 We're talking about William Blake's poetry. Today, we have Dr. Ben Lubner and Dr. Robert Bennett, and they're up to something. And I'm going to let them take it away right now. So Professor Lubner, welcome. I actually don't know where Professor Bennett is. He's supposed to be here by now, and we're supposed to be trading back and forth in our readings, so I assume he'll just get here shortly. And in the meantime, I'll start this thing's on. I think he might not be closer. That much closer? Anyways, I'm sorry that Professor Bennett isn't here yet, but I'm just going to go ahead and get started without him, and I hope that he'll show up eventually. The first poem that I want to read, sort of get things off in a sort of lively fashion, is from Alan Ginsberg's very famous book, Howl. This poem is titled America. It's mildly political, you might say. Alan Ginsberg's America. America, I've given you all, and now I'm nothing. America, $2.27, January 17, 1956. I can't stand my own mind. America. America, get yourself with your atom bomb. I don't feel good. Don't bother me. I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind. America, when will you be angelic? When will you take off your clothes? When will you look at yourself through the grave? When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites? America, when will you send all your eggs to India? I'm sick of your insane demands. When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I want with my good looks? Are you being sinister? Is this some form of practical joke? I'm trying to come to the point. I refuse to give up my session. America, stop pushing. I know what I'm doing. Yeah, well, America, I feel sentimental about the Wobblies. You shouldn't see me reading Marx. My psychoanalysts think I'm perfectly right to vibrations. America, I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came home from Russia. America, I will sell you trophies. $2,500 apiece, $500 on your old strophe. Yeah, America saved the Spanish loyalists. America, I am the Scottsboro boys. Everybody with antelope sent a mingle about the workers. It was all so sincere. You have no idea what it would think the party was. America, it's them bad Russians. Them Russians, them Russians, and them China men, and them Russians. America, this is quite serious. America, is this correct? I better get right down to the job. It's true. I don't want to join the army or turn laths into precision part factories. I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway. So he was up there all along. The next poem I want to read is by Putin. Philip Levine, who was born in the late 1920s in Detroit and grew up in Detroit during the Great Depression. And this is a poem called What Work Is from a book of the same title. It's about looking for work in one of the auto factories in Detroit, growing up during difficult times. What work is? We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park for work. You know what work is. If you're old enough to read this, you know what work is, although you may not do it. But forget you. This is about waiting, shifting from one foot to another, feeling the light rain falling like mist into your hair, blurring your vision, until you think you see your own brother ahead of you, maybe 10 places. You rub your glasses with your fingers, and of course it's someone else's brother. Narrow were across the shoulders than yours, but with the same sad slouch, the grin that does not hide the stubbornness, the sad refusal to give in to rain, to the hours of waiting, to the knowledge that somewhere ahead a man is waiting who will say, no, we're not hiring today for any reason he wants. You love your brother. Now suddenly you can hardly stand the love flooding you for your brother, who's not beside you or behind you ahead, or ahead because he's home trying to sleep off a miserable night at Cadillac so he can get up before noon to study as German. Works eight hours a night so he can sing Wagner, the opera you hate most, the worst music ever invented. How long has it been since you told him you loved him? Held his wide shoulders, opened your eyes wide and said those words, and maybe kissed his cheek. You've never done something so simple, so obvious, not because you're too young or too dumb, not because you're jealous or even mean or incapable of crying in the presence of another man, no, just because you don't know what work is. A couple of the pieces I'm going to read are poetic manifestos from the period of the 1950s and 1960s where a lot of poets tried to reinvent American poetry or artists tried to reinvent American art by creating new styles of art. And some of these manifestos help explain what these artists thought they were up to. This is Kly's Oldenburg's I Am For An Art. I am for an art that is political, erotical, mystical. I am for an art that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum. I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero. I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap