When we did, the king of rats had bowed to me. When we did, king of swans had bowed to me. When we did, king of the world had bowed to me. Awake, the living God. Swans have come in the picture. And as a matter of fact, there are a lot of people. We'll talk a little about the use of the charade and the people in it. In this, again, as I said, Ocean is almost, after it comes into the Ocean City, Ocean is almost sure to be mean. And the Chinese doctor is, maybe you can tell by eyes when it occurred. What I'm talking about is something like a cubist portrait, or as an artist, it's not the biography, but you draw upon the people around them, and they're drawn into a circle, and they draw upon the poems that happened, sort of all the poems that happened.

[01:13]

Now a world is emerging, and when in the opening of this essay on Spicer I said that he had He was not only a poet for me, as only a small company are for me today, but he was an event of poetry for me, as if in his person a primary presentation from an entity or cultivation of the poem address had appeared in my life. And certainly it's clear that it was reciprocal. There were serious poems and appearances of Beisert in my work. coming back the same way. The rats and swans and world also come forward. They came in poems of And what you do, Jack found the swan. In medieval scenes, which precede this poem, the swan knight had appeared.

[02:17]

But in our theory of the poem and a whole approach to the poem, nothing could exist merely in the poem world. If you borrow from somebody's poem, you really were lost, because you're talking a false language. So it had to be there. We should ransack the search and try to figure out where the swans were at, so it's probably no difficulty. But swans... But then Jack found that the one place that you were sure to see it, there were decals of swans in the bathroom. Every time he was out of the job, he was looking at nothing but swans. He couldn't figure out where the swans were. In the most elaborate one of when it would all be together, there would be no theory in which something appeared in a dream because you had seen it. the day before. But if you had seen it in a dream, and you hadn't yet seen it in the day, we cut in the day, there was a realm called the actual realm.

[03:18]

And there was another realm called dream. Both of those are the ones we pay very little attention to, the two of them. But in one place, we wouldn't be like Freudian, that we would presume that you would find the root of seeing something in a dream. by finding out where you'd seen it during the day. But we've had something firmer. If it wasn't a dream, it was sure to be in the actual day. And you perform an operation very much like a Freudian, because if it wasn't in the past, it would be sure to be in the future. Past and future didn't signify. But more than that, if it was in a poem, and you busily, anxiously looked through dream and day references, all right. It was almost sure to be there, but if it wasn't, it would occur there. And yet, all of that didn't signify. It wasn't cause and effect. It meant that it was throughout. The things of the world are throughout. And the tapestry would be complete, no matter how many worlds it possibly made.

[04:23]

Spikes are especially like multiple-world science fiction that's emerging. And as this world is building, And we're referring back and forth to each other's poems. We are reading in that period, but reading then a group of people reading intensively each other's poetry. Also, I remember Leonard Wolfe emerges as nothing but a professor out of San Francisco State University and doing a probably making a fortune, I hope, on doing annotated Dracula and annotated werewolf. He had written a book called Hamlet, Troy, and Pundit. In those years, he was a typical of, I don't want to cast despair on young poets who were graduates to this thing, but he was typical of it, promising young poets.

[05:27]

But his poems had haunting elements in them. And then we kept pursuing, we kept trying to get him connected with these things that would happen in the poem. And we finally found out he didn't want to connect what he wanted to write with poems like R.P. Blackmore and get printed in Hudson Revue. And he came damn close to it, and then finally succeeded in not thinking about it. But back to these wanted elements as we pursued them, so that it is Goliath's In medieval scenes, the poem on Goliath, the line quoted is from a line from Leonard Wolfe's Hematria. It's built into the poem from Leonard Wolfe's Hematria. We found lots of that. Well, to give you an idea of what the we was, Jack, Michael, myself, and then not quite certain at all, Robin Blazer, because we hadn't started writing poetry that way. But we were hounding Leonard Wolfe to see if we could get it connected.

[06:30]

If we could have gotten it plugged in into the current, he would have been a goner. And we wanted more goners. We saw most people were bright enough, they were never going to get plugged in. Neither foolish enough or brave enough to get on the current. When we went around, we found there's a very good reason for these strange elements in Leonard Wolfe's life. He had been born in Transylvania, and in a Jewish community, the Jewish community had some elements that are not, I would think, Jewish. They are remarkably like Mithraic elements. Leonard's parents deserted him completely, left him with his grandmother when he was a baby. I guess, in fact, Papa came over here. They came over here and they sent for baby. They get a job and get things going. But one of his first reactions was that he went into a massive diarrhea.

