 I'm Craig Wine. I'm the vice president of the board of trustees for Kellogg-Hubert Library. We have another Auguste trustee president, our president, Steve Gold. And we are just thrilled to bring these programs to the community. This is one of our biggest and most fun and growing enterprises that we take on each year. It's really satisfying. I live in Callis. So there are now five, again towns, in sort of the service area of Kellogg-Hubert. And I represent Callis on the board. And I'm a sugar maker and a former photographer for the Associated Press. And being on this board, in particular, I've been on a few, is just really satisfying. Things at the library have never been better. We've got a really committed board. We've got an amazing director. And the ship, SS Kellogg-Hubert, has really sailing into great seas. So I do want to mention, in case some of you have not attended other events, there are booklets for the rest of poem city, many, many events, 35 in the month of April. Then there are some on the table in the back. Also on the table in the back are a bunch of Leland Kinsey's books for sale by Bearpont. So you can peruse those at some point. Rachel Sennichal, I want to give all due credit. It was her inspiration. Yes. Sennichal. It was her inspiration that created poem city, first in Waterbury, and then when she came here to Kellogg-Hubert. This is the seventh year for poem city. I also have to mention boasting a bit, perhaps. But it's my third year being a poet. Also, I have a poem in a window downtown. So it's fun for me to edit my poems down to 24 lines, if I need to, because that's the limit. This one is actually shorter. So I'm pleased that they chose the shortest one. So Leland Kinsey is our poet, our reader tonight. Leland and I actually go back. We were just chatting. Maybe it's 15 years or so or 17. We actually once spent a year in a cranberry bog together, if you can believe that. We worked on a story together. I, as a photographer for Vermont Life, he is a writer kind of visiting this cranberry bog that he knows well at a certain undisclosed location in the Northeast Kingdom. He told me that's all I can say. But it's a wonderful spot. And it's a natural quaking bog with wild cranberries. I only fell through twice up to here. So we do go back a ways. It was a really fun project. I'm just going to read this short intro in case some of you are not as familiar with him. Leland Kinsey was born and raised on a farm in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, where his ancestors settled in the early 1800s. He's conducted writing workshops for the Vermont Council on the Children's Literacy Foundation at over 100 schools in New Hampshire and Vermont. Since receiving his MA, Leland has worked as a farm hand printer and horse trainer and has taught courses at Elder Hostel. He's published six collections of poetry, including In the Rain Shadow. His much anticipated new and selected poetry collection galvanized ranges from Kinsey's home in the rugged mountains of northern Vermont to the towering stone lighthouses in Highland, shillings of his ancestor Scotland. Drawing from seven previous acclaimed collections and with more than 12 new poems, Kinsey takes us with him on his travels to the brawling rivers of Labrador, the slopes of Kilimanjaro, the wheat fields and dinosaur digs of Alberta, and the ranchos of the Tex-Mex border. So without further delay, Leland Kinsey. Thank you very much for that generous introduction. I thought tonight that I would simply begin at the beginning. This is titled The Skinny. And I don't think there's anything I need to. The Skinny. At a pool and rapids near home, my father once stood naked before the Queen of England. He died from a bridge rebuilt after the 27 flood, which had also ripped out Highbridge three pools down and had shredded miles of railroad tracks, whose decade old repairs he stood below. More than 100 years before that, a miller wanted more of a head of water to turn his grist wheels and thought he'd add long pond to his headwaters of the Barton River. His men dug six feet down, excuse me, his six feet down through the clay bed of the perched pond, hit quicksand, and the mile and a half long body of water plowed through its shore and began its hell-bent roar down the entire valley to Lake Memphromagog. One man ran six miles and saved every resident of Glover, where it sits in a narrow defile. But the flood cleaned every village and bridge off the valley floor in its 20-mile sweep north. Vestiges remain, a delta built at the river's mouth on which cactails grow far out into the lake, making sepia walls that remind me of the wallpaper in the unusual curved walls of my grandmother's house. A changed course, now through denser black willow, black ash, and silver maple forests, where the bottoms of huge trees often lie submerged like some river-bottom bayou far to the south, many sandbanks, and a gravel and hard-panned surface on the alluvial lands. My mother's, my father's mother's land was sandy, as she and her boys struggled to farm through the depression and abandonment, and the town's factories and production shops, though driven by the river's cheap power, shut. All this just before the war, before an older brother would escape to war in England. The threat of war brought the new royal couple on a goodwill tour, and when their train, traveling from Boston to Montreal for embarkation