 Good afternoon Can you hear me back there? Welcome to today's poetry reading in honor of National Poetry Month The MSU libraries has scheduled a series of poetry events and we're really fortunate to have with us today Montana's poet laureate Greg Pape to read his poetry for us Greg's visit is thanks to a collaboration among the friends of the MSU libraries the friends of the Bowes and Public Library and Humanities Montana We really appreciate all the help from those groups in addition to this reading Greg will also read and speak about his poetry this evening at Bowes and Public Library Beginning at 6 30 with a wine and cheese reception. You're all invited to that at 7 the reading will begin Yeah, it's gonna be good And it'll be in the large community room at Bowes and Public Library So just a little bit about about Greg before we start in addition to being Montana's second Poet Laureate Greg teaches poetry and creative writing at the University of Montana, and he's done that for 22 years Essentially, so we have a seasoned teacher with us. He's also published nine books of poetry for which he has won many awards and you'll see many of them in our Lobby display over in that direction. Here's one. I'll just wave in front of you and It's great to have him here because Greg has long been an advocate for Poetry and creative writing as a necessary and essential part of our education system and our culture as a whole So he's a real poetry advocate So I just like I just stop and let him start please welcome Greg join me in welcoming him to campus and to our community Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. I had a nice drive over from Missoula yesterday the roads were dry and Be happy about that. I'm going to start with a poem by a Poet other than myself This is a poem by Poet that I admire Lee young Lee from his new book behind my eyes And the poem is called station This is kind of the right place to do this Your attention, please Train number nine the northern Zephyr Destined for Rivers End is now boarding All ticketed passengers, please proceed to the gate marked evening Your attention, please train number seven leaves blown by bound for the color of thinking and Renovated time is now departing All ticketed passengers made board behind my eyes Your attention, please train number four the 20th century Has joined the wind undisguised to become the written word Those who never heard their names may inquire at the uneven margin of this story Or else consult the ivy lying awake under our open window Your attention, please the music arriving out of hidden ground and endlessly beginning is now the flower Now the fruit Now our cup and cheer under branches more ancient than our grandmother's hair Passengers with memories of the sea may board leisurely at any unmarked gate Faithful members of the foam may proceed to cloud and Veronica Your attention, please under falling petals never think about home Seeing begins in the dark Listening stills us Yesterday has gone ahead to meet you Your attention, please train number 66 unbidden song soon to be the full hearts quiet Takes no passengers Please leave your baggage with the attendant at the window marked your name sprung from hiding An intrepid perfume is waging our rescue You may board at either end of childhood Now that poem is I love that poem and Kind of a good start because I'm saying please give me your attention It's a lyric poem. It's a poem that is based on the analog of a train station And they're they're calling people to the Conductor is calling people to the train now. I'm going to shift up and begin reading here At the last line there you may begin at either end of childhood Well, I'm at the far end of childhood But I'm still very much interested in childhood and I think childhood is where The imagination the seeds of the imagination really take off and All of us before we have a good grip on the language before we have a good understanding of how we're supposed to operate in the world we we make up a world for ourselves with our imaginations and I think this is something important and something essential about poetry and I told myself I thought well, I probably if I'm going to write anymore about childhood I better do it now Because the farther away from it should get the dimmer your memory becomes But then I was talking to a friend of mine who's a researcher Doing research with memory and he told me he says The more you read and the more you write and the more you think and the more you imagine The better your brain is going to survive the longer. It's going to last the more things will work So I got charged up and I thought well, I can still write childhood poems That's a long introduction to a narrative poem Called blood and perfection We had just moved from a tar paper shed lit at night by candles and kerosene lamps With pastel pink and pale green bed sheets tacked up for curtains a tar bucket for a toilet To the new house Stan had built at the end of Avenue B What did it stand for I wondered better boy blood The house had a flat roof covered with glittering white rocks Lovered windows and a big fireplace of adobe blocks Stan had made of mud and straw poured into forms one by one and set out to dry in the sun My mother sang my blue heaven as she worked in the new kitchen She taught me to write my name in near perfect cursive and showed me how to turn a small frozen orange juice can into a bank That went full held exactly 50 cents. I Was learning about work and worth what worked and what