 It is my assumption that the phrase needs no introduction applies here with Robert Pinsky. So with that in mind, I will not serve as an introducer, but instead as something perhaps of a character witness. I've worked with Robert for the better part of 15 years at the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and he predates me there. And during that time, we've shared countless meals, swapped stories, exchanged enthusiasm and bafflements, and shared the podium for an evening reading. And as both participant and observer, I can confirm the following. Robert is generous, Robert is kind and attentive, and in any conversation, Robert is interested, curious, opinionated, and present. And his readings, always memorable, bring a mix of joy, intellect, and musicality, and all in a manner that somehow conjure a real-time paradox between the stentorium in the coliseum and the intimate whisper of a confidant in a small, private space. In Robert Pinsky, we have a poet who is fiercely committed to art, fiercely committed to believing in the best potentials of humanity, and in times such as these, when we need guidance and wisdom, perspective and clarity, truth and honesty, Robert is among the few we know we can turn to. As the pandemic overtook our lives, beginning our national confusion and personal disorientation, who didn't find solace in opening the Washington Post one mid-April morning to see Robert sitting in his home, giving voice and perspective to the fear and worries of isolation, telling us, heavy with longing in my mind is preferable to hollow. If I am heavy with longing, at least I still have some idea of what I want. And such is what we've come to expect in this writer. The search for and belief in the connective spirit of humanity, an argument for the link between intellect, body and spirit, and a constant call for life. Please welcome Robert Pinsky. Thank you so much, Adam. That is a beautiful introduction. If about 70% of it is true, I will be happy and self-congratulatory. I'm going to try to make what I do suit the necessity of doing this not in person, but virtually. So I'll tell you my plan. My plan is to read a few poems that I wrote a long time ago, and then I'm going to show you some videos that I hope very brief. A couple of one-minute videos, maybe another five-minute video, that will show what I think I'm doing when I write these things with ragged write typography and capital letters at the beginnings of lines. And then I'm hoping that would take maybe 20 minutes, 25 minutes. Then I'm hoping we'll have a kind of early Q&A, and I tend to welcome kind introductions. Adam quoted some lines from a poem. I'll start with the poem that Adam quoted from. The poem is called House Hour. There are a lot of people from different times of my life here tonight. There are two or three people I went to high school with, I'm happy to say. There's recent colleagues, and this poem is about a certain kind of neighborhood, like the neighborhood I grew up in. Multi-family houses, when I was deciding to move back to Boston from beautiful California, from Berkeley, I think my wife and I made the decision when we were in that kind of neighborhood here in Somerville, Mass. House Hour. Now the pale honey of a kitchen light burns in an upstairs window, the sash across, milky daylight moon, sky scored by foam lines, houses in rows, as patient as cows, dormers and gables of an immigrant street in the small city, the wind worn afternoon, shading into night. Hundreds of times before I have felt it in some district of shingle and downspout at just this hour, the renter walking home from the bus carrying a crisp bag. Maybe a store visible at the corner, neon at dusk, macaroni mist on the glass. Unwilled, seductive as music, wreath as dusk itself, the forgotten mirror brushed for dozens of years by the same gray light, the same shadows of soffit and beamon, a wreath of old snow glowing along the walk. If I am hallowed or if I am heavy with longing, the same. The same ponderous houses of siding, fur framing, horsehair plaster, fire bricks in a certain light, changing nothing, but touching those separate rooms of the past, those separate hours. And now, at this one time of day, touching this one, last spokes of light silvering the attic dust. I'll read a poem. I'll wet the instrument and then read a poem. I guess instrument is a little joke. But a thing I want to communicate to the students and others is that poetry is much more like singing and dancing. It's even much more like sports than some preconceptions. It's physical. It has to do with what you do with your breath and your mouth. I've visited a school for the deaf. And there, it's what you do. The kids, when they read their poems, vocalized. But