 Hi, my name is Noah Warren, and I coordinate Launch Pumps with Geoffrey G. O'Brien. It's my distinct pleasure to introduce Shane McCrae this afternoon. Shane has published seven books of poetry in the past ten years. I'm gonna let that sink in. It's a prodigious output and a testament both to the power of his vision and his country's appetite for it. These inventive, pained, and masterful books are line by line the record of an ongoing search for a usable past, for a present aware to but not paralyzed by its burdens for a habitable future. Even as each book strikes us with novelties, a theme, a form, and character, we recognize their continuities of sound and style. And perhaps the most characteristic feature of McCrae's verse is the effect he's perfected of imperfection. By which I mean both that flaw in the human condition and in the grammatical sense of an action whose end is unclear and may be ongoing. In his first book, 2011's Mule, he writes in lines remarkable for their motion and their curious stasis. We married in an open field, a wide and open field, a field of wild and running horses, a field of horses running through. We married in an open wide. His lines feel like they've just been written down. Which is to say their allegiance is already split, torn between an effort to capture instant by instant change and the instinct for control that print indicts. You might have heard the tightly wound, dynamic rhythms when I quoted, what's hard to capture in speech or the various ways he's developed to interrupt a standard pentameter line with spaces and slashes, or to overcharge it so that the ear is always in tension with and often outrunning the eye. McCrae's poems often feel so addictingly propulsive that we barely notice the ways they rephrase themselves as they develop. His characteristic needle skips stage the simultaneity of forward motion and its revision as it passes into history. In those lines from Mule, McCrae marries in an open wide, a space of possibility foreclosed by its absolute passness. His most recent book, Sometimes I Never Suffered, flags in its title a paradoxical time only imaginable through the condensation of McCrae's language. A corner of heaven where a recurring speaker, Jim Limber, Jefferson Davis' adopted Milano's son, is sometimes able to forget his suffering. As such, the book is frequently concerned with gaps and riffs in memory where the particulars of terror have been scrubbed into brightness. These emerge as the book's various violent or lobotomized heavens and represent on a larger scale McCrae's forceful imagination and defense of a space just a little outside history, a haunted fiefdom of the imagination. It's a space and a time that much poetry often has in mind. But one thing I find so remarkable about Shane's verse is how gaps and pauses open at the smallest level, at the line at meter, flower into the American cosmogony he is now built across his past three books. Like Dante and Milton, Duncan and Mackie, he's married a structural firmness of vision and conscience with the freedom of imagination and the fluency of alert language. It's a mode with risks, most vividly, that disconnection from the actual should untether poetry from the earth and allow the reader to ask why. But this is one of McCrae's deep themes, an exploration of how our embodied experience controls what we can imagine, even as the cordon of imagination allows us a space to repair, however tentatively, our experience. His purgatory, his hell and his heaven are riven along the same lines as this nation is. They challenge us to see how both whiteness and blackness feed on and generate unequal mythologies. McCrae, with his divine theater, creates an arena where these mythologies can be crumpled together. And at the site of that crumple, that nexus, we find inevitably a mind waiting for us, a perspective and an experience waiting to speak itself into being. Jim Limber, or a hastily assembled angel. This is intersectionality as a cosmic principle. Shane is the recipient of too many awards to list here and an assistant professor at Columbia. Please join me in welcoming a powerful poet of the human and the divine. Thank you, Noah, for that introduction. And thank you again and thank you, Jeffrey, for putting this together and thank everyone involved for making this happen. And also all of you for coming. So I'm going to read for about 30 minutes or so. When always feels one must apologize if I'm going to read that long, but I'm going to try to not apologize, but just know it's in my head. I will apologize for how bright I am. I'm using my phone to zoom because I've never had my phone freeze, whereas it happens in my laptop all the time. So anyway, everything I'm going to read is in some sense new. I'm going to read from groups of poems that I'm in the