 So welcome to our third and final, I think it's our fourth actually, final talking in the library event for the fall semester. I'm going to have Professor Ted Delaney introduce our speaker, Vijay Seshradri, in a few minutes. But I just wanted to talk to you a little bit about this series. I wanted to send a shout out to our donor, Mrs. Mary Tuft-White, who is no longer with us, but she gave the endowed fund for this talking in the library series quite a while ago, maybe 10 or 15 years ago. And her son also, John Hazen-White Jr., gave money for supporting this new space that was redone a couple of years ago and has become one of the best event spaces on campus. So I just wanted to tell you a little bit about the spring events that we'll be having in the talking in the library series. We're going to have a national security scholar named Hayat Alvi, who's a professor at the Naval War College in Newport. And she is a security analyst and she teaches decision making courses, which probably doesn't make sense to us, but to her it does. And she is also a scholar in the Greater Middle East Regional Studies Program at the Naval War College. And she will be in March, March 21st. And then we will have Garth Greenwell, who is a novelist, and he will be our Vermont Fellowship Family Endowment Scholar who will be coming in to work with our creative writing students. And hopefully some of you are out there who have applied for that Vermont Fellowship, which we'll be selecting very soon for that. And his most recent book is What Belongs to You, so he will be reading and talking from that book. And that will be held at Rogers Free Library. We usually do one joint program with Rogers Free Library in Bristol in the fall and spring semesters. That will be April 9th. And the final one will be Kathleen Cleaver, who's part of our BERS Memorial Lecture and Book Exhibition, which we do every year. It's an endowed program as well. And she is the wife of Eldridge Cleaver, and we will be celebrating Soul on Ice as the book that we have selected for that BERS program. And she's going to be talking a lot about her life in human rights struggles and civil rights in the 60s. She was the first secretary of the Black Panther Party, so we're really excited to have her. And Professor Christine Fagan, who's over here, has just led two of our BERS fellow students to UC Berkeley to the Bancroft Library to do some selections of materials for that exhibit. So we're very excited about the BERS program. So keep your eyes open on our website. We also have done a lib guide for Vijay. You can see some of his links to his works and interviews. So please go there. It's from our library home page. Just go to lib guides and you will see. Actually, I think he's featured. There's a picture of him on the front page of the home page. Without further ado, Professor Delaney is going to introduce our speaker. Thanks everybody for coming. I'm the substitute teacher today because really the reason that Vijay has been able to come in is because of the work of Adam Braver, Professor Braver who set it up and unfortunately is disappointed he can't be here because he's in California promoting his new book, The Disappeared, available in finer bookstores. But it left to me the pleasure of introducing Vijay, who I met a short while ago. So let me tell you a little bit about him and we'll just bring him right on. As usual, you're from his work and then do a little Q&A. So poet, SAS and critic Vijay Shashadri was born in India and came to the United States at the age of five. He earned a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA from Columbia University. Vijay is the author Wild Kingdom, the Long Meadow which won the James Lachlan Award and three sections which won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. The Pulitzer Prize committee described three sections as a quote compelling collection of poems that examine human consciousness from birth to dementia and a voice that is by turns witty and grave, compassionate and remorseless. Vijay's been the recipient of numerous prestigious fellowships including New York Foundation of Arts, the NEA, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He's worked as an editor at the New Yorker and has taught at Bennington College and Sarah Lawrence College where he currently directs the graduate non-fiction writing program. So it's a thrill to have him here. Let me bring on Vijay. Do you want it? It's really good to be here. I drove up from New York City. I love that drive up 95 because after Connecticut falls away you get this long stretch at Rhode Island. Wow, this is Rhode Island. This is a beautiful town. I guess, you know, when you're invited to read you always feel you have to read new work. You're still actually kicking as a poet although most poets just want to lie down and sleep and kick no longer. So I'm going to read some new poems and then I'm going to kind of move on to some older poems. I think then we're going to have a Q&A and a bunch of you are supposed to be leaving at five or a few. Okay, I shouldn't have said that, right? Now everybody will. These first two poems are for my parents. They both passed away recently in the past few years. But they're still around in my mind and I always feel I have to start reading by reading these poems because otherwise