they also signed at the same time. It's all of the above, but it comes out of the body. This poem is the poem I chose to put first in this book, my selected poems. Rhyme, air and instrument of the tongue, the tongue and instrument of the body, the body and instrument of the spirit, the spirit of being of the air. Each bird, the medium of its song, each song a world, a containment, like a hotel room ready for us guests who inherit our compartment of time there. In the Joseph Cornell box among ephemera as its element, the preserved bird, a study in spontaneous elegy, the parrot, art, mortal in its cornered sphere. Each room stands a rung in a laddered filament, clambered by all us unsteady chambered voices that share it, each one reciting, I too was here. I too was here in a room, a rhyme, a song in the box, in books, each element and instrument, the body still straining to parrot the spirit of being of the air. Home is called Rhyme, I like to quote a very favorable review of the book that said, it's like Robert Pinsky to write a poem called Rhyme that doesn't rhyme. In fact, it does, tongue, instrument, body, spirit, air, song, containment, ready inherit there, among elements studied parrot, well, it doesn't really matter. But I guess it matters for what I'm trying to say tonight, which is that the sounds of language and that language and the art of poetry in particular is right at the juncture between the body and the mind. And the first one minute videos I'm going to show you are of babies. You're going to see a 10 week old baby, that young, the 10 week old baby. And I feel like you're seeing that they tell me there's the part of the brain that has to do with our social life and also with working our speech. And you can see how much he loves, how hard he's working and how much he likes that experience. So I'm going to share my screen now. And I think I first will show you the baby. And then I may immediately show you one of the videos I made at favoredpawn.org, which was an adult saying a poem that he didn't write. And then I think I'm going to invite questions. Then there'll be a really embarrassing silence if nobody has anything to say. And I may be forced to read other poems. But first, I will share screen. Then you want to have a conversation? And what date is it? Is it June 6th? Hi. Thank you. I think so. So you get that one last high. And I can't prove it to you mathematically, but when I see that face, I feel he's doing what is the appeal of the art of poetry and he's taking pleasure in it. The next is 18 months old, year and a half. And what I'm interested in, and again, is the pleasure, how much fun it is for the kid and how precisely he talks to bubble talk. He gets the rhythms and the exact consonants of the nonsense double talk he's hearing. He is an expert already at reproducing what he hears. Gu-ug-ug-gu-gu-gu-gu. Du-gu-gu-gu-gu-gu-gu-gu-gu-gu. Who were those? Ma-gu-waga. Ma-gu-waga do. Ma-gu-waga do. He's there. So Ma-gu-waga do is produced very, very accurately. And now these are the videos. there about five minutes each. And I'm gonna choose one where I think the guy speaks very convincingly. Here, I'll just let you see him read it. And then I'm gonna unshare screen and I'm gonna hope that either through chat or voice or some way, somebody's gonna respond to what I'm trying to say. And you all will let me know if I'm messing up the technology. I remember us very well, but I came from a really upset, and it's a date situation. I wanted to go out with this girl and I just ended up feeling very bad at the end of it. It just didn't work out the way I wanted it to. I just ended up feeling kind of lonely and graphed, I suppose. I came home and I opened this book and I read some of the poems. And up to that point, I think my sense of poetry was that it was always this grandiose, like a little better term, highfalutin, not very real way of using language. And I looked at this stuff and I could not believe it. It was light years beyond anything else I'd ever read. It was powerful, it was rough, it was bitter, it was caustic, and it was at the same time really urgent about a need for love. I was amazed that here's a woman who was from a very well-heeled New England existence. And the stuff that she really spoke to me, a man, a Jamaican immigrant, you could hardly get two people in the world more distant in terms of socioeconomic, intellectual, and religious realities. But she spoke to me, she spoke to me, she spoke, it seems directly to my life. And because of that, I have always loved her work. And I think in some ways, her work was sort of an entree for me into the larger world of art. And I think when I started looking at other poets and started looking at the world of visual art, it