midst of working on right now, and also from recent poems from my next book. So I'm going to start with a group of poems that is, I guess, I'd like to think I'm in the middle of working on part of the number. And this first poem is called In the Ditch where the camera finds my body. I'm splashing in the driveway in a ditch in which a corpse of rain has gathered here. A corpse is gathered. Wearing nothing, a full diaper, I am three. A clear sky leans as if upon a bar upon the house and everyone in the picture, my grandmother, me, I am. The rain comes down. My mother's parents have just kidnapped me. I am the corpse in which I play. I'm dancing in the court. The clear sky sickened, watching but with no clouds in the sky, the sky can't move away. Behind me picking flowers my mother's mother sees. The green has fled the leaf. Oh reader, listener, stay. You are now evident. And this is called Something Grand I Was. We must have flown. I don't remember flying. My mother's parents, me, a three year old, we must have flown. We couldn't have a food was going to drive the car from Oregon to Texas, Salem. That means feet to Austin. I think he was a soldier, Steve F. Austin. I see us sometimes in a C-130, a military plane, but big enough for us, our car and things from Oregon to Texas, Salem. That new seat. Too big for us, our car and things, but shouldn't it have been too big enormous? Something grand. I was being kidnapped. Shouldn't it have been impossible? 100,000 pounds of steel, aluminum and blood in the sky itself incredulous and mocking. Shouldn't a flock of birds have struck the props like laughter? The sky have shamed us then from its first part. This is, I always feel like I should be introducing things, but I also don't feel like I would say about them. This is after my grandparents kidnapped me. They moved to a new development. The only scenes I know are scenes my mother's parents thought to take pictures of me in the ditch. My mother's father in the yard before the fence was built before the lawn was fitted to the earth. Face like a face after a mauling. He is posing like a hunter in the dirt. He grips a hoe and kneels in the court called everywhere. A neighborhood is coming. Where an armed man kneels and grins, that man will build a house. This is, I mean, this is introductory information, I suppose. This is a sonnet, but most of the ones that have been reading it as well. This is explaining my appearance in certain pictures. In pictures now, I do not smile and didn't. Then I would laugh if I was being tickled. And sometimes one, my mother's mother would tickle me and the other would take the picture. My mother's father. And so sometimes I'm not smiling, but I'm laughing. My eyes closed and my mouth open almost like I'm screaming, but I'm laughing when I was a child. In pictures with my kidnappers, with one, my mother's mother, always. I am sitting most often in her lap, her arms around my blurred waist. She has me on Ritalin. And the trick is wait until the laughing stops. As the mouth closes, you can take the smile. I've got two more of these, the both sonnets. Two more from this group. Two more from this group. This is a window in the, well, before I say the title. I'm going to say the word GIF, not GIF, but GIF. Although maybe GIF, I don't know, but I'm going to say GIF. I always feel like, I always feel like I read this poem once before. I feel like if I'm going to read it, I should say that because I also feel like people are going to hear GIFT. So GIFT. This is called a window in the house from which I was kidnapped. The pale blinds rise and fall, a GIFT forever. The blinds move on their own. At first my father stands with the string between his fingers first and middle, pulling even after it tears into his fingers, tears the first and middle skin. Him pulling, letting go, his blood staining the length of the loop string nearest him. At first he pulls the string for years. Eventually he steps back from the window into the room. He steps back, doesn't turn now. He watches from a shadow in the room for me, his child to be returned to him. I see him watching from a farther shadow whenever I look into his eyes. The room is endless. And this is having been raised by my kidnappers. I consider the GIFT of life or a GIFT from a thief. A GIFT that disappears as it is given. A GIFT from whom whenever they give you anything, you have to ask them where they got it from. A GIFT that disappears and takes you with it. A GIFT for which you will not be forgiven. Whether you give it or receive it when my mother's parent kidnapped me. My grandmother that I would see my father again in a few days. And the big wheel he had given me. The GIFT she gave me then. And then for 13 years I did it. You must close your eyes for the GIFT. After you open it it's stolen, but it wasn't