 Thank you so much, Dale. I am going to read from a book that came out in September called Unidentified Sign Objects. I read down here this fall, so some of you have heard some of these poems before. And you can see me afterwards for a tuition reduction coupon. I'm going to begin with where the villanelle called Plimate. Elise, age nine, worries about the ice and polar bears with no place to go. She lies in bed, alert to her fraught life. Downstairs her mother weeps. The words wife, unfair, too long elongate and explode. Elise, age nine, worries about the ice. Her father tries to soothe this endless strife. He talks like that, full of what he calls woe. She lies in bed, alert to her fraught life. Where no beautiful animals entice little girls to live in homes of snow. Elise, age nine, worries about the ice. Igloo's melt mother's mutter knife, the empty kitchen air, pays to and fro. She lies in bed, alert to her fraught life. What's been done is done not so much in spite as fear. Love marooned on a flow. Elise, age nine, worries about the ice. She lies in bed, alert to her fraught life. There are a couple of poems in this book. I've done a lot of homages to artists over the course of my career. And there are two in here to photographers. I'm going to read one of them. There's a great African-American photographer named Roy de Carava who lived in Harlem, worked in New York City, and took a lot of great photos of the jazz world in New York in the 50s and 60s. A really extraordinary artist. So this is one of his photos. It's of two people in a club. I saw a white woman and an African-American man. The present tense of jazz on a photo by Roy de Carava. Prim in a dress, a jumper, a young white woman listens. A few tables away, a young Negro man wearing a carefully knotted tie listens. It must be past midnight. Reason has headed home. Only a few seekers still are up, tapping their internal feet to the sound the planet would make. If it could riff a bit on its axis, invite a few stars down to agglomerate the gravity. Though bound by time and space, you can feel these two people aren't likely to speak. They're listening. That feels sad. The miserable starch of history floating on top of the unmelted pot. But feels right and respectful too. Since with each note their souls throb and faint. Since as people they didn't know they were so big and small, so free, despite themselves. These two people in New York City in the 1950s not looking further than the moment, not touching one another which could make you weep for the loneliness of being in a body and praise it to their dignity. The music you can't hear but must be there. I'm going to read another poem now that's concerned with music but of a very different sort. This one goes out to Elizabeth Hastings. Ode to the DC Five. You read that the bassist in the Dave Clark Five has died. And think you didn't like the Dave Clark Five that much. They were peppy but not a whole lot more overdoing their British notion of joy that wore thin in two minutes because it lacked sex and darkness. That to the Brit's credit the stones would soon provide. But you're sad anyway because you feel how even nostalgia slips away. How no one knows what George Washington was really like. We'll never sniff his breath or watch him clack his dentures or hear him say a word like constitutional. And that hurts not because you're afraid of oblivion which would be silly but because it's a drag how every story has to have the same ending. That's the beauty of poems though how they don't care about that. Poems just care about a teenage guy fumbling around with a base and then starting to get the plunk plunk hang of it and meeting some other guys and starting a band or joining a band and thinking hey this is fun and hey I'm going to get laid. And lots of good thoughts like that which come way before death and that are immaterial because although the music isn't immemorial it doesn't have to be because nothing has to be. Its failures are alluring as its successes maybe more so. So it's genius is so rare the chance of some genius liver puddley and coming together being about the same as you buying a power ball ticket and winning 63 million dollars which still wouldn't buy immortality but would give you a great stereo system to listen to the Dave Clark Five. Though after a while you'd realize you don't need a great stereo system to listen to the Dave Clark Five that in fact it makes the experience worse because you keep expecting something musical and that wouldn't be the Dave Clark Five or its basses dumping along like a flat tire and that pimply as spree feeling pretty bogus as the decades go down in a hail of gunfire and grief or quiet bank accounts or grandchildren but poetry doesn't care about that it's not an obituary it's a life-tuary which in its way the Dave Clark Five was getting at how swell it is to be young and full of snappy sap and not knowing anything and not listening to anyone and being not much more than a gyrating body homing in on some homely lass who swoons with delight at the opening bars of catches if you can even though she knows the Beatles are way better than this stuff it doesn't matter there are moments in life when anything will do and you just go with that