(Beth Bachmann, Rick Barot, Deborah Landau, Jericho Brown) Often characterized as"midcareer" awards, Guggenheim Fellowships are intended for men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts. These recipients from the class of 2016 showcase the geographic, cultural, and aesthetic diversity of the latest fellows in poetry.

Published Date: April 26, 2017

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:05):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2017 A W P conference in Washington dc. The recording features Beth Bachman, Rick Barrett, Deborah Lynn down, and Jericho Brown. You'll now hear Beth Bachman provide introductions,

Speaker 2 (00:00:30):

So we really appreciate you coming out to hear some poetry and I know that all four of us want to thank that Guggenheim Foundation for bringing us together to celebrate this year, which is really a gift that we've been given to think and write. And so we just want to share with everyone the kind of things we've been thinking and writing about or even the kind of work that led us to this point. I'm going to introduce everyone and then I'll read first and turn things over and I'll introduce them in the order. They will read after I read and I'm going to keep it short so we can get onto the good stuff. Rick Barrett's latest book is Cord from Ban Books and he teaches at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington where he directs the low residency M F A program. Deborah Land's most recent book is the Uses of the Body from Copper Canyon.

Speaker 2 (00:01:23):

She teaches in and directs the creative writing program at New York University. Jericho Brown's most recent book is the New Testament from Copper Canyon as well, and he's an associate professor of English and creative writing at Emory. And I'm Beth Bachman and I teach at the M F A program at Vanderbilt in Nashville and my most recent book is Do Not Rise from Pittsburgh Press. And I'll kick things off. Yeah. Let's see. So this is my little book about revolution do not rise. So I want to read a poem in honor of our present moment crisis.

Speaker 2 (00:02:08):

The air is hot and then it's cold. The water wants out, so open your mouth and say snow. The water wants out right there on the tongue. The flaw is always breaking away. Watch the fire it wants out of the place so it splinters like insects. Out of a hole you pour light into fragments then drift or alarm. Hydra of the war. We said the water has many heads destroy one and two more ripen thirsty flowers. Winter is not a threat here in this heat. It takes so long for the head and body to rise. In constellation, it's daylight. The silver white birds gone black. Most things in nature have no meaning still. We wondered how if the answer was fear or love to kill the cup, always an offer prisoner still water is like leaves a sound trap.

Speaker 2 (00:03:50):

I'm going to read the title poem. The title actually comes at the end of this poem instead of the beginning. And it's a line from a John Dunn poem Daybreak, where one lover says to the other, stay, oh sweet and do not rise. But I was also thinking about Cassius Clay singing Stand By Me and when he sings it, he slips and sings, stand down, stand by me. So the book is really about surrender both in war and in love and it starts with a paraphrase from the US Army field Manual kill or get killed. So it kind of traverses a lot of territory. In a short amount of time, copperhead struck properly, the windpipe is copper tubing. I woke wanting a fitting all over my green eyes, pennies on my eyes, but summer was long. October the snake had plenty of places to hide un corroded and not yet slowed by cold. The second I say, put your hands on the back of your head, look at me, not the weapon. Force me to open my hand. We've been in love for some time now remember, what did you say? Surrender. Do not rise while your room has a door.

Speaker 2 (00:05:38):

It's not the shore, it's the ocean that opens. Devil make a mountain of me for the water to dwell against.

Speaker 2 (00:05:54):

I became aware of my methods and the methods changed me. Soldier, you make my body a map on the floor. It's what the door is for. Hesitation. A hand that wants to be a mouth panting, pasture food and ear that dogs a woman. Water hammer. Wrap your wrist at parting. I insist you call me by my first name. So that's my book about war. And then afterwards I wrote a book about peace because you can't have peace without war. So they go together and it's framed. This new book is called Cease and it's framed by these four long poems each called wall and I want to read the first of those wall poems and then tomorrow we can all go march against the wall. But for now you can listen for this hidden Robert Frost line that sneaks into this poem wall.

Speaker 2 (00:07:09):

To keep the peace, we need a wall to fall to our knees before, to all things in architecture, each body its own boundary, the air deliberate. So many moves between one opening, careful to keep the wall clear of camouflage, clear in its threat. So many patterns have holes. A hand, an arm, a child netting a wall will not allow less than enough guard per prisoner head down and hungry. Your skin I remember ads against not over the wall, in place of the blood, the wall after all made of water, the gulf. A blue we could touch on both ends given clearance to return what's left of the body. Now bridge simple arch geometry of the circle spanning come cool my tongue. This light well opening internal space to the space that opens into it. Wind eye, the flood made our bodies a levy earthen, gnawed away.

