(John Ashbery, Christopher Bakken, Suzanne Gardinier, Stanley Moss, Hermine Pinson, Yerra Sugarman) Celebrated poets from the catalogue of Sheep Meadow Press, including publisher Stanley Moss, will read from some of their recent works. Poets will include John Ashbery reading his translations of the great, recently deceased, French poet Pierre Martory, Christopher Bakken, Suzanne Gardinier, Hermine Pinson, and Yerra Sugarman .

Published Date: October 12, 2011

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast Series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in New York on February 2nd, 2008. The recording features Christopher Bakken, Suzanne Gardinier, Stanley Moss, John Ashbery, Hermine Pinson, and Yerra Sugarman. Now you will hear Christopher Bakken begin the reading.

Christopher Bakken:

My dean and the faculty at a little college called Allegheny were very concerned when I published a book called Goat Funeral with a publisher called Sheep Meadow Press. This is a kind of invocation to the weird pastoral that this book is about. Imagine if someone was dumb enough to make a movie, say about farming in America. This is called Theme Song For An Agrarian Epic.

Our hero ruts the horizon, hay gets made. It's rained for two weeks straight, but the dead are back to sleep now, those who live must work. The garden swarms with hornets and cabbage moths, sweet peas lay prostrate, and the mud alchemizing raw sugar from the air. There are only two sins here, sloth and wealth. Even the kittens waste no time, yet beneath the apple blossoms, you cannot see her now, the farmer's daughter pouts for love, ignores her reflection in the bird bath. Do not ask her to speak. Rotted poplars, a disheveled mane of willow, the yap of some mutt over the hill, and always some scrap, battered and rusting behind the wobbly tool shed, where the hired help, Chuck, what's not fit to fix. High above the oats, a crow flying past sees only the farmer's cap. Red is a squashed tulip emblazoned with moorman's feed. Weary calves stagger home from their feast of meadow grass and dandelion. On the doorstep, singing in the upper registers of cream, one milk bottle gathers flies. You'll have enough. The fields are full. The kitchen door is always open. Stranger go on in.

At the heart of this book is a series of eclogues. Eclogues, you might remember are poems, duets between shepherds. My shepherds live somewhere between Martinsville, Wisconsin and Mount Aetna in a kind of no place, but they sit in the edge complaining about the things that shepherds complain about, sheep that won't behave correctly, et cetera. This is the title, I'll just read one of these eclogues, this is the title of poem, Eclogue ... they have creative titles, Eclogue One, Eclogue Two, if Virgil could, I could. Why not? But this is Eclogue Four, Goat Funeral. I need to tell you one thing now that I'm about to read the poem. Bouzouki is a kind of musical instrument, it's a sort of potbellied guitar, but it's also a form of very kitsch music. You go to do bouzouki in the nightclubs of Athens, which we just spend obnoxious amounts of money, you shower performers with carnations, et cetera, and you'll understand, I think, from there.

Goat Funeral. I fled the tavern soaked with booze and gravitas, stumbled into the scrub along the river, cursing the whole crowd, their bouzouki kitsch, the arder of their mob confidence. Woke only when that shepherd, Juliana, lit the fire for her stillborn goat, wailed against the spirit that claimed it too soon. Understand that it was early, the grass still slick, her firewood soggy with smoke. The sycamores were involved with their fog. The deer were busy hiding in the brush. She had acacia blossoms in her braids, and I saw that a little pollen dusted the shoulder where she'd rent her mourning shawl. The dead one was wreathed with olive leaves, a pile of grain uneaten at the mouth.

We made an odd society by that bank, two humans too familiar with the dead. The dead still waiting for someone to speak. The wilderness around us watching, the town behind us stupidly asleep. What choice did I have? The goat was dead. The girl pretty. The river risen too high. It was for her. The animal inside me rose from its lair, shook off its winter sleep, and I took her in my arms and stoked the fire, and helped her burn. Oh, heartless God, the little beast.

That's the last goat we will kill at this reading, promise.I think just two more poems. We're on a very tight schedule. If you live in Western Pennsylvania, in a 120-year old house built by the inventor of the zipper, one of the challenges you have in the summer is that you have horny little brown bats that invade. As the papa of the house, it's my job to catch them with my bat net, which I bought from a professional bat catcher. This poem is called Portrait Detail With Bat.

In the background you feel a spattered shadow orbit the bedroom, just a quiver of wings that hides in the curvature of one ear. Some corridor of sensations swooped into left reeling, then with one inky swath, what was just a suspicion of bat, smears light from wall to wall. The thing cast no shadow, but you recognize its song from your dreams, festive as a jar of nails. Now, paint into the frame a wife and child, a cowed watchdog waiting for you to act. This is your portrait.

