Video: Poetry Reading featuring Jackie Wang and Stephanie Burt, joined by Nat Raha and Ethan Seeley

[AUDIO LOGO] ANNOUNCER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

ANNOUNCER 2: Poetry reading September 9, 2024.

SHERAH BLOOR: Somehow, I don't recognize everyone. I recognize a lot of people, but for those of you who are new, Peripheries is a-- we run events at the Center for Study of World Religions, like this one. This is our first event of the year. Poetry readings, workshops, and craft talks. We're also a journal, annual journal. I'll leave these over there and you can take a look at them.

And we have our first poetry competition judged by Josh Bell. Poems are due on October 15. Emma and Sam also work for Peripheries. OK, so first event of the academic year, which we scheduled at the last minute on the only evening we could get these four poets to converge.

And, unfortunately, Jackie will be online from New York. Four poets, so I'm going to keep my introductions really short. I've been telling people that this will be the fun or funniest event because how I connect these four parts together in my mind is their humor. And I mean humor, though, in a profound sense of bringing joy.

But also never compromising on that which breaks through humor, that which needs to be said and said with urgency and which their humor allows to be heard open-heartedly. So I'm going to start with Jackie, since she's in the ether. We're going to find her.

JACKIE WANG: Can you hear me?

SHERAH BLOOR: Yes, and now I'm introducing you. [CHUCKLES]

Your face is huge.

ETHAN SEELY: In a good way.

SHERAH BLOOR: In a great way. So Jackie is a very good friend of ours. A lot of us had the privilege of spending time closely reading early drafts of the poems that appeared in The Sunflower Cast a Spell To Save Us From The Void, which was a National Book Award finalist, and we feel we can claim some of this honor. Thank you, Jackie.

And I think even some people might appear in that book. Jackie is also, of course, the famous author of Carceral Capitalism and assistant professor of American studies and ethnicity at USC. And now Jackie will kick the night off.

[APPLAUSE]

JACKIE WANG: Thank you so much. You can claim it all. I don't even feel responsible for dreams that I write. I'm just, like, the vessel for it. So give the National Book Award finalist honor to my unconscious, the dream world, whatever. It doesn't matter. So I have major FOMO not being there with you tonight because so many of my friends I know are in this room right now and friends I from different contexts.

So I was very excited to be able to see people meet each other and to make the hang with you all, but had to take care of some annoying bureaucratic stuff in New York. So I'm really sad to not be there with you all. I just wanted to say that I will be in Cambridge one last time before I leave the country.

So let's be in touch about getting together. And I can properly say goodbye to people in Cambridge because I would love--

SHERAH BLOOR: --for the people that inviting them all to my house.

[CHUCKLING]

JACKIE WANG: So whoever's there that I know-- no, I'm just joking. No, but I want to actually have a proper goodbye to people because there's so many people I've also gotten to over the last year through taking juries last workshop as well. So I would love to say Hi and goodbye to you all. So I'm just read a piece that I decided to read just because a phrase from it was lodged in my head.

But I realized it's a piece about just some thoughts that were drifting through my head when I moved to Cambridge. And I realized peace also has a bit about Scotland in it. So I think I'm constellating Cambridge and Scotland because Nat Raha, who's reading tonight, is coming from Scotland. And maybe I'm kind of starting to feel a little bit sad about saying goodbye to Cambridge for the time being.

So this piece is called What is This Orgy of Song? And this is from my most recent book, Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun. What is this conspiracy of voice, the friend's voice who sings this time William Blake's laughing song? When the painted birds laugh in the shade, when our table with cherries and nuts is spread, come live and be merry and join with me to sing the sweet chorus of ha-ha-hee.

What is this orgy of song and the canopy above my head? What is the lightness of walking alone outside or what I find when I force myself to stop reading and walk across the bridge over the Charles River at sunset? The breeze becomes an analgesic. The cop inside my head is gagged.

And the light on the water mimics a 4th of July sparkle that sparkles forever as a loop of light, growing in the mind of the universe, a pulsating mass of iridescent cerebral matter which any of you can plug into at any time just by accepting that perdition is not where you are, condemned to dwell, that at any moment you can will the cosmic umbilical cords to drop from the light mine for you to plug into your foreheads.

So it was all just a joke? My head played on me? Hell? Hell was just a joke I could unbelieve? In the poem, what was it I said? You do. You do. Undo. My being invaginated by the levity of stealing all the food I can while sauntering through the party in my machine gun leggings. What is the nature of your being?

[INAUDIBLE] describes me as a comedian, but why is it that some know me as a dour, joyless, depressive? White people? Well, guess not all of them. Memory of a conversation I had in Claire's car about substance, Spinoza, friendship, and bad mixtures. What mixes well with me is sun. But it's difficult to reconcile this with being a creature of the night.

On the nighttime walk to the library, I close my eyes and am impaled by the light. The streetlights are false moons. Behind the tree, the real moon. Through a window in the science center, I see a man looking into a microscope. Above him, a room in which the cine lasers at use is plastered.

The bio and cyberneticians are at work. I feel them everywhere in Cambridge, engineering our collective death. Around the corner, a teenage boy folds his apron in the banh mi food truck. The shift has just finished and soon he'll be home or in the bed of a lover. I remember feeling inside my head, but then getting hit by the sun from behind a tree.

I look up into the song. The wind breathes yellow rain. It falls from branches as bits of yellow confetti cut out of construction paper, shards of yellow littering the campus. The leaves stick to the bottom of the shoes of the students and are dragged into the library. The trees cry light so that we may be happy. Are you happy?

The German mathematician walks by. He seems not to recognize me. I want to find L, but I haven't got my phone on me. The yellow leaves transport me to the back seat of Nat's car, sitting next to Dana, pointing out the leaves to him, the way they catch the light on their way down. To be on the road, it felt like an adolescent summer, my last week of freedom.