Speaker 2 (00:08:32):

Something there is that does not once, but it no longer holds the tongue of the fire. Roars for water. But boundaries now are made instead of oil, the fire spits and splits. Why set the self a flame when we can do it together? The whole world hanging in the air in all directions. The direction to go straight on at the end of a movement without pause the wall. So simple in war, enough dirt to go over the top singing. Finish me first. A wall to run along your fingers to let bear the weight of execution on one side still. Now the other. A garden interior courtyard. More insects than fruit. Both segmented sugar does not obey the wall. It once a thousand mouths. Yours, mine from inside the fruit, the strain, release me the strain deserter the wall. Black juice, only skin around every corner.

Speaker 2 (00:09:46):

We met the nameless wall sometimes with head, sometimes with spit. Too beautiful to be left alone. Some dead prefer stone to see. We imagine snow here and there. The wall less erasure a thing. Only the living desire rest in ownership. Property according to water is rhythmic. Trust the wall. It is not a window hole in the stone. You cannot go through the view from the wall. Is the wall rope slipping around? Rope a new knot. Each time the rope goes through light is not out the window. Here it is. Heat glass is domesticated. Two private dwellings separated by a bad mouth, an ear lobe, a sparrow, sunshine the only way out. A big fat bomb glow. There's a lesson for everything you'd ever want to make or destroy. A lesson in placement, a lesson in timing, a lesson in pressure, a lesson in too much a lesson in longing to be let be ignition. What was it anyway, the wall. So light now. So much sand you'd think, no it can't go on and on and on and on like that. No blue at the tip of it. No glue to undo, nothing to see. No other side so far as the eye can see.

Speaker 2 (00:11:33):

Alright, I just want to read a few of the short ones. I'm not ready which come between in this new manuscript seats. So in between these wall poems, I was writing what I was calling unpunctuated prose poems. But then I was thinking if they have no punctuation, they have no sentences. And sentences are like the basic unit of pros. So they're actually not like pros at all. So I've started to think of them more as like a stanza based form and stanza comes from the word room, which makes sense because I surrounded them in these four walls, but I didn't get it as I was writing the book. So you know how it's with writing, sometimes you have to do it to figure out what you did. So I'm just going to end with a couple of these wands that have no punctuation, so I'm still figuring out where to breathe or if to breathe as I read them. This one is a riff on a line from Robert Duncan, which I think kind of could be describing our president. And the quote from Duncan is Shakespeare sees how in the assassin's mind the world is filled with enemies. The truth itself is enemy and quicken's action to override subversive thought

Speaker 2 (00:12:55):

To the assassin. Truth is the enemy, it's over. The best part about terror is territory. Together we opened the border. You're trembling. You said like fire. I said the field seemed whole again. It contained me and my womb. It shook for a moment. We did not own anything. What we could see of the world was the field and it appeared to be everywhere. The enemy had many bright places to hide beauty. The horse would not, no matter how many times its head, I held under water, I rolled up my sleeve, I cracked my lipstick with my canine teeth. I held my arm out to sign the horse had feelings, A will cowgirl, an American dream, a diamond on its face, my hand, its hair, my voice, its ear asking it. Drink Hollywood. The horse would not. No way no how Cowboy the moon bullseye baby my money face down on the table the threat, the border peace there. Peace here sheriff. And one more overcome the bloodshot. I cannot swallow any more. Red sunset rose after sunset rose in the mouth of the field. Godless. We sleep like animals unmoved by moth head. I need water to see again. I need to see the water again. I need you to wake to witness what the water can smother my heart is blue like fire. I need you an ocean pure enough to drink before breaking. Why is your heart like the sky symmetry? I don't need my hands to say anything. Your hands are also clean. Thank

Speaker 3 (00:15:15):

You.

Speaker 3 (00:15:28):

I agree. Hi everyone, I'm Rick Barrett. Can you hear me? Is that good? Alright, I'm really excited to be reading with these other poets up here. I'm going to read one poem from my recent book chord and then read some other poems which are newer. This first poem that I'm reading is called the Wooden Overcoat and the trigger for this poem was reading a novel about 19th century mining in Montana and I came across this phrase because it was being used as a euphemism for coffins and I thought there's got to be a poem in there somewhere. So this is that poem, the wooden overcoat. It turns out that there's a difference between a detail and an image. If a dandelion is a mere detail, the dandelion inked on a friend's bicep is an image because it moves when her body does. Even when a shirt covers the little black sun on a thin stalk, the same way that the barcode on the back of another friend's neck is just a detail.

