(Nikky Finney, Lyn Hejinian, Tree Swenson) The Academy of American Poets presents an event featuring two prestigious poets, Nikky Finney and Lyn Hejinian, who will be reading their own work.

Published Date: July 11, 2012

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP podcast series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Chicago on March 3rd, 2012. The recording features Therese Winson, Nikky Finney, Lyn Hejinian and Beth Harrison. Now you'll hear Therese Winson from the Academy of American Poets provide introductions.

Therese Winson:

Good evening. The Academy of American Poets is really happy to be presenting the last event of this AWP, which it's such a remarkable annual feast. I come here and I just feel like we've brought together so many souls who are spending most of the year laboring in solitude. And then here we are and it's so impressive to see the numbers of people and how this conference has grown over the years, and wish I could zoom up on Google Map where you can go way up and see the whole planet and just look at all of the people who are here. But of course, that's not what's important.

What's important about AWP is the individual conversations that happen, the things that people hear when they're in panels and listening and they hear something, or when you're sitting around in the bar at night and there's something else that you hear and it's great that's what's important. And I thought it was kind of lackluster the applause of thanks for David Fenza, Christian Teresi, Amber Whiticomb and I think we should one more time thank AWP for bringing us together every year. Woo-hoo.

So the Academy of American Poets tries to all year long capture that sense of overview and the sense that the whole of the United States, our literary community is built of many different styles of poetry, many different genres... Not genres, many different aesthetics and we try to represent everything that's going on and it too has been growing just like AWP has been growing over the years, and in the last month we had 65% growth on our website over last year. It's like this is amazing what's happening with the interest in poetry in this country and we now sustain 14,000,000 visits a year to our website and it's coming from all sorts of people from the hatchet faced literati like ourselves and also from the school kids across the country who are secretly finding others of their kind during national poetry month.

The Academy is able to do its work thanks to its many members across the country and I know some of you are here tonight and I want to thank those of you who are here and are supporters.

I have to say just a moment of sentimentality here, the Academy of American Poets, this was my dream job years ago and when I was at Copper Canyon Press was to be the executive director of the Academy of American Poets and it has exceeded the dream that I had to do this with all the poets that I've been able to work with because it's on behalf of the poets who are doing the work on behalf of the culture, the people who are really diving into the wreck to bring back the treasures. But 10 years is a long time. It's time for me to go and the executive director normally introduces our guest readers, but since I am delighted to say that the entire time I've been at the Academy of American Poets, I've been very lucky to work with someone who hasn't had nearly as much credit as she deserves and it's perhaps the fate of associate directors everywhere, but I'm very happy that Beth Harrison has been an appointed interim executive director of the Academy of American Posts and so she is going to introduce tonight's readers.

Beth Harrison:

Good evening. Thank you all so much for being here. I told Christian I thought we could shout down just about any blues band that wanted to take us on, so let's do that.

I'm deeply honored to introduce Nikky Finney and Lyn Hejinian tonight. First up will be Nikky. She was born in South Carolina to a family of politicians and activists. She began writing poetry as a young girl during the civil rights struggle and subsequently attended Talladega College in Alabama. Her first book of Poetry On Wings Made of Gauze was published in 1985 followed by Rice and the World is Round. Last year her collection Head Off and Split was selected for the National Book Award in poetry. Her acceptance speech for that award was as powerful and most likely more powerful than anything ever heard at the Oscars. She spoke of the slave codes of South Carolina circa 1739, describing them as the queen's tongue arranged perfectly on the most beautiful paper sealed with wax and palmetto tree sap determined to control what can never be controlled, the will of the human heart to speak its own mind.

As intense and gleaming as the knife referenced in the title poem Finney's most recent book pushes us to be mindful of what we fraction, fragment, cutoff, dice, dishonor throw away, and ultimately what we keep from the past as we cut through to the future. Finney's many other honors include a PEN American Open Book Award and the Benjamin Franklin Award for poetry.