they'll visit me in the dead of night and say, why didn't you read those poems? This one's for my father. It's called Collins Ferry Road. Only a river could bottom out like this. Not a person. Definitely not. And definitely not you. You were always just a person. Not you meandering between smoking slag heaps, unmoored coal barges booming down your waters heavier than mercury. Definitely not you. Don't even imagine it. The two eyed fishes in the shallows are doing what? Feeding? Dreaming? No. They don't need ears to hear your ghost who is thrashing and muttering in the brush between the river and the road. Your ghost coming back to where you bottomed out in a way inalienable to yourself. Where you thought you should have died but didn't. Afraid to go back to where you shouldn't have died but did. I met him up there. How did I get here? He asked me. How do I get back? Where do I go now? This one's for my mother. It's called Your Living Eyes. They wheeled you your caregivers did to the picture window to watch the birds fretting at the feeder. Then they forgot you there and you forgot them. A thousand years later the angel of death sidled in. Disguised as a little girl clutching at her pinafore and chewing the ends of her pigtails. She had a look whose vacancy was overrehearsed. But I hear your interview with her went well anyway. I hear actually that it went better than anybody could ever have thought it would. She said beauty and sadness are never far apart. You said bullshit. She said some birds are real, some are invisible. But which are which? You said back off bitch. She stared out the window. Her eyes narrowed but they didn't touch. What was she seeing? What was she saying to herself? Do I know or do I care? Enough with these impassive forces. This one or that other one, the one who gave you life, you who gave me life. The yellow of the finches is as molten as ever. Splashing on the holly bushes. The moon pale white inside the pale blue morning. Dropping its panicles of glass on the bright grass is climbing down. But the sun is climbing up. The world your eyes see is the world as it really is. And you and I are going to live in it forever and we will hitchhike to the painted hills together and hop a freight back home. I'll read one more from this bunch. This is actually a poem with a story. I moved to New York City in the early 80s and I immediately became a resident of the city. I think the year after I became a resident I got a jury summons. Summons to present myself at the courthouse and be maybe selected to a jury. And I thought it was of course like everybody else does. Incredibly inconvenient. And I resented it and I went down and I wasn't chosen. And then a few years later I got another one. This is what happens if you're voting in a city and I always vote. And I went down again, disgruntled again and I didn't get chosen. And I was relieved but sort of a little wistful at that time. Because I thought wow. I always imagined being on a jury and murder trial. A serial killer. Being sequestered and all that stuff. Having the mafia call you up. Threaten your wife unless you decide the case a certain way. All those wonderful narratives were floating around in my mind and I wasn't getting to participate in any of them. So the second time I was a little wistful and then it happened again. And then it happened again. And then it happened again. And after a while I got very angry. And I kept thinking well maybe it's because I'm a person of color. But I noticed that other people of color were being impaneled on juries while I wasn't. And then after it happened again I said well it's because I'm South Asian. But then I noticed that people who looked like they were South Asians were also being impaneled. And so finally I had to conclude that it was me. Just me. That they didn't want me and they were never going to impanel me on a jury. And by this time I'd moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn and it happened again. I asked to come down to Adams Street and I waited in a room all day and then they said sorry about this poem. As an enigmatic title it's called Comma's Dash's Ellipses Full Stops, question marks. People restless on the pews downtown. People not of the book or of the book. Itchy and introspective in the big cross section of humanity room in the courthouse on Adams Street. Apothecaries, Scriveners, gendarmes, recidivists. 60% are happy, 65% of the time. 30% are okay, 79% of the time. One is angry. That's what the bulletins from the aethers say. And maybe we'll do something about it. But not today. Today is another day. Today is the day the self's whispering to itself in its hundred endangered languages merges with the sound of water running and scoring grooves in the damp, lithic, adhesive interiors. The limestone cavern of being where flying mammals hang and nurse their young and contemplate upside down the inescape person waiting to be called out of himself into the light of reason to be impaneled on a jury here, right here in Brooklyn so he can judge lest he not be judged but forgiven, just forgiven. Grace with no instinct to explain itself pouring out of every portal. Are you blind that you can't see it? I am. I guess I am. Communion, submission, detachment. And what would I rather be doing than sitting here pretending not to look at the rest