But for the punks, the summer never ends. There's no "back to school" to punctuate leisure time, for time does not revolve around the beginning and end of a semester. And so on the same day I start school, I receive a postcard from Steve of a picture of him and Julian hopping trains across the BC Rockies.

But these short train hopping and sailing excursions are just a precursor to Steve's main adventure, sailing to Hawaii, where I'm sure Moxie will meet him on an app-coding trip. This app-coding trip turned into the Signal app, the encrypted messaging app. I want to write to Steve, take me with you. But there's no return address. He's on the move.

When Dana asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said a traveler. IN the postcard photo, both Steve and Julian are wearing Black jackets. Steve is doing a peace sign and Julian is flicking off the camera. Are they caricaturing their respective temperaments? I remember the summer I met them both.

I remember somehow finding my way to Julian's house through Moxie, as I did not-- as I didn't know him then. As we sat in his living room talking, he told me stories about his travels across Central America. And then it clicked, he was the author of the only zine I brought with me that summer, a zine I randomly plucked from the new college zine library titled One Way Ticket.

31 and 32 years old and still oogles, Steve jokes in his letter. Julian is in a PhD program now, studying continental philosophy, still falling in love like it's the first time. Maybe it's OK to take a break from concepts, theories, ideas, even literature to try to find my way back to the non-teleological event of writing, a writing that is comfortable enough with itself to be simple, to just feel out the texture of a walk or being with others, small observations.

So when people ask me what I'm working on, I can say nothing. Have no grand statements for you. I am a life like you, and this is about that. As I observe the uneven brick sidewalk of Oxford Street, I remembered the sensation of what was once the most distinct of all feelings for me, gratitude.

It seemed to radiate from everything. I love strangers. I love to watch the way they were present with each other. The more confused they appeared to me, the more I loved them. I love the backs of their heads while walking down crowded streets. I love Macias for sitting with me in the swimming cafes, letting me in against his better judgment.

I love the dog shit paved streets of Govan, Glasgow, the majesty of Buchanan Street, and the thoroughfares of foreign towns walking down them and the warped consciousness of toothaches. Busby station, when Julian said it, our train rides came back to me. The timbre of a certain accent heard over an intercom seared into our minds.

I even love when Nemo, the Dalmatian, stole the fruitcake and noshed in Cloudberry's living room. I love the steam rising from the old houses on a rare sunny day in Glasgow. Today the sun was bright, but it rained for only an hour. And this hour of rain was synchronized exactly with my counseling session.

From the fourth floor of the Harvard University Health Services building, I watched a storm rage and violently whip the leaves of a tree while the psychologist asked me questions about my depression. I even loved everything bad, for it was part of the whole of life. But this mentality also manifests as a self-destructive inability to stay mad at anyone.

Because she was real to me, I could not hate her. Was the rain sent to cleanse me? Genuflect because there is gratitude, an all-pervasive feeling of contrition. Look at how my hatred softens. It is supple, like silken tofu. My skin betrays me by failing as a barrier.

But what does this ineptitude of skin allow me? I love coasting down the bridge into Lido Key. I love the weeping willows of Murcia. I love my spice shelf in the house I lived in with Pete. I love the smell of the cool air coming in through the cracks of my good view porch room, walking down the snowy Hamden Street on my birthday.

I have no grand statements for you. I have a bowl of pennies, some sentences and half sentences, scraps of pattern origami paper. I have the colored lights on the bridge into Poughkeepsie, whispers in the back seat of a car, daydreams of lives epically lived, but epic in feeling not wealth or importance.

I have a pigeon crashing into a glass walkway, falling to the ground and dying, twitching on the ground. The death throes. The way it stared at me right before dying. Elle, my dad, and I were all deeply disturbed. As we pride ourselves from the distressing scene, my father told us the story of the man who killed the last passenger pigeon, how these pigeons were once so abundant, they blotted out the sky.

We were looking for a place to eat. There is history in every micro-transaction, in glances exchanged between strangers, and even in the tier I left on the Woodberry table, the way the reflection of the light and the tear made it look like an eyeball with a laser pupil. The night will be good to you if you can resist the urge to blot out feeling with molecules that will make life bearable but less round.

There is a night waiting for you where you kill the fear that has been holding you hostage. Loving as an owl, watching at night from a tree. Arboreal creature, we are made of feather bliss, borrowed light. Write yourself into a state again, love and then sleep.

Some backtracking, but all is not lost. You are free, but for how long? Life becomes this mythology of the everyday made by freaks on their lonely, unscripted journeys. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

Also shout out to Stephanie Burke, who found my journal on the steps of Lamont Library, which I was, like, so out of it during this period and just, like, was journaling and left my journal behind. Thanks for returning it to me.

SHERAH BLOOR: That was really beautiful. And I lived 10 years in Cambridge and 10 years in Scotland, so it felt really beautiful and affirmative. I'm going to introduce Ethan Seely. He asked me the other day, earnestly, whether he should be a poet or a stand up comedian.

[CHUCKLING]

I think he has combined both and will. Ethan is also our dear friend. He attended Harvard Divinity School and he read for Peripheries. He lives at the moment in Western Massachusetts, but will sadly be relocating soon to NYU, where he will be the Willy Birkhofer fellow in poetry at New York University. Ethan.

ETHAN SEELY: Hey. What's up, Center for the Study of World Religions? Hi, Jackie. I'm a little nervous. I've only done-- this is my second time, like, reading poetry in public. And I'm happy to say that Jackie Wang has been a presence at both of the-- I read with Jackie both times, so it feels very warm and very good to me since she's a dear friend.

And Sherah, thank you, Sherah, for bringing me here and everybody else. But I'll just-- let me know if I go on too long. I'm not going to drag this out too long. But I got some poems to read for you. This first one is called The Hundred Years' War.

At the end of the Hundred Years' War, everyone was tired. A few hours before dusk, a bell rang and a loud voice said, that's all, folks. So that was 100 years. It was sometimes in the 14th or 15th century, a Wednesday, and I felt having a beer. The buds were just beginning to come out on the trees and they had that sour smell when their vegetable minds turned to sex and reproduction.

