 Welcome everybody! Welcome to the T.W. Wood Gallery and we're really very excited to have George Longnecker back for Tom City and launching his new book as well. So, I'm Ginny Callan, I'm the director here at the gallery. We've been here about three years, open to the public. We used to be up on the hill at Vermont College for many years. And Vermont College became Vermont College of Fine Arts and wanted to start exhibiting their student work. And so we had to look for a new home. So we bought this building with the Monteverdi Music School and River Rock School. And it's become the Center for Arts and Learning and we're really trying to have lots of broad arts and broader than that activity. So if you haven't been here before, we're really glad you found us. The gallery does a lot of different things. We do summer art camps for kids. We're having a art excursion to the Clark Museum in early June for a Women in Paris exhibit. We have classes going on. There's a watercolor class coming up in a couple of weeks with Robert O'Brien, some paint and sip classes, flower design, a number of different things and there's a listing out in the hallway. So there's an email list if you want to get on our newsletter list comes out a couple of times a month and we'll tell you all the great things that are happening here. We have an after school arts program. We have a number of little mob pillar kids come over every afternoon and do art activities. So we're a small non-profit. We survive by volunteers and membership and donations. So if you're not a member think about doing that, there's information in the hall. I want to introduce Tom McCone who is going to introduce George and most people if you live around Montpelier, you know Tom because he's been such a great stimulus at the Kellogg Hubbard Library doing so much for the community as well. So thank you Tom. Thank you, Ginny. Isn't this great? Standing room only for a poet. Well as many of you know George Longenacker lived a few miles from here in Middlesex. He was professor and chair of the Department of English, Humanities and Social Sciences at Vermont Technical College. He is a longtime member of the Green Mountain Club and you may think that's slightly off-topic but not at all because you know appreciation and love of the outdoors is a big part of George's life and it comes out in his poetry also. So I've admired and appreciated George's poetry for a lot of years and I have lots and lots of poems on single sheets of paper and now I have 62 of them bound together in one book and that's really wonderful to have in this durable form. So I'm going to read to you passages that a couple of other poets have written about George. First is from Karen McCann and many of you know Karen too. From domestic sweetness to the large-scale catastrophes these poems toggle between. From school drills against atomic bombs to visiting memorials to witnessing war in our time through the media. From a kitchen in Vermont to a bombed out kitchen in Syria. George's long and echoed needles at sadness through beauty catching the details of dailiness and of tragedies that can break and open our hearts. These love poems for the world for his family are wide open and his eye is keen. I love the resounding we in these poems in love steady at home as the world spins apart. These poems stare up at the universe and give us children who sleep all night in fossil seashells coiled in a bed of time. Birds fly in and out of these love poems too arguing for sense amidst it all and from poet Marge Percy. George long the knickers star route is an excellent and moving collection. It's rare to find a poet who writes knowledgeably and in precise detail about nature but also turns his craft to poems about married love our constant wars about death of children of strangers of friends of our destruction of the planet and each other. Here is a poet with intelligence craft and heart. I love that line. Would you please welcome a poet of intelligence craft and heart. George long and star route. She lived on the star route. Bliss pond road her dented rural mailbox one of two on the corner by a sugar maple. Let me kiss you she said I missed my turn and drove all the way to Libra. November stars flared between black branches somewhere between bliss pond and Orion I turned and followed the right road home. Let me kiss you she said and I stayed longer. Some nights we still spread our wings and fly west past Orion wings tip to tip Libra to Pisces along the star route up over the Pleiades blue stardust sparks in her eyes. Let me kiss you she says and we swoop so low over the pond that our feathers touch stars in the water. Thank you Ginny and the Woodard Gallery. Thank you so much Tom and Rachel Seneschal at the library for all you do for Poland City. There's no other event like this in the United States that does so many events in one month is poem city. I'd like to thank Main Street rag my publisher Scott Douglas to help turn out this book is poet editor publisher and he