stolen for you. No one will give you who you are. So, two books ago. Wait, that's not right, is it? Yeah, it is. This book called the Gilded Auction Block. I guess it's two books ago because I have a book from now. I published a book called the Gilded Auction Block. It has a long poem in it called The Hell Poem. Which is part of a larger project that was constituted of poems from in the language of my chapter. Three books back, the Gilded Auction Block. Two books back and the entirety of Sometimes I Never Suffered. And in a sense that project is done. But I thought it would be neat and fun. And also because I couldn't choose to do anything else apparently. To continue writing sections of The Hell Poem. And these are in some sense alternate continuations thereof. Because in a canonical sense, not that I have a comment on what that would mean, but. Considering whatever that poem is, The Hell Poem, it's finished and it's all there. But these are all imagined continuations of or alternate versions of them. So they both are and are not. And I'm going to read three of them. And I should also add it's The Hell Poem is sort of a journey through hell or a journey deeper into hell actually. And the guide to the journey is this robot bird. Who is a servant of Satan. Sort of. It's complicated. Anyway, this is the robot bird tells me how it is I am in hell. My name is Law. I do the work. The boss says he created me in the however long it was between when Cain crushed Able's forehead with a rough and the first drop of blood hit the ground. I was the voice of the blood crying out to God. You know, the thing in the Bible, God says the voice of thy brother's blood cry unto me from the ground. That shit happened. I was a baby all fucking falling and shit. Yeah. Anyway, I say that makes Cain killing Able. I say that makes Able poor dickless Able the first human and the father of all humankind. But the boss he says different. He says it's him, the boss for making the murder possible and he's not philosophical like me. He doesn't have to be but he is sure as shit. He's fucking he's smarter than me. Smarter than you anyway. So listen, a couple weeks ago, we got a fact. You think there'd be a phone in hell? Fuck no, we fact. So anyway, we got a fact about you shit for brains and said you would be coming down and the boss wanted you to get a tour. At first I thought it meant the boss down here because you know, he's the boss I think things mean. But then I heard him shouting and breaking shit in the throne room and I realized it meant the boss. And as as this dawns on me, he stomps out of the throne room sees the I don't know the joy of knowing what's going on for once flash in my eye or some shit. He's fucking. Next thing I know, I'm guiding your slow after health, but the boss doesn't want you to know you're getting special treatment. So if you see him, keep your mouth shut. Oh shit. Don't look at me like that. I know you're not breathing. It still works. What I think is if Abel's not your father tainted after all he had the big rock and how many times you think he saw his dad kill anything by crushing its head, not many right? Nah man, an arrow in the heart. And by the way, that's what God gave you by telling Adam he could name the animal. God told you where their hearts were. Adam never missed the shot. You might think this sounds like bullshit. But he was using a gift God had given him. So killing was like prayer for the cane. He looked able in the eye and saw himself, not in his brother's heart, but in his head and crushed his head. And yeah, where else do humans start? Cain named the animal in Abel's head. Um, I maybe should have introduced that in some other way by adding the next book that I'm going to publish is called Cain named the animal. And lately I've also been filled with, well, I'm always filled with anxious energy. I've lately wanted to point out the forms the poems are in. And so that was in quaterines. They're unrhymed quaterines. Blank. I am a tetrameter. I don't know if there's any reason to care about that, but that's what it is. This is blank. I am big pentameter triplets. Are they triplets if they don't rhyme? Not really, but that's what it is. And it's called the finger and the ditch. It uses the same characters, but they've moved on. I mean, that last one was just sort of a, you know, the bird telling the unnamed journey or through hell who the bird is. This one, what happened immediately before this as the, is the bird and the unnamed journeyer do into center of a mountain from the top of a mountain, top of the mountain. The bird had transformed into a large robot by this point. And the bird of course survived the jump fine, but the person on the way down because they're invisibly tethered to the bird, they're cut in half by the tether is attached to a