I went to find my friend Gustav, and we sat down on a bench with a couple of beers, the real dark stuff with a lot of foam on top. Gustav was missing his right hand. He said, I can't even remember how it happened, but sometimes I'll wake up after dreaming about someone stealing my horse Silhouette. And I'll go out to the barn to check that she's still there.

And I'll reach up for the bridle with my right hand, and I don't even think about it. But she's still there every time. I'm missing a bunch of flesh too, I thought, but you don't hear me going on about it. And I'd never give my horse a God damn asinine name like Silhouette. That's half the reason we lost the war in the first place. Or did we? For all I knew, in some foggy valley in the Rhineland 65 years ago, I cut off Gustave's hand, and that's how we became friends.

Thanks. This one's called-- [CHUCKLES]

Yeah, there's so many people that have been in workshop, read, like, versions of these poems. Yeah, it's wonderful. I'd be remiss not to mention my teachers, I guess, which is with Joy Graham and Josh Bell here at Harvard, who have really-- I don't know. And of course, Sherah and Emma and everyone, Sam and Alex, one of my favorite poets. And all these people, so-- who have all crafted all of these, I feel, like, collectively.

Got a lot of papers here. I'm going to call-- or I'm going to read this one. This one's called Nature? About the journal, Nature? My mom's a biochemist. I used to read it a lot as a child. It's, like, poetry, like, all these, like, very, you know, just poet, nature, science. Nature. In the latest issue, the human heart is revealed to be made up of tiny filaments working overtime to contract, to expand temporarily.

Look at this cartoon diagram. Each color a protein wound like a tangle of birthday balloon tails. And here we have our model of an artificial heart, or rather, two genetically modified pig hearts beating inside the chests of two brain dead human recipients who must not wink or pause the pulsing inside their dim cavities.

Fold the page and see a new photo of the Large Magellanic Cloud, its mass unknown. This one's called Bionic Avatars. I know Jackie likes this one, so I thought I read it again. She asked me to read it at the first one. So it's called Bionic Avatars.

The tech billionaire hated death. He hated it more than the average person who hates it a lot. In meetings, he was always going on about telomeres and apoptosis. Make a note, he declared war against death at both the macro and the micro level, and the other people gathered around the table, nodded, scratched invisible itches.

He planned to live for 1,000 years, but not in a weird way like Dracula. Make a note, construct bionic avatars. Then he goes home and eats a dry muffin and drinks a protein shake and wipes most of the crumbs off his pants. In his bedroom, he watches amateur porn on a large screen because he likes to see what nonbillionaires look like naked.

He clicks on a video. The tech billionaire is disgusted. He can hear the television on in the background. He recognizes the theme song to Friends. He can hear the laugh track. The tech billionaire misses the bus, so his mom has to give him a ride to work. It is his first day of being a tech billionaire, and he wonders if the other employees will laugh at him.

A lot of people think being a tech billionaire is easy, but turns out it isn't. First of all, have to meet with politicians and pretend you like them. Secondly, your skin gets dry sometimes. Sometimes whole bits of skin fall off, and you have to replace them with wet paper. Sometimes a bridge collapses and it's your fault somehow. Sometimes you reap the whirlwind.

[CHUCKLES]

Decisions. How about this one? It's called Someday Soon. We're very honored to be sleeping with you today.

[CHUCKLING]

There is a button located behind your left ear, if you need any assistance. That thrumming noise you hear is the background for the rest of your life. These gentlemen will gladly escort your children into the other room now. I've got your test results back. And let me just say, you're obnoxiously kind. Our leading indicators indicate an upsurge in evangelical fervor.

My, my, someone's elongated today. Press Enter to exit the survey. Press the right button to tear off your mouth. No one is trying to take away your despair. I'm so glad you could join us. Don't use that tone with me, young lady. I'm your executive producer. This replica of your childhood home took us months to construct.

And now for the climax, we are going to burn it. If you reach into the pocket of the seat back in front of you, you will find the words to an incomprehensibly beautiful anthem. I encourage you all to sing along.

Got a lot of papers, yeah. It's basically going to come down to what I draw out of this pile next, yeah. Let's see, that one? Oh, they're printed on the front and the back. So yeah, we got-- this one's about this town I live in called Turners Falls, Massachusetts. I got a couple about Turners Falls. Maybe we'll do, like-- maybe we do one of them. This one's called And the Turbines Stopped.

I showed this to some people at various institutions, and they thought it was, like, a magical wonderland. But really, it was just me walking around where I live and writing down what I saw. So it's called, yeah, And the Turbines Stopped. We have visited your falls. We have seen the dam and the fish ladder where the blue blueback Shad struggle against the stream.

We have opened the candy stores. We have toured your historical museum complex, its wide halls dedicated to the memory of your once humming lumber and/or steel mill. We have perused the police blotter and we have noted an alarming rise in children who have taken to their tree houses and won't come down. We have tasted your pineapple-flavored microbrews.

We have restored harsh penalties for avian malfeasance. We have attended your high school's production of The Crucible for three consecutive years. Every year, we have applauded the performance of Ms. Amy Dennison, a performance that can only be described as electrifying. We have evicted all the squirrels.

We have urinated on no less than three municipal vehicles. Yes, mistakes were made, people were maimed, some in unspeakable ways. The plaque commemorating the massacre will, unfortunately, have to go. We have nothing further to report, except a flat screen TV leaning against the fire hydrant next to the mailbox where someone has spray painted the word "drugz."

That's with a Z. On the black screen, a shadow world should be reflected, the curbside snow, the distant peaks. A young man who has lost his drone across the river is heading toward an island. One or two terriers in the vicinity. A pair of Guinea hens is behaving strangely in the parking lot of the food city.