Speaker 3 (00:16:46):

Until you hear that the row of numbers underneath are the numbers his grandfather got on his arm in a camp in Poland, then it's an image something activated in the reader's senses beyond mere fact. I know the difference doesn't matter except in poetry where a coffin is just another coffin until someone at a funeral calls it a wooden overcoat, an image that is so heavy and warm at the same time that you forget it's about death. At my uncle's funeral, the coffin was so beautiful, it was like the chandelier lighting the room where treaties our sign. It made me think of how loved he was. It made me think of Shoshone funerals where everything the dead person owned was put into a bonfire, even their horse. In that last sentence, is the horse a detail or an image? I don't really know. In my mind, a horse is never anywhere near a fire and a detail is as luminous as an image. The trumpet vine, the fence, the clothes, the fire. So these are new poems and it is a privilege to thank the Guggenheim Foundation for the amazing fellowship that they gave me. This next poem is about Louis Vuitton. So

Speaker 3 (00:18:44):

Just so you know the girl carrying a ladder on the same day I read about the luxury goods company that has produced a punching bag you can buy for $175,000. I see the photograph of the Palestinian girl who carries a ladder with her each morning when she goes to school. To scale the wall of my own understanding of why a punching bag would cost so much. I have to think about why I am attracted to that punching bag. The way some people are attracted to pink kittens or the way some people are attracted to camouflage or the way some people are attracted to their gods.

Speaker 3 (00:19:35):

I want that punching bag the way the girl carrying the ladder wants to go to school. Relentless, single-minded and absurd. Carrying the ladder that is twice or three times as tall as she is leaning the wall, leaning the ladder against the wall that separates her from her school. The girl goes up the ladder as though it is something she does every day, which she does. When I think of a punching bag, I think of sex. When I think of a ladder, I think of picking apples. When I think of a girl carrying the ladder to go to school, I think of my neighborhood's girls carrying pink camouflage backpacks, not knowing about the armies that the camouflage stands for. The logo of the luxury brand is printed all over that punching bag the way camouflage is all over us. Camouflage bedsheets, camouflage cell phone covers, camouflage shirts and neon shirts that everyone wears, even the people who vote against guns. We live in paradox and we prosper. We live in paradox and we thrive. What I can't figure out is how the girl deals with the Barb Dwyer at the top of the wall she has to go over or what that ladder weighs or what she does with the ladder when she gets to school.

Speaker 3 (00:21:17):

Does she put it against the wall with the other ladders, the way kids put their bikes in bike racks at school? What I can't figure out is why two men who look like Gods would want to break down the wall of each other's faces knowing there's only blood on the other side, or why apples are the fruit that children bring to their teachers and why it isn't coconuts or grapefruit or why my neighborhood's girls on their way to school each morning carry backpacks that are so heavy it looks like they're carrying the world.

Speaker 4 (00:22:05):

Thank you.

Speaker 3 (00:22:11):

Those punching bags came in a limited edition of 25. You get a jump rope with it and I really did want it, but even my Guggenheim money wouldn't have covered the cost.

Speaker 3 (00:22:37):

This next poem that I'm going to read is important to me in that I just recently decided that it was going to be the titled poem for my next manuscript and there are a few things I need to say about it. I'm going to rattle off a bunch of French names and I don't speak French and so I'm going to butcher some of them. Jacqueline Woodson appears in the poem at some point this morning I went to a panel on poetry and history and my very good friend Brian Tier was part of the panel and he said something during his talk that felt like the epigraph for this poem. He said Research is a kind of mourning and so this poem is very much driven by research and hopefully I'll give permission from Brian to use that as an epigraph. The poem is called Still Life with Helicopters.

Speaker 3 (00:23:37):

Almost 2000 years before Leonardo at DaVinci imagined a machine whose screw like overhead motor could lift the machine into vertical flight. Children in China played with bamboo toys whose propellers thin and light as dragonfly wings were set on a sharpened stick and spun into the wonder of an object spiraling in the air. These toys were brought back to Europe by early travelers where they gave dreams to certain men whose names are now an ornate inventory on the Wikipedia page that I am looking at. Mikhail Luminoso, Christian, Illinois, George Kaley Alfon, Pinot Gustav Ponton Demat, Enrico Fini Jacques and Louis Briga, Jacob Elham, Paul Cornew and most dashing of all Raul Pet Skara de cast Ponton Deur coined the term helicopter from the Greek words for helix and wing in time. In no time at all, these dreamers and their dream contraptions led to other names, Airbus, Augusta, Westland, Sikorsky Aircraft, Boeing Vertol, bell Helicopter Mitsubishi Kawasaki, Fuji Heavy Industries and dozens of other aircraft manufacturers in the world.

Speaker 3 (00:25:29):

In 1974, Airbus introduced the A three 50, also known as the Astar, a best-selling helicopter offering high performance enhanced maneuverability and reduced pilot workload. One popular use of the Astar is to provide aerial observation and support to ground units, which must be what the Oakland Police Department helicopter is doing now while a protestor swarm onto the five 80 freeway and shut it down. Protesting the grand jury's decision in Ferguson, Missouri, not to indict the police officer who killed Michael Brown. The police and news helicopters are what I hear as I sit at my desk, the desk and its world of things. The black notebook, the pencils, the loose change, the movie stubs, the paperclips, the fortune cookie slips, the green paperweight and the little glass utopia inside it. And my copy, a brown girl dreaming so I am going to read two more. I loved what you did with the Robert Frost. I am doing the same thing with this next poem. The title of this poem is the Grasshopper and the Cricket and it's a riff on the famous poem by Keith the sonnet by Keith's called on the grasshopper and the cricket. And you all know that poem because it has that great first line, the poetry of earth is never dead, so I wanted to write a poem that was responding to that in some way.