[07:38]

And his grandmother and the town went to a ceremony where they split open an ox, threw him into the pot, Ox sewed him up and re-delivered him from an ox. Wolf is his name, and Lepescu had been his Romanian, Transylvanian name, the Romanian name. And that means werewolf. So, of course, his first book was going to do with annotated Dracula and so forth. Wow. No wonder you didn't want to plug in. I will take a plot shot at Robin Blanchard's delicacy of hinting at Spicer, who would be much more refined than Spicer was on a subject. No sooner said that did it get, oh yes, yes, yes.

[08:42]

It was blasphemy because it was an assignment in Jack Spicer's magic workshop. And maybe it's on the notes on the magic workshop here, I'm not sure. He said, oh yes, and then using the Lacanian language, you won't even find the other mentioned in Spicer anywhere. He didn't live in the world with the other. I wrote you a notebook. Yeah, Robin may have another, but does the other other, is Robin the other's other? And then I got Nicole, other, [...] and went off in the distance. If you aren't born, you know, it's like not being born in the drug generation. You're in or out of the bottle of the cigarette. If you're not born in the other generation, the other won't even get to you. And nowhere in spite of it is there the other. You fall in love and you do foolish things like that, and you do or do not get there, don't walk there. He's got an accusation of God or something, but that's not the other, and the ghosts are not the other.

[09:46]

His definition of blasphemy that he gave us, because I took the magic workshop from Jack Weiser, having invented it, so he had a job. Meanwhile, I didn't want to not get educated, so I didn't. He assigned blasphemy. That was one that, as a matter of fact, I wrote a poem against blasphemy, I think, or no, I know it is a text that resumed blasphemy, I can't remember, but I really, I can't think. Spicer, however, did have a definition of blasphemy, had nothing to do with the other, I thought that's a great thing. He said that blasphemy is when an artist that have a really big light on a poem, you'll turn the whole the whole city on to light the light bulb and blow out the town. And it was right. No wonder I was saying current. We wanted to get him in on that current. And the current looks scary enough to us in its own way.

[10:54]

But as the current built, we were building stronger and stronger. the sense of what poets we were continuous with. Who were the preceding poets? If a distinction were to be made, eventually I'd commit the first heresy. So it was a long time before Spicer and Robin Blaser were prepared at all to read Black Mountain Poets. Because not only do I try to get them to read a magazine called Origin. But then I'm going to have poems of that, and that is even more outrageous, and I've never succeeded in getting them to read for a children, and certainly not blackmailing me with fear. So it wasn't until I entered by 56 when there begins to be, when I really begin preaching at them as I'm beginning to write, beginning to finish the book letters, and then at that began to be attracted to them again. And Robin hadn't started writing yet, and Jack had stopped writing.

[11:58]

So there's a massive correspondence trying to get them started writing. Because here was a whole lost thing that had been quite real. So essentially, where Spicer takes hold, Well, if I did not take hold of the scene that he really belonged to, it's in the terms of magic. And when he named the magic poets, there are myself, Olsen, Ginsburg, amazingly enough. I can't remember that list. I should have brought the lecture along. It's a very interesting lecture. And it is quite solid. That is, in the eyes of his followers, for instance, at that point, he did not conclude Blazer. It's an almost definitive statement. And that he did include Olson. Olson had totally rejected Biden.

[12:59]

Not only had no interest in it, but really would have been an addict. I've got two real wounds before it. One was that after writing homage to Creeley, he sent it to Creeley and never got any response. That's not the wound that it would have been at. I've been a very naughty boy and relayed the letter, which I wrote to Creeley, and asked what happened in the homage to Creeley, and could get made nothing of it. But in Olson's case, Olson had really attacked Jack directly. And in the phase in the last year, in the last two years or so, his followers had the impression that they were not to read. They formed an index, and they had the impression they were not to read Jack, period, also quite tense. Yet when he comes to give this last lecture, they're adults again, as a primary, as the magic. So in magic, that surpassed everything, and it would be who was the magic poet before one line.

