 We have two wonderful poets for you to listen to this afternoon. Carol Westberg is going to read first, and then we'll have Pamela Harrison. So I'm going to introduce Carol now, and then she'll read. And then I will introduce Pamela and then she'll read. And then we'll have some time at the end where you can talk with them. Carol Westberg is poet, teacher, and editor two full collections of poetry. The first one was Slipstream, for which she was a finalist in the 2011 New Hampshire Literary Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry. Her second book, Terra Infirma, was a finalist for the 2014 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. She's written many additional poems. Two of them were honored. One, The Map of Uncertained Soundings was a finalist for the Ruth Stone Prize. And Tyranny of Dreams was a selection for the Poet Laureates New Hampshire Poet Showcase. She's published in Prairie Schooner, Hunger Mountain, Salamander, Calyx, North American Review, and other journals. She currently consults as a writer, editor, and project manager in such organizations and companies as Apple, the Aspen Institute, the Institute for the Future. These are very, you know, wow. I read this and thought, ooh, that is a really impressive. John Wiley and Sons, Josie Baz, Simon Pierce. Oh, that little university on the West Coast called Stanford and many others. She has a degree from Duke. Another one from that university out there on the West Coast starts with an S. But most importantly, Vermont College. She's worked as a communications director at Vermont Law School, director of creative services at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, and on and on. But what we really want to hear from her is her poetry. So let's welcome Carol. Thank you so much. Can everyone hear? I want to acknowledge all the people who worked really hard to make Palm City a thriving endeavor for poetry for many years. It's, I think, very important. And to have it out in the world, is that good? Good, all right. And it's true, my most important degree was from Vermont College because it was about poetry. And by that time, it was all because I wanted to do it. Makes a big difference. Can you speak into the mic? Can I speak into the mic? Can you hear better now? Yes, a little bit louder. A little louder? All right. I think we'll just have to talk about that. Is that better? Yes. Good. Thank you. I'd like to know whether or not you're going to hear. I'm going to start with, after the bell stops, the sound. My father asks, who lives in that White House? Just visible out the kitchen window. I reply, as I did five minutes before. I don't know, Dad. He will ask again. As he will ask, how long ago my mother died? He could not remember. Not the day she died or the days after. When he kept weeping, can I see her again? Have we held the service yet? His wife is nine weeks gone. And he wonders where she is, where he is. And who lives in that house way up there? I don't know what he can see of her face and hands. A gestures once familiar as his own. Does he still hear her calling in the next room? Does he remember her hair as auburn or white? Her breasts before the surgery or after? Her image slowly fades to a stranger's. And this moment is all he has. Just this within waves of resonance of his story, of hers. I'm going to go back in time a little bit to the farm called the destructive power of pigs. I take those pigs everywhere under the eight layers of my skin, midwinter sows, piglets attached, sadide mort, the boar, I ride out of the feedlot, willing him to scratch wings through his white, wiry hide. He likes his straw clean, gates open, every itch scratched. Pig nature calls him to grab the melon rind with his whole mouth. My father gives me the runt to bottle feed until it can fend for itself. Years later, under my azure coat, I carry that piglet to Istanbul and Paris. We visit alabaster beasts, go snout to snout with kin in paintings like Bruegel's roasted pig that trots along. A carving knife slipped under its hide. Human nature calls me to open my mouth and eyes wide. The pig girl travels everywhere inside, still wanting, wanting the melon, the wings. Halo, you inhale through a hole in your throat attached to the machine that breathes for you. A silver halo drilled into your skull secures your caged body, silent as sand. They've stitched the cut that gaped from your mouth into your left cheek. You sleep as long as the drug grips into your vein. Wake to hear, see your mouth words, unable to escape pain. It's my turn to see you alone. How small you look, big brother. Hands still, legs still. I'm afraid to wake you, but touch your shoulder, wrist, foot. I worry that your swollen feet will get cold exposed with no sheet. Then remember, they can't be a source of pain. Only a miracle could let you move again below the neck. How could you not fear this tethered life more than death? You climbed high into the Andes, cast your small, plain shadow over ocean and desert. And just yesterday tore a brick neck down a Mazazal trail to crash and sever the