(Andrew Hudgins, Linda Gregerson, Rodney Jones, Maurice Manning, Leslie Harrison) To celebrate Michael Collier's first ten years editing the poetry series at HMH, five of his authors will read. Hudgins will moderate. Michael, a professor at the University of Maryland, also directs the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Under his editorship, the press has produced a National Book Award Finalist, and won three Kingsley Tufts Awards, the Poets' Prize, a Pulitzer Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Published Date: August 10, 2011

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP podcast series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Washington DC on February 4th, 2011. The recording features Andrew Hudgins, Linda Gregerson, Leslie Harrison, Rodney Jones, and Maurice Manning. Now you'll hear Andrew Hudgins provide introductions.

Andrew Hudgins:

Thank you for coming out to our reading celebrating Michael Collier's 10 years as editor of the Houghton Mifflin Poetry Series. Our participants are Linda Gregerson. Linda is the author of four collections of poetry and two volumes of criticism. Her honors include awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Kingsley Tufts Endowment, and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. She's the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Michigan. Leslie Harrison holds graduate degrees from UC Irvine and the Johns Hopkins University. I love to do that to the Johns Hopkins people.

She won the Bakeless Prize and her book Displacement was published in 2009, and if you are on a hiring committee, you couldn't hire a better poet than Leslie Harrison. Maurice Manning's most recent book is The Common Man. He's also the author of a Companion for Owls, and Bucolics, not a Companion for Owls and Bucolics. He teaches in the writing program at Indiana University and the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College. And I'm Andrew Hudgins. I've written eight books of poetry, including most recently American Rendering: New and Selected Poems, and I teach at the Ohio State University.

We had a consulting firm. $100,000, we were no longer Ohio State University. We were the Ohio State University. Before Michael Collier was the poetry editor at Houghton Mifflin, Peter Davison was. I was one of the poets that Peter inherited when he came in and he always treated me like I was one of his own. I say of Peter the same thing that I say of Michael, he made me a better poet. He took my work and he kicked it around and he kicked me harder than Michael did and I found that I responded to that, but on the other hand, Michael has a gentler and deeper touch. So when the transition came from Peter to Michael, we knew that the Poetry Series was in extremely good hands.

We are well aware that in celebrating Michael, we were in some uncomfortable way celebrating ourselves, but how else to say thank you to an editor who has made us better poets, and in many ways, has been a better critic of our poems than we have writing them? One may might simply be to say that first and foremost, Michael is himself a poet and I'd like to launch our celebration by reading one of Michael's own superb poems, 2212 West Flower Street. In deftly understated blank verse, the poem begins with a horrific suicide, then quietly deepens the human being behind the act in a way that makes the horror sadder, more horrible, and more human.

2212 West Florida Street. When I think of the man who lived in the house behind ours and how he killed his wife and then went into his own backyard a few short feet from my bedroom window, and put the blue-black barrel of the 30.06 inside his mouth and pulled the trigger, I do not think about how much of the barrel he had to swallow before his fingers reached the trigger, nor the bullet that passed out the back of his neck, nor the wild orbit of blood that followed his crazy dance before he collapsed in a clatter over the trash cans, which woke me. Instead, I think of how quickly his neighbors restored his memory, his humanity, remembering his passion for stars which brought him into his yard on clear nights with a telescope and tripod.

Or the way he stood in the alley in his rubber boots and emptied the red slurry from his rock tumblers before he washed the glassy chunks of agate and petrified wood. And we remembered too, the gooseneck lamp on the kitchen table that burned after dinner and how he worked in its bright circle to fashion flies and lures. The hook held firmly in the jeweler's vice while he wound the nylon thread around the haft and feathers, and bending closer to the light, he concentrated on tying the knots, pulling them tight against the coiled threads and bending closer still, turning his head slightly toward the window, his eyes lost in the dark yard.

He took the thread ends in his teeth and chewed them free. Perhaps he saw us standing on the sidewalk watching him. Perhaps he didn't. He was a man so involved with what he did and what he did was so much of his loneliness. Our presence didn't matter. No one's did. So careful and precise were all his passions. He must have felt the hook with its tiny barbs against his lip, sharp and trigger shaped. It must have been a common danger for him, the wet clear membrane of his mouth threatened by the flies and lures, the beautiful enticements he made with his own hands and the small loose thread ends which clung to the roof of his mouth and which he tried to spit out like an annoyance that would choke him.

