 Welcome. Thank you all for joining us at the first Lunch Poems of 2022, and it is such a distinct honor to welcome Sandra Lim. I'm going to get right to it. Her new book is The Curious Thing, which is just really a marvel in all senses. And in the first poem, a poem called The Protagonists, I hope you'll hear, Sandra Lim's speaker looks inward with the tenderness of long familiarity and the frankness, and offers us a preview of her main themes. She writes, at one time I asked for everything. It's a tone which balances large claims with disarming sincerity, and a simplified time that hints at the parables this book is full of. The need and desire of that statement emerges later as erotic innocence and its chastening. A second later in the poem, Lim's speaker gives us the central question of the poem in the book, which is a large and ancient one. What does the human heart love? Not who, what? Lim implies that, one, there's something delusive about love and the heart that has to be scrutinized, and two, that the knowledge that might come of self questioning leads us outward to elemental or permanent truths, the human heart. This moment is so deeply lyric that it's a great risk, going straight back to a tradition that begins with Sappho, a lesser poet might get bogged down in platitudes. But this is exactly the moment where Lim surprises us. Answering the question of what the human heart needs, she accelerates to go to have so far to go in deepest night. Just like that, the poem caroms away from stony wisdom. The careful static scrutiny of the human heart is struck into the ecstatic, which enacts its own insatiability and desire not to know and not to rest. The poem ends on an image that for me hangs over the rest of the book, acknowledging the power of both the desire for permanent knowledge and the equal need to thrill to newness. The heart becomes a quote, stone, flung from a volcano. We might interpret that as reflecting the fact that even as moment to moment, Lim's diamond cut language thrills with its precision and the exquisite acids of its understatements, its ironies. This is a book wild with motion. The composed and eloquent language we experience is framed by and carried by the quivering blanks between them. Their vast narrative leaps in the space of a sentence, the sensitive white spaces of enjambment, where so much swerving happens, and most deeply, the profoundly illogical hungers and urges that swirl beneath the strong, crisp thinking of these poems. I mentioned the elementality of its questions. This is a book as erudite as it is inquisitive, driven by a voice as sly as it is direct. At its core is the story of a crossed relationship, tessellated and kaleidoscoped, framed by before and afters. That material, very often plain spoken and domestic, drinks on a patio, two people working in an apartment, sticky summer sex, is suspended under titles like bent lyre, pastoral, theme and variation, or classics. The poem touches through references as diverse as Spinoza and Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys, Flaubert and Tristan Shandy, testing with a kind of twinkling ambivalence, how useful these myths are explaining the chaos of a human heart. Even as these poems show us how profoundly the sensibility and these literary techniques are informed by immersion in a life in letters. This great poem twists shut at Justice Crooks. She writes, something has made you brave. There is more to life than writing. And I want to acknowledge by, I want to close by acknowledging just how important Sanders work has been to me. This work shows everywhere and it's sharply beveled lines, it's rye humor. It's a funny book. It's cultural music and it's tender humanness, the evidence of a deep mastery of verbal craft, and an entire commitment to the art of living. It's really an honor. Welcome, Sandra. Oh my gosh. Noah, thank you so much for that amazing introduction. I'm so honored. And thank you to Jeffrey and Noah and lunch poems for having me. I'm so happy to be here. Virtually back at Cal. And I will get started. I am going to read pretty much exclusively from the new book from the curious thing. And I will begin with the poem, the protagonists, the protagonists. At one time, I asked for everything. When I saw how my love was squandered. I would secrete venom. But now I sing of the fat sleepy little sensor who has replaced me, whose disappointments create the life of the house. What does the human heart love. To have so far to go in deep this night. The challenge now is to convey the supreme deity of the heart. It is a stone flung from a volcano. The amoralists in Gertis famous ballad, a little Heath Rose tells a rough boy, she'll prick him if he picks her. But he picks her anyway. Look how the erotic imagination honors you little rose. It runs its cringly grace over you remorselessly. We go out into the light of a hot Sunday afternoon. None of us wants to grow old in a library. This next poem is called Jean Reese. It's now within an hour of sundown of a late November afternoon. It was a beautiful day. The cold burned down any indignation. What won't degrade the sick and distant or near and black bad nature tides of want. Jean Reese is saying, if I could jump out of the window, one bang and I'd be out of it. It isn't done to