you say yes to whatever is breathing hard in your face it's breath maybe like George Washington's because he lived in some moments once upon a time and though he'd never heard an electric bass he must have wanted to rock out as a kid because kids always want to rock out that's what their bodies are telling them to pick up a bass or another person or a constitution or a nation and start rocking start plunking away and feeling that though it's just you some second-person figment that one uncharted day will dissolve into the listless ozone it doesn't matter because no one's counting how many ecstasy buttons you've pushed because one is enough I read this a little while ago up in Vermont someone said what do you have against a Dave Clark five I'm tough so I've mentioned George Washington and so when I was a kid a few years ago in my elementary classroom there were two paintings on the wall one was the Gilbert Stewart painting of George Washington and the other was a painting of Columbus coming ashore into the New World and you know even when I was 11 years old I knew this is really jive you know like what is this this is very very strange so it took a while but I wrote about it and of course I'm writing about it from not the Columbus guys but the people who were here it's called Bear imagine being the one who saw the wooden boat clatter ashore the strange men step forward and heard their harsh voices in the morning wind calling your people together and beginning to tell your vision the day no longer a day but a story fashioned by unwanted gods imagine ringing sense out of what was senseless or a fraction of premonition doom and demise at last arrived safe and stupidly sound they looked absurd those bearded men who dropped to their knees and intoned impossible words who raised hands and eyes to the sharp with light sky imagine being the one the first the bearer of tidings that will transfigure death and ruin joy imagine the one running back to his tribe short forever of breath okay, poets have long memories so this is based on a meter that peaked around the time of Beowulf so that it's alliterative and you'll hear the alliteration in here it's called Haircut 1956 men must be mundane their virile vanity veiled in crew cuts critique of hair head honed to thin thrust of follicles fine flatland extreme the empty edge but Bob the barber sharpened shears shook apple aprons aimed tonic and talked TV Ike, illness, invasions of countries by communist killers while the wealth of weeks fell formlessly the fix of lessened locks lightly combed the cunning clack and whack whelming wavy sensuousness sapsons strength bagered, bound, buzzed doing things like it's like a dog walking on its hind legs you know it has a quality I can do this okay, this is another one my poetry is a lot about collisions of past and present because as Faulkner said the past isn't even over and that seems to be essential to I don't know even semi keeping your wits about you in this amnesiac society so a number of the poems in here are odes which is again an old form that's how to say capacious you can put different things in it so there was in the late 19th century some of you I'm sure know about this there was a religious movement in the plains Indians primarily called the ghost dance and it was part of the movement was this dance in which basically they dance to make the white people leave go die and the buffalo to come back since they had been slaughtered so this is called odes to the ghost dancers easy with time I forget out of time how do we call the stars shuffle in their recondite heaven to hear them I must be still to hear them I have to open my beleaguered head how much money did I make today the spirits watch and grimace thousands of Indians shuffle their feet a thin yet supple sound if you stand outside Walmart Taco Bell Eddie Bauer the shilling hearts of the fluorescent republic and are very still above the cars starting people prattling radios broadcasting you can feel the tremor of moccasin feet shuffling not stopping dancing past exhaustion past hope and hopelessness to a place out of time but in life the concise moments of crickets beavers buffalo on a lush prairie ravens talking have you seen the Indians they are almost all dead but they have plenty of ghosts no ghosts for sale in Walmart, Taco Bell, Eddie Bauer only those hungry ghosts buying 12 packs of paper towels extra sauce signature twill shirts chanting Walmart Taco Bell, Eddie Bauer Walmart, Taco Bell, Eddie Bauer Walmart, Taco Bell, Eddie Bauer Walmart, Taco Bell, Eddie Bauer I forget how many died for this how many were scalped eviscerated, speared, arrowed their ghosts are angry too but the Indians continue to dance the troops ride into the encampment at wounded knee and start shooting screams many screams everyone moves on nothing comes back but like sun and clouds and stars the spirits are undeterred they hear the shuffling feet the cries that pierce the squander of grief okay, a lot of these clearly come from my fertile imagination but this one comes very much from my life it's called Ode to Speech still fumbling with words as if attempted eloquence could preserve you in my backward sight as if your death held other deaths at bay I see you emerging