading Rosanna's poems, one discovers a grace and dignity in her lines that is undergirded by a fierce intellect that not only continues to ask the eternal questions of human consciousness, but also in a way that makes us realize that more often than not, it is not the answer she seeks, but rather the refining of the question. One common bond she and I share is a devotion to world literature in translation. And for Rosanna as a translator, sometimes her reading is in the original language. I bring that up, that is being driven to writing in translation, because she and I have discussed on more than one occasion what it might be that draws us to such books, almost more so than contemporary American writing, that it must be something more than the obviousness of cultural competency or keeping a globalist eye on the world of literature. I have suggested that the fusion of the political and the cultural is much more heightened in many of these works. The urgency felt in regions that have experienced and do experience threat and upheaval in ongoing and relevant ways that inform the inquiry of what it means to be alive or to even want to be alive. Other times, perhaps, it is the simple matter of finding a new way of looking at the familiar in a way that makes it seem all the more fresh and perhaps and or perhaps sensical in a world full of nonsense, nonsense. But then, as I think about it now and as I think about Rosanna's poetry, I also see engaging with those international works as a way of forever refining the questions. And like Rosanna's poetry, using a different artfulness of language, different angles of perspective and light, language is a new form of thinking, of seeing, of communing in order to distill those ancient questions, the ones we need to clarify a little bit more each time we clarify, the ones we keep asking that allow us to that allow us to further enter the mysteries without the expectation of ever solving them. Rather, that on our little dot on the continuum, the questions that get us that much closer to a place of understanding. So with that, I welcome Rosanna Warren and look forward to those questions. Thank you to Adam and to the library and to all the poets. I loved walking this afternoon along the poetry walk and pausing at each poem and thinking that there was so much imagination blossoming on this campus. It's really terrific. I was very energized and heartened to see this at a time when there's a lot in the world that's not so heartening. I'm gonna read a few poems from my most recent book. Thank you, so forth. But mostly new poems from a, or more recent poems from a manuscript I'm putting together now. So let's see. Am I audible? This is good. This poem is called Cotillion Photo and for those of you who don't know what a cotillion is, it's an old fashioned or perhaps still happens in some societies, a kind of formal dance where young ladies are sort of of a certain social class come out, so to speak, which meant in those days that they were on the marriage market in a certain sort of affluent class. I wasn't in that class and I didn't have a coming out party in what was called in those days a coming out party, very different from coming out now, so to speak. But the poem comes from seeing photographs in somebody's house, framed photographs of these young women in their fancy dresses. Cotillion Photo. These young women will last forever, posed like greyhounds, trapped in the silver crust of the frame. You can't tell one from another the breed is so pure. They will never run. Each one aloft on a frozen wave of white cotillion lace to resemble marriage, to resemble fate. I remember July sun pouring down in a prickly meadow and a garter snake skin laid out like fairy lingerie on a stone wall. This was Connecticut, there would be a stone wall. Crickets were scraping marrow from the day. I was young, I'd been alone for weeks. I painted the meadow morning and afternoon trying to capture the crackling sound with my brush. I was reading Oedipus Rex. I understood neither the snake skin nor the play. Your life is one long night, said Oedipus to the prophet. Oedipus, who saw nothing. Oak trees rustled in drought. In saffron grass, small creatures skittered. There came a day when I said to myself, I should prefer to sleep. Small planets tasted dry and bitter on my tongue. And two days later, I woke, alone in the creaking barn at dusk, not knowing what day, what month, what year, but feeling the whole of earth rolling on its way. It is not your fate that I should be your ruin, the prophet said. I moved my arms, my legs, I unclenched my hands and stood up dizzy from the cot. What was to come would come in its own good time outside the frame. The moon was rising above the hill, a shy wind gathered force, and trees in their black silhouettes linked arms. One concern that I have in a lot of these poems is how to respond or if to respond at all to the suffering of others. In this poem, there's a starts with a human