 Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to get us going here this evening. I want to welcome you. My name is Steve Gold. I'm the president of the board of trustees of the Kellogg Hubbard Library. Welcome to the 13th annual evening at the library. This is an opportunity to recognize a distinguished Vermont author and to raise funds for our wonderful library. We started in 2006, and our first honoree was Catherine Patterson. I want to read you the list of all the honorees that we have had. Beginning in 2006 with Catherine Patterson, in 2007, Reeve Lindberg was our honoree, 2008, Tom Slayton, 2009, Chris Bogalian, 2010, Howard Frank Mosier, 2011, Chris and Nancy Graff. 2012, Mary Azarian, 2013, Archer Mayer, 2014, Howard Norman, 2015, Ed Coran, 2016, Rowan Jacobson, last year, Ellen Brian Voight. And this year we are delighted and honored to have Major Jackson as our honoree. It's wonderful to see so many of you here this evening. I know that virtually everyone in the room in one way or another is a supporter of our wonderful library. We're an independent nonprofit organization. We're extremely indebted and grateful to the six communities that support us with their tax dollars, Berlin, Calus, East Montpelier, Middlesex, Montpelier, and Worcester. And we want to thank you each for participating in tonight's fundraiser and responding as many of you do every year to our appeals. In every sense, we really are a community library. We enjoy taxpayer support, donor support, business sponsorships, and tremendous volunteer support. In fact, with all of the financial support that we get, the library would still not be able to function were it not for the tremendous core of volunteers that work to make this place the wonderful place that it is. So thank you again for joining us tonight. I'm going to turn the podium over to Tom McCone, the executive director of the library. Thank you, Steve. Am I correct that the speaker in the other room is working now? Okay, we didn't have that on the beginning. We were wondering why people were still talking over there on the food. You notice we have a new setup this year. We counted the seats and we can actually fit more people in this room than we could fit before the fireplace there. Those of you who are fans of the balcony, I'm sorry. If any of you are at the balcony right now and you're wondering what's going on, we move down here for the first time in 13 years. But anyway, it is great to have all of you here. I want to start by thanking our sponsors for this event. We thank them in a few ways. And this is quite a list, but I don't read all of them. So, library sustainers are Everett Insurance, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and Kinney Drugs, library patrons, Dennis Ricker and Brown, National Life Group Foundation, Union Mutual, VSECU, Rich Cassidy Law, Gossens Bachman, Washington Electric, Northfield Savings Bank, and Calmont Vedvages. Library Friends, Bear Pond Books, Union River Animal Hospital, Mail W. Johnson, Martha Lang, Century 21 Jack Associates, SNR Services, Broad Lane Financial Management, Father Gil Segali and Valley, Community National Bank, Concept 2, Main Street Dentistry, Main Street Family Dentistry, Bonton Gourmet and Capital Copy. So, those are our sponsors for this event. Also, all of the folks who are working here tonight, all the businesses have given us discounts, which helps us also. And, of course, Greg and Gretchen of Bonton are our caterers. And at the bars, we have Sweet Melissa's. And the musicians are Eero, Sekerra, I got the right thing. And Tom Morse, and Colin McCaffrey did the sound system for us. When Colin left earlier, the other speaker was on. So, somebody must have turned that off for us. So, I also want to thank the Kellogg-Harvard Library Board of Trustees. We really have a wonderful, very hard-working board, 13 members on it. They are extremely dedicated. I've worked with a variety of boards over the years in a variety of places. And this is really an exceptionally strong board. And they do an enormous amount for us. And would you please thank our board of trustees? I also want to thank our staff. A lot of them have put in quite a few volunteer hours to make this happen. As you can imagine, this does take a lot of planning and a lot of work to get this ready. And to clean this up again after it's tonight and get it back into shape for Monday morning. So, we also depend on dozens and dozens of volunteers. We have a lot of volunteers for this event. We have over 90 people who are regular volunteers for the Kellogg-Harvard Library. That makes an enormous difference for us. We'd never be able to do as many things as we could do without all of those volunteers. One more, thank you. And I'm getting close to the end of my list of things here. But also, I want to thank Rachel Seneschal, who coordinates this really large undertaking. Board members are going around selling 50-50 raffle tickets. We'll have the drawing after major's presentation later this evening. If you haven't already visited the non-fiction room, we have the silent auction going on out there. There's a lot of new things this year, very interesting stuff. That will go on until about 