ED HERMAN:
Welcome to Poetry Lectures, featuring talks by poets, scholars and educators presented by poetryfoundation.org. In this program, we depart from the usual format and hear a performance combining poetry with music. In the first half of the program, we'll hear pianist Mabel Kwan accompany Reginald Gibbons and Rachel Webster. In the second half, Poets Christina Pugh and Ed Roberson are accompanied by the music of Ari Brown. Reginald Gibbons is a poet, fiction writer, translator and literary critic at Northwestern University is a professor of English classics, Spanish and Portuguese. Rachel Webster's work has appeared in Poetry magazine and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Loyola University in Chicago and Northwestern University. Along with the poetry, we'll hear pianist Mabel Kwan play music by Jonathan Harvey, Georgy Ligeti and John Cage. This performance took place in April 2011 at the Fine Arts Building in Chicago. We begin with Rachel Webster.

RACHEL WEBSTER:
These first fragments are by William Butler Yeats. A tree there is that from its topmost bow is half fullall glittering flame and half all green abounding foliage moistened with the dew.

(PIANO MUSIC PLAYS)

From the first crescent to the half, the dream that summons to adventure. And the man is always happy like a bird or a beast.

(PIANO MUSIC PLAYS)

REGINALD GIBBONS:
But while the moon is rounding towards the fall. He follows whatever whims most difficult among whims, not impossible. And those scarred, as with the cat of nine tails of the mind, his body moulded from within his body grows calm layer.

(PIANO MUSIC PLAYS)

Reformer, merchant statesman, learned man, dutiful husband, honest wife by turn. Cradle upon cradle. And all in flight and all deformed because there is no deformity but saves us from a dream. Adams and Wabash. Where moonlight angles through the east west streets down among the old for America, tall buildings that changed the streets of other cities circulate elevated trains overhead, shrieking and drumming lit by explosions of sparks that harm no one and the shadowed persons walking underneath the erratic waves. Not of the lake, but of noise, move through fog, served by the steel mesh of the supporting structures or through rain that rinses pavements and the L platforms or through new snow that quiets corners, moods, riveted careers.

Working for others with hands, backs, machines. Men built hard towers that part the high air. Women and men built, cooked, cleaned, delivered, typed and filed. Carried and delivered. Priced and sold. The river and air were filthy. In 100 years, builders would migrate north a mile. But in those modern times, this was all the downtown that was. And circling on a round-cornered rectangle of tracks, run the trains clockwise and counter, veering through or loop the loop and out again. Why even try to list the kinds of places men and women made to make money? Not enough of them yet too many. From slow trains overhead, some passengers can still see stone ornaments, pilasters, lintels carved by grandfathers, great uncles and gone second cousins of today. Gargoyle heads and curving leaves like memorials for that which was built to be torn down again someday. For those who got good wages out of all this building or we're broken by it, or both, yet whose labour preserves a record of labour, imagination, ambition, skill, greed, folly, courage, cost, error story.

So that a time before remains present within the dark spark lit loud careening now. The collection manager of the bird specimens at the Natural History Museum told of often stopping on his way to work during spring and fall at the immense convention building. Tall, long and wide on the shore of Lake Michigan, where on the north side he would gather the bodies of the migratory birds killed by their collisions against the expanse of glass before first light. The north side, whether in fall or in spring. A puzzle are these particular birds blown off course by winds. And do they return in starlight or dimness before dawn or under dark clouds towards shore, making for the large bulk they might perceive as forest? They have been flying along the same route for tens of thousands of years. And not yet has their thinking formulated this obstacle of the city that has appeared in the swift stroke of 150 cycles of their migration.

(PIANO MUSIC PLAYS)

Avian time. Broadway and Argyle, smoky cold, broken, late afternoon clouds mob eastward, walking west I see on sidewalks.

No one I know, no one who knows me yet from all are wandering at the same hour comes shared under thoughts we can hear. Then once again that which is not darkness and darkens our obscurity slants rightly from sky to make bleak slush ice meekly gleam the effect of elms. Across the narrow street from the old hotel that now houses human damage temporarily. Deranged, debilitated, but up and around in their odd postures, taking their meds or maybe trading them is the little park. Once a neighboring mansion's side yard where beautiful, huge old elm trees long in that place, stand in a close group over the mown green lawn. Watered and well-kept by the city. Their shapes expressive. The effect of elms is of struggle upward and survival of strength. Despite past grief, the ballad languorous arches and torment limbs in the last stopped attitude of writhing. While under them wander the deformed and tentative persons, accompanied by voices counting their footsteps. Exhaling the very breath the trees breathe in.

