Video: Peripheries Launch Event 2023

January 16, 2024

On the evening of November 30, 2023, the much-anticipated event celebrating the launch of Peripheries, the Center for the Study of World Religions’s (CSWR) annual literary and arts journal, unfolded with a blend of poetry, music, and art, drawing over 140 attendees both in-person and virtually. The air buzzed with excitement as guests, including Chef Daniella Malfi, a MRPL candidate and musician deeply inspired by the journal, expressed their eagerness to delve into the 6th edition.

Peripheries Launch Event 2023

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ANNOUNCER: Harvard Divinity School.

ANNOUNCER: Peripheries Launch Event 2023. November 30th, 2023.

SPEAKER: Welcome to the Launch of Peripheries Sixth Edition, and we're going to start with some music. Sam Weinberg is a saxophonist improviser and visual artist from New York, and he's just going to kick off the evening for us before our poetry events.

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SAM WEINBERG: Thanks.

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CHARLES STANG: Good evening, everyone. I'm honored to welcome you to this very special event, a celebration of the launch of the sixth and latest edition issue of Peripheries. Before I go any further, however, first of all, I want to thank Sam so much once again.

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And I want to invite those of you who are lurking in the back to please come forward and sit-in the front. This is really somewhere between an invitation and a directive and if there's-- and do so now while I'm talking because if there's anyone's words that you can kind of half pay attention to, they're mine. Thank you.

So my name is Charles Stang. I am the director at the Center for the Study of World Religions here at Harvard Divinity School which serves as the publisher of this amazing journal. More than five years ago, Sherah Bloor and I first conceived of Peripheries, and I don't think either of us knew then what a success it would be.

As I look back on my five years in this role, the launch and the trajectory of Peripheries is among those accomplishments the center is proudest of. We're especially proud of Sherah and the other student editors she has enlisted to help build up and to build out Peripheries. And finally, of course, we're so pleased to welcome those poets and artists who have given so generously of their time and talent to fill Peripheries pages.

I'm going to keep my remarks brief, knowing all too well that you are not here to hear from me, but to enjoy music and art and especially the words of our honored guests, the poets Victoria Chang, Jorie Graham and Alice Oswald whom Sherah will soon introduce. Allow me, though, to say a few words about Peripheries and its special place in the center.

As you all know, Peripheries publishes poetry, prose, visual art and music that is broadly understood peripheral, work that explores the interstices between discourses, traditions, language, art forms and genres. Its name was originally in the singular, periphery, and was meant to play off the name of our center, Center and Periphery.

Sherah suggested that we shift to the plural, peripheries. Not least because it signaled that the journal was interested, not in-- excuse me, not in one, but in many peripheral points of view. A kaleidoscope of the marginal, the incidental and even the accidental. E.M. Forster once described the poet, Constantine Cavafy, as quote, "Standing at a slight angle to the universe."

Here at the center, we're keenly interested in those who occupy the margins of the so-called world religions and those who stand at a slight angle to the traditions from whence they come. So too, in the pages of Peripheries, you will find those who like Cavafy stand at a slight angle to the universe, indeed at a slight angle to this university and thank God for that.

In order to survive and to thrive in this university, I think we need more spaces for odd angles and peripheral points of view. And I'd like to think that the Divinity School and especially our center just across the street, which are at the geographical and in many ways, the existential periphery of this institution, can help create and cultivate those spaces, physical and physiological, political and poetic.

Many of those of you who have answered the call of the peripheral are students here at HDS but many of you come from across the university. For the past five years, talented students have contributed handsomely to this journal both as writers and editors. Some have moved on to careers in writing. They're busy teaching and publishing.

One of our very own, Danny Kraft, is coming back in the spring to share his own poetry and to lead a translation workshop on Yiddish poetry. Peripheries and its workshop community of poets are part of the center's long standing interest and investment in spirituality in the arts based on the conviction that there is an important relationship between spirituality and creativity that remains always to be explored and expressed.

My hope is that this evening is such an opportunity for exploration and expression. I cannot praise Peripheries without once again acknowledging Sherah Bloor, the driving force behind the journal and its workshop community. Sherah is a brilliant poet, philosopher, scholar of religion and editor in chief.

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She leads a very talented team of editors who are behind the current truly mesmerizing and engrossing issue of Peripheries. I want to thank Sherah. I want to thank the members of the editorial board for their vision, their commitment, their professionalism, and their creativity. Without them, of course, Peripheries would simply not be possible.

Sam Bailey. Where's Sam? OK. Sam's hiding. There he is Sam Bailey.

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Emma Delisle. There's Emma. And Gabby Woo. There's Gabby. Thank you three. And although she is joining us on the screen rather than in person, I would like to welcome Jorie Graham back to the Divinity School and back to this room where just two years ago, she read her poem, "I Say to the Double Doors", as a dedication to the opening of the newly renovated Schwartz Hall. So welcome back Jorie.

Thank you for your invaluable mentorship of Sherah and so many others in this community, and thank you for your support of Peripheries. Finally, we all owe an enormous thanks to Laurie Sedgwick. Where is she? There's Laurie in the back.

