 Hello, good afternoon Thank you all for being here what a wonderful turnout on a melancholy December afternoon Jesse, I hope you'll lift our spirits It's really really always always an honor to welcome poets of caliber such as Jesse Poets with such deep Berkeley roots before we get started if everyone could turn off their phones to the degree of Possible would be Wonderful, I want to thank briefly our sponsors as always the English department the library gives us so much support both Numerated and affective and this beautiful space And then the dean's office has been generous in supporting lunch comes so without further ado. Here's our director, Jeffrey G. O'Brien Thank you, Noah and welcome Jesse. Did you have to walk like a couple of hundred yards to get here? I'm gonna talk about rhyme today which is a really dramatic character in Jesse's debut book and tooth available at the back courtesy of Pegasus after the reading Maybe as dramatic a character as the speaker of the poems, although obviously indistinguishable from them to some extent Rhymes near disappearance from poetry is an under accounted for story But it's one that Jesse Nathan's egg tooth Tells via rhyme startling presence in almost all the poems Most of which borrow a stanza form from John Dunn which sutures an ABA be quatrain scheme to CCC Terset Sometimes strict and perfect sometimes merely assonant barely there or temporarily gone I feel the book surveys all the attitudes towards and handlings of rhyme since the 16th century At one point the title poem egg tooth calls this in live end anachronism half medieval Which implies there is another half that is not One that is deliberately and inevitably contemporary the resurrection of this kind of verse Capacity in the time of its embarrassment makes the classical feel radical. It's re-allowed The repetition of this stanza form in so many of the poems in so many variations Also allows readerly expectation To shift from the shock of an initial encounter with such sturdy rhyme That is so out of place and out of time in our moment and turn instead to Bracing familiarity and an intimate tracking of all the possibilities afforded by rhymes loud quiet loud presence here It's also a way of linking personal history with the history of a formal feature dredging up ancient sonic correspondences while also auditing how a person or a poet came to be and comes to be This is a book about development But it will not limit itself to one sense of that word instead preferring to skein together Formal structure personal life and the domination and division of land in the States All of these are forms often painful ones of becoming that egg tooth wants to track At the same time this use of Dunn's rhyming stanza tells a story of discrepancy between then and now between one plan and another a Narrative of near misses and internal riven miss a four and a three That itself rhymes with the book suturing of Kansas and Northern California as sites of development Rhyme is also thus one of the candidates for the books title a little organic disposable tool for getting out of one environment and into another But unlike a baby birds instrument poetry's version never quite drops away here never outlives its usefulness Sometimes this history of rhyme and self can be told in a single tercit sonics as in the last three lines of the title Poem egg tooth which rhyme pay blade and fly Moving from one sensual logic of corresponding to another There are technical reasons why those three words can be said to rhyme But they also rhyme because they've been put in the stanzaic in line positions where we now expect them to That they do is like the book and its account of experience both shocking and normal Which is to say it feels right or to borrow an ancient word that the book uses twice Nathan here makes rhyme writing Please help me in welcoming Jassi Nathan Thanks, Jeffrey. That was beautiful and and thanks Noah and everyone for being here today It's it's it's really quite a sight to see all of you new faces friendly faces It's it's a special thing this this series. I Think it's fair to say that I grew up as a poet in this room in this Reading series lunch poems so many amazing poets over the years that I got to see here Robin Blazer, Sufya Sinclair, Linda Gregerson the list just goes on and on and Fadi Judah so it's it's it's really it Amazing to take a place here at this podium and to be able to read from egg tooth The book moves back and forth between Northern California and rural Kansas like my life so the poems Go back and forth and I'll read I'll read it a few from these different worlds Start with a straw refrain, which is a little song that opens the book Song of a hot day of losing your mind on a hot day straw refrain young gray cat Puddled under the boxwood Only the eyes alert oppressed to dirt That hiss the hiss of grasses hissing what should what should blank road shimmers on days like this my mind you hardly seem to be on days like these No, no see that side long silver drum that his is a sigh of the propane tank two o'clock you can smell it Don't breathe that sigh The creeks gone dry Summer as wide as the wildered sky days like this my mind You hardly seem to be straw frail No breeze you had a theory that the birds would silence on a day like this But the mockers keenness and the king bird and the virios commenced to warble on as heat bears down a day like this My mind you hardly seem to be you road You creak When I was small the farmhouse that we lived in was struck by lightning and if it Wouldn't have been so terrifying it it would have been exciting His poem is called shock As the storm moved in I watched the night sky before I slept A biblical clap woke the house to sprays of sheetrock a powdered sprite springing