9.15. So if you haven't been out there, you still have a chance to go out there afterwards. We also have an art exhibit, both upstairs and downstairs, titled Water Landing. This is photography by Linda Hogan and Rachel Seneschal. So getting close to the major here. So to introduce our honoree this evening, we're pleased to have the award-winning poet in Montpelier High School English teacher, Karen McCann. I guess some of you have heard of her. So Karen, who received an MFA from Warren Wilson College, is the author of Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes, which received both the 2013 New Issues Poetry Prize and the 2015 Vermont Book Award. Karen has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Vermont Arts Council, and others. Please join me in welcoming Karen McCann. So Tom gave me 10 minutes, and I plan to use them, so buckle up. It's not every day we wake to find a Vermont writer in the style magazine of The New York Times. But yesterday, there was Major Jackson, with 31 other impeccably suited men amid stacks and piles of books. The article is titled Black Male Writers for Our Time. It begins, these 32 American men and their peers are producing literature that is essential to how we understand our country and its place in the world right now. He sits in the front row among such luminaries as Cornelius Edie, Yusuf Komenyaka, James McBride, Gregory Pardlow, and Kevin Young. The article celebrates their, quote, extraordinary period of artistry at a moment of significant national divisiveness. If you all in the back could poke your neighbors to listen up, that'd be awesome. I mean, not for me, but pretty soon. You sound plenty loud in here, but in the other room, it's not so loud. So I should yell? Yeah. I mean, I can. You're a teacher. That's true. No. OK. You can't even hear it in the other room. Really? Oh, jeez. All right. Just send a chain of pokes down through the doorway. I know you can. I've taught your children. And while Major Jackson is a luminary figure in our national literary landscape, I want to focus on the bright star he is for us here in Vermont, which is what brings us to the Kellogg Hubbard Library tonight. Where outside the stars bless us with the light similar to that of our men of the hour. The first thing I remember Major Jackson saying to me years ago was, I'm easily distracted. We were talking at a dinner, and I was wearing a charm bracelet that caught his eye. This memory is funny to me, but it also opens a window. I think it's the job of the poet to be easily distracted, to look at the world and see everything at once, to be distracted from a single vision into a vision of multiplicity, into playful ways of seeing. Major Jackson's poems exhibit serious playfulness. His poetry ties us to narrative moments and intermittently opens into the lyric moment. His poems zero in on images and unexpected detail. His language shifts and shifts each phrase fresh and transporting, and musical beyond compare. Major takes seriously his teacher Sonia Sanchez's charge to see the world for what it is. His poetic eye is loving and discerning, lifting what he sees into celebratory prayer, even when his project is to lament. Major's poems report back from everywhere, from city bus stops to the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, from regret to new love, from Greek islands to Cocoa Beach, from basketball courts to mornings in bed, from Philadelphia to Addison County, from disappearance to witness, from regret to utter ridiculous joy. There's his acclaimed brilliance on the page, and there's the work he does behind the scenes as an editor, organizer, and critical friend. I have been lucky to work in community with Major in a writing group that sustains me like family. About our work together, pro-et Kristen Fondal reflects. Major could easily devote all his time to his own craft and his considerable gifts, but instead he nurtures community and connection for his fellow poets and writers as well. Speaking personally, his welcome and editorial insight have made a huge difference in my work. I'm sure this is true for many others. Ultimately, his legacy will not be only his own words, but also the words of many others who found encouragement and each other because Major Jackson believes in bringing people together. Though he is adamant, this is me talking now, though he is adamant that he is just another poet in the group, it is true that it is a gift to watch his mind at work. His longtime friend, poet Elizabeth Powell, adds, Major is a force behind our poetry community, what we lovingly call the Vermont School. His generosity is a kind of sunlight that invigorates, shines his luminous intellect, brings people together to share their best selves. Seeing him makes me smile, his friendship is a joyous feeling, uplifting a blessing as are his poems, his benedictions to the world and life's urgent questions, which as a poet he lives into deeply faithfully. He and his work emanate a musicality of vision that scores the human experience. He lets me know that poetry can save us, that he is devoted to that precious truth, and out of that makes a kind of beauty that is rare and moving and full of an exuberant