admit to this kind of need. But spirit needs a house. And the brief pageant of being escorted through the grieving joy of words set down right. The cold bores her. Oppresses her. Life comes to bore her. She can strip a thing down. I want beauty, she adds. Hear me? I hear you Jean. Yours is a voice disabused. And inside the cold of it. There's a sort of festival. Something means everything. I had a long and mysterious fever when I was four years old. I was in bed for five months. My mother took the illness as some obscure anger of mine that took time to a sewage, a root fire underground. This is what she told me once anyway. I think I lived to myself. I like to imagine that I was at one time, truly formless and uncaring. Only yearning toward water and sleep, opening and closing. She said that in my fever, I even sped at her once. When I looked up into her face, my eyes were plain and bright. And she thought I was becoming something that she knew nothing about. And then it passed. For once, my spirit refuses the effort of understanding. Of course I could not see what lay before me then. I was a child, wasn't I? I didn't have my heart set on anything. Whereas now, facts are more solid than I can stand. I need a few more ideas. A room of one's own is splendid. You don't know what your story is about when you begin it. And a love to measure past and future loves against. The danger may be that it carries the force of original thought. When in reality, it is just what you have had with you all along. A curious thing lying on your heart. Like that childhood fever, it's private without account. I had a dream around that early time. Or was it a real episode? My mother can't remember. I saw the most beautiful young woman on the street. And when she turned to look down and smile upon me. I saw that she had no teeth at all. Uncertain. The distortion had stopped in her face. But it was like a promise, wasn't it? The prediction of a poisoning of spirit. Where it's very healing. I'm not sure now which Spinoza says. He who loves God cannot invent ever that God loves him in return. Do you know? I think the cool silver of this is hard to live by. When there is anything you want very much. You're making up a story all of the time of how you will get it. And how it will be. You want the love of God. And the human sort. A big treasure and a little treasure. I wonder if you're like me. A touch of fronted by your own underlying avidity. For now. It is pleasant to lie on one's bed. Chronicling everything in ice. Though the hyenas in the room. And the real flowers. These things take some of the innocence out of the day. Want in a person is like hunger in a dog. Spinoza probably would not say. His wakeful solitary reasoning plainly outstrips my wildest intuition. Yet. In so far as my heart is a boot with a hole in it. I think this is what writing could be. What he calls nature. An existence no longer born as means. Or ends. I'm going to transition to. A longer, a long poem in the book. And it's in 10 sections. But they're short sections. This is called a shaggy dog story. One. I am hot and tiny. Yet I wrote Jane Eyre. I died on a rainy Thursday in Paris. In the summer I come home to a household laid waste. By a tin of fatal corned beef. I take my pen name from a small French village. I drink like a fish. I'm always looking at the same piece of paper. Giving up hope and working a little. What does art know. Sometimes it remarks. I didn't think you were like that. I thought my casing without feeling. Too much material. And the steady hubbub within seems off the point. All this is a pig of an undertaking. Just to touch thoughts. No one knows anything about life's meaning. Though it all gets carted away. Even the great scheme of things. To. In the middle of my life, I felt a heave of something like nausea. My real life had really begun. No longer a speculative existence. Though I still loved having a whole day ahead of me. Hurt and excited. I wanted to get everything down on the page. I was as anxious to entertain as Shaheer is odd. And as certain that if I failed, I would die. It seemed that anything less than that was unfair. Three. I saw my friends fall in love. They're tremendous happiness. Deciding upon something at the last minute. I pictured myself eating dirt. I saw a face of a young black. Conspirators in an opera. Then strange faced. Like a jury. The view from inside was nothing but walls and drain pipes. And a little sky. Florid 18th century music. Against tasseturn furniture. And there was just me. And my human concerns. And my life. And my life. And my life. Is renters and urban apartments. The sanctioned anonymity sharpening. Whatever's funny or jabbing in a person. Or misapplied. Or ruined. Our like ability having nothing to do. With the legitimacy of our demands for privacy. We bandaged up the bleeding and tearful young woman. And she said. I think she went to the movies about an hour later. Looking as fresh as a daisy. The studying and flushed sensation of setting forth. Whatever spring didn't restore. You sometimes felt you could. With nothing left over. Five. Love was losing its explanatory power. And I was beginning to smell a rat. Are we going to keep to this one grand concern. Like a serious drinker who sticks to one drink. Start again. Like all