The lights flicker in the aisles. A woodpecker has spent all afternoon dissecting a tree limb. The sidewalk is covered with the tree. As the sun sets. A woman is still balanced on top of a ladder, painting a sign.

SHERAH BLOOR: One more.

ETHAN SEELY: What?

SHERAH BLOOR: One more.

ETHAN SEELY: One more? One short one? One more? [MUMBLES]

All right, all right, all right, we're going to do that. All right, I'm going to read this one called Song of Songs, which, since it's the Center for the Study of World Religions, I'm sure someone is familiar with the Hebrew Bible, with-- in the Hebrew, it's Shir hashirim. And so it's kind of I feel like it's dedicated to my dear friend Sherah, who put this all together for us.

Shir hashirim the song of songs. Well, you'll get the conceit.

SHERAH BLOOR: Will we?

ETHAN SEELY: It's all just oh's, basically. It's some oulipian kind of nonsense I was into for a while. But people seem to this one, so I just thought I'd read it and, like-- damn, this is like being recorded for posterity. All right--

[CHUCKLING]

Song of Songs. Yeah, I'm sorry for anyone who watches this in the future. Robocop strolls downtown to follow no-good goons who shoot common crooks, Hollywood's non-stop, tomorrow's go vroom, vroom. God's not wrong, got cosmos on lockdown.

Postdocs opt for monkhood, not lots of blowjobs, schoolwork, not off-color porn plots. Profs co-opt God's words for so-so books on Solomon's songs. Two Goth boys gone fond of non-orthodox protocols bow down to Malik's consorts. Off-work bookworms foxtrot to songs of cool blondes who slowly croon doo wop or Motown.

Don Johnson logs on to hotsoloboys.com to post photos of Don Johnson's cock. Townsfolk kowtow to food stubs who won't chow down on footlong corndogs. On Tom's porch, mobs of phlox blossoms form walls of sloppy color. Oh, Tom's on shrooms.

Most doctors own Volvos to go to and fro from Toronto to Boston, both hotspots for cow pox. Now look how flocks of crows roost only on rooftops of mom and pop shops, how monsoons flood low spots, bottoms of bogs or mossy pools, frost swoops down on cross town woodlots.

So who knows how forms morph? Who knows how forms morph, cow God to owl God, body to rock to Gorgon? Cold protons glom onto to gold horns. Foot born from hoof, logos on workshop doors. Don't stop now, oh, moon of Hong Kong, of Solomon, color of ox blood.

I'll do one more very short one. After that, and then we'll wrap it up. I'm just so honored to be on this lineup with such luminaries. Some Other Trees. I think it's good to read-- I don't know. I just want to read something that, like, I'm kind of working on or it's like-- I don't know. Trying to figure out as I go.

From the trees, I learned verticality, lifted my nose off the poodle-soaked mulch, frost my shoulders back and popped my skull on. They showed me how to walk with my feet planted. Now we walk around, pollinating each other's eyeballs. Oops, I'm pregnant. I learned to sneeze. Little apple wins on the sidewalk sleeve. I learned where we die. But in the interest of time, I'm going to have to leave it there.

[CHUCKLING]

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you.

SHERAH BLOOR: Give you a moment, recover.

[CHUCKLES]

ETHAN SEELY: You told me--

SHERAH BLOOR: Told you. I told you it would be fun. OK, so about five years ago, I was blown away listening to Nat Raha read in Berlin at a launch for very cool translation magazine that some Australian friends run there called Artichoke. And Periphery should be so cool, so we should also get Nat Raha. Her poetry is of an experimental queer lyric and resistance to racial capitalism.

Her most recent of three poetry collections-- but now I'm worried it's 4 and I messed that up, yes, it is-- is of sirens, body, and faultlines. But there's also this, which is new and is called Apparition, Nines and is over there probably for sale. She is lecturer in fine art critical studies at the Glasgow School of Arts and publishes important criticism and theory, which you will discover later when you Google her.

[CHUCKLING]

[APPLAUSE]

NAT RAHA: Hey.

AUDIENCE: Hi.

NAT RAHA: Hey. Thanks for having me. Thanks, Sherah, for organizing all of this. I feel like cutting my reading a little bit. Is that cool? Or should I go long or go-- OK, that's fine, I'll go long. Let's go long. it's been nine years since I've been in Cambridge, which is hilarious because the book's called Nines. And it's the 9th of September. This all just-- I only now thought about this in the last 20 minutes.

I'm not even joking. [CHUCKLES] Yeah, this is this-- I'm going to read from this new book that's coming out from Nightboat imminently. But there's some copies over there. All of the poems are nine lines long and they all have nine syllable lines. This is a form invented by a close friend of mine, the Niner.

My friend's name is Mendoza. They're an experimental poet based in London. I'm going to read the first nine poems, and then I'm going to read nine more, and then I'm going to read something else.

This of obscure cosmos, violence reiterated, vivid, paused, blood in fire and synthetics,

Silver and liquid, eyes stenciled, brick quote

As authors who could not conceive us and hold

To have lived, impossible gravity, chilled and all known ways.

I'm crashing the party, by the way. I was going to say that out loud. It's fine.

Dasima made and horny. I'll shave in flesh and lox dined on black beans, corn, and sugar,

Vagabonds, tinkers, tricksters and jailbirds had demanded our bodies owe

Fascist rags, codes and divisions, systematic flesh and capitals,

Nostalgia imposed in gender, evotive nations soil.

Agree, your logic treacherous, political and philosophic,

Distribution of thought and activity engineered, divestment, hot policing and exotic.

But some of us want to keep our jobs-- that's a quote.

In your demand that we flesh, nice for being and pills, had abolished your entitlements, our

Saxes and flashes constituted from the women and femmes who charged

You pale and sweating, majorities, smears and intonations, assured arrogant thieves.

