 Welcome to the Week in Corporate Poetry series sponsored by the Comparative Media Studies program, Comparative Media Studies and Writing program at MIT. My name is Ed Barrett, and tonight I had the pleasure of introducing one of my favorite poets, Charles North. Charles has quite a history of publications. I'm actually going to read from a piece of paper so I don't leave anything out. Charles has published 12 books of poems, including the recent Everything and Other Poems, which was a New York Times new and noteworthy book, What It Is Like, which headed NPR's best poetry books of the year, and the Innovative Baseball Poems Complete Lineups. It's one of my favorite collections. They're sly, inventive, imaginative, intelligent, and if I can even whisper the word entertaining poems, they're delight. Charles has also published three books of critical prose, collaborations with painters, most recently 11's with the noted New York internationally known painter, Trevor Winkfield, and co-edited the Poet and Painters Anthologies Broadway and Broadway II with James Schuyler. Charles has received a slew of awards, as you would imagine, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant, two NEA fellowships, four Fund for Poetry Awards and a Poets Foundation Award. He lives with his wife, painter Paula North in New York City. Please welcome Charles North. Thank you, Ed. This is something of a special reading for me, and not only because, as we were saying a minute ago, the invitation for it came three years ago and had to be canceled at least a couple of times, but it's a special reading for me. I hope this doesn't embarrass Ed, but he's one of my favorite people. And also, I was a longtime friend of Bill Corvitz for whom the series is named, so it's special in both, it's very meaningful for me on both those counts. I also have some connections to the area which I am allowing myself to mention, somewhere on the tenuous side, but they're meaningful to me. I'm from New York, but I've been a socks fan since I was eight years old. I went to Tufts and very, very briefly to Harvard Law School. My best friend in high school went to MIT and I had an elementary school friend who was the first person to get an MIT PhD in philosophy. I remember him doing algebra in third grade. This is an MIT student. Okay. Poets often begin with older poems and work their way up. I thought I would do something a little bit opposite just for a change of pace. And I would read a few poems from my recent collection. I'd mentioned everything and, which is the title poem, and other poems. And then if there's time, which I hope, I'll read a few older ones, which I haven't read in a long time, but that's fun to do sometimes. And I'm expecting it to be something like a half hour. If it isn't, I'm sure Ed will step in, give me a virtual punch in the nose. Okay. So Ed mentioned a collaboration that I did with my friend, the artist, Trevor Wingfield. We actually have a newer one called En Fasse, which came out last year, I think. But I'm going to read some sections from the book, 11's. My part is, I like to think of it as a longish prose poem. I'm not going to read it all. I'm going to read parts. It's in the form of a diary, but it isn't really, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. It isn't quite a diary. And it's all in prose. So this is from 11's, which name I like. Trevor's was born in England. And your 11's is your 11 o'clock coffee or a tea or pick me up in the morning in England. I've always liked the word. Okay. I'll read sections, skip around. This is the beginning, April 10 opening day. Though it's been proved time and time again that few things close entirely. Mouths, screen doors, seasons, parts, cases, bars, flies. I know, mines, plays, arteries, bookstores. June 22. The giraffe vendor stopped by and will come back later. He seems nice. Granting the difference between a wish and a forward gesture. Does a flashback constitute a new element rather than a celebration of continuity? Is it like taking it from the top in music? June 26. Speaking of names for new elements, what about equilibrium at 11 o'clock? Not exactly a solid, but by no means a gas. Can an emulsion be an element? Wittgensteinium? Strativarium? June 29. tedium, linoleum, hegemony, ilium, brooklynese, subfusk, semulacrum, granola, dopamine, onerarium, epithelamion, Byzantium, secretariat, incunabula, priludium, exon, saturnalia, rustolium, leaf mold, facture, plebiscite, lager, monadium, parsimony, sigovia. It's a long list. I'm stopping there. So I'm skipping ahead. June 30. You can lead a paper wasp to a coffee cup, but you can't know if circling the rose-colored