 Welcome to the last lunch poems of the season. We are thrilled to have Paul Tran here, reading from their really just released baby collection, All the Flowers Kneeling. I'm going to introduce you now. So, the fourth section of a poem early in the book called Scheherazade, Scheherazade ends quote, I found in violence a voice. We can find the letters V, O, I, C, and E in the word violence and thus read and see and hear this as both a proposition about how trauma makes and remakes a person and their expressive matrix as well as an instance of serious enneagrammatic wit or play. In trans poetry, we have to hold both these things at once statements about pain and the formal and linguistic materials that are involved in those statements that make them poetry rather than only outcry or declaration. But we don't only have to hold those two things simultaneously, we have to think them together and as each other. Trans is a poetry that believes and forms capacity to enact experience rather than merely meditate upon it. All the beautiful recursions of word and phrase, all the formal architectures are there to say that knowledge and experience are not the before of the poem but the during of it. Even as these are poems that want to take the measure of past experience, they want to do it, I want to say unmasterfully, don't want to know in advance what they think of what has already happened and seek forms that can invite the reader into that open-ended knowing that undetermined predication of thinking and feeling that the pressure of intense form can require and host for both composer and reader. Karen can structure this commitment on the plane of the whole book, which opens with a poem called Orchard of Knowing and ends with a poem called Orchard of Unknowing, moving from a stable of multifarious state of knowing to one of not, but can also invent incredibly complex forms within poems that feel more adequate to their experience than the received forms of poetry written in English do but which maintain or even exceed all the intensity of such received forms, sorry, as the sonic crown or the sestina. Here's the author's own description of a form they invented, which they call the hydra for a poem titled, I see not stars, but they're light reaching across the distance between us. This will be hard for you to follow, but that's part of the point I think, quote, the hydra is a nonce or invented form consisting of 13 sections. Each section is a lyric of 13 lines. The final line contains 13 words the first word of the last line in section X becomes the first word of the first line in section Y. The second word of the last line in section X becomes the first word of the second line in section Y. This continues for the third through the 13th words of the last line in section X and the first words of the third through the 13th line in section Y. When I'm harnessing the energies of both the sonic crown and the sestina, this form keeps stopping short of the sonnet's closural bound of 14 and repeats more intensely from section to section than a sonnet crown does. The form allows for the highly regulated movement of material from one side of expression to another, but also for its vertical scattering down the left margin of sections. Such the repeated things here have an intense presence and yet are potentially inaudible and invisible, gathered and un-gathered. This is formal enactment of a state of being rather than its mere description. And in its dizzying complexity, it's abyss of opportunity and its invitation to a reader to wander through that expresses Trent's intense ambition for poetry. They think it can do more than make nothing happen. It can carry happening and make of that a radical form of care for author and reader, self and other. Let's enter that form now and be carried. Please welcome Paul Trent. Lipstick Elegy. I climbed down to the beach facing the Pacific Ocean where torrents of rain sure the sand. On the other side, my grandmother sleeps soundlessly in her bed, her owl-eye of the whitest silk. My mother knew her mother died long before the telephone rang like bells announcing the last American helicopter leaving Saigon arrow shot back to its bow. Long distance missile, I know. She would fly home if she could. She works overtime instead. Curls her hair with hat rollers, rouges her cheeks like Gong Li and raised the red lantern and I. I'm her understudy hiding in the doorways between her grief and mine. I apply her foundation to my face. I conceal the parts of me that she conceals huckering my lips as if to kiss a man who would want me the way I want it to be loved. And I said, all there be witching names allowed. Twisted rose, fuchsia in Paris, irreverence I picked. The lipstick she would least approve of. Wrapped a white towel around my waist dance for hours in the kitchen, checking my reflection in a charred skillet. I laughed, her laugh, the way my grandmother used to laugh when she was alive. When she taught me to pray from the Q-dai be when I braided her hair in the unbearable heat. My tiny fingers weaving each silver strand into a fishtail, a French twist each knot. Another child she never got to