An aching young man on the street approaches. Stops me with his eyes and sings. Sir, Sir. He shows me his right hand. It's purple and red, blood splattered, grotesquely swollen. He says he fell while chasing a thief who grabbed his backpack with his wallet in it. He has to get home by bus to Carbondale. He needs $65. He has 50. Shows me his jaw moves. What about the emergency room? I asked. Man, he says. I don't have a thousand for that bill. What about pain pills, Advil, Something? I ask, he says. That's $8 for a bottle right there. He's pressing his left thumb deep into the soft water balloons scabbing mess of his harmed right hand. He says, Man, this hurts. It feels better when I press on it. Don't do that, I say. I don't know anything. Why do I say it except his hand looks so bad. I don't see how he'll recover. A nurse says she told me if it's this swollen, then it is a broken. It's fractured. You know what time it is? In the face of his logic, I hold out no alternative. So I hold up my unarmed right hand to show him my watch, he says.

I can't see it. And I tell him it's two. I ask myself, why can't he see it? And he says, My bus is at five and I live an hour and a half on the other side of that. Got to get back to Kentucky, while a nearby billboard keeps showing us both an ad, a visage, half woman and half leopard, a face this age wrongly puts on fortune may be wronging the woman, the leopard and us. And then the row of courageous trees that live and die down the sidewalk. A wind is shoving the leaves this way and that.

RACHEL WEBSTER:
Started like this in delight. How could I not see the leaves ringing yellow with light taste the berry opening on my tongue and not want to tell you. If we had never separated. If we had gone on walking hip to hip, then just the extension of the arm wonder in the eyes. Soft fruit warm in the hand, passed from my hand to yours. Just this would have been enough. But I walked further to gather you crouched, waiting and hunt and what I saw was pedals opening a quickened winging. How could I not pursue it? How could I not come back to tell you with my nimble fingers than a flutter of music on my tongue? My first word was, Look, I met this missing. You meet this thus and undercurrent of the word is love. When I saw it, it was early in morning's memory. With that fog around the edges and me wrapped in blankets, rocking just up and over the rung of consciousness into the blurred limbs. I was coming to know as my own, into a car, clapping through a broth of wind and rain. Parents murmuring in the front seat over wiper beats and soft talk radio sounds to become the beginning and end.

A slow unwrapping of cinnamon gum and her passing it to him as he aims us straight and low. The car slows, then stops. She opens the door to asphalt soap sky. Across the road, a workman is climbing the hotel sign. He scales the tight white rungs until he's high as the building. Until he's no longer what I understand as a man, but something small enough to hold and bend like an action figure or a poem. Is this the moment two years later when I realized the bag slung over his heart is filled with black letters? Is this when I have him pause at the top, heart lock, rushing his limbs one march done? And how long can I stare like this at his body interrupted with mist, his tiny hand reaching into his tiny bag and me clutching orange juice, still swaddling my newness in this world before I see it? No, no of a moment dropping through the hollow pole of a life and it goes on happening. Yet it happened almost slowly. A man falling like no more than a bright spoked star of snow with me there trying to wake.

Shuttle. Rain falls all day on the day your mother was born years before. We're so happy we have this soft rain. This soft rain someone says You think? Yes. Of the bloodroot pushing up through its hood of skin. It will erupt in a foam of white and yolk yellow at the stem. She was alive during the war and safe enough on this half of the world. But you saw her looking through the hissing fence, pressing food between its barbs with warm gloved hands. She saw you, too. Then one day, only tired dirt and burnt grass under the stench of skin. She couldn't wait to have you. The boy with the marks on his back, you grew and you were wholly absorbing the blows of the rain. Then you left as if you could leave the sight of these gouged wings, scars behind the heart of having fallen. Cold. Cold. The rearranging air. The hell note of the yet who are you? What you remember a story? You can shine a few years to where you are, not you and new. We climbed back from the beach of three as shifting pools dissolve the sky and swaths of peach and gold.

And night folded us back to its bruise. The dark seemed to rise like steam from the earth, beginning in the ankles of trees and leaves, undersides then up the black basalt in sandbanks until it saddened our path, swallowing our hands, our feet, and we could not see to see. We poured the ground for the soft hemlock needles, flexed our toes for the jutting stones and called on our technologies, lighting our keys, our keys, our keys. I crawled on hands and knees and yelled out commands while you cried, terrorized. You fell a long way into memory falling. But somehow we reached the top, mostly unscathed. And after sleeping late in times carapace, we woke alive for the first time.

The setting of that last poem and this next poem is Kauai, where I lived with Richard Fammeree. And this reading is dedicated to him. And I was pregnant with our daughter there, and we took her back when she was about 18 months old, thinking that it would be this blissful experience for her to return to where she came from.