Speaker 3 (00:27:33):

The grasshopper and the cricket, the poetry of earth is a 90 year old woman in front of a slot machine in a casino in California. She's wearing a gray dress, her sharp red lipstick in two lines across her mouth put there by a daughter like Gertrude Steins. Her hair is cut very close nearby is her wheelchair painted blue like a boy's bicycle. It is a weekday in March and the casino is the size of a hanger that could house a dozen airplanes, but it is thousands of machines that fill the eye an event of light and color. The sentences she now speaks are like the sentences of Gertrude Stein but without the ironies of art, time is like a compressed accordion. The farthest points now near more present than the present waiting. I'm at the food court reading a magazine article about the languages that the world is losing, the languages spoken only by a few remaining people or by one remaining person or lost completely except for the grainy recordings and archives. Mysterious as the sounds made by extinct birds, the reels on her slot machines spin, their symbols never match. She's playing the 1 cent slots and her money will go far into the afternoon

Speaker 3 (00:29:25):

And because waiting is thinking, I'm thinking of the eternity. Keats writes about in his sonnet about the grasshopper and the cricket seizing never in the hedges and in the evening stove, the grasshopper of summer, the cricket of winter.

Speaker 3 (00:29:55):

This is the last one. Thank you all very much for listening. What I need to mention about this last one is that I grew up in Oakland, California and my parents have lived in the same house for almost 40 years now. And so I go back to this house quite a bit. It's the house that I grew up in and it's a house that feels very much haunted but it's haunted in an interesting way in that it's haunted by past lives that I've had there other than other people's lives. So I wanted to write a poem that described that haunting, somehow owed with interruptions. Someone is in the kitchen, washing the dishes, someone is in the living room watching the news. Someone in a bedroom is holding a used stamp with tweezers and adding it to his collection. Someone is scolding a dog barking now for decades, a different dog for each of the decades. Someone is reading the paper and listening to a baseball game on the radio at the same time at the base of the altar you drop some coins into a wooden box and the lights reveal the vast worn painting in front of you.

Speaker 3 (00:31:23):

The holy subject is illuminated for a few minutes before it is dimm again. There are churches all over Italy where you can do this. The smell of incense, the smell of stone, someone is taking the ashes out of the small cave of the fireplace. Though this might've been a hundred years ago when the house was new and we didn't live in it. Someone is writing a letter on thin blue paper. Someone is putting down the needle on a spinning record just so on the couch. Someone is sleeping upstairs, someone is looking into the bathroom mirror.

Speaker 3 (00:32:13):

While we were waiting for my sister's surgery to finish, I walked around the hospital and came across a waiting room that had an enormous aquarium. The black fish with red stripes, the yellow fish with blue stripes, the triangle fish, the cylinder fish, the little orange schools and the cellophane glint of their turns in the box water among arrangements of coral, that city of bones, someone is walking down the creaking staircase in the dark, a hand sliding on the rail. Someone is on the telephone, which means nobody else can use it for another hour. Someone is in his room doing homework, someone is reading in her room, someone is talking to the gray wall, someone is talking to the gray wall In summer. On a hot afternoon someone peels at a corner of wallpaper and sees only more wallpaper underneath. I used to think that to write poems to make any kind of art meant trying to transcend the prosaic elements of the self to arrive at some essential plane of the self where poems were supposed to succeed. I was wrong. Thank you.

Speaker 5 (00:34:01):

Hello. I want to echo the thanks to. Well thank you back for organizing this. It's great to read with you guys and also I'd like to echo thanks to the Guggenheim Foundation because of the Guggenheim. N Y U gave me leave and because N Y U gave me leave, I have new poems so I'm going to do something I never do, which is read only new poems, which is scary. This is my book if you want it, you can get it at Copper Canyon table over there. Okay, I'm working on a book called Soft Targets and it is, I'm hoping to hand it over to Copper Canyon in this summer. N Y U has a program in Paris for writers, so I spend six weeks there every year and we've been there during a lot of the recent terrorist attacks. So these poems came out of that to begin with and like my other books, it's in lyric sequence, so they're little sections like this and I'll pause in between them soft targets. When we arrived in Paris, the corners were empty. The people uneasy the future, unlikely still there was bread on the plate, still wine still. We arranged to meet though the streets filled with migrants and the French stepped over them un route to bakeries and cafes. Summer seemed to hover along the sun and the city had become a home of sorts though of late too much flame and breaking white blossoming. The days threaded along and we allowed ourselves to be buttoned in by them.