Michael Collier's poem. Thank you. And on a downward arc, I'm going to read two poems from my book and then turn the podium over to the next reader. Since we are celebrating, one of the ways that you can help us celebrate Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is by buying the books so that there can continue to be a poetry series. Mine is called American Rendering: New and Selected Poems, and this is the first poem in the book. It's called My Daughter. After midnight, I dragged carpet padding from a trash bin and spread it on the asphalt between the wall and dumpster. Seasoned with sleep, I pulled carpet remnants over me and that night, I married, raised a family, and outlived everyone except a daughter, a teacher, and her two children, one damaged.

I woke when a bread truck scraped the bin. From under damp carpet, I watched punctilious bin sign invoices, sweep, hose down the docks. A boy in a bloody butcher's smock leaned against the wall and smoked through bloody fingers. At night, I search and sometimes find my daughter. I make good money now, I tell her. Let me take Theresa home with me. I can buy the help she needs. My daughter smiles, asks how I'm doing, and I lose the moment to my wife, my job, my actual family as the thick faced infant bucks in her arms, or beats her forehead hard and almost musically against the table. When I clinch her to my belly, she screams red-faced and rigid.

Hush, hush, hush, I serenade her. Oh, unhushable baby, hush. And I'd like to end my section by reading a villanelle about Freedom Summer, which in Mississippi, we're talking the sixties, early to mid-sixties before my father was stationed back in the Deep South, but like I think all of you, the names Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner have a totemic force. Poem is called The Names of the Lost. The night burned all night long that freedom summer. 94 at midnight, 80 at dawn, late June, a high speed chase, Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner rammed off the road and hustled from their car. Wayne Rogers asked, are you that nigger lover? The nights burned all night long that Freedom Summer.

I know exactly how you're feeling, sir, said Schwerner. Roberts shot him in the heart. They shot them all, Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner. You didn't leave me nothing but a nigger, Jim Jordan griped, but at least I killed me one. The nights burned all night long that Freedom Summer. Ray Killen prayed a funeral prayer. The preacher beseeched God's mercy on these communists, these agitators, Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner before they buried them using a bulldozer. The nights burned all night long that Freedom Summer, asked Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner. Thank you.

Linda Gregerson:

And I just want to second Andrew's thanks to our immensely generous and gifted editor, Michael Collier, and to his predecessor, Peter Davison, whom I counted as my dear friend and who, when he was dying and I would speak to him on the phone and say, "Peter, how are you," he'd say, "Oh, you know," and then want to talk about poetry? He said, "What have you read lately? What's wonderful," and that's how he always was. I learned immense amounts from him. Okay. The Salvage One. So door to door among the shotgun shacks in Cullowhee and Waynesville in our cleanest shirts, and ma'am and excuse me were all but second nature now and this one woman comes to the door, she must have weighed 300 pounds.

"Would you be willing to tell us who you plan to vote for," we say, and she turns around with Everett. "Who are we voting for? The Black guy," says Everett, "The Black guy", she says, except that wasn't the language they used. They used the word we've all agreed to banish from even our innermost thoughts, which is when I knew he was going to win too, at which point the speaker discovers as if the lesson were new, she has told the story at her own expense. "Amazing," said my sister's chairman's second wife, "to think what you've amounted to considering where you're from," which she imagined was a compliment.

One country friends where when we have to go there as depend upon it, fat or thin, regenerate or blinkered to the end, we shall. They have to take us in. I saw three, a river full of geese as I drove home across our one lane bridge, 400 of the measly close mass against the current and the bitter wind. Some settled on the ice and just the few at a time who'd loosen rank to gather again downstream as if to paraphrase. The fabric every minute bound by just that pulling out that holds the raveling together. "You were driving all this time," said Steven, counting geese, the snow falling into the river. No, the river about to give itself over to ice, I'd stopped.