lacework of nerves at the top of your spine. A mercy that you who don't believe in miracles wake able to shape the words, let me go. After your children smuggle in the dog to lick your face, the hospital sends a slim angel to turn off the machine. So some of us live longer than others, and some of us just live on with whatever it is that is handed to us. This poem is called A Tyranny of Dreams. I don't mean to compete over whose child suffers more. Yours, bleeding, hope away each month. Or mine, signed up for our first shock treatment. Nemons impassive over all our children's dreams. As a mother, I know fear wraps its hands around the throat. A phone call can turn the night air to ice. Today, a fire burns in the wood stove, and Garrison Keeler jokes on the radio about SSRIs. I doubt his son ever took a razor and sliced line by line into his thigh to silence voices clamoring inside. But what do I know of his son? Our daughters. They all must strive to rise each day and find two comfortable shoes to slip into. I've grown wary of the tyranny of dreams. Just now, I mean to pad downstairs for tea and toast that all spread thick with your wild plum jam. I don't know that it gets happier, but I'm going to read the title. The title poem, this is called Terra Inferma. A gullswing tangled in net, strandy and high tide, scavenging I don't touch it. No place is safe with a window open, screens off, alligators slithering in the yard. My piece of Terra Inferma. A slow dance opens the heart. The whole gapes widens in a gyre. Don't sew me up yet. Let me help you with the buttons, the zipper. I'm in over my heart, the moon. My idea of you, our lips electric. All the women in the exercise room had lost a breast, usually the left. We woke to morphine dreams, dared to touch our incisions. The alien construction, warm to the touch, gives no milk. The glass eye does not see. I slouch toward the corner store, tubes protruding. Each night I take flight, return in time for toast and eggs. In the dream, my tumors grow wild, skin bulges of a rogue cells, winter coming on, rain thick as saliva, leaves trapped in ice. I burn a clean path through, below cold water, lake bed, the underworld on fire. Sparks fly from my eyes and mouth, the body capacious as stars. Catch the wheel and spin it into the vast. So I'm going to read some newer poems. I don't promise that they're happier, but this is sort of what's been going on. So here we go. This one's called Once More With No Feeling. Everyone is talking about the new moon, blood moon, and another thing. Soon it will be time to go. So love the slab you stand on. Inside the body, a willow catches fire in this minute, in the next, in the unreal country of next year. That breath is passed. Another vagrant passes through. Inside, like outside, space expands in the ambient anxiety of my night watch. After the surgery, I felt relieved to not have sex. No, I don't want to talk about it now. Maybe in the lifespan of an ant, of a mountain range heaved up from the sea, I will find two sticks to rub together for fire. I slide my fingertips lightly from collarbone down respone to the hollow that separates what remains of cleavage. Soft slope to the right, taut ridge to the left. Search for the margins of sensation for endings, beginnings, as feeling appears or disappears, skin warm to the touch, but numb as an empty bowl. Next one's called Accumulations. It has an epigraph from the poet Gupu. The thing in itself has no abnormality. A small spider spins in the north corner of our bedroom in the momentum of our life with words. You tell me why the eighth king cut the skyrope. We alight in storm, drought, aspirations to be steadfast, pause in the hard knowledge of bone protruding on my x-ray. I become more unknowing each day, crack one egg in the glass bowl, another distracted in the sink. Don't hope for a better past. Accumulation of snapped wings, catcalls, cornells, boxed owls, be calmed on the post-coital sea. Do you hear my flinch and quiver? See the light in my fingers spill out my eyes. And the isolation of this cork-lined room cruised was large enough to contain kindness. I pause, open the door, outside as inside. We shift and glide. There's another kind of gliding. It's called drift. Mid-afternoon in the slow lane on I-89, on the verge of drifting right, as usual, barely aware of threats too huge to take in, trucks speed past, my hands light on my own wheel, attention fraying into space, torpor, fractions of seconds elapse. Before I remember, I must remember to stay alert in the gaps, in time, in space, wing beats before blackout, impact, screech of metal on guard rail, adrenaline surge, grip, lift, and brain takes charge. Slows my car down, tests for alignment, listens for signs it's safe to motor on home slowly in this space and time. No deer or humans were harmed in my laps. Just one left quaking, aware she was spared for an instant on a cliff's edge, awake. Edible in edible. In Reykjavik, I sip birch bark tea, eat spotted catfish wrapped in moss. The wide mind takes it all in. The mouth swallows black lava salt and parts