rim has anything to do with the creative process, or if a rush of cool air storms a previously unacknowledged barricade. It is, after all, only two weeks to Bastille Day. Rattling the edges of everything except strictly speaking, what doesn't have any. November 1. Some ideas are nearer and dearer than others. The problem is how to make them permanent and not just souped up to the occasion. With the corollary that permanence is, to at least some degree, a function of souping up. Take the one about daylight, supported by nothing until you and I realize we're the ones chosen to carry it, along with the grocery bags, paper coffee cups, and a list of things that really should be done by lunchtime. Ideas that can't or won't adjust to the times gust into oblivion, but out so much as a blink. The seven civic dwarfs, half the bunkhouse, parricks and ferricks, the hotel to dream, the rooster crowing its head off, I'm scratching the surface. November 15. A smell of garlic, and the almost sun leans on a linden tree, affecting nonchalance. November 19. The silent E that looks back at you from the ends of so many words, though I have a suspicion it doesn't always do so happily. November 20. Hail green celery leaves, and the small whitish hearts that signify narcissism in the unmediated sense. But I only recently learned that narcotic has the same root, which might explain to some degree, those mornings when fog, for want of a better term, is unreleaved. What is the good life, apart from focus on what is good about it, for as long as that lasts, absent which the notion has so little content or connection to the conscious self, that the smallest breeze or grinding of bricks puts an end to it. Of course, horseradishes and turnips of hearts too, never mind artichokes, possibly macoon apples with their short season. Whereas the outer directed eggplants, carrots, kale, tomatoes, pumpkins, etc. live healthy and useful lives, reveling in monopoly, monopoly cards, as do cars and national flags. December 14. The day after being scooped out of its trough, mostly by hand, but with some heavy machinery too, was rolled out, tarred, cemented, and allowed to dry before traffic resumed its normal morning flow on both sides of Broadway and the other north-south arteries that define the west side. While it's true that names make navigating easier, it's also true that most are merely pasted on. Occasionally romantically involved with their subjects, but more often creatures of habit or even sheer impulse. This is the last section that I'll read in the last one from this piece. December 17, note from yesterday. The rusted water tank with a cupola and its imagined pendentives at 4 p.m. versus the screensaver when encroaching darkness is the last thing you want saved. One of the things a Bloody Mary clearly has going for it is the color. More too, of course, but the free-floating passion when used shaved ice a reminder of the frozen sea within. In contrast to the physicalist celery or explosiveness of Tabasco, red darkened upon red, touches more deeply than mere alcohol. Says you. Well, I do, I think. Who knows? Not the moon swirling in the clouds of its gray matter, or the migraine as sun suffused with an analytical cubism of meanings in color and not, like a fireball hitting a window paint. Part of what I think is that texture, grain, feel are days of the week and the formal aspects that used to count as bare bones reality scoop years from the lives they're glued to. There goes one now. Nothingness, the sinfonietta they all play in, pauses just long enough for space-time to get a word in. Before the sun dips a toe into the glass and the blood sprouts wings claws and a beak and pushes off from its high-rise perch for parts unknown to the perceiver who perceives the redness that is not before being blindsided by the redness that is. This is a pollen poem, shortish. The title is kind of stolen from Thelonious Monk. It's called Craper School with Paula. Does realism get your vote? It gets mine. The plants with their insatiable thirst for appearances. The heart-stopping 7 p.m. air, moonlighting, as a pressed cardboard Korean ashtray server, modest coaster, decorated with a single blondish branch holding six leaves and a piece of rose-colored fruit, pear, plum, bright peach, ripe peach, slightly raised as if applied to the flat, creamy space behind, collect with light gray, light green, and brown marks of varying size, from pin cricks to ashes, pencil it looks like to brush. The romance of the windowpains, I'm squinting a little, has nothing to do with the misguided view. The one with the fates schmoozing under the maroon awning of the high