that still comes out on top. I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary. I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself and twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips and is heavy in course and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself. I am for an artist who vanishes, turning up in a white cap painting signs or hallways. I am for an art that comes out of a chimney like black hair and scatters in the sky. I am for an art that spills out of an old man's purse when he is bounced off of passing fender. I am for an art out of a doggy's mouth falling five stories from the roof. I am for the art that a kid licks after peeling away the wrapper. I am for an art that joggles like everyone's knees when the bust traverses the next covation. I am for an art that is smoked like a cigarette, smells like a pair of shoes. I am for an art that flaps like a flag or helps blow noses like a handkerchief. I am for an art that is put on and taken off like pants which develops holes like socks which is eaten like a piece of pie or abandoned with great contempt like a piece of shit. I am for art covered with bandages. I am for art that lifts and rolls and runs and jumps. I am for art that comes in a can or washes up on the shore. I am for art that coils and grunts like a wrestler. I am for art that sheds hair. I am for art you can sit on. I am for art from a pocket with deep channels of the ear from the edge of a knife from the corners of the mouth stuck in the eye or worn on the wrist. I am for art under the skirts and the art of pinching cockroaches. I am for the art of conversation between the sidewalk and a blind man's metal stick. I am for the art that grows in a pot that comes down out of the skies at night like lightning that hides in the clouds and growls. I am for art that is flipped on and off with a switch. I figured that since this is the first day that we've had some really, really nice spring weather, I'd read a poem about spring if I could find it. This is from a book called Vita Nova, which means new life by poet named Luis Glick. Poem is called Nest. A bird was making its nest in the dream. I watched it closely. In my life, I was trying to be a witness, not a theorist. The place you begin doesn't determine the place you end. The bird took what it found. Took what it found in the yard, its base materials, nervously scanning the very yard in early spring in debris by the south wall, pushing a few twigs with its beak. Image of loneliness. The small creature coming up with nothing, then dry twigs, carrying one by one the twigs to the hideout, which is all it was then. It took what there was, the available material. Spirit wasn't enough. And when it wove like the first Penelope, but toward a different end, how did it weave? It weaved carefully but hopelessly the few twigs with any suppleness, any flexibility. Choosing knees over the brittle, the recalcitrant. Early spring, late desolation. The bird circled the bare yard, making efforts to survive of what remained to it. It had its task to imagine the future. Steadily flying around, patiently bearing small twigs to the solitude of the exposed tree in the steady coldness of the outside world. I had nothing to build with. It was winter. I couldn't imagine anything but the past. I couldn't even imagine the past if it came to that. And I didn't know how I came here. Everyone else much farther along. I was back at the beginning at a time in life we can't remember beginnings. The bird collected twigs in the apple tree, relating each addition to existing mass, but when was there suddenly mass? It took what it found after the others were finished. The same materials, why should it matter to be finished last? The same materials, the same limited good, brown twigs, broken and fallen, and in one, a length of yellow wool. Then it was spring and I was inexplicably happy. I knew where I was on Broadway with my bag of groceries, spring fruit in the stores. First, cherries at Formaggio for Sithia beginning. First I was at peace, then I was contented, satisfied, and then flashes of joy and the season changed for all of us, of course. And as I peered out, my mind grew sharper and I remember accurately the sequence of my responses, my eyes fixing on each thing from the shelter of the hidden self. First, I love it. Then, I can use it. Kaufman's Heavy Water Blues. And I believe that Bob Kaufman is the single greatest poet of the 20th century who isn't Wallace Stevens. And if I have time, I may read his poetic manifesto as well. But I want you to hear the poem first and then try to imagine what his manifesto and definition of poetry might be. The radio is teaching my goldfish jiu-jitsu. I'm in love with the skin diver who sleeps underwater. My neighbors are drunken linguists and I speak butterfly. Consolidated Edison is threatening to cut off my brain. The postman keeps putting sex in my mailbox. My