ideas, it appears to root and come into leaf. The transience intensifies the effects. Sometimes it even flourishes and dryness. Sometimes it's like, you know, I don't know what to do. Metaphors like this can be lazy. And I'm trying to get at the work of the matter. The gap that is shaped like a person. The longing to be with and to be alone. You give time to all these things. It goes on till all hours. And somebody must clean up afterward. Then the silence begins. I think it's a pleasure of the mind. Like any other. I think there must be a way to care for dogs. Without treating them like dumb humans. Though the mind is one long, unbreakable leash. The other day. My friend declared that she favored straightforward narratives. Clear. Unassuming. And if tart. Amiably so. I felt the reproach. But style. As Diana Rieland says. Helps you get down the stairs. Seven. Several months now passed. Without event. Several years. The grubs and worms themselves. Tell the story. Couriers with few adjectives. I think I have some capacity for abstract reasoning. After the world cools its details. But I'm still having difficulty writing about time. It does not appear to be the great healer. That all of us say it is. Eight. And here. Life is going on to. A coffee pot for towels. A book. A lamp. And a bed. Your ignorant hair grows long. You become drowsy with lust with infinite dogginess. Pleasure. Like a focusing lens. You become a dog. Pleasure. Like a focusing lens. You admire the bold loneliness of a real life. As never before. And when the world treats you well. You sometimes come to believe you are deserving of it. Nine. I'm traveling back to childhood. I'm going to the sea. I will throw myself down onto the rocks. Down into the sea. Where there are no predispositions. I was faced down again in the dark blue mud. Where the cold and rocks and glints and vera degrees. Tried to draw me into the passionate logic of their work. It was just after my eighth birthday. It made me shy. What are you doing down there? My parents asked me. They had prepared winter food. Stew, crude vegetables, mung beans. But I couldn't be persuaded. The days up to then had been like pearls on a string. One no after another. Until one day. They were like a fire spreading. But I don't know what to expect. I get roasted, but I don't know what to expect. It's a different, but social. Part of what makes life shameful and exciting. Is the fact of being gripped. By something true that you just barely into it. I breathed in its complex sense. Switch gears a little bit and. We do some. Some love poems. We were in a small grim cafe. She sipped pure black droplets from a tiny cup. Make him come back, she said. Her voice like something brought up intact from the cold center of a lake. It was the kind of story I like, and I wanted to get it right for later. The hot morning in the cafe, feeling encroached on by a cloud of dusty ferns and creepers and the low earth of duty. I can't read a book all the way through, she said. And most days, I'm only unhappy. My heart is always with the lovers. Pastoral, when you called, I would come running. All my tags jingling. You'd grab a hank of my hair, and that would block out every thought. Our bodies swelled and stank in the heat, and we caved to it all day under a cloud of flies. I dreamt of strung pheasants in old paintings, a horse of thick paste biting my arm. I dreamt of nothing. Sticky and hungry, we were like bad tempered children who stay out too long in the rain. They feel lonely, but have no language for it. You once gashed your head open. My leg twisted beneath me at a serene new angle. Our greed was largest and most generous. With the sun high behind us, we weren't two, but four. Our shadows playing ahead of us in the melting summer grasses. We became almost ugly with use. Our questions traveling too fast, no one stopping to answer. The cat looked into our faces through sleepy slits. I dreamt that I died. You weren't even very sad. You touched my face. It was already cold. And cold was beyond understanding. The stronger. With me, life becomes sweeter. So she loses some of the ability to defend herself. Yet even this gives her a forlorn sense of satisfaction. I know it by the distracted half-smile on her face. People believe love can do so much as when they talk incessantly about the weather. They sound as if they're waiting for something incredible to come their way. Nestled against me, isn't she a moron of joy? She loves to tell stories because they're already finished by the start of the telling. Her favorites are driven by longing. She reads and reads, theorizing. But it often appears to me as if she's taking elaborate pains to hurt herself more accurately. Deep in my heart, these things just don't interest me. The indiscriminate effects of time, how the worst can happen. So many things will lie unrealized. That's the math. The way she links things together only brings out the violence. Some of our perfect nights, you can't put into words. And certain kinds of defeat, they just keep you talking through your hat. Be another dog home. This is called barking noises. Then he hated her. She had been farther than he had. She led a nasty mental life. Her heart always thumped like a stick dragged down the stairs. The cat in the hallway rose from