actually prints his own books. There aren't many people like that. And you're right Harley Dave. One thing I'm going to do in my workshop in a couple of weeks on the 20th is talk about poems of witness. How do we witness history and bear witness without being too didactic too preachy and teachy. I'm going to read some poems in which I try to do that. One takes place here in Montpion. Bottles and Victoria's Secret. Tim searches for five cent bottles and cans along the Winooski River fills his sack crosses the tracks to the Redemption Center. Lots more back there. He tells the clerk as she hands him a dollar 70. It's a good day. Look what I found. Tim shows her a damp Victoria's Secret catalog bronze model and purple bra and panties on its cover. My daughter would like this. Her name is Victoria too. But she left years ago with her mother after Tim's Vietnam memories returned like a grenade to the head. He pockets the money leaves with his sack and Victoria's Secret. Behind the store Tim sleeps near the river under a railroad bridge. New redemption. He says when people ask him where he lives. His mind floats. Griftwood on the Winooski. Kids walking home from school giving change and leftover lunch. One student wrote of Tim in a PTSD report. Punching creosote stains the bridge trains hauling granite rattle the tracks above his bed rats run on feather feet. Scurry by on their way to dumpsters. He sees Victoria with her alphabet blocks. TC DD PTSD 245 T CD E F. He hears bullets smells defoliant like oranges or old beer bottles. But it all blows away as red maple leaves and snowflakes drift down to his bed. Tim watches ice bones and bottles in the river. The siege of Leningrad. How long does it take to destroy a city? They ate only bread. One piece each day. Now one candle burns for each day of despair and siege in 1944. This was a ruin of stone and bones. Breath turned to frost as people stepped over frozen bodies in the gutter. Eyes icy white each day of the siege death and course bread. Below ground is the memorial where candles burn bread under glass long ago turned to stone. Only one piece each day. My daughter asks me outside as a fountain where visitors toss pennies and rubles into icy water. Some leave roses and carnations which instantly freeze. How long ago was it? She asks. I can tell her how long ago but can't explain bread hard as stone or children turned to ice and bone. Catacombs at Pechuri. Deep in the catacombs of the Pechuri monastery skulls of monks are piled to the ceilings. Femurs stacked like firewood deep beneath the Russian soil. We move along narrow passageways lit by candles and torches. Shadows flicker and empty eye sockets. My daughter wants to know how long the monks have been dead. We find dates on team tombs from the reigns of Elon and Katerina. But there are no dates of birth and death for the piles of skulls. But for them, time hardly matters. They were born skulls pressing out of warm vaginas. They were born in the umbilical cot. My daughter cannot turn away from the bones too close to birth to ignore death. It's winter in Russia. Yet in the catacombs, it's warm with the sweet fruity smell of soil and death. Above sun shines on gold. Orthodox crosses that glitter on snow. We are gone and the catacombs are dark. We are born in the pile of skulls grows light flickers in skulls eyes. The next one's an ecrastic poem for art reason. Ecrastic poem is about a work of art or a picture. Salt and sorrow. A kitchen in a residence in Aleppo, Syria. Damage Sunday and fighting. Narcisco Contresos photo the New York Times. Walls are blackened. There's a refrigerator with rust at the bottom. Stickers of yellow butterflies and blackbirds on its door. A dish towel hangs on the door handle and a top sits a vase of purple paper flowers on shelves shelves jars of spices still stand upright. We can't see what's upright in the rest of the home. If its power is on, earth walls and windows are intact. Charred ceiling plaster covers the floor. No mortar shells or shrapnel though. A jar of beans lies unbroken and a tiny drawer maybe for salt. We don't know, but nobody can live without salt or sorrow, no matter where. On a lower shelf rest three small pairs of sneakers. We can't see the children, their parents or the photographer. They must all be somewhere outside, but outside is not in the picture. We can't hear if there are explosions and artillery fire. On the wall hang pans, a strainer and measuring spoons. Why do some things fall and not others? All the utensils are blackened, but we can't tell whether from cooking or just war. In a dish strainer cups dry, they'll need to be washed again. If the family returns, if they live, their blackened kitchen sent naked around the world. Purple socks. Another photo from Aleppo. A boy sits on a curb crying and talking on his phone. Shattered cement all around him. Next to a body covered by a brown blanket, not large enough to be an adult. All we can see are the feet wearing purple socks. A child who awoke and dressed