of creatures that once had scales, hooves, wings. Will I eat carrot but not cow, sheep, not dog, pig, not horse, pheasant, not cormorant, or puffin, charming thieves with parrot beaks who don't hunt their own food but steal other birds prey, humpbacks taken schooling fish, and I taste ninky quail disguised in lime sauce on a white plate. God sees everything I do, being with me, being in, consuming what I consume. Fish eyes stare up at us, make a face on the plate, unnumbered the eyes of God. I'm just going to read a couple more new ones in almost 10. Snow moon for the disruptor in chief's clothing. I feel the full moon's pull, wake to radiance out my window. Snow moon under cloud covers gaps, spilling uneven light over new snow. I think of the downed trees and fungus-covered stumps on yesterday's mink-brook walk, water rushing through the narrows where ice breaks free. Briefly eclipsed, the snow moon shines over us all, sleeping or waking. Eyes open or closed. If, as the betas say, all intelligences awake with the morning, when our crazed chief tweets at 3 AM ego swelled his dark vision descending, he too feels the snow moon's pull, speaks and gestures to effects unknown. Powerless over the moon, he can't steal our freedom to extend him benevolence this radiant night. Bitter house in my fear, I'll end up bitter as chicory and alone, alone, wind quipping long grasses in the dunes. With my fear, I'll end up like the husband I left in the wake of my faithlessness, both of us wandering a wilderness of concrete streets. No one to go home to, no one to talk to in the swaddling dark. Past my fear, I'll end up bitter as burdock root, like a child beaten with her father's studded belt, grown, scarred, and angry, leaving home afraid of no ghost more than her father, living alone. I'm not alone in my fear, I'll end up like my ex, who fears his next wife will leave him and she does. I've grown wary of acrid greens. I brew bitter-nailed tea, serve kiwi and papitas as antidotes to soothe my two grown daughters, thin as reeds, and not alone in their fear, they'll end up on some windswept coast, scutting along, along like a sea foam, left quivering on damp sand. And I have one more to hope will be a little more optimistic. Just, you know, we do what we can here. This is called, we pass like thieves. We pass in the grocery store, quilling our anonymous carts. We pass invisible as a summer breeze, tubes hidden under loose clothes. We pass marked by scars familiar to our lovers, like sleepwalkers. Our hands graze the banister on the way downstairs. We pass like thieves, stealing each day we can, like the guilty, cleared of all charges, like innocents falsely accused. We pass for natives, unremarkable, unscathed. We pass like ghosts of our former selves, sorrows mingling in the air, like snowdees overhead, we sweep north or south in season. We pass like comets, trailing our cosmic dust. So thank you all. And thank you. We'll have some time at the end if you would like to talk to Carol about any of those amazing poems. Next, we have Pamela Harrison, winner of the 2002 Penn Northern New England Discovery Poet Award. She has read her poems at the Library of Congress and has five full-length collections of poetry. Stereocticon, Oki Chronicles. And that comes from, I'm assuming, she says she was born and raised in Oklahoma, so Oki Chronicles. Out of Silence, which was cited as one of three notable new books of poetry and the Denver Post's Book Beat column. In 2012, a volume titled What to Make of It. And that is a recounting of her adventures with her doctor husband in challenging circumstances in the Arctic, Africa, and Central America. She will be reading from her most recent volume, Glory Bush and Green Banana. Pamela is an adjunct professor in English literature for the University System of New Hampshire and in creative writing for Dartmouth College. Please welcome Pamela. It's lovely to see all these lovely faces out in the audience. And thank you all for coming. I'm very happy to read from this particular book. Lindy said, told you that I traveled with my husband, who sadly passed unexpectedly away two years ago. But before that happened, he took me to Africa during the reign of Ibi Amin and to Finland, where I had just a small nervous breakdown because I didn't know the language. And then he had malaria and almost died on our honeymoon in Africa. And then we went to Honduras and the Arctic and all these places. So this particular book, which was actually the first collection that I put together, I wrote after we came back from a year's stay on a tiny Caribbean island with our eight-year-old daughter, Kate. And Dennis was the Project Hope Doctor. And Kate was the only resident white child on the island. And I taught at the high school. And it was an absolutely challenging, beautiful, difficult, memorable not to be missed year. So this is the story. It was a finalist in 12 national contests. And then I just couldn't, I had to move on. So I put it in a drawer for 16 years. And forgot about it. And then by a circuitous route, my publisher found out about