 Welcome to poem city. Well, here we are three quarters of the way through Enjoying Ten years. This is the 10th anniversary of poem city. We owe it to Rachel Sennichal who works for Cali Coburn library I work with Rachel. My name is Michelle Singer and I'm her program assistant for poem city And every year it's our pleasure to put this festival together and get the artwork organized from the elementary school kids and Pick the placement of the poems and otherwise just enjoy poetry to the maximum We are so happy to be here today for welcome for integrating personal and political a reading with Sue Burton and Carol Potter I would like to thank our poem city sponsors National Life Group Foundation Vermont Humanities Council the Hunger Mountain Co-op Vermont College of Fine Arts and the Poetry Society of Vermont They give us really important financial backing to make all this happen We are so happy to have Carol and Sue with us today Carol Potter's most recent collection some slow bees was awarded the field poetry prize from Oberlin College Press She teaches for the Antioch University Low Residency MFA program and lives in Tunbridge Sue Burton's collection box is a nut 2018 Indies finalist in poetry and was selected by the by Diane Seuss For the two Sylvia's Press poetry prize Also released in 2018 is her book like poem Little Steel from Foamite Press She has an MFA in writing from Vermont College and lives in Burlington They will have a Q&A session after and have books for sale for cash or check. Welcome to Sue and Carol Well welcome everyone on this terrible day of the usual rain I want to thank that Kellogg Hubbard Library for well for Hosting us and also just for poem city, which is fantastic. So Relay our thank yous to Rachel and Thank you to Michelle Singer who has been a sort of our to-go person and she's been wonderful. So It's really great It's such a delight to be reading today with Carol Potter I first heard her read several years ago at the Norwich bookstore and I was taken with her work Especially her heroic crown of sonnets called the Miss Nancy Papers, which is based on the 1960s TV series romper room It's a wild poem It's in the book back there So a heroic crown is 14 sonnets and the last line of one sonnet becomes the first line of the next and then you and then There's a 15th sonnet where you take either the first lines or the last lines of each of the first 14 poems And that becomes the 15th sonnet got that Okay Anyway, I heard Carol read and I said oh I could do a crown sonnet for Nettie Nettie was my great aunt who died of an illegal abortion in 1902 I've been working on a poem or maybe an essay or who knows what for several years And it was just stymied by my reams of information Family history the legal legal status of abortion in Ohio in the early 1900s a Year's worth of 1902 Columbus Ohio newspaper clippings and my own history because I've worked as a physician assistant in women's health centers My friends were saying sue you should write a novel So it was a little crazy to think about Nettie as a sonnet sequence But there's something to be said for structure and these little 14-line boxes for controlling material So later I'll read some of the Nettie sonnets Carol and I are billed as reading poems incorporating personal and political details At first we thought we were billed as political poets Which seemed either a minefield or a big role to fill You know political poetry has had sort of a tenuous reputation in this country the US The present US poet laureate Tracy K Smith describes her experience as an MFA student in the late 90s Which is when I went back to Vermont College and got an MFA The attitude in the 90s or the attack on political poetry was couched in terms like Didacticism and slackened craft and artistically questionable Good poetry was personal lyric and still based on the old Iowa Writers Workshop mantra of show don't tell Of course, there are always undercurrents just as there have been trends in the other arts of the media or culture as a whole But in the last maybe 10 years there's been a shift We have political movements now like black lives matter and me too and pride fun to end gun violence And at the same time our country's politicians are heading us towards fascism Right now there's a need for poets for everyone to speak out So political poetry has reemerged although the old term is still may be suspect Political poetry is now often referred to as poetry of engagement If you're interested we can talk about this in the Q&A Okay, after all that I'm going to start off by reading a poem decidedly not political As part of the Palm City Celebration it's posted in the window at the three penny tap room. I decided to come back next life as a cocktail a Marilyn Monroe of a drink plum lipstick see-through skirt. Yes. I love being irresistible Drink me drink me but wish to become a martini with Kurosawa and lemon twisties or champagne with crème vette Aromatic seeds wide wild violets brandy dash with cloves. Oh Life is such an adventure today's installment a librarian with a transplanted heart of a biker starts to crave beef and true story Goes out and buys a Harley My drink is the color of a heart has cravings Serialized romances card tricks and show these would you drink me drink me if I'm infused with violets Petals tickling your throat. Oh, oh, it's metaphysical the night sky fizzing Stars like gold canaries cognac chartreuse the cadence of the moon all that frog song I'm the story you'll pick up and never put down You will become thirsty The title of my book box refers to the magicians box in which the woman who is sawn in half is sawn in half Get that so the magicians box is sometimes referred to as the celbit box after its inventor. So here's a description for your edification about the celbit box The