of you, of the city and of the world so compelling as your exhausted, disillusioned but steadfast commitment to the mechanisms of justice, the apparatus of democracy. Twelve good persons and true will be summoned from the cardinal points to but not me, I guess. The bailiff is saying go home, not you, not today. For the hundredth time I have been called but not chosen. For the hundredth time I have to shuffle into the subway station at J Street where a tall, sweet-looking willowy violinist is playing the chacon with apocalyptic focus and the ghost of a smile on her lips. Maybe she will say yes to me. Maybe I can stay with her always. Maybe I can sleep on my hands at her little desk. I'd rather go blind than to walk away from you, child. These are a couple of poems from three sections or a few. This one is called Nursing Home. The title is representative of the content. I should say something about the form. It's written in three sections. The first is a lyric. The second is prose pastiche. And the third is play script. But in this case, it's not clear who is speaking. Nursing Home, one. She had dreams 50 years ago she remembers on this day. She dreamed about Bombay. It looked like Rio. She dreamed about Rio, which looked like itself. Though Rio was a city she'd never seen. Not on TV. Not in a magazine. Rain scans done on her show. Her parasolvian pathways and declivities choked by cities. Microscopic mercurial cities made from her memories good and bad. From the things she saw but didn't see. From the remembered pressure of every lover she ever had. Two. Unexpected, useful combinations between cognitive psychology and neuroscience have fostered new observational protocols, not only for elderly patients in the Lewy body pathologic subgroup, but those discovered across a wide spectrum of dementias induced phenomena, including but not limited to normal pressure hydrocephalus, NPH, classical Alzheimer's disease, AD, and the deformations in mental recognition and function. Dear, eat the soup with the spoon, not the fork. The choreoscating visions. Who is that laid out in my bed? The spontaneous motor features of Parkinsonism. Synaptic patterns embodied in sparks, showers, electrical cascades, waterfalls and shooting stars are increasingly revealing an etiology approximately to be fully established, and suggestive links between processes strictly biochemical and ideational and linguistic explosions for which documentation has been massive while analysis has so far been scammed. While an adequate conceptual apparatus still remains out of reach, progress across a broad frontier of research has been sufficiently dramatic to suggest possible developments that will lead both to therapeutic remedies for distressed elderly patients and to a synthesis among various disciplines that have here to seem not just incompatible but in direct conflict with one another. Certain coherencies have been unearthed that have truly startled our consensus. Three, she doesn't know any better than to act the fool. Is she dead? No, she's not dead. Is she dead? No, I'm not dead, and I don't want anybody to think I'm dead. Do you think it's funny? Wonder why she acts like that. Is she dead? No, she's not dead, and I'm not dead neither. Is she really dead? No, she's not dead, but she's acting the fool. Are you really dead? No, I'm not really dead. I'm just acting the fool. I'll show you how I can act the fool. No, I don't think I look nice. I think I look pretty. No, I'm not dead. I just act like I'm dead. What makes you want to act like she's dead? Do you think she's dead? Do you think she's dead, or is she just acting the fool? That's the poem that comprehends the remorseless part of the citation. It's the only remorseless poem I've ever written. The rest of my poems are very nice poems. This one is called Guide for the Perplexed. And for about 25 years I've had a subscription to Science News. Do you know, do you all know Science News? It's a weekly science digest. Digest of all the research, new research in science. And it comes in hard copy every week, and it gets piled up on our coffee table. My wife keeps telling me, she keeps saying, well, the Science News are piling up again, Vijay. And I say, yeah, I know. They keep piling up, and they keep piling up, and eventually she has to threaten to recycle them. So I immediately go through the whole stack and spend a night reading them all before she recycles them. And I have been subscribing to this magazine for 25 years. And probably even longer now. Because I think I'm going to get an idea for a poem from it. I have never got an idea for a poem from this magazine, except this one time. And you'll see what the fact is. And it so astonished me that I said, I have to either die or write a poem incorporating this fact. So this is the poem, Guide for the Perplexed. The bedroom slippers, silk linings. The dressing gown of brocade stitched with the zodiac. The pajamas underneath also made out of silk, for which how many individuals of the species be more I, having munched the succulent pale green mulberry leaves, and insinuated a sack wherein to magnify themselves were steamed to death from the inside out. The delicate fibers are intact. He feels their ripeness on his skin. He listens deeply into the night which listens back. The birch log pops in the fireplace. The