like it was an ordinary day, but there are no more ordinary days in Aleppo. Or maybe slept in clothes because they heard planes. After all, they live in a city that is ceased to exist. The parents, if they still alive, will bury their child still wearing purple socks. So a diptych, which is the title of this poem is, you know, probably known from art museums, it can be either a side by side pair of paintings like other diptychs or tryptics, or it can also be a type of memorial speech. Diptych. Early April at Yonksi on Hudson. I always forgot how much I like the sun setting and reflecting orange on the river off battery part. I remember how much I like this restaurant. I hadn't known if it survived. Across West Street from this cafe, the sky glowed with burning jet fuel. I imagine they grip something in those final seconds, fingers curling and incinerated. Their dust settled in this restaurant. I remember the times showed how the blast blew open windows of apartments upstairs. Sometimes forget how much I like my daughter's fingers. So intricate the way she uses her chopsticks. She flies back and forth from California often. But wasn't on one of those planes. People sometimes forget that this has not been the only place Leningrad or even the worst Nagasaki. Though it's hard to remember when you're in the place where ash and dust fell, where bodies fell. I always forget how much I like the Sichuan shrimp here. Lights coming on across the Jersey side, the sun still dull orange in the river, fingers of late light between the buildings. Some people upstairs were still home to see orange fireballs. I see the pictures again and again. So orange and huge. Hard to forget those sanity demand demands we only remember so much. For some reason, I think of sweet smell oranges. Humanity demands we not forget too much. Though it's hard to think too much about Gettysburg, fetid sweet smell of 10,000 rotting joyous vultures and crows coming for miles. I've never really liked large cities. But I always forget how much I like lights reflected in the Hudson and the sounds of tugboat horns. Only other only four other people in the Yangtzeon Hudson still early time enough to get uptown to the play. Sanity demands that we not remember in our every waking moment, bodies falling through the sky or collapsing in pieces on battlefields at Vicksburg vultures circling optimistically, hoping for another civil war or catastrophe. It was so warm that some windows upstairs were open that day. You forget how much force, how much dust blew in reality demands that we accept the dust and ash upstairs at Buchenwald. But sanity demands that we scream at dip ticks of the dead. Sanity demands we forget in Gola and Fallujah and here. But humanity demands we remember. I remember that the subway station is still closed at battery and we'll have to walk around the hole. We finish eating and pay. The ash and orange have almost vanished in the river. My daughter watches the water gin resting on fingers. Only a faint reflection remains. I sometimes forget how quickly it fades. This fox walks into a poem. Around the bar stand a wolf, a vulture, a crow and two rabbits. On the Villanelle lounge a boa constrictor, a couple of chinchillas and three cats. What are you doing here? The crow asks. May I ask what you're doing here? Fox replies. Oh, we all symbolize something or other says boa. A raven sex tet plays another rondeau redoublet. Crow is along a little off-key. Well, I gotta take a whiz wolf house and head for the John door. He's lifting his leg to piss in the Villanelle when Fox comes in. This place is one big metaphor. Tell me wolf snaps. Lowering his leg. I can't stand it. How come she put you in the poem? One of the cats asks Fox. Oh, she needed something to rhyme with locks or talks and keep her pentameter, I guess. Now the boa is hitting on one of the chinchillas, but she knows he's only after oral sex. Last stands a bartender calls closing in four lines. Fox ordered another round. Talks over the music as the ravens play their last number. They all finish with tequila sestinas as the poet locks the back door. So, I said I was going to read from a frog forgotten Vermont poet, Francis Frost. I found her in an anthology of literature that UBM and Dartmouth put out in 1973. She's not related to Robert Frost. No relation at all. She was a good poet, but she's not in the Vermont anthology and the anthology of American poetry. The big ones are Rita Doves and the others. She's not an American war poetry. They're just surprising. I wanted to read a few of hers. And her book Mid-Century came out just after World War II as in a number of poems. Mid-Century, Francis Frost. O'Chemic Age. O'Century of sorrow. What shall the heart compel? The brain contrive that will outwit the treacherous tomorrow. By what quick silver strategy survive? The child, the dog, the red mercurial fox, the tottering big-eyed calf, the silver running of the frightened mouse. What chipmunk in the rocks will nibble dawn with cobwebs and with