Talking In The Library Poetry Walk Rosanna Warren

all right I think we'll get going now thank you all for um coming out here um this afternoon or early evening uh welcome to the second annual poetry walk um many people to thank for this which I'll do briefly notably Karen bot and Sue McMullen who forged the collaboration between the library and the tutoring center but also the help and support of our colleagues Mary woo Cindy Jones Wendy MCD heiny bened Heidi Benedict and the facilities crew for staking the posts in the ground but of course most importantly we have the poets themselves who get the most thanks for their creativity and their willingness to share it throughout the Campus Community um and for those of you who had the poems up on the campus walk can you stand so we can just sort of see who you [Music] [Applause] are I made a note to myself clap if nobody claps so you guys did that so um to honor our poets and the 20 24 poetry walk we are fortunate to have with us Rosanna Warren an important and significant American poet in reading rosanna's poems one discovers a Grace and dignity in her lines that is undergirded by a fierce intellect that not only continues to ask the Eternal questions of human consciousness but also in a way that makes us realize that more often than not it is the it is not the answer she seeks but rather the refining of the question one common Bond she and I share is a Devotion to world literature in Translation and for Rosanna as a translator sometimes her reading is in the original language I bring that up being driven that that is being driven to writing in Translation because she and I have discussed on more than one occasion what it might be that draws us to such books almost more so than Contemporary American writing that it must be something more than the obviousness of cultural competency or keeping a globalist eye on the world of literature I have suggested that the fusion of the political and the cultural is much more heightened in many of these works the urgency felt in regions that have experienced and do experience threat and upheave evil in ongoing and relevant ways that inform the inquiry of what it means to be alive or to even want to be alive other times Perhaps it is the simple matter of finding a new way of looking at the familiar in a way that makes it seem all the more fresh and perhaps Andor perhaps sensical in a world full of nonsense nonsense but then as I think about it now and as I think about rosanna's poetry I also see engaging with those International works as a way of forever refining the questions and like rosanna's poetry using a different artfulness of language different angles of perspective and light language is a new form of thinking of seeing of communing in order to distill those ancient questions the ones we need to clarify a little bit more each time we clarify the ones we keep asking that allow us to that allow us to further enter the Mysteries without the expectation of ever solving them rather that on our little dot on the Continuum the questions that get us that much closer to a place of understanding so with that I welcome Rosanna Warren and look forward to those questions [Applause] thank you to Adam and to the library and to all the poets uh I loved walking this afternoon along the Poetry walk and pausing at each poem and thinking that there was so much imagination blossoming on this campus it's really terrific I was I was very energized and and heartened to see this at a time when there's a lot in the world that's not so heartening um I'm going to read a few poems from my most recent book Thank you so forth and but mostly new poems from a um or more recent poems from a manuscript I'm putting together now so let's see um am I audible is this good um this poem is called catian photo and for those of you who don't know what a catian is it's an oldfashioned and uh or perhaps still happens in some of societies uh kind of formal dance where young ladies are sort of of of a certain social class come out so to speak and which meant in those days that they were on the marriage Market uh in a certain sort of affluent class I I wasn't in that class and I didn't have a coming out party uh in the what what was called in those days a coming out party very different from coming out now um so to speak uh but um the poem comes from seeing photographs in somebody's house framed photographs of these young women um in their fancy dresses catian photo these young women will last forever posed like Greyhounds trapped in the silver crust of the frame you can't tell one from another the breed is so pure they will never run each one aoft on a frozen wave of white catian lace to resemble marriage to resemble fate I remember a July Sun pouring down in a prickly Meadow and a garter snake skin laid out like fairy lingerie on a stone wall this was Connecticut there would be a stone wall crickets were scraping marrow from the day I was young I'd been alone for weeks I painted the meadow morning and afternoon trying to capture the crackling sound with my brush I was reading edus Rex I understood neither the snake skin nor the play your life life is one long night said