fetishes brood on the mantelpiece. The ice melts in the gin. And yellow are in deeper than dandelion yellow. Yellow are in stronger than Moroccan yellow. The color almost of a yellow marigold is the yellow silk kimono she wears to greet the floating world. Mods on the wing clutter the starlight. Ghosts of dead mods are on the window pane and knee deep in the ballroom. In social clubs and places of worship, they are proof if anyone still needs proof that awesome are the powers of humankind who have taken this self-same moth and endowed it with a gene from the jellyfish so as to produce fluorescent silk. And all in the interests of beauty. I shall spare you, by the way, my comprehensive researches into the history of the Silk Road. This one is called Bright Copper Kettles. Do you all know where that comes from? I have to, when I'm talking to college audiences, I have to remind people or introduce them for the first time. Many of you don't, right? You don't. Rain drops on roses and whiskers on kittens. Sound of music? Third line is Bright Copper Kettles. But you're not supposed to say the fourth line because that's the central of the poem. Bright Copper Kettles. Dead friends coming back to life. Dead family speaking languages living and dead. Their minds retentive. Their five senses intact. Their footprints like a butterfly's. Mercy shining from their comprehensive faces. This is one of my favorite things. I like it so much I sleep all the time. Moon by day and sun by night find me dispersed deep in the dreams where they appear. In fields of golden rod, in the city of five pyramids, before the empress with the melting face, under the towering plain tree, they just show up. It's alright, they seem to say. It always was. They are diffident and polite. Who knew the dead were so polite? They don't want to scare me. Their heads don't spin like weather veins. They don't want to steal my body and possess the earth and wreak vengeance. They're dead, do you understand? They don't exist. And besides, why would they care? They're subatomic, horizontal. Think about it. One of them shyly offers me a pencil. The eyes under the eyelids start faster and faster. Through the intercom of the house where for so long there was no music. The right reverend, Al Green, is singing. I could never see tomorrow. I was never told about the sorrow. I guess I should read this. This is sort of a political poem. I don't really write political poems. I write sort of political poems sometimes. The jury duty poem was actually meant to be a political poem. I was asked to contribute to essentially an anti-Donald Trump anthology that Knoff put out. So I sent that poem and they sent it back to me and said it was too gentle for their anthology. It felt bad. So I started trying to write a poem. Fuck Donald Trump. I couldn't do it. I'm too riddled with irony. It's just terrible. Everything just becomes ironic in my hands that I touch it. I have the mightest touch for irony. I touch anything. I have to start laughing at myself. Maybe I could do something with Louis C. K. On the drive back to the city, I'll try to work up an Al Franken. We have to attack our own. We can't. Who knows? Anyway, this poem is called Trailing Clouds of Glory. Those of you who read romantic poetry will recognize that phrase. It's from The Immortality Ode by William Wordsworth, one of the great, great poems of the English language. The relevant couplet is Trailing Clouds of Glory. Did we come from God who is our home? I always read Wordsworth's Immortality Ode as a kind of a migration poem. It's a poem about the migration of the soul into the body and the subsequent entrapment of the soul in materiality so that it loses a sense of the tremendous origins of its being. Become slowly blinded by the material world. It's a heartbreaking poem when you really think about it. I chose the title because, not because of that, although that idea enters the poem at the end of the poem. I chose the title because in 2010, the state of Arizona passed a law that stated that if you looked like you were an undocumented person, say, if you looked like me, you know, I mean, I look so undocumented, right? Who would ever give me a document? And if they did, I'd refuse it, right? Anyway, if you looked like you were an undocumented person, the constabulary of the state of Arizona could accost you and make you kind of show them your papers. And when I was young, I would have been indignant about this. I mean, not only the threat to someone like myself, but also the sort of affront to the Constitution and to Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence going back to the Magna Carta, basically. But when I read the story in the Times in 2010, I thought, wow, you know, what a great idea for a poem. This is how far up it's ended, you know. It's either science news or the Times. I'm always looking for an idea for a poem. So this is the poem, Trailing Clouds of Glory. Even though I am an immigrant, the angel with the flaming sword seems fine with me. He unhokes the velvet rope. He ushers me into the club. Some activity in the mosh pit, a banquet here, a pen handler there, a gray curtain drawn down over the infinitely curving lunette, Jupiter in its crescent phase, huge, a vista of a waterfall with a rainbow in the spray, a few disultery orgies, a billboard of