from the nail heads air flavored with ozone In the hallway on the ceiling a halo grew orange around a fixture a glow And dad on the phone downstairs now shepherding the young ones out to shelter in the soap house and mom Who's usually sharp as a crack fumbling in the pandemonium at the extinguisher So I small and spry some ways slithered in up the crawl space and find a burning fan Not just that fire fanged attic fan Wire floor rags even wall studs chuckle in those flames a company that almost comforts Until I gag on smoke or fear and jerk the pin and aim a sweep of foam Blonde as bone until it's dark and I'm alone Some say it was lightning in a mineral bisque that triggered first life Grandpa said in 1933. He lost six head his life savings to one strike And I in the soap house later with an emt Would sense in the rafters swallows veer loop follow as if a shadow had a shadow in that corner of the prairie That my mother is from and which I landed when I was 10 years old with the rest of my family the the Mennonites of which my mom is a Descended of comes out of that community Still practice a ritual called foot washing That goes back to biblical times the idea being that you might greet a stranger by washing their feet If you've ever had your your feet washed It's it's a strange and intimate and kind of wonderful experience and the idea is that that if a group of people a congregation practices this once a year or so It might be a good way to begin to break down barriers between different people so it's It's it's that tradition that gives gives rise to this poem foot washers stout as a dance hall white clappard and square It stood between fields a short piece from town bordered by gravel a butt by god's acre this roominess anchored by pews Through which wound mother and her special vamps and daddy and his monk straps to wear a line of basin's weight Warmish water lapping in the linen towels drape where feet of different walks have gathered Footfoundered and fit alike for each soul to cradle Dows and bathe their right hand neighbors heel instep digits found immaculate or blooming lint Or faint funk or toenail paint Footloose snail mangled imp Most everybody's here There's auntie who pronounces it pleasure as she communes with sue the drama coach and uncle who keeps fake owls In the garden who quizzes tom the sheriff who's ticklish as he sprinkles his toes And down at heel justin who yesterday hunted mallards up a slew Splays his shovels to a wing tipped banker And there there I am Turning over a word in my head catenary Word for parabolas that fountains form word for the you a necklace makes curve And upside down arch as I towel off a sprouting cousin's fallen arches ankle bone All 33 joints known and unknown that carry me away from home poem about leaving that place driving And arriving in this this place About that that the way the land changes across that expanse of the western united states This is a poem also that um Make some use of the fact that the the earliest human Remains that archaeologists and anthropologists have looked at Have tattoos on top of scars And so this is if you draw rightly on a wound It might brighten and so And so they drive Over arid floors of long departed seas And up with the land's ramp off the continental shield They witness the mural of mountains emerge And they span the north plat near the train bridge trusses career in the wind boom of trucks through basin past bluff straight through No, no they they stop at a tattooist's hut What for why to mark themselves for themselves? Is it their first Yes, and they what is it of he gets a barn swallow. She gets a spiral Where his shoulder her ankle? And what do they mean? So many questions I don't know, but ink as blue as bruises may be a kind of trust sealed and believed And does it hurt? Of course It seeps with dew drops of blood Why did they do it? Charmed? Armor? Maybe certain pain is meditative? Are they happy? Well, they have a long hug And after that They drive till they arrive at the city Soft sky Trees mighty Busy bridges festooning the night A lot of this book was was written While I was living in the sunset district Which I always think of as kind of a Beach town attached to san francisco A different pace there and because there are no major freeways It hasn't um gotten developed quite the same way And and nearby was golden gate park The lung of the city and I would wander around there and and and this poem is a kind of postcard from the wonderful plaza That some of you many of you probably know well between the science museum and the art museum And it has a little epigraph From chest of miwosha's poem bypassing rue Descartes I entered the universal dazzled And desiring Not a gathering She says A milieu She'd made cake Orange cinnamon with dates from a tenesian recipe And we savor it on a bench lulling with midday in a plaza of plain trees and fountains Knee deep while strangers of a mind to meander meander Milieu she muses from a term for medium Plus a word for place This in the place of the dog whose size asleep in equitable sunshine Of the ukulele variations in over the rainbow of the elder who styles a baggie a glove to bust his frenchies or dur of the checker spot Breathing on the pollarded knees of a plain tree of the shaggy lady who lives in this commons these commons of sand and cement all the voices and feet they've absorbed all the rickety easels of nudes sprawled amid strollers trikes Not a bleed of car alarm She wiggles free of her shoes remembers a coyote we've seen weaving through after dark on a beat Pausing in the band shell to sniff the concrete the book ends um on a on a poem that Connects these two worlds by way of the telephone And it's called this long distance. The other thing I guess I'll say is that