was because of class. I think that you can have deep, profound transformative experiences, but in a quiet setting. And I think actually the quiet setting, and I think of this in terms of my lighting, creating this kind of emotional hush. It's a place where you can, the viewers can come to and gain access to these other places. This is Nick and the Camel Stick by Sylvia Platt. I am a miner, the light burns blue. Waxy, stalactites drift and thicken tears. The earthen room exudes from its dead board of black bat airs rattling, baggy shawls, cold homicides. They well to me like plants. Old cable calcium icicles, old echo, even the noose away, those holy gills. And the fish, the fish, Christ, they are tings of ice, a vice of knives, a piranha religion drinking its first communion out of my live toes. The candle gulps and recovers its small altitude, its yellows heart. Oh, love, how did you get here? Oh, embryo, remembering even in sleep, your cross position, the blood glues clean in you. The pain you wake to is not yours. Love, love, I have hung our cave with roses, with soft blood, the last of Victoriana. Let the stars plummet to their darker dress. Let the mercuric atoms that cripple drip into the terrible well. You are the one solid, the space is lean on, envious, you are the baby in the bar. I love this poem because it's crazy, because it's headlong, it's brutal, it goes all over the place and it does not proceed rationally. The first line is I am a miner and the light burns blue. You're a miner? And what blue light, what are you talking about? And the last line is like this gift from the God. So, am I back here? The favorite poem project is made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts, fostering America's creativity and investing in our living cultural heritage. Did I fail to, are we back? Okay, I don't see myself, but if you can hear me and see me, we are well. Now, the technology makes it harder maybe to break the little shyness, but let's see if we can have a conversation. I promise that any question that people have, any remark you wanna make, I am going to treat it respectfully. Robert, there's a question already in the queue here. So, I will, others? Okay, Kyla, you're live. All right, hi, so my question for you today, I was wondering how you would describe that the relationship between poetry and emotion and why it is that you think poetry is so important and prominent in times of high emotion, such as our times that we're living in right now? I find poetry seems to become important to people at times of communal emotions. Anybody who writes poetry knows that your friends, when there's a funeral or a wedding, they say they have a poem to suggest funerals and weddings and now we have in the largest possible community a societal crisis and poetry gets important. The relation between poetry and art for me has to do with my feeling that emotion is there all the time. Thoughts are there all the time, all day long. It's rattling around in here. And I'm feeling sad, sexual, hungry, drowsy, bored, angry, pleased, amused, irritated, all at the same time. And swirling around in different proportions, something happens when an arrangement of vowels and consonants calms that down a little bit. There's a little bit less chatter on the roof of my brain. I'll give you my favorite super short example. It's a poem written, I guess 150 years ago by Walter Savage Landor, two-line poem. Here is the two-line poem of Landor. And I'm thinking about your question, Kyla. On love, on grief, on every human thing, time sprinkles leafy's water with his wing. On love, on grief, on every human thing, time sprinkles leafy's water with his wing. Speaking of babies, I've learned I can recite that or recite gates to an infant. It's like singing to the infant. The child is comforted. So even if I don't know what leafy is, I know it's what time sprinkles on everything. And not engulfs with sprinkles. My point is that like the baby learning how to say hi and very pleased that he comes close to saying hi, it's a physical experience. Three times at the beginning of that poem, I put my upper teeth on my lower lip. On love, on grief, on every human thing. Three times at the end, I purse my lips. Time sprinkles leafy's water with his wing. When Walter Savage Landor, a very rich upper class, great Latinist Englishman wrote that poem, my various ancestors were running away from Cossacks or selling the Cossacks liquor all around Poland in Bielorussia. None of them knew this language. But here I am, 150 years later, my lips and my teeth and my feelings as a result, I get to feel what it would feel like to need to say that about love and grief and everything. And what I would add to your question, Kyla, about emotion and