name. I'm sorry, mother of my mother. Immortal Buddha with a thousand hands chewing a fist of beetle root. Your teeth black as dawn, no child. And our family stays a child their mother can love. Thank you so very much, Jeffrey, Noah, Alana, all the organizers of lunch poems, University of California Berkeley poets and writers for making this program possible. It is an absolute honor to be here with you and to read poems from my first book, All the Flowers Kneeling. So many dreams come true. The poems in this collection emerged nine years ago when I was raped in college, my junior year. And that sent me to reckon with having been a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and the sexual violence that the women in my family have endured since the French and China war and the American war Vietnam. That the word rape does not appear in this collection. The word trauma does not appear in this collection either. I wanted this book to be about survival, to be about love, to be about knowledge, whether the knowledge that we are worthy and deserving of love is enough for our survival. How can one person redefine what survival means on their own terms for their own purposes? And one of the questions I had to ask myself in the midst of this process was whether I was invested in my own persistence. Galileo, I thought I could stop time by taking apart the clock. Minute hand, hour hand, nothing can keep. Nothing is kept, only kept track of. I felt passing seconds accumulate like dead calves in a thunderstorm of the mind, no longer a mind, but a page torn out of the dictionary with the definition of the word self effaced. I couldn't face it. The world moving on as if nothing happened. Everyone got up, got dressed, went to work, went home. There were parties, ecstasy, Hennessy dancing around each other, bluntness, blunts rolled to keep thought after thought from roiling inside me like wind across water coercing shapelessness into shape. I put on my best face. I was glamor. I was grammar, yet my best could not best my beast. I too had been taken apart. And I did not want to be fixed. I wanted everything dismantled and useless like me. Case, wheel, hands, dial, face. Which are all parts of a clock, by the way. I believe so very much that poetry and the production of knowledge go hand in hand. And that's why every poem I write starts with a question. And I pursue that question through the lyric until the poem can ultimately become this primary source document that can contain what I learned so that when history ultimately does repeat itself, when in the course of being human, I repeat my mistakes, my failures of imagination, my choices regrettably, I can return to the poem and learn again what I had once sacrificed to learn, struggled to learn. And in these ways, I feel that poetry is indelible to me. It's a record of thought, of the mind at work. And even when I had few examples, I could turn to other poets, I could turn to other artists, I could turn to history. And one of the historical events that kept recurring in my mind was 1959 in Madison, Wisconsin, the psychologist Harry Harlow experimented on a group of rhesus monkeys, baby, rhesus monkeys who he separated from their mothers and put into one of two chambers. Both had surrogate mothers, but the first was made out of tarry cloth, the cloth that constitutes our towels. And the second had a surrogate mother made out of wire. The first chamber did not have a bottle of milk while the wire mother did. And over the course of 165 days, he found that the babies in the first chamber who were emaciated, but had been able to hold on to the tarry cloth mother were so eager to be reintegrated to their families, whereas the monkeys in the second chamber, though nourished on a bottle of milk, could not stand the sight of another moving being because they had been imprisoned by this wire mother. And I wanted to borrow the voice of the baby monkeys for this poem, scientific method. Of course, I chose the tarry cloth surrogate, milkless, artifice, false, idle. Everyone I'm told has a mother, but my master bred me in a laboratory, his colony of orphans. They called me Rhesus macaque, macaque mulata, old world monkeys. My matriarchs ruled the grasslands and forests long before white men like you weaned. Their whiteness and maleness from our chromosomes slashed and burned our homes, what they once called the Orient, French Indochina, Vietnam master, like a good despot, besotted and dumbstruck decided that he would try to find the genesis of allegiance, the science of loss and love, nature versus nurture. Segregated me at birth from my maker, her pelt sopping with placental blood and in this chamber where he kept track of me, his pupils recorded my every movement, my every utterance hoping I might even to them some part of themselves, but I wasn't stupid. I knew famine, I knew emaciation, and nevertheless I picked that lifeless piece of shit because it was soft to hold. Who would it want that though it could not hold me back? I didn't hurl myself on the floor in terror or tantrum like those infants with the wire mothers. I understood the function of motherhood, witness