rise, schmooze as C.H.M.L.O. is more alike it. And the embarrassed-looking sycamores, revealing for all their worth, in their slightly fictionalized but emotionally accurate way, which contributes to the overall tone without detracting from the realistic participation. A motorbike taking the corner too fast, a cat knowing the worst that can possibly happen and managing to avoid it, which could be the key signature, if not for a freestanding radiance just outside, unmoored, a hint of plum or anju pear. The next piece is, I wrote for a poet friend, Ron Paget. It's called French licks. Licks, I guess, as in jazz riffs, at least they hope. I like the name of the town, French lick. There's another connection to Boston, Larry Bird, one of the old-time great basketball players, which I remember was in my head when they wrote it. So it's a bunch of quite short pieces that I translated and put together in what I hope is a whole. Who knows? Ron Paget is one of our great translators from the French, so I did this with some trepidation. I had never done any real translating before. What do you want me to say? But it's so Picasso, Gaston Le Roux, Carco Giraudu, Admiral's Unsure Leaf, the Guillemets Museum, Schools for Everything Under the Sun, Aragon, Saint-Ex, Gertrude Stein, Fuel Oil, People Doing Business Deals, Soccer, Reiner Maria Rilke, Everything I Can Possibly Think Of, Leon Paul Farg. At one end of the bridge that squashes the water underneath it, the cop just took out his ticket book. Max Jacob. Even dead, I'm an insomniac. Jules Superville. Oh night, if only you didn't have ears pouring out. I need better glasses. Oh night, if only you didn't have stars pouring out their hackneyed phrases. I want emptiness, blackness, bare nothingness. Charles Baudelaire. The dog in the fireplace just woke up. The cat with a cigarette is purring in front. It doesn't look like anyone needs a drink. The wine is court anyway. That odd hat covering your forehead, pointed and ugly. Watch out, your ideas don't leave when you take it off. Pierre Régardie. Bread is supposed to be eaten, not only honored in a poem. Francise Pont. I detest working, lazy, half asleep, with the one hand not buried under the covers. I barely managed to write you this poem. Barely. Marc-Antoine Girard de Saint-Amal. Did anyone see the toe across the street? He's tiny, no bigger than a doll, going on his knees. Embarrassed? Not at all. Arthritic. He has to drag each leg ahead of him. Where to? He came up out of a sewer pipe, poor guy. Not a soul noticed. It used to be that way with me. Now they mock my yellow star. Lucky toad. You don't have to drag a yellow star everywhere you go. Max Chaco. A drizzle all over Europe. Everyone's in the same boat. Never mind the infantry. Busy with their guns. With the scary newspaper headlines. Constant drizzle, making the flags go limp. Jules Superville. Your eyes aren't eyes, they're gods. They hold sway over kings. But I say gods make it blue heavens with the same flashings and dartings. Heavens, how about brilliant suns blinding us to everything else? Suns, more like lightning bolts that give a hint of the force of our love. This is a sonneting, by the way, although I don't rhyme. The pain I feel couldn't come from a god. The heavens are one thing, not two. As for the sun, who doesn't know it's unique? Sun rays? They don't hold a candle to your eyes. Yet the false comparisons all shed light. Eyes, gods, heavens, suns, and their brilliance. Honor a loger de Porsche. Just before the bell of night, when the seasonal canvas ruffles and the sun draws honey from the bodies of women in bed, and every ship with its vowels and its incest sets sail solo to the shrill flutes of Europe. Saint-Jean Perce. Almost dawn and no one else around. The milkman's cans wake up the street. Guillaume Apollinaire. The future arrived, but it's lazy, Paul Valérie. I remember when winter coats, I remember what winter coats smell like. Dogs running under the table, saucers clinking while cabinet ministers fell. Times anger. Pretty women's laughter strewn on the floor like turtledove feathers. The canon of theories designed to order or else disrupt. Handshakes indicating contrary states of mind. Tumultuous and peaceful. Huffed up. Subrosa. Unnoticed. Yet ringing with health like a gothic steeple. My own Paul Fark. Tall, spelt locomotives speeding effortlessly through the lonely Serbian mountains. Followed by four yellow cars with gold riding on them and beyond across Rose, Strune, Bulgaria. Valérie Larbault. It all comes down to time, naturally. For you two, we have to beat it at its own game, if you know what I mean. Beat it to the punch. You know the