[14:05]

Yeats is where Jack very much centers. And that poem you write, and so forth, Yeats. And the ghosts come through. The ghosts that he played with earlier come through in a different way when they come. And Yeats' informants are the prototype for the informants of Jack's later books that want to dictate the book. But this is a poem in which there's an address directly to Stevens, and Stevens is the poet that both Robin Blaser and Spicer, and then, interestingly enough, have Wallace Stevens as an origin point for the poem. And for a particular fiction book. I certainly have a noticeable amount of Stevens, but since I am omnivorous, that would not be strikingly there.

[15:11]

But oh, yes, I know my own origin points of trying to write points, and there were Bravo Browning I mentioned. A Lecture of Practical Aesthetics. Entering the room, Mr. Stevens, on an early Sunday morning, wore sailor whites and helmet. He had brought a couple with him, and they danced like bears. He had brought a bottle with him, and the vapors rose. From helmet, naked bottle, couple, haloed him, and waved at us. Haloed him. It looked like haloed him. That's OK. He had brought a bottle with him, and the vapour froze from helmet, naked bottle, couple, haloed him, and waked up. But Mr. Stevens listened. Sight and sense are dull and heavier than vapour, and they cling and weigh with meaning. To floors and bottoms of the sea, horizon them, you are an island of our sea, Mr. Stevens, perhaps rare, certainly covered with up-growing vegetation.

[16:13]

You may consist of dancing animals. The bear, Mr. Stevens, may be your emblem. rampant on a white fielder panting enthralled above the floor in the ocean. And you, a bearish demiurge, Mr. Stevens, licking vapor into the shape of your eyelid, fiercely insular, out of sense and sight, Mr. Stevens. You may unambiguously dance, buoying the helmet and the couple, the bottle and the dance itself, but consider, Mr. Stevens, though imperceptible, we are also alive. It is not right that you should merely touch us. Excite, Mr. Stevens, any islander asleep. need the geographer a geographer mr stevens tastes islet finds in this macro cannibalism his own micro microcosm to form a conceit mr stevens in finding you he chews upon its flesh chews it mr stevens like down down to the very bone An island, Mr. Stevens, should be above such discoveries, available but slightly mythological. Our revolving map will be misleading, though it be drawn, Mr. Stevens, with the blood and flesh both superimposed as ink on paper.

[17:18]

It will be no picture, no tourist postcard of the best of your contours reflected on water. It will be a map, Mr. Stevens, that can't be stiffened into symbols. And that's poetry too, Mr. Stevens. I am a geographer. Well, here's a poem. This is a poem, I think, in which for the first time, although it's contained in that one that I read, the one addressing the lady as California, in which a formula entered, a formula that, yeah, both of these books, two, written about the same time. These are from 1948, when I'm writing the Venice poem and so forth. Jack starts cursing those he falls in love with. And that carried over disastrously into some where, actually, he curses, follows the poem through.

[18:22]

In other words, he comes to predestine them as Dan. And Dan and Yao and Yao were placed still in the same universe. And that carried through. so that he ruined the real love relationship. Well, ruined, but his power is so much greater than it was hardly. They were not psychodramatic. Jack would go to the first phase in which he was very happy, and everybody would think, wow, except that there was no way in which there was going to be, the household was not, was not a realm in itself. It was swept into the, it can't be called, it's a poem drama. And the poem drama is beginning to appear, the one in which the series of poems will end in a kind of damnation. And these are individual poems where you've got Orpheus after Eurydice and Orpheus' Song to Apollo.

[19:28]

And both of them are Orpheus, courtesy now, in some sense. Eurydice advances. Now, I think, from here on, they will all be young men. And in both of these cases, they're young men that I think I will venture were just love-luckies. I think that's a real relationship. Orpheus after Eurydice. Then I, a singer and hunter, fished in streams too deep for love. A god grew there, a god grew there, a wet and wet-like god grew there. Mela, mela, peto, it made you a plumene. His flesh is honey and his bones are made of brown, brown sugar, and he is a god. He is a god, I know he is a god. Mela, mela, peto, it made you a plumene. Drink wine, I sang. Drink cold red wine. Grow liquid.

[20:28]

Spread yourself. Oh, bruise yourself. Intoxicate yourself. Dilute yourself. You want to web the rivers of the world. You want to glue the tides together with yourself. You look so innocent. Water would melt in your mouth. I looked and saw a weep, a honey tear. I, Orpheus, had raised a water god that wept a honey tear. Melo, Melo, Beto, and Medios Luminati. And I let my mouth go like this. I had a voice that I recognized like Henry Fonda, except it was shaped by something like what my mouth was doing as it went through there. It was very spooky when they brought the record out, when the Hemingway brought the record out, and put it on the needle, and I never separated the voice from the person reading it, the way the mouth went when it was doing it. It's a cross between Henry Fonda, except it's being done by, oh boy. Is it still another one, but he's got a, is it, is it, is it, is that, that?