Their wingspans had they not been taking shelter here, as wide as we are tall. My husband rather objects to being made the straight man in my poems where he enters as the voice of reason and skepticism, but I cannot do without him. Her argument for the existence of God. This one then. The doctor who, of course, possesses a foreign name thus gathering all our, what shall we call them, our powers of foreboding in a single sorted corner of the morning news contrived to miss the following. Eight fractured ribs, three missing fingertips, infected tissue torn and partly healed again between the upper lip and gum.

And this part, you have to use your Sunday finest to imagine, a broken back, third lumbar, which had all but severed the spinal cord, leaving him floppy or so the coroner later determined below the waist. Now granted, she might not have thought to expect a wailing one and a half year old to toddle obligingly over the tiles, nor felt she had the leisure to apply her little mallet just below the knee. We see that, but we are not talking nuance here. The tooth he had swallowed so hard had been the blow to his face. Of course, one had no inkling that would take some sort of psychic or an MRI, but ulcerated lesions on the scalp and ears.

I tell you, if I hear once more how the underage mother's underage boyfriend suffered a difficult childhood himself, I'll start to wreck the furniture. When I'm allowed to run the world, you'll have to get a license just to take the course on parenting and everyone will fail it and good riddance will die out, but in the meantime, which is where we're always stranded and ignoring consolation, which is laughable, what's to be made of the sheer bad fit? The reigning brilliance of the genome and the risen moon, the cell wall whose electric charge forms now a channel, now a subtle barrier, no modulating thought has thought to equal.

The arachnid's exoskeleton, the kestrel's eye, and we who might have been worthy, but for reasons forever withheld from us aren't. Wouldn't you rather be damned for cause? A sunset poem. I think of orange as that thing, both the phenomenon and the word that poems always have to choke on. Famously, there is nothing that rhymes with orange, so I always think it's this kind of standing joke and that orange, when it appears and demands to be named, is a kind of joke on we who try to write on us, those of us who try to write. Verena. Smothered up in gauze, the sky's been healing for a week or two conserving its basin of gruel.

The shops have closed in sympathy. The ferry's ministrations barely mark the hour, and just when we'd convinced ourselves that beauty unsubdued betrays a coarsened mind, the fabric starts to loosen, lift and daylight all unblighted takes a gaudy goodnight bow. What sudden in distinction just an hour ago had all but persuaded us not to regret resumes its first divisions. Slate from cinder, ash from smoke, warmed dapple gray from mole skin, dove from quaker gray, from taupe until the black water satins unroll their gorgeous lengths above a sharpening partition of lake and loam. Give up yet, says the [inaudible 00:20:11] sable brush.

Then watch what I can do with orange and flood lit ink besotted so as sails the upper atmosphere that all our better judgment fails. The Alps, they've seen it all before. They've flattened into waiting mode. The people flat, bedazzled that in fairness, had a shorter way to fall. And finally, I'm going to read just one section from a sequence I wrote about the ravishing frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence. They tell the story of the life of St. Peter and one of the stories about St. Peter was that after the death of Christ, St. Peter inherited his power of healing the ill.

And it was rumored that even Peter's shadow had the much like the hem of the garment of his Lord had the power to heal the sick. This poem is called His Shadow. They brought us out in the pavement then, our palates and cots, the poorest barely decent in their bed clothes and facing as best we could the sun. So whether he would've know his passing shadow might pass over us and we be healed as if some ghastly catalog of everything you fear the flesh might one day have in store for you should suddenly block your way back home.

But look how the painter has lovingly rendered the clubs of my knees, gall knots, hooves of callous, you would surely look away from in the ordinary course of things, calves like an afterthought trailing behind. I wonder will I get to keep some sign of this when I'm made whole? I've come to think the body scorns hypothesis. Hasn't it paid for its losses in kind while we are writ in water? My advantage here was learning so early how little the world will spare us. Now this rumored cure, you see the peeling fresco, it was once as chaste as you. Thank you.

Leslie Harrison:

Good morning. I too owe Michael Collier an enormous debt of gratitude. So many people, especially younger writers do. There's the Maryland program, there's Breadloaf, there's Houghton Mifflin, there's his own writing, his wonderful poems, and in his spare time, he translates Greek plays. The explanation I heard for this at Breadloaf was that Michael is an alien. That didn't make much sense to me except if his people were tragically, tragically wrong about how to seize power in this world. I'm going to read some winter poems, which isn't hard because they pretty much all are, in honor of many of our travel difficulties in getting here.