edus to the prophet edus who saw nothing oak trees rustled in drought in Saffron grass small creatures skittered there came a day when I said to myself I should prefer to sleep small planets tasted dry and bitter on my tongue and two days later I woke alone in the creaking Barn at dusk not knowing what day what month what year but feeling the Hall of Earth rolling on its way it is not your fate that I should be your ruin the prophet said I moved my arms my legs I unclenched my hands and stood up dizzy from the cart what was to come would come in its own good time outside the frame the moon was Rising above the hill a shy wind gathered force and trees in their black Silhouettes linked arms one concern that I have in a lot of these poems is how to respond or if to respond if at all to the suffering of of others um well in this poem there's a starts with a a human skull and I will tell you that this happens to be a real human skull on a shelf that I know well Shelf a human skull among the bielo dust to dust it all evens out on the Shelf under a veil of gray there was a think in that cavity once I have forgotten whole years of my life in those eye sockets once surprise and fear you picked it up in a field in Turkey a small head a child a youth who knows how he she died though we can imagine yes horribly imagine and so forget better look at the Kenyan statuette of a woman carrying a pot on her head or the soapstone Dove from Japan or Twisted Driftwood why go looking for sorrow yet we look we hunt you probe the boiled mackerel head for every might of sustenance brain the tiny white golf balls of eyes the fatty ribbon along the jaw and augury in each bite I don't want to remember how much pain I've caused centuries of War we store in our craniums but in that skull now crouched on the Shelf no Echo no prayer only air a relic of air let's see um some of this there's a little sequence in this book uh about um of poems about remarkable women artists of one kind or another and one of them is coko Chanel who whom you may know as the great the brilliant French fashion designer uh and of the perfume the Chanel perfume um uh who was remarkable remarkably horrendous person personally uh I would call her a moral monster but uh but a a genius designer genius artist and there's an epigraph from Chanel Chanel a garment should be logical Coco Chanel yes I made the perfume yes I am an orphan light my cigarette just so the perfect profile in tallo in air now let the hems down now we slash the collar and when a man enters always make him pay always a stray Prince around before the casino closes this Century tilts I'm good at Sphinx Elegance excludes I exclude milk waste tears uterus do I remember the large colored orphanage Halls no I refuse place a coramandel screen in front of the car wreck and your world war my dumy Mo we live in an age with no interiors and his blood scrolled the pavement by the crumpled car embellishment gives way to line and ease of motion a Bugatti flare wealth assuming the proportion of catastrophe and if the other was a German officer I'm on my knees with a Corona of pins bristling from my lips it's not adoration it's [Music] Revenge um and in these years I got uh quite I was of rereading the um Greek presocratic philosophers uh and one of them is anaximander who's really worth reading and he easy to read because it only survives in fragments um and so uh okay this is the anex amander poem and the title is from one of his fragments that the Earth is suspended as Sila prinks purple from halfth clouds and the Cardinal flings his ribbon of song in two high arcs then Trails the vibrat among the boughs May unclenches but not enough buds grip fetal leaves each night scatters frost on sidewalks we tread on broken sky you are sick and far away the world is in flux said anaximander worlds are born appear and disappear we perish even the gods fade spare me the industrial daffodil poking through scraps of snow the season will have its hard birth and we will be dragged into light how many years has that ill corroded your gut whirlwinds tyoon break out of the cloud the tearing makes thunder the crack against black makes the flash so natural philosophy began you watched glaciers slide and crash at the tip of the earth you floated on a rope into ice crevasses to catch the gleam and the groan I sculpted the planet and sculpts it still you hammered aluminum into that shape the stars are a wheel of fire broken off from Earth fire surrounded by air we came from the unlimited to it we return so taught anaximander of myus who thought we would be destroyed um a thought that has occurred to some people these days who studied climate change um the U in this poem happens to be all my poems are not literal and autobiographical but in this case the the U is I can say was is my my brother who at that time had a serious illness and I'm and who went to twice to Antarctica studying ice formations and is an artist so I'm glad to say he survived he was not destroyed let's see and uh another poem here in is also this happens to be another family poem in a sense um it's for my daughter who one of my daughters is a psychiatric social worker um and it's