to my suffering companion in hell, all the things that master tried to deny to me, his ceaseless cruelty concealed as inquisition unthinkable until it was thought I endured. By keeping the wisdom he yearned to discover and take credit for to myself, love like me is a beast no master can name, no dungeon can discipline love is master and dungeon, so don't underestimate me. Simple-minded and subservient as I might appear to be, I gathered more about my master than he ever did about me, which I guess is a kind of fidelity, conceived not from fondness, but fear magnified by fascination master made me his Terry Clauss Serget, his red-clawed god nursing his id on my tits and for that I pitied him. All this time he was the animal, all this time he belonged to me. When I wrote that, I thought the poem was primarily about being a survivor in a family that did not recognize what happened to me. At the distance I felt between myself and my mother came from the secret we both had to suffer with for each other. And I wondered for a long time if her denial of history was because of her own guilt that maybe she thought she could have saved me from it. I wondered for a long time if her denial of history was because if she had saved me from it, maybe I wouldn't have grown up queer or trans, and I wish I could say to her, you did the best that you could. And I think less so, I don't know, I've been asked whether my different rhetorical modes, writing poems in persona, writing poems in a phrases, it's because I was trying to find a vessel for the story, but it's less so that than it is turning towards what I've understood as lyric indirection as a way of saying something without saying it and allowing the not saying to say even more. I could have written an autobiographical poem about this conflict of distance between me and my family, but I sought and saw in the opportunity of the monkey's voice, the ability to say something more about attachment theory, about the cost of knowledge, who benefits and who is extorted for us to learn about ourself and the world. And oh no, it returns to one of my most impactful experiences as a reader, reading Tony Morrison's The Blue's Eye and seeing the way a single idea can change someone's life. In that book, Pakola Breedlove believes that if she had the bluest eyes, her life would be changed, that she could be accepted into community, that she could survive the trauma done to her. And this idea irrevocably shapes her life. And so the terrain of ideas is something that is very important to me and in my work. And it's part of why I think that poems can't simply be expressions of what we know. They have to be expressions of what we discover and they have to enact that discovery for not just the poet again and again, but for the reader as well. This next poem borrows its voice from Judah in the Bible, who, after her village was invaded by soldiers, sneaks into the tent of the general and beheads him. And she has been rendered by incredible artists like Artemisia Gentileschi, who in 1620 was one of the few women of her time to testify before her assailant. And both this painting and the story of Judith has been a lighthouse for me. Judah slaying hollow fair niece. I know better than to leave the house without my good dress, my good knife. Like it's my stone, oh, I'm so sorry. Press the round button, okay. My crucifix, my knife, like a crucifix between my stone breast, my mother would have me whipped for that, would have me kneel on rice until I shrill so loud. I rang the church bells and I tell you, she would remind me that elegance is our revenge, that there are neither victims nor victors, but the bitch we envy in the end I am that bitch. I'm so dogged, I'm so damn not even death wanted me. He sent me back after you sacked my body the way your army sacked my village stacked our headless idol in the river where our children impaled themselves on rocks. I exit night, I enter your tent gilded in this bolt of stubborn sunlight. My sleeves already rolled up and I know what they'll say. She's a slut for showing this much skin, this irreverence for what is seen when I ask to be seen. Look at me, my thigh lifts from your thigh, my mouth spits poison into your mouth. You nasty beauty, I'm no beast, but when my blade slides clean through your thick neck while my maid keeps your blood off me in my good dress it will be a song the parish sings for centuries. Tell Mary, tell Eve, go ahead and tell Salome and David about me and watch all their faces. Like yours turn grain. I'm really grateful to Jeffrey for introducing this invented form that sits at the heart of my book. For a long time growing up as a queer and trans poet of color I thought one of my parodies was just to demonstrate mastery or proficiency that I can in fact write poems or can in fact be a poet. And I forget that poets of color have been holding the door open for writers like myself for centuries and that we have also been inventors contributing to the form, contributing to the field. And so one of my major ambitions for this book was to presage on that history of invention and intervention. When I think about the ways that the