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Laurie is the center's events coordinator. I'd also like to thank Rob and Bobby from the HDS media team.

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Thank you so much. And to the centers two student research assistants, LJ and Tristan. Thank you. Thank you both. So--

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--I hope you all enjoy the poetry, the music and the art this evening. And with that, Sherah, the floor is yours.

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SHERAH BLOOR: Thank you, Charlie. And thank you, Sam Weinberg-- can't see you-- for welcoming us with saxophone and the collages behind him both of which appear in the journal, this journal, our 2024 edition, the sixth installment of Peripheries. Welcome to the launch.

There are still seats in the front. People, come. There are lots of seats. OK. You may enter while I speak. OK. The journal is, as usual, quite capacious, but I will not be so voluminous here. I know you want to hear poetry, but first, some gratitude or some more gratitude to those whose work sustains it.

To Gabby Woo, our designer, for the exquisite aesthetic, sensitivity and patience with which she materializes our vision. This really is a collective vision, so I want to thank all our editors, especially our managing editor Sam Bailey for his tireless administrative labor as well as his invaluable editorial work.

What is best in the journal is thanks to him and to the craft and careful curation of our associate editor Emma Delisle. And my gratitude to the entire editorial team, the senior poetry, prose, sound and visual art editors, some of whom-- many of whom are here or online.

The Harvard Divinity School's student body and faculty also make this whole enterprise possible as does the generous support of the Center for the Study of World Religions so beautifully helmed by Charles Stang and Gosia Sklodowska. Thank you. I also want to thank Heather Hughes from Harvard University Press, our new distributor, very excitingly, and to celebrate our ongoing relationship with our good friends at Grolier Poetry Bookshop who deserve our support.

James Frazer from Grolier is in the foyer with books to be purchased.

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After the readings, you're welcome to join us for the reception. And I want to say that this beautiful event, again, was organized by Lauri Sedgwick. Thank you to her for her dedication--

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--and hard work, and all of her support. And Thank you to Robert Deveau and Robbie Rhodes for crucial tech support. This was all very complicated. Post reading, we will be convening in the next door room, which has been transformed into a gallery space exhibiting a selection of pieces from the journal.

There'll be refreshments and more live music by guitarist Jamie Balmer. Thank you, Jamie. And you can peruse the journal. In the journal, you will find long sequences from Geoffrey Nutter and Joanna Klink, pieces from Cody-Rose Clevidence, Angie Estes, Sharon Olds, Aracelis Girmay, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Bin Ramke, Tracy K. Smith and Jackie Wang, multi-sensorial as ever paintings and photographs, join music scores, animation, algorithms and even this year, dance.

And there is a book within a book. This year's folio was edited by Emma and Sam. Thank you. A lot of hard work. The Anti-Letters collects occasional writings transformed into craft exercises and was originally inspired by the Master Letters of Emily Dickinson. So what is on the cover is not some extravagant salt shaker, but rather Emily Dickinson's letter seal generously made available to us by Houghton Library.

Finally and most urgently now, I want to thank our three readers Alice Oswald, Victoria Chang and Jorie Graham. We are proud to-- so proud to include one of Alice's poems in Peripheries issue 6 and we're honored that she will be able to read for us tonight. Though we wish that we could give her a warm welcome in person, we are very grateful to have her with us virtually, especially since it is around midnight right now in the UK, so we'll start with Alice.

Alice Oswald's poetry collections include "The Thing in the Gap-Stone Tile", "Dart", "Memorial" "Falling Awake", "Nobody" and "A Short Story of Falling". Her many honors and awards include the Eric Gregory Award, the Arts Foundation Award for Poetry, the Forward Prize, the Ted Hughes Award, the TS Eliot Prize, the GRIFFIN poetry prize, and the London Hellenic Prize.

For "Memorial", a reworking that isolates, repeats and writes from the many deaths in Homer's Iliad. Alice won the Warwick Prize for writing. The first poet to be awarded this prize. Alice Oswald is a poet known for her expertise in classical literature, and often works in book length poems or sequences that take influence from the oral tradition.

Her poems are acutely attuned to the natural world, and her words are meant to be spoken physically and organically into that world. The voice of plants, she says to McSweeney's Jesse Nathan, a patterned that is what's remarkable about a good garden. It speaks to you all at once in interlocking patterns and you realize immediately that prose is a second language, whereas poetry, insofar as it is patterned, is primary.

Please join me now in welcoming the gardener and poet Alice Oswald.

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ALICE OSWALD: Thank you so much. Am I audible? I hope someone will tell me if I'm not audible. It's very nice to be, sort of, here. I'm not quite sure where I am when I'm online, but I'm delighted to be reading for this launch and your publication sounds amazing. I'm going to start and end with a sonnet, which I think is the perfect form for calling out and hearing back.

And I'm going to do a rather strange thing. I'm going to speak each poem twice as a gesture towards those patterns which can so easily be lost online. It's a very odd thing giving an online reading, especially if like me, you're very interested in live performance. But having now done it a few times, I have decided that if I repeat poems, then I am in some way making an allusion to time.