If your violence a source of pleasure. We trust our anxious days and juts, where once bridges borders

Decline winter bones. Gorgeous, warm

Girl, if we are citizens of nowhere, a threat to the tone and image composed,

Cute lace, we divine femmes now here to dissect your impositions

So late in the day, buck organs in casual violence.

Your pleasure, excruciate living, and the beauty about our eye lines.

This decades old violence for bored stars and black salt.

She said the possible diminished, order administered names

Heart [INAUDIBLE] fall into the wage day.

Turbulent, shimmer, out of discourse, traded, closed, pinned,

Ordinary trappings and verse to squats dislocate.

In nationhood, your reveries, 500 truncated years.

We dined on stolen whiskey to our ministerial bones, forced to find work.

A rustic allegory region, narrating cities and aggressions.

Light and false, nature conditioned, cohered by skins, separated, crashed, lit.

A trial, your crimes of invention in my charred gold mini dress,

Cremated homes, debt and circuits, capital commission and hate,

Dined on flour, divine salt and threads of your flags aroused,

A vulgar comedy drives and erotics silenced beliefs and rituals disintegrating.

We impossible siblings, lobes, saw, close hairs and gleaming.

Our traumas dismissed, bitter salt stream in cheeks spark structurally,

Your lavish ships divisions devaluations institute ions,

Blood harmonics of work, migration and conjugal flicker track memory.

I'm getting taller as the reading goes on.

As all the exits shut, reverse the town hall. Each riot van, engine removed

Chassis near marine ecology. [INAUDIBLE] vassal's history.

Bitter salt, bitter, buried sands. Write it up the walk, seen before tarmac.

Babe, hold frequencies to be removed from air.

What spells, war. You're desperate internal coloniality,

Riots, food, 38 harvests, arctic and lungs on fire

Relations between things exchanged, labor, wages, dispossessions.

The centuries we disintegrate, found new feelings, consciousness, actions.

What futures you see and split. Chaos and falsehoods, your plague of affections, your extra legal arm.

Our specter, the reparation of centuries, Your thieved and hoarded borders

Dissolve formations and patriots, Black bodies against your empire raids.

This is after an album by the artist, Kindness, called "Something Like A War."

And softness, its weapon casting logics callous from us,

Arms as air, the sea, sensation spun unbinds in refusal,

Slow sequence of days, expanse retuned

Keep near your pastel tones, depth, sites, the heart on keys you grant yourself

Femme vox, affections unfurl.

Of all taken from bodies, our remaining hunger, and with it your price tags on sustenance.

Delayed payments, imaginary chains of power purchase what we call to abolish.

We've reassembled our affections and solidarities, our cracked efflorescent hands.

On the stand, list your horrors, proclamations and divestments

Pull blood from the crown and audio, your archaic printed murders, bludgeon civilized to this day

Against the name of your afflictions, your rebel and basic hatred turn hands to gather.

Stolen our lives and bodies back.

This is after Jose Esteban Munoz's "The Sense of Brown."

Organization, harsh, indignation of houses, our trappings and displacement

Vacancies, movements, crossing belts and bridges, intensive hope,

Unit care, emergent cries to lying under skin and soul.

Task to touch the space of sensation, dynamic dynamite.

Justice is a practice to unfold. Reverse the future, turn the truth up from soil in the everyday, compelled.

All that crashes with pandemic, all that's held against need.

And after our affections dozed, regressive histories bloom, alternate truths.

Membranes deteriorate. Toxicity, our fevers and constellations,

Trying to unstick garish riches. Preach to scold or corners.

Patterns for thought, feeling, action and whole blessings.

Pleasures, oxygen, and fear tears. Look me in the eyes with love.

There may be be some rustling. I'm going to read a long poem, some writing on the back. Well, it's long-ish. It's called "Retributions." It's for my good friend, Nisha Ramayya, who's a poet based in London.

I wrote this poem pretty much exactly two years ago. I was in a woodland, in a coppiced woodland. It's got this 500-year-old root system, and all the trees were last coppiced at the end of World War I in southwest Scotland. And she went back there a couple of weeks ago trying to think about questions around survivor embodiment.

And yeah, wait. I'm going to do something while I'm talking. Pull something up. And the poem is also responding to-- sorry, I'm going to-- excuse me if I open somebody's tab. The poem's also responding to this artwork by-- you can't see it?

There you go. It's responding to this artwork by Sutapa Biswas, who's a Contemporary South Asian artist who lives in the UK. She's based in the UK. She's Bengali. And this work's actually on display in Edinburgh till the end of the year. Come to Edinburgh. Jackie, come to Edinburgh.

Yeah, what do I want to say? So it's a portrait of the goddess, Kali. It's called Housewives with Steak Knives. We don't want to sign up to Art Net. That's fine. As you can maybe see, she's garlanded with a garland of heads of various 20th century figures.

This work's from 1984. And she's holding the head of a decapitated somebody-- a colonizer. And she's also holding a small flag, which has an Artemisia Gentileschi painting on it.

So this work's also responding to that. And the third thing is if you've been following what's been going on in Eastern India, especially in and around Calcutta, there's a feminist movement that's erupted in the last month after the horrific rape and murder of a 31-year-old doctor who worked at this hospital called RG Kar in Kolkata.

And the women, queer, and trans folks and men in solidarity with them, with us have been on the streets in Kolkata for the past month, including tonight. So I wanted to read this, feeling through all of these things, thinking about them.

"Retributions." It's got a series of epigraphs throughout the text, so I'll read them as we go.

At the edge of the world, I wait for the travelers who will not come from a [INAUDIBLE] weapons.

The courtesies of order of ruly forms pursued from the heart of rage or terror or grief

Defame the truth of every human crisis.

That's from June Jordan's Civil War.

[INAUDIBLE] interpersonal fissures, a new norm discarding sociality like enclosure,

A daily practice witness to dust piling, decimate cobbles exhumed, and neighbor's news.

[INAUDIBLE] narratives unexcavated from dunes.