Now, what you love, you fear, and you love this fear, defender of the brood. The bat's wings are wide as a gulls, with panels through which to see darkly. It's tuned into frequencies quieter than the rush of your blood. You are alarmed by what alters your image. You are put off by your flight from it. This beauty, a daughter of gravity, yet you fetch a jar, close in, your ghosts watch from under their blankets, and you know it's time to dance it to a corner, make it finally perch, trapezing like a porcupine cocoon. It chatters with you there, and the ears pull back like a doberman's when you meet face to face, the bronze helmet of fur, the limitless wells of those tiny eyes, and you, bearing your teeth.

One more poem. There's a series of duets with dead people, almost all of them poets, and my attempt to sing along with the idea of these poets more than anything. I hope you have heard of the wonderful Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who made a career out of writing in other people's voices. This is Duet With Fernando Pessoa.

At times we wish that we could disappear, having followed too long the terrified trails of sparrows between rafter beams in the branches of elms, all that's been dashed upon itself in back alleyways and coal pits, everything I follow on my brainless ramble through the market, where I flatten out to fit the tatters of my wallet. Meanwhile, the baker's fire collapses back to ash, and the broad-chested church on the corner, absorbs all sounds not sanctioned by the rain. When we see between things, where ethers heaving at the border, see how the shape of a leaf, for instance, dilates beyond contours permitted by the eye, where underlying matter can muster beyond the banter of books, then we see a votive geometry known only to those versed in my Jesuit liturgy of the senses, a new music swelling the top sails of the altar boys' tongues.

Meanwhile, the same atomic fog, and mad men thrash the congas of our garbage pales. I see between things, through the narrow chinks, through a negative space even knowing can't fill, through the neon hum the insects master to pester us. I surrender the hub of skin that strung me out, slack as an old tire. A forehead having tasted exterior it forgot was there. My mind left back in its neoclassical urn, and I'll have more wine if that's all I think can happen, and I'll have more wine if life is nothing, brimming as I drink it with gypsy ventriloquism, noting as I down it, my duty to the voices I must dream. Thanks. We have to play handoff, Suzanne Gardinier.

Suzanne Gardinier:

Thank you. I'd like to thank Stanley Moss, and Sean Garrity, wherever he is, for getting these books born on Wednesday. I'd also like to thank Agha Shahid Ali. My book is a collection of 101 ghazal, and Shahi introduced me to the beautiful living form of the ghazal, to which I do no justice, but something else maybe.

In a dream, in a room that doesn't exist, in an occupied city, two women dancing. The emperor's searchlight finds the room's corners, but they keep to the dark parts, two women dancing. Who's the leader? Who the follower? Cheek to cheek as they say, two women dancing. How do they know where to put their feet? One leaning, one yielding, two women dancing. Stalked city, or is the hunting over? Helicopters, and two women dancing. Deeper than the sea sings their instructor, someone dead teaching two women dancing. Light through the slits in the walls of the garrison, press the closure it opens, two women dancing. To the tune of ashwind, of the guards pacing, to the tune of sirens, two women dancing. Loosened, untied, unleashed, undone, whose are they? Contraband. Two women dancing. One with a ring on her left hand's third finger, one with a scar there, two women dancing. One lowering a mask of mirrors, one a mask of ink, two women dancing.

Put your fingers to my lips, will you? Before I say something past forgiving. Tell me where your hands have been. Tell me what you've done that's past forgiving. I know someone who's free, but not here, past touch, past memory, past forgiving. The guards in lines try to take off their flesh, and put on steel, past death, past forgiving. Your voice, a clear stream over gravel, laced with trembling. A hesitation between orchards, past forgiving. Your ankles pale on the couch, the day fading, did you mean to show me what's past forgiving? The way your hips used to tell me the truth that is not the truth, and is past forgiving. Those the guards touch strapped in ice and plastic, the faces on street posters, past forgiving. The emperor's loyal ones cheering, is this how our children will learn what's past forgiving? A woman with a photograph, her mother's face, which of them is past forgiving? Who's here? Your trespasser, blinder of witnesses, past purity, past famine, past forgiving.

Do you remember what you told me when you were sitting on my lap last night? In a chair, but not anyone we know yet, in a city in which we were strangers last night. The arms low enough for your knees to rest there, strong enough to hold you last night. On my lap frontwards, you forgot your costume, and I forgot to remind you last night. A splint made wet to learn to bend, the arc of your back in my hands last night. I was wearing a mask in the form of a shirt, but you undid the buttons last night. Your breasts speaking silence, my tongue, the translator, we had a long conversation last night. What did I think I would do with it, what I thought I could keep from you last night? What my fingers inside you made us say, your lips against my listening last night. Who made your face? Who made the chair by a window that was our bed last night? Your listener kept hearing it, city bled white just outside our window last night.