the snub-nosed electric car of the future. The inside is exactly the same as the outside, down to the emcee in the yellow spats. So why the angel with the flaming sword, ringing in the sheep and waving away the goats? And the men with the binoculars, elbows resting on the roll bars of jeeps, peering into the desert. There is a border, but it is not fixed. It wavers, it shimmies, it rises and plunges into the unimaginable seventh dimension before erupting in a field of Dakota corn. On the F train to Manhattan yesterday, I sat across from a family threesome Guatemalan by the look of them, delicate and archaic and Mayan, and obviously undocumented to the bone. They didn't seem anxious. The mother was laughing and squabbling with the daughter over a knockoff smartphone on which they were playing a video game together. The boy, maybe three, disdained their ruckus. I recognized the scowl on his face, the retrospective, maskless rage of inception. He looked just like my son when my son came out of his mother after 30 hours of labor. The head squashed, the lips swollen, the skin in purple and hideous with blood and afterbirth. Out of the inflamed tunnel and into the cold room of harsh sounds, he looked right at me with his bleared eyes. He had a voice like Richard Burton's. He had an impressive command of the major English texts. I will do such things what they are, yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth, he said. The child, he said, his father of the man. I should actually, I forgot that I was speaking to a college audience of young people mostly, you know, otherwise I would have explained who Richard Burton was. It's enough to know that he was the Jay-Z of his era and his wife was the Beyonce. Her name was Elizabeth Taylor. He was a great Shakespearean actor, right? A lot of people felt that Elizabeth Taylor ruined him. Maybe Beyonce ruined Jay-Z. So I'm going to end and then take some questions, but I'll end with this poem. It's called Light Verse. And for a while there in the first decade of the 21st century, the New York Times would three or four times a year publish poems on the op-ed page of the Sunday Week in Review. And I always imagined that the New York Times editorial board would get together and they'd say, well, let's torture some poets now, because they would come up with these really bizarre topics. And they would call up poets and they'd say, well, write a poem on this topic. And of course no poet can refuse the New York Times, I mean, two million readers, right? I mean, what poet is going to say didn't know to that. And so one September they called me up and they said, we want you to write a poem about the end of daylight savings time. Do you think you can do that? I said, of course I can do that. I've been dying to address this subject all my life. So I wrote the poem and they published it and this is the poem. Lightverse. Standard time begins. It's just five but it's light like six. It's lighter than we think. Mind and day are out of sync. The dog is restless. The dog's owner is sleeping and dreaming of Elvis. The treetop should be dark purple, but they're pink. Here and now, here and now, the sun shakes off an hour. The sun assumes its pre-colendrical power. It is though only what we make it seem. Now in the dog owner's dream, the dog replaces Elvis and grows bigger than that big tower in Singapore and keeps on growing until he arrives at a size with which only the planets can empathize. He sprints down the ecliptic's plane chased by his owner, Jane. That's not really her name. We yells at him to come back and synchronize. Thanks. Well, I mean, I think there are two aspects of it. One is your lexical terrain and so it's sort of advisable in some way to know other languages that overlap English. So French is very useful, Latin is very useful in terms of knowing the roots of words and understanding how rich and complicated words are. And so I think that is language specific. It's specific to English. And I guess, you know, I don't know any Germanic languages. I just know Romance languages, unfortunately, among European languages. So I don't know exactly how helpful German would have been if I'd learned it or Dutch or, say, Swedish. But I'm sure those would be helpful, too, because we do speak a Germanic language. We write in the Germanic language. And so I think that's important just in terms of kind of understanding the diapason of language and how rich and complex the terrain in which we live is in English. And the other thing I think, and you can get this by learning languages across the globe, which is how meaning is made out of syntax and structure and becoming really aware of that. I mean, all of this goes to consciousness and consciousness about the instruments that you're using. And that's really essential to being a writer after a certain point. You just have to know what it is you're working with. Just like a painter has to know their material or a sculpture. You just have to kind of... And one of the things that's been very, very useful to me in learning non-European languages is coming across different syntactic structures and different ways in which idioms work and understanding the instability of syntax itself. And so those two things. But you can stay within the European fold and still get a sense of the syntactic complexity of