20090203-13399-10th Muse

Event Introduction and Announcements

00:00:00

Introduction of Sarah Lindsay

00:00:40

Sarah Lindsay's Reading

00:05:57

Atsuro Riley's Reading

00:06:10

Introduction of Kevin McFadden

00:26:53

Kevin McFadden's Reading

00:29:59

Introduction of Atsuro Riley

00:53:56

00:00:00

BERNARD SCHWARTZ

Good evening, everyone. I'm Bernard Schwartz, the director of the Unterberg Poetry Center, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to the 10th Muse readings by Sarah Lindsay, Kevin McFadden, and Atsuro Riley. Each poet will be introduced by this year's curator, Kay Ryan. And on behalf of the Poetry Center, I wanted to thank Kay for helping us carry on this long standing tradition, which goes back 20 years now. The first reading was curated by Richard Howard in April of 1989. But before we begin, I wanted to offer a brief reminder about some of the other poetry events taking place this spring. They include readings by Charles Simic, Rae Armantrout, Cole Swensen, Charles Wright, Natasha Trethewey, and Richard Wilbur, as well as a special evening with translator Daniel Mendelsohn on the poetry of Cavafy. Meanwhile, the next event in our main reading series will take place this Thursday, February 5th, when we'll present the final words and music collaboration of the season, Check counterpoints Leos Janacek and Milan Kundera in commemoration of Mr. Kundera's 80th birthday. The program will feature musical performances by members of the Cleveland Orchestra and readings by actor Michael Stuhlbarg. Though Mr. Kundera is unable to be with us on Thursday night, he himself has chosen the passages of his own work to be read among the music, and even written a brief essay to mark the occasion. It should be a very memorable evening, and I hope you'll join us then. Following tonight's readings, we invite you all to a book signing and public reception in the lounge located through the doors at the back of the hall. Books by the authors will be available for purchase at that time, courtesy of Barnes and Noble. And now, please welcome Kay Ryan as she introduces Sarah Lindsay. (applause)

00:02:06

KAY RYAN

Well, it's especially relaxing to be here this evening, since I don't have to read and have -- and feel very confident in the the wonderful poets that I've selected for for this evening's reading. I feel yeah, I really feel kind of smug about my choices, and I'm really looking forward to it. So I'm just going to introduce one of my poets at a time. I call them my poets because they are. (laughter) First, Sarah Lindsay. From the time I first saw two poems by Sarah Lindsay in Georgia Review, how many years ago? I think it was 1966, probably. I felt that her work was a force to contend with. I'm always looking for that shock that's so relaxing, finding myself in the hands of a commanding writer. If I just looked at her poems on the page, though, I wouldn't anticipate their savage grip. They're so, how shall I put it? Long. (laughter) Of course, I consider anything over, you know, like ten lines long. Nobody really knows the secret formula of a poet, including the poet. Other poets can seem to use the same ingredients and produce lifeless clods. But I would say Sarah Lindsay's brew is something constantly mutating, a combination of passions. I'm sure one of the first things that appealed to me was that her poems have subjects, scientific or historical or archaeological, real or imagined, or a braid of the three. I guess that'd be the six, wouldn't it? Okay. They revel in scholarship. This is a nice relief from the personal of which we've been experiencing an overserving for this last number of decades. A second element that electrifies Sarah Lindsay's poems is their fascination with extremity. Bodies freeze, burn, desiccate, explode, drop, rise, implode, get stranded. One kind of life tends to eat the guts out of another kind of life. These things are just interesting. A third essential element of Sarah Lindsay's work is respect for the requirements of story. One must remember not to dawdle overmuch over the glories of language. And her language is glorious. Or the glories of the natural and unnatural world. One must drive on to an ending which, in her case, despite all the layerings of facts, fake facts, and fine fancy, can have a simplicity worthy of Cavafy. Sarah Lindsay's methods, which are impersonally flamboyant, arrive by some perhaps dark art at ends which are stringent and intimate. Sarah Lindsay is the author of three books of poems, the most recent of which is Twigs and Knucklebones, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2008. Please welcome Sarah Lindsay. (applause)

00:06:04

SARAH LINDSAY

I must do a sound check. Is this good? Good. Thank you all for coming tonight, in spite of the picturesque weather. And thank you Kay for considering me one of your poets. I'm honored and very pleased to be here. And be curated. My last reading was in a bookstore about this big, which was a packed house of 15 people. So this is somewhat awesome to me and I will do the best I can. First, I'd like to explain that Kay didn't read any of my poetry in 1966 because at that point I was still learning how to write -- to print. It was 1996. I just had to do that because I'm a proofreader. (laughter) And I'm going to begin with a relatively short poem, which is based on my suspicion that in the near future, people are not going to be satisfied merely to read their palms and read the auguries of different kinds, if they can actually try to manipulate them instead. It's called Laser Palmistry. "Determined not to ask too much, the chiromantic surgeon's very first client passed up the lottery winning star along the Apollo line, the peacock's eye on the mercury finger for luck and protection. But given the discount for scientific advancement, she made four choices. Erase the ring of Saturn that circled her left middle finger and kept her melancholy. Build up her mount of Apollo to make her lively and creative. Lengthen her heart line. She would be discriminating and faithful in love. And draw her a good, strong fate line because she had none. What kind? Surprise me, she said, opened her hands and felt so naked she had to close her eyes. Who knew that while his meticulous lasers worked, the tea leaves in her mug in the kitchen sink shifted before they dried, or that three counties over, a sheep suffered cramps as its entrails readjusted. Meanwhile, no fewer than nine unrelated people felt tickles like ants in their palms as their own lines moved. That night, while the patient's unexpected headache accompanied minor changes in the protuberances of her skull, a few widely scattered astronomers frowned at anomalies in their data. And on floreana in the Galapagos Islands and as yet undiscovered vein of perfectly aligned crystals disappeared. And that was just the beginning." (laughter) (applause)