mirror died and can't tell if I still reflect. I put my eyes on a diet. My tears are gaining too much weight. I crossed the desert in a taxi cab only to be locked in a pyramid with the face of the dog on my breath. I went to a masquerade disguised as myself, not one of my friends recognized. I dreamed I went to John Mitchell's poetry party in my made-in-form brain. Put the silver in the barbecue pit. The Chinese are attacking with nuclear restaurants. The radio is teaching my goldfish jiu-jitsu. My old lady has taken up skin diving and sleeps underwater. I am hanging out with a drunken linguist who can speak butterfly and represents the caterpillar industry down in Washington, DC. I never understand other people's desires and hopes until they coincide with my own. Then we clash. I have definite proof that the culture of the caveman disappeared due to his inability to produce one magazine that could be delivered by a kid on a bicycle. When reading all those thick books on the life of God it should be noted that they were all written by men. It is perfectly all right to cast the first stone if you have some more in your pocket. Television, America's ultimate relief from the Indian disturbance. I hope that when machines finally take over they won't build men that break down as soon as they're paid for. I shall refuse to go to the moon unless I'm inoculated against the dangers of indiscriminate love. After riding across the desert in a taxi cab he discovered himself locked in a pyramid with the face of a dog on his breath. The search for the end of the circle, constant occupation of squares. Why don't they stop throwing symbols that Aaron's cluttered enough with echoes? Just when I cleaned the manger for the wise men the shrews from across the street showed up. The voice of the radio shouted, get up, do something to someone. But me and my son laughed in our furnished room. Keep this microphone. This is a poem about a goldfish, too. A little bit different. It's also about a poem about a man who's dying from AIDS. Maggie's taking care of a man who's dying. He's attended to everything, said goodbye to his parents, paid off his credit card. She says, why don't you just run it up to the limit? But he wants everything squared away, no balance owed. Though he misses the pets he's already found a home for. He can't be around dogs or cats, too much risk. He says, I can't have anything. She says, a bowl of goldfish? He says, he doesn't want to start with anything and then describes the kind he'd maybe like, how their tails would fan to a gold flaring. They talk about hot jewel tones, gold lacquer. Say, maybe they'll go pick some out, though he can't go much of anywhere. And then abruptly he says, I can't love anything I can't finish. He says it like he's had enough of the whole skin-to-lint world. Though what he means is he'll never be satisfied and therefore has established this discipline, a kind of severe rehearsal. That's where they leave it, him looking out the window, her knitting as she does, because she needs to do something. Later, he leaves a message, yes, to the bowl of goldfish. Meaning, let me go if I have to in brilliance. In a story I read, a Zen master who preferred his detachment or perfected his detachment from the things of the world. Remembered at the morning of dying, a deer he used to feed in the park and wondered who might care for it. And at that instance was reborn in the stunned flesh of a fawn. So, Maggie's friend. Is he going out into the last loved object of his attention? Fanning the veined translucence of an opulent tale, undulent in some uncaptureable curve. Is he bronze chrysanthemums, copper leaf, hurried darting, doubloons, ice-colored fins, troubling the water? Mark Doty's brilliance. Time for one more poem and then maybe then I'll do a final poem. But in keeping with our theme of poetry and poetic manifestos, I'll read Laurence Ferlinghetti's I Am Waiting, which is both a poem and a poetic manifesto at the same time. I am waiting for my case to come up and I am waiting for a rebirth of wonder and I am waiting for someone to really discover America and whale and I am waiting for the discovery of some new symbolic Western frontier and I am waiting for the American eagle to really spread its wings and straighten up and fly right and I am waiting for the age of anxiety to drop dead and I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy and I am waiting for the final withering away of all governments and I am perpetually awaiting a rebirth of wonder. I am waiting for the second coming and I am waiting for a religious revival to sweep through the state of Arizona and I am waiting for the grapes of wrath to be stored and I am waiting for them to prove that God is really American and I am seriously waiting for Billy Graham and Elvis Presley to exchange roles seriously and I am waiting to see God on television piped into church altars if only they can find the right channel to tune in on and I am