skull. And I will tell you that this happens to be a real human skull on a shelf that I know well. Shelf. A human skull among the bebelow, dust to dust, it all evens out on the shelf under a veil of gray. There was a think in that cavity once. I have forgotten whole years of my life. In those eye sockets once, surprise and fear. You picked it up in a field in Turkey, a small head, a child, a youth. Who knows how he, she, died. Though we can imagine, yes horribly imagine and so forget. Better look at the Kenyan statuette of a woman carrying a pot on her head or the soapstone dove from Japan or twisted driftwood. Why go looking for sorrow? Yet we look, we hunt. You probe the boiled mackerel head for every might of sustenance. Brain, the tiny white golf balls of eyes, the fatty ribbon along the jaw and augury in each bite. I don't want to remember how much pain I've caused. Centuries of war we store in our craniums, but in that skull now crouched on the shelf, no echo, no prayer, only air, relic of air. Relic of air. Some of this, there's a little sequence in this book about, of poems about remarkable women artists of one kind or another. And one of them is Coco Chanel, who you may know as the great, the brilliant French fashion designer and of the perfume, the Chanel perfume, who was remarkable, remarkably horrendous person personally. I would call her a moral monster, but a genius designer, genius artist. And there's an epigraph from Chanel. Chanel, a garment should be logical. Coco Chanel. Yes, I made the perfume. Yes, I am an orphan, light my cigarette. Just so, the perfect profile intagliode in air. Now let the hems down, now we slash the collar. And when a man enters, always make him pay. Always a stray prince around before the casino closes. This century tilts. I'm good at sphinxing. Elegance excludes. I exclude milk, waste, tears, uterus. Do I remember the large colored orphanage halls? No, I refuse. Place a Coromandel screen in front of the car wreck and your world war, my deumimonde. We live in an age with no interiors and his blood scrawled the pavement by the crumpled car. Embellishment gives way to line and ease of motion. A Bugatti flair, wealth assuming the proportion of catastrophe. And if the other was a German officer, I'm on my knees with a corona of pins bristling from my lips. It's not adoration, it's revenge. In these years, I got quite, I was rereading the Greek pre-Socratic philosophers and one of them is Anaximander, who's really worth reading. And he's easy to read because it only survives in fragments. And so, okay, this is the Anaximander poem and the title is from one of his fragments. That the earth is suspended. As Silla prinks purple from half thawed clods and the cardinal flings his ribbon of song in two high arcs, then trails the vibrato among the bows, may unclenches, but not enough. Buds grip fetal leaves, each night scatters frost. On sidewalks we tread on broken sky. You are sick and far away. The world is in flux, said Anaximander. Worlds are born, appear and disappear. We perish, even the gods fade. Spare me the industrial daffodils poking through scraps of snow. The season will have its hard birth and we will be dragged into light. How many years has that ill corroded your gut? Whirlwinds, typhoons break out of the cloud. The tearing makes thunder, the crack against black makes the flash. So natural philosophy began. You watched glaciers slide and crash at the tip of the earth. You floated on a rope into ice crevasses to catch the gleam and the groan. I sculpted the planet and sculpts it still. You hammered aluminum into that shape. The stars are a wheel of fire, broken off from earth fire, surrounded by air. We came from the unlimited, to it we return. So taught Anaximander of Miletus who thought we would be destroyed. A thought that has occurred to some people these days who studied climate change. The you in this poem happens to be, all my poems are not literal and only autobiographical, but in this case, the you is, I can say is my brother who at that time had a serious illness and who went twice to Antarctica studying ice formations and is an artist. So I'm glad to say he survived. He was not destroyed. And another poem here is also, this happens to be another family poem in a sense. It's for my daughter, one of my daughters is a psychiatric social worker. And it's in the category of poems about the suffering of others and how we respond or don't respond. For Chiara, leaves crackle beneath our feet, tinder kindling as we walk by the brook, the crab apple tree, a crimson pointy east, nimbus. You want to hold each wounded soul in your hands, autumn flares, the damaged, the human berserk find their way to you. I don't know how you sleep. In the Gorgon's blood one drop is poison, the other heals. Fevered autumn, autumn I adore croons and old song. We stroll the road scuffing dust and come upon a garter snake lying motionless. It's tail, we guess, nicked by a passing car. When we nudge it, it