And I think that unrecorded time, the kind of time that is absolutely unretrievable is really the true medium of poetry, and it is the place where human repetition happens. So whenever I repeat a poem, you may feel bored, but please also notice that I am alive, and I'm operating in time that is unrepeatable, and I'm kind of trying to outflank it.

So I'll start with the poem, which I sent to Peripheries Magazine, and it's called "Spider. And this poem actually was written after a dream in which this happened. "I found this copper spider in my shoe, and when I praised her gracefulness, she grew more graceful.

She began to lift as if inflated by my gracious adjective. Spider, full of order, made of air and horsehair like an inside out guitar. I want to praise your instrument of praise and so increase its tentative and sideways workings that when you fasten to my door four pairs of compasses whose pencils draw the surface area of time in eight successive circles like a sketch of fate with one line lengthening to the sun.

I know if I keep still, the whole design will grow." "I found this copper spider in my shoe, and when I praised her gracefulness, she grew more graceful. She began to lift as if inflated by my gracious adjective. Oh, spider, full of order, made of air and horsehair like an inside out guitar.

I want to praise your instrument of praise and so increase its tentative and sideways workings that when you fasten to my door four pairs of compasses whose pencils draw the surface area of time in eight successive circles like a sketch of fate with one line lengthening to the sun. I know if I keep still, the whole design will grow."

The next poem is a gardening poem, and it's a poem about packing moss around Narcissus bulbs, which is a lovely job to do. "I am glad of moss which lives aloof on a low wall always to the north of us, glad of its reticence, glad of its diligence because after a quarrel, once I turned to moss to let my eyes sink in and stared and stared long enough to see a bird land on a pin then ferns and a footpath.

And after that, I saw the queen of the Earth, and therefore, I am twice glad to take a handful to the low wall to lift up moss and let its coldness in through my fingers, glad to pack it on the bulbs like eerie elf blankets, green and dark and double lined to keep bewitchment in.

I am glad of its density, glad of its modesty and am twice, no more than twice, glad of Persephone who loves this 100 headed flower under my cold hands waiting to appear." "I am glad of moss which lives aloof on a low wall always to the north of us, glad of its reticence, glad of its diligence because after a quarrel, once I turned to moss to let my eyes sink in and stared and stared long enough to see a bird land on a pin then ferns and a footpath.

I am glad of its density, glad of its modesty. Yes, I am twice, no more than twice, glad of Persephone who loves this 100 headed flower under my cold hands waiting to appear." The next poem is an originally a poem about a nightingale, because I discovered a nightingale and sat underneath it for as long as I possibly could trying to catch its tune in my language.

So the main thing this poem is doing is trying to actually render the rhythms that I heard in that Nightingale, but it also alludes to the really strange myth that a Nightingale is a mother who has murdered her child. "When we crossed into night just now, I only half saw something tugging at the tree curtain and there suddenly was a tiny murderer singing in her dressing room.

I can't believe she would wear such dusty clothes, said one angel to another looking up from his book while her anguish crimsoned his ear. And they told me you have to speak Latin to enter heaven, but she who has been a professional assassin, D minor, D minor she sings.

Oh, yes, I can feel her heart racing not in great fettle, in fact, it is one of those odd things that the female nightingale is mute. It is only the male who sings. Exit the oak shaking its leafy tambourine followed by the gate, the field, the path not even a hat to put money in. Simply lie down flat in the dark and forget your family while the Earth, with her bird bone needle, repairs each myth."

When we crossed into night just now, I only half saw something tugging at the tree curtain and there suddenly was a tiny murderer singing in her dressing room. I can't believe she would wear such dusty clothes, said one angel to another looking up from his book while her anguish crimsoned his ear.

And they told me you have to speak Latin to enter heaven, but she who has been a professional assassin, D minor, D minor she sings. Oh, yes, I can feel her heart racing not in great fettle, in fact, it is one of those odd things that the female nightingale is mute. It is only the male who sings.

Exit the oak, shaking its leafy tambourine followed by the gate, the field, the path not even a hat to put money in. Simply lie down flat in the dark and forget your family while the Earth, with her bird bone needle, repairs each myth." Just a couple more.

The next poem is an older poem called "Shadow" and it traces it traces a walk, which I used to do every day watching my shadow following and changing behind me. "I'm going to flicker for a moment and tell you the tale of a shadow that falls at dusk out of the blue to the Earth and turns left along the path to here groggily under its blackout being dragged along, crippled over things as if broken winged.

Not yet continuous, no more than a shiver of something with the flesh parachute of a human opening above it, but lengthening a little as it descends through the rings of one hour into the next with the rooks flying upwards snipping at the clouds until at last, out of that opening, here it lies, my own impersonal pronoun crumpled under me like a dead body.

It is faint. It has been falling for a long time. Look, when I walk it's like a pair of scissors thrown at me by the sun so that now as if my skin were not quite tucked in, I am cold, cold, trying to slide myself out of my own shade, but hour by hour, more shade leaks out.