She's deeply invested in the black arts movement, is a co-founder of the Affrilachian poets and she serves on the board of directors of [inaudible 00:06:08]. She's currently a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

The poet Bruce Weigel has said Nikky Finney takes the reader to a wonderfully alive world where the musical possibilities of language overflow with surprise and innovation. Finney has an ear to go along with the wildness of her imagination, which sweeps through history like a pair of wings. Her carefully modulated free verse is always purposeful in its desire to move the reader in a way that allows us intimate access to necessary observations about ourselves. These poems and other words have the power to save us. Please welcome to the stage Nikky Finney.

Nikky Finney:

I began this life as infant photographer focusing with the moving middle eye of me, the round umbilical cord where it melded into the body center like a vacuum sucking in the sights, not with any eye but with skin. Did I see this? Do I remember now? The skin can sow remember.

This picture that I first took of touch here in the studio body of birth. First photograph a feeling anchored by something other than the liquid albumin world where I had lived from the first. Only one hour old and I remember unlatching my eyes to see the tiny incubating opening where I'd already lived for a week, the warm, stale air pouring in on me, not with my mind, but with full body camera. Do I remember this?

I can't show you any photographs to prove what I'm telling you is true. I am remembering this not with my mind, but with my body. The body can so remember what long ago left the accidental scene of the eye. The perfect circular opening round, just like the end, beginning of the cord round like the camera's eye that I would one day accidentally flutter inside of discovering the silky stems of wildebeest poems growing sour, sweet filigree weeds.

Men who give milk. Epigraph. Breast development occurs commonly and spontaneous lactation occasionally in men under conditions of starvation. Discover Magazine. February, 1995

In Toronto there is a man with [inaudible 00:09:48] hair walking one way, a giant garbage bag bobbles in his arms. Now and then he looks another way behind where another bag sits. He does not turn for it, not then. Instead, he pays attention to his future, walking all the way ahead down the street he goes, tipping a tight rope walker's agility. His bag as bulbous as a giant's eye cannot help him see.

People with steaming cups and toasted breads pushed to not be in his way. His whole wide world is on the move. I keep one eye on him and his moving bag. The other eye is kept on the bag of his corner past. He reaches the end of the street, sits the bag and his arms down on the corner gentles it as if it is a sack of the last time he heard the high yellow and coral orange of his mother's laugh before when his world had a lock, a key, a ceiling, a proper place for her to cup his lion eyed face.

As he leaves, he pats the bag on its belly, U-turns, walks two blocks back to the other bag, squats picks that bag up, turns forward again, once again, walking, walking. His walk is strong as if he has children. Three, one wife to love until the end. A 30 year mortgage, a niggling boss keep your shiny quarters, his feet sing out to the bread pushers. He does not stop at the first corner or the second corner. With his first bag, he walks beyond into his future to the third corner where he sets the bag in his arms, the bag of his dreams down. He settles his hand on this bag's spine as if it is that day in the country with his father when it was about to rain.

This is how to shift and glide the old man says. The old four speed truck lurches like a bullfrog. Two hours of repeat instruction and the old man finally reaches for the boy's temple, his hand and onyx butterfly landing on a purple bush it both fears and fancies. This is the first time his father has ever touched him. The boy able parking between two old oaks laying down the sure smooth tracks of the man to be. The walking man with hair like [inaudible 00:12:34] stands and turns away from this noonday flash of the ephemeral. He goes back for the sunshine bag that is fat with his laughing mother who is always reaching even now for his browning and walking face, he walks it to the corner beyond the bag spilling with his finally satisfied father and his satisfied fathers finally soaring butterflies.

This picking up and putting down, this serpentine stepping goes on until the sun gives up, raises its red orange hand all day, all week, the pendant, then crescent then waning whole winter moon pores. With every step his feet stitch then unbraided the wooly strings of his heart. Keep moving. His two bags never meet on the same corner. Everything now out of his reach is never out of his arms for long. In Toronto a man zigzags his way across Canada. In Canada a black man stitches himself back to earth.

Penguin, mullet, bread.