didn't Having filled one small can with pennies. I needed another Miracles and catastrophes abound And in childhood they take on an especially personal tone When for instance, I set the small can with its frozen contents out in the sun to thaw. I Lost track of time. I Failed to calculate the chemical volatility of the hydrogen content in the concentrated juice of the orange. I Had other projects to attend to other explorations on which to embark The new bathroom waited with its gleam of stainless steel in immaculate white porcelain There was so much to consider so much to learn At that time, I didn't know and certainly couldn't spell most of these words But there was something old in me like a voice in the dark that exclaimed and Commanded in many tongues Hebrew maybe Latin English Spanish Chinese Bantu Choctaw and if I moved Through the moments in a reverie of concentration I heard words and phrases Behold Carpe diem mea culpa Though the meaning was unclear But the razor blades were right there Behind the mirror in the new medicine cabinet next to the pill bottles the toenail clippers And that strange in it my mother sometimes used to curl her eyelashes There comes an instant when the idea clarifies Like a black and white photograph in its chemical bath Resolving from whiteness through the gray scale into a focused picture I held the cardboard cylinder of the emptied toilet paper roll in my left hand And the razor blade carefully between thumb and forefinger in my right And I could see in the transforming fire of imagination that one straight slice Could turn a cylinder into a perfect rectangle What I couldn't see was that perfection was an idea rarely if ever accomplished Just as I began to pull the razor down in a straight line There was a startling The bathroom window was spattered with orange And the razor sliced through the cardboard Down through the fat meat in the heel of my palm And stopped at the bone Gorgeous The old unlikely word for altered Comes to mind now as the crimson clouds swirl and drain again in the porcelain sink And the thin scar I'll carry in my left hand As long as I have a body Is nothing but true In my My travels around the state as poet laureate I get to visit a lot of small towns and places And I've been trying to keep some notes and Make a record of my of my travels and This is a poem that came out of a fairly recent poem that came out of traveling around It's called lunch in lima Any of you ever been to lima? You probably had lunch in the same place I did then because there's only one place Occasionally a traveler may ask What's it like to live in lima montana? And the answer comes in the form of an old joke 10 months of winter and two months of company All along the bar the citizens bow their bow before their beers or coffees And give thanks to social security While the poker machine in the corner goes ping and pays out another hand with a one-eyed jack and a pair of fives There are faces in lima that look like the land The land around lima is mountains and pastures Pastures that resemble chessboards Cows for ponds horses for knights A bishop on a backhoe a bishop on a four-wheeler The queen is a hawk on a fence post The king is the board itself In checkmate to the land The sky is truly big But also heavy or light or furiously out of focus in blowing snow Most hopes are kept small to fit in the pockets of overalls the wind The wind is the wind Blowing a plastic bag A wolf's howl a rooster's cry A human sigh Dreams of antelope and cattle Exhaust of trucks and smoke from all the chimneys in lima Translating everything into its own ancient tongue But step in close the door on the wind Today's special at Jan's cafe is an indian taco Frybread smothered with chili cheese lettuce onion and tomato Jan herself will smile and offer free refills as long as lunch lasts And then it's goodbye Jan Goodbye lima and back out into the wind I think I'll read uh, I've got a bunch of these poems about traveling around, uh, Montana But I think I'm gonna skip over the the more dark ones and Head to one that is close to my heart This is called the spell of the bitter root and this is a poem about my home river the bitter root river and I'm uh I've been fighting a battle in the courts with a group of people that love the bitter root for the last eight to ten years and Having to do with stream access and privatization of the river itself the riverbed We took this fight all the way through the courts to the supreme court and we won and now The legislature has recently passed another bill that guarantees access at bridges so We are going to fight for this stream access law And it's it's going to be under attack from now on. They're going to be people trying to get around this law, but We're going to fight and we're going to win. We're going to keep the river for the people of montana This is called the spell of the bitter root our river runs north map-wise anyway But it has been ditched and diked rip wrapped and rerouted dredged and diverted channelized head gated and privatized in many places Portages abound And no trespassing signs hang from strands of barbed wire strung across braves This is not right But does the river care It just wants to meander take its own sweet time Trust in gravity and the tidal pull of eventual dissolution in the great peacemaking sea As verne and wilsey our deceased water master Who drifts now in that sea? Certainly well new Any shoring up or rip wrapping the banks will have consequences downstream Sometimes it seems