poetry is that it has to do with that feeling of the baby liking to communicate with the voice that's looking down at him, speaking to him. Or liking to reproduce Agawaga Magadu. There is an interpersonal or social or erotic component of why we love the art of poetry. It's older than prose. It's deeply related to its sister, Song. And it goes very deep in us. It goes very far in. Thank you, yes. Okay, other questions? Robert, we have questions both for live questions and in the Q&A. Let me jump to the Q&A. We'll try to go back and forth. And this question comes from Thea Schiller. Says, I understand what you say about poems being our entire body. When I'm with my one and two-year-old grandchildren of two and two, one and two slash two-year-old grandson, he points to a squirrel and says, Agawaga, as if he is the first person to see a squirrel. And for me, it is our position as poets to say, look, look, this is what I am seeing. And I want you to see it too. What do you think about this? I think the one or two-year-old has seen a lot of language. He's seen a lot of people around him using language to say what they're seeing. And if the best he can do is Agawaga, he's happy with it. This is very much like singing, dancing, sports. I'll insert the sad fact that we have to be taught that we don't like poetry. The way somebody has to teach you, people say, I can't dance. I don't know how to dance. You did when you were two years old. The band starts at the wedding and you start shaking your ass around. And you have to be taught. All the little kids like to run after the ball. Somebody has to teach you, oh no, Adam is good at sports. You aren't. And then you say, oh, I can't play ball. This is one of the prices we pay for civilization. And I earn my bread as a teacher, have most of my life. And sometimes we do harm, we try not to. So that one-year-old, two-year-old, it's not that he's, it's not simply that he's the first person ever to see a squirrel. He's imitating all the times he's seen anybody point to anything and say, look, it's a tractor or it's kind of dangerous or it makes me think or it's a cantaloupe. He's used to these grunts that we have evolved to be very, very communicative. Thank you, Robert. We have a question now from Carol Peters who is live to talk. I'm listening, Carol. Hi, hello from Spokane. When you were doing your reading at Gonzaga, you had a little jazz combo with you. Is that something that you do often? Whenever I get a chance, there are two CDs with the great pianist Lawrence Hubgood. I did a CD called Palm Jazz, a one called House Hour. I started off wanting to be a musician. And for me, they're, as I already said, it's so much like song, I am a non-singing vocalist. I have worked, I did a show with Bruce Springsteen in, it's fairly Dickinson in New Jersey. I have worked with an Irish band. If any musicians are willing to try to improvise together, I am eager and glad to do it. And I always try to make it actually musical. They're not accompanying me. We were listening to one another and we're trying to make it one performance. And I remember it was a piano player named Seals. I think it's Mark Seals. He was wonderful. That's quite a while ago, I think, that we did that at Gonzaga. So the answer to that is yes, explanation, Mark. Thank you. Pleasure, Carol. I'm happy to read some more stuff at this point. We've got a couple more questions. Let's do that and then we'll do a finish with some poetry. Okay, let's do that. I'm gonna jump ahead to, because there's a question from Harvey here that is related to what you're saying. And that is, has your poetry been set to music by anyone that you're aware of? Quite a lot. The wonderful composer Ezra Laderman is quite a few of my poems. It's often been done. I wrote the libretto for an opera by Todd McOver that was premiered at the Loparad de Monte Carlo who's performed here in Boston and Texas and California. It's a different art. I'm much more confident when I'm reading things I've written or that someone else has written with musicians than when I'm trying to write something for a musician. Famous dialogue between Stéphane Malarmé and his friend. You can see the composer says after the performance of La Crémi d'une phone, he says, my friend, Stéphane, how did it feel to hear your poem set to music? And that bastard Malarmé says, I won't attempt it in French, but he says, that's what I thought I was doing when I wrote it. So there's the music one has written into it. So yeah, my work has been set to music and I appreciate it. I'm very proud of it. But for me, I'm not such a hot songwriter. It's different. It's a different art. So Robert, there are three more questions currently. Do you wanna read and come back to questions or do