in the in the category of poems about the suffering of others and how we respond or don't respond for Kiara leaves crackle beneath our feet Tinder kindling as we walk by the Brook the crab apple tree a crimson pointy East Nimbus you want to hold each wounded soul in your hands Autumn flares the damage the human berserk find their way to you I don't know how you sleep in the gorgon's blood one drop is Poison the other heals fevered autumn autumn I adore crun an old song We stroll the road scuffing dust and come upon a garter snake lying motionless its tail we guess Nick by a passing car when we nudge it it flips to its back in an agonized S squirms but can't Advance its belly gleams we n Edge it into the grass do we stop seeing when we walk away the brook rattles on homes far off dusk Settles slowly among leaves that's not Mercy scattering from its hands um it it it remains to me a great a guilt I didn't I couldn't kill that snake though it was obviously an Agony so these are some of the how are we doing some of the um the the ones that are shaping up into a into a new book these were poems this book came out smack as the pandemic was exploding in May 2020 a great time to bring out a book um and I retreated with my beloved I don't like the word partner it's so legal uh to our cabin in the Catskill Mountains where we live for two years in tremendous Solitude um during those first years of the pandemic and so a lot of these poems are full of animals and uh nature and also dread political and Na and political and medical uh dread um the title of this poem Dead Flowers is from a famous Rolling Stones song if anybody still listens to The Rolling Stones I don't know I'm old enough to have been brought up on the Rolling Stones dead flowers if you hurt yourself before someone else hurts you is that homeopathic watch me prick poison into my skin sign my name in pain watch me miss the appointment cancel the call watch me gulp smoke and receive a certificate of Enlightenment between the smeared egio Horizon to the west and the bone white Eastern Sky the emperor appoints me to the Poetry Bureau and I declare myself Queen of the Underground on the back road the turkey vulture plucked the guts from the squashed squirrel then flapped up to the dead branch of the Shagbark Hickory to examine us examining the carcass oh sacerdotal bird with your Crimson scalp and glossy vestments teach us to translate the spasm the cry the disintegrating flesh the regret what can be made of all this grief over the butter yellow humming feather grass midday Meadow skim the shadows of vultures ghostly six-foot wingspan V swiftest signature turning death into speed I don't know we all forget so much so quick but I suppose you haven't forgotten those trucks full of corpses in Brooklyn and other places in the United States um this is this a poem appears to be about mushrooms but it's also about politics bolus crickets are stitching the afternoon together what the squalling catb bird rends crickets relentlessly repair the maple Shivers sends yellowed messages sailing down too much has ripped half the main branch cracked off and hangs teetering across lower boughs leaving on the trunk a blonde wound we crossed the Brook on stepping stone and climb West up the mountain flank through Laurel thickets along the scooped out Valley of beaches up the stream bed to sit on a fallen tree but there's no rest we carry with us what we left below a country clawing its very idea to shreds the Scarlet bolus mushroom prongs from decaying wood in its Bishop's amaranth skull cap it stands its ground one kind will nourish the other sickens but not like the white amonita bringing on liver failure seizures death these are so cheerful I'm sorry I I'll I'll I will I will vary the tone eventually I promise um but in those shocking first months of the Corona virus um you know lurking in a cabin in the woods um I was just trying to find a language for the the shock and Terror of it all and uh I went back and started reading thus CD's panan War which I really if you haven't read thiddies I really recommend reading thiddies it's sort of horribly like reading the New York Times and um uh when it's about the pelian war for those of you who haven't read you cities but the war between Athens and the various other Greek city states and the pelonis but it is also a tremendous tremendous record of how a plague the plague struck Athens and what happened to the society when the plague struck and what happened to language and social relations so this was um the beginning of a way that I tried my find I tried to find a way to write about my experience of living in a land that had a plague and I broke up the sentences on purpose so if they sound broken to you you're listening right the title is from suties they set about wasting the land when the plague first broke out among the Athenians when the plague out of Ethiopia spread into Egypt and Libya and among the Persians violent fever bloody throats and tongues vomit blisters foul breath genitals fingers toes broke off when the plague we saw the moon rise it floated over heaped unburied corpses birds and dogs that ate them died the moon Rose over