Speaker 5 (00:35:30):

I had a thought but it turned autumn turned cold. I had a body unwed, vital despite funeral and everything, especially in snow, especially at dusk and after a quiet nolita of streets and soft falling elsewhere, A simultaneous singing on Belleville ray, oblique odean the globe ample with bodies covered in graves and gardens, potholes and water, an ardent river. We walk together a wine and rising breeze, much trouble at hand. Get the lilies still and friendship and more lush life before the snuff out begins in earnest aeros aeros in Paris. We were and chose to stay all night in a lovely and sarraf cocktail haze. Despite the blacked out theater, the shuttered pains behind which the dying lay dying. Yet we were breathing and breathing and breathing. All summer we sat with our backs to the street, letting time pass, trying but getting nowhere. Mostly lying all afternoon in the grass as if green and insect were the world. I am and you are. We wrote until the paper seemed a tree again and we walked beneath it. Greener and unsold. Afresh in a July of the Senate was we came to rest on the riverbanks. Pleasure seeking yet finding a blood light, flooding what we'd gone to see

Speaker 5 (00:37:04):

Massive powers that be what will be. We smoke our pipes to forget you and mildly now we bite our time, the violence and real cities under siege but also filled this morning with coffee drinkers, office workers, waiters and the like. Golden. We were in the moment of conception and arrived alive as if we always would be. A breath leaves the body and wishes it could return. Maybe the news to the left and right of us rich with failure, terror, dither the bloated moon in constant charge of us like vapor, running ourselves down into the fern. Deep sleep that sends us up again midnight inside a room of dread, a vision of it, startled and rimmed and this did frame our constituency that summer even in our cozy homes, even in a painless state on the eternity down river O oblivion, poor fucks. We are breathing mindlessly as the marsh grass floods, rivers filling with fish that can't live here anymore. The fauna flora all faked, all spoiled. The planet a combative, gothic cast to everything weak and disordered become the government's disquiet rules us now onward I thought. And so we were obscured all night. We stood by the river gazing at the gorgeous lights and wished for a benevolent world

Speaker 5 (00:38:49):

It was good getting drunk in the ENT city. Whiskey lopping off the day's fear. Dawn came and had an element of Xanax. Dust came and we dumbed ourselves down where there were bribes, grooms, board boy soldiers with iPhones and guns. I'm a soft target. You're a soft target and the city has a hundred hundred thousands. This phase it's a phasing in scan for an exit, a doorway, a stare. It's a sing of routine, A sing of fear. Our big mouths could be shut up with just a shot or two.

Speaker 5 (00:39:28):

The skin and softness of the face, the wrist, inners and hips and the lips. The rose tongue, the global body. Its infinite, permute, softness, soft targets, soft readers, drinkers, pedestrians and rain in the failing light. We walked out into it and now we share a room with it. Would you like to read to me in the soft? Would you like to enter me in the soft? Would you like a lunch of me in the soft long delirium of soft? The good news is we have each other. The bad news is colossian, crop of salt rifles, a submachine gun, pistols, ammunition, and four boxes containing thousands of small steel balls.

Speaker 5 (00:40:18):

Kitten is a soft target. She's very young and lots of stress. Know her siblings know her mom. You're a soft target kitty, katt and knights, a soft target and all of us within it. An Osama shot dead in his pajamas and everyone on the Brooklyn bound F as the man removes a bomb from his bag, a square of chocolate. He detonates in his mouth. Mama was a soft target in a fleshly nightgown despite hostile, despite sick. She went for it and birthed a soft target. Her mini soft dropped one spring and she too is soft. She is soft, too soft. Her tummy plumping with blood. Will we ever run out of days soft asks.

Speaker 5 (00:41:03):

Oma was a soft target in Frankfurt. 1938 got her soft the fuck out of there, smuggled out her egg purse to become us and so it ended and so it didn't end. If she'd been distracted, if she'd lived blindly, if she'd been dazed or dullard or out of luck, kissed her dog goodbye. Snuck a candy in her pocket. In her pocket, ran past the door of her school, her doctor's office, her favorite park, the house where the boy she secretly loved lived was made to wade into the night like a swimmer thought she could not swim.

Speaker 5 (00:41:45):

Super afterlife. I don't crave you. I like daylight, I like crowds. I don't think it will be charming underground. The silence will be sudden. Then last. What? Chic will shrink. There won't be any pretty pity. We'll never peaches there or air. We'll be so squashed and sour there. I don't want a cold place. Don't want a thread. Beared. Clamp and consequence. All old. Our loneliness will be prolonged then go too far. Oh fuck. It's true. Then nothing left of you. There were real officers in the street but they were doing it wrong. One winked at me, another was purely conceptual. One thought to himself as I walked by you little bitch. Bulge knobs of their guns, made them oral, made them real big. Machismo. Even the skinny ones, even the abstract, a certain beauty in the duty of it. The absence of pleasantries, cold and uniformed. Meanwhile he was broken. She was concussed and we returned home. Gilded with what? Safety in advance of danger. Animals agitate. When the time comes, all of this will be only shouts and disturbance. So I'm going to read something even newer. It's hard to read something new. Like if I were reading from this book, I just practically have it memorized and it's hard to read these new poems but I'm trying. Okay, I wrote this yesterday and this morning,