humanity that reconciles the world to the world and each of us to the other. Poet and novelist Maria Hummel shares this, Vermont likes to celebrate its spokespeople in national politics, but Major Jackson can certainly rival them with his highly regarded, longstanding poetic talent and vision. Not only has he elevated Vermont letters with his own work, but for years he has brought many poets to Burlington, i.e. most recently Sharon Olds, Ed Hirsch, Kevin Young, whom we otherwise might not encounter. He is a keystone figure in our literary community. His reading series at the University of Vermont, the painted word, in 10 years has presented 62 programs featuring 82 poets, intermixing local and national poets as well as students of poetry. Of the series, in celebrating its 10-year anniversary, Major writes, all of the poets helped shape the next generation of literary readers who understand a free democracy is contingent upon a belief in language to express our most profound observations and beliefs and an important means of documenting our lives in language that is fresh, memorable, and generative, but moreover from all parts of the human family. The work of poetry is indeed to save us and to transport us, to bring us into uncharted territory. Two years I brought Major Jackson to read at Montpelier High School. In the capital city schools of the second whitest state in the nation, our black students struggle to see themselves in their schools and community, to see local role models, to see who they can become. They don't feel represented by the curriculum. That day, Sparks flew in the audience as he read and because of his stunning reading, a young girl finally saw herself on a Vermont stage. And because of a racist incident between her and another student in the audience and because all our black students got together at Montpelier High School, our Racial Justice Alliance was formed, the group that worked to raise the Black Lives Matter flag at Montpelier High School and to fly it, yeah, and to fly it in the words of one young woman, until we feel like the American flag alone represents us. After his reading, Major lingered in a packed classroom and shown the light of his life story with my kids. He gave them advice, he told them stories. He met them where they were and elevated them with his warmth and candor and good humor. He remains a legend at MHS. Students regularly say things like, remember what Major Jackson said, or it's like in that Major Jackson poem where, or didn't Major Jackson read a poem about that? Or most recently, hey, Ms. McHaddon, I saw Major Jackson in conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates at UVM. And Major Jackson talked to me after that. You should have seen the light in that young man's face. Major Jackson was born and raised in Philadelphia, where he pursued his degree in accounting at Temple University. In the late 1990s, he joined the Dark Room Collective, an organization that gave greater visibility to emerging and established writers of color. Major Jackson is the author of four books of poetry, including Rural Deep, Holding Company, Hoops, and Leaving Saturn, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. He is the editor of the Library of America's County Cullen, Collected Poems, and Renga for Obama, a book-length occasional poem composed by almost 300 poets under his direction to honor President Obama. Among countless other honors, he is the recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushkart Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter-Binner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in American poetry review, Kalalu, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Plowshares, Poetry, Tim House, and has been included in multiple volumes of Best American Poetry. He has distinguished faculty at New York University, distinguished visiting faculty at New York University, core faculty at the Bennington Writing Seminars and teaches at the University of Vermont, where he is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor. Major lives right down the street from me in South Burlington, Vermont. In the life work of a poet, one of the great tasks is to simultaneously keep your voice, but also to reinvent it. I find his third book, Holding Company, to be a work of stunning change. A collection of 10-line poems, the restriction forces him away from story and into moment, into fragment, and the resulting poems feel like sand castles to me. Constructions that are unbuilt and rebuilt again within the arbitrary boundaries of constraint, but resulting in imagined spaces that are for their short moments exactly and only what is real. I'm gonna read one to you. Roof of the World. I live on the roof of the world among the aerial simulacra of things, among the faded, the old tennis shoes, vanished baseballs, heartbreak, gridded with dirt. My mind flickers like lightning in a cloud. I'm networked, beholding electric wires and church spires. I lean forward and peer at the suffering below. Sautre said, man is condemned to be free. I believe in the dead who claim to believe in me, says to the missing and forgotten. Day darkens on, I hear our prayers rising. I