one about the flea inside the drawer? I'm sure you do. It makes perfect sense. I really don't know what else to say. Am I ever going to see you? Marie Michel. I'm going to skip a few. The kings never even touched the door. So how can they possibly know how it feels to push open one of these two-dimensional friendly giants, forcefully or not, or to return it to its original position, holding it in one's arms? Francis Pons. Pale muse after me again. You ask way too much. It's like riding on sand in the middle of a storm. I remember when I was young and poems just came. But things have gotten tough. My instrument would snap like a reed if I so much as tried. Alfred de Musée. No horses kicked up pieces of a dream. Huge red clouds mushroomed over the public spaces. Even the small street lamps swiveled their beacons to sea. As for the future, it's lethal mosquitoes whined and steamed in the gardens. He may say there. I'll finish with three little ones I'm skipping around. It's not nearly as enjoyable to write something down as it is to erase it in one fell swoop like a sudden storm. Cut to black. Francis Pons. You ups and downs, unfathomable pulse of green seas, the piece of grazing animals and of the lines Alchemy publishes on students' foreheads. To have all the words running around in one's head and choose the plainest, if not the worst, and then start the celebration. Jules Supervillain. Okay. The last things I'm going to read from this book, the title page is very long. It's the longest thing I've ever written by far about 30 pages long. I'm going to read the first section of it. There are four sections. And I'm going to start it. It starts in the book with something I titled study for everything. The name of the poem is everything. And it ends with a coda. So I'll read the study for everything, then the first section. Study for everything. Ten years shmanyer. The sages are all in the Hudson River pier. Don't lean over too far. I wouldn't be surprised to see arms and legs, even a vital organ or two, representing the shy, passive aggressive inner life. Brushing out followed by brushing in. If people in high rises shouldn't groan, neither should the brown stones huddle closer together each time there's a hint of autumn in the air or in the trees. Like, if you'll pardon me for saying so, rushing to cremate the dead, when everyone, themselves included, knows we want them around for as long as humanly possible. Not, of course, that the pangs have much choice regarding where to settle or be observed. A rusty hydrant is as good as a park bench. The handful of pigeons poking around a chunk of baguette near the grass don't seem to agree, but they're hand-stamped, inks some line too, already beginning to fade. I only know what I know is one version, another as witness so many royal portraits, or the parade of experimental drugs for a dread disease, is that knowledge works only some of the time, really works. Never mind how things seem, as opposed to how they see themselves, or why appearance stakes so much, if not everything, on the distinction. Okay, this is section one of everything. And it starts with an epigraph by George Harriman, the wonderful cartoonist who did the crazy cat, which is one of the all-time great things. And the epigraph is, everything is just nothing repeating itself. One, stop me if you've heard this one. Two llamas poke their heads out of the small stone enclosure part of a garage they spend their time in, when they're not taking the sun in a tiny fenced-in yard dotted with wild stars. Just as we turn to look, a small flock of wild turkeys materialized out of nothing and began squawking, clearly at us. Who knew they were the concierge family? Everything gusts and then dies back down. At least as likely, everything exists inside a giant thought balloon, which rides continual gusts, although no one can possibly speak about, let alone contemplate the situation. As to the air outside the balloon, spangled with oak leaves and high strips of white clouds, let's leave that one for now. As the beaver said to the log, half in, half out of water, getting to know you, getting to know all about you. Speaking of balloons, the image I've always liked from as far back as high school is the lead one, successful as a lead balloon. It took off like a lead balloon. The fact that it got off the ground at all, before plummeting with a thud if not a loud crash, does a good job of encapsulating human striving wedded to human failure. Not certainly that the conjunction is inevitably the case, but the poignancy to me anyway is palpable. As to the light from outside that must penetrate the thought balloon, regardless of