what you're dealing with and remind yourself of basic things. I mean, I teach a lot of prose writing because I don't really teach poetry at all. I started the non-fiction writing program at Sarah Lawrence and I teach exclusively, actually, prose seminars or give lectures in rhetoric. And I always at some point make people learn again if they haven't learned it. If they have learned it. And oftentimes they haven't learned it. The parts of speech. So that they understand how complicated the English sentence is and how many things you can do with it. And in English we write a very loose and complicated sentence because so many things have come into English. English has had so many influences. And it's such a... I mean, other people, foreign speakers who learn English say that it's the hardest language to learn because it's not rational. People can't figure out. And when you compare it to, say, French, or certainly inflected languages, it is pretty irrational and strange. And so I always try to teach people to be aware of the parts of speech that go up to make an English sentence when they're writing prose and really be conscious of the flexibility of the English sentence. And I think you learn that almost instinctively by learning another language. You know, you are comparing that language to English when you're realizing, as you're learning it. So there's a back formation and you're learning much more about English when you're in another language than you would otherwise have learned if you weren't in that language. So it's very, very useful for writers. And I think also it's useful for us as human beings. I mean, we are living in a global. And to be in another language is also to be in another way of thinking. Another habit of mine, which is very useful to you. So yeah, I'd recommend it. I'm very nervous about asking you a question. But we have a general education program and in the core seminars of professors and teachers are encouraged to use materials from outside their discipline. So I have the nerve to use poetry. I have no idea what I'm doing. But the students who are also from across the discipline, I think you're probably talking to the choir here. When I ask my students to read poetry here, I'm an engineer in the criminal justice major who is a scientist from across all majors. And I have a hard time making the pitch that is good for them. Can you make a pitch to people who aren't in the choir? Yeah. Our thought is made out of words. It's imbricated in language. And you are never going to get away from the material impediment of thought, which is language. You can only think through language. And so I guess that's the first thing. That you have to kind of master language in order to master thought and convey your intention in some way, shape, or form. And intentionality is also conveyed through a mastery of rhetoric. And rhetoric and the materiality of language are central to poetry. And you can acquire so much of that skill having to do with thinking, which is having to do with articulation by reading poetry, by appreciating poetry, by allowing what poetry does is it makes you conscious of words and how deep and profound words are. The seminar I'm teaching now is called Documenting Identity. And we're kind of looking at identity writing as a manifestation of identity politics and the problems and the issues with identity politics and the virtues of identity politics, which is a big sort of contemporary political theme. And it's something that's vexing the world in one way, shape, or form now. And a lot of the students I have are their activists or they're interested in political science and they're taking this as a writing class that seems to fit into issues they're concerned with having to do with gender, having to do with race, having to do with class, and the way in which the individual fits themselves into the larger structures of American democracy. And I encourage all of that. I mean, we started out by reading Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, the famous section where he talks about the laws of Virginia where, which is sort of the err, you know, this was right after Charlottesville that we started and we read that along with the Declaration of Independence. And, you know, I mean, Jefferson's Notes on Virginia is pretty shocking in terms of our current sort of racial agonies because of the way he talks about race and skin color and the scientism behind all of that stuff in that chapter. And then we also read in tandem with those two sort of foundational texts. And Notes on Virginia, of course, was very, very important. I mean, it was, you know, I mean, Notes on Virginia is where he, Jefferson, comes up with his, you know, what we regard as Jeffersonianism, you know, Jeffersonian agrarianism and stuff like that. So it was a tremendously influential text. As influential, almost as influential in terms of his corpus of writing as the Declaration itself. And we also read a James Baldwin essay, which really has to do with skin color too, which is what Notes on the Section of Laws and Notes on Virginia is dealing with. And, you know, it was sort of fascinating to take a purely literary and deconstructive take on these different texts and comparing them in terms of the stories they were telling, you know. And I think you can do that with prose