belt that slices them in half, but doesn't kill them because they're already dead. So they grab their legs as they're falling into the mountain and they pull their legs back up to their body. When they land on, when they actually finally land, they're completely liquefied. Well, their bones, their tibias shoot out of their shoulders. It's a thing. So, but then after they liquefied, because they're in hell, all their parts return and they are reconstituted and it is the terribly painful thing. So this poem starts right after that. It's called the finger and the ditch. After my body splattered back together, or it was splattered back together by a hand or force, I couldn't see a love. I couldn't see a cruelty, re-nerving my body for more suffering, the robot bird rolling its clattering shoulders bark. If you've got bones and nerves and blood in you, why aren't you moving? And again I felt the cord, I couldn't see the cord that bound me to the bird, the cord that only minutes before had severed where it tugged me now, my upper body from my lower body, tugging me forward. Though the bird stood still, tugging me forward like the mechanism in a tape measure that erases as it winds the tape back in the thing the tape had been unwound to show. The cord had ripped me apart to show me no escaping hell. A love of the suffering of others put me back together, love stitched me together with a steel needle like a bowling pin, invisible just like the cord, just like the love. And the cord dragged me to the bird, I fell in the dirt at the first tug and the cord dragged me to the bird bouncing, a stone skipped on a lake, the puffs of dust, the puffs of mist my body would make, if it were skipped across smooth water. I stopped at the bird's feet, the robot's feet, and coughing raised myself, my palms on the dirt, first to one knee, then to my feet, you sure you still got human lungs, you fucking sound like a coffee grinder, grinding sand, one hard jerk at a time. The robot barked the bird, barked its beak, its beak opening and closing like a plastic head, Tyrannosaurus head on a plastic stick, operated by a child who uses it to grab small objects of foot and a half farther from him than without the head, its sharp tooth, small tooth, jaws, feet, and reach. The robot barked then squinted barked, fuck you, then turned around, but just before it turned it looked as it had looked the morning we met. On the blue calm, sudden lake that was the gate through which I dropped to hell, the robot, a gall, I first thought tumbled from the sky, as if it had been thrown into my rowboat from heaven are so hard from hell it seemed to fly before it fell. It staggered as it stood then squinted first at the lake, then me, coughed, fuck you, follow me, and flew off popping. Couldn't you, and followed it to hell. Now the bird walked. I didn't try to chew. I followed it to the verge of the boiling mountain that boiled as if it were a lake on fire. The surface of the mountain, the fir trees that leaped and sank like drunks on headless bulls, the bodies only, also leaping, sinking, spirits that can't see hell is riding them and leap to bucket, thinking hell is men and sink beneath its weight and leap again. The bulls beneath the firs and rocks like boots and snow in the dirt and in the dirty snow, maintained at the summit by enormous loud machine so hot they melted almost as soon as they made it flesh colored. They made of infinite flesh tone, no snowflake was the same color as any other, so they all melted and flowed down the mountain together and collected in a ditch at the verge through which rolled plants that looked like tumbled weeds but red and made of vein. The water shivered as the mountain boiled. The ditch was narrow. I stepped back a few steps then I ran a few steps forward and I leaped across it and the mountain boiled more furiously in the stream of flesh toned water flowing from the peak at once flooded its banks and all the mountainside at once was covered and the mountainside at once became a face but featureless and sweating off its skin. And I stood ankle deep in the skin and turned to the robot bird who hadn't leaped barked before I spoke. What did you think would happen asshole who told you to jump. Who told you to jump the ditch. The bird had been tugging his middle finger on its left. It's hugging the middle finger on his left hand as it barked and now it fits the finger off frowned and spat the finger in the ditch and the red rolling plants and the ditch turned blue and seemed to die. Stopped rolling just drifted in the shallowing tan water as the water retreated from the face of the mountain and became again a stream of melted skin trickling down the mountain. And the bird then stepped across the ditch. You got to pay fucker or somebody is going to have to pay for you. You're