She pulls white oily meat of mullet off the long sharp bones of spine. The bones prick she never once says Ouch. I watch her long fingers seven inches away. My eyes are two glossy olives glued to the delicate woman's mouth. It is summer behind her, the white curtains she has made move like seagrass, tall, freckled, waving just beyond I am camera. She's movie. She bites, then rolls, placing plump soft chunks of fish into the side of her mouth. Her eyes grow big from what she tastes. I study her mouth, not her eyes. She chews slowly, never showing what's there. Her tongue twists and falls. My dinner moves in slow white fish animation. She coos like a woman who can taste any flavor in the world. A woman who can hula-hoop in her own mouth.

My hand rises, my fingers reach, fall short, then fall again. I want to say, mama, pull the flesh from the throat, not the belly. The meat there has more juice than the meat around the fin, but she is the mama. I have no baby patois for what little I know of watery things. I have only 17 months of new desire and only two ways of showing it. It's too soon to tell her how much I miss my private swimming hole that by the size six looks of her has all but dried up. She chews down on the flesh of the fish, packs it around good until it is a perfect caramel mush. Catching some of the juice that falls with her longest finger there at the corner of her mouth, she pushes all of the sweet flesh back inside. Once or twice she pulls out a hatpin size bone hiding in the waves of tender meat.

Only then does she wear her eureka smile holding it up in the air to show. My wishful eyes rise. Her long hand is circled in light. My body shifts into grateful. My newish eyes lift over and beyond the white curtains that all visitors believe are store-bought. This she says is why you have a mama. Her empire backbone finally speaks. This is why you must never talk back to me. Why you must love, honor and obey me. My job, her toes pas de deux, is to feed and tell you the stories and keep you away from sharp things that might slip into your throat and never completely disappear. Her eyes plie into the slinky circles of her mouth. The sweet flesh is finally ground salt and snapper, spit and meal. A fine pate. She reaches her long brown fingers deep inside her jaw, our hinged mouths open mine prematurely.

My fists are flying fleshy verbs in the apple air of her kitchen. Bald and sweet anticipation. My chubby legs yoga extend into early orgasmic pose. My chin sets into downward facing dog, my begging eyes and dark mouth lips close in slow around her fingers. The pounded succulent fish and spit land center of my tongue.

I swell in my first chair ever fed by the mother who relishes the story of turning her back and leaving me once to swim off a thousand miles, find food, fight off shimmering shark, then swim a thousand miles back just to drop her beak into mine. I am the lucky girl of the high chair.

Boulangerie. Begins with the epigraph from Rumi. The way you make love is the way God will be with you. One, the arc of your boneless back flags above me. We are blind discoverers. The nine seas pooled between us. Blue curves, maritime, sheath of surrender, limbed night. What sweeter world could be Voyaged from the earth's center pieced of figs, suckle, orange, the twice licked skin of key limes, breath of peppermint, braided, burning.

Two. The long twin inches of my hands. Take the whole night to ski the two pineapple halves of you. Brown baklava pieced over a caramel cooler of skin. The monsoon is early. Two marsupials coax because deeper into the pouch of night, wandering inside the hour of the lung hoping to turn conch by day. Our outside skins well brushed, inside we are desperate sandpaper. Breathless. The buttery lights of day sink into dawn. Two perfect halves of pink grapefruit skinned 12 times crushed to velvet, lifted, assumed to the inside flesh of new coconut. A burning moon fossilizes, figs sway right over right left. Dips left don't fall is what you whisper.

Three. We wrap each other down around become ground cover for every lonely night that ever was. In the morning, the monkeys come to eat what's left of us. Talk is of the great storm long gone now. The older one, the bishop who never stops filling his jaws and covering his eyes, listens back for one last thunder squall of fruit he hopes will fall. He wants one last floating midnight note to drop like nine miles of ripe banana down the back of his throat. He wants homily, return, consecration.

The clitoris is nine centimeters deep in the pelvis. Most of it's scrunched and hidden. New studies show the shy curl to be longer than the penis. But like Africa, the continent, it is never drawn to size. Mapmakers and others who draw important things for a living do not want us to know this. In some females the clitoris stretches unfurls eight inches with two to 3.5 inches shaft free outside the body. The longest clitoris of record has been found in the blue whale. In water desire can rise, honor sea levels, ignore landlocked cartographers. In water desire refuses retreat.