um, I Have heard recently that the sutro tower when it was first developed this Radio tower in the center of san francisco was Was reviled as a kind of blemish on the the skyline Living nearby it. I sort of had a different feeling. There was something strangely I don't know comforting is the word For that blinking figure Which appears in this poem this long distance sunday In his grandmother's time Had been the day you went visiting Noontime news topped with beet borscht and pickled pig's feet cottage cheese stuffed in pancakes and spudding silly talk and coffee His art with his hopes had conspired to conduct him many states away But even now when sunday's here he calls his kin And when he'd call his parents his dad would begin with weather Five inches since friday's seven and three tenths since monday. It may even hawk up more And his mother would in vay or other times dial up other Composings first frost came so he picked up the hoses slid the barn door closed any minute now will get fresh straw for the stalls Or she'd say how they butchered the hens one had a clot of new eggs in her ready to lay Or she might tell stories of aunt larry who never married and carried a snuff box Or dad would describe having recycled faxes that had blankened each message returned to the ether And then the sun might describe a minus tide Or tell how his shoulder tattooed has haired over as if his swallow flies in a thicket Or he'd ask how low is the well or which kind of locust again is the swing tree And so forth they'd sneeze cough Mentioned the soap house had had to be raised or that cat the catamaran was trounced in a squall or how their bodies Were giving out an organ recital they'd call it And he drinking coffee might offer as balm the lights up the hills and the night in his city Described as the winkings of great piles of embers And his mother might report on emerald leaves emerald wheat High leaning cloud banks or his father might say that the starlings were mustering the pasture They could murder if they wanted And the sun Not really sure what then to say Says an iconic radio tower from where he sits presents like a comb jelly And they who in his imagination are in the dining room. He knows well Hold up their phone up against the back window to let him hear the call So personal and clear of the train out there a couple of very short poems about trees One in the voice of a tree and one addressed to a tree The eastern red cedar is indeed indigenous to kansas There's actually a piece in the times today about how it's without the check of fire and the buffalo Is now kind of taking over the prairie A green glacier they called it moving through the land, but it is rather hearty and There's a particular old cedar on the farm And this is what the cedar may have said If I were half as free as you I wouldn't droop Make faces of parchment Shed branches like phantoms wouldn't hide a heart of soft scarlet If you were half as free as me you wouldn't go You who leave not once like guests But over and over like friends And a california Tree Canary island date palm now a california tree I couldn't say the dream I had last night But I might start by saying your dates were motionless in a breeze almost orange like bittersweet almost yellow like bittersweet an egg tooth As jeffrey alluded to is is a a bit of cartilage that forms on a baby bird's beak in the egg And they use it It has one purpose and that is to break out break through that shell and and and once Once hatching is completed it disappears it evaporates a figure That that came to seem very important as I was Putting this first book of poems together slowly through the years a figure for emergence um And as this was happening I was becoming obsessed with obsessed by this seven line stanza that much of the book is written in That that comes out of john dunne's work and eventually fairly late in the process it seemed to me that um, I was having A a fairly direct hallucinated conversation with mr. Dunne And so this is the title poem egg tooth and so at last spoke john dunne's ghost leaned up out of my book and nearly bit me Seven he says sponsors creation, but also vice Three and four holy, but three marks the roosters count His face was gold pounded thin I say use me like an egg tooth Break the shell that shields you let me be the germ hoarder of calcium the bulb of sharp caruncle Expression of beak of horn that makes a toothlet to snout thrust a barb To barb what's chipped away by the very thing maintained and encased enamel glaze grades the puncturer's tool So draw your breath by drawing a hole Use my imbalanced device Half medieval to shuck frank death as you surge with goodbye As you fast and breathe and pay supposing the face a blade sustained to sing and to fly the metaphor The framing that often Gets deployed when talking about the the middle part of this country that vast expanse of of prairie is one of emptiness flyover country And it's that same story that has been used For many centuries now to justify things like colonizing that land This this sense that well, it's empty We'll improve it. We'll fill it And and that story Began to bother me more and more and and the the poem that I want to read now and and leave you with Is a kind of dissent on that story There's there's really so much If you get close The other thing that that began to happen as I as I worked in this Rather constricting stanza was that a kind of free verse voice was also pushing its way out I grew up in the free verse tradition And so this is a poem in which that collision is in some ways, I think mirrored in the the Interactions between the the grids that european settlers brought to the prairie and the meandering movement of the streams Which follow their own logic and The world of of of