lyric has developed in the Western tradition, for example, how the sonnet uses its rhetorical logic to bring the reader towards a kind of conclusion, a kind of certitude, I knew that wasn't my experience. And so how could I formally intervene in that? Well, if it does so with a concluding couplet in lines 13 and 14, what if I take one line away, invent a form of only 13 lines, resist that impulse for closure. If a sonnet crown for example, lifts verbatim the last line of one sonnet as the first line of another as if to say experiences can be cleanly imported from one moment in time to another, that wasn't my experience either. Can I resist that? Can I invent a form that has 13 lines and 13 words in the final line and each of those words are the respective first words of the next poem. So for example, if a poem ends, what that is, even if it's nothing in the end, I couldn't say. That means that in the next section, line one starts with the word what, line two, the word that, line three, the word is, line four, even and so forth. It suggests that, oh my goodness, lessons in history are taken, but maybe not as cleanly. Maybe they haunt in the background. Maybe they have to be looked at closely in order to be seen. That seemed more accurate to my experience as a survivor. And finally, in so many received forms and in so many lyric traditions, there's such a focus on the end of the poetic line. That's where rhyme occurs. That's where in the Sistine of the recurring words occur. It almost suggests that as writers and as readers, we move from this unknown beginning to this known end or this anticipated end where a phonic echo might concatenate or where we can expect to see something but recur. That wasn't my experience either. I moved from the known beginning of this incident, this inherited history, this challenge of existence to an unknown end, what life can look like, what it means to trust, love, be fulfilled, be happy and healthy, what language means from that known beginning to that unknown end. And so the form had to reflect that as well. I like to read the last few sections, nine to 13, and then close on one last poem. I see not stars, but their light reaching across the distance between us, nine. Was I wrong to believe that I could still be loved after all this time convinced I was the twisted pine, convinced I had to keep on remembering the desert wind, the flames that broke into and broke open this body that released from me another me, another membrane containing pleasure and death planted beneath the ash between me and the human shore that one day will rescue me from this reliving, this pattern season after season of death and pleasure. And suppose I lived to see myself alive, a new finally relieving myself of my wish for the if in the middle of life was I wrong then to believe I could love someone else. Tell me what love is to a survivor. Tell me love like voice can be rung from violence so that this pine, wind, flame, seed, ash might mean something, though what that is, even if it's nothing in the end, I couldn't say what I withhold from my mother when she asked me what happened that night before my 21st birthday, I withhold to protect her. Is this the explanation I offer myself? As we continue along the Embarcadero, even as waves retreat from the seawall as my mother takes my hand in hers, if not tenderly, then with her kind of tenderness I assure myself it's easier with the truth, with those I love to be spared than to be unsparing. Nothing hurts, not the waves racing in, not my mother releasing my hand in the last light of the year, recounting as though an apology to me, the story of what happened to her, how she assumed it would never end like asking forgiveness, not for what had been done, but for what hadn't. I guess this too is love in direction, suppression, silence, pressing on. Couldn't omission be? Admission, couldn't an embankment be? An embrace say, roughly now, the truth. A man seated me without consent, I bloomed. Say cheese, the camera commands the octopus receding into the reef, roughly then not so roughly. The octopus extends a tentacle. Now the camera advances, ruthless is the mind, determined to capture the truth about the mind, whatever that might be truth, reveals more about the viewer than the subject being viewed. A man I loved said that my evolution was unbelievable. I kissed him and said that man and his failure to believe was exactly why I had, to evolve, seated? Yes, like a plot, seated? Absolutely not, like the octopus, me confronting what could kill me was me confronting my life. Without reservation, the octopus lunges forward. I do not consent to this, beak, teeth, venom, grip, reaching for the unknown. I unleashed my tentacle. I unleashed all my tentacles at once. Bloomed, blurred, let this photograph show that human nature is nature's cruelest invention. Bloomed, after decades dormant, after dryness and humiliation, after dryness and heat, after the rainfall blurred the atmosphere, the desert, a sea of gold and pink and purple, let sprout, let butterflies and bees and hummingbirds, let grow this desert gold, this gravel ghost, this golden evening primrose, this