waiting for the last supper to be served again with a strange new appetizer and I am perpetually awaiting a rebirth of wonder. I am waiting for my number to be called and I am waiting for the living end and I am waiting for dad to come home his pockets full of irradiated silver dollars and I am waiting for the atomic test to end and I am waiting happily for things to get much worse before they improve and I am waiting for the salvation army to take over and I am waiting for the human crowd to wander off a cliff somewhere clutching its atomic umbrella and I am waiting for Ike to act and I am waiting for the meek to be blessed and inherit the earth without taxes and I am waiting for forests and animals to reclaim the earth as theirs and I am waiting for a way to be devised to destroy all nationalisms without killing anybody and I am waiting for linux and planets to fall like rain and I am waiting for lovers and weepers to lie down together again in a new rebirth of wonder and I am waiting for Tom Swift to grow up and I am waiting for the American boy to take off Beauty's clothes and get on top of her and I am waiting for Allison Wonderland to retransmit to me her total dream of innocence and I am waiting for Child Roland to come to the final darkest tower and I am waiting for Aphrodite to grow live arms at a final disarmament conference in a new rebirth of wonder I am waiting to get some intimations of immortality by recollecting my early childhood and I am waiting for the green mornings to come again used dumb green fields come back again and I am waiting for some strains of unpremeditated art to shake my typewriter and I am waiting to write the great indelible poem and I am waiting for the last careless rapture and I am perpetually waiting for the fleeting lovers on the Grecian urn to catch each other up at last and embrace and I am waiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder. Okay, so I guess this will be the last poem of the reading. Thanks everybody for coming and for those of you who are already here for listening if you work. And just so everybody knows tonight at the Bozeman Public Library from 6.30 to 8.30 Robert and I are going to be giving a talk on poetry particularly the poetry of Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler and how their poetry seems to anticipate sort of poetics of texting and twittering and other sorts of new technologies so hope to see you all there. This is a poem by John Ashbury called The Wrong Kind of Insurance. The Wrong Kind of Insurance. I teach in a high school and see the nurses in some of the hospitals and if all teachers are like that maybe I can give you a bus someday maybe we can get together for lunch or coffee or something. The white marble statues in the auditorium are colder to the touch than the rain that falls past the post office inscription about rain or snow or gloom tonight. I think about what these archaic meanings mean that unfurl like a rope ladder down through history to fall at our feet like crocuses. All of our lives is a rebus of little wooden animals painted shy terrific colors magnificent and horrible close together. The message is learned the way light at the edge of a beach in autumn is learned. The seasons are superimposed. In New York we have winter in August as they do in Argentina and Australia. Spring is leafy and cold, autumn pale and dry and changes build up forever like birds released into the light of an August sky falling away forever to define the handful of things we know for sure followed by musical evenings. Yes, friends these clouds pulled along on invisible ropes are as you have guessed merely stage machinery. And the funny thing is it knows we know about it and still wants us to go on believing in what it so unskillfully imitates and wants to be loved not for that but for itself. The murky atmosphere of a park tattered foliage wise old tree trunks rainbow tissue paper wadded clouds down near where the perspective intersects the sunset so we may know we too are somehow impossible. Formed of so many different things too many to make sense to anybody. We straggle on as quotients hard to combine ingredients and what continues does so with our participation in consent. Try milk of tears but it is not the same the dandelions will have to know why in your comic dirge routine will be lost on the unfolding sheaves of the wind. The lucky one though will carry you too far to some manageable cold open shore of sorrows you expected to reach then leave behind. Thus friend this distilled dispersed musk of moving around the product of leaf after transparent leaf of too many comings and goings visitors at all hours. Each night is trifoliate strange to the touch. Thanks again. Thank you professors Bennett and Lubner for helping us to make poetry out loud in the library reel and for helping us to celebrate National Poetry Month and National Library Week. If you want more there at Boseman Public Library tonight at 6.30. Thank you.