 In the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, obviously, during the Depression era, when he was a young man, he had difficulty finding work. This is a poem about that experience, and also it's about growing up with his brother. But he wrote it in the early 1990s, when he was about 60, so his brother would have been gone for a long time by then. He would have come to some knowledge concerning what work is that perhaps didn't count as his young. That's the name of the poem, and the book goes from that which is what work is. We stand in the rain in a long line, waiting at Ford Highland Park for work. You know what work is. If you're old enough to read this, you know what work is, although you may not do it. Forget you. This is about waiting. Shifting from one foot to another, feeling the light rain falling like mist into your hair, blurring your vision, until you think you see your own brother ahead of you, maybe 10 places. You rub your glasses with your fingers, and of course it's someone else's brother, narrower across the shoulder than yours, but with the same sad slouch, the grin that does not hide the stubbornness, the sad refusal to give in to rain, the hours wasted waiting to the knowledge that somewhere ahead, a man is waiting and will say, no, we're not hiring today for any reason he wants. You love your brother. Now, suddenly, you can hardly stand the love flooding you for your brother, who's not beside you or behind you or ahead because he's home trying to sleep off the miserable night shift that Cadillac tried so he can get up before noon to study as German. Works eight hours a night so he can sing Wagner, the opera you hate most, the worst music ever invented. How long has it been since you told him you loved him? Held his wide shoulders, opened your eyes wide and said those words, maybe kissed his cheek? You've never done something so simple. So obvious. Not because you're too young or too dumb, not because you're jealous or even mean, or incapable of crying in the presence of another man. No, just because you don't know what work is. Double dose of English professors. You can take a nap, maybe. But what I've got is a little bit of William Blake, who's a poet that I mean I write about, I study, I lecture about, but I had never really in my life ever spent any time reciting. So I just have this opportunity to try to recite a bit of Blake. And it's kind of fun to think about him in a different way than I usually do. So this is from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, one of his illuminated books, which has pictures. So you're going to have to make the pictures in your mind as I'm doing this. But just one bit of a word of how to listen to this. Because Blake is weird. And one thing to listen for when you're listening to this is just to be thinking about that he's rewriting, I mean in his mind he's writing the Bible and working his way through a number of books of the Bible from Genesis, certainly to the book of Proverbs all the way to Revelation. Throughout the whole piece echoes commandments. So listen for commandments of various kinds. But it's not the ten commandments he's after. And what he's after is the type of commandment that shows up in Genesis where God says let there be light and then there's light. It's that kind of thing that he's playing on. Rintra roars and shakes his fires in the burdened air. Hungry clouds swag on the deep. Once meat and in apparel's path the just man kept his course along the veil of death. Roses are planted where thorns grow and on the barren heat sing the hunt bees. Then the apparel's path was planted and a river and a spring on every cliff and tomb and on the bleached bones red clay brought forth. Till the villain left the paths of ease to walk in apparel's paths and drive the just man into barren climes. Now the sneaking serpent walks in mild humility and the just man rages in the wilds or lions. Rintra roars and shakes his fires in the burdened air. Hungry clouds sway on the deep. As the new heaven has begun and it is 33 years since its advent the eternal hell revives and lo, Swedenborg is the angel sitting at the tomb and his writings are the linen cloths folded up. Now is the dominion of Edom and the return of Adam into paradise. See Isaiah 34 and 35 chapters. Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate are necessary to human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call good and evil. Good is the passive that obeys energy. Evil is the active springing from energy. Good is heaven, reason is hell. A memorable fancy. As I was walking among the fires of hell delighting in the enjoyment of Jesus which to angels looked like torment and insanity I collected some of their problems. Thinking that as the sayings used in a nation mark its character so the proverbs of hell show the nature of infernal wisdom better than any description of buildings or gardens. When I came home on the abyss of the five senses where a flat-sided steep frowns over the present world I saw a mighty devil folded in black clouds hovering on the sides of the rocks with corroding fires he wrote the following sentence now perceived by the minds of men and read by them on earth how do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight closed by your senses five the proverbs of hell. You see time learn and harvest teach in winter and joy. Drive your carp and your plow over the bones of the dead. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Prudence is a rich, ugly, old maid courted by incapacity. He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence. The cut worm forgives the plow. Dip him in the river who loves water. The fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. Eternity is in love with the productions. The busy bee has no time for sorrow. If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise. Prisons are built with stones of law brothels with the bricks of religion. How do you know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough? Enough or from the end of the poem is his song of liberty. Let the priests of the raven run no more in deadly black with horse-node curse the sons of joy nor their accepted brethren whom tyrant he calls free lay the bound or build a roof nor pale religious lechery call that virginity that desires but acts not for everything that lives is holy. That's pretty good. Moving along, it's Anthony Rootville. So that's Sangha. So the poem today is pretty short. It's called Root 3. It's given by David T. He's a pioneer or a secure scientist that teaches that. It's a math poem so it combines poetry and math which is something that doesn't happen very often. Math people got dragged on by their liberal rights friends might enjoy this. I fear that I will always be a lonely dumber like Root 3. A 3 is all that's good and right. I must my 3 keep out of sight. Need the vicious square root sign. I wish instead I were a 9. For 9 could fork the evil trick with just some quick arithmetic. I know I'll never see the sum as 1.7321 such as my reality a sad irrationality. All right, what is this I see? Another square root of 3. It's quietly coalescing by together now we multiply. The form of number we prefer rejoicing as an integer. With the way of magic wands we break free of our mortal bonds. My square root sign has come with me. My love for you has been renewed. Thank you. Moving along with one and next we've got Jesse Tower. This is a science paper that I lost control of. Thanks to my English professors. So I'll just jump in. Legacy of a cosmology. I know that you are interested in that you believe and I know that the world too is incredible. Though they will not believe for many years, yes, for many ages since they cannot understand it. John Carter to Edgar Rice Burroughs, God of Mars, 1918. Who we are and where we come from in the bent of stellar cosmology is in our mirror of physics and although that I'm useless, there is no good fiction. Historical drama and period of pieces are hard months to crack. Often it is there are five points in this circle. Tap, tap, tap, tap. And three in this one. Squeak, squeak. You stare at it, write it down, note it, and wait. Stellar cosmology is, in terms of information, as useless as the number of rocks on the surface of Mars, there's nothing I don't disagree with. Hence no conflict. I couldn't rush to the board and prove fault with the dazzling bit of math. But I've said it was an off mirror of cosmology as a place looking outward, where looking outward is into the past and the past swings you into the future. We divine where we are going by measurements of ancient starlight, the discovery of a battlefield and other relatives, relics of human habitation can be analyzed against what we are now. In this, Earthbound Antiquity formulates ideas of who we are today. Now, unlike cosmology, to find some present, the stars have always been our dreams, our portents. We cannot see them without seeing our future. In terms of physics and cosmology, we are extraordinarily nitpicky beings. Imagine a beast, a creature that has no immediate need to, which counts every blade of grass it ever encounters all the days of its life. This creature, if both are pawed, stresses over a single missed one. We gather and gather data. We have no idea if it is important, whether we do. We stare at the dots on the chalkboard, eat our jelly beans, and sleep on the floor, fretting over those dots. They were given to us. They must have meaning. We burn enormous amounts of resources, searching for smaller and smaller things to count. If we can't stuff our faces in some crowning, we figure out how to shrink our hands. Among the stars, we divine the futures of our lives, predictions coupled with omens until the omens were predictable. In this way, for the Old World, a great deal of the globe is found not only to be missing, but far larger than expected. Future was created, gazing at the past, and continues to hold promise. The greater focus of other planets, like Mars, to move the frontier upward, are being-counting ways paid off. The idea of other Earths has haunted the mind for centuries. Ha ha, as if! The passive-chartle ghosted by the glimmer of dream and prophecy like gold in a stream. We have counted flowers in a breeze, strong a draw, fishing the deep, sheep on the cliff, bows and blades, the moon at noon, brood on the tree, wolves and weeds. To say there should be shock in our math leads to no mystery for me, turning a scope to space as as natural as it can be. Perfectly suited, the Earth observer is safely free. The sky is large and full of secrets, something we absolutely detest and not solving. Don't gather and measure, in our drag to discover, what we find whispered by our stellar lover is that she is our mother. Sorting into finding is the drama of another. By seeing into the universe past and playing with the unseen, we uncover the cemetery we are comfortable with. Not only is the frontier a promise of range we desperately want to know. Is this all there is? After