sing to you now. Please welcome Major Jackson. I'll take an introduction from Karen McCann over a photo shoot in the New York Times style magazine. Any day. Any day. That's pretty wild. So this is a huge, huge honor for me. It is a stunning, a stunning to be recognized as a member of this community. And by the way, I'm just gonna let you know, I'm not gonna be up here long. I'm gonna let you get to the dumplings and the cheese and the wine. And I just, I thought about this. I'm just going to kind of talk about my gratitude for this community and I wanna talk about the role of libraries in my life and development. And I wanna thank a bunch of people and I'm gonna read a few poems and walk you through. Yeah, that's a good idea. Walk you, maybe read a few poems and then in the night so that you can hear, I think there's music too. So first thanks. I wanna thank Tom and Rachel and the Board of Trustees for this enormous honor. It is definitely coming behind people like Ellen Bryant Voigt and Chris Brogillian and previous other honorees to join that particular list is the honorist in itself. So thank you very, very much. And thank you all for supporting Kellogg Hubbard Library. When I moved here to Vermont, I made a decision of course to live in Burlington. But then when I came down to Montpelier, just on a whim, one Saturday and visited four bookstores in a matter of like, I was like, I moved to the wrong city. I should be commuting north. It's not too late, that's very true. Is there a real estate agent in the house? Several. Five, so at least, right. So I wanna thank the Board of Trustees and Kellogg Hubbard Library stands along with those four bookstores as a pillar of this community. I also wanna thank Karen and my writing community who are here, my wife, Dee Dee and Liz Pau and Kristen Fogdoll is here and Angela Palm and Micaiah and Jeff who are also here and Cliff. Just people who are emblematic of the kind of Vermont ethos of people. I feel like to live in Vermont, there's some sort of secret interview process that happens that brings people who are like-minded here and that's just fantastic. Growing up in Philadelphia and if you are familiar with North Philadelphia, then you have some sort of vision of the community of which I came and for me to my development as a writer would not be for the Columbia branch of the Philadelphia library as well as the central branch when I was in high school, but as a young kid who, and let me just say I'm sure many of us have these particular stories about libraries, but the library for me was the place that I went to because I didn't want to go home and I know libraries serve that function for many kids in America and it hasn't stopped serving that function in addition to other kinds of function. There were people there who I met older and younger who geeked out on certain areas of the library. You can always find them. It also didn't hurt that there was a young girl who went to my school that would hang out there at the Columbia branch of the library. So please continue to do this. Please continue to gather around what I feel to be an institution that is of vital importance. You never know what young writer you are helping to support indirectly by supporting a place like this. I now, as an adult, get to geek out with other people. Montpelier is special to me because it's also the home of two institutions, Vermont Humanities Council and Vermont Arts Council, of which I've served on boards and I want to thank Peter Gilbert, who's been a friend and in a way a bit of a mentor. That dude has a lot of knowledge and I feel like I need to model that people like George, who's here, whose voice I miss on the radio. Someone who, when I came here and listened, found definitely a kindred spirit and we've met over the years to kind of talk about books and poems and music. So, and I also want to thank my son, Romy, who's just starting high school, who's giving up movie night to be here and he's a reader, he's in between books now. He just, I said, what are you reading now? He said, I just finished Beowulf and so we need to, we need to find him another book and so thanks to everyone who's here, Karen Middleman, who's new to the community and Amy Cunningham and my former board colleagues and current colleagues for both VHC as well as the Vermont Arts Council. I'm gonna walk you through some books. Fortunately, I've only published four, so it'll kind of be short. This first book is called Leaving Saturn and I did get a degree in accounting at the Fox Business School at Temple University but we don't have this now anymore. There's something called electives. At University of Vermont, we have students who as soon as they come in, we have them programmed to take a number of classes and maybe they have one or two. But electives allowed me to find my love again of literature. Most of my credits that weren't in the business school were in the English department, so much so that my advisor asked me to, if I wanted to get a double major. In the 90s, that was unheard of, you minor, but you didn't double and having spent six years in undergrad, I was thinking, I think I'm done. I can't stay another year to get a degree. But most of