00:08:56

SARAH LINDSAY

The scariest book I think I have ever read is something called Parasite Rex, and it describes the way that tiny organisms in the bodies of their hosts can manipulate the behavior of their hosts to achieve whatever their life cycle -- the life cycle of the parasite demands. So I spent days after that wondering if I was really making my own choices or not. It was a very strange effect, and I think there may be some gnawed entrails in this one too. I'm not sure. It's called Why We Held On. "In the 23rd century, maybe they'll find that a parasite made me behave this way. That just as viruses, flukes and worms are implicated in human obesity, heart attacks, forms of dementia, and possibly a taste for hot peppers or keeping too many cats, a microorganism infests a number of us and compels us to cling to the past. Its victims, we imagined, we followed our hearts as we dug up nubbins of brick, aired moldy buffalo robes, sailed away to stuffed birds, or copied the letter that mentioned Granny's mules were named Huldy and Tom. Saved, preserved, displayed the leavings of people we couldn't get back, wouldn't see again, or never saw. The photo that happens to show his chin. The beaten copper mask in her grave. The painting of what they hunted. The footprint beneath. Collected the animal parts that last that weren't soft or small or delicate, that were heaped in spate at the bends of rubbed out rivers and mapped the rivers, traced the watershed named the ancient sea. It did us no good except for illusory satisfaction, increased our labors, distracted us from making new things, and cleaning, fostered oppressive accumulations in melancholy. But it wasn't our fault. We know that when the three spined stickleback fish has a particular tapeworm in its guts, and the worm to proceed with its cycle must move to a bird. The worm can turn the fish orange and make it swim fearlessly at the surface, almost begging a heron to eat it. Likewise, a tiny crustacean, unwitting host to young thorny headed worms, craves light when it should seek darkness and shows itself to the duck that will eat it, in which the worms will mature. The ant, whose system is ruled by lancet flukes, never questions the reckless urge to climb to the tip of a tall blade of grass and stay as long as the cool of the evening, Or until it is munched by a cow, in whose body the flukes will thrive. And the housefly, filled by a fungus, knows only that it must land in a high place and dies there obligingly, in an odd position suitable for the firing of spores at sunset. But the reasoning minds of the 23rd Century Institute, having found the cause of our counter-productive affliction, can move ahead toward a cure, although some researchers instead will find they cannot resist pursuit of the mystery of the parasites motivation." (applause)

00:12:21

SARAH LINDSAY

Which might be an explanation for why my husband and I spent the morning in the museum looking at Babylonian antiquities with silly grins on our faces. It's great to be in New York. I must mention, for my own satisfaction that this is probably the first poetry reading I've ever given that isn't going to have an elephant in it. (laughter) I couldn't seem to work out a way to have an elephant poem, but now I've mentioned elephants, so I feel better. This -- this poem has a lot of other animals in it, and more natural history facts which I promise you, I did not make up. It's called Song of a Spadefoot Toad. "We stand by the patch of grass marked his, but he is no longer subject to the whims of this bewildering sphere with its sound waves, cancers, specific gravity. Spring where we still live, where ostrich chicks before hatching sing through the eggshell. Where filarial worms in bloodstream darkness know when it's night and drift to the skin of their host so mosquitoes will drink them and bear them away. Did he look without eyes once more, as if over his shoulder? Did his old home shrink to a rolling marble where elephants hollow out caves in a mountain to eat its salt? Where ants shelter aphids and drink their sweet green milk. Where a black tailed prairie dog bolts through a tunnel with an infant head and scarlet neck in its mouth. We who still recoil from death. How can we picture where he is now when we labor to comprehend this place where minute crustaceans pierced the side of a swordfish to lodge in its heart, where spadefoot toads wake from 11 months sleep and sing till their throats bleed. Where humans do everything humans do. Where a fig wasp pollinates a flower while laying her eggs, then lies on her side as baby nematodes crawl from her half eaten gut. And where faithfully every day in mangrove shallows paired seahorses, armless, legless, without expression, dance with each other at sunrise." (applause)

00:14:50

SARAH LINDSAY

One of my secret advantages as a poet is that I get to play in a string quartet of friends, and one of them tells the best stories, and I keep stealing them. And one that he told me happened to a cellist that he played with a different cellist who was a descendant of Felix Mendelssohn and grew up in Berlin in a very glamorous society until they had to flee from the Third Reich. And this poem has a duet of violin and cello in it. And for those of you whose parents did not insist on violin lessons or cello lessons, I should just explain that the frog of the bow is the square end that you hold and the hair is attached to that end. As to the other end, there's a phenomenon known as the violin hickey, which is where the chinrest has rubbed on the violinists jaw so that they -- that's referred to in the poems. It's called Knocked Music. "Like him, she is old. Her neck curves like the violins whose long harsh kiss shows on her jaw. When she turns to the tuning fork she spanked on her knee, her pursed lips drawing in the long, thin A. Beethoven tonight? Mozart, Haydn, Brahms. She gloats absently over the sheets to his usual shrug. He goes back to touching the cello strings with his thumbs. She lifts her bow and its hair falls loose from the frog like a girl's. It's always something, isn't it? How we play these fragile things, I don't know, they could fall apart in our hands. With her second bow, she tunes again. He doesn't see her rosin it. Bent over the cello's shoulder, he has the sense of remembering Berlin, the night a bomb buried the bridegroom, and all but one of his friends. The night he knelt outside his gaping home and heard the grand piano fall five floors, heard its last five monstrous chords that blotted out for years all the music he knew. 'Mozart, then,' he says, and so they play."