The gatekeeper fallen asleep, the lock slipped from the hasp, and the way open when you come. The white stallion, or is it a mare who moves in the dark just before you come? Arched and held firm, lost and intent, torn and joined, rent, beloved when you come. My voyager vaulted verge, and tip and tongue, and lip, and whisper when you come. In my mouth, scraps of the songs with no words, you leave trembling there when you come. At the angel's behest and mercy driven down the throat of the tempest when you come. The parched ache at the cistern brim, the rapture of the dipper when you come. On the third circumnavigation, a harbor called Salt Taste that greets you when you come. Is it you or the angel wet with sweat, filling the room with God's name when you come? The paved beach, and the wetness of the brook freed from the burying ground when you come. Someone almost there, your shepherd of ache, whose stray ones are gathered again when you come.

This next one has a place name in it, Beit Lahiya, which is in Gaza. The claw of a crab, the sweet flesh near the elbow, I say I'll stop when I'm full, but I don't. The dawn soft over dark apartments, I say I'll turn and go home, but I don't. Who are you? What do you want from me? I say I'll ask without smiling, but I don't. The burning curry missing the mango, I say I'll forget the sweet, but I don't. It's night and you're nervous so I say I'll laugh at the lovers with you, but I don't. I listen, I feast, I crack, I batten, I miss you. I lie. I do. I don't. Two women in a room left by someone else, who knows what they're trying to say. I don't. The emperor's harvest, this boy, I say I don't think of him enough, and I don't. Feast of razed Beit Lahiya orange grove, I say I'll share it, but I don't. Feast of your voice in your body's absence, I say I'll rest there but, I don't. Behold your upright citizen made faithless, I say I mean faithless, but I don't.

This next radif, the repeated refrain is sin dejar cosa, which means without leaving out anything, and it's from one of the epigraphs to the book, which is from the Cántico Espiritual of San Juan de la Cruz. The end of it is yol le di de hecho a mí, sin dejar cosa, allí le prometí de ser su Esposa.

When they meet in the lion's den, jasmine and cedar their bed, tell me, sin dejar cosa. When the shepherd and his family met the plains near Mosul, tell me, sin dejar cosa. Narrow streets inhospitable to machines of death, a map of kitchens, sin dejar cosa. The brook of your mouth, the walker's thirst attended water-bearer, sin dejar cosa. A water truck, four children, a hundred sheep, the emperor's charnel list, sin dejar cosa. Your narrowness around my fingers, your lips to my ear, tell me, sin dejar cosa. "I want to see the pilot who killed my children," she said, sin dejar cosa. Your fear the binding around your breasts all night, loosening, sin dejar cosa. Before the soldiers, he's heretic dreaming her mouth what she said to him, sin dejar cosa. How I faltered before you found me, and touched the scar of my forehead, sin dejar cosa. How the friendly and enemy children will tell the emperor's folly, sin dejar cosa. How you stripped me like the fall wind strips a tree, wise, exigent, terrible, sin dejar cosa. Goodnight from your baffled auditor trying to reckon what's missing, sin dejar cosa.

This is the last one. You left a few souvenirs last night, three bent feathers, marks on my hips, Angel. My brother's wounds open again by morning, all night they're closed and blessed by an angel. With your thumb you wipe the lipstick from my neck so no one will know you visited, Angel. Is it true you're wearing a uniform now? Are you part of the emperor's legion, Angel? The tide line of your sweat on the sheet, your shoulders labor, night swimmer, Angel. A note on the pillow, un rompecabeza, artichoke, thistle, one of each from your angel who whispers sedition, who takes your clothes of stone and gives you flesh, Angel. In the morning my hips are broken, and the ash on the window sill has a new name, Angel. The sounds in the dark as you break me, is this how someone groan gets born, Angel? How you dream the guards take you away for the heresy of your tenderness, Angel. In the braid of us, hard to tell one from the other. In the dark, two women, part ash, part angel. Thank you. Our next reader is Stanley Moss.

Stanley Moss:

The Bathers. In the great bronze tub of summer, with the lion's heads cast on each side, couples come and bathe together, each touches only his or her lover, as he or she falls back into the warm eucalyptus-scented waters. It is a hot summer evening, and the last sunlight clings to the lighter and darker blues of grapes, and to the white and rose plate on the bare marble table. Now the lovers plunge, surface drift, an intruding elder would not know if there were six or two, or be aware of the entering and withdrawing. There is a sudden stillness of water. The bathers whisper in the classical manner, intimate, distant things. They are forgetful that the darkness called night is always present, sunlight is the guest.

It is the moment of departure, they dress by mistake, exchanged some of their clothing, and linger in the glaring night traffic of the old city. I hosed down the tub after 500 years of lovemaking, and my few summers. I did not know the touch of naked bodies would give to bronze a fragile gold patina, or that women in love jump in their lover's tubs. God of tubs take pity on solitary bathers who scrub their flesh with rough stone, and have nothing to show for bathing, but cleanliness and disillusion. Some believe the gods come as swans, showers of gold themselves or not at all. I think they come as bathers, lovers, whales fountaining, hippopotami squatting in the mud.