my poems, I found myself as a poet during those undergrad years. And my teacher, important teacher who's still a mentor today, is a wonderful American poet named Sonia Sanchez. So I wanna read a poem from the first collection, Leaving Saturn, about, and this, you can thank Romy for this. I asked him, what should I read? And he said, read the poem about the guy that walks around like he's driving a car. And when I was a kid, there was this guy named Steve who was meticulously dressed in floor shine shoes and he wore them down because he walked around the neighborhood like he was driving a car. And this was a source of amusement for me and my friends who would see him turn the corner and start walking downshifting and speed up. It was really funny. And the guys would ask him what kind of car he was driving and the girls would sometimes ask him for a ride. This is called some kind of crazy. It doesn't matter if you can't see Steve's corvette, turquoise colored, plush purple seats, gold trim rims that make little stars in your eyes as if the sun is kneeling, kissing the edge of sanity. Like a Baptist preacher, he can make you believe. It's there. His scuff wingtips ragged as a mop shuffling concrete could be 10 inch Firestone wheels. His vocal cords fake an eight cylinder engine that wags like a dog's tail as he shifts gears. Imagine Steve, moonstruck, cool, turning right onto Ridge Avenue, arms forming arcs, his hands a set of stiff C's overthrowing each other's rule, his life body and head snapping back, pushing a stick shift into fourth, whizzing past Uncle Sam's pawn shop, past the stop and go. Only he knows his destination, his limits. Can you see him? Imagine Steve, moonstruck, cool, parallel parking between a pacer and a pinto, obviously. Now let me just say, when I read that to high school students, it goes over their ass. You know what a pacer is, and you remember the pinto. That's great. Parking between a pacer and a pinto, obviously the most hip, backing up, head over right shoulder, one hand spinning as if polishing a dream. And there's Tina wanting to know what makes a boy tick, wanting a one-way trip to the stars. Weed the faithful, never call him crazy, crack-brained, just a little touched. It's all he ever wants, a car, a girl, a community of believers. Ooh. So this next book is called Coops, and most of the poems in Leaving Saturns have to do with my childhood in Philadelphia. But this next book, and I wrote that while it was at the University of Vermont, no that's not true, University of Oregon, the other progressive space in the U.S. But then I arrived here, and I instantly started into this book called Coops. And as you can imagine, Coops is metaphorical, of course, and I was fortunate enough to be invited to spend a summer at Robert Frost House in Franconia, New Hampshire. And that was great, it was the summertime, though, and what the board didn't tell me that while you're living at the Frost Place, there might be visitors, because there was a huge sign off the street that there was going to be a Frost House. Off of Route 91 that announced the next stop, Robert Frost House, and it was a bit of a wonderful experience to see people walking on that beautiful porch and walking around the land, and then they went peeking the window and see me. I've arisen to dawn at the Frost Place. I've jerry-rigged the desk by the window, overlooking a trail. I'm the new face of mountain poetry. Tourists come and go, off hours, though, interrupting my ego's pursuit, a lasting chamber for my soul. The worst is when I munch a bowl of frosted flakes pacing in my briefs, and the right curious family peers in, they visor their foreheads, disbelief creeps across their face. I am the old man's ghost, as were 26 beforehand, summers we come to haunt the porch, as Billy Matthews put it, to scorch off Morning Fog, which I poke with my pen and swirl, it gathers cobwebby-like round thoughts I curled and write to their end. The broccoli-toped trees I see down straight after that to Route 93. Tourists abound this time of year. I wish I could install on deck. I've not the word for what they're called, one of those standing, boardwalk binoculars requiring a quarter that opens a shutter. Then suddenly the ocean's particulars are as intimate as your face. Buttery midday light they see, my mind sputtering to complete these stanzas stacked like bricks or mornings when I am my own exhibitionist, catching me in the mirror, dancing nude or toiling my hands or stirring brown sugar in my tea. In any case, my back rudely to their probing eyes, wide as a rugala. I'd hang a sign, beggars disallowed or peace god or shh poet at work, to really back them off, beware of jerk. And then the third book was, well after two books you get tenure and you just kind of chill for a minute. But then the third book was written, not here in Vermont, but at the Radcliffe Institute in Harvard which was formerly the, what's the name of it before then? The name would come to me, but I wrote, decided, I was writing narrative poems and they were pretty long and then I decided to give myself this exercise of only writing 10 line poems and just to kind of figure out how shape and space works. This