00:17:06

SARAH LINDSAY

Speaking of Mesopotamian antiquities, I created a -- more or less created of an ancient Mesopotamian kingdom for Twigs and Knucklebones, because I was reading about Sumerian archaeology. And so, you know, there are some remarkable resemblances between this culture and the Sumerians, but whenever I needed to make something up, I was able to do that too. So this one is set several thousand years ago, in a culture where the burial methods involved putting the bodies under the floor of the house that you lived in, and an adult would be buried on their sleeping mat, but a baby was put into a jar that was sealed but then broken open. And so this is called Jars. "So tuck him into a womb of clay. In the few days he lived outside of mine, he slept little, cried less, stared at me as if trying hard to think of the answer to something I'd asked him. Last night, he lost interest. My first son, who required from me so much to make his little lavender body. It goes in a jar now, and under the floor in the dark beside his father's father. Here is my bracelet to be his necklace. In one year, my mother, my sister, my son and my husband brought back in pieces from battle. Yet how can I claim to be singled out by the arrows of hasht or the mouth of [silhouette?] that would dishonor the mourners who sought the thousand fallen at Nebuchadrezzar My father, who takes up the floor yet again. On this very street, [Masada Goodman?], in the days of his strength, turned yellow and died. After him went [Marta Masada gal?], whose jaw decayed, and I know of two other infant jars, sealed and broken and placed beneath their mother's feet. Break this jars mouth and leave it below to be covered. Where does it come from? This stubborn idea that we should decide what we keep." (applause) Thanks. I honestly don't know what possessed me to give them long names like that that I couldn't pronounce. I'm going to read a poem about the growth of a truffle. Not the chocolate kind that I prefer, but one of the fungus kind. And I'm thinking that maybe this poem is a little bit out of date, because at the time I wrote it, they apparently didn't have any idea how to cultivate truffles. It just had to be an accident that they grew. But I think that maybe the science has caught up with this one now. It's called World truffle. "This time, the mycorrhizal infection at the crooked roots of a hazelnut tree meets a set of conditions so knotted and invisible it feels like goodwill or magic when the truffle begins its warty branches that grow away from the sun. This time, it doesn't stop with one fairy ring and dissolute spores, but fingers its way beneath the turf and under the fence, and past the signs for truffle reserve harvest regulated by the state Forestry Department. Out through Umbria, up the shank of Italy, it enmeshes the skin of the Alps. In time, its pale filaments have threaded Europe, and almost as stubborn as death, are probing sand on one side and burrowing on the other through the heated, muttering bed of the sea, its pregnant mounds rise modestly in deserts, rainforests, city parks, yellow truffle flies hover and buzz at tiny, aromatic cracks in Panama and the Aleutians. It smells like wood, smoke, humus and or it smells of sex. It smells like 10,000 years. It smells of a promise that a little tastes better than all, that a mix and disguise is best. Young dogs whiff it, twist in the air and bury their faces in loam. Tapirs and cormorants sway in its fragrance. Camels open their nostrils for it. Coatimundi and honey badgers start digging. Lemurs bark and octopuses embrace. Humans sense nothing unusual. (laughter) Yet some of them teachers raking leaves in Sioux City, truck drivers stretching their legs in Ulan Bator, take a few deep breaths and unaware, begin to love the world. (applause) Thanks.

00:21:55

SARAH LINDSAY

I forgot to look at my watch. I hope I have time for two more before the hook comes out. (laughter) This one, I apologize, but it does go back to parasites. It also goes back to ancient days when saints or saints-to-be would do odd things like try to spend their lives on the top of a pillar, and I'm not sure how broad the top of the pillar was, but I'll have to look that up. This is called The Blessed Elias and the Worm. "The Blessed Elias, who never was made a saint, within his first year atop the pillar to which he retired from the sinful world's ground level, noticed signs of the presence of the parasite that would be with him all the rest of his days. First, he rebuked it. He tried the usual purgatives. When medicine failed, he fed it sand and little stones to teach it the unappetizing nature of the material sphere. When its tail or head, for who could tell which emerged through an abscess, he wrapped it around a twig, as advised, and turned the twig at intervals to draw out gently its growing length. They say his self-denial was such that he'd wind out one new inch in the time when a man of normal habits would have twisted out a dozen. The Blessed Elias reminded the worm that had chosen a poor host indeed, he preached at many sermons. After much prayer and meditation, often concerning whether the mortification of his flesh improved the worm in any way, the Blessed Elias resolved that this was not an affliction sent to test him, but one of God's creatures, and because in his years on the pillar, he adhered to a vow of silence on all matters except for faith. The followers who supplied his meager requirements were dumbly amazed to hear one day his voice come down without its rasp of certainty, saying perhaps it would like some figs." Thank you. (applause)

00:24:10

SARAH LINDSAY

My second violinist with the good stories is also a very capable craftsman and a vegetarian and an excellent gardener. And one day he showed up and announced that it was one of the Jewish High Holy days, and he had a shofar from his garden. It wasn't made of a ram's horn at all. It was made of the stem of one of his vegetables, and he blew it, and it sounded quite convincing to me. So this is in his honor, and it is called Zucchini Shofar. "No animals were harmed in the making of this joyful noise. (laughter) A thick, twisted stem from the garden is the wedding couple's ceremonial ram's horn. Its substance will not survive 1000 years, nor will the garden which is today their temple. Nor will their names, nor their union now announced with ritual blasts upon the zucchini shofar. Shall we measure blessings by their duration? Through the narrow organic channel, fuzzily come the prescribed sustained notes, short notes and rests. All that rhythm requires. Among their talents, the newlyweds excel at making and serving mustard, green soup and molasses cookies, and taking nieces and nephews for walks in the woods. The gardener dyes eggs with onion skins, wraps presents, tells stories, finds the best seashells. His friends adore his paper cuttings. Nothing I do will last, he says. What is this future approval we think we need? Who made passing time our judge? Do we want butter that endures for ages? Or butter that melts into homemade cornbread now? The note that rings in my deaf ear without ceasing or two voices abashed by the vows they undertake? This moment's cord of earthly commotion will never be struck exactly so again. Though love does love to repeat its favorite lines. So let the shofar splutter, its slow notes and quick notes. Let the nieces and nephews practice their flutes and trombones. Let living room pianos invite unwashed hands. Let glasses of different fullness be tapped for their different notes. Let everyone learn how to whistle. Let the girl dawdling home from her trumpet lesson pause at the half built house on the corner where the newly installed maze of plumbing comes down to one little pipe whose open end she can reach. So she takes a deep breath and makes the whole house sound." Thank you very much. (applause)