home, passed on schedule over the granite arch near where my father and uncle swam nude in an early heat wave, they stood and waved, and thought or pretended the queen responded. At a window, a sweep of a hand, a pleasant face, moving away at considerable speed, the water, the train, and all attendant rushing towards some accounting. This poem is in the form of a letter. The core that I mentioned is just the name of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and droplets are those little spheres that make up raspberries and blackberries and cloudberries or do berries, as they're in here. And this is in the form of a letter, as I say. Fish eggs. So you fished each of the three forks, rediscovering the core's discovery. I wish I could cover those waters with you. Yes, I went to Labrador again, fished the upper reaches of the Ataconac for brook trout, Grand Rouge, they call them, and Wannaniche. My arms ached one day from catching and releasing. I landed one toward day's end in a long, fast riffle as others swam upstream, backs out of water, between my legs and all around. I slipped the two long sets of eggs out of the belly of the big red and set them on a rock. The eggs had the color and look of the droplets of cloudberries I'd gathered in my creel at the edges of string bogs. The eggs and berries were to be my gift to the Inuit woman who cooked my evening meals. I turned to wash the spine blood from my catch, half a minute, and when I turned back, a gull sat where the eggs had been, a slight gel coating beneath its webbed toes. Eggs and no gull noticed, gull and no eggs to be seen. No one's rights involved. Just quick as that, life's magic act. I don't have a cold. This is just an artifact of the chemo. Some years ago, I went to Africa to visit my double first cousin, where he was the head of Heffer Project for 30 years in Tanzania. And a book came out of that. But this is a new poem, but looking back on that experience. Shouldered, Arusha, Tanzania. On the shoulder of Mount Meru, my cousin's three preteen boys put their shoulders to a boulder that intruded sharply on a sandy road and bruised their knees and bikes, broke cast iron wheels of barrows carrying the upper farmer's melt to market, scraped the sides and tires of the few 4x4s carrying agricultural agents and NGO people serving the refugees trying to live still higher, attempting the harrowing climb. The boys' parents and others they heard, often saying, something should be done. They thought if they could get it moving, it would flop neatly to the side. They got it moving. But instead of settling on its rounded top, it rolled over, bordering young coffee trees and not several of their shade trees, smashed through a fence, taking meters of it, sped faster into a garden and squashed, squashed corn and a swath of cassava. Gelged a dent in a rare newly-tired road, crossed the village furrow and damaged a small weir, not two shops made of large shipping boxes off their rubble foundations, emptying every shelf, slowed through the school's fence and came to rest near the eastern wall. The day they told me of it, we walked and talked, down every thrashed, apologized for, paid for, proud inch. And because this is a new and selected, I get to go back and read poems that I haven't read for a long time. I was lucky enough last spring, or actually it was late winter, to read this poem down in Tunbridge. The very night my daughter was winging her way across the Pacific to her Peace Corps assignment in the Archipelago Nation of Vanuatu. And so I'm going to read this because, well, I guess because she's there and I'm here. This was written when she was about five. It's titled Erratic Lunches. And you know the ordinary meaning of the word erratic. You may not know, you probably do, but you may not know that erratic is also the scientific term for those boulders that glaciers lie, leave around the landscape. Erratic Lunches. My daughter and I often climb in spring, summer, and fall a boulder just tall enough to frighten her, but small enough for her to scramble up its angles and edges. A glacier perched the larger erratic on that hill, other rocks of the same hill lie scattered thickly over the pasture high above a lake. We picnic on the narrow top, room enough for two, and watch the near farmer, harrow or hay his fields, or bolts plow the distant lake with fine white furrows. The boulder is roughly the size and shape of an elephant. On hot humid days, pestered by flies, we could pretend that we are in the tropics, but seldom do, or that the wind, which dries our bread, will take us anywhere but here. We see the yearly resident hawks hover in the wind and take sparrow, wren, cricket, mouse. Month to month, we watch Daphne and Radora give way to blue-it and yellow-rattle, which fade to hawkweed and steeplebush. Today's late August, school will take some of these times, and her horizons will widen, though this one's pretty huge. I concentrate on just this place and what she and I are doing in it, and try not to know too often how my words will echo through every landscape of her life. The crusty bread seems a luxury, as does our ease. I thought I might go, excuse me, back to Africa. The title of this, I won't explain because it's defined right in the poem itself. La churro, biking up a sandy road, still washboard from the short rains two months ago, and hedged by a fine-leaved shrub, the underside