our moonshark, we got a clear view of what terraforming holds soul and cost. A species, if this is our only ecosystem, worries about the states, famine and greed. The discovery of so immense a number of galaxies glazed our mind. It was the flash of game in the trees. Having our particle physics begin to meld with astrophysics. In the interim, we build weapons of war and fear to use them. Turns the whale by the snout. The warm current brought with it the scent of a new ocean. This news may not have brought the reaction but my impression is that it confirmed our inner suspicions and chasms. An intensely miniscule in an intensely miniscule amount of time the tangled tumble of elemental tables converted with the wherewithal witnessing interstellar weather. Our solar system, a singular soleil is not alone in the circumnavigation of our stellar cluster. Brilliant blossoms, bubbles bubble from our beams below burns banal becomes Jupiter of a thousand stars of the ancient heavens, Jovi and worlds we call them and bend in our homes. Our past is our future and we doodlebub from the eye atop the mountain. We yearn to be nurtured by a nature that we both seek to escape and embrace. Who are we? Wayfarers and dawn treaders. We stand on our shores with hymns of grace and faces grim, paddles ready for each limb. Between us, the sea dog named Jim. We probe the quantum courtsuit dim sum, cosmic streams, theories of everything and at the other end, a dim, foreign sun. To lose our place is special sum of the moment when we find a comet this old world we call home. For most others, we've won another place to build our throne, much, much too far to phone. On that day, many may call it a miracle, a mark of the sublime evidence designed for others that recall the past eternal, the ember we lit torched to candle to flame. It is just another astrological sign arrived right on time. But who am I to say? I am no ancient Greek or Babylonian freak. I am a loser with no great winning streak. A union atheist, perhaps, is too neat to sail up in the onostic creek. Without humanism none of it matters at all. A growing number of us are already Is there anyone else who wishes to play ball? After understanding our complexity, perhaps computing the universe's creation is the easiest thing of all. So how long will we last if the universe is so stated and vast? How long until we fall? Our lives are short, our span and quick tick times ten. Catastrophe, apocalypse, cataclysm and judgment day on a solar eclipse, doggas beg us to remind us of our sin. But the cloak of pious hesitance stumbles steps to stumble below the eyes of the dark, and we cast aside. There are other events of heaven and earth, like Equinox, like solstice, and the turning of the tide. Perhaps the nights have grown shorter and we approach our longest day. The frosted dog-wrong winter has crept from the sea. Yet we get retired. By a point on the chalkboard and we draw a star. The first star of the morning star is Venus, phosphorus, Lucifer, and Jesus. It is wisdom the symbol of David and Solomon. The Arthurian legend, it is the five virtues of chivalry, the five wounds of Christ. The star is wood, fire, water, earth and air. Pythagorean roots gilded with the golden ratio. We represent our senses and connect ourselves to the universe in our past patio. The base ten comprehensions of an amalgam of our maximum of counting digits. By staring upward, the bent mirror impulses this reflection into our gibbons. Three points on the chalkboard create a triangle. The base shape of our Euclidean geometry is a symbol of protection in ancient Germany. Our news is nine. The base unit of empire, man, woman, child, our fate is three. The sizes most utilitarian, small, medium, and large correspond to the holy trinity. Good things come and freeze. Bad things come and freeze. Pythagoras believed in free. It is a crowd to me. Everyone must have a beginning, middle, and end. How many times must you try and try again? First, you do not succeed. Indeed, three. There is a heaven, a hell, a midgard. Physics is not immune with its electron proton and neutron. Balance even further rains supreme with gauge balsam, quartz, and leptons. Do not be worried, do not be alarmed. There is nothing magic or special in the observant. Observation is made from a tree. There are five points in this circle and three in this one squeak, squeak, squeak. And we eat our jellybee. What does it mean? It does not matter if it is something unseen. And it's a tough enough to crack. But that's what it is to be a human being. How about Ann Humphrey? Ann Humphrey? Ann here? Ann here. I'm a service titled is The Song of the Mouthwork. I'm a homely little bit of tin and bone. I'm beloved by the legion of the lost. I haven't got a box of humanitone and a dime or two will satisfy the cost. I don't attempt your highfalutin flights. I am more or less certain on the key. But I tell you boys, there's lots and lots of nights when you've taken mighty comfort out of me. I weigh an ounce or two and I'm so small you can pack me in the pocket of your vest. And when at night so wearily you crawl into your bunk and stretch your limbs to rest you can take me out and play me soft and low. The simple songs that trouble your heartstrings. The tunes that used to fancy long ago before you made a rot mess of things. Then a dreamy look will come into your eyes and you'll break off in the middle of a note and then with just the dreariest of sighs you drop me in the pocket of your coat. But somehow I've