history is simply a string of bad ideas Like lining the banks of the river with wrecked cars A pristine trout stream Sandwiched between two lanes of the stalled traffic of the dead But then fenders hoods and mangled grills Broke loose from the cables Batteries wept acid over the stones Headlights and windshields ground into a kind of sand And the sleek coops and sedans of lost decades Littered the bars and beaches Progenitor of the caddis and stonefly The midge and the trout Our river runs under the under the spell of anastomosis From the greek for opening Ana throughout and stoma mouth A mouth that won't stay closed A network of living vessels Veins in a watery leaf of earth Channels braids a continuous flow Of wild water Just as we do our river wants to stretch out and move freely in its own bed That's the rant part I'll shift now to a little bit different tone One of the things that I've been doing in my in this new book that I'm working on is Writing a few character sketches I like to focus on a certain person and try and Like a painter painting a portrait You don't want to get just what the person looks like but you want to get the feel of the person You want to be able to reach inside and touch the inside of the person as well So I think of this a little section in this new book As sketches and portraits And this is called lair and deer And lair is short for lair On the porch at wawona he would sit in his wheelchair and watch the deer He spoke with his clear eyes and his palsy body Did you see ginger today? Ginger was a doe Yes, he said by looking right at you and raising his eyebrows and stiffening his back Do you want to go inside now? No, he said Persing his lips and lowering his eyes For 30 years he was fed with a spoon and a spill-proof cup Sometimes he would choke and spit up like an infant When he had to go Someone had to go with him and hold him on the toilet and wipe him clean Sometimes he would sigh and smile the calmest smile When he was happy and excited he would kick his feet and wave his arms like broken flowers The deer came right up to him and ate the grain scattered at his feet And sniffed his knees and breathed with him in the early evening I'm not sure how long to go, but I think I'm going to read Three or four more poems Get it in you? Okay I have been teaching a long time And I started off as a teacher in Arizona. I got an MFA at the University of Arizona in Tucson And after I got my MFA I began working for the Arizona Arts Commission on the Arts and Humanities And I traveled around to Indian reservations and nursing homes and public schools all over the state Teaching poetry Encouraging kids and people of all ages To write and to use this marvelous faculty that we all have this imagination And to strengthen our connection with our imagination and language And in doing that we strengthen our connection with the world We make the community stronger. We we make more contribution We do good things when we when we indulge in poetry So I encourage everybody to indulge in poetry because it's in here. You're all poets This is called not like a dream of freedom and it's about teaching in a prison in Alabama women's prison The sun shines on everything On the museum with its glass portals in the ceiling Angled just so to take in only the north light On new grass pushing up through cracks in the asphalt On the waxed blood red hood of the Cadillac in the parking lot On the razor wire Spiraling along the perimeter fence of the julia tutweiler state prison for women Like an eerie visual music meant to clarify and insinuate the human potential for pain And the sun shines on the white laundry hung out to dry in the yard Where soon the buzzer will sound and the inmates will be let out to take whatever measure of freedom They can still dream with their lunch of beans and white bread And then after lunch a few of the women will go to poetry session And when that's over Angela will take the poet aside The first man she's seen in months who wasn't a guard or a shrink And read him the poem she wouldn't show to the group He will carry the poem with him Not like a dream of freedom That was Langston's poem Unless shared in common like sunlight and like air The dream will die for lack of substance anywhere No, not like a dream of freedom But like a secret hurt told Given into a stranger's care Three more uh when I began to write these poems about memory I didn't stop at early childhood. That's where I started Early childhood and I worked my way up and and the the working title of this new book is called a voice of first things And I was trying to get at First crucial or important experiences and this this one is called peaches All right, I say the word peaches and everybody gets an image Right, we all have we all have uh our associations with the word peaches Would you all say the word peaches for me? Peaches peaches It's a great word, isn't it? It's a cool word and you know the first thing that happens is we we imagine I do anyway those yummy things that we eat, you know peaches. I like peaches And especially fresh peaches But in addition to that Image of the taste the flavor of the feel of a peach the smell of a peach We also have stories surrounding the notion of peaches, right? You can get your own uh, I'm going to read you a poem about one of mine. Okay, and this is also about uh Adolescent work experience. It's called peaches those mornings rising from sleep before dawn in Fresno To drive down highway 99 And that old yellow pickup my palomino To work