Or if I stand if I move one hand, I hear the hiss of flowers closing their eyelids and the trees, as if dust was being beaten from a rug, shake out their birds and in again. It's as if I've interrupted something that was falling in a straight line from the eye of God. And if I do nothing, the ground gives up.

The almost minty clarity of its grass begins to fade. The white moths under the leaves are amazed." That's a longish poem, so I won't read it twice, and I will end now with another sonnet, which I'll only read once and this is another sonnet about a dream.

I mostly write sonnets when I dream because there's something about the dream that is already sort of trapped in the head and so I quite like this trapping form. And this is called "Boat Ghost" and it was a poem I wrote after the rowing boat that I really loved, which we used to row across the river in Devon, and we dragged it all the way to Bristol and hid it under a bush and it got stolen, so I had a dream about the ghost of this boat.

"I dreamed I was up early a little sly wanting to steal some time. I had thought I would thrash along through the fields and find our boat and row somewhere, but the river in spate, flashed its muchness at me such a mud brown mounded exuberance that I lay down wrapped in my coat knowing it would be hard to row against so much mad self-regard.

I had horror of it, fear of its excess, fear of its fear and as I lay there helpless, weeping about the past, I tell you plainly that an old boat ghost sent a ripple through me. You were there too, and the huge heart shape left by its wake left stirrings in our sleep."

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SHERAH BLOOR: As if it weren't enough to spend some time in Alice Oswald's dreams. I think we could have listened to just one poem over and over again for the night, but we have more. Victoria Chang. Victoria Chang's books include The Trees Witness Everything, Dear Memory, Obit, Bobby Chang, The Boss, Salvina Molesta, Circle and with My Back to the World and forthcoming in 2024.

She has also written books for children and middle readers and has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, the Chowdhury Prize in Literature, a Pushcart Prize and a MacDowell Prize. I nearly lost my place because there were too many. Obit, published in 2020 by Copper Canyon, received the L.A. Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award.

It was long listed for a National Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Victoria serves as the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech, and as the director of Poetry @ Tech. In conversation with Matthew Zapruder for Air/Light Magazine Victoria Chang says, I think of myself as an electric wire, a conductor.

The poem is electricity or electrons that flow or move through the conductor, me. I'm useful, necessary, but ultimately, not the thing itself. The thing that is most important, which is the electricity to turn on that light. We are incredibly honored to feature two of Victoria's poems in this issue of Peripheries and to welcome her in person to our community at the Divinity School tonight. Please join me in welcoming Victoria Chang.

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VICTORIA CHANG: OK. Sure I was given a time. I'm going to read a little bit less than the time that I was given, but make sure I stay within that time, within the other time that I decided for myself. OK. So hello. How are you? Good? Yeah? I want to thank Perpheries Journal for inviting me and Jorie and Alice, such an honor to read with you.

Sherah, Emma, with the multiple Sams today and Professor Charles Stang and everyone who worked on Peripheries, I know how much work goes into such an endeavor. It is a beautiful, gorgeous journal, so congratulations. I brought some slides, but I'm not going to show them just quite yet, and I'm just going to read some poems.

This first one is from my book Obit and my mother passed away in 2015 of pulmonary fibrosis. That's when your lungs harden and you gradually suffocate to death. "My mother's teeth died twice. Once in 1965, all pulled out from gum disease. Once again on August 3rd, 2015. The fake teeth sit a box in the garage.

When she died, I touched them, smelled them, thought I heard a whimper. I shoved the teeth into my mouth, but having two sets of teeth only made me hungrier. When my mother died, I saw myself in the mirror, her words around my mouth like powder from a donut. Her last words were in English.

She asked for a Sprite. I wonder whether her last thought was in Chinese. I wonder what her last thought was. I used to think that a dead person's words die with them. Now I know that they scatter, looking for meaning to attach to a scent. My mother used to collect orange blossoms in a small shallow bowl. I passed the tree each spring.

I always knew that grief was something I could smell, but I didn't know that it's not actually a noun, but a verb, that it moves." I'm going to skip that one. I do a lot of skipping. This one is called "The Bees". I don't know why I'm resisting wearing my glasses. I can't see anything. "The Bees" 268 million years ago from the Philippines, passed away, on April 26, 2217 in Nome, Alaska.

The detaching icebergs crushed the bees who used to fly over conference rooms. Once, I nearly died in a small plane with a CEO, CFO, and COO during their IPO. On the ground, the CEO glared at me as if I had caused the storm, as if the yellow lights had come from my mind, as if the buzzing had come from my shaking, as if the lightning were a box I had tripped over.

Maybe he was right. Maybe I had become estranged from a part of myself that wanted to stay alive, that wanted them to remain alive. In the same way, I had become estranged from my mother forever, but not from her death." Slide. OK. Not yet actually. But you can look at that while I read so you don't look at me.