The Hermaphrodites In The Garden. After the lesson of the serpent, there is the lesson of the slug and the snail. Hermaphrodites, they prosper on or under leaves, green or dead, perhaps within the flower. See how slowly, on a windless day, the clouds move over the garden, while the slug and the snail little by little pursue their kind. Each pair with four sexes knows to whom it belongs, as a horse knows where each of its four feet is on a narrow path, two straight below the eyes, two a length behind. There is cause and reason for, but in the garden mostly life defaults. Each male female lies with a male female, folds and unfolds, enters and withdraws. On some seventh day, after a seventh day, they rest, two plural for narratives, or dreams, or parables after their season. One by one they simply die, in no special order. Each sex leaves the other without comfort or desire.

I opened my hands of shadow and shell that covered my face. They offered little protection from shame or the world. I returned to the garden, times mash of flowers, stigmas and anthers in sunlight and fragrant rain. Human, singular, the slug of my tongue moves from crevice to crevice, while my ear, distant cousin of a snail, follows the breathing and pink trillium of a woman who is beautiful as the garden is beautiful. Beyond joy and sorrow, where every part of every flower is joy and sorrow, I, lost in beauty, cannot tell which is which, the body's fragrance symmetry from its rhymes. I'm surrounded by your moist providence, a red and purple sunrise blinds me.

My father was born in Lithuania, in a town called Kaunas, which is now called ... a town called Kovno, which is now called Kaunas, and this is a poem called A Visit to Kaunas. I put on my mosaic horns, a pointed beard, my goat hoof feet, my nose, eyes, hair and ears are just right, and walk the streets of the old ghetto. In May, under the giant lilac, and blooming chestnut trees, I'm the only dirty word in the Lithuanian language. I taxi to the death camp, and to the forest, where the birds are gay, freight trains still screech, scream and stop. I have origins here, not roots, origins among the ashes of shoemakers and scholars below the roots of these Christmas trees, and below the pits filled with charred splinters of bone covered with fathoms of concrete.

But I am the devil, I know in the city someone wears the good gold watch given to him by a mother to save her infant throne in a sewer. Someone still tells time by that watch. I think it is the town clock, perhaps Lithuanian that has three words for soul needs more words for murder. Murder is bread. Please pass the murder and butter gets you to the wine you are drinking is my blood. The murder you are eating is my body. Who planted the lilac and chestnut trees? Whose woods are these? I think I know. I do my little devil dance, my goat hooves click on the stone streets. Das Lied von der Erde ist murder, murder, murder.

A poem called Vanitas. In the side view mirror of my car, through the morning fog, I saw a human skull that had to be my face, where the headlights of the car behind me should have been, or a morning star. I did not think to step on the gas and race away from the skull I knew wasn't behind me, still it had me by the throat. I can tell a raven from a crow, but I can't tell visionary bone from ghost. I'm used to my eyes fibbing to me, fives are sometimes eights, twos, threes. I know the Chinese character for the word nature is a nose that stands for breathing, life. I need to see an ancient nose in the mirror.

A Poem called In The Rain. There are principles I would die for, but not to worship this god or that. To live, I'd kneel before the Egyptian insect god, the dung beetle who rose a ball of mud or dung across the ground as if he were moving the solar disc or a hose across the sky. I would pray to a blue scarab inlaid in lapis lazuli suggestive of the heavens. The Lord is many. I sit riding at the feet of a baboon guard, counterfeit to counterfeit, my lord smiles, box, and scratches, all prayers to him are the honking of geese. To live, I pray to a god with the head of a crocodile in the body of a man or a woman. Our father who art in river, holy mother dozing in the mud sunning thyself, look on your young in danger. Open your crocodile mouth, the doors of your cathedral, let us all swim in. We are gathered by the river nesting on your tongue, swim us to safety. Believers and non-believers rejoice together in the reign.

Psalm, god of paper and writing, god of first and last drafts, god of dislikes, god of everyday occasions, he is not my servant, does not work for tips. Under the dome of the Roman pantheon, god in three persons carries a cross on his back as an aging centaur, hands bound behind his back, carries Eros. Chinese god of examinations, blood work, biopsy, urine analysis, grant me the grade of fair in the study of dark holes, fair in anus, self-knowledge, and the leaves of the vagina like the pages of a book in the vision of Ezekiel. May I also open my mouth and read the book by eating it, swallow its meaning. My shepherd, let me continue to just pass in the army of the living, keep me from the ranks of the excellent dead. It's true I worshiped Aphrodite who was driven me off with her slipper after my worst ways pleased her. I make noise for the Lord. My shepherd, I want, I want, I want.

A little last poem called Obama. We've got a chance to be proud of our country again, even if when president he must avoid going to the theater. Thank you. It's my honor and pleasure to introduce Pierre Martory and John Ashbery.