And in celebration that so many of us are here. Dusting. This morning, a dusting of snow. This morning, twittering flakes, flakes clumping, convocations of them on the lawn, sun, winter pale sideways without force lacking a certain substance. If he died where he lives, no one would think to tell me, not right away. My father gone into the long raveling of sidereal years was gone into coffin three days before someone remembered he had children somewhere, and like the Milky Way finally arriving overhead, called me and absence was made flesh and brought low into ground though none of his children know where.

This thin snow comes, fragments of the cold, cold stars and somewhere, he wakes or does not, and in this white dusting, he, like the starlight, the snow, stubborn, resisting, dissolution continues for now to shine. Home is hiking. I hike a lot. I write about hiking a lot and winter. Home is Hiking. One, though in theory, night happens first to the sky when you are idling worn boots in a pond tucked just below the summit, when you're watching a beaver navigate and chew, stroke and fell, when you're watching this still pool, this creature, these winded trees. The night is a thing that happens first behind your back. The sky thins and sheens, darkness fills a valley scattered with stars, one of which you live in.

Two, I get as far as the rise edging the yard, the trees behind beckon like a jailbreak, but I sit and watch the risen dark sliced by spill of yellow light, the window making of the night an architecture. His shadow pacing the bright aquarium that dusk has made and overhead, the stars three have done what I have done, have spent the day spinning and whirling beyond sight, unhoused and absent, meaningless, but now, the night complete, the stars and I assemble in our usual places, shining as always in a litany of fresh and ancient betrayals. Hoarfrost. Hoarfrost is what happens when a cold wind hits even colder land and it's the frost that coats trees and everything else, just in case you're not a winter person.

Hoarfrost. Dawn, ground fog gathers and unfurls, smudging snow, sky, air. The sun flickers, refuses to fade. I'm saying goodbye. Evidence. While he wakes, I walk the mountain, hoarfrost tasting of sky and dust and cold thickens as I climb. Fetal 4:00 AM, I listened to the dark and to silence, dark's beloved familiar, receding into him sleeping in the same soft sheets, in the close heated room. I fingered the satin binding and thought whatever is known about winter, I know, have always known, will know better now. On the day I leave, I leave the mountain first. Early sun turns fuzz of frost to something slick.

Slow curve, falling rock, passing lane, the signs explain in the light sharpening these things, him refusing the window, me already gone. I was reading a book review, which is often a mistake, and I came across the phrase that became the title of this poem. I don't remember the book review, but I really liked the phrase. This is called The Day Beauty Divorced Meaning. You can tell what kind of a book review it was, right? Their friends looked shocked, said not possible, said how sad. The trees carried on with their treeish lives, stately except when they shed their silly dandruff of birds, and the ocean did what oceans mostly do, suspended almost everything, dropped one small ship or two.

The day beauty divorced meaning, someone picked a flower, a fight, a flight, someone got on a boat, a closet lost its suitcases, someone was snowed in, someone else on. The sun went down and all it was, was night. I'm going to read two more poems, I think, and then carry on with my day. This is my first AWP, by the way. I walked into the lobby of the Marriott last night and thought uh-oh, then I went to my hotel room and didn't come out for a long time. This is one of those poems you're getting among the things that I do besides hiking and living in the winter is drink a lot of tea. So this one is surprisingly enough called Tea.

Nearly dawn, I'm watching the trees march out of night surround again this house. The dogs twitch in final dreams. The stove, this orange unsteady heat and black iron box breathes warm mirage into the cold, into the sky. The yellow enamel teapot does the same inside. The tea leaves in their white paper pouch in their sky blue mug, I've brewed thousands of cups like this. Wood house, wood fire, the woods leaning out of the night of their stubborn life. The taste of leaves hot on my tongue. The last poem is called Lately, I Have Been Dark and at Peace. Somebody pointed out to me that it was a lie, the title. I don't know what they meant. Lately, I Have Been Dark and at Peace.

Is it better to resist essential nature or learn to dwell within? Once upon a time, I loved once, I married a man, loved another. Once, I turned the snow's shallow acknowledgements to wings, a frozen lake to dusk and glide. I do not love the dark, the cold for death, for barren or despair. I never needed to learn to love the winter, the water, the world absent us and our busy makings. I loved them for extreme, for all edges apparent, for indifference to my losses, to loss that already includes both men for knives and utility and danger, for not pretending the universe is kind, for true things made more accessible, for indivisible, the cleave from the shine. Thank you.