But my mother passed in 2015, and then I eventually found a box or box or a storage facility with lots of boxes, and I was initially very excited. I found all the things that one might find, lots of papers, documents. I suddenly knew names of people I didn't know. I knew birth dates and things like that.

But the more things I found, oddly, the more sort of grief I felt, because I had no one to ask all these questions to, so I started writing a little bit of prose, and I wrote my mother a letter, and this is the first letter I wrote and it eventually became lots of letters to lots of people, and it became my book, Dear Memory, which I'll show you some stuff from there later. Like that's the next thing I'll be reading.

"Dear mother, I have so many questions. What city were you born in? What was your American birthday? Your Chinese Birthday? What did your mother do? What did your grandmother do? Who was your father? Grandfather? It's too late now, but I would like to know. I would like to know why your mother followed Chiang Kai-Shek taking you and your six or seven siblings across China to Taiwan.

I would like to know what was said in that meeting. I would like to know who was in that meeting, where that meeting took place. I would like to the people that were left behind. I would like to know if there are other people who look like me. I would like to know if you took a train, if you walked, if you had pockets in your dress, if you wore pants, if your hand was in a fist, or if it held a small stone.

I would like to know if you thought the trees were black or green at night, if it was cold enough to see your breath, to sting your fingers. I would like to know who you spoke to along the way, if you had some preserved salty plums that we both love in your pocket. I would like to know if you carried a bag, if you had a book in your bag.

I would like to know where you got your food for the trip, why I never knew your mother, father or your siblings. I would liked to have known your father. I would like to know what his voice sounded like, if it was brittle or pale, if it was blue or red. I would have liked to the sound he made when he swallowed food.

I would like to know if your mother was afraid. During college, I spent several weeks with her in Taiwan. She bought me bao or buns every morning that steamed in small plastic bags with no ties and sweet dojang tofu milk-- sorry, I'm losing my voice-- always too hot for me to drink.

How she sat there and watched me eat, complained to me about your brother's wife. She complained of being sick and how no one would help her. Do you know how long it took me to figure out how to call an ambulance? And then when they came, she refused to go. I still remember how the two men stared at me as if I could move a country.

Listen, it's the wind. That's the same wind from your country's Sometimes, if I listened closely at night, I can hear you drop a small bag at the door. I hear the sound of the bow touching the ground and the wind trying to open the bag, but when I open the door, there's nothing there, just the same wind. Thousands of years old.

Happy birthday, wind. Happy birthday, mother. April 6, 1940. I know this now. All the nurses, doctors and morticians asked me so I memorized it. Your American birthday. April 6, 1940, I said again and again as if I had known this my whole life." I'm wondering why I'm losing-- oh, thank you.

You know, I did such a good job today. I walked 16,000 steps. Thank you. I went to the Museum of Fine Arts and decided I saw so many amazing things, including the artist Matthew Wong, if you don't know that artist. I was so moved that I walked my way back here but now I lost my voice so-- thank you. Thank you, Christina.

So now I'm going to read some of these I made. Also started working with my hands a lot. So I did some collaging, and I'm not a visual artist, but I do like playing around with my hands. You see-- OK. That one. It's so hard to see from here. OK. That one is-- my mother is in there somewhere, and I ended up cutting little pieces of paper and writing poems on them.

And then I glued them on, and then I unglued them, and I ended up just letting them kind of stay a little bit alight unattached. So I'll read the little poem on there. "I wonder what the hat was trying to cover. The others have flowers on their dresses. All of your flowers were on the underside.

Even then, your stare was slightly lower, looking right beneath where happiness begins." The next slide, please. That one, I think, is the one where my-- I think it's my great grandmother, and then my mother's at the top, and there are multiple of her siblings, and I believe there are maybe one or two that are missing, maybe unborn.

"Once, you had to stand behind your grandmother who left a country, each of your feet lifted off the land onto the boat like nightingales. I imagine the night sky, you below deck, light coming from two moons, but only half of your face lit up. You stood still as the moons rearranged themselves.

During the switch, language was lost at sea. The language belongs to no one. A door opens." I'm going to switch and read some miniature poems. So my brain moves a lot. So maybe you have to just adjust to my jumping. I'm going to read a few of these tiny poems that are from The Trees Witness Everything and they're tiny, tiny, like three lines, four lines, that kind of thing.

They're all in syllabics, so like maybe a la [INAUDIBLE] a la haikus and tankas. And they-- too make my heart-- my life even harder, I used the titles of W.S Merwin as my titles, and you'll see why. They're just really these really gorgeous, capacious, open titles. They're kind of little glittering fields that call you to use them as their titles or maybe that's just me.

I'll read a few. "To H." "When the stars hit the windows now, they turn into flies. Who knew they would come down?" "The River of Bees." "There are no more bees. Remember how they glided? Don't worry, they are not dead. They have flown past death. There, they walk on two legs, build their hives out of concrete."

"Calling Late". "The men used to call at all hours, but what I missed most are the late night talks, ones where I held the phone so close it pressed like a gun." "Little Soul" "I wrote on your back until your knees broke and now one mile left, I must toss you." "Turning."