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. Simon vile.

The Condoleezza suite. Concerto number five. Condoleezza and intransigence.

At piano you are a major sound, more than the articulate ivory keys. You hear things that aren't there. On nightly TV, you open your mouth to sing a brilliant delayed count lifts subsides. We take pride diving through your shastakovich gap. At news conferences you and they cheek to cheek are guillotined and gutted, prepared, handled, neatly trust with jade and diamond thread. You are the fifth little girl of bombingham found recently with ligature marks beneath high court rulings excavated with airbrush and Texas sized picks by not one but two closely related presidents preserved forever in Washington marble and the panning lights of CNN on display. The ruby carrot curio fresh from the royally rubble of integration. The Condoleezza suite concerto number seven. Condoleezza working out at the Watergate.

Condoleezza rises at four, stepping on the treadmill, her long fingers brace the two slim handles of accommodating steel. She steadies her sleepy legs for the long day ahead. She doesn't get very far. Her knees buckle wanting back last night's dream. Dream number nine where she's 15 and leaning forward from the bench playing Mozart's piano concerto in D minor alone before the gawking, disbelieving, applauding crowd, not dream number two where she is nine and not in the church that explodes into dust. The heart pine floor giving way beneath her friend Denise rocketing her up into the air like a jack-in-the-box of a black girl wrapped in a Dixie cross. She ups the speed on the treadmill remembering she has to be three times as good. Don't mix up your dreams, Condi. She runs faster. Back to the right. Finally hitting her stride. Mozart returns to her side. She's 15 again. All smiles and relocated to the peaks of the Rocky Mountains where she and the Steinway are the only black people in the room.

Left. Epigraph. Eenie meenie miney moe. Rudyard Kipling, a counting out song in land and sea tails for scouts and guides, 1923.

The woman with cheerleading legs has been left for dead. She hot paces a roof four days, three nights, her leaping fingers, helium arms rise and fall pulling at the weak old baby in the bassinet pointing to the 82-year-old grandmother fanning and raspy in the New Orleans Saints folding chair. Eenie meenie miny moe. Three times a day the helicopter flies by in a low crawl. The grandmother insists on not being helpless, so she waves a white handkerchief that she puts on and takes off her head toward the cameraman and the pilot who remembers well the art of his mirrored eye posture in his low flying helicopter. [foreign language 00:26:36].

He makes a slow Viet Kong dip and dive, A move known in rescue as the observation pass. The roof is surrounded by broken levee water. The people are dark but not broken, starving, abandoned, dehydrated, brown and cumulus but not broken.

The 400-year-old anniversary of observation begins again. Eenie meenie miney moe catch a. The woman with pompom legs, waves her uneven homemade sign. It says, please help, please. And even if the E has been left off of the please do you know simply by looking at her that it has been left off because she can't spell and therefore is not worth saving? Or was it because the water was rising so fast there wasn't time?

Eenie meenie miney moe catch a. The low flying helicopter does not know the answer. It catches all of this on patriotic tape but does not land and does not drop dictionary or ladder. Regulations require an E be at the end of any pleas before any national response can be taken. Therefore, it takes four days before the National Council of Observers will consider dropping one bottle of water or one case of dehydrated baby formula on the roof where the E has rolled off into the flood, but obviously not splashed loud enough. Where four days later, not the mother, not the baby girl, but the determined hanky waiver whom they were both named for has now been covered up with a green plastic window awning pushed to the side right where the missing E was last seen. My mother said to pick the very best one.

What else would you call it Mr. Every child left behind? Anyone you know ever left off or put on an E by mistake? Potato. Potato.

In the future observation helicopters will leave the well observed south and fly in Kanye West was finally right formation. They will arrive over burning San Diego. The fires there will be put out so well. The people there will wait in a civilized manner. They will receive foie gras and free massage for all their trouble while their houses don't flood, but instead burn calmly to the ground.