you wanna? People have to say. Okay. We have Jillian Damiani who's a student here at Roger Williams. Hi. So, Jillian. Hi. So my question was, you discussed how art and crises are interconnected. Do you think without crises, we would have no good art? And do you think that? You're talking a little fast for me. Without? Do you think without crises, we would have no good art? And do you think we'll have a kind of renaissance post-pandemic? Yeah. Everything kinetic. It's always something is rolling downhill. There's always something happening. Drama began with religious plays on the steps of churches and it turned out the most popular parts were when the devil would come out. Firecrackers attached to his ass. Something is always going wrong in my experience. Something is always not right. So the crisis in a social level brings out the craving for art. But what do we do all day? We play video games. We watch videos. We read. Our hunger for art is so deep in the animal that there's always some form of crisis. If there isn't one, we invent one. If I win a prize, then I think, oh, now I've won a prize. Everyone would be paying attention to me and they will say, what are you gonna do next? You won a prize. What now? So the happiest thing in the world, there's always some next step. Even in love. Baudelaire says in his prose poem about love, there's always a changing degree to which one person is the surgeon, the other is the patient. One person is the tormentor, the other is tormented. So, yes, Gillian, I think there is a kind of a curve, especially a communal one. And there's always gonna be an appetite for art. It's always gonna be inspired by one kind of personal or general crisis and it will never be completely filled. We always want more. Thank you. Okay, Robert, this question comes from Susan Kasent. It says, Rhyme was such a beautiful journey of rhyme words, blocking and tumbling over one another and changing along the way. Could you speak about the power of repetition and poetry in expression in the world at large, perhaps especially now? My wife is writing a psychoanalytic piece based on Freud's, I think it's called repeating repetition and working through. It's a basic thing, is repetition. It can be a curse and it can be a blessed relief. All poetry rhymes, it isn't always in rhyme. With my poem, I said, among song, the rhymes are sort of hidden. It isn't always that you got a rhyme because it's in time to do what you need whenever you bleed. But one of my examples of this is William Carlos Williams' poem about the roofers. Now they're resting in the fleckless light separately and in unison, like the sacks of sisted stones stacked regularly about the flat roof, ready after lunch to be opened and strewn. The copper and eight-foot strips has been beaten lengthwise at right angles and lies ready to edge the coping. One still chewing picks up a copper strip and runs his eye along it. In a conversation with my students at BU, the MFA program this week, I presented that poem as an example of rhyme in unrhymed poetry. Now they're resting separately, now they're resting in the fleckless light separately. It's in the key of eh, in unison, in unison, like the sacks of sisted stones stacked regularly about the flat roof, ready after lunch to be opened and strewn. And I'm exaggerating the words to show how repetition of like sounds is at the heart of poetry. The best prose writers do it a lot too. If you pick up Adam's writing, you will find repetitions of syntax, you'll find repetitions of sound, and the degree and kind of like and unlike sounds is always varying, it's always different, and you can never predict how a master's gonna do it. Emily Dickinson turned the hymn and the ballad inside out, and she made a new kind of music. Right, I've got three more questions here. Do you wanna take these last three, Robert, and then finish with some reading? Okay. So this comes from Rachel Dewoskin. I'm pronouncing it right. That plath reading was stunningly moving, especially in the context of your poems and the videos of baby speakers, their poems. Can you talk a little bit about how you came up with the favorite poem project, what it meant to you and to others, and why it is such connections like the one we saw in that reading, and why it is that such connections like the one we saw in that reading happened in such a particular way through poems. If anybody here has not read a novel or a book of poetry by Rachel Dewoskin, I urge you to recommend it highly. Honored to be asked the question by Rachel. That project, it fulfilled something that goes back to my childhood, where I grew up in a town where there are a lot of different ethnic groups mixed together. The part of it I lived in was not rich. My parents