00:26:53

KAY RYAN

Well, I'd say things are going wonderfully so far. One of the lovely things about my poets is they don't overlap. They have divided the kingdom of poetry very, very neatly among them, except in all being wonderful. Next, I'd like to introduce Kevin McFadden. Kevin McFadden's poems impress you, actually knock you over with their wordplay. They are very hard Scrabble. Hardscrabble is the name of his new first book, but there, hard scrabble is run together to give it the good old fashioned meaning of torn from the Earth with difficulty, like a tenant farmers hardscrabble life. It could just be a pun to have overlaid these two meanings of hard scrabble. After all, Kevin McFadden's always playing a very advanced game of word. His poems seethe with sport, echoes, anagrams, etymologies, ologisms, neologisms, post-ologisms, decimations, portmanteaus, suitcases, grips, chimes, rhymes and other crimes. In Scrabble terms, he's always going for the triple word scores, but I don't think wordplay is enough to constitute a poem, even though the brain is very pleased. Something has to ride inside a poem, whether it's entirely clear or not. You have to feel some live hard scrabble beast in there. Kevin McFadden's beast is skittish but passionate. It feels a soreness for America, a tenderness for the underdog, a love of Americana, and a deep respect for the magical properties of our language. Certain we are made of it. There is a reverential sense of playing with fire in Kevin McFadden's work. He is very like the Kabbalist, whom he describes in one of the impressive 14 liners in his autobiographical sequence Famed Cities, which is part of Hardscrabble. He says a Kabbalist knows how much can hang on one letter, one omission from the Talmud will end creation, boil the seas, set every river on fire. Kevin McFadden's Hardscrabble was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2008. Please welcome Kevin McFadden. (applause)

00:29:59

KEVIN MCFADDEN

Thank you so much, Kay. It's wonderful to hear those kinds of things about your work from a poet who you thought of originally as your poet. Years ago, when I first read Kay's work, I was blown away. I started paying more attention to some of her prose on writing, and I thought, wow, she sees it the way I feel about it, too. Being a poet, you sort of, you know, you send out these poems into the world, you wait three to six months for somebody to write you back or not, and sometimes take a poem or not. The process is very long and grueling and in a way, I'm grateful for how tough it is. And that's what Kay said. She never shied away from that. And she respected what would come back and learned from it. And I thought, that is incredibly noble. And yeah, we kind of -- not approval from people we know, but from people we don't know sometimes that helps shape the work. So, thank you, Kay. I'm going to read my first poem called The Atomic Test, and it's got some strong language in it. You wouldn't expect weak language, I think, from a poetry reading. But it's nothing you haven't heard if you have cable TV or teenagers. The Atomic Test. "I love American, cowboys and idioms. To say a band was 'bad' and mean they're good. To say your friend's 'the shit' and mean the best. It depends on what we emphasize. Some tests in the medical sense that turn up positive are negative. Those who throw fits like missiles go ballistic. Thought is a trip to be triggered. Ideas that blow our minds resound, but don't leave mushroom clouds. The age is atomic. Hot, the new cool. The body exposed in a flash or a streak. Colors can all of a sudden be loud. Good news is big. Big is a theme. You can talk big, think big, be big business or sneer big friggin deal. If zealots hearts will break for zeal, guess what word makes bigots squeal? Ace reporters don't make a deuces mistake. Would you listen to a suit and follow a beat? Punchlines to the head beat headlines to the punch. Still who would rearrange your face has not the skill of a plastic surgeon. Who would teach you a lesson has more cartilage than tutelage in mind. Or take the American motif of striking earthward with a pick. Groundbreaking. The biggest adjective an artist or a scientist can hope for hitting paydirt. If you understand me, say I dig. Some rake, will call his girl his hoe. Nail her with his cock, not his hammer. It's true, he could do her in a pinch, but that could mean death in a different context. With sex, it's safe to stick to sports, a score. A well-armed quarterback has got a gun and the losing fans curse shoot. Or worse, if he rifles one in the hurry before the half. When a comedian slays a crowd, don't worry, never worry. It only means they laughed. A hard day, the office is murder. After work, a newlywed couple will kiss a little, then bang a sort of ritual. After the prom, the guy says the night was better than good. It was killer. His date will likely say it was the bomb." Thank you. (applause)

00:34:30

KEVIN MCFADDEN

I read this poem in New York because my mother actually came to this country when she was nine. She was born in the former Yugoslavia. She was part of a Hungarian speaking minority there. They were displaced persons during the war. She came, as I said, and came through New York for a little bit, and then passed on to Cleveland, where I'm from, that river of fire we were talking about, cave red is actually something we did in Cleveland. But I picture my mother in this time, and it's mostly imagined because she wouldn't talk about it a lot. It was a kind of age of assimilation when she moved into the United States. And you would not maybe even know that she wasn't born in the Midwest if you were to meet her. So I did this poem thinking of her. When the word 'magyar' comes up, that's what Hungarians refer to the Hungarian language as. A French Statue. "Liberty's so high up you think you expected her down to earth. No such luck. You clasp at your mother's skirt. She knows this place where names get changed. Some by accident, some not. Where immigrants learn a new sir. Or as you'll see here, a last. You're next. Your name. Your next of kin. Next you'll learn, is how to move lines, not queues. No matter what that kind Irish passenger taught you. Next, please. Next. And this is the city you heard of but a year ago, as your parents explained in Hungarian. Soon enough, you'll be in school. They'll ask what you speak and magyar you'll repeat. Mud. Your. A tongue pronounced with mud. Hungary, you learn for its own pun by first Thanksgiving. Turkey, you will learn to stuff. More and more each year, you'll grow to love the Salvation Army Santa ringing bells to bring Christmas. You'll give me coins to feed his kettle and say, 'These people were your first taste of America.' Sugar cookies. Weak cocoa. Willkommen. What the lady said to you so strangely with a will. Those first few crumbs of welcome, have some. Or is it bienvenüe? Neither. Thank you. You're welcome now. Hard to tell you from a local. Hard to tell you to what I've clung to. Phrases you've fed, American as mom and apple pie, brand spanking new. Chew the fat. Take a load off. Each a measure of freedom. The drinking gourd 40 acres and a mule a chicken in every pot a man on the moon. An odd numerology of urgency. Second wind. The fourth quarter. The bottom of the ninth. At contradictions we never stopped. Free reign. Statue of Liberty. You had me take it all with displaced patients. Just in case. Any way the wind blows, you never know. In the meantime, make yourself at home. All systems go." (applause)