celbit box the bloodthirsty hair raising celbit box in which a woman is sawn in half was introduced in 1921 By the magician PT celbit with the prototypical ever-smiling magicians assistant Betty Barker inside London the roaring 20s when this sawing took place crowds lined up for blocks Selbit stagehands dumped red and water into the gutters behind Finnsbury Park Empire Nurses stood in white caps by the exits and ambulance parked out front as a publicity stunt PT celbit offered suffragette Christabel Pankers 20 pounds a week to be his permanent sawing block She declined I Think many of you know how the trick works the sawing in half trick But for those of you that don't I'll do a little demonstration Well first of all there to the box it has two parts so it can be pulled apart But it's initially closed and there are two women So one woman walks in lies gets into the box lies down puts her feet up The one end of the box and her head up the other Meanwhile, there is another woman in the second half of the box crouching like this underneath, okay, so The one woman lies down the magician twirls his cape. They turn the box around And meanwhile the woman who's in the front pulls her knees up to her chest the woman who's down below goes her feet up The trick is you have to have the same size foot All right The house of illusion She'd say some day you'll go on without me She worked the back of the box from underneath Where the saw couldn't reach? Her name was Ruby. We had nothing in common, but our long skinny feet She was down there in the dark like Nijinsky's fawn in a cream-colored body suit little goat horns that nobody could see Bobby pinned in hair that nobody could see red streaked in kinked and of course the silver shoes same size as mine at the end of The box that everybody could see She was always talking down there. I'm inside Nijinsky's dead brain She get louder when Jack started with the saw inside the cloven soul The whole box thumping like a stance Jack sawing away. Shut up the hell up But how that voice splitting me like a headache it got so I didn't know who I was She was I don't know a sprite dressed like a man dressed as a goat She'd say it's magic and I think I'm not really there up here with my own skinny feet out the end of a box And a lipstick smile at the all-american prom queen After the show she'd perch on the bar in her font in her fawn leotard and hold up her drink Always something tall and purple or blue with maraschino's and crushed ice and she'd say it's art The woman who is son-in-half is in love with Oliver sacks. I Would go up to Oliver sacks at a party and he wouldn't settle away when he asked what do you do and I told him Oliver sacks at 80 Mercury on the periodic table Now I'm in love with Adrienne rich or at least in love with the poem that says I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow Is it better for me to love the Adrienne rich who built the poem or the Adrienne rich inside the poem? Oliver sacks doesn't remember faces, but he would recognize me in a poem Oliver sacks is happy to be mercury solid when it's cold. He can turn on the heat whenever he wants When I am 80 I will still love my box My box is a tooth and I am the root my box edged with gold Why am I lying in a box? Because it fits me like a ruby slipper Because taking up snakes is illegal in every state, but West Virginia The box is my gift horse. Don't look it in the mouth But what if things son-in-half makes nothing happen? What if I click my heels? What if I click three times? I'm deathly afraid of death by regret and of the mad and their lousy weather So I'm going to read a poem in the voice of the box The box gets on in half as well After hours the box all lacquer and gold locks fortells has an epigraph the monarchy to survive Must put on a show for the people Low the future has five sides in a lid on the top of the lid is painted curtains on the underside sky Sky and the Greek blue like an empty coat egg persisted as a battlefield My mama was a gypsy wagon my papa a pine box draped with a flag as is always was ever will be Once I watched the gypsies carry the saint down to the sea I was a baby and they wrapped me in flowers and a sequin shawl I'll show you the king said but I saw his fate in the bottom of the cup Low the populace will vote in a new king Low he will provide for us another war And we're back now in the voice of the woman herself son in half Once a God painted a sky blue like the sky to be invisible above the battlefield And there is referring to Amman the Egyptian God who's invoked at the end of Jewish and Christian prayers I paint myself red Like Gabriel's copper-tinted wings in the window of the sealic Sandini the light would pass through me and I'd color I change everything The magic of course. I always say is not in being son in half, but in the rebirth Climbing back on stage night after night the ritual of it all Or I paint myself red like Matisse's red room to plant an idea Something like that. He said something like that Or maybe the red and Picasso's girl before a mirror where the red holding the mirror is the color of the box My box my twin curled up inside There is always another girl hidden in the mirror the mirror is always red Red has many values the troubadours rose the whore of Babylon's red hair The red you're waiting to see spill across the stage when I'm son in half. I Like the idea of planting an idea in China red is the color for brides and in the Renaissance Mary wears red under her cloak Some gods are painted red Visible in the blue sky above the cannons, but not on the battlefield Okay, I'm going to switch gears for a few minutes to another battlefield I have another book Called Little Steel Little Steel is a long poem which is written in sections. So it's a little tricky You can't just dab here and