Speaker 5 (00:43:22):

Which is not a good sign. I'm going to read it anyway. I got off the train in the city and I couldn't stand it. Our king,

Speaker 5 (00:43:33):

This is my plaint note to the ambassadors of love. All dreaming now is retroactive the government so cystic, a scary station on a defunct radio. The radioactive someday is here. Our king is a bestseller, a genius of industry, an ego to deflate, stalemate. Our king is a crank, a crook, our king. It is incongruous. Our king is improper ill-equipped. How is it that we pushed the handle and he popped out toasted and now he sits at the head of our table. Can we be excused? He's a capitalist conglomerate, an x-ray of need stealthily. He moves himself up the flagpole raising the trees.

Speaker 5 (00:44:21):

Let's resume our king from the press table. Demands his order in our courts. Where's his wig of misdemeanor? Sets his bears loose in our gardens, pleads us guilty and says so and says no. And so again, in his pajamas, no less in his crown, desperate. He is in general ridiculous. Not sublime. Coffee won't cure this nor cruciferous vegetables nor time this malignancy trumps up, runs deep and deeper into crime. No good. Our legs, no good religion, hope or signs. Meantime we were taking stock. Meantime his lies meantime. Knife sharpening fault finding, dictating hand wringing. Act one. A toddler man, a boy beginning to scribble the rest of us. Stay put. Act two. What the hell are you doing here Mr. Bumble? And so the indecent, bogus shame fest begins our king. He is all he was cracked up to be. Will boys be boys? Leave it all to me.

Speaker 5 (00:45:33):

To be female on coronation night is a difficulty. Her skin under his thumb is a sick house is too much. Our king on paper, our king in moonlight, our king in the outflowing tide, our king on my daughter, his weight drops in midnight and pings her little bed. A doomsday porro, something more. A flesh struggling to be man. There was no excuse for the smug frog of him. Our king. No, you aren't her king. Not at all. He's deaf to summer and doesn't laugh. Takes one. Stand then another. This by his hands then that we had liquor and then some tried to disregard our broken parts. Idle life, appallingly, circular. Mr. Zilch and his Mrs. Can we be thug enough? Can we put them out? Come quickly. Come everyone. The brothers are puncture the dogs full of holes. We have no moment to collect ourselves.

Speaker 5 (00:46:39):

Forget all the quarrels and pretext and what progress. Never. And now what will be. I'm not going to argue with you. I'm alarmed. We're a plague on the ice and deserve contempt, materialism, greed, corporate, blah, blah blah. PS in the mountain. Crush on the pss in the fountain, crush on the mountain. There ain't no bravos here. Comrades, commend yourselves on a job. Very poorly done. I think someone has done grave injury. I think person or persons I think we're losing by default. Goodbye to the governor, to all governors pur foible, pure metastatic mass, the power of it. So sad. Keep your passport handy. Keep cash, keep water and batteries. Collect your meds and loved ones just in case. Just in case. Walk, then run just in case. Eat in a hurry. Wear flats and no makeup. Cuff your pants. Learn how to swim just in case. Take off your dress, your body, your voice just in case. And silence your phone. Stay off the beach, the street, the planet. These romps, they have grown a bit less carefree, O feminine, no skin and a crushed glow of soft o corporeal defeat. Can we not wriggle free? There must be some mistake. Our king, he's put a race on and now the clock flicks forward. Stares us down.

Speaker 3 (00:48:27):

Hi. Oh, this microphone's really good.

Speaker 3 (00:48:33):

I'm kind of tall. I'm not very tall, but I'm kind of tall so you get all excited when you get a good microphone. I, I'm really grateful to Beth Bachman for organizing this and for asking me to be a part of it and for being such a wonderful poet and for being my sister at the very beginning. Our first books came out at the very same time. So I always feel like every time I get a poem in a place in print, I'm like my sister's holding my hand. So I really appreciate her and I'm also grateful to Rick and to Deborah. It is an honor to be on any list that includes their names. Their homes have meant so much to my life and to my work. And obviously I am grateful to the Guggenheim Foundation. Well for the money,

Speaker 3 (00:49:36):

Which is no small thing many of us are, although I've had these questions for a long time, many of us are having for the first time some questions about capitalism. Any way you look at it, it is how we live now. I'm sure y'all are doing everything you can to change that. So I like it when an artist who has been at work can somehow be recognized for that work as work through compensation, which will help them eat and keep the lights on. And I think of that as a very important thing. I think everyone deserves to be compensated and properly paid for the work that they do. So I'm grateful for the Guggenheim and now that I'm thinking about that, I meant to tell you all this. Make sure you'll stay. Many of us got here yesterday. We'll leave Sunday. So tip the people who are going to clean your rooms for all those days.