In the prospect of absolute winter, we itch at palms, felines were out for--

Be either ensconced in frost or family. There's little boundedness.

Carries an alarm of blackbirds, tenor sax. The next duet's for rainfall.

Fill these rooms against separability, against the stake of deaths.

We politicize the relation, holding body minds together without together souls.

Utopia is what we fabricate between us. The now here, the what's been lived and the future reparative

Can leave your keys at home, See Us, Inc,

Even if the book doesn't come to print, plant it with willow, make it ritual like reading,

Make the practice of bodying root. Plant our miraculous arms or our poems in common.

Give 40 years, claim the land from capital. Tidelines, lips, buckled on the ice of the law.

Go into the heart of the city. Find seeds, mixed mouths, multiples spat in the direction of haters,

Bleached offices of Naval force, administration, permissories on sale to new worlds,

Drained and undrained fens, aromatics. Giddy trace on senses, intensive,

Lines feeding, winds wept, salting, north sea, [INAUDIBLE]

Go to the heart of the city, find the craters under infrastructure for sweat, cum,

Abandoned feelings from the full forces of bodies in movement dancing where we were found.

If there's trust in a generation's length already, divine glass, cinderblocks, fresh concrete and steel,

Muscles, ground oyster shells, pearlescent rays crushed into them. One.

Wrong mic.

[INAUDIBLE] proposes that the fight against fascism, imperialism, ethno-nationalism, colonialism,

Fantasies of owning land under the most dense military occupation,

Mouth stapled, arrested intellectuals, and emboldened racists,

Extrajudicial demolitions, echoes encoded screamed into walls,

The divisions and stakes with which a nation is reconstituted,

Claiming control of our bodies to breathe its vision of future.

Disintegrate small talk as a swerve and a continual burning of oxygen.

Reclaim an island, materialistic, dig in for gold, construct a prison to strike fear,

Splintering voice political, economic torpor, populated with deportations

To keep palms from world scheming, from the essential joining and sharing.

She proposes that the fight against fascism, imperialism, ethno-nationalism, colonialism

Begins in the home, domestic goddess labor, the entropy of Artemisia pritilata,

Removing the fishhook and facing the scorn.

Eventually, you've little option but to inaugurate a laboratory to implode or diffuse reaction.

And we of the line of abolitionists, the duress of placement.

A consistent sonic quake we find the kitchen is under.

Matter detunes, imprecise, accustomed like walls to fracture.

A locus of patriarchal compression. Such we, sharing preservation,

The word regeneration, vegetables, tinctures and arms of miraculous refusal,

Generous placelessness, the not here and the dispossession of here

With the lightning, khadgar-- the dagger-- mundamala,

An ultimate reality of our animate range.

Black illuminate flame, ascend collective scream as fullness of sky, as absolute night.

Kali could spare a body but no attitude servers and accouterments pattern to service patriarchy,

Drives vipers into burning peace. Turning fear to gage and mortar, decimate arteries of reaction,

Hatred, drinking the venom from the source, electric dripping red.

In your so-noble violences, persons, personifications beheaded, garlanded

Of crimes to serve as claims on the Earth against humanity, against ecologies

That consume the matter of us to inanimacy, to physical ends, to a well in the voice.

To streets alighting in fires, voices, tongues, conks, streaming hairs.

Goddess radiant arms that are her arms that are our arms that are her arms

That are our arms that are her arms that are our arms-- our her arms.

A collective intimate retribution, a riptide, a counternarrative, thunder, alternate truths.

Amidst the becoming, chaotic shreds that freedoms work,

Admonished abject, what's left by flesh.

Sediment, trashed sense to skin, spine, late in the wait like a nightmare,

Wormhole, potentia, bad time travel, craters trapping, vertebrate soundings.

Harms simmer under skin, echo, radio, active half-life's a glow,

Erupt barking, fibrous in densities disappeared, a traumatic practice of embodied resistance.

Left to subsist on a gratitude for life. Scars witness, rememory the social body.

The worlds we forge atop to decompose [INAUDIBLE]

Amber's freedom and the marvelous air like magma runs like our own blood.

A mass, make life in defiant multiplicity that the laws and disappearances fail to extinguish

To rest from structural violence the possibilities of maintenance, of life towards a reparative practice of the everyday.

Interlude.

That is what she used to say because she was capable

Of living over here and there and several places at once and several times

Yesterday, tomorrow. And so she was afraid. [INAUDIBLE]

Exchange presupposes the system blowing open, ears out to ocean's depth,

Ancestral surroundings on peaks and ebbs. By now, the freeze of our hands,

Years of body mind shielding break wind to record sound tide

Add months without touch, multiply for the increased speed of the Earth's rotation.

Lost count of moons between meetings. Pace of breathing, tigers, growth of the mangle.

I'm from the floor of the woods, awake arboreal instances.

A lattice incarnate as copies of roots predating enclosure, Cromwell

The coming up in the legacy of war, clear cut, the return of the repressed.

Count is a historical perspectives on even deep recesses of peace here shaped by violence.

The forest bears histories of labor, indentured migrant marginalized,

Gravitating tides, arms of million drawn into the well, denude, plantea, monocrop

A landscape, timber, rubber, coconut-- Malaya, Myanmar, Sri Lanka,

A worker's geography of debt, root, and bone, then called to this neck of the woods--

which is Scotland--

Over winter without coats, drives the chattering of teeth

Become anxious, grind to grounding, the recuperation of an empire,

Divisive frosts at black wrists, a population to a general strike,

Fabricating a refusal of the world in your image to sing.

The ashes and oaks, resonance, giving back to ground.

Scale the energy photosynthetic, jewels in light and labor, core and rooted here.

Bear turbulent breeze, recruited to the carving burn.

It's hard to know the bliss of a canopy in a meddling climate.

A drenching clarity offered, handed, fill the wrong kind of silent summer,

Late with chant, words to steed dejection.

Throw to the groove-- I'm going to do that again. I messed it up.