00:38:05

KEVIN MCFADDEN

For me, language really opened up so much when I did a semester -- a year really, abroad in Scotland. You know, English is kind of like a pasta. It has a different taste and different countries and different sizes make the same thing. English basically sound a lot different. I'm going to read off a couple names, place names here. The first ones are meant to be in Ohio. That's why I'll say Edinburgh with a hard G. This poem is called Lone Glasgow. "Where I first learned to say things, Ohio, my accent was the local legal tender good in Edinburgh as Dublin or London. Then came Glasgow proper, one year abroad and broad Glaswegian, the notes brought from home, bouncing everywhere overdrawn. What a wild time in Glasgow. Time was tame. See the town. You had to hear the tune. New loans, including my name. I began saying, 'Cave in' if I wanted the right introduction in a pub. The road was rude. The power sometimes poor. My voice skim milk and that butter churn of gutturals Scots vowels clotted and spread like cream. I learned to hear everything twice and nothing the same. Glasgow never leaves you alone. It leaves you a lane." (applause) I live in Virginia now, and there's a town spelled D-A-N-T-E, which a literary crowd would know. It's pronounced 'daint' there, after some -- after someone's name who was part of the town founder. It's a coal town. And that was the main enterprise there. Pronunciation, Daint. "No, not to hell and back again. Here it rhymes with quaint. So don't bother abandoning anything, ye who enter here, it's only spoken as paint or taint. Or as if deception crept up slow, a hiss, an air or lack thereof. To play canaries dead asleep, a faint or faint. Say it's coal alone that guides you. Not salvation. No audience with the multifoliet rows. Just duty. Fuel duty. The dusts same old, same old at your throat. Carbide mush on the coat you wore in. Or your neighbor's coat the day he was pinned and pronounced. What was it now? Dead. Then you might not put much stock in pronunciation or saint. You may find deep down a place you don't believe in, cavern that won't echo or caint." (applause)

00:41:24

KEVIN MCFADDEN

You know, it's profoundly unfair that you're here because of Kay's choices. But we don't get to hear Kay's poems, so I thought we could remedy that very easily. I'm going to read one of Kay's called New Clothes. "The emperor who was tricked by the tailors is familiar to you. But the tailors keep on changing what they do to make money. Tailor means to make something fit somebody. Be guaranteed that they will discover your pride. You will cast aside something you cherish when the tailors whisper, 'Only you could wear this.' It almost never could -- it is almost never clothes such as the Emperor bought. But it is always something close to something you've got." (applause) It's hard to get poems down to the size that Kay's are, but I tried at one point and this is my most Kay-like attempt I will read here. It's called Data. And that word means things that are given, data, from the Latin word to give. So they are givings, but we use data as sort of the information at hand, not thinking about the implied question in that word. Data. "Given givens, one's got lots to go on, lots to prove. One watches watches, figures figures. One thinks, one knows, one lives. Goofs and guesses later, any given note taker nervously addresses next, who gave or else what gives?" (applause) There were a number of flawed editions of the Bible in English, where one letter might be dropped out. They're fairly famous, depending on how egregious the error was. One was called the Standing Fish's Bible in 1806 edition, in which Ezekiel 47:10 reads, "and it shall come to pass that the fishes shall stand upon it," instead of fishers. Feet. "Sticky, floundering, floppy, numerous. Once I helped birth a litter of puppies. Every scrawny dog checked out. Two eyes, two ears, one tail, except the runt who came with his paws on backward, pads up, whining every step. High register misunderstandings. The farmer pious man wouldn't hear of this. Held him down in a tub till no bubbles. But some of the new ideas do all right. Now and then there's a two-headed cow to pull out, or a tongueless frog to dissect, each destined for little their share of the pain prepared them. Always a chick with no beak who can't break the first layer. Always more loose talk among fish about feet. Flukes are older than you can imagine. The whale wasn't one picked to make it." (applause)

00:45:28

KEVIN MCFADDEN

I do like anagrams a lot. I like the economy of a word that can change all of its letters out with nothing in excess and become another word. Some of those flawed editions of the Bible did just that. Some of the lead type got flipped around. There's one called the Lyons Bible, an 1804 edition, in which Kings 8:19 reads, "but thy son, that shall come forth out of thy lions" instead of loins. Well, I put that as an epigraph on a poem called Hate. Amherst comes up in here an Amherst, actually, and the one I mean is Lord Jeffery Amherst. He is the father of germ warfare. There are a lot of figures in the American past that we, you know, we don't sound out as loudly as other ones that are maybe more known to us because they come from other places. So I just want to put Amherst on the map of those. Hate. "Empires are my premise." And I should say in this, there's going to be a lot of those. "Empires are my premise. Archilochus, my school chair. More was my first word and that means Rome. Denotation is detonation. Be careful as car fuel, at home in the anger, at home on the range. Does the den exist to justify the manes? I must mean amens. I must name names. I hate that there's an Amherst in a man's heart. I hate that there's a Hitler in the lair. If you can't feel the heat, there's reason, there's no sear. Look outside, tedious. Look inside, sin, die. Satire as rite. Rage is my gear. These images only I games. So be it. Rather throw notes than stone. Draw words, not sword. The insulted despise the insulated, and burn for lack of a letter. Hate is the heat. Hate the A." (applause)

00:48:07

KEVIN MCFADDEN

When you play with anagrams, you go for bigger and bigger game each time. And this eventually led me to a form where I would take a line of poetry or a line, just a well-known phrase, and want to take all the letters from it and jumble them around and turn them into every other line of the poem. Exactly. (laughter) So it's kind of tough. And actually, you'll see in the -- there's copies of our manuscripts around or some draft manuscripts in the tonight's program. I think it's kind of neat to look at people's process. One of the ones I had in there is one of these types of poems. I'm not going to read that one or the one that came of it. But that's part of it. I use a computer sometimes to help generate the possibilities and then kind of winnow them down, just like you have to do with any poem. So this one, I think it might be fitting to choose a Langston Hughes line, which this -- this poem begins with. The poem is called Meditate, Sea to Sea. "Let America be America again. Ice age ambiance. Later, a miracle air, a meat mania, ice barge, ice amble. A Thai. Agrarian came later. Inca came. A bear image I bare. An Eric came agile at aim. Let America be a maniac, I rage. Italian came, macabre I agree. Came Iberia, came angle, a rat I rate, a marine bilge. Came a CIA angelic era, a tame iambic ear. Bacteria came in a mire. Algae era. Militia came, began a race, a crime. Eager aim Cain at Abel. At Abe, L. Imagine a ceramic era, ceramic ear. I am it. A lab, a gene I age. A meme trace. A bicranial air age, a bicameral cinema. Et cetera. A manic beige malaria, a carnage. America I let be. I am a cameraman I create a big lie. Let America be a camera again. I am a cabaret emcee. A girl in a bar. I am a teenage circle. I am a Miami tribe. An eagle, a car, ace Airmen. Elegiac America a bet. Let America be a magic arena I anagram. I bet I care came a lie. A clear image. I bet America an animal acreage. I bet America beer I can amalgamate air. Iceberg, an ale. Ace an ear. I mimic a man. Bear me. I cite a racial age. Bear me, I glaciate Americana. I am a rain. Let America be a cage. I remain a gate, a Mecca. I blare Niagara. I accelerate, maim. Be a beam I emanate a grail, searcy mirage. America, a neat cable I tie in. America, a gala embrace. Let America be America again."