Speaker 3 (00:50:45):

This first poem is, it's a poem, I mean to be about this supposed idea of the universal or about universality. And so I had to use an experience that we're all familiar with. The poem is actually about a time in our lives that we all have in common. It's that time of our lives where we were told that we should be having the time of our lives, that we should be having a good time, that these are our best years. We even take pictures for almost every event that comes up during this period and we put on smiles as if we are happy, but at the same time we are all miserable in trying to figure out during this time why we are so miserable. Why everyone in the world seems to hate us. The best phrase that I could think of to characterize this period of life is high school.

Speaker 3 (00:51:58):

The microscopes heavy and expensive, hard and black with bits of chrome for points of pride they looked like baby cannons, the real children of war and I hated them for that, for what our teacher said they could do. And then I hated them for what they did when we gave up on stealing looks at each other's bodies to press a left or right eye into the barrel and see our actual cells taken down to a cell, then blown back up again. Every atomic thing about a piece of my hair beneath one slide, just as unimportant as anyone else's growing in that science class where I learned what little difference God saw. If God saw me, it was the start of one fear, A tiny one, not much worth mentioning. Narrow like a pencil touched, tucked behind the ear, but by certain grace lost when I reached for it to stab someone I secretly loved a boy who'd advanced through those tight hallways, shoving some without saying, excuse me, more an insult than a battle included on an American history exam, red coats, red blood cells, red bricked education. I can't remember the exact date or grade, but I know when I began ignoring slight alarms that move others to charge or retreat, I'm a kind of camouflage I never let on. When I don't understand or when I'm scared of conflicts so old, they seem to amount to nothing. Dust particles left behind really like the viral geography of an expanding country or like the most recent name of an occupied territory. I imagine you imagine when you see a speck like me walking with a white woman

Speaker 3 (00:54:36):

As a human being,

Speaker 3 (00:54:39):

There is the happiness you have and the happiness you deserve. They sit apart from one another the way you and your mother sat on opposite ends of the sofa. After an ambulance came to take your father away, some good doctor will stitch him up and soon an aunt will arrive to drive your mother to the hospital where she will settle next to him forever. As promised, she holds the arm of her seat as if she could fall, as if it's the only sturdy thing and it's since you've done what you always wanted, you fought your father and won marred him, he'll have a scar he can see all because of you and your mother, the only woman you ever cried for, must tend to it as a bride, tends to her vows, forsaking all others no matter how sore the injury, no matter how sore the injury has left you, you sit understanding yourself as a human being. Finally free now that nobody's got to love you. This next poem is written, thinking about the deaths and being confounded by the circumstances surrounding the deaths of people like Jesus Huerta in North and Victor White in Louisiana and Sandra Bland in Texas.

Speaker 3 (00:56:33):

Bullet points,

Speaker 3 (00:56:36):

I will not shoot myself in the head and I will not shoot myself in the back and I will not hang myself with a trash bag. And if I do, I promise you I will not do it in a police car while handcuffed or in the jail sale of a town I only know the name of because I have to drive through it to get home. Yes, I may be at risk, but I promise you I trust the maggots and the ants and the roaches who live beneath the floorboards of my house to do what they must to any carcass more than I trust an officer of the law of the land to shut my eyes like a man of God might or to cover me with a sheet so clean. My mother could have used it to tuck me in. When I kill me, I will kill me the same way most Americans do. I promise you cigarette smoke or a piece of meat on which I choke or so broke, I freeze in one of these winters. We keep calling worst. I promise that if you hear of me dead anywhere near a cop, then that cop killed me. He took me from us and left my body, which is no matter what we've been taught greater than the settlement, a city can pay a mother to stop crying and more beautiful than the brand new shiny bullet fished from the falls of my brain.

Speaker 3 (00:58:24):

When I was a kid I was in love with riddles. So I've been trying to write a poem that's a riddle since about 2002 and not succeeding. And I think I wasn't succeeding because I always knew the answer to the riddle. So here's a poem where I don't know the answer to the riddle. Riddle.