[21:33]

Another movie voice, Jack, really. Movie voice was in the later songs of jukeboxes. Very immediate government of Washington. Orpheus' song to Apollo. You, Apollo, have yoked your horse to the wrong sun. You have picked the wrong flower. Breaking a branch of impossible green-stemmed hyacinth, you have found thorns and populated a rose. Sometimes we were almost like lovers, as the sun almost touches the earth at sunset. But at touch, the horse leapt like an ox into another orbit of roses, perhaps If the moon were made of cold green cheese, I could call you Diana. Perhaps if a knife could peel that rosy rind, it would find you virgin as a star, too hot to move. Nevertheless, this is almost goodbye. You fool, Apollo. Stick your extra roses somewhere where the teeth. I like your aspirations, but the sky too deep for fornication.

[22:39]

And this is from the saying, this series is a night in four parts. I'll read the revised edition of it. I'll first two parts and then read it in its original, I think. A night in four parts. I think I published this first in Berkeley, Pennsylvania, so that dates again where we are, 1948. Part one, Going to Sleep. While the heart twists on a cold bed without sleep, under the hot light of an angry moon, a cat bleeps. The cat prowls into cold places, but the heart stays where the blood is. True, like sleeping. Down in the world where the cat prowls, heart's mannequin is climbing down, prepared for love.

[23:53]

Spawn's eye, spawn's mouth, spawn's throat, spawn's genital heart is so laudous naked that the world recoils, shakes like a ladder, spits like a cat disappeared. Part Three, Wet Dream. Downward it plunges through the walls of flesh, heart fall through lake and cavern under sleep, deep like Orpheus, a beating mandolin plucking the plectrum of the moon upon its dreams. It sings, it sings, it sings. It sings, restore, restore Eurydice to life. Oh, take the husband and return the wife. It sings, still deeper conjured by its spell, Eurydice, the alley cat of hell. Meow, meow, Eurydice's not dead. Oh, find your cross-eyed tomcat for my bed. Too late, too late it was, too late it fell.

[24:57]

The sounds of singing and the sounds of hell become a swarm of angry orange flies and naked Orpheus. The moon shriveled, dies, and rises, leaving lost Eurydice. Heart flutters upward towards humanity, jagged and half-awake. Four. It waits, and under the new sun, an old self slowly emerges. This is no moon self shrinking from the sun. This is no cat self slinking from the sun. Only the sober weight of the day's passions narrowing response. Self winds heart-self like a watch that remembers the almost unmechanical enumeration, chastens itself with water, dresses. What was the dream I had? Heart-self can't answer. Let me give you the second version of that fourth part of waking.

[26:06]

Heart waits, twists like a cat on hot bricks, beating off sunlight. Now the heart slinks back to the blood, and the day starts. Then the blood asks, who is that lover that thrashed you around last night? And the heart can't answer. So go on to the proposition itself. And the cat itself, it's just like a cat. Oh, this is what was written in the library. Again, Berkeley at the time of Plague. Plague took us in the land from under us, rose like a boil, enclosing us within. We waited in the blue skies, riot a while, becoming black with death. Plague took us in the chairs from under us, stepped cautiously while entering the room.

[27:08]

We were discussing Yates. It paused a while, then smiled and made us die. Plague took us, laughed, and re-proportioned us, swelled us to dizzy, unaccustomed sighs. We died prodigiously. It hurt a while, but left a certain quiet in our eyes. You want to listen to it? We find the body difficult to speak, the face too hard to hear through. We find that eyes and kissing stammer, and that heaving groin babble like ingots. Sex is an ache of mouth, the squeak our bodies make when they rub mouths against each other trying to talk. Like silent little children we embrace, aching together, and love is emptiness of ear, but it's sure we put a face against our ear and listen to it as we would a shell, tune, fight, roar. We find the body difficult to speak across the wall, like scrape.