"My mother is dead. The lemons still turn yellow. The trout still stare emptily. Desire is still free. We still love many people, eat peaches as if kissing." "The Lovers". "There is a wildfire starving on top of a lake. See how the water holds fire, but cannot end it? We insist on love when all we want is mercy."

"The Gods". "The fact that leaves can't be put back on trees makes me think that you do not exist." So I'm going to switch again to these new poems, and they are ekphrastic poems based on the artwork of the artist Agnes Martin. Does anyone know her work? Yeah, I love her so much.

And I'll read-- so the MoMA had actually commissioned a poem. And so I wrote a poem on Agnes Martin's piece On a Clear Day", 1973, which I think I brought a slide in for. Maybe you could move-- yeah, there it is. And there's a whole series of these actually and when they're put on a wall together, they're so beautiful.

And also during that time, the Atlanta spa shootings had happened and so that appears in here as well. "On a Clear Day", 1973. "On a clear day, the horses disappeared. Just the apples they had been fed were left. The apples were strewn across the field and had become rectangles.

When people found, them they still gathered and ate them. The people who hunched over their apples were far away, but the sounds of their chewing were over here. On a clear day, all the sounds fit into the boxes. On any clear day, all my thinking fits into boxes that can't be opened. What if our thinking was never meant to come out?

If it only remains thinking within boxes, when out it becomes weapons, takes on different shapes with sharp points. Today, there is no shortage of thinking, but all the thinking is divided into portions. Today, I'm hungry, but all the portions are gone. There are only 48. On clear days, there are only 48 birds, 48 people, and 48 houses, and 48 wars, and 48 apples.

I keep counting grids, but no matter how I try, I still get six dead Asian women who don't fit into 48 boxes. All night, my thoughts are shaped like birds. In the morning, I lean in closer to the mirror and someone has drawn lines across my face. I realize that failure consists of both the outline and the outlined, that lines are not meant to hold in our emptiness."

OK. How are we doing? I'm going to read just a few more. Maybe-- let's see. Maybe I'll read the one that is in Peripheries. So we'll have to skip ahead a little bit. Skip. Oh, that's the poem. And the skip, skip, skip. So much Agnes Martin for you to just enjoy. Keep going, please. Yes, keep going. Thank you. There. OK. Thank you.

I always bring too much, and then I start shaving and cutting when I'm up here. Not the smartest thing to do. So I'll read-- just so you know, I'll read two more poems. This one and one more. This is called "Reclining Woman" and it's based on a Picasso. That's up there. "The woman's head, the size of a small peach.

Three more small peaches between her legs. I wouldn't have put three between her legs, separating desire into thirds or making it round. I wouldn't have painted desire on its side. The woman are always reclining on couches. Lately, a rope pokes out of my skin. The only way I've ever known how to use a rope is for hanging.

Lately, I've been feeling that there could be another use for the rope. Others might name that hope, but I think of it as efficiency. Once I used the rope to hold back my hands, desire to touch someone so many times that my biceps doubled in size. Sensitive people's fingers are always pointing at the lilies outside of the frame.

What if the tingling was never an inner life, but the trees using our veins to send Earth's classified information? Maybe the hands were spies all along wrapped in a borrowed coat. Maybe desire is really vertical. It is a tree rushing messages to another tree. Sometimes there are so many messages because of our killing that our hands swell."

And I'll read one more. And I think it's the gold one that's-- keep going, please. There. That one. Thank you. Has anyone seen this one? Yay. One person. It's in the MoMA in New York right now. If you happen to be there over the holidays or any time soon, you should go check it out. It's my favorite.

It's one of three pieces that she used gold leaf with to make out of and gold leaf is very difficult to work with. And this is a beautiful piece. Actually if you go to the next slide I think. Yeah, that's how it looks in the room. And one more. I think I brought one more. Yeah. That just shows you how big is it. It's 10 by 10.

So I'll read the poem. It's called "Friendship", 1963. Thank you for listening. "I came to the city, so I could see gold. When I arrived, though, the leaves were gold too, and I became confused. I called the front desk four times and Angel answered each time by the third call, he ended with talk soon.

In the morning, a different man answered, and I burst into tears. On 53rd Street, small children kept on running into me, a father yelled so loudly at the boy on the scooter that I thought he knew I was carrying death on my back. By the time I arrived at the museum, there was a long line. The bald man in front of me kept turning around to look at me.

I could tell by his forehead that he could hurt me. When I finally found the room, I was the only one in there. Everyone else was below me in the Picasso room. While I stared at the gold rectangles, two attendants talked about whether to work overtime and get paid time and a half. I wanted to tell them that there is no such thing as time, just time and a half.

Sometime in the night, Etel Adnan had died. I had just seen her paintings the day before. The crowds were large, and I wondered whether our looking had accelerated her death. When I took a photo of Agnes's piece, I saw my dark reflection on the gold. I started counting the grids, but the bald man came up next to me.