is a poem called, Prayer. Let me live in the luxury of my friends, like the neatly folded shirt of a carry-on. Look what we've done to the bees, they say, terrorists of silence. They return to the place of battle and aim their show guns. Their handwriting detonates in libraries. They torture the hairless ears of lieutenants. O, my allies, they're valiant songs. I huddle silent and insatiable, like a spider in the corner of their studies. Three more poems and this one is called, Why I Write Poetry and I've been teaching at NYU New York University for 10 years. Every Monday or Wednesday I fly down the first flight on JetBlue. Get a haircut because there's not black barbers in Vermont and go to museums and then teach and then have dinner with family or actually with friends and most recently my son Langston. And then I get on the last flight back to Vermont. That first flight leaves around 5.30, so I'm normally at the airport by 4.30. And if I haven't gotten a good night's sleep, I will sleep on the plane and normally I have a jacket and I normally buy a window seat. Occasionally I'll have a very awoke neighbor sitting next to me and often if that's the case the neighbor will ask, so are you going down for a business? And I'll say yes and then they'll say, what do you do? And if I feel like talking, I'll say I teach. And if I don't feel like talking, I tell them I'm a poet. I can start sleeping that normally shuts down the conversation. But this one morning my neighbor asked me why? Why do you write poetry? And I had no answer for him. I was really mad and frustrated at myself. Something that I dedicated my life to you to think I would have a off the shelf reason to explain why I gave up accounting and all the money I could have made instead of teaching and writing poems. So when I arrived at my office at NYU I started this poem. I didn't finish it there but I started it. Why I write poetry? Because my son is as old as the stars because I have no blessings. Because I hold tangerines like orange tennis balls because I sit alone and welcome morning across the unshaped jaws of my lawn. Because the houses on my street sleep like turtles. Because the proper weight of beauty last night, because the proper weight of beauty was her eyes last night beneath my eyes. Because the red goblet from which I drank made even water a Faustian toast. Because radishes should be banned, little pellets that they are. Because life is ordinary unless you plan and set in motion a war. Because I have not thanked enough. Because my lips moisten whenever I hear Mingus's goodbye pork pie hat. Because I plant winter vegetables in July. Because I could say the morning died like candle wax and no one would question that truth. Because I relished being sent into the coat room in third grade where alone I would run my hands over my cat classmates coats as if plain tagged with their bodies. Because once I shoplifted a pair of Hawaiian shorts and was caught at the gallery mall. Because suit reminds me of the warmth of my grandmother and old aunts. Because the long coast of my dreams is filled with saxophones and poems. Because somewhere someone is buying a Rolex. Because I wish I could speak three different languages but have to settle for the language of business and commerce. Because I used to wear paisley shirts and herringbone sports jackets. Because I better get it in my soul. Because my grandfather loved clean syntax, cologne, Stacey Adam's shoes, Irish tweed caps in women but not necessarily in that order. Because I think that elderly or sexy and the young are naive and brutish. Because a vision of trees only comes to wise women and men who can fix old watches. Because I write with a pen whose supply of ink comes from the sea. Because gardens are fun to visit in the evenings when everyone has put away their coats and swords. Because I still do not eat corporate french fries. Because punctuation is my jury and the moon is my judge. Because my best friend in fourth grade chased city buses from corner to corner. His father could not stop looking up at the sky after his return from the war. Because para-taxes is just another way of making ends meet. Because I've been on a steady diet of words since the age of three. And I'm going to end with this poem called Mr. Pate's Barber Shot, which is back in the first book. And Mr. Pate, this is kind of a crazy story. But Mr. Pate was my neighborhood barber. And as far as I knew, he didn't have any kids. Because a lot of the kids in my neighborhood would, believe it or not, congregate with the old men who hung out in this barber shop to get out haircuts. Mothers would drop off their children because they knew they were good hands in this community's, what amounted to a community center. Anyway, Mr. Pate would occasionally pay us quarters or dollars to sweep up his floor. And when I went off to college, I would still come back to him, because I was still in Philadelphia, to get my hair cut. And he always had a story about one of the kids in the neighborhood and what happened to them. And this was in the era of the crack era in North Philadelphia. And so normally, the stories wasn't good stories. Normally, and I watched him every visit, he