cunning? What shall we save in cities ruin us? Of precious crucibles of fiddles crying? When mortal meteors made luminous scream down the fiery plummet of their dye? Shall we in the steel-pocked terror of our earth devise some alchemy, some starry magic, whereby a child gone mad may yet give birth to a child less murderous and tragic? What shall we leave upon this hemisphere? What shape of hands? What maggot in belief? What war-crazed eyes? What agonies of fear? What name for God? O century of grief. This one also by Francis Frost, his first snow. Out of the northwest, down the coast, the snow covers the sweet firm. Lodges and bayberry hushes the break of the hidden tide on the windward rocks. Here on the fractured cliff, the blackberry bushes are purple. Hooped under whiteness, their berries forgotten by the tongues of the island children, the eaters of snow. Children, if down your coast, among your islands, fly the low gray birds, their cockpits stuttering death. Be no more afraid than of the aiming gulls who've cried toward their nesting rocks through your childhood evenings. Taste blood with no less delight than you taste new snow, made as less cold and as brief as the melting flakes. And her next one is time out. By night in hedge or hurried hole in ruthless house by day, beneath the plunging stars or flung in sand or rainy head, wherever there lies down to sleep, a fighting man and grim, too tired for hate or grief, a child curls down to sleep in him. Francis Frost, I wanted to do some poems of history and bearing witness tonight and then some memoir and a couple of newer poems as well. I want to thank my wife, Cindy, who's a great editor. She has an eye for words and she's inspired many of these poems. Fourth of July at Toscano. From our table by the window, we watch a constant procession of leashed coodles, collies, corgis and muts on Charles Street's cracked brick sidewalk. One collie wears a flag tucked into its star-studded collar. A fat man in baggy shorts wears a red, white and blue USA top hat. Our waitress recites house specials like poetry. Vino Nobile, Corte, Aliflora, Fungi, Parabella, Minestrone, Dividura, Argosta. We sip our wine. Across the street three starfish decorate the sash of third story apartment windows. Already there are crowds on Charles and Chestnut moving to the river for the concert and fireworks. A flag that once flew over Kandahar drapes the band shell and the Esplanade where the Boston Pops will place stars and stripes forever. In the back bag, gigantic flag hangs high on the old Hancock building. Its field of stars is as big as the restaurant. While inside, away from the heat on brick and cobblestone, we enjoy our Minestrone and Argosta. As we eat, three fighter jets roar over in formation. Soon fireworks brighter than stars will light Boston. A cannonade of thunder and fire too much like real artillery or like cannonballs over Boston harbor in the revolution. For all the noise it's hard to believe in God or anything at all. The tables at Toscano are full while outside, greyness descends into human night. All of us happy to at least have a holiday with good wine. Fourth of July. On the fourth of July, we climb the ladder up the town water tower to a circular walkway a hundred feet above Reddit. Street lights flickered on below. Three 16-year-old boys on the edge of the night where we climbed the ladder from the steel catwalk up the bulbous globe, gripping and ascending until we were 150 feet up. As twilight faded on the shore of Lake Quantapaua, we rested on the dome of the world, one hand clutching the ladder, the other gripping ourselves. Three boys atop a water tower on the fourth of July waiting for the fireworks. We unzipped the sky. There was nothing between us and the stars as fireworks erupted into black sky and sparked and sputtered. Shivering a shimmy down the ladder from the globe to the catwalk where I crunched against the cold railing and photographed the fourth of July finale with my 35 millimeter. The coda chrome slides are all that's left. Their colors have dimmed but the fireworks still spark in the night. It wasn't only for stars and fireworks. We needed to climb that tower until we tasted death. I look up at that ladder now and wonder how we survived three k crazy 16 year olds high on the night. Yet I take my camera and climb that ladder again. For the night the three of us were together falling into sky, erupting with fireworks and slowly drifting with the sparks down into Lake Quantapaua. Rambler. How many people here ever drove a rambler? Tells the age of this group. Rambler. We thought that car would go on forever. Our 59 rambler american with three-speed shift an overdrive on her steering column. A lime green turtle of a car purred across the kansas prairie through kiawa south into oklahoma and all the way to Mexico when Vietnam and Biafra were everywhere. On the radio we heard body counts famine and carpet bombing. We thought maybe in Mexico we could leave it all behind but how could we have