The grandmothers were right about everything. People who outlived bull whips and Bull Connor historically afraid of water and routinely fed to crocodiles left in the sun on the sticky tar heat of roofs to roast like pigs surrounded by 40 feet of churning water in the summer of 2005, while the richest country in the world played the old observation game, studied the situation, wondered by committee what to do, counted in private by long historical division speculated whether or not some people are surely born ready accustomed to flood, famine, fear. My mother said to pick the very best one and you are not it. After all, it was only Paul, New Orleans old bastard city of funny spellers, non-swimmers with squeeze box accordion accents who would be left alive to care.

The final word from Tony K [inaudible 00:30:39], Nikky, do not leave the arena to the fools. Thank you very much.

Beth Harrison:

Thank you so very much. It was beautiful.

Our next reader tonight is Lyn Hejinian. Lyn is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Writing is an Aid to Memory, a Thought is the Bride of What Thinking, My Life, the Cold of Poetry, the Cell, Happily, the Fatalist and my life in the nineties just to name a few as well as the most recent, the Book of a Thousand Eyes, which has just been published by Omnidawn Press. She's also the author of a collection of essays, the Language of Inquiry, and is a highly regarded editor. Since 1981 she has co-edited the Poetics Journal.

Recognized today as one of the most important and innovative works of contemporary American literature. My life is poetic autobiography as much as it is poetry. A philosophical inquiry into the mathematics of language. The opening phrase, a pause arose something on paper evokes Gertrude Stein's roses and with them the thrill of experiencing something new for the reader who sits down with this book for the first time, A thrill that doesn't wane on the fifth or the 15th reading.

It is a work that works by working through us. It evolves with us as we move through our curious evolutions. The poet Juliana Spar has written, Hejinian's work often demonstrates how poetry is a way of thinking, a way of encountering and constructing the world, one endless utopian moment, even as it is a world full of failures. Hejinian's honors include a writing fellowship from the California Arts Council, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Academy of American Poets Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement and mid-career. She also currently serves as a chancellor at the academy, a San Francisco Bay area native. She's a professor of English at the University of California Berkeley. Please welcome Lyn Hejinian.

Lyn Hejinian:

Thank you Beth. Thanks AWP and Academy of American Poets for inviting me to give this reading. Thanks to all of you who came into this formidable room. I am going to read from the new book that Beth just mentioned, the Book of a Thousand Eyes. It's an homage to shaharazad. It's a collection of night works.

Little red sign here says hello, but that doesn't help me with the timing. Unless it said goodbye after a certain amount of time.

All right, and I myself can read to see if what I've written is right. Sleep offers an excuse for substitution, but who else would dream the world one thinks. It's only there the world repeats. Many days are often mine. Do I feel that timeless satisfaction? It's seldom said. Who can be trusted? One tells but cannot recognize.

Octive, allegro. Nonetheless. Sleep. Credulity frenzied cannot distract. Aristotle, acts, putting orbs and trees in balance come to credulity, whispered credulity. Conflict in credulity. Contrast in credulity. It takes credulity to grasp at a varied something. Credulity in the same direction. Credulity becoming more by comparison. Credit, credulity clutter, credulity. Credulity we counter with credulity freely. The credulity of the clown in a mishap, Mary miserably. The credulity of the populace umbrellaed in the rain, the credulity of the conscious mind binds it to its intuitions. The credulous proceed. Credulity accrues to the singer who knows the words to her song. The horse pulling the cart was not credulous, the dog following it was intentionally. Things invite credulity. Events demand credulity, credulity. In yonder mountain forms correctly, belief goes under. Credulity overcomes three girls playing hopscotch temporarily. Leaping credulity leaps with credulity. Stretching credulity, continuing credulity, insufferable leaping, credulity, thumps suddenly reverse credulity the credulous must sudden sink or circus.

The credulous comes from credulity and arrives late askew. Then half from that they proceed. Half again from that, some thriving carts shrink as they approach. The thriving carts stop to let rules off. On. Tossing credulity, we live vaguely to include complications. Others are never explained. Picnicking with inexplicable credulity, we sit in the shade and form a massive figure. We shift and form another. With credulity provided we tag walls. Remember credulity and darkness task at hand. Take credulity for gravity. Lacking credulity, I pull my tongue. Gaining credulity, I rise to speak. I scroll graffiti on the wall and sign one Zola, one wag head, one banquet, one vote, and one honky bitch of a bamboozled [inaudible 00:37:38]. Everything gives off signs of credible life. The credulous are easy to tease. We seat ourselves comfortably one by one and are recognized. Logic goes right out the door. Doubt having left it open.