00:51:40

KEVIN MCFADDEN

I'll read just one more. It's called The Faucet. Thank you very much. You've been a great audience. The Faucet. "The sink is costing me precious concentration. Poet. Poet. Poet. (laughter) It mocks. Mating call for a plumber. My friends suggest I should write more toward the impossible, around the unreal. I tell them my theme's America, what's the diff? Water is expensive and money is supposed to trickle. The national pastimes a diamond made of dirt. It's difficult not to write satire, an old spout spurted. He's right. Bills pop up, cents flies out. A pitcher's catching the faucets fluent language. I myself don't spigot. (laughter) The plumber does, thank God, know his pipes. Chit chatting a little, we try to jive our slippery jargons. As long as you're here, could you snake the commode? I ask with a blue collar coyness. I might have called it the throne. By accent, I'd trace this plumber to Pittsburgh. The way he says toilet, 'terlet'. The way he says faucet, 'fercet.' He asks what I do. My skin crawls. And I tell him saying poetry is like his business. If the job is done right, you never need see the pipes, just know they're flowing. His look says I'm full of shit. (laughter) Terlt, I think. Don't force it." Thank you. (applause)

00:53:56

KAY RYAN

Hey, I told you, didn't I? Our final poet for the evening -- my final poet for the evening is Atsuro Riley. I don't want to say that Atsuro Riley's first book, Romey's Order, the poems of them -- in them are like flypaper, except I can't resist. The poems untwist like spirals. They're sticky on both sides and they create a buzz. Well, I've sacrificed subtlety for impact. But there is truth to what I've said. Regarding the spiral idea, one of the deepest, strangest achievements of Atsuro Riley's poetic language is its boneless capacity to take shapes, actually to absorb all the senses. He warps and double saturates language until it simply does what he wants. The parts of speech themselves are new made for the child Romey's world. They combine and curl to the curve of a ditch pipe or the y-crotch of a tree. There's no way to untangle emotions from scents or tastes from hopes. No way to unbraid what is felt with the body from what is feared by the mind. And when I say his poems are sticky on both sides, I'm right too. You don't so much read at Atsuro's poems as find your muscles acting them out. You're stuck in the hot Carolina low country he creates. You feel it on your skin. It's a rich paradox that these highly polished, exquisitely discriminating aesthetic objects offer the reader no aesthetic distance. You can't help occupying the senses of a young boy who can't help seeing and feeling everything, including a lot that he doesn't want to. Romey's love of the exact phrasings and objects of his immediate world runs through your body. You squirm with the feeling of dark secrets packed all around with dark hints. The astonishing musical elements of the poems, the rhyming, echoing and mirroring of both sound and themes come from every angle, from every odd distance, to make a score that underwrites the whole book sequence. When you put this book down, American poetry is different than when you picked it up. It gives me great pleasure to report that Romey's Order was recently accepted by the University of Chicago Press, and is forthcoming in 2010. I'm delighted to introduce Atsuro Riley. (applause)

00:57:30

ATSURO RILEY

Thank you, Kay. Would you come out and do that again? (laughter) I want to add to Kay's marvelous description of this sequence by beginning with a poem -- beginning with that most elemental and originary of forms, a child's picture of a house. Now, you may know that Tailspin is a truly wretched drugstore perfume of the 1970s. That's in here. This is called Picture. " This is the house and jungle-strangled yard I come from and carry. The air out here is supper- singed and bruised-tingeing and close. From where I'm hid, a perfect y- crotch perch of medicine-smelling sweet-gum, I can belly worry this welted branch and watch for swells and coming squalls along our elbow-curve of river. Or I can hunker turn and brace my trunk and limbs and face my home. Our roof is crimp-ribbed and buckling tin and tar. Our in-warped wooden porch door is kick-scarred and splintering. The hinges of it rust, cry and rasp in time with every tailspin, wind and jam-slap and after-slap and shudder. Our steps are slabs of cinder-crush and temper, tamped and cooled. See that funnel-blur of color in the red gold glass? Mama mainly, boiling jelly. She's the apron-yellow rickracked plaid in there and stove coil coral. The quick silver blade flash, plus the magma-brimming ladle splash. That's her behind the bramble-berry purple sieved and stored. Out here, crickets are cricking their legs. Turtlets are cringing in their bunker-shells and burrows. Once bedded, nightcrawling worms are nerving up through beanvine roots and moonvines and dew-shining now and cursive. Mama will pressure-cook and scald and pan-scorch and frizzle. Daddy will river-drift down to the falling-down dock. I myself will monkey- shinny so high no bark-burns or tree rats or tides or lava-spit can reach me. I will hunt for after-scraps and sparks and eat them all." (applause)

01:01:00

ATSURO RILEY

This next poem is a simple poem. Only two sentences in which the boy tries tracking his father and mainly discovers among a whole bunch of other things, that his daddy is a verb. It's called Map, and I'll try it -- it's hard to do it with one breath, but I'll try. Map. "Daddy goes. Trolling and trawling and crawfishing and crabbing and bass-boating and trestle-jumping bare and to rust-brackish water and cane-poling for bream and shallow- gigging too with a nail-pointy broomstick and creek-shrimping and cooler-dragging and coon-chasing and dove-dogging and duck-bagging and squirrel-tailing and tail-hankering and hard- cranking and shifting and backfiring like a gun and his tittie-tan El Camino. And parking it at The House of Ham and Dawn's Busy Hands, and Betty's Pink house and Mrs. Sweatman's brick house and Linda's dock-facing double-wide and spine- leaning Vicki against her wide-glide Pontiac and pumping for pay at Ray Wade's Esso and snuff-dipping and plug-sucking and tar-weeping pore-wise and Lucky Strike smoking and Kool only sometimes, and penny-pinching and dog-racing and bet-losing, cock sucking, motherfucking pool-shooting and bottle-shooting over behind Tas-T-O's Donuts and shooting the shit and chewing the fat and just jawin who asked you and blank-blinking quick back at me. And whose young are you no-how and hounddog-digging buried half-pints from the woods." (applause)