John Ashbery:

I'm going to read from my book of translations of the French poet Pierre Martory, which has just been published, in fact, about 10 minutes ago when I was first handed a copy of it. So I will have to kind of fumble around in it to find the ones that I want to read. Who is Pierre Martory? He was a writer whom I met in the mid-50s when I went to France as a Fulbright student, and we became very close friends, and indeed up until his death 10 years ago. He was born in Bayonne, France in the Basque district. In fact, he was of partly Basque origin. He was born in 1920. He spent much of his childhood in Morocco, where his father was an officer in the French Army. His university education started in September, 1939, which was not a very good time to start out in college.

He ended up managing to get onto the last train out of Paris in June of 1940, which he described often as ... it sounded really nightmarish, when the train went through Tours, the station had been bombed by the Italian Air Force, and the whole station was on fire. He eventually wound up in North Africa in the French Army, and shortly after the Americans landed in North Africa, the French switched over and joined the American Army. Apparently, there were three days where the French were fighting the Americans, and then they wisely gave up and joined them. He isn't known in France at all. He really didn't try to get his work published. He published a novel in 1953, which got very good reviews, but that was really all he ever published, except for a few poems in little magazines.

I began translating him because I loved his poetry so much, and I felt that it would never see the light of day in any language unless I worked on it, and published it in English. In fact, he is somewhat better known here than he is in his native France, which still doesn't know about him. I will, I'll read a few poems here. Wait a minute, I'll have to sort of fumble around in the table of contents.

This is one called Litanies. May it please the shower of gold to cover me for I am cold from soft metal. May it please the shower of gold to cover me for I am cold from soft metal. May it please the shower of water to cover me for I have faith of metamorphosis. May it please the shower of water to cover me for I have faith of metamorphosis. May it please the harsh idea to nourish me for I thirst after my false loves. May it please the harsh idea to nourish me for I thirst after my false loves. May it please the afternoon to suffice me for I've had too much of my dark days. May it please the afternoon to suffice me for I've had too much of my dark days. May it please the near here to open for me for I've knocked at its door in vain. May it please the near here to open for me for I've knocked at its door in vain.

May it please the calm sea to swell for I've trapped too many sea lice. May it please the calm sea to swell for I've trapped too many sea lice. May it please the incarnate soul to show itself for I have believed in the incarnate soul. May it please the incarnate soul to show itself for I have believed in the incarnate soul. May it please the closed fist to show itself for I have drawn the rusty blade. May it please the closed fist to show itself for I've drawn the rusty blade. May it please the lover the love to lie to itself for I've known the weight of the lie. May it please the lover the love to lie to itself for I've known the weight of the lie. May it please the man in tears to bruise himself, I've howled the cry of my dreams. May it please the man in tears to bruise himself, I've howled the cry of my dreams. I don't know the dates of a lot of these, including that one, since he didn't always date them.

This is one from a very early 50s called Blues, both in French and in English. The bed of the railway links me to these days of hell. The bed of the railway just one night can do it all. Love of the others you wear me out with great strokes of a stiff brush. In a station of Paris, is there a true love that smiles? In a station of Paris, everything begins and everything fails. Love of the others, you suck the young blood of my life. In the words of my big brother I can still hear them on my cot. In the words of my big brother, can it be he forgot? Love of the others, you are slow to promise a reward. So be it my child, some people are never satisfied. So be it my child, some win, some fall by the wayside. Love of the others you put out my eyes by dent of fevers. Goodbye is a big handkerchief, a big handkerchief of paper that you throw in the sewer once it's been soiled with tears. Love of the others you leave in my mouth a taste of clay.

Under the elm. Under the elm, for a long time I've been waiting for you all my soul. Weeks follow each other like books perused, my thoughts elsewhere, full of music that's distracted too, full of a deep buzzing where words, images, perceptions dwell in the jumble of memory, of which our mind is composed, and nothing comes to assert your coming. No other sign than smoke. Is it you that we should have welcomed when tenderness filled our hearts? You that we should have discovered on the shores of pity or of love? I have not been taught to notice your presence, even when reveille raises the limbs of a future happiness, even when tired of a long day. I seek silence in the immense dark, where I jettison what differentiates the sun from death. Hours accumulated, absurd riches, I'm ready to give up the trees in the cities, but I still hope to receive you, my soul, laden with my own eternity. You who are me, who resembles nobody. You that I must give back someday to who knows who.

This one is called A Sunday in Montfort-l'Amaury. Montfort-l'Amaury is perhaps the French equivalent of Greenwich, Connecticut or Tuxedo Park, New York, with somewhat more cultural overlays. Revell had a house there which I once visited, in fact, with the Pierre. I don't know whether this poem was written while recollecting that or not. A green egg incubating under the snow, an egg covered with ideograms. If the little train stops at the map's margins don't seize the chance to escape down the bathtub drain, the acrobat reestablishes on the lawn the balance he lost on the balcony railing. Together we had seen the worst landscapes, regretting the cinematographer's black and white. When we came back far from the dog, close to the wolf's path, there was no one to welcome us with great bursts of wrath.