[28:09]

by reading some of the imaginary elegies. They were the peak of this period, and they're one devoted itself very much to, there's still some poems that go forward that are written in the East before it comes to the poems that are in the book, but this will bring us to the place where the more formal kind of begin to come together, and in a sense, he knows what he's doing. And remember, he's about 30 when he, let's see, go back, he's about 32 when he, right after the law, and he has eight more years to live. He's spelling them out, because he's busy at it, making sure they run out into the sand. There's a bit of misinformation in the collected books, and that is that Blaisdell says that Spicer started writing after Locke, while he was teaching the Magic Workshop.

[29:25]

But Spicer was in an agony all the way through the Magic Workshop because he couldn't write his own assignments. There was one book written in the time that Jack Gilbert was Just as when my workshop would follow Jack's, the workshop was selected by a came and took an examination, so you could tell from the examination. It's suddenly what the composition would be of the people in the workshop. Jack Gilbert, for instance, wrote the one book he wrote entirely within that workshop. The majority of the poems in there are workshop assignments. And Beauregard started writing. He'd written before. I thought, my god, what is this boy doing? He's got to write it or something. And can he get forward and read the WAP? He couldn't make anything out of it. And everybody was opposed to it, except Jack and myself.

[30:25]

And then Beauregard was utterly bewildered, because he said, well, how did the ship And we said, well, just continue. At least that's getting near it. That is why you're getting . It's just typewriting. And so forth. We go back and forth. But there were a remarkable number and a considerable number of poems in opening of the field are, I would take Jack's assignments as happenings that fell in the form opening the field. Jack was following the opening of the field as it was written. So there was a kind of curve. So it wasn't an intense agony that no poems came to him. I know very well he didn't write. He was following that. And then after Walker came in a flood of poems. These are the imaginary elegies again. All the philosophy a man needs is in Berkeley. W.E. Yeats. I think that's Berkeley. But there's a reason for that. And this is, finally, the eyes and God and the alley gaps.

[31:34]

Well, I think you could have spotted the cross-eyed tomcat in that last poem. I appear frequently. A poet by the name of Landis Everson appears in this. But meanwhile, again, they're so transformed, this is like, it is fun to look at a Cubist portrait and a photograph of the person to see what they've done, but it's not quite that full. But for those of you, for instance, the bronze god derived from the sun and from a person already appeared in the beginning of the Venice poem, which at least I'm not sure. I have a great confusion about poems that have been earlier. OK. One. Poetry, almost blind like a camera, is alive in sight only for a second.

[32:38]

Click, snap, goes the eyelid of the eye before movement, almost as the word happens. One would not choose to blink and go blind after the instant. One would not choose to see the continuous platonic pattern of birds flying long after the stream of birds had dropped or had nested. Lucky for us, there are visible things like oceans which are always around, continuous discipline adjunct to the moment of sight, but not so sweet as we have seen. When I praise the sun or any bronze god derived from it, don't think I would praise the very tall, blonde boy who ate all my potato chips at the Red Bulls. It's just that I won't see him when I open my eyes and I will see the sun. Things like the sun are always there when the eyes open, insistent as breath. One can only worship the cold eternal for the support of what is absolutely necessary, but not so true. The temporary tense poetry, tense photographs, tense eyes. I conjure up from photographs the birds, the boy, the room in which I began to write this poem.

[33:43]

All my eye has seen, or ever could have seen, I love. I love. The eyelid clicks. I see cold poetry at the edge of their inkling. It is as if we conjure the dead, and they speak only through our own damned trumpets, through our damned medium. I'm gonna leave a Negro printed from sunny heaven. The voice sounds blonde and tall. Goodbye from us in spirit land since we've put down in spirit land. You can't see us in spirit land and we can't see at all. Two. I guess you could see what he meant by he liked something, didn't he? Oh, sure, yeah. I think there's a recording of him doing the .

[34:51]

Well, they were laughing at Spicer. I mean, laughing and ridiculing how ridiculous the book was. Don Allen talked about all this early in these years when Don was an editor in New York, and as a matter of fact dictating a lot of what got published, and out of that came that anthology, but he couldn't get, and he had a lot of prestige, he couldn't get anybody interested in publishing Jack Spicer. He kept trying to get, well, nowhere. So out of it. As a matter of fact, it was out of a great frustration of trying to get certain key poets published anywhere in any magazine that would ask him to advise them. But Don came to want to do an anthology. 2. God must have a big eye to see everything that we have lost or forgotten. Men used to say that all lost objects stay upon the moon untouched by any other eye that gods. The moon is God's big yellow eye remembering what we have lost or never thought.