it and it came to light. And regrettably, Dennis died a year before. Just the year before it could come out. But he was so excited about it. So this is an interview to him. He's one of the major players. And I'm going to just move sort of quickly through in a chronological way so you can get a sense of the bite of the place. The first poem is called Carriacou. And there's a word, manumission in it. Manumission is the term for the formal emancipation of all of Britain's colonial slaves. And it happened in 1834. Carriacou, a sound like birdsong. Ring neck dove, a sidling to sleep in a tamarind tree. This isle of reefs winks eight by three miles small in a peacock sea, for refugees from plagues of ants on Guadalupe first fled with their thousand slaves. Abandoned here at manumission, unprofitable as a cracked jug, suffering two seasons, sodden and draught. Chromanti, Igbo, Chamba survived and thrived. Among their 7,000 descendants will raise to 10 the number of white planter volunteers. Arriving in a squall, the pilot takes two tries to land on a runway grazed by goats and cows. The road trickles out to a jungle trail. Climbing vines insinuate through slatted blinds. Rain slithers in muddy waves beneath the doors. Gurgles from the roof into a basement cistern, our catchment for the year, purified for us by some eyeless fish eating larvae in the dark. Too tired to unpack, we eat a meal of crackers and sardines. The cat mules in unfamiliar rooms. Kate hums comfort to her dolls as the sun sinks into sea. No twilight softens the care worn day. When we turn on the lamp, every curious bug in the bush shoulders in to welcome us. No painter's brush. While you spend your days running island clinics, attending the sick and dying, corralling kids from undercots to tests for sickle cell, trekking to make calls in mud shanties, cocked like top hats on steep volcanic hills. Yes, I cope at home, unpacking our belongings and entertaining Kate. But also, darling, dealing with mahogany roaches, fastened like old broaches at the neck of my nightgown. Long-horned hoppers gripping the bed close like a guilty conscience. And beside me, on the kitchen wall, tarantulas, coys tinted as a lover's hand, striped black and yellow scarlet-painted caterpillars, lascivious and plump as grandmasquil bosses to the frangipani boughs. Olscorpio, like an aroused lothario, sachets smugly up the veranda and into my sleepless nights. In a place so thickly strewn with sneaky creatures, it's hard to pretend platonic thoughts. One orchid sings its satisfactions, many multiply delight. These insects, though, grown strange with camouflage and geared for eating, startle singly. In numbers, they appall. Leaf by leaf, I will watch them cart whole trees away, caravans departing with the lavishments of Rome, eating till my aesthetics pared down to an eyeball on nature's plate. No painter's brush saves jungle blooms from their undoing. Here, dear, racks the way of the place. Export English. Patois wines like a mighty vine through the children's speech, so closely grown and densely leafed, I wonder how I'll root some English free. I must, if there to pass the test that prunes their futures in the bud. How, without books, a library, or some reinforcing pattern in their mother tongue, am I to teach them? I'm crossed from speaking over the rub and bustle of too many kids and too few desks, above the clanking roar of generators at the electrical plant next door. I see the attendance sprawled on the floor two days by the din to think or move. Now rain clatters down like hard consonants on the corrugated roof and were caught in the drumming. Lester's large eyes stare from his honey-brown face in the rear of the rain-darkened room, dreaming again of the yellowfin he fishes for on weekends off the rocks at Belmont with a bent wire and beach-combed scrap of monofilament line. Leandra folds her elegant bones and rebraids the ribbon in her corn-road hair. Kinroy taps his pencil to the Hillsborough beat of hi-fi calypso that colors the street beside the rum shops and fixing tree, where his father repairs every truck that breaks and car that dies from the beatings they take on the high climb to Windward. Kinroy's got the music in him and knows enough about cars to make him golden wherever he goes. And Magdalene, Magdalene, my mischief, father and five brothers lost at sea. She's got some brilliant excuse for not doing homework and heads to town with her sleeves rolled up, breaking all the rules. If she wrote her reasons out, she'd have a book too smart for her own good. If she doesn't get knocked up first, some righteous Pharisee will take her down. We gaze past one another in the gloom, waiting for the rain to stop bringing news through the painless windows of a life whose necessities and pleasures spring far beyond the rigid rules of my foreign grammar. Only one in six of these kids will pass the government test, skimmed like sweet cream and stolen away to life abroad. The rain relents. We return to what came first, old tales told around a fire before the written word was known. Prometheus, who