flips to its back in an agonized S, squirms but can't advance. Its belly gleams, we nudge it into the grass. Do we stop seeing when we walk away? The brook rattles on, homes far off. Dusk settles slowly among leaves. That's not mercy scattering from its hands. It remains to me a great, a guilt. I didn't, I couldn't kill that snake, though it was obviously an agony. So these are some of the, how are we doing? Some of the ones that are shaping up into a new book. These were poems. This book came out smack as the pandemic was exploding in May 2020, a great time to bring out a book. And I retreated with my beloved, I don't like the word partner, it's illegal, to our cabin in the Catskill Mountains where we live for two years in tremendous solitude during those first years of the pandemic. And so a lot of these poems are full of animals and nature and also dread political and medical dread. The title of this poem, Dead Flowers, is from a famous Rolling Stones song. Anybody still listens to the Rolling Stones? I don't know, I'm old enough to have been brought up on the Rolling Stones. Dead Flowers. If you hurt yourself before someone else hurts you, is that homeopathic? Watch me prick poison into my skin, sign my name in pain. Watch me miss the appointment, cancel the call. Watch me gulp smoke and receive a certificate of enlightenment between the smeared egg yolk horizon to the west and the bone white eastern sky. The emperor appoints me to the poetry bureau and I declare myself queen of the underground. On the back road, the turkey vulture plucked the guts from the squash squirrel, then flapped up to the dead branch of the shag bark hickory to examine us examining the carcass. Oh, sacerdotal bird, with your crimson scalp and glossy vestments teach us to translate the spasm, the cry, the disintegrating flesh, the regret. What can be made of all this grief? Over the butter, yellow, humming, feather-grast midday meadow, skim the shadows of vultures, ghostly six-foot wingspan, V, swift as signature, turning death into speed. I don't know, we all forget so much so quickly, but I suppose you haven't forgotten those trucks full of corpses in Brooklyn and other places in the United States. This is, this poem appears to be out in mushrooms, but it's also about politics. Boletus, crickets are stitching the afternoon together. What the squalling cat bird rends, crickets relentlessly repair. The maple shivers, sends yellowed messages sailing down. Too much has ripped, half the main branch cracked off and hangs, teetering across lower boughs, leaving on the trunk a blonde wound. We cross the brook on stepping stones and climb west up the mountain flank through laurel thickets, along the scooped out valley of beaches, up the stream bed to sit on a fallen tree. But there's no rest. We carry with us what we left below, a country clawing, it's a very idea to shreds the scarlet Boletus mushroom prongs from decaying wood. In its bishops amaranth skullcap, it stands its ground. One kind will nourish the other sickens, but not like the white Amanita bringing on liver failure, seizures, death. These are so cheerful, I'm sorry. I will vary the tone eventually, I promise. But in those shocking first months of the coronavirus lurking in a cabin in the woods, I was just trying to find a language for the shock and terror of it all. And I went back and started reading Thucydides, the Peloponnesian War, which I really, if you haven't read Thucydides, I really recommend reading Thucydides. It's sort of horribly like reading the New York Times. And it's about the Peloponnesian War, for those of you who haven't read Thucydides, but the war between Athens on the various other Greek city-states on the Peloponnesus, but it is also a tremendous record of how a plague struck Athens and what happened to the society when the plague struck and what happened to language and social relations. So this was the beginning of a way that I tried to find a way to write about my experience of living in a land that had a plague. And I broke up the sentences on purpose. So if they sound broken to you, you're listening right. The title is from Thucydides. They set about wasting the land. When the plague first broke out among the Athenians, when the plague out of Ethiopia spread into Egypt and Libya and among the Persians, violent fever, bloody throats and tongues, vomit, blisters, foul breath, genitals, fingers, and toes broke off. When the plague, we saw the moon rise. It floated over heaped unburied corpses. Birds and dogs that ate them died. The moon rose over broken laws of God and man, smashed oracles, frantic mortal orgies. We saw, we heard, words turned inside out. Families broke, parties passionate for power crashed. No words were binding, no oaths reconciled. When the plague broke us, we broke each other. Let's see. This is different before COVID. I had traveled to Japan for the first time in my life and visited some, among other things, some Buddhist temples. And this is