from the old's 88 a bandage on your head that the scarf you bought at Liberty of London on your one trip abroad doesn't quite cover and you shrunken inside your winter coat and moving very slowly tottering would be the word though you were only 47 and trying to form a smile of some sort a desperate smile a smile to rid you of pain and the weariness that eats my very bones a smile to show you were fighting back as you taught me to fight back when the world taunted me you halted on the sidewalk as if to take in the cold breeze as if after weeks away weeks in a small white room it was a pleasure the raw January air how it shoved and gnawed at a body's modest warmth you looked around slowly your neck creaking it lately having done little more than prop up your cancer besieged head and tried to say something maybe about the sky or house or a German shepherd lady who wagged her tail bravely but no words came out none only a rueful blankness more of that stolid fumbling that was the ruin of each laugh and kiss and exclamation you seemed bewildered to be there to be alive to be expected to respond when all that lay in front of you was coming to a bed and waiting patient and impatient for what the words nothing more to be done signified you told me you'd overheard those words one intern informing another I love you all you said then on the sidewalk to the dog and your husband and us children but you didn't smile your words were quiet and grave like the words in a speech but from the depth of words they're blind insides okay there are a number of affordable pubs in here these are quad trains it's called upon hearing of the death of a former lover again the dawning flush of your pale flesh you undressing slowly back to me then turning and smiling rye and windsome what you wished you asked not a question I stood in reply then the full skein of you rubbing against me and the smooth static of our different but one bodies passion that even now decades later makes memory whimper I pace on the back porch among shovels and returnables hear your meter of grunts and gasps I stop, protest your name like a faith okay now I'm going to revisit this blockhead self I was talking about the other day happily banished by the wisdom of age so this is called Port Authority 1969 for those of you who haven't been there that's the big building in New York where the bus is coming this is going to begin really right at you the way these things can happen Les Chicks the Poc Puerto Rican man who seemed to me to be somewhere out there in the tundra of late middle age asked as I headed from my bus towards some distant exit in the Port Authority whose name always confused me since there were no boats or docks no thanks sir I replied I'm going to hear the almond brothers at the Fillmore East as if that somehow explains something I kept walking as did he one thing sonny I want to tell you is call me any fool thing but not sir in front of a staircase he bo stopped I eyed his hair dosed with tonic and slicked back Allah 1956 you understand me sonny I'm under the hill not above the hill you get it half earnest half contentious he leered appropriately yes sir I answered he regarded me with visceral wonder one thing I forget sonny is stupid no matter how much I see it and I fucking live it I forget he shook his head a lock of oily hair fell forward a guy in a business suit edged up to us you hector the guy asked I wanted to yell something like how much or how long or what the hell happens but the moment dissolved into the ugly lights and trash on the floor and the night outside minatory the way night is supposed to be not going to get picked up by this you know come to New York City campaign okay a couple more again I write about collisions and this is one of the ultimate ones Jerry Lee Lewis and Nuremberg so this refers to the Nuremberg trials it also refers to the movie Judgement in Nuremberg which Spencer Tracy after the war the Second World War a very small group of Nazis were prosecuted and Jerry Lewis still out there he just made a record wonderful record called rock and roll time I think that's a bit all you need to know here Jerry Lee Lewis and Nuremberg in unreal time as went ahead dices up decades centuries millennia while slowly sluicing into the nether bog of sleep Jerry Lee Lewis also titled The Killer for among other things his pianistic prowess appears in Nuremberg in a stiff wide lapel suit he could have bought at Lanskis in Memphis if he was from Memphis but he wasn't standing there with that cool hairdo to confront the modest panoply of Nazis who are standing in for many Nazis who are there to take the rap glad in there we are the superior race way to do that since it was a service to Arians to cleanse the earth of scum which by implication included musicians humping pianos and 13 year old cousins while braying like country western boogie woogie banshees Jerry Lee has no time to dig this whacked out ideology he doesn't give a teenage shit about the tatters of their goose stepping zig-hiling murder machine what matters is the sweet dross in his love exercised mind an undressed woman and some get-down hands hurricaneing a keyboard which is what a mind should hold so that when Gary starts in with his witty repartee Jerry