brought that fire. Fair Pandora, who saved Hope's gift. Sly Anansi, a shanty spider who stole ripe breadfruit from proud, suspicious Cassander. And Neami, the god of all things who hung the moon for all Anansi's sons. Tropical math. Take 300 kids in a one room grade school divided by four chocolates blackboards, times zero desk paper, pencils, books, plus every lesson learned by rote equals a cacophony beyond my powers to compute. It takes no prodigy to know our eight-year-old and I go nose to nose each morning bluddying the sacred rules. Oh, boy, bluddying the sacred rules of homeschooling before I leave to teach the island kids each day. Mother, daughter, playmates by default. Now must we prove so teacher pupil to? Blessedly my headmasters got the answer. Mascot first former Kate will come to college. A head short of seventh grade shoulders, fair-haired child in a sea of dark, now out of the house in school and loosed from the frazzle of her mother's hair. But catalog of split lips, scraped shins, lumps and blood bruises, plucked ribbons, dismantled braids, hidden books and stolen lunches, snatched at, scratched her path barred by teasing teens and still Kate rises to their every bait. She sets her chin and scowls, sticks both elbows out, saves her tears for home. Today one clots her lash as she declares she hates me for our coming here. I wanted to tell her it was her father's idea. But she's also a heroine of the story because she's one of the bravest little kids I ever saw. You know, we didn't have mosquito netting for the first three months during the rainy season because the house that we'd been given to live in was a house for January, February and March when there are no books. So, but her solution was so sane and so simple and she never whippered, she never complained, she never cried about it, I can't believe it. She would get into bed and pull the sheet up over her head and then tuck it in all around her through, you know, and she slept under her sheath until we got some mosquito netting. What a kid. Now she loves to travel, can you believe it? Paradise unfurled, there's a term obia, meaning witchcraft or spell. Paradise unfurled, the tropical sun sets somewhere beyond the bulwark of trunks, vines and jungle scrub that muscle from our backyard all the way to where we're told smugglers load their boats with dope by night for richer markets north. Rufus drops his cutlass to help me cut a view. Armed with garden shears and pruning tongs, I'm gloved, trousered, long-sleeved and de-hatted against caustic blossoms posing as bugs, venomous bandits passing as sticks, life so disguised, half the time I don't know what I'm hacking at. Three hours work clears an arm's length more. Sinking into a chair to sit my rum, I see the sunset just. Pearly clouds mount behind chapokare, beaches glow pale pairings of the moon. Godiva's working late, digging her okra slope with a mannequin blade. 82, she waves a stringy arm tougher than her Bible's cover. Before he goes, Rufus gathers stinkbush leaves for his baby's clothes. Obia, he says, against the evil devil. What do I know? I have scant purchase on a view. Green mango chutney, there's a term for this, jumbies, jumbies are West Indian ghosts of the dead. Sick of sameness, I want a condiment to dandia drab food. Dennis and I both lost 17 pounds this year, you have to understand, the food was iffy. Something saucy to give some relish to the rice. High over the forest trail, a mango tree waves inverted skirts, casting a somber shade where it's rumored, headless jumbies lurk. Scoffing at credulity, I climb laden boughs to steal the new fruit hanging plump as purses. Bag filled, I scramble home, peel and cut the pulp, macerate and salt then stew with sugar, vinegar, ginger root and raisins, gone only a little wormy in their box. After dinner, 10 bottles glisten on the counter like miser's coin, hoarded for my tasting, late alone. Shadow at my back, greed attends my pleasure. By morning, my arms are blistered to the elbow, boils ooze between my fingers under my rings and I itch like hell. Refusing the jar I offer from my store, Rufus shakes the black rattle of his rastafarian locks and reproves green mango jucu. Don't you know? No, I didn't know, nobody knew that. Okay, this is the end of the poems that end the first section. And it introduces, the second of these two poems, introduces the argument that begins to take, that has already begun to take place between the romantic woman, at least she used to be romantic and the realist husband, right? Okay, Halloween. As all the mothers do back home, I've draped our living room with crepe paper, leering cardboard jack-o'-lanterns and a life-size laughing skeleton hanging from the ceiling on a string. I've invited six children up from town for a party tonight, bobbing for limes, pinning the tail on the donkey, costumes, animal masks, cookies, popcorns, favors. One kid may prove Kate's playmate by and by, but something strange is up before the sun is down. Streams of villagers climb the hill beside our house. In hushed tones and nervous whispers, they