That dog and wolf is an allusion to the French expression entre chien et loup, halfway between dog and wolf. A common expression for twilight. A time when it would be difficult to distinguish between a wolf and a dog seen from a distance. Then I will explain in the next stanza espagnolette, is a word for the metal latches of a French window. At Cádiz, the better to hear the castanets, we bruised our hands grappling with some espagnolettes. The moon laying waste to exquisite mosaics, still kept the mellowness of Mogrebin flutes. Today shielded from inquisitive comers, the Argentine bolero still tinkles on catarro dulcimers. The return was accomplished on an incommensurable night, people with hoarse voice, cats, and weary English women. A curtain whose silk is ablaze conceals nothing more than a stupid lost phrase. A green egg incubating under the snow, and egg covered with ideograms.

I'll read one more. This is called Toteninsel, The Isle Of The Dead, which is the title of a famous Arnold Böcklin painting, which you may have seen, of a mysterious boat moving toward the Isle of the Dead. The familiar voice, an old friend plucks me from the harbor's delights, and as we climb together toward the myrtle wood, "Tell me," he says, taking my hand, "is in the time of our excursions, why you arrive so soon, and how you journeyed? At this hour the offices are closed, besides you can wait as long as you like without going in. It's impossible to get lost and pointless to worry, or we can go for a walk if you wish, for as long as you wish." In turning, I no longer see anything on the other shore, nothing but a gilded patch of fogged islands, with reflected photographs, and the mast and spars, the boats, the charred branches of trees, something like a goodbye frozen between the sky and the water.

It's worse than predicted, but the worst was predicted. Yet if only I was sure of being here, of having found you all again, of speaking, and of feeling regret with you. The houses are all alike, dried flowers along the sandy walks, from one terrorist to another a telephone would allow, but is this really the same house? And isn't there ocean among the islands making all conversation impossible, because it's raining, especially since, are we really speaking the same language? I began to lose hope one evening when still trying to believe in the dawn. I knew that day would slide out of night without me grazing the trees, the antennas, the cornices, and would touch through the pain, my covered face which had accepted the weight of the sheet. I who used to awaken at the slightest hand near my sleep. So it was the dawn when I was to be born forever that I had dreaded so much, expecting convulsions, shards of puss on the walls, shouted horrors, but I was only standing in front of the autograph shop under glass, where my reflection hid the lines.

A letter addressed to me was for sale, and I slipped on the sidewalk like a wet towel, or else I was listening after a brief dinner after love. The other had barely left, his smell still on my fingers, to my heart slacking all at once then start and fall silent. Or else I was entering a dream where I thought I ran after a naked child screened by bushes, forwarding a river beaded with rainbow drops, singing from the opposite bank intensified the warmth of his hand, the heat of his armpit, the down of his side or his weapons, and I choked drowning in the rapids. I had learned joy, life among young mad men, colored hummingbirds dancing around me. In a spangled garden under leafy arches, a unicorn seated by the fires of fireplaces, pale, polished its flank, its breasts pointed. Plato opened before the emptied flasks, and on the wall a shadow, a congealed clock. Me going in, me who refuses to lose me among all anticipated pleasures. Was I looking for a fountain or was it oblivion? An astrolabe? Or the crew of a galleon to drink with me to my thirst?

Pigeons polluted the lake water, unless it was a fallen umbel, unless it was badly worded phrases, our bicycles overturned on the zinnias. Where was I going with no other map than a mirror? At evening, each face shot up out of the motor oil like an insult to a genital organ, and the eyes looked at who watches them vacillate, keeping a distance while beauty beat the drum at the windows. The room sealed, no one to cry fire. Then I saw someone pass the foot of the bed, not knowing if it was myself or no one. The lamp glowed without electric current. The spines of books spoken in precise language. The sounds of the street no longer brought the familiar carts closer. I pressed a hand that no longer palpitated. I whistled, and chilly muffled voices didn't answer to their name, although it was shouted as though they were deaf or dead. I hang around silence, the depthless well has no more water for my thirst.

There, I am swallowed up by discrete nothingness. There, where my life has imperceptibly led me. There, I fall without having known any why, but the days and nights of my search who has gazed on them, a frozen witness, without seeing that a flame slept in the deepest strata of my blood. The books read in company, the musics and museums, the inhabited landscapes will have left me alone, and even the sky where I no longer find the lasting color of the weather turns every which way. All stars scrambled, so vaguely that I think I'm walking straight in a world of closed circuits. Blood coiled on itself, in circles endless meridians. So few days overtaking the time that is given, and so few words repeated by so many mouths now that I'm beginning to be nothing. It's pointless to worry, impossible to get lost, or we can go for a walk, if you wish, for as long as you wish. Thank you. Hermine Pinson will be the next reader.