broken laws of God and man smashed oracles frantic mortal orgies we saw we heard words turned inside out families broke parties passionate for power crashed no words were binding no Oaths reconciled when the plague broke us we broke each other let's see this is [Laughter] different before covid I had traveled to Japan for the first time in my life and visited some among other things some Buddhist temples and this is aspired from a famous temple in Kyoto the ten RI Temple um where which was founded by a brilliant monk named soseki who designed the famous Pond so's shrine the mother bear stands on her hind legs to bat hard green apples from the boughs while two Cubs slide up the trunk as if black water should flow upward and disappear in shuttering leaves the third Cub rummages for fruit in Tall Grass the apples are tiny and sour the Bears are hungry working hard the Whole Meadow strives shakes with striving as crickets thrum and dragonflies slice the air and overhead the paragan Falcon floats its high staccato cry my fingers are stained with ink in Koto in soseki's Ancient Temple the stone Basin for mixing ink stands upright a shrine to writing at its base water in a Troth a Dipper one dips one pours water over one's hands one prays to write purely how hard when we want so much we're hungry we want to leave our names Scholars hands the exiled researcher told me holding my hands in hers calluses ink stains rough cuticles hands that work she's dead now muso saki's Pond has lasted for 700 years um and I mentioned um animals including quite a few snakes up there in the Catskills where we mostly live still live there a lot um my beloved is a mathematician so this is a poem this came out in the New Yorker a couple years ago um this is a a a math poem in a way I don't understand math but he's always working on math and um I love watching him work uh and um I was really happy when this poem came out and The New Yorker a a mathematician at Cambridge University in England wrote me and said oh finally someone's writing poems about number Theory and can I quote you in my book great okay so it's a snake poem as well as a math poem number Theory how are we doing on time yes not too bad number Theory the 4 and A2 foot blackback rat snake swayed up and across the kitchen screen door seeking a way in encountering instead our eyes it slowly deliberately withdrew to slide across the stone porch over the wall and along the foundation inspecting every crevice feeling nosing listening its way toward a solution which it found around the corner up the back flagstone steps where it's squeezed its impossible length and girth inch by patterned inch into the crack beneath the topmost SLE so we know we're living with a patient companion like you inquisitive you sit taught in your chair Whispering as you probe the gaps between prime numbers until Infinity it's pattern you seek the opening through which your thought will Glide suddenly into a lit space and be at home in a shaky house where wasps gnaw the walls yeah the mathematician who wrote me said that's right we're never sure we're we're never sure that the theorem is really going to stin and there are a lot of bears up there where we live so here's another bear inscription inscription and the roots of the Fallen Oak Tree rear in flamboyant Gothic lenes Earth soed from days of rain so ghost pipes spring up crooking their cers spectral parasites I borrow from them all sometimes I think I'm a plant pale and moh heterotropic this is a novel about time the Learned author declared yes the Book of Life whose Pages turn slowly yet so swiftly in this diseased reclusive year damp sheets of shale underf fooot where am I D Shale underfoot and the shuttering silver flash of beach leaves above hardly had the snow melted then the Catalpa white torches extinguish and summer starts sliding into its oblet as the Black Bear Glides so suddenly into the meadow we never hear his approach in a blink he's here all presence a silhouette tall on his hind legs smacking apples from the lower boughs when he turns he shows his Roman snout his prophetic brow his thoughtful considering eyes like a shadow he Springs up the trunk almost invisible in the Shivering green he's there chomping wild apples it's his season it's their season let me give away what I fear other solstices will roll around in childhood I slept in a high room fringed by dark sleeve sprues a treehouse in which I learned a grammar of Shadows that house is gone the Towering sprues are cut I hear the bear munching the branches Shake it's hard to distinguish his Blackness from the tree's own inward night and that larger night I shall be oh yes getting to know let's see um here's a a a poem about another poem about writing since some of you are a lot of you practically everybody in the room is a writer as far as I can tell um so I was really fascinated maybe you all know this I didn't I was Finding in the woods these little paper balls about this big and wondering what they were they turn out to be they're called Galls and they come from oak leaves when wasps create drill into the oaklea and um inject it with a little chemical and it put their larvae in there and