bucked you up a bit and as you turn around and face the wall you don't feel quite so spineless and unfit. You're not so bad a fellow after all. Do you recollect the bitter Arctic night your camp beside the canyon on the trail, your tent a tiny square of orange light, the moon above consumptive like in pale, your supper cooked, your little stove would glow, you tired but snug and happy as a child. Then it was turkey in the straw until your lips were nearly raw and you hurled your bold defiance to the wild. Do you recollect the flashing, lashing pain, the gulf of human blackness overhead the lighting making grippiers of the rain the cattle horns like candles of the dead, you're sitting on your bronco there alone in your slicker saddle sore and sick with cold. Do you think the silent bird did not hear the mockingbird or relish silver threads among the gold? Do you recollect the wild Magellan coast, the headwinds and the icy roaring seas the nights you thought that everything was lost the days you toiled in water to your knees, the frozen rat lines shrieking in the gale the hissing steeps and gulfs of livid foam when you cheered your messmates nine with Ben Bolton Clementine and Dixieland and seeing Nelly Holm let the jammy banjo voice the younger son who waits for his remittance to arrive I represent the grimy gritty one who sweats his bones to keep himself alive who's up against the real thing from his birth, whose heritage is hard and bitter toil I voice the weary smeary ones of earth of the sea and of the soil I'm the steinway of strange mischief and mischance I am the stratidarius of blank defeat in the down world where the devil bleeds the dance I am simply and symbolically meet I'm the irrepressive spirit of mankind I am the small boy playing knuckle down with death at the end of all things known I thrill and pivot triumph at a breath I am a humble little bit of tin and horn I'm a byword, I'm a plaything, I'm a jest the virtuoso looks on me was scorn but there's times when I'm better than the best ask the stoker and the sailor of the sea ask the mucker and the hewer of the pine ask the herder of the plain the leaner of the grain there's a lowly loving kingdom in its mind Rebecca! I have my phone on my phone my smart phone I have a piece of paper in my clutch good this is one of my favorite poems that I wrote in grade keeler's creative poetry we used to go to church together we went to continually build your faith and I went to sit next to you we've heard the same words they meant more to you than they ever did to me this was your community you knew everyone and everyone loved you excuse me writing the church's script read more you attain the beauty of the earth surrounding your sanctuary you always had the tools they needed and all the tricks that you can do yourself at least giggle when you sing you loved singing about him for your little old man voice never created the right notes I remember one Sunday I was looking forward to singing with you but grandma had been out of town you told me we couldn't go without granny because all the old ladies would flirt with you without her protection I laughed and agreed about your dairy cream instead the last time I visited your church I didn't sit next to you I couldn't I don't think it was allowed instead I ran into your place and held me in tight we both listened but it's hard to hear the room was nearly silent but we didn't want to hear I wish I could remember what was said but maybe it's best I can only remember the sound of your voice maybe like my fine so I'm not from here from Seattle and so I just heard about this yesterday I wrote this poem last night and finished it this morning I don't know I'm going to call it Remembrance there comes a point in time when one remembers their childhood as a whole as a thing separate from the life they're now living this might be exhilarating a more real side of the maturity we already have it might be frightening as we're pushed into a world we've heard stories of our whole life but it's this famous world which we know nothing about allow me to explain the world to whom we now belong provides no safety nets it fosters thoughts and feelings that we like to call pleasure there comes a point in time when one remembers their childhood when it becomes a thing of the past something we now may only long for we must build ourselves a fortress and spend our time foraging for sustenance but no when we remember it becomes our time to work pretty good because we've got three bullets left and we've got another time to get them in we keep moving I think next is Ryan Ryan Thompson did I get that by the way the walking movement is warming this great song that I can know about okay, Jesse Kaiser I'm going to be reading from I'm Like a Consent because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me the carriage held but just ourselves and immortality we slowly drove out in no haste and I had put away my labor and my leisure too for his stability we passed the school where children played and lessons scarcely done we passed the fields with gazing grain and passed the setting sun we paused before a house that seemed a swollen ground the roof was scarcely visible the corners spun out since then to centuries but each feel shorter than a day we passed the horses hats looks like next we've got Jerry Johnson okay welcome back to you thank you to live in Bozeman is to experience weather and I found an interesting few years I've been here that you can read the paper then you can hear