Hermine Pinson:

These poems were actually written around the time that I suffered a brain tumor. Paean to Insomnia, for Harryette Mullen, my great-grandmother. On foe cussing on or about 4:00 AM, I, too, sing the dictionary, o say can you see. Bleary. Bicker. Blister. Battle. Botch. Bun. Bile. Butt. Boar. Bunch. Both. Bite. Break. Beach. Brake. Beetle. Can this branch? Breaking bones live. Back. Bid. Bridle. Bristle. Brash. Band. Bend. Boot. Brave the blessed. Battled. Cackle. Cackle our Sistrurus or cistern, other than both bunting. Here, here, here, here, here, the tweet you pitch and toss, pitch and toss way, go way out your way.

Then nest door diddle, tat for eight hours, and then, and then no sunlit nights. Eho me, may, be, haggle, but repeat butter, batter, bitter, bunting then no more but. Then no mo, Jew, mole, sui, turtle, very, very assist as ss, of course sit, sat back, sat down in mid, miff, fa, muddled, more or lurse, muff, milker. Wa, su, tu, uh, ha, ga, ra, ta [inaudible 00:52:19]. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Nine times. Testing. Just no ice, please. So bad you, bad you, da-day, the unthing sat with its mouth open all day. So you say sassying, I say it's us sing. I say I say so. Opening for the the in thee, thy thingness, not so much so, su, su, sweet. Yes, indeed, sat some socializing on the frying lee, but, but not gone, not yet.

Music speech, how does it go? Sing a little bit of it. At the center of my skull shines a 100-watt bulb. I can't throw off this light, how to transpose the music or distress signals of this chorus sphere. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, can you hear me make sense? Feedback is pure or fiction when you've been parsed by a spark, shot down by light. Is that it? Be patient. I stutter now. Tap, tuck, tap, tuck, I'll start over. Take the moon for my subject. Mind these blue flashes. The last of the snake's tail parts grasses. Did you hear what I said? You're repeating yourself. I'm a hollerer, doctor. Where's my husband? Get the chaplain. How much time do I have left? Certain sonic patterns purge. This little light of mine is the snake I saw hanging in the rafter. Does she know where she is? Should we sedate her now? Certain sonic patterns purge. Every round goes higher, higher. Every round goes higher, higher. Every round goes higher, higher. Yes, the patient's cross, it's the steroids. Turn down the heat, she'll settle.

Somebody get the chaplain in here, I need to holler, certain sonic patterns purge. The patient refuses to lie down, won't watch TV, demands to be moved. The doctor will see her now. Doctor, can you see me now? Patience, take your rest. If I don't mind these blues, I might can. Doctor, how long? Not long, 5, 10, 15, 20. You missed the first part. Last night, night before, 24 doctors at my door. I got up, let them in, hit them on the head till they saw the snake two. 5, 10, 15, 20, those are months, madam. Maybe. Is this a sign for me to be? All I can tell, there's light, a snake I can't throw off. It goes like this.

This last poem is sung for my mother, and she died in a fire. Mama died. Daddy got drunk. He missed her soul. He tried to marry his vice. She laughing. She laughing. On the other side, a woman on fire to live lives again. In her seed, the promise of peace. She was called, she called us to see, to sing the signs, to read and say do-re, do-re, do-re-mi-fa. Earth song. She calls us to pay attention to each grass blade, the mood of the sky, to be cause and effect. Wind blows and seeds round the world to become roots of crepe myrtle, cedar, Shimpaku bonsai, Cyprus, oak, palm, magnolia, which did no wrong, which did no wrong. Green Earth says no time for foolishness. Green Earth says no time to take a rest, just do what you going to do. Play it a little to the right, play it a little to the left, just do what you going to do.

In this wilderness, we lost her. We thought till we couldn't, fought till we couldn't know the blessing of water, and only blood would do, only blood would do, and one child was, one child is all children in this wilderness. Children. Adam and Eve, and pinch me tight, went down to the river one night, Adam and Eve left. Who did they leave? Children. This is the church. This is the steeple. Open the church and see. Do-re, do-re, do-re-mi-fa. She laughing. She crying on the other side, and the woman on fire to live lives again in her seed. She was called, she called us to see, to sing the signs, to read and say do-re, do-re, do-re-mi-fa-so. Thank you. Yerra Sugarman.

Yerra Sugarman:

I'd first like to thank Stanley Moss and Sean Garrity for bringing these books to life, thank you. I'm going to read a sequence. A few things you might need to know. It's for my aunt, and she is a Holocaust survivor who has been in a coma since 1999, and who immigrated to Israel after World War II. IDF is an abbreviation for Israel Defense forces, and there's an epigraph, the sequence begins with an epigraph from a poem by Adrienne Rich, and the rest of it is a series of journal entries.