its ersatz bed, quietly leading its feminine life. All three clocks in the apartment pointed to half past four when he left. No one disbelieved the clocks. She sat at the kitchen table until the windows got dark. She dipped a cold chicken drumstick into a saucer of salt and ate it. It was delicious. That are, then I became this stupid, trilling thing. What I desired was to become obscene. All the things I had loved up to then fell away in the long struggle between winter and spring. And then there was my body inside of my soul. It had different aspirations. What form does it take without the soul? Helpless in a hideous new way and as patient as a mountain. The soul is an innocent before it. So when I say stupid, I simply offer meaninglessness. And when I say trilling, I only mean a leaving off of past sound. And when I am obscene, I am shorn of all expository passages and so on and so on with things that are. I wish I could be in person there with you in the library, but I will read this poem called San Francisco. My older neighbor on Rose Street once showed me the contents of his rent control department just up the stairs from mine. He was a hoarder living in a state of tragic grandeur that his circumstances did not entirely support. Recurringly, his latest boyfriend would flee from him. When we met later in the alley to take out the trash, we would reliably turn into two lumps of fear. What was more terrifying than being abandoned? Downstairs, I was a collector too with my need to interpret and sort everything. But we didn't tire of the spectacle of our private lives, though many initiatives went badly wrong. I was altogether more anxious about being light-minded. My railroad apartment was a small cloth diary with a lock and key. It was my real life, or what so often passes among us for real life. And for all his possessions, my neighbor dreamed of having a petite trinon with a vast garden to walk in. And Dog Rose is lavishing a limitless dining room table. Of course, there was no table because there was no dining room. Obviously, there was never a garden to walk in. It's called Refuse Knicks. Her favorite person, Flo Baer, says, when you write the biography of friend, you must do it as if you were taking revenge for him. Who says we have to live like everyone else? She drops a line down onto the page in a poet's household. Some people secretly love bad news. Like a dog in the kitchen. She investigates the scrap. It could be a nod from naturalism to realism, or a salute the other way around. It could be just the sort of thing one writes when one feels the strings of happiness close at hand. All right. Just read a few more. This is called The Absolutist. My grandmother ran her own business in Seoul, an average, yet busy, lunchtime canteen near the center of the city. I can see her waiting for beverage deliveries, scrubbing down sticky tables, endearing the smell of ripe garbage in the summers. She always emerges from the building late in the day, dark and slim, and walks home like someone floating down the Nile. She took up with the careless, married man while death was eating up most everything around her. No one can tell me if it was a love match, or if this was, frankly, a more pragmatic way to live. I like to think she read whatever she wanted while she ate alone, that she was thrilled with the stillness at the end of her nights. I daydream that she was an enchanted, yet distracted mother. She died soon after having her last child. In every photo, she turns away from the camera. Cover anyone's face and changed circumstances take up the burden of narrative. She was said to be guiltily pretty and took chances. Maybe she was shallow. I tend to believe she was clear with herself that she was never worn away. I never can picture the food itself at all. And I'll just close with two short poems. Thank you so much again for having me. This is called A Walk Around the Park. We did not say much to each other, but we grinned because this love was so good, you sucked the rib bones and I licked my fingers like a cat. Now I'm omniscient. I'm going to skip past the hard parts that go on for a very long time. Here's the future. I laughed because the pleasure was earned, yet vouchsafed. And I made room for what was dead past and what yet didn't exist. I was not always kind, but I was clear. And I will leave you with a poem called The Future. Who or what can beseech you now? There are no origins or general principles. There is only this hole in the earth. Can you still be afraid then for what you don't have and what you'll never have? That despair is like an explosion of understanding. It can make you quite careless, but the pain of not knowing how to write says fate. You have a treat coming and it was always so. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Sandra, for all the festival and above and root fire inside Spinoza and cold. And also I want to say for your amazing pacing of delivery that gives us time to feel both those things and how something is everything. Thank you so much for being here. And thank you as always to the UC Berkeley Library for supporting the series. Please come back next month on March 3rd when Paul Tran will be reading from their debut collection, All the Flowers Kneeling. Until then, be well and safe. Thank you.