[35:58]

That's why the moon looks raw and ghostly in the dark. It is the camera shots of every instant in the world laid bare in terrible detail. Yellow coal it is the object we never saw it is the dodo's flying through the snow that flew from Baffin land to Greenland's tip But did not even see themselves the moon is meant for lovers lovers lose themselves and others do not see themselves The moon does the moon does the moon is not a yellow camera. It perceives what wasn't what undoes What will not happen? It's not a sharp and clicking eye of glass and wood, just old, slow, infinite exposure of the negative that cannot happen. Fear God's old eyes for being shot with ice instead of blood. Fear its inhuman mirror-blindness, luring lovers. Fear God's moon for hexing sticking things and forgotten dolls. Fear it for wolves, for witches, magic, lunacy, for parlor tricks. The poet built the castle on the moon, made of dead skin and glass. Here, marvelous machines stamp Chinese fortune cookies full of love.

[37:01]

Tarot cards make love to other tarot cards. Here, agony or just imagination, sister bitch. This is the sun-tormented castle, which reflects the sun. Da, da, da, da. The castle sings, da. I don't remember what I lost. Da, da. The song, da. The hippogriffs were singing, da, da, da. The boy, his horns were wet with song. Da, da. I don't remember. Da, da, [...] da. L, old butter face who always eats her lover. Hell somehow exists in the distance between the remembered and the forgotten. Hell somehow exists in the distance between what happened and what never happened, between the moon and the earth and the instant between the poem and God's yellow eye. Look through the window at the real moon. See the sky surrounded, brewed with rays. But look now in this room. See the moon children, wolf, bear, and otter, dragon, dog, Look now in this room, see the moon children flying, crawling, swimming, burning, vacant with beauty, hear them whisper.

[38:07]

These poems go over a period of about four or five years, and there were lots of writing and rewriting, although they don't, there's only one poem I think of this in which two versions were given, but I meant there was a great deal of struggle to bring elegance into shape. 3. God's other eye is good and gold, so bright the sun to the shine blinds. His eye is accurate. His eye observes the goodness of the light. It shines. Then, pouncing like a cat, devours each golden trace of light. It saw it shine. Cat feeds on mouse. God feeds on God. God's goodness is a black and blinding cannibal with sunny teeth that only eats itself. Deny the light. God's golden eye is brazen. It is clanging brass of good intention. It is noisy, burning, clanging brass. Light is a carrying crow, cawing and swooping, cawing and swooping. Then there is a sudden stop.

[39:11]

The day changes. There is an innocent old sun quite cold and cloud. The ache of sunshine stops. God is gone. God is gone. Nothing was quite as good as it's getting late, put on your coat, it's getting late, it's getting cold. Most things happen in twilight when the sun goes down and the moon hasn't come and the earth dances. Most things happen in twilight when neither eye is open and the earth dances. Most things happen in twilight when the earth dances and God is blinded, a gigantic, gigantic fact. The poised above the swimming pool receive the sun. Their groins are crept against the wet, warm cement. They look as if they dream, as if their bodies dreamed. Rescue their bodies from the poised sun. Shelt with the dreamers. They're like lobsters now, hot, red, and private as they dream. They dream about themselves. They dream of dreams about themselves. They dream. They dream of dreams about themselves. Splash them with twilight like a wet bath. Unbind the dreamer.

[40:13]

Be like God. Four. Yes, be like God. I wonder what I thought when I wrote that. The dreamer sang a bit, as if five years had thickened on their flesh. Though this is the fourth, would be five years later. The other, well, 1950, but I moved back to 48. Yes, be like God, I wondered what I thought when I wrote that. The dreamer sang a bit, as if five years had thickened on her flesh or on my eyes. Waked with what? Should I throw rocks at them to make their naked private body bleed? No, let them sleep. This much I've learned in these five years and what I've spent and earned. Time did not finish a thought. The dummies in the empty front house watch the tides wash in and out. The thick old moon shines through the rotten timbers every night. This much is clear, they think, the men who made us twitch and creak at what the laughter in our throats are just as cold as wheat.