01:02:51

ATSURO RILEY

And this next poem is one of a number of things that get made in this book. And this is a box that someone has made, and the boy is narrating the contents of it. He might -- he's possibly inside the box, narrating from within. Now you will wonder if you really heard that pigs rinds have been fried crisp and strung into a necklace. You will have heard correctly. (laughter) Box. "These twigs stand for clothesline-pines. First thing back when our lot was new, Mama ax- hacked them naked of their lower limbs and switches. This scratch-piece of variegated yarns in here for how she Cat's Cradle-rigged our trees with wire. One hairy sprig of this packing twine could count for cracklings, queasy-carried. I mean, pigs' rinds threaded on my neck like beads. Mama crystal-cut and fried crisp through the night. And fine-needled at them like a jewel-kindler would or a spider. Q, what did you learn at the Superette? A, a fret worked choker draws a crowd. Okra does too. These dry rattle BB- seeds are seeds of the time when her okra crop grew giant. She'd pounded fish heads into fertilizer cups and carved complicated water grooves and flooded us like a patty. Dark groves rose like Vietnam bamboo. Cars came by to see her camouflaged green stalks going high as the house, and how the bristly, pointed finger pods were not like food, but human. People pointed at all she'd raised, and long, wood sided neighbor wagons idled and lingered, and one man leaned his whole self out and white, flashed and popped and tossed his melting flash cube. And mama lifted up this skirt to hide her eyes." (applause)

01:05:30

ATSURO RILEY

This is the longest poem I'll read. It's called Strand. And in this poem, the boy is leaning upon the alphabet pretty hard in the hopes that he might gather up, hold on to, constitute, reconstitute his father. A couple of quick glosses: cackleberries are eggs, naturally. Cat heads are biscuits the size of cat heads. Wallace is George Wallace, the former governor of Alabama. He ran unsuccessfully for president four times. You may have heard him rolling quite violently in his grave on our recent inauguration day. (laughter) Evan Rude is an outdoor motor on a boat, and a rooster tail is a very tall weight coming from that boat or even from a car, provided there's enough dust. Strand. "Alphabet sleuths the porch, bind and try to braid our river wrack and leavings. Used to it was cackle berries and cat heads with him when he dry docked home. Daddy, mama, don't cook all the running out them yellows. Me and raise them biscuits big for sopping. Other big names of ours I've kept are hen drops and coop mines and moons and chicken lights and dumpties. Here is the filling station shirt he got from when he pumped monkeyed for money. The name Eggs red stitched and patched to where his chest would go. Say Eugene on one side and Esso on the other. Happy Motoring is tiger tailed in script across its back. Gas smells the main meat, grass sweat, gnat lotion, neck wise ghost whiffs of goop for gunky hands. His hands and mine hammering made this hutch. I reckon your rabbit could use her a cabin or someplace. Chicken wires, right airy and cleans. Let's drive some stilt legs down to set her up so dogs don't help theirself to supper. Instinct, they can't hardly help, it makes them try. Jim Beam and Jim Crow drive him through like Jesus does some others. Sure, I'm evergreen for Wallace, but I'm not no KKK. Leaf. Leave. Leaves. Leaving. Left. Have I said yet how mud, worms and flickery mind minnows live off leaf chaff and blown bark sluff and home grounds and gravel? Son rearing you some is easy, they durn near about feed theirselves. Time was or truer, nights were he'd porch beach finally or suddenly yard founder from nowhere. One time I kerosened ancient oak to lure him home. Polaroid, the charcoal stump of it, the whole, the rain pond ringed with turpentine smelling pines and understory birds and stinging vines. My quail call was too sissy, high by half, but strong as his. But his El Camino Evinrude rooster tail was taller. Across to the sandbar right regular, LJ's up by eight mile. The dock on Tuesdays two for one, smokies, darts and gristle. There was the trestle that carried the train that trusted the trestle that bridged the river, that cooled the fish that fed the boy that watched the trestle, that slow cankered and rusted and fell. Wasn't that your daddy we seen Sunday last hunching like a stray underneath the upriver overpass. Daddy, Eugene Hutto equals verb. Plus how to hammer, wire and jerry, homely words. [Anchored?] for example. Yesterdaddy, zags." (applause)

01:10:41

ATSURO RILEY

Oh, this one will be a little more fun. This is modeled on science -- science class filmstrips, in which you'll remember facts got imparted to us about nature, about our changing bodies, and which were presented in the filmstrip without verbs or animation like we have now, or any connective tissue of any kind. Noun. Noun. Noun. Still still still. Image. Image. Image. And I thought for doing this project, which is to give an account -- a reluctant account of an encounter, possibly a forbidden encounter, and certainly an encounter in forbidden territory. This would be the perfect form, so I'm using it. But as I use this form, sex facts and nature facts and the facts about this account get all conflated and mixed up. The poem goes by quite quickly. And the last thing I'd like to say is that a bait boy is, among other possibilities, one who sells bait. (laughter) Filmstrip. "Bait boy. Minnow naked. Nneck to belt. Chigger bitten. Calamined. Powder pinkish chalk nickle. Spackle scales. Nipple jots like dimes. Buckets. Sperm team, some silversides. Prime tag tails. Creole crickets. Red worms. Cottonmouth. Creek prong. Marsh musk. Trailer husks. Wrong water swale. And back sloughs back beyond. Lure spur of brac beyond. Fox track slip. Whip. Slug muscles. Gristle snails. Coarse boar hairs. Rumor. Trace of wild man. Ruts of root man. King snake snipe cox. Rock skink. Snappers. Clink of boot man. Funk of shack man, fire calls. Leg traps. Tackle pile tires. Tar paper belt man. Salt man. Short shuck shack." (applause)