thought that our rambler could go on forever. Everything american seemed wrong from Memphis to Chicago from LA to plakoo but maybe in Mexico maybe a little farther and for a while with tires humming humming on pavement the ride was all we needed you falling asleep next to me as we rode on into the dusty fire of a plain sunset. We were so sure that car would go on but shouldn't we have seen how it would end the rambler finally dying on a hill off hate street in san francisco while dead soldiers were still being shipped home and so so many highways later you walking away down in the road down the road in vermont but that night the rambler american's flat six purrs had carried us south across the oklahoma panhandle just a little farther and we leave kansas biafra and vietnam behind for a while and us riding and knowing that we and the rambler and the flat planes must go on forever. Oh to gasoline i love you but i hate you you've always been so refined and i like your aroma but you're killing me i have fond memories of your high octane brew forget about co2 oil spills gasoline you and i have gone so many places we crossed the kansas plains in my triumph black oil pumps rocked gently sucked fossil fuel from bedrock brought crude that took us all the way to california you had pumps at every crossroads i'd gas up and drive to escape city pollution watch purple sunsets through dust and ozone haves janice joplin singing nothing left to lose i loved the wilderness and hated you but you took me everywhere now they blame it all all on you gasoline who filled my karmann guia my rambler took us to brice zion and yosemite i know you're dangerous but my heart's an engine you've kept beating for so long tell me it can't be all your fault raw crude on beaches melting glaciers hurricane i want to inhale your fumes hit the gas go west like nothing matters except wind and a full gas tank i have to shuffle papers i will read you a couple of new ones at the end seven ten across the street is a white church steeple whose clock long ago stopped at seven ten on the corner beyond the yield sign is parked a baby blue 72 karmann guia sleep blows east as one of my students hurries in red face and other folds her arms on the desk while outside yellow leaves still cling to branches sometimes i wish i were their age again and cling to the idea that if i could go back something would yield i'd love you better we'd get up saturday and not argue maybe we'd even listen to each other we'd fly off in our karmann guia it's a whiny engine worrying we'd stop somewhere at seven ten stay in bed forever we have time to do it all over again maybe do it right this time snow clings to gravestones in the cemetery across from the church a few maple leaves fall i swear the frozen clock has moved its hand so when i taught it for my tech i sometimes taught in the red schoolhouse used to be one of the randolph elementary schools you know the play and just across the way is the church clock i wrote this i was doing the same exercise with my students we came in the next day of the clock with hands and feet maybe it hurt my parents this one is dedicated to sarah my yoga teacher yoga class imagine earth below us she says i think of a stone slab a top mount hunger where i've napped in warm sun she says to look for balance in life i think of stone balancing for eons then i think of hunger remember my dream a hotel room i can't get out of a dining room i can't find student papers piling forever higher but i want to think of birds yellow throat warblers that balance on tiny branches branch out she says then we can't own i hear warblers saying think inside your body she says as we breathe deeply i think of my heart as electrical resistance hear ohm feel it beating imagine myself a warbler heartbeat five times faster we move into tree pose i balance feel my heart pump think of silly cliches heartache heart sick i'm balancing on a pine branch resting on warm stone my heart beats so slowly and perfectly i'm barely aware i'm here poems of fish behind stones and brooks resting in eddies they pick through detritus flowing down leap to eat gadflies floating on the surface make their own verse from beer cans fishing line used condoms their own dead cherry blossoms my father helps me clean the trout my mother pan fries it with butter and breadcrumbs we light the fireplace more for light than warmth in the old lodge bare wood floors and beams creak a stuffed deer head watches from high on the wall no past or future just poems of trout who ignore syntax live in present towns flow on forever my mother and father still with me only today with our fish and besides being dedicated to Cynthia this book is dedicated to my dear friend George Nathan who died last year he's a great poet collaborated on many of these poems with me book last poem for George Nathan here where you wrote so many poems sawgrass plates click in the breeze gather drops of morning mist while herons wade the marsh along with a few rosy eights bloombills wings slashed