Throw, tear the groove. Present, anticipatory for Virgos moon,

Layered in the return of night. The page of co-presence, yet still in trappings, port this island.

In the conjure of limbs and flesh, commit.

Meant to nonlocality, proposing it, ever open to free exchange,

Energetics transfer in and out of and undoing this welding,

In the conjure of limbs and flash, train an eye to move and witness,

Body it like a warehouse or atelier, dropping assumptions, logics, objection,

Patterns and holding logarithmics that like to fly. Ease yourself down

[INAUDIBLE] and fly the limit in the conjure of limbs.

Throw and flash, emit, throw in the-- in the conjure of limbs, throw and fly the group,

Body minds unremember, spin, delaying,

Freaks refuse these conditions of destruction

Fuchsia and blaze

Like the reveal when the light comes up, some verdant [INAUDIBLE] to femme.

All that beauty brought through the room is a kind of love.

But the beauty subsides and fuck, we're back in the domestic,

Vox stretched over hearts, these frequencies lingering in us, in lives,

Proxim, me, Claude Cahun-- he's my cat-- and Gainer carrying bear paws.

(SINGING) Is it so, don't want to let you go, never can say goodbye, boy. Oh.

That is what she used to say. It is because she was capable of living over here

And there in several places at once. Several times, yesterday, tomorrow.

Coda-- [SPEAKING FRENCH]

Please excuse my French.

Dare to dream of a peaceful life.

Peaceful here does not mean a pacification or appeasing, but a politics and a practice of solidarity, love, and self-defense, as Francois Verges.

Daily eyes on galaxies. Autumn heat. Unbelieving carceral nights.

We recolor the cities with visions of love.

Dusks, truth in harm, warm flesh after its weaponization.

Can sacred image sound so loud to quell the violence that would follow us 100 orbits of the Earth?

Or does the power we envision as living stop you in fear

To question why you come to be scared of our blessed power?

Ritualize the beckoning winter, hours lost for a lack of national preparedness.

Practice the negation of hunger, a fire for this endless night.

Danced against prohibitions, spun and thrown into the fire.

There'll be days when survival stops all work,

When flesh fishes on the absorption of lava,

When our admission of pleasure moves us on the floors of the world.

Not only will we live, hand the scissors for the hair.

Forth Voices on high tide, a source.

However, of evenings turbulent emptied air.

Insects break like catastrophic economies, uncertain of stooping nations,

Hung like a garlanded half lunar face.

What are you afraid of? Houses will not hold for themselves.

Renarrating the black machete, fouls for survival on anointed Earth.

For life to return to ground, hold out your tongue.

Thanks.

[APPLAUSE]

SHERAH BLOOR: I don't know how to do that.

AUDIENCE: You did it. You did it.

SHERAH BLOOR: Sorry we're keeping you a little late but it's because we started a bit-- early or late, depending on the poster you saw. But OK, if anyone has gotten the chance to see Stephanie's glorious introductions to readings, you will understand how intimidating this is for me to introduce Stephanie. But I can only honor her renown by way of contrast and try in my fumbling way to quickly just express our gratitude to Stephanie Burt for her generosity and enthusiasm as a pedagogue and writer.

Her poems are also so generous, opening up the strictures of the craft to house superheroes in even punctuation marks who get to voice poems themselves. This is to reference her most recent, We Are Mermaids. There is no absence of world in Stephanie's writing, a friend said today. And Stephanie also brings the unsuspecting world to poetry in works of criticism such as the brilliantly titled "Don't Read Poetry." Stephanie, thank you. Wow.

STEPHANIE BURT: That was great. It was a great introduction. I don't want to be intimidating, and I'm very happy to be here. And I've been-- is Jackie still there? Jackie, are you there?

It's OK. No, I've just wanted to read with Jackie for quite some time. And now it's happening, and I'm excited. And I feel like we've been hearing these ambitious, world breaking projects that are in touch with the spirit of radical change. And here I am with my little tiny conventional jewelry things. But thank you, and thank you to the center and to everyone who have been reading with this.

I'm going to read a couple of new ones. And I will read for under 15 minutes. And if there's anyone here who's read We Are Mermaids and wants to hear a particular poem from it, I take requests. Seriously, it's really an honor.

Do we all know what t-shirt cannons are? No? Does somebody want to explain what a t-shirt cannon is? No? What? It fires wrapped-up t-shirts, yeah. That's what it does.

You see it in sporting events, and it just goes pew. You see them at halftime at sporting events. Do people want to hear a poem spoken by a t-shirt cannon? OK. It's just called "T-Shirt Cannon." You're on.

I do not see myself as trigger happy, though detractors call me a loudmouth,

Distracting and full of hot air, subtle as a helicopter,

Made from spring loaded worry, no tact and without compunction.

No one can say I haven't tried.

My favorite songs are bangers and on your feet anthems,

Whose four on the floor beat follows their function.

These little ones once came to me, all balled up and shiny, wrapped like tiny pillows.

They could never travel without my prior approval.

Until they got bigger, no one else knew how they felt or what they meant.

My aim is honestly a quandary. A prankster once tried to fill me with superglue.

It seems to me that I have taken forever to warm up and never felt ready.

And then it's over in the time it takes to pronounce four syllables.

Vicissitude, velleity, indelible. I will do almost anything next intermission.

To avoid feeling hollow, I have become a device, a way to deliver the soft goods you compete to take home.

They seek you. They hope you will fold their laundry.

I talk to myself when they leave. And then, and then--

Now stand if you can and try to catch my children,

Who sail through your field of view on their own like a rainbow. I may never see them again.

If you can guess, about eight lines in, my older kid just went away to college. Yeah. Now you know what the poem is really about, if you didn't guess. I'm not sure that one is ready to read.

"Student Evaluations."

The foamy tides daily believe they can climb all the way up the beach.

It's weird to be at this point where I've written poems that might go in the next book, but I don't know yet. So are there Swifties here? It's OK if there aren't. I just won't read the Taylor related poems.