Lee says one sad mother fucker and the world for once gets what it is to be American and unafraid of what anyone thinks especially some Nazi slime ball who believes he's better than anyone else because he's from Europe and has a lot of unhappy history up his vicious asshole that got made into more history that soldiers like my uncle Nathan paid for with his life on the beach at Anzio his precious blood vanishing into the grievous sands of silence Gering says something smug but Jerry Lee is busy waggling his eyes around the courtroom no chicks or pianos being serious is fucking boring being serious has killed a lot more people than not being serious the dream ends here in Hollywood time Spencer Tracy is talking about the real complaining party in this courtroom which is civilization everyone nods at this large last word it sounds good like maybe you could use it in a song each syllable taught yet sibilant in its brief articulate leap though it doesn't rhyme with much though it feels like some wish something badly out of touch okay two more I had a request from the back of the room sometimes when you're in this business is not the right word I have a poet friend who was audited by the IRS and and they looked at her income and they said I'm sorry but this is a hobby oh that hurts that really really hurts she is someone who has published about seven or eight books teaches at Vermont College and it's a hobby so consequently there are journals out there which put on their masthead as it were the title of this poem which is don't send us any poems about poetry who can blame them okay so of course that's my poem another hallowing species of pathos dewey assertion meeting tactless fact while sad or poisoned self stands downstage muttering about flowers, bread times witless unsigned aggression packed as the serbic gods reign shit, war, unrequited everything upon one more lovers brimming, aggrieved near desperate head every moment a triumph in the sweepstakes of random abiding feeling fingers clutching air umbrella handles wet matches meant to set a fire glacial mysteries the whole rank savor of unwanted memory seeping through words okay and I'll leave you with the last poem which is called leaving not to be here anymore not to hear the cat's fat purring not to smell wood smoke wet dog cheap cologne good cologne and stars oaks and asters snow and rain every form I take mostly for granted makes me sad but pleased to be writing down these words pleased to have been one more who got the chance to participate who raised his hand although he didn't know the answer or understand the question no matter the leaving makes me sad so much was offered so freely and completely thank you as not everything I'm just an intrigued how do you have through the time because memory is something I did not rely on too much but what are your what is the question the funny thing is I don't have much of a memory and I also have never kept a journal my whole life so all I can say is I'm sort of porous and permeable so to speak and stuff comes in there and breath somewhere in there and then comes out somehow or another I'm very proud to say being a poet is like wandering around in an electrical storm waiting to be hit sounds great doesn't it yeah well I tell kids in school that sometimes they think gee maybe I want to be in a catwalk can you just talk a little bit about your process and I'm not as familiar with poetry so do you sort of come up with a concept and write a draft in one sitting or is it over time no concept zero concept no idea it's no concept just you know the strikes be the strikes we work it all comes back to words so the something strikes a spark you know I read about the Dave Clark five faces or part three group or you know I had a dream about a woman I was connected with many decades ago and yeah things like that I mean it's all coming out of the you know the subconscious basically and so just form or content or both directed or yeah absolutely but not one thing predominantly over the other no kind of go back and forth yeah I mean obviously if you write something a villain now form is really making itself present it feels right for what you're trying to write about that's a poem of obsession and that form takes you to that place of obsession you can't get away from it it's a big question so I'm wondering about there yes Mr. White tell us a little more about collision poetry collision poetry I think the Greeks call it drama it's you know basically one of the questions poetry asks is what does one thing have to do with another which is a pretty basic human question and the answer in this society as far as I can tell is they don't so I look at it as my job as it were since pellets are these you know neglected people practicing their hobbies who essentially take on the stuff that the rest of the society pushes aside the rest of society gets to have you know Fox News and Eddie Bauer and all the other crap that this place manufactures you know meanwhile back at the ranch there are a few people who are actually trying to sort of toad off the score about the whole thing trying to do what the poet Gary Snyder called the real work you know and these unheralded heroes of our society some of them are looking at these