Suddenly, there were two dark shadows on the gold. I asked him to step away, but when he said, no, it was Agnes's voice." Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

SHERAH BLOOR: Thank you so much, Victoria. We didn't actually plan that you would be presenting visual art, but we're so grateful for that, because it's one of the things Peripheries tries to do is to have visual art and poetry talking to one another. So that was absolutely perfect and electrifying.

Jorie Graham. Jorie Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently To 2040 and To The Last Be Human, which collects her four prior books, Runaway, First Place and Sea Change. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for The Dream of the Unified Field, Selected Poems From 1974 to 1994.

And her many other awards and honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Fellowship, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award, the Whiting Award, the Forward Prize for Poetry, and the Wallace Stevens Award. She has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard.

Asked in a New Yorker interview with Katie Waldman to identify the overwhelming question that shapes her work, Jorie responds, what is creation by which I mean the world around us? And what would be a right relationship to it? How do we, in the midst of such gifts from what we once regarded-- sorry.

Let me start again. What would be a right relationship to it? How do we, in the midst of such gifts from what we once regarded as an actual creation, do so much harm? How do we, nonetheless, in the face of this, live our one life fully, making sure not to override wonder, astonishment, pleasure, joy?

Jori-- I'm addressing her. She's everywhere.

[LAUGHTER]

As our teacher, mentor, and dear friend, we want to Thank you for all that you have given us and continue to give us. Much of our community here would not exist, if it weren't for you. Peripheries certainly would not exist. We have been waiting for a long time for Peripheries to be worthy enough to invite you to read.

We still don't think we've quite gotten there, but luckily, you have agreed to grace us with your presence nonetheless. Everyone, please join me in welcoming our own Jorie Graham.

[APPLAUSE]

JORIE GRAHAM: Thank you, Sherah. Thank you to everyone who has made-- thank you-- first of all, I would like to say that the two readings that I've just sat through are astonishing. Really worth the time that is, as Alice pointed out, time spent and not recoverable.

I would like to say that Sherah's poems, Emma's poems, Sam's poems, and many of the other people who participate in the making of Peripheries are themselves astonishing works, and I can't wait till those books are in the world and that you get to hear from them, although they are widely published, they're remarkable. The magazine is remarkable.

And thank you to the Divinity School for having had the-- I actually don't know how the Divinity School works because so many poets in-- that are coming out of Harvard are all the Divinity School, and I don't know what you're doing. Maybe it's because you-- I tell myself that it's because it's the one part of the university that is asking questions that are actually unanswerable, and as a result, well, that keeps you on edge.

I'm going to read three poems to close out this incredible evening. All of the poems tonight have worked with time and the feeling of real time and of the kind of time, which is lyric time, which is interesting what Alice was doing about reading the poem twice. You do feel that something happens on the page and that you have a strange way of being able to go back upstream in a poem and read it again, and it's not the same time you were in when you read it the first time.

I think that's what Shakespeare is always telling us in his sonnets when he's talking about making you aware of the fact that the poem you've just read, he's just written, he's just undergone it. One of my favorite lines, as my students all know, is the ending line that in black ink, my love may still shine bright.

Reminding us that the ink hasn't been blotted yet, that it is still wet on the page in the sonnet that Shakespeare has just written and that it's still wet for me and just as fresh and the emotion that I receive reading the poem is many hundreds of years later. Top 28 started today.

It's a-- I know there is much, much else very grave, and I was going to do a reading that was all involved with the other nightmares that are going on, on the planet right now, but I really feel like COP28 is one of the last chances we have to make some sense of it. And there was actually some good news.

I don't even know that I've seen any good news recently, but there was good news today, and the first day of COP, so I'm going to read some poems that involve our relationship to, Sherah's quote, our relationship to creation. The-- of the first of the three poems I'll read is in short quatrains and the title runs into the first line, so I'll read it continuously.

"Extinct yet. "Who owns the map? May I look? Where is my claim? Is my history verifiable? If I included the memory of the animals, the animal's memories, are they still here? Are we alone? Look, the filaments appear of memories. Whose?

What was land like? Did it move through us? Something says non-stop, are you here? Are your ancestors real? Do you have a body? Do you have yourself in mind? Can you see your hands? Have you broken it, the thread? Try to feel the pull of the other end, says, make sure both ends are alive when you pull to try to re-enter here.

A Raven has arrived while I am taking all this down. Incorporate me, it squawks. It hops closer along the stone wall. Do you remember despair? It's coming closer, says, I look at him. Do not hurry, I say, but he is tapping the stone all over with his beak. His coat is sun.

He looks carefully at me, because I am so still and eager. He sees my loneliness. He sees my loneliness. Cicadas begin. Is this a real encounter? I ask, of the old kind when there were Ravens? No, says the light. You are barely here. The Raven left a long time ago.

It is traveling it's thread, it's sky road forever now. It knows the current through the cicadas, which you cannot hear but which flows over you now. But is it not here? I ask, looking up through my stanzas. Did it not reach me as it came in? Did it not enter here at stanza 8?