photograph of notched leaf ficelia rising three feet high from a bed of stone, show the way, show salt flats and sand dunes and rocks so faith that a moment can be a monument, that the monumental can be this momentary human was I who came back and still took for granted the abundance nature made known to me, princess plume, magnificent lupine, my suffering is that I try to make my suffering beautiful. And I'm no beauty. I'm told that nature's an allegory in which the ego hides like the dark throat, shooting star, cruelest was I who crossed death valley to the valley of life by my own invention. I found a way, I'm no artifact between art and fact. And fact I invention slid into my mind tonight like a formal feeling, just as I slid my body into my body suit. It was August again, found in my purse was a boarding pass and there I was looking through a telescope in the fogged covered field as someone drew closer, way in the distance the stars appeared, still fixed, still luminous. I'm going to be far from my pain one day. I'm going to no longer feel that pain, but something new and just as merciless artifact of the past, artifice of the future there, I was in the tall grass between the choices I made and the choices I was given, the fogs ambivalent art made it so that I saw only what was in front of me. And no matter what drew closer, the stranger in the field or the field itself fact or fiction my need or my desire I had to focus on what I could see. I see not stars, but their light reaching across the distance between us. Always I tell my students that the poem is no better than the person, that an actualized lyric poem requires the ongoing actualization of the poet. And so it took me almost 10 years to put this book together because there was so much growing up that had to be done. So many received ideas I had to unyoke myself from so many ways of moving through the world that finally became transparent as not sufficient, as not enough. I had to change so that my poems could change and oftentimes the poems facilitated that transformation. One of the most important poems in here is one called Copernicus. And in that poem, I finally admitted to myself that for a long time I thought I was special because I suffered and that wasn't true at all. And I had to learn to look at myself differently in order to look at the world differently. And once that became possible, it was like taking a step back into life and joining, oh no, joining all the people I loved and who loved me enough to wait. And so this last poem, Bioluminescence is for them, my chosen family in this world who make this world possible. Bioluminescence. There's a dark so deep beneath the sea. The creatures beget their own light. This feat, this fact of adaptation, I could say it is beautiful. But the creatures are hideous. Lantern fish, hatchet fish, viper fish, I not unlike them forfeited beauty to glimpse the world hidden by eternal darkness. I subsisted on falling matter, unaware from where or why matter fell and on the weaker creatures beguiled by my luminosity, my hideous face opening suddenly to take them in to a darkness darker and more eternal than this underworld under water. I swam and swam toward nowhere and nothing I after so much isolation, so much indifference kept going even when going meant only waiting, hovering in place so far below, so far away from the rest of life, the terrestrial made possible by and thereby dependent upon light, I did what I had to do, I stopped. I killed, I just wanted to feel in my body, my body at work, working to stay alive. So I swam, I kept going, I waited, I found myself without meaning to, without contriving any meaning at the time, in time in the company of creatures who hideous like me had to be their own illumination, their own God, their own Genesis and often we feuded, more often we fused like anglerfish, blood to blood, desire to desire. We were wild, bewildered, beautiful in our wilderness and wildness in the most extreme conditions. We proved that life can exist, I exist, I am my life, I thought, approaching at last the bottom of the sea, it wasn't the bottom, it wasn't the sea. Thank you so much. Paul, thank you. I think I can speak for everyone and saying that was really moving and really special to hear, not just the kind of gorgeous glimmers and the slips of those poems, but to hear you so fully inhabit them and hear the stern wisdom, the tender wisdom of your thoughts on poetry too. Thank you. And thank you everyone for being here. Lunch pumps would not be lunch pumps without you and it's been a long, hard year, but we're grateful for the opportunity to keep bringing poets to Berkeley and to share them with you. Thank you to everyone who makes that possible, the library, our beautiful AV department. Thank you, Alana. And I encourage you to sign up for our mailing list if you haven't and to consider going to YouTube where you can review this reading as all our past readings. This is our last reading for the 2021, 2022 year. We look forward to welcoming you again, hopefully in person in the Morrison Library when we pick up again in the fall. So please stay in touch and thank you.