Ambivalence can't determine the heights to which we'll climb. An incredible saga. Credulity is incomplete. Why not believe big bodies? Why not ride wild horses? There is no superfluous credulity among us. Credulity is rarely indifferent. Viva, light, light, thick, light down the middle and around the sides sets off credulity. Thus, the bronze equestrian. Shrink credulity or shimmy it. Calendar credulity or cost it. Come singer and prove the song credulity recedes to the background. Credulity returns as a result. Credulity in motion encompassing credulity. Let's just hope that farm animals stay more credible than military figures in a field. Thus, the bronze equestrian. Stravinsky, what a genius. See circus and believe it. Can we? Indeed. Personal credulity, credited credulity. Credulity slips into the cot. We can chronicle credulity and incredible drama. January through October. We confess credulity. The moonlight is critical.

As the alarm clocks go off, we say to ourselves, it's time or to each other we say it and elbows to bed, hands to head, nude night gown or pajamaed. We rise some to the left, some to the right as if into a dream or out of many. And why? When we sleep like geese, we're free. When we wake like geese, we feed on wheat and milk, which we find melancholy and why it's viscous and white and thick. It shines back at us.

It's round and simple placid face which we can scarcely, irritate or imitate that we bear our teeth, take it on our tongue. Grow gray with age and die like paper, turn to ash, taking flight as all things must that are white as cumulus clouds flat at the bottom and round on top, they rarely produce precipitation, evaporating as the sun sets through a broken ring smashed by a hammer hitting the hand of a woman once a girl and that girl once a bride who married a simpleton named Napoleon or Ned who led a life of scholarship, eating candy and drawing circles whose value has increased so much that now at seven 15 on March 3rd, each is worth 71.5 times more than it was around a quarter of a century ago and why? Ghosts are made of light and disappear as the sun shines achieving new naivete.

Butts bear, buttholes exposed to alarming shittings, of embarrassing excrement dropping in dreams and why? Between the buttock slice secrets we cannot keep to ourselves of experiences that knock us on the brow that resonate and we let them. We can't help it.

See how the film running back shows ripples closing in like initiates to a circle or animals to a pool from which they've chased back out by a man with a stick. And why? Because he has a stick and he's a man and those are animals. A gazelle is among them and a camel, a poodle and more women than I can name Hilda, Crystal or Diane, about whose neck hangs an instrument designed for seeing birds on the wing or on the branch of the family tree on whose green bows my grandfather publicly grumpy and sweet in the yard found some inedible fruits unripe when placed in the basket as a child tucks a doll like Samantha, born in 1904 or Nelly born 1906, both of whom come by mail with a book. See americangirl.com that adds to the story of life a 19th century fiction that they hope to make history when time two was young and tomatoes were inedible.

The wife of the merchant George sat plotting. The merchant George sat ironing. Their daughter little Greta was in the corner playing with a roll of film snip snip snip. One frame after another fell onto the table. This is pleasant, secretarial work said little Greta chewing the end of one of her braids. "Klondike, Klondike," said the parrot. The merchant George had received the Parrot as a gift from a morose lawyer in San Francisco who claimed to be descended from Jack London.

Descended is the operative term, said the wife of merchant George who was a cynic. She was never envious but often jealous and she was apt to become stricken with grief whenever the merchant George was away from home even slightly longer than expected. Like Penelope, she kept a loom in the bedroom and she displayed her passions by weaving flamboyant fabrics. She called them displacements and regarded them as proof of her emotional maturity. George, you are an emotional baby she said as she settled baby Samuel onto her lap and slid his first taste of rice cereal across his lips. Skeptically baby Samuel spat it out. What I wonder has happened to them all. Is it the same thing that has happened to me?