of each leaflet of which was heavily barbed, named in translation from Swahili wait a while. I tired quickly from the pitch of road and afternoon sun. My cousin, his three sons, and I entered the yard of a farmer my cousin knew, and sat on worn plank benches beneath the large Australian oak. We could look back down the steep shoulder of Mount Meru to the busy old Nairobi Road, or at least the hedge of dust that rose between the hedges. The farmer insisted we drink and brought us metal cups, cool with condensation. La churro, my cousin said, and drank large drafts. I tipped my cup and tasted sour milk with curds solid enough to chew, and looked to see a grayish whey with hulled corn at the bottom. My cousin was now spooning out of his like a fountain float. I tipped and chewed some corn for a hard swallow. As a child, I had drunk a cup of vinegar-sourced cream in my mother's pantry, large acidic lumps sliding down and right back up over jars and cans and flower tub. My mother's punishment twice mine, though mine was harsh. I sat in the shade long, finishing my treat. Bad etiquette to leave generosity half gone. Biking on, my cousin did not make it worse or better by telling me that la churro is made in gourds washed with cattle urine, a quite sterile fluid then cauterized with a hot coal. Milk, hominy, a mildly antibiotic plant to prevent the souring going too far are introduced and allowed to work. The gourds are kept damp, so evaporation cools the preparation and makes for a soothing drink if one is used to it. People favor this, he said, get used to it. It will be offered often at times the only drink. It was. I did not ever like the taste, but could drink the whey and clotted smoothness down to the maze for a thorough chew without a flinch in a land where people starve no compliment to me. My stomach almost always ate, depending on how much the drink had worked. Later that day, I hit a sand patch, clumsily fell, and rasped open my face, bare arm, and both hands on the hedge, painful in entanglement, lovely in the offering. Surviving bulls. The whitewashed walls were smeared with blood the day the bull rampaged inside the barn after escaping from its pen. My father gave my brother and me each a stout stick to block exits and hoped we didn't have to use them as he beat the bull about the stable floor, bloodied its nose, dented its ribs, as the bull had done to my mother when it pinned her to the ground in the pasture and rolled and butted her about. He'd then gone in the barn with the cows and she managed to crawl beyond the fence where we found her sitting when we came home from the fields. I had once had a young Jersey Bull turn on me. In the muddy barnyard, he came from the side, lowered his horns, and bowled me over cleanly, and two of his three feet tromped me into the mud. I struggled up and he turned to come again. I pulled a fence post from the ground and laid it hard right on his crown. He went down to his knees, recovered, and fled to the woods with me in pursuit. And not until a half mile in did I notice I still carried the heavy post. A full-grown Holstein bull charged me once with no chance for escape. I jumped slightly as he hit, wrapped my legs around his nose, my arms around his neck, and gave a twist that took him down heavily but not too much on me and stunned him enough to give me time to run. My brother, not so lucky, was rumpled good by that same bull in an open field, held at the chest by the bull's head as the bull spun around, then backed up for more. But my brother sprung behind the lone utility pole and after a short savage dance the bull walked off and my brother, breathing painfully, walked home. The snap once broke on the nose ring pole as my father led an airship bull to breed. In the tight enclosure, the bull knocked my father about and down like a skittle peg. But he rolled under a high enough board and got away with a bruised leg and an unwanted lesson in maintenance. My father had taken nothing out on that bull, but this day he gave the bull who knocked my mother down a hard and useless lesson. After it all, he called the commission sales to come and get the bull while it still stood and gave my swollen black and blue mother the check to cash and spend in town, but she just put it by. I hadn't planned to read this one, but since you mentioned that cranberry bog, I thought I would read in the cranberry bog. The large cranberry plants arch over the water close to the run flowing from beaver dams above and slowed to a channel through the sphagnum flats which stretch like fields toward the open water of the remaining kettle pond. The peat moss lays purple, orange, over brush root hummocks, often topped with small cranberries like carnelian beads, but they are not the crop I'm after. Moose paths, voles, and lemming runs, crisscross the sedgy quaking bog, which often sinks enough beneath me so the water almost over tops my tall boots. At the most quivery places, I gingerly sidestep not wanting to break through to whatever muddy soup, whatever black water room the vegetative mats float above. The large cranberries often grow thickest around grade cedar stumps that line the dank banks. I stoop each by each and the berries come to hand, hazy, but are finger brushed to a deep plum color as they rattle into my pale. Doll's-eye berries of dogbane seem to peer over the scene. Two berries and seeds lie in piles by rodent