there into it. So I'll read the first couple sections It's based on a skill a steel strike that took place in my hometown of Maslin, Ohio in 1937 It's a strike that affected the town for decades and really still does When I was growing up no one in my family talked about the little steel strike We didn't learn about it in school. It was a strike brutally put down by Republic Steel But it set the stage for recognition of the union and for labor reforms These days in mass and the mills are gone and the town is dead. I mean half more than half the town has boarded up I think if you're Talking or thinking about political poems or poems of engagement something to think about is audience to whom are you speaking? Do you expect to make things happen to kind of paraphrase Odin? I started working on this poem in the 80s in the 90s, but I really didn't find my audience until a couple years ago I was writing about the strike because of a need in myself, but I Wanted it to be heard, but for various reasons it was sitting in my drawer for years But a couple years ago. It's a long story But Burlington's wonderful for my press encouraged me to publish it And then I was invited to read my poem in Maslin at an event of the steelworkers organization of retired active retirees It was the first time these folks had heard a poem about themselves telling their story in Some place maybe it's analogous to how African-Americans or the LGBTQ community feel about the recent brilliant outpouring of poems by their peers Someone putting words to their experience Acknowledging it although there still aren't too many poems about steelworkers So I'll read the first two sections it the poem features Some 1937 immigrants steelworkers two of whom got were shot In this during the strike When I read the poem in Ohio Trump was trumpeting against immigrants I mean he still is but I said to the steelworkers group were all immigrants some of us Just got here sooner than the others and they broke into rousing applause. So You know sometimes steelworkers are stereotyped, but you should Okay, a little steel Let us praise Fulgencio causada shot in the back of the head Let us interrogate the bullet. Oh, but the strikers threw a rock and That is plays praise Nick Vafias or Vodious or Vodlas gun down at the door to the strikers kitchen excusable homicide Praise the Union who took up a collection causadas VB blasted four-foot crosses over near the fence But what's become of Vodious's cross so we could check the spelling? Praise the eerie street cemetery that dips and rises for acres gray slabs Smack-deb in front of black marble monuments the size of mobile homes I'll far cry from Rose Hill where my father is buried dead level Cowfield on the other side of town Where the great equalizer has stomped the graves heel printing identical flat metal plaques and pop-up metal vases But behind eerie's mausoleum the footstones of four section four are flanked by lumps and sags Even in death the worst town the west border plunging to rambling defunct Republic Steel So praise Betty Betty the furnace and Betty my best friend in high school Ten million dollars fired up in October 1926 Hundreds of steelmen in attendance gaping like medieval bumpkins at rems Cathedral big Betty once while lady processed 6.5 million tons of iron before she was banked for the last time in 1965 Raised in 1974 Praise the girders the pilers pilings the stainless pots and pans the roller bearings The handrails the chassis's the gears the road signs the crankshafts the tankers the halls the kitchen sinks the bread knives The bed springs the train tracks the lorries DC threes praise steel praise Maslin steel Marion Red 25 years from high school last night's hold that tiger still reverberates We stood and ridiculously sang before the buffet and then again at midnight I can't decipher this eerie street cemetery map So follow a hillbilly Virgil a kid with an orange mustache with a twang I got knocked out of me when I was 10 we keep her up by selling graves. He says What if you run out of plots? I say He waves toward a new section across the street fresh dead maintaining the old the infallible formula of social security Section four he says is the only place where the fill has sunk the forehand side. He says kicking at one of the moms They came from Italy from Greece from Slovakia from Spain They came up from West Virginia. My mom said don't let on that's where your dad's from They came from the south though blacks had to settle in the bottoms The mill the mill blood brothers. They married the mill Marion Red wish yourself Battalions of smokestacks keeping them true big shotguns on end Marion blue Vale of ash of unremitting heat acres of soot gritty wedding cake basilica a Promise big as a city brick looming separated by a moat the Tuscarawas River from the good side of town Some days the sun cut red through the haze Some days she didn't bother. Oh But it was a dream in 1937 they fist to cut for $5 a day a 40-hour week by 1986 $600 a week time and a half over time if Interview with Uncle Bob. I did a number of interviews with people in town Of course you have your foreigners that did the rough jobs down there like chipping and scarfing which is real bad for your health They lived on the other side of town over in Columbia Heights They'd come in by the hundreds and they'd be 20 25 of them living in one house's size They'd have bumps in the basement and little cupboards for their bread and they'd save every dime and send it back to Italy Then when they'd made enough money, they'd go home without any teeth They'd all lose their teeth from the acid fumes and the soaking pits If they didn't quit young they were dead because it killed them sure as you're a quick tall Okay, I'm going to go back to box and to his other thing which is abortion I Worked