didn't go to college, but they were very good talkers, very good looking people, and they were part of a very aspirational, American attitude toward culture, founded largely in the American public school system. You'll find a lot of immigrants of the generation of my grandparents named their children things like Sydney, and Milton, and Herbert, because English lit and the English language was so important to them. And I wanted my Laurier project not to be preaching to people, not to be telling them poetry is good. It's good for you. You should like it. If you don't, you're bad. Instead, we desired one where you ask, not tell, ask people, do you have a poem that you love? And it was very quickly discovered that it was indeed had a lot to do. It had a lot to do with how it sounded. And as editor, I was glad to have poems by Langston Hughes and Sylvia Plath and William Shakespeare. Not always my taste, my standards. And that goes back to Longbranch and growing up in whatever you want to call it, a working class or a lower middle class family that wanted the best. If poetry is a ruling class art, and if the ruling class in the democracy is supposed to be the people, then it should be the best. So those are some of the social attitudes behind the videos at favoritepoem.org. Great. Robert, I'm gonna just read all the remaining questions to you because some of this may cut. And then do a couple of poems, good. Yeah, because some of these may combine. So we have one of these two, a little bit more connected from Robert Powell and from Francisco, Oregon. And from Robert Powell, he says, I read Woodworth's Ode recently after not having read it for decades. I was floored by it in my 60s to the core and it was nothing to me in my 20s. There's clearly more than sound to poetry as important as it is. What can you say about that explosive combination of sound and sense? And then the question from Francisco, Oregon is, a quote, a poem is not a fully realized work of art until it's uttered aloud by someone other than the author. One quote, you said that 40 years ago to me at Berkeley. How did you come to this conviction? It's a wonderful poet. I have his new book of poems, Rubén Darío, is the, I forget the title, anyway. I came to that conclusion as an experience of giving poetry readings, partly trying not to be boring and realizing that poetry is in a way the most physical art. Dance is more physical, but it's an artist, it's a trained body. The poem gets under your skin. It's when someone else says it. And that at some point about when Francisco was my student, I thought, I realized that was the highest ambition a poet can have, is to write something that someone else would want to say. It's different from being a singer-songwriter. It isn't presenting your own performance skills. I'm giving you a reading, I'd like not to be boring, but the great to be as Sylvia Plath was to Sefrádi. To be as Langston Hughes is to Poe of Chin in that other video, that's what Chico and I aspire to. Maybe I should just close with, what are the other questions? There was the one about Woodworth about the Ode, Wardsworth about being more meaningful later in life. And then there's a question from Elizabeth Cage in Sydney, Australia. Yes. Asking what art are you engaging with now? And particularly in conjunction with the times, what are you drawn to reading and listening to? And then there's one question in the live questioning if you're up for one more after that. Yeah. I always have trouble saying what I'm reading because I'm always reading several things at once. I was reading Thomas Hardy this afternoon for some reason, probably with similar reasons that one would read that Wardsworth Ode, different times in your life you have different attitudes. Wardsworth's Ode is all about uncertainty and doubt and feeling are you quite sure? And I remember when I was in my sixties, you begin to become a little bit unsure and to wonder. And this comes at different times in life. I saw a wonderful quotation somewhere that you never feel older than when you're in your late or middle twenties, but maybe it comes back again in your middle sixties. And it's easier for me to answer the question from Australia about what I did. Just yesterday I finished a prose autobiography. I sent it to my great agent who's also a great editor, Jill Nerum, she'll probably tell me 150 things I need to improve, but in some way through these trying times through a great national anxiety and dread and calamity. If somehow it was comforting me to go back and start with my mom making fun of my dad and then go to the favorite poem project, it was okay, I liked it. And so I officially congratulate myself. I finished at least one draft of an autobiography. I'll read a