And she was wildly uncomfortable. So that there are surprises everywhere. So this is written after that Kauai. We've come back to the site of her conception. She calls it why and cries all night, sleepless, wild. It seems the way is always floating and the goal to live. So the ghosts we were don't trail us an echo. I think we're inside a flower under a pollen of stars vast as scattered sand. The air pulses with perfume, flowers calling the flowers and the ferrying air. But my eyes are thin and elsewhere. I'm thinking maybe even coming into the soul is a difficult birth squeezed in the body's vice. My pant leg like pinchers or the vegetable petals of some tropical flower, even my mind gripped by the folds of the flesh. How the cell keeps doubling itself out into complex. The tulip trees of the valley spread their bone canopies into slick green leaves and fire flowers deep as cups their cups fill with rain, rain drinks, the leaf drinking rain. I can't begin to explain how on this porous peak of stone in the sea, our daughter came into me.

Little flick of a fish I could not see. I was just learning to be human and upright among all that life. And what was real was stranger than night with its dust of unnamed sons. It was the beyond in us. And she was cream of the pores is the cream of skin thickening. I look out, black leaves, colour of dried blood, and my ulcerated tonsils fluttering as I breathe open-mouthed through the branches there are branches. Some remember their lives of green, some hung languor, a sturdy with sap. The question becomes how to live the right life, filling with it as a liquid converted from light until it becomes the way that factors your place. Until just walking to the car with some coffee you can sense suddenly purpose and traffic and glances, wind swirls, clattering wrappers to the street. The man with a gunning hose dividing the sidewalk into continents of soap, commuters and students, umbilical to music and that branch quivering as it touches another, which is also, of course, itself.

SPEAKER:
That was Rachel Webster and Reginald Gibbons with pianist Mabel Kwan. Next, we'll hear Ari Brown's piano improvisations, along with the poetry of Christina Pugh and Ed Roberson. Ari Brown is a multi-instrumentalist and composer whose principal instrument is the saxophone. He has performed in diverse settings, such as with Anthony Braxton, Chuck Berry and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Christina Pugh is a poet and literary critic and teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Ed Roberson has taught at the University of Chicago, Columbia College and Northwestern University. But his poetry draws on his experiences in the Amazon, Alaska and elsewhere. The set begins with Ari Brown and Christina Pugh.

CHRISTINA PUGH:
I and though. Must we cultivate our kindness? Can we book a fellow feeling for the sake of the fellow, not the ghost? Last night, for example, the white-haired girl told us singing was like praying. And that iron of naturalized note in the bluegrass made me want to say sublime to myself. In the sapphic sense that no sublimity is love. Oh, wash me green as yonder field. And the girls read song did light from the stage. Constellating phrases like heavens divided in a quaver between forte and whisper. Acute supple waivers among syllables and slants. And now may you keep me close within your ear. I can hear the voice I loved when I wondered at its dialect. You know, if I'm ever able to speak. I want someone human to answer me. We'll never die. Out of the blue and into the black. Can you see the grain that waves the most delicate grain of the voice I long for. Precarious shaft between melody and speech. If you step on the ice, it will splinter into worlds. Then incalculable spokes. Much as dust to dust, the preacher said.

Most artful when it cannot hold your weight consider green burial. Your coffin smallest room will irresistibly dissolve. Your stanza lip the snow and your nutrients plume like a twister in the dirt. His voice is abrading in the shallows of my ear. The seam between quiet and vibrato. As tears, I'm thinking of his portrait. It's an x-ray, a street lamp. The leash of his spine. Be skyward from his haunches cloud. He's dying. But the x-ray is holistic in itself. Film here and sweeter than my own powder living bone. Call it seepage, wetering erosion or any word that typifies the structure treading ocean word. Breath word burning in scape of the rays. Surfboard or waterboard and tissue still a music. Now, this regally to burn as tears of by. Have you noticed how translucent, these red maple leaves wave? Shot silk light shot. Something nearly right, but not nanometers of depth were shivered from the leaf. Is when we say a hair's breadth to codify everything. The eye can't strip, restrain this difference.

Since a soft uniform code. The uniform of darkness. Our eye by definition will try to allay. And if the macula fails. Then every passing face must worl the same. The undulated maple leaves armed vegetable but glass pulled and proto crinkled by a man who made an ethic of my mist. Whose blown glass iris was equivalent in glimmer. To the one brown eye still wet in the socket.

(PIANO MUSIC PLAYS)

Mute. If, in the midst of conversation, friend shares space with a flat-screen eloquent as sculpture or painting was within the neutral confines of a room. How will it feel to see singing silenced as a fountain of youths living rock lyrics in Japan? How to note neon stars sequencing in squalls above musicians' heads, if not within a camera's mute and oscillating swoops. How in hair shaken soundless over drums and bone arms crooked to hold guitar. How to know the listeners who vibrate base against the balls of their rooted feet. Their eyes closed tight as if to say I shall not want. And neither shall I want.