for over 25 years at the Vermont Women's Health Center in Planned Parenthood And I'm going to start with a villanelle Which is on page 2 a Villanelle is a form that it repeats lines throughout the poem So it's great for obsessive themes or for obsessive personalities And there are references to the poet priest Gerard Manley Hopkins and his poetic technique of sprung rhythm in the poem and I wrote this poem after Dr. George Teller an abortion provider from Kansas was shot in the head He usually wore a bulletproof vest though I'm not sure about that day because he was killed in his church just before a Sunday service It's called today it's Hopkins and his obscure spiritual contraptions Everything I read is heart-corseted like a concealable vest police surplus good as new Some fanatic is packing a gun. I Turned to Hopkins living speech sprung stress compressed then I'm off again helped me obsessed Oh restless mind my own spiritual strange spiritual contraption Armor with a warranty order online unless you're a felon But a killer aims at your head when you're his holy pretext right to choose third eye bull's eye Some fanatic is packing a gun Why is the body so feared is physicality its passion? Even Hopkins the beauty of the body is dangerous Wrestling with God that obscures spiritual contraption Last week. I read we're wired for God blessed evolution. We're spring me wired to control oil water sex God help us tonight a fanatic is packing a gun Another doctor shot the killer thinks he's one bodies ourselves mere rhetoric Beauty is the spirit fleshed. I mourn I get ready for work. I put on my contraption It presses on my heart Some fanatic is packing a gun Okay, so I'll read some of the netty sections Um They're prose poem sonnet So what I had was a set margins and then just when I got to end of 14 lines for one That was the end of that one, but it sounds easier than it was It's kind of a complicated story netty died of an abortion, but she probably wasn't even pregnant There's secrecy incompetent doctors She was taken to a dicey neighborhood to convalesce at a boarding house run by a midwife mrs. Beatty The author of netty's ruin as them as they called him in the newspaper skipped town There was a big trial headlines in the paper for months Netty's brother who'd help her get who'd helped her get the abortion could have been sent to jail as an accomplice Legally in 1902 there was a controversy whether a woman who had an abortion was a victim or a perpetrator of a crime Hard to believe that we're back at that place again today Okay, so I'll read a few of the sections It's called box set For my great aunt Antoinette netty vote boat 1880 1902 One netty in a pine box the family Bible says died young Erased then written in again a scandal my mother says botched back alley in all the papers My mother's name is moon. He took advantage got her drunk My great grandma netty's mother Susan. I'm named for her saw a bell of fire in netty shoes left out on the landing Why did you go back to teaching? Names begotten a line of heroes toting the muskets bugles our ticket to the D. A. R. Proper netty's name erased who wrote it back Mu says our people didn't slight Men's names doing muskety things no family tree for Antoinette Antoinette netty boat Frenchified Ohio My mother's name is Mu. She told me everything she knows My name is sudy sudy. Don't brood. No one likes a gloomy puss Netty has a lovely tombstone down in Thurston Then I'm gonna switch to three Is it true netty wasn't pregnant, but she thought she was did she try one of those mail order concoctions? The parsley seed cure did it screw up her hormones? Everybody took them ads in church bulletins for blocked menses, but she was seen by doctors Hoskins and cooks Did they even know how to do a pelvic exam? They inserted implements bent smooth bent spoons pen holders wire attached but can't repeat 1968 Baltimore X waiting in a bar while I go to the doctors to get a rabbit test to get a phone number so somebody could drive me someplace in Pennsylvania Unfolded exit had a few beers by the time I got back to the bar The doctors waiting room was standing room only thick with smoke, and then I'm switching to 11 Netty died not knowing tell me it was a blessing sudy sudy Howl was mrs. Beatty was she motherly? Early on she'd said I try to do all the good in this little harm as I can't but I always get the worst Netty's own mother put a tiny pill box on her head shut herself up in the parlor her father said no more girls will leave the farm Now my mother at 83 30 years older than netty's aged father when he was summoned to Columbus Standing in the graveyard down at Thurston her hair so white wearing the white wool coat She bought for my wedding years ago her black patent leather pocketbook enormous slung over one arm You don't have to lug around that purse. I call to her. It'll be perfectly safe in the car She shakes her head and takes hold of the clasp with both hands the boats are right here. She says 12 Right here moves says again clasping the boat family headstone frowning slightly her other grandparents were her favorites The boats were a nervous bunch. She said and the sisters fought like barn cats, but they were loyal to each other Netty's tombstone a few feet down slope from her parents graves faces away from the churchyard in the direction of the old farm a polished granite square wreath with scraggly brown grass Antoinette daughter of WW and SL Boat July 7 1880 May 30 1902 It's a beautiful marker moves says now. Do you feel better? Back in the car. She looks tired small. It's starting to drizzle As we turn north from the cemetery out into the main road. She looks over her shoulder in size She fumbles in her purse for her compact didn't you ever want children and then I'll read 15 the last the composite poem