Here we begin. Stop. Study the human mind. She's gone. I see nothing when she moves the mind from within, she must mean the light to be right. That's not an anthropological view, it's not a hand. Then is this a case of fantasy passing act through impasse. Both. Temptation leaps to the corridors. Chaos keeps to control. Narration rings story on story. The mechanisms pulling. The events occur in relay, the concluding is displaced and delayed and the observer asks only that things continue. The observer governs. Don't stop.

Once there was an old man who was buried in a bottle under an apple tree. Every summer his daughter came to pick apples off the tree and when her basket was full, she would stamp her foot and shout, get out.

The sun shone. The sky was clear. Perhaps tomorrow there will be a few clouds said the irritable painter at the edge of the orchard. If not, I will go to a museum to spit at the idiots one can always find there. The orchard stood across the road from a sweet smelling shadow filled forest. Moats of light drifted between the trees and a clear creek splashed over sparkling stones and flowed into occasional ponds. The sounds of the water excited the handsome little grandson of the woman who had come there to fish. You'll make the fish nervous she said to him, you'll catch the fish if you can wiggle as they do the boy replied. During the night, dew refresh the orchard. Drops of water, slid over the apples and fell to the ground covering the bottle with the old man inside. Oh, how long it takes, he said. But when it's done, it's going to be delightful.

Isn't sleep fitted to this world? Aren't dreams a form of internal criticism? Doesn't each dream catch a previous day of the world in an act of criticism? Isn't this itself dreamed criticized by an expert?

Some people are ticklish and it's symptomatic of their sensitivity. They're quick like storytellers to express experience. There's evidence that they dream and every day the evidence is accumulating. They need it services. They cannot concoct without laughing at the strength of sleep. Still the stretch of sensitivity is hard to measure. The senses inventive permit us to sleep. They get us into a situation. Among senseless objects there is still some reality, but senses have objects. Everything provides evidence of this. The objects make themselves available and laugh. Suddenly you're one of them. Morbid curiosity makes you watch the warned. Being what's watching, you're watched. As careful as it is to be eclectic you cannot choose. Dreaming of encyclopedias and thumbing backwards. Is this what it is to have memories?

Now it's dark and there's someone in it. You've all experienced that surely. Is it unacceptable and does it hurt? Does it make you sleep? It is hardly dark and already the body is haunted. Divided by the sun, it can hardly rise. The body is dead but its skin is hypersensitive. It contains person already with permission or not. Details emerge forever. Science. Science, some ambulance and narcolepsy walking on all fours and wondering what one can't do. Wanting to part fully relaxed with nothing. If pain, then time, if time then vision, then story, then moral. But someone else maintains the moral. Moral. Isn't it true that no act can have a name which can be said to represent it? Since a name to be of any use at all must remain constant. While every action is both practically and perceptually inconstant, changing from one moment to the next.

I watch. I don't have to be careful. The spy stays behind my eye. I look into the shoes, I place them under the window. They have to point somewhere. Why not toward the sea? The room is placid. The shaft of sunlight between window and wall is clear. Is the dog panting? Its tongue is wagging at both sides. Its tail is between its legs. Have the birds reversed? Are the birds revived and in the air. I jam the roses into the sand. Freud wouldn't understand this immediately. Soon the many human waking naughty souls will walk out of isolation.

At first the man in the chair. Isn't he hideous? The chair is a still bulk plagued by penguins. They're shuffling forward into my ear. Along comes a peripheral figure trying to evade the spy the car in silhouette, a paralyzing shimmer. Rain is falling just an inch and a half of milk. It's true what the guy says says the guy whom they say is not to be trusted. I get into an angle of shadow. The measures of the night require no space. You think that hadn't yet been revealed to me in those days. Black grooves, the bare floor. Backup. You too want to communicate?

On the 100th night. I dream of seven subtitles all in a row. The first is the long interruption and modernity, and then comes the loop of linearity along continental divides followed by the teacher's desk and the social event, the journey from noodles to pasta, mimicry and sibling ties, the temporality of memory and paradox and mystification and hilarity as the commodity form in cartoons.