with red but there will be no new poems today on a beach nearby dawn rises yellow and mist clovers make tracks in wet sand we counted your last days like your mother counted days before birth slowly your words faded lettered olive shells worn down by sea tides couple of new ones this one was also inspired in part by George rain taxi soft music down a windy street worn smooth by light years of frustration traffic the fugs true red oak leaves stuck to the side window of an old checker cab headlights reflected in dark puddles the old Hancock towers light glowed red for rain and from a higher building a beacon revolved in the night horns of boats in the harbour harbour echoed through streets or water splashed up from gutters ran down the sidewalks there on a corner i thought i saw you with your bag of poetry books and pens first drafts a stoplight glowed red in a puddle and when my cab finally moved on you were gone of course i should have known it couldn't be you we wouldn't write any more poems together i'd seen you die on the first day of strength i forgot where i was going in all this rain i didn't know why the streets were so wet why this cab was so old i forgot what you had been writing about the last time we were together the rain across rivers of streetlights a new one coyotes howled the minute we finished reading your poems they started first a few gaps from distant woods then howls that rolled across the meta and moved with coyotes across moonlight you should have been here except of course you're dead not deceased departed gone to heaven dead you thought all animals should be wild we'd argue about that in so many things in between revising poems while my cats brushed against your legs the coyotes howled again as the moon rose they must have been running in a pack we couldn't have planned a better memorial for you who put so many animals in your poems heron alligator osprey but you're not here to write this one and how i miss arguing about words with you take my words take every line breaks stands and dash take a glass of red wine like drink between poems take my poem take moonlight and coyotes howls take off into meadow and forest and run wild it doesn't matter much on jupiter you wake me to see jupiter so bright aligned with four more planets satyr mars venus and mercury when the moon sets those other worlds glow all the night barred owls call back and forth from palms and pines breeze off the everglades brushes our skin like moth wings carry scent of mud from mangrove swamps so far to jupiter yet the planets tonight are as close as our bodies on this blanket where we lie just three feet above sea level palm fronds tick and the wind for a while owls still call as clouds turn pink it doesn't matter much on jupiter the earth's polar ice melts the florida slips under sea planets and stars fall to the horizon a storm blows on jupiter older than all of our history love i hope we can survive for one more night thank you thank you so much i'll take a few questions but first the commercial i do have books for sale back here i know some of you pre-bought books so i'll be glad to sign moes have books for sale at $14 i take u.s cash cash from any other nation as long as you know the exchange rate checks or if you came with no money or a check don't be embarrassed i have a way for you to take the book home get my address and send me later so any questions on the writing process or anything else is anything that's answerable in a poetry group which other poet is or poets have most influenced you oh a lot i i studied with uh palm beach poetry festival with charged in order to have a poet laureate of the month marge piercey whose class i took on the waltz three on k cod 40 years ago she she's been a huge support actually a couple of the words like softened the title softened sorrow came from her the late promise locks this class i also took that at palm beach i carried macad what a pure poet a great poet but that'd be a whole hour long talk jane tell you all how will do you when you started jordan writing poems started i started writing poetry when i was about 20 which was half a century and i really didn't do any more for years i did around 200 radio commentaries for wncs and i taught comp lit so about 17 16 or 17 years ago i started writing poetry again you know i knew how to write that doesn't necessarily mean you know how to write a poem so i really needed and susan thomas is another person i should mention of marshfield and new york poet i studied with her and she really said to to write poetry you need to read poetry you need to read contemporary poetry that's true for any you're writing a novel or you've got to be aware of the literary so yeah this this is a project that's coming together for about 16 years so you've been published in a lot of journals can you talk about the challenges relating to getting your own book yes to submit to journals the ratio of uh submission to acceptance is 50 to 1 so you have to send out a lot of stuff any of you i see other poets