um and then I I then I found out that oak gall is the basis for the ink that European the west Western people wrote with for about 2,000 years way up into the 19th century it was the basis for Inc so that made me think about writing and the word droop which is in the first line is spelled d r u p it's not the verb to droop but it's a it's a little um Red Berry uh on the viburnum tree Gul cat Birds clawing at the Ruby droops of Viburnum and bouncing the boughs as the great heat squats over us and crickets sandpaper sunlight in the bristling meadow we are not lost we're just quiet if we don't speak it's not that we don't have anything to say but that the owl has said it for us in his raspy whistle perched 20 ft away on a log Fallen across the brook professorial examining the trickle amid Stones then suddenly he drops and seizes what a salamander in his beak and gulps it down a smacking cracking sound after which he fastidiously wipes his mouth on the tree but more ingenious the WASP who drills the oak leaf to lay her eggs injecting chemicals that swell the leaf into a allall a globed Papyrus Palazo in which the common deared tree generates a cafeteria so the lari can feed until with sprouted wings and feet low they chew their way out and take flight they leave this teac colored paper lantern ball plyy the Elder instructed us to crush and boil with iron sulfate to make the oak gall ink Europeans wrote with for almost 2,000 years we are not lost we have been writing out of our silence our bile our chafing G the larvi were hungry so was the owl and we from disease made a codex of hungers and shaped each letter precisely so it would last see I'll just read a few just a few more to conclude um uh this one this one I'm happy to say this came out in the New Yorker or last year and is coming out now in the the 2024 best American poems so um another one that I think of as one of my obliquely political poems um somebody here mentioned liking trains I Love Trains and for 10 years I taught at the University of Chicago and I often took the train between New York and Chicago because I hate flying this is an overnight train poem a new year was it myself I left behind or was the country letting go of itself at each clackety clack as the train rattled northward into dusk girders flashed by the ghosts of factories then Frozen Fields their stubble narrowly laid out in ancient foreign inde decipherable script new solitudes flared on the smutty pain as if I were aging faster than the engine's hurtle while the Hudson shoved its massive of wrinkled drows Southward dreaming at its own pace the drowned River carrying thousands of years of sediment through torn uterus of rock angry signs slashed the Shadows wrecked cars stacked in yards tilting fences sheds pledged Revenge then a hoosh of snow tattered the trees at night swallowed us whole Till Dawn jerking me from my birth broke over Indiana's frostbitten furrows a country graveyard slotted among farms and with just two two poems um these are very very new it's just came out in a magazine hindsight I've seen demons each one tossed in its hurricane of scarf they were foreign carved and painted they protected a temple shall I invite one home with his bug eyes his fangs but that's not the conversation we should be having you and I let's go back to our early letters see how the ink splurts out of the capital I see the Tremor blurring y o you each ink blot a cocoon in which a demon larvae batens and dozes oozing out its time they live for decades in manila folders this species is indigenous and dogenous they secrete Venom but warmed scrabbled free released to air they rise each new sked Wing striking an emerald Shimmer a flash of quartz I could have seen you better I know that now let's see okay Mexico no I didn't chuck out my grandmother I hardly knew her but I lost her books those guide books to Mexico Circa 1908 when she the young gringa bride went riding among cacti she had style my Grandmama in Jolly lead with a broad brimmed hat while her husband the engineer tinkered in the Anglo mine until his heart sputtered what a romance they'd never heard of Zapata she wore long dresses blouses with lace they list their tea learned a few words in Spanish and the book hard cover mold ridden with etchings of men in sombreros women in Shaws donkeys Galore I dragged them from house to house for decades wondering if I'd meet her in those pages I never did and now into some dumpster or shunted carton they vanished those Ardent ignorant Protestant newly Weds and the long bedraggle moment that followed their Mexican fling how much past can I do without easy to cast off someone else's Illusions here outside my window in New York the parchment leaves of the calerie Paar clap in the wind applauding or is it pulsy shaking them thank [Applause] you thanks very much I I don't know if you have if if you're the sort of if you have a convention here of wanting to make comments or ask a question if if anyone wants to ask a question or make a comment I'll be happy to try to answer and if not we can all go have cookies and lemonade so okay I think you should be released thank you very much for being so attentive [Applause]