but what I did is I did it as an erasure poem So it started off with the 14 lines and then I Erase most of it. I mean because her name was erased in the family Bible. So it made sense to me And it also made it easier 15 erased Netty died not Guilty they dug the grave Okay, I'll end with a poem called American pastoral American pastoral Autumn house of no need Death at the door and you drowsing in the sun. Oh Rocking chair rocking chair freckles corn stock here House of no-seek corn drying So many lacquered afternoons and now another Bees bees why bother messing on the golden rod? America and fine fettle while the fields burn So glad to be reading with Sue and thank you for everybody for coming I'm going to read some newer poems and oh Thank you many that were There's a series of Have a series of poems that are based loosely on some kind of pop science Evolution and my question has been as human beings how much have we actually evolved that we like to think we've evolved but This is palm is called a common misperception It's quiet like that Bukalic looks like nothing's going wrong anywhere at all Bear trees rocking back and forth three crows chasing an owl across the field into the woods Yesterday men appeared at the top of the drive Rifles orange vests big boots at the same moment dog ran at them marking in a 350 ton C-5 Air Force cargo plane grazed us all It's 200 foot wingspan at treetop the noise of it making each of us hold his or her breath for a moment Dog didn't bite the man the man didn't shoot the dog Plane didn't crash of course. They were puzzled by the woman shouting from the doorway of the house. I Wasn't shouting. I was swearing at dog at men with rifles Cargo planes forest one week after San Bernardino the inexplicable mother and father It gets confusing Which was which when and where hands up or down on the ground on a bike in a car We heard the shots saw someone fall the plane boots on the ground dog barking one thing blending to another Link which linkage disequilibrium. Yes something vestigial in us all You might be the enemy you were fighting from the air What you know might be useful information if you could shake your own self down Could remember what country you came from what language you were taught to speak if you were the men in the plane Or the men the plane had come to take if you were the plane or if you were the bolts on that plane or simply a passenger What feeds us what we feed on the men faded back into the house The men faded backs use me they've been faded back into the woods the plane disappeared dog came back into the house That's a Massachusetts poem actually and I'm going to move on to a couple of post poems that I have a Gotta call it animal Cedarium. That's all a through Z sort of five illistic poems that were begun into 216 after the election and there seemed to be no other response Because it again it all kind of blends together In this poem is called anaconda and in fact I did not have an anaconda. I do know somebody that did have a bow constrictor This anaconda In the house It felt very Trumpy in that there was something then then just we couldn't see it But it was squeezing us around the middle Oh anyway When we brought the anaconda home from the pet store as things seemed to be okay My sister insisted on carrying it around with her though. She could barely walk the snake was so heavy We were accustomed to that sort of extra load Something a bit cool around the neck and the shoulders bowing down I told her to put it back in the cage because we hadn't named it yet and didn't really know If it was a him or a her She put a sock on the snake's tail that night because she was certain it would get too cold in our house The heat hardly working and our father gone missing the next morning the snake was gone too There was no food in the house either and clearly the snake had rummaged through the cupboards had opened the fridge and drunk the milk We saw beads of milk and a ribbon of crumbs on the floor Something we got used to hearing rustle around in the walls of the house all night long It was like there was some extra muscle in our lives One night my sister Was giggling in her sleep and the snake was there around her middle pretending to tickle her This is something that happens to girls the thing wraps around you you giggle you forget in the next poem is written Exactly around the time of the coffin hearings and the confirmation and it's I did have a dog that did this but This is sort of sort of exaggerated and the pumps called woodchucks are the girl in need of some murder You do not want them in your fields the holes they make Places your animals could step into and break a leg Mounds that could tip a tractor over if the kids were driving and weren't so smooth letting out the clutch And yes, this is a farm story Which is what those of us who grew up on farms have always secretly known is the only story The death the sex the birth the father beating on the cow the pig getting its throat slit How you watched whatever happened to be happening and you didn't flinch To brand new hooves poking out the back end of the cow then the wet muzzle the face Then the whole calf body slipping out thumping onto the ground. There you have it the wet the slops My dog rushing out to eat the placenta the after birth all that licking and chewing my dog How sharp her eyesight she'd spot a woodchuck from the top of the pasture and off she'd go How many times I watched her sprint through the field grab a woodchuck by the neck and shake it dead She'd bring it back rolling it eat it She was the dog that went everywhere with me. She had murder in her. It's true I liked that I was a girl in need of some murder The sharpshooter that was my dog I was a girl in need of something running fast fuck down the field and shaking it by the