call it our gate for the doctor. A suicide, they say, hanging in the mango. Take those decorations down or you'll be taken for a witch, he warns me when he gets home. Forget the party, no parent or child will brave our road for months to come. So, island suicide, first part, first half is the wife speaking and the second half, the doctor. Two weeks, he hung with the birds beneath the shelter of the mango tree. Slender, long fingers of leaves, pieced sunshine into dappled shadow, hung sheets of sea squall out to dry and sewed each evening star into his midnight cloak. The rain bird sat at his shoulder and the goats and cows grazing beneath his gaze were satisfied. He oversaw it all. Guavas swelled, quawks out of the tree, and the dogs and cows gracing beneath his gaze Guavas swelled, coral and yellow and ripened, fell plump as ready expectations, leaving delicate tracings in the long, blonde grass. It was as fine a place as any he knew. After gray years abroad, working steerage and hustling like a rat through alleyways of Brooklyn, he could hear the sea and see it, bluer in sunshine in the tropical sky, branches creaked like a ship in the breeze and it felt like the voyage home. The doctor demures, it wasn't like that. Bodies wrought in this heat. The poor man's head detached and rolled, flying crusted down a hill of dirt. His limbs, what the land crabs didn't eat were piled like dunnel below the rope. You want to prettify to escape the ugly truth. The wretch was mad, so tormented, suffocation offered his broken brain relief. We'll all come to it in our saddened boxes. Though the whole village could see and smell the fact, I had to pronounce him. It made me gag. Well, let me introduce you to a few of the characters. Odinga quashy. And she's gonna use the word juking again. It's a juking board, which is what you wash your clothes on. Odinga quashy. Grown so old and weak, her children must feed her. Odinga drifts most of every day, somewhere beyond Lester, chatting with friends now dead, humming tunes at her juking board. Today she walks off a cloud toward the open arms of her young mother, hits her head on the floor so hard the family sends for the hope doctor to certify her death. As the white man, bearded as the blessed Nazarene, bends to read her lidded eyes, they flutter open. Then, wee foo, she says, it takes a mess of talking to convince Odinga she hasn't waked in heaven. So here's a poem in honor of Dennis, Doctor Hopeful. That's sort of what they called it, Doctor Hopeful. Kanisha Bristol's first baby turns breech, a bloody cord dangling from the mother's crotch since nurses calling down hospital halls for help. No generator means no refrigeration, means no blood, no plasma, no saline, no lights, and no night flights from this tiny island anchored in the ocean, softly suing dark. Two months ago, my hope doc had to call the Coast Guard cutter up through heavy seas to save a young mother in convulsions. Bent over her travail in the heaving hold, looking in his life vest like a wounded frigate bird, he remembers now how his own spirit tossed on the waves, steeps, and troughs. That night, the baby died, though the mother lived, and in Grenada was delivered of her lost hope, so gone to the world, she never believed his tale of so much danger in the dead of night. Now, when Kanisha's baby's heartbeat stops pulsing through the cord, the doctor steps outside to mourn beneath the canopy of stars. Haley's comet curls, a vagrant, Haley's comet curls, a vagrant comma in heaven's unbroken code. He wonders again why he came, what it was he hoped to do. Then, with one swooshing push and a whale loud as a cutter straining through a gale, Kanisha's infant slithers limp and still as a drowned manikoo onto the bloody bed. The doctor holds the tiny body close, breathing his last extravagant hope into its thimble full of lungs. Minutes pass, his eyes blur with weariness or tears. The deck of the baby's chest rises and falls on the desperate waves of his desire, but the borrowed breath at last takes hold, harbored in the body of a boy whose name and strapping health thereafter make a sign of saving grace to all who know the truth of baby Dr. Hopeful Bristol's birth. Mr. Clement gives a lesson in good manners. I come, all business to a shop, to see if he will mend my broken chair. Sawdust, like golden snow, drifts in the notches of his lays and saws, lights the dusky halo of his hair. I start straight in with what I want, how the cane broke and what I'd like to pay. Mr. Clement looks twice away, abashed, sets his tools down, wipes his face, waits before me with his proffered hand. Greetings first I learn how the family is, then how things prosper at the school. Our hands joined all the while, moving gently up and down, raising the rungs of our relation to that cordial height where work may rightly start. Three more, we got time for three more. There's a word blocko in this. It's a big dance party that they always would locate at the crossroads so that they could put the amps on the four corners of the roads and you would dance in the middle of the