those two places collides All all across the the prairie, but it's especially Visible in a strange way if you follow the the creeks and sometimes I would Wander along the creek beds and It's a different world there because it's outside of the human The settled human area The the turtles are enormous the the wildlife has a kind of abundance That makes me think of places like the dm the demilitarized zone or Chernobyl where Left to its own devices nature has claimed this space. So that those move through the prairie. It's it's called a prairie woodland And it's a kind of between world At one point. I thought the book would be called between states So much of it is as jeffrey pointed out Between between kansas and california Between the prairie and the woods Between my jewish heritage and my menonite heritage This is between states And the little epigraph is walking the creek springtime I'm remembering It took 20 minutes for the local firefighters to reach us the night the lightning got the attic blazing Long enough to take a bath I'm remembering as the road greater growls by somewhere It's unremitting blade leveling the sand of a road bunched and rutted stopping the land from taking it back Stopping it in the language of a straight line And i'm remembering how someone used to toss bushlight empties down our crushed limestone drive Thrown from a passing pickup cans silver glossed azure and partially crushed Imagining the hush of the creek bed in winter's crust ice sounding off But it's april And april is stingy nettles sneeze weed and terse breezes wide awake skies vain blue tulips I'm remembering a rainstorm mudding the road even as i pedaled home left the bike Ran soaking through fields following the lips of the waterway that appeared articulate Weirdly lit up in lightning Imagining roma my grandmother heard in the pasture as a child. They would canvas the farmhouse barter for milk At dusk the calls of their children Imagining people before that who tracked this route may be camped on these banks fished Called out to a friend a strategy or result could eat what they caught without second thought I'm remembering the placard in the half ring of fading pines off old 81 Describing a people who must have had scores of words for zephyr People who say the translators could sing my children when at first I liked the whites my children When at first I liked the whites I gave them fruits my children A people whom the white government sent surveyors to to establish a trail's way through these parts My aunt used to sing when the prince wants an apple he takes the tree And the envoy arrived in the grass sea to weadle the osage and the caw offering $800 in a few saddles for a promise of permanent free passage Local trapper as translator he the best they could scare up his caw sketchy at best And I'm imagining my relatives soon flooding in with cabinet and poppy seed bonnet and spring tooth Hope chest and hedgerow they're book full of martyrs Dear is a mirror and quilts made in the drunkard's path by hands that wouldn't hold a drink Obsessed and kind selectively Women and men enough of whom must have believed when they were told to hallucinate a past to quell a present Told these are the gardens of the desert these the unshorn fields boundless In blank verse it was home to a race that long has passed away in a forgotten language and old tunes all is gone Though the actual act of emptying was actually still happening Even as they set to plowing that first time like plowing a doormat the sod Rent open with a sound like a zipper harrowing reaping Shocking threshing, which is to say by 1846 the caw were penned in reserves by 1873 pushed out of state and by 1876 Boundaries forced marches monoculture my four parents by the powers are granted swaths of so-called open land to open up And I'm imagining first of all much water under no bridges The streams like this they would have seen foaming with fish peppered with turtle An opus of bird song they'd have heard and maybe heard also of two men who set out from the northeast border Killing 800 wolves before they reached the smoky hill river And i'm seeing buffalo 10 000 killed in one hunt in 1882 by men with sharps As I watch a black bull corral the herd in the paddock i'm threading through whose hump is a massive Whose head is low so his body's like a road grader The droves rambunctious and nervous as they quick march They must have heard me in the underbrush or they've heard and seen this gleaner Roadbound dust comet traversing one of these little concrete lime and clay bridges That's all the speaking these roads and creeks are want to do with one another And when it's gone And the cattle gone and the air cleaner The quietude I think not strange and empty The creek not foaming with dace but cocoa brown with topsoil the ground greened over by recent rain A clown faced cloud somersaulting slowly as a contrail Punctures her nose plain proving a scratch that dissolves on the cosmic glass Frail trace of cities I'm down here imagining the chaff in the air of olden times and a people my mothers who must have believed the line That these contours were theirs to grid grounds theirs years before they landed this gift outright blank Still un-storied artless unenhanced for the taking like a creeper takes that cottonwood by the ears Takes what it wants while still giving an impression of peace to a poet having a sit before he blunders on with his egg lob Passing not through a prairie Not through a woodland but through a prairie woodland technical term for this band of life Woods along streams surrounded by oceans of grass I'm remembering the way flying in the creeks seem to cross the gridded lines the roads like veins over graph paper Which natives and settlers relied on spotted afar to locate