inspired from a famous temple in Kyoto, the Ten Riji Temple, which was founded by a brilliant monk named Soseki. Who designed the famous pond. Soseki's shrine. The mother bear stands on her hind legs to bat hard green apples from the boughs. While two cubs slide up the trunk as if black water should flow upward and disappear in shuttering leaves. The third cub rummages for fruit in tall grass. The apples are tiny and sour. The bears are hungry, working hard. The whole meadow strives, shakes with striving as crickets thrum and dragonflies slice the air and overhead the peregrine falcon floats its high staccato cry. My fingers are stained with ink. In Kyoto, in Soseki's ancient temple, the stone basin for mixing ink stands upright, a shrine to writing at its base, water in a troth, a dipper. One dips, one pours water over one's hands. One prays to write purely how hard when we want so much. We're hungry, we want to leave our names. Scholar's hands, the exiled researcher told me, holding my hands in hers. Calluses, ink stains, rough cuticles, hands that work. She's dead now. Muso Soseki's pond has lasted for 700 years. And I mentioned animals, including quite a few snakes up there in the Catskills where we mostly live, still live there a lot. My beloved is a mathematician. So this is a poem, this came out on The New Yorker a couple of years ago. This is a math poem in a way. I don't understand math, but he's always working on math. And I love watching him work. And I was really happy when this poem came out in The New Yorker of a mathematician at Cambridge University in England wrote me and said, oh, finally someone's writing poems about number theory. And can I quote you in my book? So great. Okay. So it's a snake poem as well as a math poem. Number theory, how are we doing on time? Yes, not too bad. Number theory, the four and a half foot black-backed rat snake swayed up and across the kitchen screen door seeking a way in. Encountering instead our eyes, it slowly deliberately withdrew to slide across the stone porch over the wall and along the foundation inspecting every crevice feeling, nosing, listening its way toward a solution, which it found around the corner up the back flagstone steps where it squeezed its impossible length and girth inch by patterned inch into the crack beneath the topmost slate. So we know we're living with a patient companion like you inquisitive. You sit, taught in your chair, whispering as you probe the gaps between prime numbers until infinity. It's pattern you seek, the opening through which your thought will glide suddenly into a lit space and be at home in a shaky house where wasps gnaw the walls. The mathematician who wrote me said, that's right, we're never sure, we're never sure the theorem's girly gonna stay. And there are a lot of bears up there where we live. So here's another bear. Inscription. Inscription and the roots of the fallen oak tree rear in flamboyant gothic lozenges, earth sogged from days of rain, so ghost pipes spring up, croaking their croziers, spectral parasites. I borrow from them all. Sometimes I think I'm a plant, pale and micro-heterotrophic. This is a novel about time, the learned author declared. Yes, the book of life whose pages turn slowly, yet so swiftly in this diseased reclusive year, damp sheets of shale underfoot. Where am I? A shale underfoot in the shuttering silver flash of beach leaves above. Hardly has the snow melted, then the catalpas white torches extinguish and summer starts sliding into its oobliet. As the black bear glides so suddenly into the meadow, we never hear his approach. In a blink, he's here, all presence, a silhouette tall on his hind legs, smacking apples from the lower boughs. When he turns, he shows his Roman snout, his prophetic brow, his thoughtful considering eyes like a shadow. He springs up the trunk, almost invisible in the shivering green. He's there, chomping wild apples. It's his season, it's their season. Let me give away what I fear. Other solstices will roll around. In childhood, I slept in a high room fringed by dark sleeve spruces, a tree house in which I learned a grammar of shadows. That house is gone. The towering spruces are cut. I hear the bear munching. The branches shake. It's hard to distinguish his blackness from the tree's own inward night. And that larger night I shall be. Oh yes, getting to know. Another poem about writing, since some of you are a lot of you, practically everybody in the room is a writer as far as I can tell. So I was really fascinated. Maybe you all know this. I didn't, I was finding in the woods these little paper balls about this big and wondering what they were. They turn out to be, they're called galls and they come from oak leaves when wasps drill into the oak leaf and inject it with a little chemical and put their larvae in there. And then I found out that oak gall is the basis for the ink that Western people wrote with for about 2,000 years. Way up into the 19th century it was the basis