Rodney Jones:

My name is Rodney Jones. Andrew, I was happy to see had passed over me. It's a bit like having a sudden power over another individual, not quite like an infidelity, but something that I feel will give me eternal power over Andrew. You understand this? Good. I want to say a word or two about editing and first, how important I think it is that we operate in such a large literary community with so many writers and so few readers that we maintain faith in the idea that someone reads literature with the idea that it should move them, period.

And no one ever gave me that feeling more directly than Peter Davison, who when I was teaching six composition courses, wrote me a letter once and it said we would like to publish three of these poems in the Atlantic Monthly, and by the way, when you have a manuscript ready, I also publish books and I would like for you to submit a book for publication, which just struck me as impossible. It was unbelievable news, and I've worked with both Peter and Michael and good things have been said about both of them. Peter could be a terrifying editor and both Andrew and I had near death experiences on submitting manuscripts to him.

When Peter would call back and he didn't say, not that he would say this to me, but I can imagine him saying it to Andrew, and he would say something like, Andi, with an I. Actually, I think that you're one of the finest poets of your generation and I'd really like to publish your work, to continue publishing your work with something about this book. I don't know. I just, could you maybe have another go with it, and we both had this very conversation and as I understand that many people did, and I think part of Peter's charm was to attempt to alert one to a higher presence, and Michael as an editor never comes out directly and slaps you.

But one notes when he says, well, perhaps you have three poems that are very much alike here and you think somehow, you come out thinking I'm very good that way, but I shouldn't be so good, and so I've loved both of them. I agree, they both made me a better poet. Maybe not good enough. These are poems I'm going to be reading from a new manuscript called Imaginary Logic, which the title of which seemed to get out of jail free card. I've always been very aware of the blue state, red state divide, living as a blue person in the red area. This, I guess, is a work of fiction. I wish it were more of one. It's called North Alabama End Time.

Early has come to my house on Sunday in a [inaudible 00:37:21] to say that the world is ending. "Anyone can see it," he says. "The signs are right before us, your global warming, your famine and pestilence, your jihads and holy wars." "I don't know," I said. Early, maybe the physics guys see it. Quarks, muons, neutrinos, the building blocks of matter are naked as pole dancers to those geniuses, but us, we read, but we're ignorant. We're like goats eating paper. "No, it's scripture," says Early. It's right there in Revelations. The world's going to end. You've hardened your heart. "People are going to cry," says Early's oldest boy Tabor and look straight at me for the rocks to fall on them.

"I can nearly see that," I tell Tabor. People get depressed. It seems like there's no way out, but then maybe they let it go a day, something fantastic happens. They change prescriptions. A redhead moves to town. Yesterday, I saved a turtle's life. "You're too negative about the end of time," says Early. It's like anything different. You have to give it a chance, strike while the iron is hot and it's hot. It's very hot. The battle of Armageddon has probably already started. "I'd like to be more positive," I say, and I try. I really do. I read all I can about wars and the evil in men's heart, but it's tough with the end. It's like the championship.

Nothing is playing infinity. It looks to me like a dead tie. "You're wrong," says Tabor. Good triumphs in the end. "He's got you there," says Early. Good always whips evil's ass. Just wait. People are going to weep and gnash their teeth. "Not that you will," he says. You're thinking. That's a start. "I hope it's not too late," I say and wave as they drive off. Not bad men, disturbed maybe, but like all turrentines, friendly. You can say anything to them. Probably they just got carried away. They meant to talk politics. The end of time was just a pretext. I often think about language with language and that's the problem. It's hard to get around language.

This is called Remember. You must understand long after the talking in, some voices remain and ghost inside you in layers like the voices you remember bleeding into one another under the main conversation on ancient telephones. These voices, actual people lived in them. Geneva, Modina, Zora, Einstein, and Faulkner agreed once they met, they heard such voices. This word, any word without voices is lost and it works another way. [inaudible 00:40:22] beneath mothers, my mind's gone. My remember is broke. It's chicken fried and chicken running. In its beak, this chicken holds a worm. Worm, she said leaning close years ago. As it wriggled, she said it again more slowly.