What water there was among networks of vines and tough shrubs that clinch these muddy lips This mustache of canopied verter running a few feet on either bank a curt succession From love grass drop seed blue stem to great big trees rising from abominable desolation said odin Where nothing points though it happens to be home to ladies slipper and pheasant and kingfisher and windmill grass And what are states to them? What are states to bobcat and nitrogen eating bacteria? and dung beetle and race runner And sunflower to carpets of sorghum Beans cornfields replete with large centipedes machines woodland a slender band of betweenness Whose meandering logic seems but he's not whimsy through the subsoil Of course, this state already had a song had reverie Had chance going forth like how the Pony would sing before battle. Let us see is this real Let us see is this real Let us see Is this real this life that I am living I'm looking where a log points a slippery log that makes its point over the real froth as I waiver between real banks To the real knob the trunk lands upon this land of lightning bug and common gray moth of the misnamed prairie dog Not canine but squirrel the metal arc not any kind of lark the horn toad not toad but spiked lizard The jackrabbit truly a hare the prairie chicken truly a grouse the locust a false acacia Even the buffalo were really a species of bison, but in their crush to have and sow the place I can picture the settler's faces and sometime glee as they attach their names to things like cathlinite Pipestone maroon erratic tracked in on the feet of glaciers crushing spruce forests used and called what by first peoples For carving pipes fine grained soft picked up by my loner grandmother who'd pick over roadsides Scour the gravel drive for wheat-sized one-celled fusillinids searching them out as if divinities slept in minerals In chips of meteorite and shark teeth And i'm remembering that it wasn't the land that carved me apart but a system of culture A school of flak from an elder if you couldn't pull a straight furrow Whose term for the leftover corners of wheat left standing at the cambered angle of a turning combines path was jews I'm remembering someone saying he hadn't done his jews yet And i'm imagining the neighbor in a case hat sweating as he forces the waterway in his field to flow straight The trenches out the curves taught us the meander to get a few more acres of arable land Plow the dew under went the old saying Meaning get out there early and turn the soil a culture of extraction Displacing itself its sports teams called the pipelineers and the threshers the wells failing The farms drying up the schools consolidating and i'm remembering mine was a school of milk all over my locker Of laying tacks on an outcast's chair the usual cruelty With a rural edge remembering that I who got kicked in the spine had my own complicities in the unstated contract of freaks for export only All that projected emptiness Only the land was always a solace I recall it as I crossed now under a bridge at the bend in the road that was a town called empire Erased felt one newcomer to the prairie blotted out I've always loved that unroomed vertigo a sky that swallows you and I hear again the greater hacking somewhere back around the section His angled blade a bomb to the quadrangles party Which gave us passable roads and the persistence of windmills He's following the lattice work his ancestors laid over branchings of stream and river Which look from above like leafless trees Or paint peeling or like cracks in a wall Eternal prairie and grass with occasional groups of trees fremont prefers this to every other landscape Charles pruce wrote on their way to taking california to me it's as if someone would prefer a book of blank pages And always I want to linger in those pages But I'm imagining the tension between singing and the journey Remembering people I knew who worked red eyes at the hatchery in the nearby town who'd brag of killing runts in creative ways Knocking them to slime Candice carmen and the hacker boys figures grown up with who don't know what figures they seem for whiteness and sex and bored destruction I'm remembering some uncle saying best not to marry on the other side of the creek What I say a border is also a world zone of cottonwood Hackberry luxurious weeds towering in scarcely a human presence a golden haze where monarchs lunge and bounce In private liberated gloom that must from above look like giant interlocking hooks I'm imagining the bobo lynx view who flies with the aid of the stars how a month ago the stream was ice How an hour ago a mare was stretching her neck over barbed wire fences for the sweeter grass And I'm imagining these stingy nettles in my path Electrify my shins imagining my stanza standing for the grid within me While my lines run on like creeks across pastors beneath a huge sun of remembering Already halved by the line of the land land half imagined half vanished as a fog comes not upon the earth But out of it Thank you. Oh, wow. What music and what control Jesse? Um a vein on graph paper. I really Oh There's a hell of a performance. Um If you want more symphonic monody, I encourage everyone to pick up Jesse's book Pegasus Has it in the back there? It's really it's really an achievement. Um On your way out if you want to sign up for our mailing list, there's a sign up sheet over there Um, we'll be convening in February for Courtney Fay Taylor. Uh, what will be our next reading? And if you want to review this reading or any other lunch poms reading, we have an active youtube archive Um, thank you all for being here today by books. Thank jesse. Thanks to the library and thanks to you Um, and thanks to bob haas our founder who's in the audience here today