There. So it is. There. Just that. In time I've loved. There. No other but one and other, no other there better by day, by night, that too carrying the body, the flamboyance. Brain. There. A falling equestrian dressed in silk and sailing since. This. There. When declared near just that in a moment. Dear. There. No further, but an extra nothing new. Rare, recovered once by dark. That hauls again there. Air ropes cups. There a dwindling likeness. Scent and beared. Seafaring scents. This. At the nearest tint taken racing ahead to a figure aboard an annoying foible. There. As if to distribute pink or red, equally black to the rescue at a rock's pace. There. For a figure. Moving lips the wrong way. Weight tipping, impending the whole meditation waiting. There.

Flagellate, gnomes and blue panties. Hey sister, don't squeeze. Potential spinach lover. [inaudible 00:52:57] concert goer. I like to stamp on corrugations. I've got to list that gum eraser. Wild are the wildebeests. Rapacious, the mass raccoons that P prowl at night. Finish the list patrol. Gigantism, existence in space. Quick claim. Humdinger, punk. Buckwheat, individual volition, rubbed me with rosewater, cast pearls before swine, get up steam, adieu lambent flame of genius, fiddle dee-dee, spatula. Rage, breathe, lovesick turtledoves, bartending tiger, unthreaded Abigail, representative negative woodblock titional seascape, sink of sun, no tide. Shut up. Waters of bitterness come down the river. Spaniel, servility pinned braggadocio. Fire eating pot walloping, post-feminist biker chick. Solicitude [inaudible 00:54:08] inquiry, napkin and bushel and [inaudible 00:54:12]. Give me a break authenticity. Judge, stammer, so please you.

I wake, I wait to remember my dream, which would be dull to anyone else, but which could remind me of the stimulating day, the day that inspired it. There are details to that day I hadn't noticed during it. Something resulting in a rainbow or a ratio, an intransigence or logic. In the dream I sailed, stole, stalled was jailed. My companion, a scientist described his impressions and analyzed what we'd experienced much better than I could have done.

I remember that an intricate corral held the shipboard animals. They were shaded by dense and sturdy sails. Overhead birds, which in real life would be called turns. But there were called tongs passed over our embraces. We followed them with our binoculars. We identified them and characterized them as desperately casting Plato's shadows. An Entire day went by. The circumstances remained under erotic analysis, dreamed in self-defense, but that only means that the situation with its shifting expectations will begin again.

Hideous forms. My legs. They kick. Out, in. Legs crawl out my skin. My brain has legs. My brain is legged. That's calm. Ten seven four. Curious on hilltops, machine baed, machine made clutching their persons the symphony goers run. The ill equestrians Gallup forward. The horses delightfully clear the jumps. So many pauses occur. I want to be an orchid. Juanita slashes a green emotion against Napoleon's whip. My legs are tailing.

Once there was a village surrounded by mountains and no one in the village could stand up for longer than one hour without laughing and falling down. Once there was a tiny black ant that scurried, paused, turned, scurry, turned and paused again. And twice there was one. And the third time too, once there was a tiny ant.

Once there was a wayside weed that pleased those who saw it as it bent in the wind and bounded back again in the sunlight and died and came back as a frog whose singing lulled children to sleep until it was swallowed by a heron and came back as a strong and gentle horse that once hauled a wagon full of tired travelers over a mountain and later lived in a field without much grass where it died of starvation and came back as a musician who was very wise and very knowledgeable and could remember everything that had happened to him, including having been a wayside weed.

Once there was a prince who liked to eat cherries and roll their pits around and around in his mouth, past his teeth and under his tongue and up again against his lips and sometimes from between them the pit would pop out and drop.

I have lived aboard a ship stranded by a terrific immobilizing wind. Now it is Thursday and I'm to teach a class at a technical institute. I'm to lecture on no plays. M has loaned to me representative masks, L has volunteered to come to the class and sing, C with dramatic compassion, has sent seven e-messages of encouragement. Just as I step into the driveway, I'm arrested. My long postponed life of crime is brought to an end before it has even begun. B has achieved enormous prestige. Will use it to help me. Dawn brings all speculation to an end. Thank you.

Beth Harrison:

Thank you so much everyone for coming tonight. And one more round of applause please. For Nikky Finney and Lyn Hejinian.

Speaker 1:

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