And where does it go now when it goes away? Again, when I tell you the Raven is golden, when I tell you it lifted and it went and it went." I'm going to read a poem from Runaway. I'm thinking of Alice's garden and creation. The poem titled "Tree".

It's in quatrains, but in longer line quatrains. Again, it deals with different relationships to the time we are in and a lot of these poems imagine a future time and then look back at the time we are in and make us feel the tension between. Well, what it looks like to be alive now if you imagine no longer being alive now and maybe seeing what you already have.

In this poem, history enters into the picture a bit. "Tree". This a fig tree and-- "Today, on two legs, stood and reached to the right spot as I saw it choosing among the twisting branches and multifaceted changing shades and greens and shades of greens lobbed and lashing sun.

The fig that seemed to me the perfect one. The ready one. It is permitted. It is possible. It is actual. The VR glasses are not needed yet, not for now. No, not for this while longer. And it is warm in my cupped palm and my fingers close round, but not too fast.

Somewhere wind, like a hammer stroke, slows down and lengthens endlessly. Closer in, the bird whose coin toss on a metal tray never stills to one face. Something is preparing to begin again. It is not us, say the spreading sails of cicadas as the winch of noon takes hold, and we are wrapped in day and hoisted up.

All the ribs of time showing through in the growing in the lengthening harness of sound, some gnats nearby, a fly where the white milk drop of the torn stem starts. Dust on the eglantine skin. White powder in the confetti of light all up the branches. Truth, sweetness of blood scent and hauled in light.

Withers of the wild carnival of tree shaking once as the fruit is removed from its dream. Remain, I think, backing away from the trembling into full corrosive sun. Momentary blindness follows. Correction. There are only moments. They hurt. Correction. Must I put down here that this is long ago? That the sky has been invisible for years now?

That the ash of our fires has covered the sun? That the fruit is stunted yellow mold when it appears at all, and we have no produce to speak of? No longer exists. All my attention is free for you to use. I can cast farther and farther out now before the change. A page turned.

We have gone into another story. History floundered or one day, the birds disappeared. The imagination tried to go here when we asked it to from where I hold the fruit in my right hand but it would not go. Where is it now? Where is this here where you and I look up trying to make sense of the normal?

Turn it to life. More life. Disinterred from desire. Heaved up onto the dry shore awaiting the others who could not join us in the end for good. I want to walk to the left around this tree I have made again. I want to sit under it full of secrecy, insight, immensity, vigor, bursting complexity, swarm oh, great forwards and backwards.

I never felt my face change into my new face. Where am I facing now? Is the question of good still stinging the open before us with its muggy destination pitched into nothingness? Something expands in you where it wrenches up it's bright policing into view. Is this good? Is this the good?

Under the celebrating crowd, inside the silences it forces hard away all around itself. We're chanting Finns where we win the war again made thin by bravery and belief. Here's a Polaroid, if you want. Here's a souvenir. Here now for you to watch, unfold.

Up close, the fruit is opening. The ribs will widen now. It is all seed, reddish foam, history. Then I'm going to end on a short poem from my most recent book, and it's just-- it is a reminder, so we have it in us to know ourselves and not know ourselves and we are in the process of watching that happen.

I've been writing a lot of-- thinking a lot about the differences between crowd emotion and individual or what I call lyric emotion. The ways in which we are watching ourselves be pulled up into emotions, which are crowd emotions, not just in literal crowds, but in the crowd, which is the online world, or in other kinds of sources of communal emotion which give rise to emotions that we're not sure we actually feel or can control.

And then what it means to recover individual emotion with accountability, which is of a different order and whether we are being perhaps treacherously guided away from the ability to recover individual emotion. This person is titled-- this poem is titled the first person "I", and the title runs into the first line.

It seems it's a kind of confession also or-- but it's the right poem for what-- the way I imagine the Divinity School. "I know myself, I say to myself, so I cannot be led astray. Led astray. I say I know myself more fully now, so I cannot be made to do something I as an other would never do.

But I did it. Didn't I do it? It wasn't me to do such a thing or believe such a thing, I tell myself as I look carefully into the only mirror I am given. Myself in there. Me looking carefully and hard. I am honest in my looking, I think, as I see someone else in their opening.

Will in their eyes wild like a sail in the wind. Wind rising now as I look in bewildered. The old gentleness. Where is it? I put my hand to my face, but it touches glass. Where is my body to guide me? I think. I tap at the prisoner in there. Is that the schoolroom? The blank in the lesson?

Is that my soul gradually by its ten thousand adjustments to its own increasing absence opening too far? Is it blind? I tap my face which is gone on the glass, which is not gone. Don't stop, I hear my mind hiss. Don't stop for anything." Thank you, everybody.

[APPLAUSE]

SHERAH BLOOR: So thank you, Jorie. Again, she's everywhere now. Thank you for, in your poems and in your person, helping us to live our one lives fully. And please join me in thanking, again, our three poets tonight.

[APPLAUSE]

And if you continue to feel inspired, submissions for Peripheries Edition Seven open tomorrow, December 1st. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

ANNOUNCER: Sponsor, Center for the Study of World Religions.