lucky that finger was worth ten of you. The water where the finger had entered chased the finger as it sank making a whirlpool where the finger thing that slowly widened it looked like a hole in skin bloodless but opening forever that would if it kept growing would in time can seem the ditch the mountain and all hell. The bird stepped forward and began to climb. So I have one more it's shorter of those homes about health. For some reason I just decided it would be cool to scroll right like way past it and this is called the mind of health. And it comes right up the line. My ankles turned the mountain sweat back rippling one inch to with each step I take waiting up the mountain, the brown sweat flowing down. Color of every skin tone merge eddies as if it were a mind of flesh deciding not a mind of water on a mountain weather deciding at my ankles weather to turn return to the sky beach light at the summit of the boiling mountain upon which no shade falls are gathered. The climb against the effortless fall to the summit from which light is wrenched like water from the stone by heat that vaporizes raw conflicting with the mind of hell that holds the rock together. Where the vapor and the will brought me the light emerges by which hell is lit that is not everywhere lit. Or to flow around my ankles down to the ditch at the base of the mountain in which the new sweat would not rise would not raise the level of the sweat already flowing but only thicken for a moment only slow the sweat consumed by uncontested people constantly in a constant market. A mind of water seeming almost the turn from being water not to flow down the climb to change its being as with each step I take I tear it. But I have lived the life on earth and step and step and watch the water for the shimmer I make tearing. Well, I've read those poems and now I wish I hadn't. But that's okay because I'm going to read other poems. Or maybe the bummer will be compounded by me reading other poems. So a couple of months ago I wrote this poem called hex and it's going to be the last poem I read. And I was really happy when I wrote it. I mean writing generally makes me happy for a particular kind of happiness. And I wondered, well, I first wished I could continue the poem but it got to its end and it ended. And then I thought it would be neat if I could do it again but it didn't seem like possible. But then a few days ago, it's a variation on the first line of pecs occurred to me. And I just started writing another poem. This is called hex because it's in blank iambic hexameter. But also the first one was, I mean, it was actually named after the barks that closed this album, hex. But it's now also called hex, hexameter. So I'm going to read, I've written three more poems that are after hex. And I'm going to read those and then I'm going to read hex. So this is newest one, which I just finished today I guess. And it's called after hex three. One's opportunities to be unhappy are one single most inherited. All other unit is requiring acknowledgement of pendant interest. It's a miracle to whom, what person, you're still alive. The city is an alphabet of numbers. It goes past 26 a sudden never ending in boundlessness, but once so short and narrow, you sang it as you smashed fully trains together that sneering green engine smashing into the blue engine that really smile how you, but how really you reverse nostalgia of the unfamiliar grid becoming home. All comfort is decay. You're sure is not a living thing, because it gets harder as it became more fatal where's that where there's less of it until it's gone and all at once not fatal. In Hills you once imagine green Hills cushion soft upon which you imagined you would lay a gingham blanket, a wicker basket, then from the latter pool of cartoon sandwich and a cartoon slice of pie on a white plate. Life apart the world except the slice itself is black, the dogs chew toy, your dog. It matches neither world exactly not the cartoon world you when you were a child imagine, and not the world, the wrong colors in the cartoon, the texture of the colors wrong. No life in the world, no life at all. But in the cartoon, it's too much of the world and all the life of the world, the plastic eye. All comfort is decay. And you have spent your middle life searching for the turkey leg the greedy wolf old laugh from the basket in the cartoon. After watching which your imagination then developed almost without your input. You've searched passively. It's true. You've sat at the dining table in the afternoon. And who are they with family. You want to say a risen, but you want to say they manifested like moaning spirits in a ball uncertain where you've got the image from everything's giving you sat at the festooned table in the afternoon, a bib from the red lobster and the heart of the next