nest entrances to small halls in the drier hummocks. I've knelt, picking, looking close like this in Labrador, where each tiny hillock moss topped through which dewberries push is a small tableau in late August of a New England round mountain in mid-fall. I'm surrounded by a number of the latter this gathering day, but knees wet, hands cold, senses startled. I focus on the miniature scene and feel delight as large as if the part were the hall, as if there were a hall. The boy whose braces stole the show. For wonders, his classmates couldn't compete with a boy whose braces could pick up radio broadcasts who could receive weather reports and music and news from near and far. His dentist said it was rare, but not unheard of, that it was like a crystal set he had built as a kid to listen to Dodger and Red Sox games. The boy's father said you could unhook that one and this one was damned inconvenient. His mother said she wished it would stop, a wish shared by his teacher, but not for the same reason. Often in class when talking of times tables or ancient history, the new rock and roll would come out, making suggestions and requests that we boys and girls were ready to follow and answer. He couldn't be sent to the hall for something he couldn't help, but she would ask him to shut his mouth to muffle the sound a little, though his jaw amplified it fine. We called him Hi-Fi, he wanted sci-fi, but a nickname he wanted was more generous than we were willing to be. Sometimes a communion, unseed speakers would talk to the priest or songs the church band would begin, but his mother would send him out. Usually the stations were local, old tombs and hardware ads, but sometimes if conditions were right, 50,000 watt stations in Indiana or farther still would reach him, made him seem directly a part of a large world we despaired of ever touching in any way. Then just when girls were getting interested and interesting, when he could be his own record hop and DJ, when he could say this song's for you and almost mean it, it ended. His teeth were straight. When he opened his mouth to speak, he had to be thinking of something like the rest of us had to try to speak from the heart a remote enough place, but sometimes his high, tinny voice seemed to be coming from more distant places still. This poem comes from a book titled The Immigrant's Contract, which is really a series of poems that accumulate to one long poem about a French Canadian immigrant that I met in his old age who by then had lost one leg to what he called a sugar. And among many things he'd done, one was build carts. He'd been a horse trainer to also build carts and he couldn't repair them anymore, but I would go up to his shop because he asked me if I would repair them and he'd come out and talk on the platform while I was down in the shop working. And so he had gone down and worked on the Art Deco hotels as they were being built in the 20s in Miami Beach. He'd gone out to Alberta and the teens and driven 10 horse teams. He'd driven dinosaur bones out of the Alberta Badlands. He helped build canals in Maryland. He helped build Jay Peak ski resort. He helped real electric put up electric lines. He helped build dams up there for electricity. He went into the woods a number of times. He cleared, he was on the surveying, clearing teams between the United States and Canada when they got caught in a hurricane and used car salesmen and so quite a fellow, an extraordinary ordinary man. And this is just one of the poems that, and as you go along the titles are just parts of lines, so the title of this is Dance Halls, but that's just a part of this line. Dance Halls acted as a pressure valve for much of those times. One woman stood out like an ember in ashes. She drank and I didn't mind it at first. Husky voiced and leaning into me hard had a face that had menned mirrors. She'd come on all storm and stockings and jumble me along like no river ever did, though they might have. We danced at the continental on the waterfront of our long lake stretching up into Canada at Grandview over Island Pound, the Shadow Lake Pavilion, the boulders at Willoughby and other small Dance Halls stuck in the woods or along back roads. The big ones were on the Big Band Circuit, Dorsey, Webb, Tatum, Shaw, the Count, the Duke and the King of Swing, all the royalty of that day arrived on the better passenger trains after hours riding past our forests and farms for what must have been small potatoes, but we feasted. We knew they'd started in New Orleans, brothels in Chicago, gin mills, and the move to ballrooms and Dance Halls made them okay for society. The radio and radio, where we mostly heard them, a distant sound of dreams that even the tall floor model receivers couldn't make big enough to seem near. On stage, they still had enough of the work and grind to carry us places we wanted to be. Why the sound of one of those bands must have carried out through the open doors and over the water and border the 30 miles to Magog, past Owl Head Mountain and Horse Head Isle, even the monks at St. Bonoite du Lac must have gotten a certain swing in their singing, the low moan of horns suggesting something closer than they wanted. Sadist or cornmeal eased the slide of feet. One man said, I've danced on that floor many a time, but I've been on that floor many more, and many a face slid all the way down, drink and hands everywhere, dizzying the head