couple of poems. Well, Robert, I wanted to interrupt one second because you have one more question, I think completely ties to what you're talking about from someone I'm presuming you went to high school with thinking of autobiography. So I'll let Bill, I guess, ask the question. Oh, Bill Gildeev, but he knows so many terrible things about me when I'm in my teens. Maybe we should just eject him. Okay, Bill, let's hear it. Oh. Maybe, are you ready? Go. All of us who graduated with you are most proud of your accomplishments, especially the poet laureate. It's rare to have known someone with as much panache as you've shown in your poetry and in your life. We truly appreciate it. Thank you, Robert. Thank you very much, Bill. I call you also as a witness, there were a certain number of people, including Mr. Colaboss and others would have said, is that guy him? Right? Ha ha ha, that is hilarious. It had to be that guy. Mr. Forkevich, Mr. Forkevich would have said, that kid's no good. Thank you, thank you. I'm very glad that you and Marina and Michael are back in her here. I saw you on the list and it means a lot to me. This book that I just finished, Long Branch is very, very much in there. We come from an historic town. Long Branch is where the American concept of celebrity was invented. It's true. Well, just down the road, spring scene too, so. Well, yes, yes. He played those bars in Atlantic, anyway, we won't go on. Here is a poem, I've been using this word, so I'll read it. I don't need to be a downer and it's not. Here is a poem called, Grief, Grief. I don't think anybody ever is really divorced, said Lenny. Also, I don't think anybody ever is really married, he said. Because English was really Lenny's second language and because of Yiddish and its displaced place in the world, he never really believed in his own prose. He wrote sentences the way a great boxer moves. Near the end, Lenny told me, I'm in hell. Something Lenny might have said about hunting for a parking space in Berkeley. Mike too, was himself. His last month, too weak to paint or make prints, he sat and made drawings of flowers, ink attentive to the rhythms of beach rows, wisteria, lily, forms like acrobats or Cossack dancers. Mike had a vision of his body dead on his studio floor seen from high above. He didn't feel sad or afraid at seeing it, he said. Just sorry for the person who would find it. You can't say nobody ever really dies. Of course they do. Lenny died, Mike died. But the odd thing is, but the odd thing is the person still makes a shape distinct and present in the mind as an object in the hand. The presence in the absence. It isn't comfort, it's grief. I have 756. I think if I read the first poem instrument in my most recent book at the Foundling Hospital, I think we'll just come out exactly at eight o'clock. And the Roger Williams students, the high school friends, Elizabeth Cade from Australia, someone calling from Spokane. Thank you very much. You helped me try to make the best of relying on technology because of the great national pickle that we're in. So I will close with this poem. I've used the word in a previous poem. I used it when I got my glass of water, so I'll wet the instrument. This poem is about what is good and bad in us that makes art. It's the first poem in at the Foundling Hospital. So I will say goodbye and thanks to you all with instrument, instrument. It was a little newborn God that made the first instrument. Sweet vibration of mind, mind, mind enclosed in its orbit. The little God scooped out a turtle shell and he strung it with a rabbit's guts. Well, what a stroke to invent music from an empty case strung with bloody filaments. The wiry rabbit flesh plot were strung, pulled taut across the gutted, resonant hull of the turtle, music from the hollow shell and the insides of a rabbit. Sweet conception, sweet instrument of mind, mind, mind, mind itself, a capable vibration, thrumming from here to there in the cloven brain flesh contained in its helmet of bones. Like an electronic box full of channels and filaments bundled inside a case, a little musical robot, dreamed up by the mind embedded in the brain with its blood-warm channels and its humming network of neurons engendering the newborn baby God. As clever and violent as his own instrument of sweet, all-consuming imagination held by its own vibration, mind, mind, mind pulled taut in its bony shell, dreaming up heaven and hell. Thank you, everybody. Robert, thank you so much for joining us tonight. My only disappointment is that we can't take you to dinner, which we would do if you were in Bristol. So I hope you'll take a rain check and we'll do that next time. One day. All right, thank you all. Bye-bye. Good night. Bye-bye, everybody. Good night.