town over around your neck knife and fork in the other and lick your mall exactly like the greedy wolf, as if your hunger were a spell you passed on food, but never has the cartoon turkey leg appeared. The perfect golden turkey leg you've hungered for since you were small. When you first saw the golden leg drawn steaming in the picnic basket like a sword drawn steaming from the entrails of your enemies. This is after hex two. One's opportunities to be unhappy are both indiscernible and too big, like the gray wall of a gropeist and fond. And as you rise the wilderness from the campus long as you are helped up from the campus long, although immediately you kneel and broke for the shoe the building not from your now wet right but first as you rise, then as you grow. But then required to state your name and name the place, you think you will be able to distinguish your warm blood from the cold accumulation of the fog. But when you touch the grass. No, it's all cool. And this is second to last poem. I'm going to read today. And this is after hex one. One's opportunities to be unhappy are dynamic, ever expanding afford Mustang chasing the sun as it sprints panic to the western limit, which was the morning you first didn't think of the riot. And for weeks afterwards, and following what once had seemed and anybody would have said so seemed to have been a sequence of events and time and only to the intelligence. Now they scurry from one Nimbus to another down the block until they disappear in dark. Then they reappear in light, then disappear again in dark. And then finally beneath the next street light they disappear in light to whom what seemed to you a sequence was a sphere of time, expanding in a space of limit. And with walls at its own, in which objects are attacked, the space pays to what authority. The sphere of the riot for what seemed likely, but it was only minutes the sphere was conveyed the polished gem from hand to hand, one representative to the next, one party to the other, and the weeks of their competitive expressions of concern in the minutes of the rolling a golden coin across scarred knuckles a magician or a criminal, but both the coin a sphere in the space between two hands, a coin in the hand. Eventually, like bullets in America, the riot passes through our heads, and we forget the riot. Everything, what once seemed strange to you becomes your heart American, your heart's blood strange to you, hidden in you, the truest part of you, unknowable, a minotaur of the hidden God, who is not you, the God, not even of your own heart. This is my last poem. Thank you all again for coming. Thank you, Noah and Jeffrey for making it happen. In this poem about the pages long from letting you know ahead of time. And called hex ones opportunities to be unhappy are unlimited are limited, but only by one's own imagination, which is powerful, but friends is defenseless, but is limited only by things. As bark psychosis did it in music at the start of the new music hex itself the start of the new music after talk talk started it, who after this heat started it, who after public image limited, though john Leiden has since gone bad, or more offensively is we always will, who after public limit image limited started it, going bad, and not to mention slip, not to mention the American, Leiden and Morris be gone for our in America, America, for Trump or in Los Angeles, bad Morris was never new, except his talent was and Johnny Maher, and always the dead old art will suffer further life, if new artists, the very resist ability work to extend it. Though such artists must not seek to extend the dead old are, or they will fail, but must make only what they must make. And if it aligns with the dead, the dead will live again one day. Low string and cleaning dissonances when the strings ascend together sirens of the cops inside their wooden bodies, their brown body. Listen, first, the sirens come from nowhere in the world except for them, for them the sirens announcing nowhere, and then the lights from nowhere around the corner, red like an idea of fire, as the drums roll beneath the strings, a shopping cart from far from where it rolls beneath the city on a sidewalk in the day in the middle of the city roll beneath the city the strings from which the sirens come the lights that chase the sirens down and live as an idea of fire and nowhere no guitar, but space and stillness where guitars with stillness and space and a boy singing alone unhappiness in the midst of the raw world, to whom I would escape from the midst of the raw world. It's now oppressive stillness and it's windowless disease. It's timelessness. It's timelessness. It's nothing's happening in my life. I don't have time to wear to run from timelessness in the windowless room in the room in which you sealed yourself