amps. It was really loud. Rough magic. Kate's one her place with Susan at the blocko and big drum. Sitting at Miss Ina's knee, shaking a red rattle in time with the beat, she dangles a pink flip-flop from her toe. In petticoats, Susan passes Papa Labia's cup. Fire lights the whites of teeth and eyes. Kate's face glows like a ghost of the moon in a camera flash. As the big drum ends, reggae and calypso blasts from amps stacked like obelisks at Bogle's Crossroad. Music swells, orgasmic, catching up the circle of revelers, rippling out in a galactic spiral through the cloud, crowd until even shadowy bodies at the outer edge of dark sway like sea fans in the oceanic tide of sound. The dusty scene is weirdly pretty. Dark arms flailing and loose hips grinding, so far removed from parades, march back home, memorial days with lifeless wreaths and marble tombs. Pushed back when the center circle grew, I watched Kate across uncrossable space as Logan, the horny schizophrenic who wears no underwear beneath his holy clothes, draws near her. Pale moon shines and dark stars spin. Island women guard her as a mother would. Kanisha plants an elbow like a truncheon on his chin. Kate's mouth opens in a perfect, oh. Just today, I sent her to Miss Inas for some rice. Tiny grains spilled after her down the trail. Enough. Friends, you bring me precious field eggs. Tiny, wrapped in newsprint, bags of cornmeal ground by hand, sour sauce, pumpkins, guava cheese in season, and quarts of pigeon peas rattling in a milk pan. And I, who have always given what I needed least, whose rooms have wheezed with plenty, see myself burdened with belongings, spending a wealth of worry over loss. Take now my gifts, new needles unparodied by salt air, fishing hooks for your lines, extra shirts and shoes and all my gratitude for teaching me how much a little is. We have time for one last. Glory Bush and Green Banana. This is what I saw. A lone fisherman coiled about a rod of muscled concentration on the seaford, dripping rocks of Vogelstown. The amber hour leaned, and everything around him poured and ran in rhythmic sway. Gulls and turns crowded the air. In a flash, he set the scent and strain to pull his harvest in. So it looked. As in a narrow boat, we cut a seam across the surface of the sunlit bay. Our boat was painted red, and from the shore, so others said, appeared suspended on a burnish tray. Life's a ditch, you say, and better told in coarse erosion than Eden's garden glade, slim comfort in a universe of random stars. You sighed the peeling rasp of scavenging birds, the ulcer on his leg that oozed, and painful truth, his son inherited an illness born by the love that brought him to be born. Reality, you say. In the shade of glory bush and green banana, this fisherman will string his salted catch to dry. All day, he'll mend his nets and tend his traps in a frothing tide of chickens and children. The wide world is, and we are of it. Why not praise the gift life gives? Why speak, except words convey some rough gleam of truth? Why gaze so intently at a loved one's face, except the particulars gathered there may be touched, and in the touching compose a universe of feeling? I say, the late sun shone, striking countless barbs and plumes on raucous birds feathered breasts, making radiant curves of outstretched wing. Thank you. We have this room for another 30 minutes, so we have plenty of time for conversation with these two amazing poets. Shall we come up? Why don't you come up? And then Carol and I can speak in unison at least. Anybody have any questions? Yes? Thank you so much for involved, both of you. I was wondering if you might speak a little bit to what your revision process is, as you're writing. Well, time does amazing things. If your manuscript is sat in a drawer for 16 years, what happened in the meantime was that I actually grew into being a poet. I never quite claimed that yet, although I supposedly had a my MFA, but it was very hard to claim being a poet yet. One of the things that I got to do when I reread the book for the first time in 16 years, I saw immediately all the things that were incomplete and needed changing about it. Time is a wonderful editor, and it helps to have been working at it for all those years in the meantime. So I took the liberty. I wanted to keep the arc of the story, the same, the characters, the same, the issues, the same. I did allow myself to rename the book because I realized that it was the Glory Bush and Green Banana poem that needed to be the book, because it's the poem that was arrived at. It was the knowledge that I achieved. And then there were all these little waterfall poems that were about three lines long. It was all the rage back when. I don't know why. I think it was something to do with Robert Bly, but anyway. Little poems like this. And I thought, well, I never lineated them. I never got them into shape. I never shaped those poems. It was about a third of the volume. No wonder it never did one. It was a finalist, but never one. But this was the great glory. I got the rare privilege of applying experience to the