collisions that underlie I mean the aim of this place is laudable all kinds of different people trying to get along the reality is slightly different from that you know so for me always with that heterogeneous quality of this society which I grew up in Balmer Merlin as we say down there I went to All Boys High School that was a third black a third Jewish a third Protestant with a smattering of Catholic guys who had gotten kicked out of parochial school for bad behavior bad actors really really bad actors and so just even going to that school was an incredible collision you know of worlds I was just you know a Jewish kid you know I had this kid next to me in my homeroom in the 10th grade Ronnie I can still see him and he had this pile of paper on his desk every morning in homeroom and finally I got up to courage for a couple months I said you know Ronnie what's with the slips of paper you know you're doing some math project or something you know some community said those are the numbers and I said what's the numbers blockhead you know he was running a numbers racket in our high school you know so that's that's your question Michael that's a collision that's a collision different realities yes poems are pretty particular that's what I'm steeped in it took me decades to be able to write something resembling decent prose poetry is pretty much my natural language where my head goes so it's not it's not a decision thing the prose stuff they tend to be more like what do they call projects you know I wanted to write about race in Baltimore in 1962-63 write about a woman before feminism and that was way beyond a poem or two so yeah and where do you see it growing because I just see more and more loss of it it's more to me that there are some generation there are some people in my generation that are missing the point of the poem I'm actually strangely optimistic basically because it's been around for thousands of years and it's bigger than we are basically it basically contains the human impulse to praise being basically I have to believe as long as there are people here that's just the basic human impulse so that doesn't make the pessimist lull to contend yes Karen I love the collection which I read a couple months ago first time and one of the things that I noticed was that collision like you could call it a collision between the personal world and then the more historical kind of bigger references and I just was curious when I was reading it if you had how much research was involved in terms of if you go out and how that influences your process I read a lot of history that's just something I do as a reader I mean I'm the kind of guy who belong to things like the history book club accumulating hard bound books that I'll only read wife once that my wife says do we need all these in here so that's just who I've been forever basically and still I still read a lot of history so yeah so it's not research I'm really not capable of doing that frankly you know I mean I just like index cards were too much for me you know so yeah that's a great title for Paul I'll keep that one to you and you know that wasn't the end question I couldn't pause when he's like give me like you've been here for two years I've been reading for ten years oh no let me squeeze you know as a fiction writer I am not the kind of person that is able to write and write and write and so I kind of absorb things and so I'm walking and seeing a movie or I'm researching when I feel like I can write but then there's this downtime so I'm thinking like for poetry I was a songwriter but it's slightly different and you're a very different poet than almost anybody I've ever heard or listened to so I'm curious do you absorb like for me part of my process is not sitting down five hours a day and writing and of course I judged the shit out of myself but that isn't working really well for me so what I come to realize is that part of me is observing like I'm observing and absorbing and I'm doing things that feed the writer in me and the project so in terms of let's say a book of poetry do you know it's going to be a book of poetry or do you write the poems and then you say wow these poems kind of make the subject matter yeah do you know what you mean yeah I do know what you mean and you write the poems and for me at least that then becomes a book I have done a couple books that were one book because of form all the poems are 14 lines okay and then I did a chap book based on a clueless president of the United States and they were all about that figure but mostly it's what you're saying you collect things and becomes a book since it's written by you you hope it has some degree of coherence so like the Port Authority poem was that something that you had since the 1960s or was that something that you just remember from your mother's memory I mean before New York I cleaned up it was a pretty raunchy place and even for you know lock-head kids they only got classes so that's totally hard some memories from that era I'm surprised you have so much oh just kidding you were seeing the Almond Brothers you know that's okay once it's lived out seeing a hell of a mind there was reprinted in the Harpers in the 1980s called Dropping Acid and Uncle Harry and Aunt