and air. I never drank, never wanted the puking and headaches, though the forgetting had its attractions. Laying the immediate pass down like overripe fodder to be burned and spread like potash. The first time we coupled, she flipped me on my back, on a lake kept caught and slid down on me like a one-fingered glove, but when she moved, the tightening and relaxing felt more like a Chinese finger puzzle and no hurry to figure it out. She laughed and topped long after, but in the morning she looked like black worry and had her own time figuring out where she was, then why she'd slept there. I'd marry her soon enough for our trouble, the camp long since tumbled and crumbled off its cedar post supports. The flood gives a mill worker a holiday. When the flood came, it sounded like all the clocks in the world hurrying. My grandfather used to yell at us to get to work, but his bellow was nothing like the roar of water taking out the bridge and there wasn't any work anyone could do to save it. It sounded like all the steam trains were coming back through town when the mill's heating room went with hisses and belching as the whole structure calved off the rear of the great white building like one of those icebergs breaking into cold water in a National Geographic special. Only the flume of flood spray on abutments and foundations washed more human shores. The guy at the hardware store gave away most of his shovels, but there wasn't anything to be shoveled in front of all that water. The flood matched through town with all the trimmings of a circus parade, gingerbread porches and roofs like fancy wagons and a fine collection of the town's wires like tinsel and ribbon. The men on machines trying to clear some various dams or bridges were doing some kind of high-wire daredevil wing walking act they didn't get paid to do. We used to get hired to clean up after the circus trooped through town and we thought all those mounds of elephant dung were too much, but it was nothing compared to the muck and ooze the river left as one swath of stink. I found out the river took Ms. Johnson right off her porch with her own big tree. And there was a time as a kid when I would have paid a quarter to see her, my teacher, taken just that way. But I'd pay a lot more to have her put back in my house too, but there's no damn ticket bunch of here to take that money. Maybe I'll end for at least for time with another new one and then open it up for any questions that anybody might have. Excuse me. Marbles in the garden. My boy pulled grass from the edge of our elderly neighbor's asparagus bed while I pulled mint from the middle and yanked the long tightly rooted runners back through the irises to the small patch of mint his wife planted in the kitchen garden 27 years ago. The boy dug with an old trowel in the path. Inches down, a marble popped up and he kept digging without telling and found 16 glass, stone, and pottery marbles. The last rare because fragile. He carried them up to the back porch where the old man sat and showed him. I saw them talking as they sat on the harness repair bench the old man inherited from his father. The man and his wife never had children. They built the house 63 years ago, ordered it from Sears and he assembled the cataloged puzzle. In the den behind the window, the man, the window that the man and my boy fronted, of course Sears sits in a box. The wife took it off at the end of their 25th anniversary day and set it on a shelf. The day she died, the man went in the kitchen off the back porch stuffed rags around the doors and windows blew the pilot lights out and turned on every fixture of the gas stove. After seven hours, hardly sleepy, he turned them off, took a hole to go out and carefully weed peas. The man fingered the marbles, his rough hands polishing off the haze of soil and age. He has the same patina and ran them back into my boy's hand with the click, click, click of strand pebbles in waves. Thank you very much. I'd be happy to answer any questions anybody might have. The second last one, what flood was that? There were certain ones, but that was sort of a generic one. But that was actually based on the story that the elderly man sitting on his father's bent told me. He had actually. I'm curious about the thousands of programs you've done with kids. I'm struck by the joy in your work and the humor again. I'm wondering what is it about doing those programs with kids that keeps you inspired and doing so many? What keeps me inspired about that is just the good work that comes out of those writing workshops. The kids do wonderful work and they're enthusiastic and teachers are amazed. I mean, it's not just me when writers go to school. My elementary school in Northwest Ohio was a witty year elementary school. And I can't help now but think, maybe this is why I'm drawn to poetry. And I just want to mention that part of poem city, if folks have not been to them in Monacoa, there's a garden of plywood constructed flowers that were built by Montpelier high school students. And poems attached from East Montpelier elementary school, both outside and in the program section. Wonderful. Reading kids' poems. And there's a program on the 22nd that kids and poetry. It's a wonderful thing. I just wanted to say that Leland, you have been in my classroom several times. And it was remarkable that poems and children would write. And I also like to write poetry. I