manuscript and saving that third of the poems that have been not completed. So that was my method for this book. I'm speaking about book revision, which is a challenging process for most of us. I think the question about revision around poems, individual poems. And I will say that for me, the ones that in the end I'm happiest with are the ones that come fast, or just I felt compelled to write. And even though I may tinker with them for certainly months, I mean, often years, I'm not fast writer. I think sometimes it can be very helpful if you have a writing group to have people give you feedback on poems and they can be invaluable. And sometimes it's good not to listen to other people. Because a point in which you just have to trust your own instincts and go with what you really want. But a lot can happen in revision. We can jettison easily half very often in doing that, at least I find. I'm not sure that was an answer to your question. I mean, it was all of it. I mean, I was meaning that poetry writing process, but that was actually very interesting to hear about your book editing process. I do know poets who don't revise, who just write, and that's it. They might change a tiny bit, but I think people are different. I revise. I like the revision process. But some poems have files this thick, because you haven't found the right window in. Or at least I haven't found the right window in. And then there are the ones that fall like a little pearl up from the top of your subconscious into words. And those are gifts. And that's when we're just speakers that something was given to us. But revision is critical, but it's the poems that just write themselves that are oftentimes the ones that last long. And you're in our pleasure that the words still still alive, if you're very good. They still speak to us after years. Yes? Can the same thing in the writing process? What do you find as a writer causes writer's block? That's a sensitive question. Try two part of it. I have periodically fallen into silences when I finished What to Make of It, which was the last book before this one. I felt that I had come to the end of something. In a natural end, one would expect some silence in the wake of that. But then it deepened, and it deepened, and it deepened. And then it became writer's block. And I was very, I began to be quite disturbed. But you know what happened? You know who brought me back? I decided that I was going to reread all of my favorite Shakespearean plays. Because I came this close to doing graduate school in Shakespearean literature. And then I didn't. I became a teacher instead. And then I found poetry, which was much better. But rereading him taught me, retaught the pleasure that I took in the language. It was the language that brought me to poetry. Because I certainly hadn't led any kind of life to write about at that point. It was the words. It was the way they felt in your mouth, and the muscles of it, and the sounds, and the way they fit together. I rediscovered, and I would give myself a week to read the play. And I was using the very textbook that I had used in college. So that I had all my little minuscule, little pencil and notes and everything. And that was so cool to revisit her, whoever she was. And then at the end of the week, I would invite friends in. And I would get CDs of my favorite place. And we would have it on viewing. And that was wonderful. And so by the end of that year, all of that joy, all of that pleasure in the medium, in the medium of words, brought me back. Maybe that one could work for you, too. I think, again, something that I heard people talk about in different ways, and depends on how long you've been at it. In the beginning, when I was first seriously writing poetry, I was supposed to just be off in private and so forth. I just wrote every day. And my process often had to do with journal writing first and then. But then the process changed. And there was some little seed of an idea. I'd wake up with a line and just start from that. But I made a promise to myself that I would write every day before work, get up, even if I could only find a half an hour, but just so that I would be writing. And I knew most of that was lost. It was just something was coming, but it was going to have to be thrown away. That got me through a lot of periods when there was nothing good that I liked coming. But it just felt like it was enough to keep going. Sometimes I think you need to stop. Maybe go do something else. If you can possibly take a little trip and get some new inspiration. Or get yourself into, you know, take an online class or a poetry class. So you get encouraged to do something different from what you do all the time. And that can just jerk you out or something. I just think it's excitement that makes you want to write. And so if you can get enthusiasm, a new obsession, something to be obsessed about. That's a good place to write from for me. Anything else? We can talk one-on-one, too. It doesn't have to be all questions. OK. Thank you. Thanks for coming. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.