 Good morning, Hank, it's Tuesday. So there's this Marianne Moore poem called Poetry, which begins, I too dislike it. There are things that are important beyond all this fiddle, which is more or less how I felt about poetry for much of my life, partly because it seemed a little dead in the sense that, like, all the poets I could name were, in fact, dead. So there didn't seem to be, like, a present tense to poetry. But also, I never felt smart enough to get poetry. Like, I thought to read a poem well, you had to be able to know that the wolf howling in the distance represented the poet's dead father or whatever, and that if you could figure that out, you were good at reading poems, and if you couldn't, you were bad at reading them, in which case, I was bad. So I mostly quit reading poems and tried instead to focus on the things that were important beyond all that fiddle. But it turns out I love poetry. As Marianne Moore puts it later in that poem, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine. And I am desperate to discover places for the genuine. And I'm also desperate for language that will help me understand the weird and overwhelming worlds I encounter within and without. And that's what poetry does for me. So much of my experience in the world is just, like, resistant to language, which makes it hard for me to understand. Like, I find it very difficult to describe my anxiety until I read a Paige Lewis poem in which they write, I feel as if I'm on the moon, listening to the air hiss out of my spacesuit, and I can't find the rip. I'm the vice president of panic, and the president is missing. And I find it hard to understand and describe how in a bout with depression it feels like reality is falling out from beneath me until I read Emily Dickinson Wright, and then a plank and reason broke, and I dropped down and down and hit a world at every plunge. And I also need poetry because it helps me imagine other people and their experiences more complexly. So working with the aforementioned Paige Lewis, we've started a new YouTube channel in collaboration with the Poetry Foundation called Hours Poetica. It features a poem read to you every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The readers might be poets like Paige Lewis or non-poets like Shailene Woodley. I think there are a lot of people out there who love poetry but just don't yet know that they love poetry, and this channel is for you. Like, you might think you don't like poetry, but listen to this poem by Julian Randall from yesterday's episode. My name's Julian Randall, and I'll be reading my poem on the night I consider coming out to my parents, which I wrote in the aftermath of the pulse shooting. On the night I consider coming out to my parents, I am afraid of something I am, but have never named. My tongue is a refuge for secrets. How does one still fear banishment if they were born in exile? There's blood on the ground. No time remains, so I'll lay it flat. I am black and Dominican and bisexual. There. If I die now, you'll have a hint for which god to petition. Sometimes, I look at a man and my hands are already digging into the small country of his back. In this way, the body is a distraction from what can make the body just a memory. My lips could bring a man's blood to the surface. My mother raised a curse and gave it her face. I am afraid to belong to another thing. To become still more no man's land. I am a trench. Nobody comes to clear the dead. Somewhere, my mother is gripping a rosary to pray for men who look like me. Somewhere, my mother is praying for me. I do not want to give her something else to worry about. I am quiet. I bury no one. Blood is drying beneath my nails. I do not know which me it belongs to. I just love that poem. Thank you to Julianne and everyone who has participated in ours, Poetica. I hope you'll check it out at the link in the doobly-doo below and subscribe, and that you will find in it, as I have, a place for the genuine. Hank, I'll see you on Friday.