AUDIENCE: There's literally no one here who listens to Taylor Swift.

STEPHANIE BURT: That's fine. We should talk later. We should talk later. I don't want to subject the high brow David Grubbs, experimental sound art fans in here to my poems about Taylor. It's OK.

I'm going to try something else first. I've been writing a series of prose poems on fairy tale subjects in collaboration with the great Mara Hampson, who is also a podcaster and voice actor-- H-A-M-P-S-O-N. And I encourage you to listen to them read fairy tales, which you can do on any podcast platform of your choice. So this is a collaboration. It's called "Little Wobbly Wolf Cubs Their Whole Lives."

They're not ghosts. They think they might be ghosts. Their eyes are large and liquid, like deer eyes or like a small pool after night rain. They know the wood, as other animals do. If they look back at you, they do so reluctantly, as if they would rather not reveal their ignorance of things humans expect them to know.

Most of them live in a hollow under a great oak log, softened and packed with mosses and leaves. There's a thatched trap door. They sleep there or hide. Those we have met have names-- Ivy, she/they; Birch, he, the oldest. The twins, Sparrow, she, and Fox, they.

Birch and Ivy seem to be raising the rest. Fox follows, we say, has a crush on Birch, who is manifestly too old for them. They know their own words, safe and family, which are the same. Clean, the same word is right. Dirty means wrong.

They like to eat fish from streams which they catch with their paws or with branches they sharpen all spring. They augment this refreshing, salty diet come August with raspberry canes and fiddlehead ferns. Winter is hard.

They have spent the autumn preparing and eating up, growing greater and softer. Bears are competitors whom they avoid. They are not ghosts. They think they might be ghosts. Do they look down on the other well-groomed children who had no choice or else for some reason allowed themselves to grow?

Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Is it sad? Is it fun? Do we like it? OK. I have never read this one aloud before. We'll see how it works.

And then I guess two from the book? Is that good? OK. I don't want to keep you for too long. That's two. Two more poems total. That's fine. That's fine. No, you gave me a sign. It's like, victory, peace, only two more. I like bunnies.

AUDIENCE: I'll sit here all night.

STEPHANIE BURT: OK. Some people have babysitters, honestly. That's a thing. My one who's now in college-- when both of my little ones who are not little anymore were little, they had child care across the street from here. So I'm having some feelings.

OK. I think one more new one, then a couple old ones, and then we'll be done. And I was invited last year to read at a high school in the Portland suburbs that has a memorial poetry event. And I learned that the backstory of this very well managed event for these high school students every year was that 15 years ago, there was a kid who was very, very into poetry, who went away to North Carolina and died quite young.

And his father, who hadn't quite figured out how to relate to the kid while he was around, decided that future young poets should have an easier time, and have poets visit the school. That's the backstory. So these were written for Lisa Melanson, the teacher there who runs it. They're just called main quatrains.

We want a future better than the past. Is that so hard? It is.

The great world wakes us up with a good morning. No, a good night kiss.

The tides complain as crescent beach. No, we complain and think that they agree.

Sand grains will never care for eggs or plovers, nor the salt wave for the sea.

Other people are not like you, except when they are.

If you meet all their needs, you can be like a star,

On your own in the far heavens, sending your strand of wave particles out,

Spilling far away beads while speeding away from what used to appear to be your fixed plot.

You can try to leave, but you can't leave. Everyone still here will tell you you're brave or naive.

I don't know. I think it's finished? I don't know. I think it is. A couple of Mermaids, we'll be done. Is that good? OK.

I was just thinking about some of the effects that you were able to get with the poems you read. And I thought maybe I needed to read a love poem that-- well, you'll see. And it's called-- and you'll see where this is going, unless you don't-- "Love Poem with A Roll On Its Side."

What if you really had never heard it before? The throaty voice,

The credibility and strength of a man who could always pick you up

And bring you to that one place and keep you there and never abandon you,

Who would move only slowly and never in circles.

A man who would hold your hand gently and yet unrelentingly,

Whose very hairline crept up to a heart-shaped peak,

Whose gentle curves matched black tea colored eyes and as if penciled brows

So that those farewell free, as long as you need me, tones of reassurance in him and him alone could be believed.

There is so little on this Earth you can trust, so little that comes around and never goes away.

But we will always have this gem, this constant companion,

This life preserver whose love is a promise you should have seen coming.

He is indeed never going to give you up, never going to let you down,

Never going to run around and desert you.

You did see that coming, didn't you? You did not. OK. If that wasn't funny, you can go home and Google Rick Roll and then hate me. I don't know.

Do we want "Superheroes" or do we want "New Zealand" or what do we want? You want superheroes? We absolutely need superheroes. Who's your favorite member of the X-Men or Marvel mutants? Does anyone have a favorite mutant?

Oh, yeah. I love him. So my Cyclops poem is in a chapbook called "For All Mutants." But I think about Cyclops all the time. Let me find you. The guy gets two weeks of happiness living on the moon with two of his three long-term lovers together and then they take it all away.

This is honestly as close to a Cyclops home. It takes place around the time I started reading X comics, so maybe you can go with this. Have you written a Cyclops poem? It's worth a try. Email me and I'll send you mine. It's just it's in another book.

"Potomac River, 1982."

Where I grew up, it was all wonderful and defensive. The adults were kind and never neglectful,

Bringing fresh water and grapes, oranges and juice and sunscreen,

Always asking each kid what we would need or might need

In the anticipated future, with its goldenrod bordered cleared field,

Its soft blacktop, its estimated yield.

We were told to look up with reason, to keep looking forward to a cloudless sky punctuated by drones.

You had to hide to be alone.

I think that's it. Are we good? OK. Thank you so much. And thanks to Shira for making this happen. And to the--

Sponsor, Center for the Study of World Religions.

Copyright 2024, the president and fellows of Harvard College.