have a poem in one of the windows. Wonderful. But I think having poets in my classroom inspired me to write poetry and inspired my students to. Good. It was a wonderful experience. Yes. Would you share a little bit about how you came to writing poetry? What brought you here? I began writing poetry in the fourth grade because I was reading poetry that I liked and so I thought I'll write some. I was also reading kids' novels and I thought I'd write those too. So we had that cheap arithmetic paper. I was in a one-room schoolhouse, grades one through eight, 18 students. So Albany, Vermont. And so we had those lift-top desks and so my desks were always writing downhill because they were stuffed so full of my writing. And I'm glad I don't have any of those left. And I thought I was very serious then and I just kept being very serious. In the poem about the boy with the braces, is there any truth in there? Yeah. It is. I mean, if you know about crystal sets, it's just the imperfections and the lead glance or galina, whichever you want to use, that crystal, and you just need a battery. You just need to find needle and find those imperfections. The battery only amplifies it, and the crystal that's receiving the radio waves. Baseball team. I have several plans about hotel names. The one I'm thinking of is full of all the town characters. Yeah. Maybe they all are, but I'm wondering if that's in this collection. It is. It is. The men I played among, you're thinking of, I believe. Oh, okay. Yeah. Would you be willing to read that? You can hardly adapt, can't you, man? You have to remember which collection it's in. Good man. That's my brother. The men I played among, the town team ball, the coach said, they hate you and you hate them, and that's the way we like it. Ty Cobb himself never ran with sharper spikes, though fleeter, nor more willing to use them and brush back pitches with a rule of law. I was the youngest just out of school because they needed a lead-off hitter. Our catcher was the oldest, a farmer with a milk run and his hands in spring training would still be cracked from winter's dry work and the smack of the ball in his mitt would split the left open to soak the leather and run down his arm. No harm, he'd say. He was slow on the bases and quick on the ball. One outfielder liked to play shoeless, had since childhood, so naturally everyone called him Joe, though his name was Ernest. The balls were dicey, but flies in play were his. The first baseman was a home run hitter. Once at the fairgrounds, he struck one into the distant horse barn and thunked a groom who knew who'd hit it instantly. The man had played semi-pro ball locally when crowds were large, thousands when full-sized diamonds were as common as commons. In one of those games, he'd hit two homers and made a leaping catch to save it all. Said I could have had the whole damn town for 15 cents and didn't have to pay nothing at all for the women who lined up after. The shortstop was as bold-legged as Wagner with little of the prowess, but few tried to take him out at second on a double-play ball. The pitcher was a tall man with a great beer belly that swung like a counterweight to speed the ball home. In his mouthpaw, he looked as his arms started around as if he could set the ball in the first baseman's mint and then it came home at such an angle he might as well have thrown it from the foul-line light pole. The man who played right and batted clean-up had played for the 15-miles team the two years it had taken to build the dam. They'd imported ringers for the battery. He had to be good all the way up the middle, he said. The version for the men had to be good because they worked hard and died two in the river, two in the dam. By God, we never lost a game. Coach had fought in World War II, played with a demagio in Iran and Iraq, played day and night games on the airfields as they waited for runs or for damaged planes to get back. He talked of great players who had gone excuse me, who had gone and come back or not. He rode me hard to hit the high hard one. I played for years and quit young quit before they did who on the field were not men or boys but ball players hard and fast who knew the rules and cut no one any slack, not even themselves none of whom died young, none of whom died happy. Here's a Roosevelt dime and Indian head nickel short change. Are there any poets you are especially inspired by? Poets that I like a lot? Yes, I like Philip Levine's work very much because he writes a lot about work and I think that's a neglected subject in poetry because it's so central for our lives and so I admire his work very much and come back to it and back to it. I like Randall Jarrell's work Robert Lowell called him the most poignant poet of his generation and I like his work very much and I like David Huzzle's work very much because of its recreation of the Virginia where he grew up and so it's a similar concern with family and landscape and plays. Do you remember what poets you liked when you first studied reading poetry? Rudyard Kipling, I thought he was great! A lot of action, he could write action and so, yep, you got your gongs all and remember very clearly some of those first poems, yeah every one just fine. Well, I thank you very much for coming and as I said there are some books back there and if anybody wants to sign I'd be happy to sign a book as well so thank you so much for coming.