in the peach orchards outside kingsburg Were briefly cool and glorious as the sun began to rise And I sang lines and phrases of songs burning through the static on am radio Ride sally ride And the wind cried marrying I love you suzie q And go ask alice dissolved into I can't get no satisfaction The morning was a woman who might have loved me If I didn't have to go to work Even the dark eyed beauty with the sunny cleavage and basket of grapes On the sun made raisin sign outside the packing houses at selma Seemed to look longingly right into my eyes But when I pulled into the dirt road beside the ditch And parked my truck next to the other trucks All the men smoked and stared at their boots As ruben the foreman explained the workings of the new mechanical peach harvester And his plan for the day We would grip the limbs with hydraulic arms Throw a switch and shake those sweet feminine peaches out of their trees By nine the sun was hot And the air was thick with dust and peach fuzz The hydraulic shakers made the peaches fall like softballs on the padded bleachers That fit around the base of each tree Then the peaches rolled onto a conveyor that dumped them into a bin Sometimes the shakers broke a limb Or snapped off a branch that whacked one of us in the head We tied our straw hats on with twine And wore bandanas over our faces like train robbers When mercifully the machine broke down We knew why It had rattled its own bolts loose Just as it rattled our teeth and jarred our bones We would lie down on the ground exhausted Hoping ruben would have to go to town parts And there in the sudden quiet of the orchard Looking up through the leaves and voluptuous Slightly swaying peaches touched by glints and filtering rays of sun I heard the voice of Dao Chen How I long to rise in thin air and ride the wind in search of my own kind Then the engine started up again and drowned out the voice of Dao Chen And then I heard the voice of Ruben Two more After work, what happens after work when you're young Um, party time Party time There was a time when the days could go anywhere Bouncing like beads of mercury Freed from the confines of a cylinder Used to measure an aspect of the weather After the glass broke and the party was over Someone had to clean up Gather the shards, run the vacuum, dampen a page from the newspaper Wipe the floor Many days those bright toxic metallic spheres Those small sparkling fragments that could cut through flesh Got lost of their own volition Others seemed to bloom suddenly out of the soil of Anhui Or take off like a sentence in search of a new verb And then the party was on again Someone I recognized as myself Was down there in the crowd at Playland Shuffling and bouncing to the beat of the Grateful Dead A woman dressed in a flag introduced herself as Turtle And offered me a brownie The music lifted me through iridescent fog Flew me like a kite And lay me down below the banks of speakers Bookending the stage where I gazed up at the flames And fret sparks issuing from Garcia's fingers Whatever I was then Reverence to reverb I was full to the brim and overflowing The doors to perception banging in the wind Someone off in the distance waving calling me in And the last poem is based on some research I was doing You're probably not going to believe this story, but this is a true story I was doing some research for a prose book that I'm working on And somebody said you should go on Ancestry.com And so I got on I paid a little bit of money and I went on Ancestry.com And I had some information about my family tree and I started putting in this information And on Ancestry.com it will give you your family tree and it will just keep going back As long as you can find as long as there are connections And I was able to go make it across the big water into England And then I just kept going I spent about three hours following this family tree And it turns out that Lady Godiva was my great great great great summer I didn't think you'd believe me This poem is called Aunt Godiva I didn't want to call her grandma. I just want to call Aunt. Okay Aunt Godiva My great great et cetera Aunt Godiva Was a modest Compassionate woman full of kindness and respect for her poor neighbors Stripping the gold foil from a chocolate and tossing it We may imagine a naked lady on a naked horse But before we bounce and jiggle off through the woods to the next thing Let's consider her motivation Old feudal Duke so-and-so her husband Decided to fatten his purse on the backs of the poor folks who worked the land Remind you of anyone? Aunt Godiva pleaded with the Duke to give them a break Here's the deal the Duke who must have been really full of it himself said Okay, you ride that big white horse of mine Nude as a toadstool Naked as a nestling through the whole of the village in broad day And I will rescind the tax And by God she did it Not a villager out of decency and respect for her Parted a curtain to watch her proud ride Except that one bastard Tom Also, most likely some distant kin of mine. Thank you very much Thanks so much to Greg for coming and joining us and sharing his poetry and thank you all for coming and hanging out with us And please come at 6 30 this evening and we'll hear more poetry and hear something about the slow poetry movement I believe is promised I want to give special thanks to Sandra Brug with the public library and to Pam Schultz of our library For their help in doing this and thank you again everybody. Happy national poetry month. Go and write something