at the start of the pandemic hoping for more life, more time. As Bark Psychosis did it, at the start of the new music and made a sound to which one wonders from life and in which one wonders still having arrived, one's opportunities to be unhappy are unlimited, though often lately limited by the end of the world. But maybe the end of the world is ending. Maybe soon one will be in small ways sad again. One's opportunities available to one's attention. Liden, the horseman, winning himself on the fetid, floating horse, long since afraid to kick the spurs and pop it, but he makes an eager winning, hoping to sound ready. He is ready to be the last American. Winnie attack. Winnie. Hill's unfurl beneath him to the hill, beneath the surface of Lake Erie and the ice above the hill. That seems to constitute the lake from somewhere other than the lake. To be a picture of a dead lake, the surface of the thing, a picture of something else. How far we travel now to be in the now impossible presence of things to which we ride in life that touches and has never touched all things by anything, us, even in the life. How far we travel, we have traveled to, to watch the lake and moving from the parking lot, approaching the moment it, the moment was already in our minds accomplished. The long visionary gaze across the eye in the midst of which the gay, the ice infinite has no middle, no middle, but is made of middle ecum. In the midst of the gaze, the moment through which the visionary move, we will leave our bodies gazing or at least our minds for once won't trouble what we see. Such peace accomplished. We have known our peace accomplished on the drive to the lake, by the time we reach the lake we turned around already in our mind. Such peace accomplished and retreated from, except we part, except we gaze at the white expanse and sigh, not knowing which emotion demands the sigh, and the sigh leaves us. Staggering, a butterfly, our frozen breath as butterflies have staggered, you have watched that seemed uncertain where to land, upon which flower. You've watched a butterfly choosing, or if it wasn't choosing, still it seemed to choose a flower pattern like itself, or breath escaping in the haze of occasion you watchers disintegrate and do not recognize yourself. But I am watching, and I see you breathing at once. I can't see beneath the picture of awe on your face, the image of the visionary moment, and even if it isn't happening beneath the image, I forgive myself for feeling nothing, no visionary being you. And the hills roll beneath the surface of the lake. As Mogwai did it, no singing, but in guitar, and sometimes human voices singing keyboards sometimes in 1997, three years after heck, at the start of the new music, each guitar a wall and hammer bolt. If we forgave ourselves for making we have made, we would destroy what we have made before we'd let ourselves enjoy it. No, we won't release ourselves to joy with our forgiveness, never. And so we build a tower from the top of which we hope to reach forgiveness. Opportunities for one to be unhappy are unlimited. A pitch of silence in the everyday unsounding. One's opportunities belong to one, but rogue unhappinesses claim their midst in a consuming infinity that even now approaches you. As Inya did it, though you didn't notice. Listen, the songs are hit, but listening, the sure connection between all things become long. America, the sure connections fray in clouds at the Capitol, and those who scream they want you back have never seen you, and wouldn't recognize you if you think. And those who lie face down on the floor in the chamber, see the floor only. The woman on the other side of the door, wide eyed and bleeding sees no metaphor. Oh music, where have you fled? Oh music, who will make me? Thank you. Shane, thank you so much for next thing the IM to further life and for compassing so many kinds of terrain into your project. It's a great way to end this series of readings for 2021. We will certainly be back in the fall, although we will be remote despite this anguishing way embodied image that I'm not sharing the space with, because we need to make decisions long before we can never look up and we'll find take advantage of remoteness to really booked and great people who are far flung. I want to thank UC Berkeley libraries and our amazing audio visual team, and I really emphatically want to thank Noah Warren who's made the difference between theory and praxis and existing in coordinating the series. And I don't know who's coming next fall and spring yet, but I do know one of the people who's coming and that will be Noah Warren himself who has a book of poetry coming out from Copper Canyon of the complete stories. So we will we know at least one of our readers for next year. Thank you for supporting the series and see you then.