Clara that was so really? yeah really I would look like that in the Harpers the zillions the zillions I mean really well certainly the two who are still with us who to my mind are great poets would be Richard Wilbur and W.S. Merwin and you should read everything by them the great great poets and then they're a host of other wonderful poets I have lists on my computer send me an email I'll give you a hundred do you have them? I'm interested in the difference if there is between poems that are more personal or more social political I have a hard time with inspiration that feels honest when it comes to the social political piece and I don't like to do anything that doesn't feel right and I'm wondering have you ever do you have a sense of what I mean when I say that I do how one taps into that versus the more personal yeah well I think I do I mean a lot of so called you know social political stuff turns out to be preaching to the choir self-righteous posturing etc which is really tedious I guess my antidote is a sense of humor basically so you want to take these things on but you want to take them on at some angle so that the less than obvious shall I say will emerge perhaps can you share one of those examples can I share one of those examples yeah one of those poems that you just talked about yeah well in terms of you know yeah well it's all it's you know the thing is the reason why I asked for that was because it really saddens me to hear you say that you only have a few guys on the farm working on the real business because poetry as a form is the most celebrated literary form in China and in Russia as well if you go to Beijing and you see guys with long hair and cowboy boots and tight jeans walking along like rock stars poets and they are professional poets that the government pay them salaries and houses you know and they are very dangerous they have to keep them paid because otherwise they write very dangerous stuff chips and all the Chinese passport ready? and all the Chinese revolutions have been stopped by people like you yeah you're safe here aren't you? a little too safe a little too safe and you're right I mean I gotta have a dear Russian friend I mean there are poets and you're named after poets you know it's gonna be a long time before you stand on the prospect of Brooklyn Heights and see the SS in the rain and down the river but you know obviously we talked about this stuff I asked Da last winter perhaps because I've read Chinese poetry and translation for decades and I said to Da what is the effect of classic Chinese poetry on your wonderful writing and essentially the answer it's everything and that that just tells you a great deal obviously the history is so enormous and so rich whereas here we're a new country and basically just you know what do they say these days we're a startle basically a startle and so poetry is as much a startle as anything here I mean it took a hundred years really before they could sort of push away the shadow of Britain here you know from the revolution so it's very much a work in progress so that's the reason because it's young as a profession perhaps some of it in our musicians I think that Dylan and Paul Simon and some of those people that it's not like we don't produce poetry we don't have that tradition that Da is talking about yeah that's yeah yeah one more question like I like I really get into Russian literature and of course Pushkin that really got me into reading but it's in translation how do you feel about reading in translation you're basically trusting and then you have to know what the translator is to make sure that this is as close to what the original intent is I mean you have to be influenced by these things and one of the things that we don't have I'm a big fan of Nikhil Volkoff we aren't censored anymore and he was censored in a way where he just made the most beautiful imaginary world I love that book so much but maybe that is one of the things maybe we're I mean not that we should be under a regime that no I'm not advocating but it's just when you're forced to come up with a different way to say something which is something I would love to do but it's not even necessary anymore I mean how do you feel about that what I feel essentially is in this society is because I have taken a lot from Polish poets post World War II Polish poets for instance and often societies basically given that things are so tight so restricted human action often has enormous consequences in terms of you agree or you don't agree that has very big consequences for each person so whether it's in fiction or in poetry I guess my answer here basically is that for me and this has to do also with the era I grew up in I mean in the year 1969 my mother died I met the woman who became my wife I went off to graduate school I was drafted and declared psychologically unfit by the U.S. Army I knew what they were talking so those are five things in that period of time so that's a lot of consequentiality in my life so that just sort of I don't know how to say it that's how I feel and see life but obviously a lot of people in this society don't because it's going another way it's all about freedom of choice possibility, happiness it's not about that thank you all so much