neck I'm Actually going to be reading something called the blow-through floor and in other manifestations, it's called with a good math and it's inspired by It begins with a with a video from National Geographic of a skater skating on black ice in Norway and Sweden and most beautiful Christine ice and the sounds that the skates made were uncanny and gorgeous and so it begins with that and into this also comes Into this also comes the fairgrounds of the Tumbridge fairgrounds that are filled with ice That first winter I was living there and actually it repeated this winter and Some references to to Bill Bryson's at home. It's our crazy architect that he talks about and also coming into this in the This fabulous story and video that I saw about the blow-through floors in the high-rise buildings in Chicago in the 83rd floor it was or something like that where they have a wide open floor So the wind will blow right through the building and not make the building sway and it Became for me, you know seemed to me like it was something that we needed personally, you know blow-through floor in the body So this begins with a with a quote from Kidritch and it is it is another sonic crown I wish to bastardize sonic 14 lines And and again the last line begins the first line of the next poem The blow-through floor I Learned to walk on that time as if it was ice every so often getting out a little farther Before the surface sagged and creaked in the cracks radiated from the place where I stood for another day That's from a hole in the sky bike of Kidridge The song wild ice makes Skating on the thinnest most pristine ice when a lake has its first cover thick enough to bear your joy is Both an art and a science the man gliding across the black lid of the lake tells us the cracks beneath the skates Making laser like other worldly sounds the thinner the ice the higher the tone High sea means it's about to break There's a mathematical equation to it as there is for so many things You've got your water pressing up from below and the sides of the lake supporting the ice as in a dome You've got the weight of a man and the air in his lungs and the sky on top of it all The math is horrible. He says so don't try it. It's a house with no Joyce You're walking on windows. The floor is made of glass these pages to Yesterday the field was covered in glass a thin layer of ice the snow crackling as dog and I poked our way across it Both of us pocking through now and again. Nothing mathematical about it random dog post-holing in my skis getting sideways No way to predict what would hold and what collapse We'd like to imagine we can control it the breakage in some of the tallest buildings now They build a blow through floor so when the wind smacks the building the building won't sway it passes through Otherwise the occupants might get nauseous might need to get the hell out of there If it was a closed office a taped up box of a building Sometimes you hear it the thought of wind against a house a tree a car a body My body in plain light in summer standing in a screen door looking at the lake ear pressed to the phone My brother telling me about the cancer. He's being treated for a breeze riffles the lid of the lake Grass between us and it There's leaning into the earpiece to hear there's someone cooking dinner in the kitchen behind me There's always a phone call some kind of notice being given He was speaking softly after all he says I'm 73 After all after the wind some sky some learning and I thought of the blow-through floor and those high rises When a blast of wind punches the building it passes through In olden times when wishing still helped one actually each one of these is Has got a title, but it's easier to not read the titles. They're all from various And olden times when wishing still helped one It doesn't break nobody falls down Maybe the blow-through floor is the same as the let it roll off your back floor. It's the don't let it get under your skin Floor it's the nothing and nobody here floor no doors to knock on no carpet floor No year-round report no evils no boss floor. It's the water over the damn floor. It's that it's not me It's you floor. It's the nobody any window floor staring down at whatever boulevard floor Waiting for who knows what to happen floor. It's the no crying over spilt milk floor. It's the nobody gets broken floor You could be the body that breaks things the one who walks on the cold frame in the drying yard You could be the one who held the clothesline and thought she could walk above the small heads of lettuce Across a pane of glass you could be that light child the magic girl You could be the one who thought the glass was magic the sneakers on your feet magic of course It breaks you could be that girl crashing through you could be the one who came screaming out of that yard Bleeding you could be the one marked the skin broken the cold frame broken the clothesline broken glass shards in your hands Inches you need are everywhere around you. That's from Every other Sunday or something like that Shards of glass in my hand mother in the driveway leaning on the horn get up hurry up get going an Accident I said my hand just flew through the window by mistake and the brothers Cutting holes in the ice to test to test which of them was toughest which could hold his head in the water longest Like there was a hole in the world one could play with pretend to die and come back It's a radiant moment really a building half demolished doors opening into the air Chairs sofas sitting at the edge of the room six stories above the street and most of the walls gone No walls left nobody home as in a war roofs windows all the people gone How we carry what gets broken forward? Sometimes it's there is sometimes not what my father saw in the war what he brought back After or