its color or degree of translucence, that too seems best left for later, like playing two sets of tennis following a bout of pneumonia or the view of Niagara that nobody has. What did the 20 ounce bottle of Perrier say to the late afternoon sunlight struggling to get indoors? The apartment building has more openings than the sprawling cemetery on the way to the dump-up state, or the one littering the heavily trafficked Manhattan approach to the Robert F. Kennedy, formerly tri-borrow bridge. You'd think the fumes by themselves would be a discourager. You say tomato, and I say everything is consumed by its appearances. I've been instructed to push a handful of minor characters back into the wings, but they won't go, no matter how hard I try. The pencil line between being and not being, hardly static, however it looks. More accurately, between staying put and erupting into feelings that can't be held in check, no matter what, like the corruption built into medical advertising aimed directly at the TV view in public. Reminds me of the boundary line between so-called feeling and so-called understanding. To have a purchase on, no thoroughly by close contact with or long experience of, as opposed to hearsay, or even legitimate authority. As the great poet Mayakovsky sidestepped at least some of the more sinister aspects of futurism, only to fall victim to himself as well as comrades who didn't mean nearly as well as they should have. So time fights off just about every conjunction, those with palpable connections to space, as well as just about any others you can name. There goes one now. No, it's a bird batting by. In fact, the sky, as well as Stephen's remarked of the world just prior to the onset of World War II, in contrast to T.S. Eliot, whom Stephen somewhat surprisingly singles out for praise, is growing floppier, warped tent poles and stakes, an occasional scrawny pigeon on a wing, one roof garden with a flapping umbrella, which from the back looks like Our Lady of the George Washington Bridge. But no cloud structure for support, unless you count the grayish wisps, barely clouds, that hung around the palisades for most of the morning. Actually, a view is appealing, provided it doesn't go, decide to go too far in the direction of floppiness and risk falling over into the appearance of whatever is holding it up, a girder or a pylon, or some idea of structure per se that hasn't yet been instantiated. Speaking of support, I've had a hard time forgetting about the guy in our building, who I used to see going for his run every morning before breakfast, who jumped from his 10th floor window and magically survived, seriously broken bones, but alive, apparently because he landed in a tiny courtyard on a bale of recycled newspapers, primarily the New York Times. Does that qualify as the ethical sphere, maybe just? Yesterday morning, just before I woke up, a few persons with backpacks and what looked like metal maps several inches thick were bobbing up and down on the platforms that looked like, on platforms that looked like ice floes, but more cork than ice. Every once in a while, one of them went over with a silent splash. Suicide is one of the silent e-words, but so are cope and rosette, inchoate, baseline, nape. Here's one, how many singularities can fit onto the head of a pin, pushed into the so-called bulletin board of consciousness. Cork, again, but not a real theme, I'm pretty sure. As distinct from the rip ties, sinkholes, tsunamis, you name it, occasionally just a tone row or cluster, that emerged seemingly out of nothing to manhandle the attention principle and hold on for what can seem and in some days be hours or even days. So how best to use one's time, which in one very large sense is everything, is at best a conundrum worth examining, and at worst the examine the dream with all the silent percussion in the course you've never signed up for, although everyone else is scribbling away at their desks next to their green lamps, the lanyap being somewhat on the order of dusk, and apparently new range of colors, intonations, shapes, etc., which is familiar and also entirely out of the blue. Okay, I think I have five minutes for my half hour, so I'll read a few, just a very few older things. Maybe four little things. By the way, this is a cover by Trevor Winkfield. It's a tiny one, it's called Everything Keeps On Happening, which is why they laminate the newspapers and put them up a few feet above the calorie pear trees, the only trees that can silently read. For example, a thick sheen like a sun with a broken yoke. But what happens is that the numinal is invariably the issue, throwing the switch awkwardly one