I'm going to lighten up a little. I don't know why I've always been afraid of famous people. Being a poet is a kind of thing you can do to avoid that because we're all famous here. I know we are, but I've encountered famous people rarely and I've never behaved well around them. This is called Starstruck. First came Bob, just Bob, a visiting cousin's second husband, the operator of Lyndon Johnson's teleprompter. Then Archie Persons, Truman Capote's biological father, jitterbugging in the parlor at my eighth grade English teacher's Christmas party. Then more flagrant examples, chance sightings of the spaceman Wernher von Braun at the Heehaw Star Junior samples before actual FaceTime with Leonard Nimoy and Joey Lauren Adams.

And why could I never speak directly? Why that silly unworthiness on confronting famous persons as if about to be auditioned by the auditorium of everyone who had hated or loved them, and what was he really like? Bald like Truman, but taller, older. Truman potato, a boy had said in class, and the answer rang as Archie danced that glamour as the thumb tacked hammers rocked in gene skeleton's upright piano. This is a poem, a book that somehow came together around a number of poems about competitions that I began to write, and one was just came out of the blue, a title of competition of prayers. I started thinking about all these prayers competing for God's attention, which is, of course, infinite.

But also had just recently come from the church of my extreme childhood, formerly a church of 42 or 43 people on a Sunday service, which had grown to 1,000 and had become sort of a mega church, and it was so interesting, the degree of sophistication because I grew up in a place where people believed in healing and I saw a number of unsuccessful healings and prayers that seemed unlikely. So this is the poem that came out of that. Prayers. Blessings go fastest than benedictions and harvest thinks. Most headaches are healed. Pleas for those in dead or prison are sometimes granted. Request for moratoriums on gravity are denied.

Only ask and reign may fall, but pancreatic cancer won't relent. War prayers cancel each other out. Men cry praying where I was born, cry because the dying fetus is sad, cry that Jesus suffered dying for them, cry especially hard at altar calls. I see us in our early teens, guilt ridden by masturbation, stirred by scripture properly seasoned by hymns sitting as stoic as Buddha through parables of burning car crashes and morning skid row hangovers of iron lungs and abandoned women, and if still, no one had come before him to kneel, weeping copiously and confessing egregious sins, Reverend Stallings would signal the pianist to play more gravely, softly until the tune slowed.

Minor arpeggios drop their notes like petals on an infant's coffin, and in its well above the throat, the soul hurt. The soul filled with tears, though how rarely in such a small congregation would anyone actually yield, repent, expose the inmost privacy when one might march with hundreds down the sawdust aisle at the annual countywide revival and receive identical redemption for the trifle of whispering to a stranger and filling out a card. Then no more fear of burning, no more worrying sins, weird and pleasurable sensations, and it lasts forever, this lasting peace down deep, this grace of joining in. Infinitely renewable sustaining grace that hallows sluts and draws heroin from addicts like toxin from a sting.

Its church is consecrated in the spirit and now there is even a bus to take you there. Christian school, Christian halfway house, the little sanctuary has sprouted wings, staffed nursery, kitchen, cafeteria, two ball courts, web mastered Christian internet band stand for Christian heavy metal and widescreen Christian karaoke, but no one shouts. It's not that kind of church. The pews are walnut. The kneeling rails are cushioned brass. They smile as they sing. When they pray for you, they mean it. They pray for keeps. They pray to break your heart and make you one of them, and I think I'll let that go because there are many people reading. Thank you so much for your attention.

Maurice Manning:

Hello. I published three books before I had an editor. Then came along the fourth book and then came along into my world Michael Collier, the first person I ever worked with who said this poem does not belong in the manuscript. This one could use some work. It was a revelation to me, and since I've only had the experience of one book, I look forward to more. I thought I'd read a few poems that based on my very pleasant interactions with Michael that I thought he would like. This is called the Chickasaw Plum Tree. So you're the one who drives the wild bees wilder. With what, I'd like to know. Your hairy blossoms, too much smell good smell. You tree. You've heart struck me. See? That's a short one.