Speaker 3 (00:58:50):

We do not recognize the body of Emmett Till. We do not know the boy's name nor the sound of his mother wailing. We have never heard a mother wailing. We do not know the history of ourselves in this nation. We do not know the history of ourselves on this planet because we do not have to know what we believe we own. We believe we own your bodies but have no use for your tears. We destroy the body that refuses use. We use maps we did not draw. We see a sea, so cross it. We see a moon. So land there. We love land so long as we can take it. We can't take that sound. What is a mother wailing? We do not recognize music until we can sell it. We sell what cannot be bought. We buy silence. Let us help you. How much does it cost to hold your breath underwater? Wait, wait. What are we? What on earth are we

Speaker 3 (01:00:17):

The myth of GaN mead as we all know, although I do have a question about this and maybe somebody can tell me later, I don't understand. When we see Greek names, we do a certain kind of a thing with pronunciation. So I don't understand why we say GaN mead instead of saying ity or ities. Do y'all understand what I'm saying? So maybe somebody will explain to me why later because I know y'all are real smart people. But in the meantime, in the Greek myth about NY Mead, as we know, Zeus is attracted to the Prince GaN mead and turns himself into a great bird, an eagle and takes ny mead up to Mount Olympus where GaN mead becomes not only yet another person raped by the king of the gods, but the hand the cut bearer to the gods, the person who serves nectar and ambrosia to the gods. There is an alternate version of that myth, and I think I'll get to that alternate version in this next poem. GaN Mead, it's the police NY Mead,

Speaker 3 (01:01:36):

A man trades his son for horses. That's the version I prefer. I like the safety of it. No one at fault, everyone rewarded. God gets the boy, the boy becomes immortal. His father rides until grief sounds as good as the Gallup of an animal born to carry those who patrol and protect our inherited kingdom. When we look at myth this way, nobody bothers saying rape. I mean don't you want God to want you? Don't you dream of someone with wings taking you up and when the master comes for our children, he smells like the men who own stables in heaven. That far to reign between promise and apology. No one has to convince us. The people of my country believe we can't be hurt if we can be bought.

Speaker 3 (01:02:54):

I don't know where y'all are from. So in the south, I mean I don't know what people know. I never know what people know, but I think this is regional and not racial, but it might be both. It might be regional and it might have something to do with me being black. But when I was growing up, the word lie was a cuss word. Has anybody else had this experience? Because people who haven't had this experience are looking at me crazy. You know how you can't say shit? You can't say fuck. Is it just me? Will you raise your hand? I don't want people to think anybody else. So there's oh, there's a white guy and then okay, yeah, so yeah. So y'all are from the south, is it southern? Yeah. So in the south they add to the list of cuss words. You sort of need to know that I think for this poem because it'll get to a point where it's like, why is he saying that? Okay, isn't that something man?

Speaker 3 (01:03:55):

Second language. It's really funny. I was telling a joke about this. I was telling somebody about how the whole time I was growing up, nobody cared if I said the N word, my mom would be like, yeah, child, blah, blah, blah n word. Now I say yeah, that N word, blah blah, blah. We would just talk to each other this way. But if I said lie, my mama would knock me out of a window. Isn't that amazing? Anyway, y'all aren't fascinated by this. I find that fascinating. Second language, you come with a little black stream tied around your tongue, nodded to remind where you came from and why you left behind. Photographs of people whose names need no pronouncing. How do you say God now that the night rises sooner? How dare you wake to work before any alarm? I am the man asking the great grandson made sold by the dead tenant. Farmers promised a plot of land to hue. They thought they could own the dirt they were bound to in that part of the country. A knot is something you get after getting knocked down and story means lie in your of the country. Class means school. This room where we practice words like rope in our hope to undo your tongue so you can tell a lie or break a promise or grow like a story.

Speaker 3 (01:05:41):

So what time is it I should read? Well, I guess I can read two more, right? I'll read two 'em. Is that okay? The hammers,

Speaker 3 (01:05:54):

They sat on the dresser like anything I put in my pocket before leaving the house, I even saw a few tiny ones tilted against the window of my living room. Little metal threats with splinters for handles. They leaned like those teenage boys at the corner who might not be teenage boys because they ask for dollars in the middle of the April day and because they knock at 10:00 AM Do I need help lifting something heavy yard work? I wondered if only I saw the hammers. The teenage boys visiting seemed not to care that they lay on the floor lit by the tv. I'd have covered them up with rugs, with dry towels and linen, but their claw and sledge and ball pen heads shown in the dark, which is at least a view in the dark and their handles mint my hands, striking surfaces, getting shelves up. Finally, one stayed in my tub, slowing the drain. I found another propped near the bulb in the refrigerator. Wasn't I hungry? Why have them there? If I could not use them, if I could not look at my own reflection in the mirror and take one to the temple and knock myself out,

Speaker 3 (01:07:25):

Stand

Speaker 3 (01:07:29):

Peace on this planet. Are guns glowing hot? We lay there together as if we were getting something done. It felt like planting a garden or planning a meal for a people who still need feeding. All that touching or barely touching, not saying much, not adding anything. The cushion of it, the skin, and occasional sigh all seemed like work worth mastering. I'm sure somebody died while we made love. Somebody killed somebody black. I thought then of holding you as a political act. I may as well have held myself. We didn't stand for one thought, didn't do a damn thing. And though you left me, I'm glad we didn't. Thank you all so much. Thank you to the sound guy in the back. Thanks man. This is good stuff.

Speaker 6 (01:08:51):

Thank.