way and then rapidly the other. So it's impossible to say more than could be said if nothing, in fact, were happening. So imperceptibly it feels awkward to be noticing. And this is an older one which was written through my daughter who's a philosopher and she went to school in New Jersey and she teaches in New Jersey. This is a little prose poem called The Philosophy of New Jersey. Actually, the sky appears older than it is. It's 63 or 64 at most, not 75. The part with the cliff face and the yellow crane could be in its early 30s. It wasn't Wallace Stevens who said, they have cut off my head and picked out all the letters of the alphabet, all the vowels and consonants and brought them out through my ears. And then they want me to write poetry. I can't do it. It was John Clare. Wallace Stevens said something like, the best poems are the ones you meant to write. That has a nice sound to it. But it's hard to see how he or anyone would know that. It would be hard, for example, to accept the notion that there are ideas one meant to have. Poems underneath every peeling sycamore and inside every file cabinet, along with ideas about poetry and uncountable other ideas. It mentioned the poems and strange poems in the form of baseball line-ups that I started writing years ago and have done a bunch over the years. Not all that many. And about a dozen years ago, I published a book called Complete Line-ups. Complete was kind of a joke because it's a tiny book. But anyway, the idea was that I arranged all kinds of things that have absolutely nothing to do with baseball. I'll give you some examples. Into baseball line-ups, kind of like regular baseball line-ups, that is to say in a batting order where a few bat things have changed, of course, since I wrote most of these things. Now it's better to bat second than fourth when you used to have your best hitter batting third or fourth. Anyway, it meant something to bat second, third or fourth. And it was different from batting seventh or eighth. And it also meant something to play center field and that was different from playing second base. Anyway, I arranged all these things. For example, philosophers, which as you probably could tell was one of my first loves, raw vegetables, tall people, what else? Diseases, they weren't all funny. And about two weeks ago, I came across a line-up that I had just about forgotten about, which didn't make the cut for this book. I never published it, but I'm going to close with it. It's a different sort of line-up. It doesn't do what the other ones do, but it was written for a poet friend of mine named Bob Hirshen, who died about a year ago. It was dedicated to him. So I thought I would finish with it. There was a memorial for him about a month ago in New York. There's a tiny story behind it. He was a great baseball fan, a Brooklyn Dodger fan until they left and then a Metz fan. And when he was a kid, he went to his first baseball game, which turned out to be the rarest of possible baseball games, a perfect game thrown by the Dodger pitcher. No hits, runs or errors, just 27 batters. And he got home and he told his father and his father said, ah, you don't know what you're talking about. Must have been a shutout. His father was apparently annoyed that he hadn't been there. And Bob wound up writing a poem about the experience, which is a very funny poem. And he titled it with the Dodger pitcher's name, which is one of the great names not just in baseball, Ed Head, real name, real perfect game, real Dodger pitcher. So about a dozen, I guess about a dozen years ago, I wrote an ode to Ed Head for Bob Hirschen. So leading off and playing right field is Don Gullet, batting second and playing shortstop is Pinky Higgins, center field batting third, Leo the Lip, that was a nickname from Leo DeRosha, who was manager and player, batting cleanup and playing first base, Ed Head, batting fifth and playing third base. I'll read it the way he pronounced his name, although it's better on paper. J.J. Putes, it looks like putts, batting sixth, I'm sorry, batting sixth and playing left field, Raleigh Fingers, batting seventh and playing right field, Wally Backman, catching Nate Oliver, pitching No-Nec Williams. I think his first name was Walters, his name was No-Nec. And I have five DHS designated hitters, Hack Wilson, Lance Berkman, Horace Stonem, Waite Hoyt, and Lewis Lepke. Thank you. Thank you, Charles. That was a home run the whole evening. Really appreciate your time and joining us. And thank you to all of you who participated. Andrew, thank you for your technical help. And maybe next year we'll actually be able to do this live in person. Thanks again. Bye-bye.