This is called Culture. Some of us in cahoots with the birds are smiling silly smiles because the sun in the barn lot is warmer today, and that means nothing in particular, but it is a change. Someone, my neighbor's neighbor over the hill, shears sheep and helps with lambing. Beach Fork the river is named for a tree, and in a way, that's a symbol and also an idea. We have a grove, we have a stand. We call it love when we fall in love. We like to be quiet and have our thoughts. We remember the old piano teacher, her spinet, an instrument that came to town on a railroad car and went by mule and wagon a ways to the old brick house. We talk, we graft the apple branch and wait another season for the fruit.

We have a church house here. It's one big room. We have a hummingbird with the silver, shiny, greenish throat. Theology. In the low woods, in the old dream of the old hard land's dream of its own darkness turning darker and so returned to the first dark in its first time, the past not past. I am not now by being here, nor will I be but then. I am for a moment dust of the first God in the woods in the first dream and in the dark of that dream, which I remember and reach by remembering and being here, and once and many times again, I fell out, out of the dream because I wanted to love my love and even lost from the dream, I found her for she was in the holy dream and loving her means I will die, which is sad, though love is worth the fix.

So when I pray I say to the God, old man, I understand the dream. Something to Say About Possums. My father says they ate them stuffed with persimmons and crab apples back in the big depression in the southern mountains, and growing up, I knew people, Black people who ate them too or said they did, usually expecting a rise from me. They're greasy, but you'll jump up and slap your mama if you ever eat one right, and once in grief, I killed one with a rock along the banks of Clark's Run one day when I was running away as a boy. I must've been 14 and scared, and then with the shutter, ashamed. Clark's Run is a little branch named for George Rogers Clark of revolutionary fame, cut from Jeffersonian cloth and marked with the same old flaw. I've taken so many backward steps.

I have believed history can be explained only to learn like sin, it can't. How I've needed more and more forgiveness. I've needed grace and followed it into a dream of green and yellow light coming from a way on high, maybe a mountain. Slow Class. Sixth grade, John Cox was round and thick and one or two heads taller than the rest of us. He wore big shoes, black and heavy that made him taller still. He said, "Boys, they're certified roach killers." We had to sweep the room after class and John would strum the broom and sing a ballad, heartsick, tapping his foot on the seat of a desk. He was in love with a pale girl and paired himself with her on the days when we shoved the desks aside and schooled the room in rounds and square dance calls. The floor was tiled in green and white.

The radiators hissed in winter. Another boy named John was raised in the blur of country music. He smoked already and so did Rabbit Rogers, who later went to jail for stealing. We were something of a band. We'd open the windows in winter and howl and beat the erasers into clouds and clang the metal dust pan like a gong, and that Thanksgiving, I wrote a poem. In 1620 at Plymouth Rock, some English men put their boat to dock. The only lines I've ever remembered in the same old meter I use now, and now, I remember Rabbit's eye, the left one, and how the pupil dripped into the gray iris, a tear. To us, the imperfection was a marvel better than a cast, more glorious than a scar. Although for Rabbit Rogers, who merely shrugged, it was a detriment he was tired of. The drop, he said, made him look dumb. Thanks.

Andrew Hudgins:

I haven't had an opportunity to plan my revenge on Rodney Jones yet, but I can tell another Peter Davison story. I remember taking my, and Peter, it was like Peter's criticism was a little bit like going to Yoda to get a reading on your book and that he would say something and you would have to figure it out. Wouldn't you agree, Rodney? And Linda, you didn't seem to have had that experience, but I remember... Anyway, this is my story. I gave him this manuscript and we were sitting having breakfast and he said, "Well, the book doesn't really come to a conclusion," and I said, "That's right. I didn't want it to come to a conclusion."

And this frustrated Peter and he said, "Books have to have shape," and of course, I knew that and I said, "Well, that would suggest a meaning that I didn't think was there," and he said, "But the book just kind of falls off the table," and I thought it does, doesn't it? It's not just that he was Yoda, I was freaking Luke Skywalker, but with Michael, who we are here to talk about tonight, this afternoon, when Michael responded to my book, it was a better read than I had given myself the same material, and that is something that you have to be extremely grateful for. So I told Michael that I was going to keep the squirm factor down, but I would like a round of applause for Michael.

Speaker 1:

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