Though we speak with sorrow on the death of the body. Let rapture be the screams dissemination.

(PIANO MUSIC PLAYS)

ED ROBERSON:
The skipping stone stays out of the water. The standing up in the boat, crossing the Delaware. The bandaid commercial parade of drum flag and five. The Evil Jimma collection things that are terms like four little girls flying around inside and exploring church. People being washed down the street with water, dogs in the St George in the dragon art history position on command on top of women. The camera catches the skipping stone. The skipping stone stays out of the water long enough to cross over concurrence to accountable term, but not over the deaths of those who go under say just prior the altered shore who are entire now complete but not ideal. A prediction of the bird ear distance. The spark of a single reptilian scale is passed without going the full length to one down the sequence suddenly across salute catastrophe, plane of locomotion tossed off on black sand. The line in a sidewinder sand explaining lifting off the continuum of the earth, explaining leaving one surface for another to arrive elsewhere on the first in time, to take up the percussion of living on the one hand and have to strike death into it to dance down the other.

Any distance between coiled tightly around the rattling emptiness, to drive a sense like that gorge-hidden singing of beating tar from an asylum seeker singing to fly the round walled growl. The seeds throw like bones. The steps are coiling hips. Our music leaping off this plane-like like a dance. That footwork takes us higher. How if stepping skips those places, how the dancing flies, how matter admitted and explained. Lifts from its lie its term of flight. Accountable to be done something with a stone touchdown to resurrect prediction to dictate to organize are missing. And from that ghost create those backs of the waters we cross on. Those black shadow known, no. That black apotheosis in the simplest shared indigenous American things already. And of Cyrus, the Middle passage has brought home along what rivers, deltas and Mississippi's mean to us. But this is what is always skipped. This is the lift the country gets to get moving the term Mickey Mouse renewed. Each generation evokes your hugs, but what face stirs your concern like one of color except to lemming separation for our distance to a distance is renewed.

(PIANO MUSIC PLAYS)

When we made the middle passage. Didn't we walk the waters? Didn't we have the waters paved with the skulls of our grief for each other? Didn't we make it on ourselves? When we crawled under the Mason-Dixon? Didn't we jump the fence over Jordan? Didn't the river reed behind us and turn blood because the bloods wouldn't tell? Didn't we make it to this one side on our other, on ourselves? Didn't we get put up? When we went back down home. Didn't we hide in each other? No hotels but we stood uppity a chance of getting shot. Didn't we walk on the shadows years later of Emmett's children who did? Didn't it make you step higher than just to walk? Didn't the westward push opening the country turn middle passage trying to shut us out? Our panic or panic at the plow flat and hardness of our feet having stood stood on each other. Didn't we open the rock like our hearts? Didn't it bleed to yield to till to eat? Didn't it? Didn't it rain? Didn't it? Didn't it rain?

ED HERMAN:
That was Ari Brown on the piano with poets Ed Roberson and Christina Pugh. Earlier, we heard poets Reginald Gibbons and Rachel Webster with pianist Mabel Kwan. The event was part of the Poetry Off the Shelf series and was co-sponsored by the PianoForte Foundation and the Poetry Foundation. It took place at Curtiss Hall in the Fine Arts Building in downtown Chicago on April 16th, 2011. The recording was provided by Chicago Public Radio's Chicago Amplified Program. You can hear this and other events recorded by Chicago, amplified at WBEZ.org. During his four-decade career, Ari Brown has appeared on more than 30 jazz albums, including Ultimate Frontier and Venus, both on Delmark Records. Mabel Kwan performs contemporary music in Chicago and throughout the US both as a soloist and a member of the Ensemble Dal Niente. Among Reginald Gibbons, many books is Slow Trains Overhead Chicago Poems and Stories, published in 2010 by the University of Chicago Press. In addition to her own poetry, Rachel Webster has edited two anthologies of poetry by young writers Alchemy and Paper Atrium.

Christina Pugh is the author of two books of poetry, Restoration and Rotary. Ed Roberson has published numerous books of poetry, including City Eclogue and Atmosphere Conditions. You can hear him read and speak about his work in a previous Poetry Lectures podcast. You can read more about these poets and some of their poems at poetryfoundation.org. Also at the Poetry Foundation website, you'll find articles by and about poets, the Harriet Blog about poetry an online archive of more than 10,000 poems. The Poetry Learning Lab, The Complete Back Issues of Poetry magazine and other audio programs to download. I'm Ed Herman. Thanks for listening to poetry lectures from poetryfoundation.org.