Journal: Rai'ut Coma Ward, Tel Aviv-Yaffo, July, 2003. "The problem is to connect, without hysteria, the pain of anyone's body with the pain of the body's world." Adrianne Rich, Contradictions: Tracking Poems. July 1st, 2003. My mother's younger sister coma ward. Still a thimbleful of world, you stay in the soft house of your body, your mind pulsing on a string, a balloon knotted to you, your memory tugging on the hospital air like a girl on her mother's sleeve. On the crowded train that strained the tracks from Lwow in 1941, memory's the girl still departing, even if you can't recall yourself, as she clutches your sister's skirts with clammy hands, rushed among the congregation, herded under a scalpel of light, whose prayers crashed like birds against a window pane. Blessed art thou, o Lord, not knowing it is glass. To connect the body's pain with the pain of the body's world, like the hands double, its shadow on a leaf of paper in this coma room's caul of light.

But you don't wonder who tenders the bitter, or who measures the weeping and the ravaged, history bears you in its unconsummated peace, where it always stops, and you retreat from the world not knowing your history or yourself. There, in the skiff of your ribs, it is still Poland 1935. Night glazes your hair, unspooling brown, draped in moonlight, and you are still 12. Your sisters' voices bloom through the buds of your ears, as you count stars like beads on an abacus. They are your mother's daughters, your half-sisters your father doesn't welcome. There, his whip splits the air. Maybe this is what memory is, God wounds, or in the delicate lace of rain, it is what pleads through a crack in the door to be let in. Or it is a moth beating against your mind's once-hot whiteness, cargo neatly stowed in your soul's coracle, where Poland leans toward you. Siberia settles in the snow of dust on your bed's metal frame, and the ghetto floats past in motes.

July 2nd, 2003. You, who would not have wanted me to fly on Shabes, something steers your gaze now past pulse and breath, past tubes and IV pouches suspended along the walls breaking skin. Now, in your hospital bed, you wear a pink hat, and the man across from you, who can still smile at shalom, has on a yarmulke, both of you, ready for the Messiah. Beside the nurses' station, on the way to the ICU, a former IDF soldier, a young slender Bedouin man, whose job was to detect bombs, writes over and over again the same words.

July 3rd, 2003. Do those who believe, forgive? And if we are like seeds, can we burst between the ruined planks of our presents and our pasts, cut from the tree of grief? "What has thou done? The voice of thy brother's blood cryeth unto me from the ground," said God to Cain. The ground, amalgam of shadow and flesh, perhaps what the soul is transience gleaming through our dust, jacket of wind and light. The deepest truth. The deepest truth, like a seashell we put to our ears in which the whole sea tolls. Does the world toll also in the shell of every single body?

July 5th. In the camp, the snow thinned to rain. You see it still stitched days onto history, a tapestry in the attic of your mind, where a seamstress is mending the world with a dove and a cloud. In the camp, the rain, her stitches, your sister, a seamstress enters through a needle, a thread through a dim lit window in your life, and you endure, your body barb of want. But how to release desire with the holes gunned through it? The sky is a burial ground, where a white ash blooms to bone. O, calx, your blown flowers.

July 7th. What do we call it, the light that prisms and keeps opening its monarch wings, and won't fold them or let them be pinned down, even as grief fastens itself to us? Regardless of this, that lunatic light polishing the shell of a house, handfuls of room, a teaspoonful. The lights in different order keeps perusing, pitched far from the mouth of a sink where a woman stood, stands still, perhaps rinsing peas in a plastic colander, now in an archive of heat lit by another wick of light. Light is its own architect, its own contractor, dismantling chambers of the heart to make it an aviary. Its own wrench, converting hallowed space for hollow bone and wingspan. It is its own sickle, threshing the violets of shadows from feet. Its own general and chief, whose strong jaws reveal something like pearls inside the shell of an empty room. What to call the silence? How to say the wounded days try to be faithful, that they're not staunched, yet beautiful, the sheerness of their iris and plume, mandarin and thistle. Though the sky keeps falling, bleeding through rice-white clouds, falling, to say memory.

Mint she'd planted still growing on its sill, dull coins of it in paper cups. How dahlias flowered near the tomb, a star is a searchlight, the night, a torn dress. July, we word our days, we named them willow ash, ache of bells, maze, cars ablaze, exile, the living dead, armies of boys, fire stroking their faces. Children. And our sentences bear themselves to stay perched on the lines of our salt sharp pages. To stay steady, be luminous, but what happens when language can no longer bear us?

July 8th. Lord, who devours us, clarify the shape of our time here. Tether us. Remind us. Land is the cause. Land is the witness. The only nation is our breath. Thank you.

Speaker 1:

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