texts, but you can also do it with poetry. And I think it's, you know, you can probably do it better with poetry in some way. You know, a poem that I just gave that same class this past Tuesday was Emily Dickinson's Number 38. I don't know if you noticed the short poem. I shall know why when time is over and I have ceased to wonder why. Christ will explain each separate anguish in the fair school room of the sky. He will tell me what Peter promised and I for wonder at his woe. I shall forget the drop of anguish that scalds me now, that scalds me now. And I wanted them to get this poem. It's a very, very small poem, but it's an epic poem, right? I shall know why when time is over and I have ceased to wonder why. Okay, you know, you know, Christ will explain each separate anguish in the fair school room of the sky. I shall know why when time is over and I have ceased to care, you know, and I have ceased to wonder why. I don't give a shit anymore because, you know, I'm dead. Then Christ is going to explain each separate anguish. So the first, the first stanza is about cosmic disappointment, right? And it's about the problem of suffering which is what we all feel. We all feel this incredible issue of suffering for which the odysseys have been written in response and stuff like that. It's a deep, deep issue in, you know, all civilizations. You know, the second stanza, he will tell me what Peter promised and I for wonder at his woe so this whole cosmic structure, right, and the cosmic disappointment. And I for wonder at his woe, I shall forget the drop of anguish that scalds me now, that scalds me now. So what she's doing is in a very, very small poem she's taking this enormous epic story of Christ and Peter and betrayal and the odyssey and all of those things and she's bringing it down to this drop of anguish she's feeling now that scalds me now, that scalds me now. So the whole universe is really about Emily Dickinson, not about Emily, not merely about Emily Dickinson. It's about the pain she's feeling at this moment, you know, and it's so absolutely convincing, right? Now how does that relate to an international studies major? How does that relate to someone who's getting a nursing degree? Or, you know, I would say the relevance is absolute and perennial and permanent because, you know, this is what we all do. I mean, I don't think the beauty of the poem and the perfection of the poem has anything to do with the lessons it is imparting or the identification we can have in the poem. You know, it exists independently of, you know, in its own right. It's as alive for me as, you know, most of the people I know, right? But the idea, that kind of transformation and the psychology and the rhetoric and the way in which the structure is created is only teaching you about thought, it's teaching you about what it means to be human. And that's what we're all in the business of learning. I mean, Emily Dickinson says, well, we're only going to learn that then. We're never going to know that now. All we're going to know here is despair and pain, you know? And that's a good, you know, it's a good position to take in, you know? I mean, I tend to agree with her. When we no longer care, we will find out. We're in the middle of a cosmic joke and we're the butt of that joke. We're just going to have that, that's our life, learning how to accept that. I hate to tell young people things like that. You know, better learn it from me than have to figure it out for yourself in some devastating situation you find yourself in. You know, at least you can arm yourselves for the horror to come. Anyway, I can't hear you. Yeah, I mean, I think my models have been poets who are kind of dry and the ones who I've learned the most from. And sentimentality in, you know, the accepted definition of emotion in excess of its cause is something that a poet has to think about, right? Because poetry requires a degree of precision in your use of language. So you can't be a slob about it. But I think as I've gotten older, when I was younger I used to be more, these days I kind of, you know, accept in others a degree of sentimentality. I mean, I think it's more complicated in some way. You don't want to lie. But sometimes we do feel more than we should be feeling about a certain thing, you know, that's kind of our nature. And I was just, I was talking to Ted and Nicole about the first poet I ever, contemporary poet I ever really thought was great when I was 16, and that was Galway Canal. And Galway Canal has always been accused of being sentimental. But I don't think it's fair, yeah. I mean, there's just kind of, you know, he's trying to get at something that he might not quite be getting at and that might not be accessible to language itself. And I think kind of this, actually the, I would put it this way, the sentimentality of Canal's poems, which gives some of them a slightly overripe quality, you know, is actually a part, a great part of their aesthetic appeal. So I don't think, you know, there are no hard and fast rules with any of this stuff. Basically, poets are people who try to get away with whatever they can. And then when they can't, they go, oh, okay, you know, I'm sorry I did that. If you can get away with it, go for it, whatever it is. And the world will let you know whether you're getting away with it or not.