seemed to get more somber and somber telling these stories about kids that I grew up with. And I wrote this poem years ago. This poem is older than my children. And recently, I heard from Mr. Pate's granddaughter, no, daughter, who wrote me, who heard this poem, to say thank you for honoring my father. And I thought, when she said that, I thought he was not alive. Turned out he's still alive. And I'm happy to read this poem in the spirit of community and how places, even if they're not libraries, are very, very important for a sense of civic communion. Mr. Pate's Barbershop. I remember the room in which he held the blade to my neck and scraped the dark hairs, foresting a jawline, stacks of ebony's and jets, clippings of black boxers, Joe Fraser, Jimmy Young, Jack Johnson. The color television bolted to a ceiling like the one I watched all night in a waiting room as St. Joseph's while my cousin recovered from gunshots. I remember the old Coke machine, a water fountain by the door, how I drank the summer of 1988 over and over from a paper cone cup and still cannot quench my thirst. For this was the year funeral homes boomed. The year Mr. Pate swept his own shop for he had lost his best little helper to cross fire. He suffered like most barbers suffered quietly. His clippers humming so loud he forgot Ali's lightning left jab, his love for angles, for carpentry, for baseball. He forgot everything and would never be the same. I remember the way the blade gleamed fierce in the fading light of dusk and a reflection of myself panned inside the razor's edge wondering if I could lay down my pen, close up my ledgers and my journals if I could undo my tie and take up barbering, where months on end a child's head would darken at my feet and bring with it the uncertainty of tomorrow. Or like Mr. Pate, gathering clumps of fallen hair at the end of a day in short, delicate whisk as though they were the fine findings of goat dust. He'd deposit in a jar and place on a shelf only to return saddies, collecting as an antique dealer collects, growing tired but never forgetting someone has to cherish these tiny little heads. Thank you. I'm sorry you stopped. I think I could speak for everyone in the room that would love to hear a couple more if you would grace us. It's early yet. We have plenty of time. Do you think you could find one or two more to share with us? I was giving you guys getting you off the hook. Thank you. I appreciate that. Well, it's winter. And as you can imagine, this is a state full of writers. But winter is probably our most productive time because it's dark and we're by the fire. Here's a poem. This is called, Rembrandt took the best selfies. It's my turn to wrestle light out of this blur of death. It's my turn to dignify a gilded frame with an imperial profile. What has left of me like a cloud? What has left of me drifts like a cloud curling above a village spire? It's my turn to isolate evil like the barbed wire of a fence post. Behind my grim stare is jubilance, which never grows old. Below this feathered hat is the first morning of man. All canvases are temples to my bright exhalations. I welcome your vigils. Think not of looted countries. Think not of the tyrant's clammy grasp of your hand as he guides you to his first pimple, nor his unethical single pill of a hard-boiled egg, which is a faint performance of ego. He's preparing to eat your babies. That's my political poem for the night. I'll end with this. This is from a series called Urban Renewal and it'll appear in the next book. It's called The Valkyrie. And it is a winter poem. The land nearly erased. The mountains flee. Another arctic blast of snow falls on the peaks, concealing that panorama which first bewitched my breath. Where now and across the valley, wind gusts kick up land clouds, akin to silvery explosions tripwired by some aimless deer whose timid motions break into a sudden sprint across a logging road, then up a gnarled hillside of saplings and dense trees. Slow wars within begin this way, a vaporous fog from which I've sought a path out of the monologue in my head. I've no true friends, my verse mediocre at best, a white captivity of rehearsed caustic thoughts that mist in layers and blinds reason. Then reversing my iceberg mind, always her, with that voice, bright as a cardinal in campfire hands leading me past glacial snow piles. Everywhere icicles collect like daggers. Sub-zero air cuts through, harsh as Wagner's The Valkyrie. I've survived blizzard nights, both of us refunding Earth's stolen daylight. OK, thank you. OK, it's time for the drawing of the 50-50 raffle. And Romy Jackson has the honor of giving us the winning ticket. I'm going to put on my glasses to make sure I get this right. OK, it is a, as you can see, it is a yellow ticket. Sorry, you blue folks, you have the blues now. The winning number is 6-5-7-7-9-7. Once again, the winning number, 6-5-7-7-9-7. Jackson says, what is the winner of our 50-50 raffle? And I have $192 to present to you. Thank you all for supporting the library. So I'm going to wrap things up here. It sounds like I don't really need to do that. I want to thank you once again. Thank you, Major. The auction remains open until 9.15. Enjoy.