doof he wrote to my mother I'm not sure how a man can come through this and have normal feelings and reactions ever again I wish to God. I were home now We never knew which door he might blow through how fast what he heard sometimes in our voices teenagers breaking things I've often wanted to break things in the office. I worked in next to the lake There were some betrayals some who said what to whom one score at a time All my life I've known girls who score their own skins little criss-crossings and hatchings as if the skin below The skin needed air as if not enough was broken Beyond the window the frozen lake people skating across it Scritch of blades little windows cracking fish beneath the surface Studying the sounds the crackled sky above them was making you can walk across it drive on it You can cut holes into it Sometimes someone or something broke through as if the ice or a door a roof a glass wall I didn't mean to do that How the wind cracks the door makes gaps and trees whistle in landscape Like blowing across an empty bottle like my father singing when he did head tilted back We could trust that voice his face radiant the song's corny, but nonetheless Sometimes it's all we need Somebody forgetting what needs to be forgotten Tonight the wind sounds like it could fly a person one end of a field to another one town to the next the body Being a closed office. No windows in it. No blow through There's some beauty to it what the wind can do to a landscape Something opening up where everything had been closed children breaking through what needed breaking Sometimes something needs some breaking we broke the doors on horseback Broke into the abandoned school careened across the wooden floors of the gymnasium Broke some signs two trucks one car if the parents looked at us mad we broke that too Sometimes you just need things to go whack like the river did this winter Packed with ice bullying itself out of its banks it filled up the fairground barns Sledges of ice planks broken floors trees Something magical the way it moved in and stayed all the doors of the barns left open the animals of last summer long gone All the animals of last summer long gone oxen pigs sheep the four-legged breath of it all I Would have liked to see the river do its work here the sound it made shoving its baggage into the barns Filling them up floor to rafters the building side-by-side with the river Doors left open as if to let flood waters pass through no harm done Now and again a structure makes some sense unlike the boat house a man built with no doors and The house with a door that opened into a wall I think of the people patting around the boat house corner to corner another man walking into the wall behind the door Nothing mathematical about it. Not the good math One could be wary of the math of the possible failure of it the rides in the midway That tilt the world teak up the lunge and plunge the cogs and gears and nuts and bolts of it all Someone has to factor it do the math put it together the wheezing machines churning lights blazing screams laughter From up on the hill above one wouldn't know if that was fun. You were hearing or something horrible Children getting heaved into the air then dropped flung sideways upside down Strap tight to the ride the doors of their bodies wide open lights passing through them The elasticity of children terrified pinned against the night sky Tickets in hand ready to go at it again Ready to go at it again and again the ponies next day yanking concrete sledges across the ring Handlers shouting crowds cheering the inordinate math of it pulling until one of the team falls to its knees Nothing my own horse would have done Bucking me off heading back to the barn. She did what she did until I learned to hang on I was a 10 year old on the back of an animal 10 times my size You can learn to ride whatever needs riding Those icebergs this winter shoulder to shoulder in the stalls like some kind of Translucent creature a person might saddle up and ride away down We need it something that can hold this weight take us out of here number 14 How much the world can hold we don't know but we've seen it break and break and break again There's children's fascination with dinosaurs. This was what was this is what disappeared Apparently Jefferson didn't believe anything had gone extinct on the American continent So sent men out to find the woolly mammoth Perhaps we're still out there looking for it Want to see it rise up out of the plane's tusk by tooth with a mastodon's giant beavers short-faced Bears we'd like to see something walking toward us field by field street by street Shining sea telling us nothing got broken anything can be repaired Here's the number 15 You're skating on the thinnest most pristine ice a white field covered in glass this body in plain light a building That could so easily fall You hope it doesn't break though sometimes. Yes, you be the body that broke things Nonetheless shards of glass in your hand smashed windows no walls left nobody home It's an office. You get born to or not wind cracking the door open that gap Sometimes something needs some breaking though so much already packed up and gone Wary of the math the possible failure of it. We'd go at it again and again one more time How much the world can hold we don't know Does anybody have any comments or questions or I just I love different But yeah, there were these themes that Especially in your poems that was fun to see that There's so many things in both of your work And hardly formulate questions But I Yeah, I don't usually use form but it tends it when there's a tremendous amount of material it tends to be you One way to convey it, you know and contain it I just Nothing That I think Sometimes sort of legitimate criticism of some of the political writing is that it's