you're not and yeah you've got to send out a lot of stuff and you know nobody this this editor the editor of my book doesn't know that she doesn't make any money on that journals don't really don't earn money unless they get some good grant money so i started submitting i went to the colrain manuscript to learn how to submit and how to revive and i sent it out 25 or 30 times then gave up and then sent two more submissions last year and this one was an open submission meaning it's not a contest you don't have to pay but bingo i got it and this was a quick turnaround i it was accepted in june and here it is in march which is unusual turnaround was often two years the other thing nice about this poem but not really an answer to your question but he let the authors do their own covers that's my photo myrtle beach south carolina other questions about submission or the writing process what is your writing process um inspiration and i need an idea i keep lists of ideas i keep a journal so on one side of the journal i have whatever i did that day and i write in cursive i think just the exercise of writing helps the brain but often not every day but on the other page i often jot down poem ideas or lines or take something i observed and write it out and i have a bunch of to do lists when you were going to school thinking back to first second third grade did you have a time paying attention to i before e except after c when there was something to go on on outside the well i have a poem about that and read that one tonight i had a terrible time paying attention i spent two years in fourth grade i probably started school too young to begin with i got the writing process down and i read a lot but i know yeah you got it i was totally unfocused just one follow-up question yeah um you mentioned a friend of yours do you exchange ideas that was george yes another when you write a poem now do you ever evaluate it and wonder how all how well it's going to be received yes all the time wonderful yeah you can't be too preoccupied with that but on the other hand you need to know how the poem is going to read when you read it that's the refraction and you have to know if it's going to be confusing there are two schools of poetry there's the more abstract what the hell did she say i i tend to be more literal you can't be too little but your reader needs to if the poem has some kind of chronology like where's the rambler is going they need to be able to figure that out i'm gonna sit over here on sign books asking questions while i sign so it sounds like these poems stretched over 15 years at work uh yes the oldest slum and i think it's jurors slum is the oldest slum here it goes back 15 years so how did you and your publisher come upon the body of work that was going to go into this you have to have the manuscript done 90 percent done when you send it to a publisher they don't want to go through choosing a poem so that's important that's one thing i learned when i went to the chlorine manuscript workshop was ordering a poem so the poem is like the reading i read a lot of them in the order during the book they have to flow together even though they're separate poems and once it's once it's accepted the publisher realizes the book's okay then you have some leeway to edit and add some new poems take stuff out but not too much you've got some basically the same book you submit then once it it's in what's called the galley proof it's too late unless you really screw not reheated you're not you're not doing final edits or switching stuff around with that for that editor will never take another one of your books other questions or comments i'm sorry george when you when you dwell on something yeah that's uh do you ever get an opinion you've got yes yeah when i dwell on a lot of things about the state of the country in the world today i don't get nervous about doing this i work doing this but just thinking about yeah what's happening in the world i don't think everybody gets that feeling i think everybody's nervous about something whether they literally seem tame or not okay do you write poems to be heard or to be read both poetry really is like song it should be read it's the idea of just reading it is more modern so yeah the poem should have a music but you as a poet i also have to pay attention to the fact that most people are going to be reading them on the page so it's got to make sense you can't do all that other stuff you know voice emphasis on the page it's got to work on the page and decide what the rhythm is where the line breaks are if it's going to be in pentameter this is um what's going to be available in like comic format on the Amazon no because of the way that some of that type is no he just doesn't my publisher doesn't do it doesn't do that he doesn't he's a hand on doesn't really work it's not hundreds of it is i didn't he doesn't use amazon i did put some sale on amazon on his cell but he doesn't like he doesn't like amazon turish thank you very much thank you tom thank you