01:13:10

ATSURO RILEY

And this next poem is another encounter, but with something more generative. A couple of glosses here. Plait is plait pronounced by some people as plat. Drupe. Drupe. It's even hard to say drupe D-R-U-P-E, that is, stone fruits. The likeness suggested here is to plums and peaches hanging from a tree. Oh, and by the way, where I grew up, some houses did get actual nicknames. Roses. "The house with the nick- and snigger-name, snort and grunt. Shunned trailer-house, pocked, scorn- brunt. Side-indented, thorn-bined, boondocked in a hollow. In a green-holler clamber-mire of itch-moss and bramble. Tremblescent ditch-jellies, globberous spawn-floss. Drupes of dapple clinking bottle-glass in trees. Strang them old oaks of his with NEHI and liquor-pints. Magnesia. Yard-splayed magnolia- blooms carved of tractor-tire. Milk-painted, fangle-plaited, barbwire-scapes and vines. And fronds. A palm-shape gold with birds at the end of the yard. Elaborated branches, branching. What is fixing to be a rosebush, caning and twining. Is leaves." (applause) This next poem is a song of mourning, a lament. I like to think of it as a threnody about someone making a threnody within the poem. The verb family at the heart of things here is plangor, plangorous, planging, plangent, a beating of the breast, a striking about the body and head in grief. You'll want to know that purlow is a cooked rice dish, a mixture cousin to rice, pilafs pulaos, perlas, and a fairly common funeral food. Bell. "The heard-tell how her baby'd burned downrivering and rippling. Rill and wave of chicken, prayer, purlow murmuring back. Brackwater cove-woods by her marsh- yard oak-creaking and crying. Mourn-cranes and eave-crow and crape-blinded windows keening black. Raining, wrack. The grieve-mother Malindy Jean porch-planking brunt and planging. Breasting river crossing-over songs with cast-iron inside them. The live heft-fact scorch-skillet willow-strung low and hanging. Her heaving shovel-hafts and oars to make it ring." (applause)

01:17:28

ATSURO RILEY

This poem answers the age old question, the question that really has been nagging all of us for ages. What if a diorama could show us things as they really are? (laughter) It takes place at a county fair. You might not know that shoot the gook down was a midway game stall popular in my home place during the Vietnam War. Diorama. "The Blue Hole Summer Fair, set up and spread out like a butterfly pinned down on paper. Twin bright lit wings, identically shaped and fenced and sized. This side holds the waffled-tin and oven-hot huts of the Home Arts Booths and Contests, the hay-sweet display-cages for the 4-H livestock. The streamer hung display stages where girl beauties twirl and try for queen. There's rosette-luster and lusting in the marching band, wearing a hole in Sousa. And pursed gaggles and clutches of feather white neighbor women eyeballing us like we're pigs feet in a jar. I wonder, does her boy talk Chinese? You ever seen that kind of black headed blue shine all in it like a crow? This other wing, the one I'm back-sneaking, side-slipping turnstiling into dips and slopes down to low-lying marsh mire. Whiffs of pluff-mud stink and live gnat-pack poison, carnie-cots and trailers camped on ooze. They've got rickety rides and tent-shows with stains and rackety bare-bulbed stalls of hoopla. Game ring-a -coke and Rebel Yell and Shoot the Gook Down. Stand here on this smut spot. Don't these mirrors show you strange? Crowds are gathering. Yonder there and down the yolk glow of a tent is drawing men on and in the way a car crash does, or a cock fight, sure enough, or neon. The ticket boy's getting mobbed at the fly of the door. No sign in sight except for the X of the Dixie flag ironed across his t-shirt. I am bone-broke but falling into line. The men upwind of me are leaking chaw-spit and pennies. That plus the eye-hunger spreading like a rumor through the swarm. The rib skinny doorkeepers hollering, bet now, bout's starting. Over his shoulder a ropy yellow light. Also circles of white tobacco smoke and bleacher rows of cooncalling men who know my daddy. And there he is, up in front with some tall man iron arming two black chested boys toward the ring." (applause)

01:21:15

ATSURO RILEY

The complicated tangle of sorrows and anguish we all see brought home around us from our present wars on everybody made me remember -- took me back, as we like to say to the -- the awful after growth that was brought home to us during that earlier war. This poem, Hutch, is a weaving together of overheard talk, as it were, from that poem -- from that time. It bears the epigraph By Way of What They Say. Hutch. "From back when it was Nam time I tell you what. Them days men boys gone dark groves rose like Vietnam, bamboo. Aftergrowth something awful. Green have mercy souls here seen camouflage everlasting. Nary a one of the brung-homes brung home whole. Mongst tar-pines come upon this box thing worked from scrap wood. Puts me much myself in mind of a rabbit crouch. Is it more a meat safe. Set there hid bedded there looking all the world like a coffin. Somebody cares to tend to it like a spring gets tendered clears the leaves. Whosoever built it set wire window-screen down the sides. Long, about five foot or thereabouts close kin to a dog-crate. A human would have to hunch. Closes over heavy this hingey-type lid on it like a casket. Swearin' to Jesus, wadn't it eye-of-pine laid down for the floor. Remembering the Garner twins, Carl and Charlie come home mute. Cherry-bombs 4th of July, them both belly scuttling under the house. Their crave of pent places ditch pipes. Mongst tar-pines come upon this box thing worked from scrapwood. From back when it was Nam time I tell you what." (applause)

01:24:03

ATSURO RILEY

And this will be my last poem. It's called Clary. "Her cart, like a dugout canoe, had been an oak trunk. Cut young. Fire-scoured. What was bark what was heartwood: Pure Char-Hoal Adze-hacked and gouged. Ever after, never not, wheeling hollow there behind her. Up the hill toward Bennett Yard, down through eight mile, the narrows. Comes Clary by here now, Body bent past bent. Intent upon horizon and carry. Her null eye long since gone isinglassy opal. The potent, brimming, fluent one looks brown. Courses Clary sure as bayou through here now. Bearing and borne ahead by hull and hold behind her. Plies the dark. Whole nights most nights along the overpass over Accabee. Crosses Clary, bless her barrow up there now, pausing and voweling there, the place where the girl fell. After a while passing comes her cart like a whole note held." (applause) Thank you.