for ink. So that made me think about writing. The word droop, which is in the first line is spelled D-R-U-P-E. It's not the verb to droop, but it's a little red berry on the viburnum tree, gall. Cat birds clawing at the ruby droops of viburnum and bouncing the bows as the great heat squats over us and crickets sandpaper sunlight in the bristling meadow. We are not lost. We're just quiet if we don't speak. It's not that we don't have anything to say, but that the owl has said it for us in his raspy whistle, perched 20 feet away on a log fallen across the brook, professorial examining the trickle amid stones. Then suddenly he drops and seizes what? A salamander in his beak and gulps it down, a smacking, cracking sound after which he fastidiously wipes his mouth on the tree. But more ingenious the wasp who drills the oak leaf to lay her eggs, injecting chemicals that swell the leaf into a gall, a globed papyrus palazzo in which the commandeered tree generates a cafeteria so the larvae can feed until with sprouted wings and feet low. They chew their way out and take flight. They leave this tea colored paper lantern ball. Pliny the elder instructed us to crush and boil with iron sulfate to make the oak gall ink Europeans wrote with for almost 2,000 years. We are not lost. We have been writing out of our silence our bile, our chafing, galled. The larvae were hungry. So was the owl and we from disease made a codex of hungers and shaped each letter precisely. So it would last. Just read a few, just a few more to conclude. This one, this one I'm happy to say this came out in New Yorker last year and is coming out now in the then 2024 Best American poems. So another one that I think of as one of my obliquely political poems. Somebody here mentioned liking trains. I love trains and for 10 years I taught at the University of Chicago and I often took the train between New York and Chicago because I hate flying. This is an overnight train poem. A new year. Was it myself I left behind? Or was the country letting go of itself at each clackity clack as the train rattled northward into dusk? Gurders flashed by, the ghosts of factories then frozen fields, their stubble narrowly laid out in ancient foreign indecipherable script. New solitudes flared on the smutty pain as if I were aging faster than the engine's hurdle while the Hudson shoved its massive wrinkled drows southward, dreaming at its own pace the drowned river, carrying thousands of years of sediment through torn uterus of rock. Angry signs slashed the shadows. Wrecked cars stacked in yards, tilting fences, sheds pledged revenge. Then a hush of snow tattered the trees and night swallowed us whole. Till dawn, jerking me from my birth broke over Indiana's frost-bitten furrows. A country graveyard slotted among farms. End with just two poems. These are very, very new. This just came out in a magazine, Hindsight. I've seen demons each one tossed in its hurricane of scarf. They were foreign, carved and painted. They protected a temple. Shall I invite one home with his bug eyes, his fangs? But that's not the conversation we should be having, you and I. Let's go back to our early letters. See how the ink splurts out of the capital I. See the tremor blurring Y-O-U. Each ink blot a cocoon in which a demon larva battens and dozes oozing out its time. They live for decades in manila folders. This species is indigenous and dodgenous. They secrete venom, but warmed, scrambled free, released to air. They rise, each new-scaned wing striking an emerald shimmer, a flash of quartz. I could have seen you better. I know that now. Mexico. No, I didn't chuck out my grandmother. I hardly knew her, but I lost her books. Those guidebooks to Mexico circa 1908 when she, the young gringa, bride went riding among cacti. She had style, my grandmama, in jolly lead with a broad brimmed hat while her husband, the engineer, tinkered in the Anglo mine until his heart sputtered. What a romance. They'd never heard of Zapata. She wore long dresses, blouses with lace. They list their tea, learned a few words in Spanish. And the books? Hard cover, mold-ridden with etchings of men in sombreros, women in shawls, donkeys galore. I dragged them from house to house for decades, wondering if I'd meet her in those pages. I never did. And now, into some dumpster or shunted carton, they vanished. Those ardent, ignorant, protestant newlyweds and the long bedragalment that followed their Mexican fling. How much past can I do without? Easy to cast off someone else's illusions. Here, outside my window in New York, the parchment leaves of the calorie pair clap in the wind, applauding. Or is it palsy shaking them? Thanks very much. I don't know if you have a convention here of wanting to make comments or ask a question. If anyone wants to ask a question or make a comment, I'll be happy to try to answer. And if not, we can all go have cookies and lemonade. Okay, I think you should be released. Thank you very much for being so attentive.