just kind of a rant and this kind of Deep inside and so that's just it wasn't Just If there's an argument about it, it's kind of a whole shit I agree when I hear political poetry, I want to run a mile because I assume it's going to be a rant or Someone's making a point more than writing poetry. It's just you know, but these homes were so metaphorical and full of imagery that they as Scooters Yeah, that's Margaret anybody see Margaret Abbott She said she wanted to she wanted to just do it, you know give a message. She would have rented billboard But you make you embody you know metaphor and landscape and and the thing is it's a political does move inside of us I mean it does shape us no matter what However, you know, we might want to pretend it doesn't but it does shape who we are and You know, it's been woven into my work forever Yeah It shows up, but you know it's helped to go away I'm curious. I think you mentioned that Started that work in the 1980s, maybe and how long has the the box series Know the woman the box kind of been on your I started. Okay. I look The information about many Mike, you know, I worked at an abortion clinic's women house clinics for years And it wasn't charters in my 40s. So my mother had gone to it a senior's Autobiographical writing workshop or something, you know, and so she came back and she had a letter that was written by one of the classmates To her granddaughters explaining about that she had why she had an abortion. This is an older woman and Mother's move said, oh, here's something you'd like to do and I of course I think she didn't want to be undone and she said well Nettie and Nettie had died of an illegal abortion. I mean, you know, she never told me I've been working, you know I said it for a planned parenthood for years So I was and she said it was in all the papers and I don't know anything about it So I didn't in a library loan search then and I and this was Well, that was after I Would say that was in the 90s. I know, you know, and then I Got one newspaper clipping that said that Nettie was taken to the place of a Mrs. Beatty in a delicate condition. I mean, you know, the writing was very Victorian And so I thought this baby had done the abortion. So I was writing these long things up in Nettie's voice And you know, this is baby and of course I identified with Mrs. Beatty, although of course Nettie had died but you know, it was a tricky thing and then a few years ago I was visiting some friends and my friend Clyde went out to her She was in Toronto. You don't have internet access at her house. So she was it She went into town and was had it where they can have internet access and she was just she punched it I think I had written read some of my Nettie stuff to her and she punched it and she said she came back Sue I punched Nettie Bope into the internet and it came out with these doctors had in work. There's a big trial So it was one of those things that had been gone on for years of just sort of stewing about the material That's partly what happened with little steel, too. I was doing I was interviewing people I was amassing all these details and then didn't know what to do with it And that's actually how I think it what did I meet you three years ago? I Had was trying to do some I was asking people for advice people people coming right a novel, you know and then I Put it aside and that's when I started doing the box poems like get me away from this project I can't stand it anymore. The box poems were sort of escape us for me You know and then I heard Carol Reed and it was time to come back to the Nettie thing So once I came back to it. It was still I would say Over a year that I put it together, but I had a lot of that stuff was already written But it was a snippets That's right, we have a state reading of the little stuff people could summon. I forget who you played My mother's role in Like to have the actual the machinery is a character And I think it's really interesting because you know if we go up and we do a lecture on you know union and some labor You know, but you can shut out you can disconnect So when you when you tap into the emotion of how it would have felt about that piece of machinery I was if you weren't in that Way for You said they've never heard of anything being about in their story told right now you celebrated all those objects that they'd make I Love the description of all the farm Right My uncle will actually help account you first one time and that you know trying to haul the calf out The description of the two hooves appear Because the cow was having difficulty just to push the calf back I love the way The thing I really loved and this is my own I liked all the anger in it, you know Something needs to be murdered Kill those woodchucks, you know Much have repressed that in my life In poetry, too, yeah, I really thought that was wonderful energy. It's a powerful section No, they have heard people Astonishingly the people I've heard have said things that were like, you know, murderous, you know Give given our recent politics Oh geez Yeah, yeah You really wanted to write that poem about your man the Supreme Court Canada and it was just I was just I would bring it back and I think it was I was reading Jeremiah, you know, it was so bad I mean finally and then I went and I testified at the State House because on my age 57 I you know, there's a belt trying to Make abortion legal and Vermont in case the Supreme Court Wipes out Rovers this way and I find and I heard the people on quote the other side quoting Jeremiah So finally I just I let I got rid of Kavanaugh and I And then I have these these characters at sand and ostrich who are a couple wonderful mineral and bird And they talk about their poet and their word because she's all set about she's reading an Old Testament prophet Oh