[41:15]

The lights are out. The lights are out. You smell the oldest smell, the smell of salt, of urine, and of sleep before you wake. This much I've learned in these five years and what I've spent and earned. Time does not finish a poem. What have I gone to bed with all these years? What have I taken crying to my bed for love of me? Only the shadows of the sun and moon, the dreamy groins are creaking images, only myself. Is there some rhetoric to make me think that I have kept a house while playing dolls? This much I've learned in these five years of what I've spent and earned. That two-eyed monster god is still above. I saw him once when I was young and once when I was seeded with madness. Or was I seeded mad because I saw him once? He is the sun and moon made real with eyes. He is the photograph of everything at once, the love that makes the blood run cold. But he is gone, no realer than old poetry This much I've learned in thee five years and what I've spent and earned. Time does not finish a poem. Upon the old amusement pier I watched the creeping darkness gather in the west.

[42:20]

Above the giant funhouse of the ghosts I heard the seagulls call. They're going west towards some great catalina of the green out where the poor man does dead. The birds don't like to leave the birds. Another wrong five, another wrong turning, another five years. I can't see the birds, the island, anything but vacant shifts and twists of the tunnel. That means another five years I can't see, or were they all right turning, the shifts of one sensible word to another, the birds flying there inside eaves with their wings dangling, not bats, birds. And offering up your life to someone anything is a pretty silly thing. I can't see where their messages get me. Another five years, their wings glittering in a splat absence. For the birds whose liver is torn out, whose liver is torn out, throw me, feed us the old turd.

[43:24]

Where their messages get me, the shifts of their beats, their hungry beats, but the birds are real, only, not only in feeling, feeding, I think their wing, glittering in the black absence, pro me, thee, us, our mouth water like an ocean. And so I say to you, Jim, do not become too curious about your poetry. Let it speed into the tunnel by itself. Do not follow it. Do not try to ride it. Let it go into the tunnel and out the other side and back to you while you do important things like loving and learning patience by the train with its utterly alien cargo moving on the black track. Prometheus was a guy who had his liver eaten out by birds, a bum who rode a black train, who is curious. Play it cool with Williams or paranoid with Fallon, but never ride it past the tunnel or look for a conductor to ask questions. Hide. Do not ask the question. At the black rope of the tunnel, Prometheus, Prometheus.

[44:29]

Five years. The song singing from the black rope. That's written in 57. He died at 65. These are just coming up. This is actually written after Larkin. This number five and six are after Larkin. It's already late poetic. I'd get six and then get through it. 1959 has dated, so I really could have, but I kept thinking, no, no, it must be program. Okay. Six. Dignity. Dignity. The extra syllables are unimportant. Have no dignity, no meaning on this world. Nitty. Hear those syllables and dig is an obvious pun for digging graves or whatever that grave digger is doing at the moment. The extra syllables are unimportant. I should have loved him yesterday. The boy with dignity.

[45:31]

Or like that little window in Alice's work which you can't go through because she's 27 feet tall because she ate a bottle called drink me. Poetry. [...] The extra syllable is unimportant. Oh, next. Next week, we will be back at Sardella. I want to go into selling books, and then in the last one, we'll really round up some of the things from the last book. We're going to meet on Saturday next week because there's a wedding at the Zen Center. There are residents there on Sunday, so we'll meet Saturday. Is the hour one degree okay? Is two to four lets people have lunch a little better?

[46:35]

What? Well, I mean, at least I have various duties. Okay. That's why I took an afternoon. Well, Well, I think we'll make it one to three on Saturday. And I think the following week, Saturday, probably, too. That's the last one. I think I checked that out. So you mean the next two Saturdays? Yeah. That round was up. Well, I'm glad to have my little afternoon of readings back for 11, though I didn't get much time to talk about it when the board week started. Oh, there are. There's a 1943 one that's in some text that somebody was following in the Everyman's Library.

[47:42]

I mean, there's something like that, whatever that date is. Then in 1863, he brought out an edition and punctuated it. Mainly, I think, changes in punctuation. There is a definitive set of Browning, but I I'm waiting to find a secondhand copy of Sardello's volume. It would be . And so I'm not getting into the range, because I don't have . I just have a little edition, a library edition of my own library. Is this the 1853? Yeah, the 1853. And as a treat of having taken this, now I certainly want to get the one that would give us what he did. I mean, something of the underlayer, overlayer. But, by the way, I did find out that although we found manuscripts of the two earlier, Pauline and Paracelsus, the manuscripts are missing in Tordello, and the manuscripts that they're set upon for manuscript status are missing.

[48:46]

So there was no question. We're really dealing between those two published versions with no manuscript material to check again. Oh, yes, yes. We have a little donation pop here for our donation. What was the name of the...

[49:10]

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