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0:11
Hello everyone, welcome, I'm Rachel Galvin. I'm associate director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Chicago and I teach in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature and I want to welcome you to the first live episode of "Writers in Residence," which is our new virtual reading series here at the Creative Writing Program and I also want to wish you a happy National Poetry Month, so today we will be having a poetry reading of Rachel times two. I'll
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be reading some poems alongside my wonderful colleague Rachel DeWoskin, and before we get to that I just want to say a quick word about this series. So this is a virtual reading series that we've launched as a way to continue cultivating literary life at University of Chicago and to keep our spirits up and connect during this challenging time, so over the next few months we'll be featuring readings from our faculty in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.
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We'll have two readings per week like today, two live readings -- sorry, we will have two readings a week, some of them will be live, some will be pre-recorded -- and we'll drop them at certain times that you can tune in for. Anything that's live will be recorded and closed-captioned later thanks to our student workers at the Creative Writing Program and those will be released as well. So, you can put it on your calendars -- coming up on Tuesday April 21st at 12:30 Central Standard
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Time, we'll have another poetry reading by John Wilkinson, the director of the Creative Writing Program and poet Nate Hoks. On Thursday, April 23rd at 5:00 p.m. we'll be dropping a pre-recorded reading from two other poets, Patrick Morrissey and Peter O'Leary, and we have many more we scheduled after that. You can find the schedule online on our website, which is creativewriting.uchicago.edu as well as on our YouTube channel and on Facebook, so
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there's many ways to find us. Also, our amazing team has been uploading videos of terrific past readings so those will now be available on our YouTube channel. In the future, we'd love to feature student writers as well, so if you are a student and you're watching this please visit the Creative Writing Program website or our Facebook page and you can find a Google form to fill out and indicate your interest. I also want to give a shout out to my students, who are
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participating in National Poetry Month and have created a U Chicago writing group where they are giving each other prompts and writing a poem for every day in the month of April, which is a totally impressive undertaking. So before I start reading I just want to give a really warm thanks to Jessi Haley, to May Huang, and to Starsha Gill and all our student workers who've done an exceptional job at setting up this series of events in this new streaming
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format which we're all coming to for the first time. They've been really incredible and really creative in making this happen during a tough time for everyone and I want to thank UChicago arts and John Wilkinson, the Director of Creative Writing, and Debbie Nelson, the Chair of the English Department, for supporting this series. And thanks to Dina Peone for coming up with our name for this series -- Writers in Residence -- and to Andrei Pohorelsky, who composed
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new theme music for the broadcasts. So without any further ado I want to get started with the first reading. I'll read for like 12 minutes and then I'll turn it over to you Rachel DeWoskin. So I'm gonna start by reading just a couple poems from a book that came out in 2018 Elevated Threat Level and I'm gonna read a poem called "The Age of Contagion," which feels relevant in a new way right now although it was written in an earlier moment. "Age of Contagion. Say a
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prayer they used to say in that part of Vermont before crossing into New York meanwhile a child's spine was being stretched by special South Korean machines until his body curved into a bridge he blinked there for a while maybe one day he would become tall and wealthy no more short powder kegs keep your ears up anything can happen ping-pong is king in Silicon Valley meanwhile women wearing prayer shawls congregate illegally under umbrellas by the Kotel of course the whole family was
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quarantined though they'd never know if they'd really had it investment bankers are going abroad in swarms they try to warm themselves by the small fires of corrupt collections the passport-free are processed and returned whence history boating through the flux of escaped administrators seeking a quiet farm and a new name nevermind the language the climate's fine meanwhile holy meanwhile in Haiti one girl survived by eating fruit leathers
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for three days." And the next poem I'll read, which is also from Elevated Threat Level, is the title poem, Elevated Threat Level Sonnet. I don't usually write sonnets but for some reason there's a number of them in this book I was sort of sonnet-prone at that moment for some reason. "Elevated Threat Level Sonnet" -- and I'm reading this also because although it was written earlier it is a poem that talks about solidarity and feeling
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connectedness in moments of fear and crisis although this is an earlier moment of fear -- "Elevated Threat Level Sonnet. Forty geese flock and dispell across the page they say there's an order to the distribution of headlights on the beltway we bow to choreography, dozens of feet marching and halting in sync down a broken Metro escalator if you place your ear on the sand the systolic diastolic rhythm of infinite cells each opening and closing its one mouth says
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we are marked like Cain and when the train halts in a tunnel you see your own falter in the eyes of a woman you don't know just as two cells from the same heart scraped into a petri dish pulse in time." So I'm going to switch gears and read a poem that I just wrote a couple days ago. So I'm sort of daring myself to do this right now -- I've been trying to keep up with my students and write every day, and this is a poem called
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"In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower." I ripped that off wholesale from Proust -- that's the name of his novel as it's translated into English. So, "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. Five girls in a cluster with careless stride at first indistinguishable from one another then it's clear they're tw,o three, five teenagers like Proust's healthy girls emerging at the seaside his young girls in flower with their bicycles and athleticism today when
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they're banded together it's not what they might do but just the fact of teenagers together outside that expresses contempt -- lost my place, sorry -- that expresses contempt for others face exposed arms linked all they have to do is walk down the street to send the message they just don't care they don't give a fig for the 20,000 people who have died this month in our country the sheer fact of their presence outside in a relaxed, casual gaggle of
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good spirits is a stronger statement than anything they might say or do they don't need to jump over the head of a seated old man to frighten him like Proust's young girls did at the beach simply by strolling in the street together they're jumping over the heads of everyone who lives in this neighborhood the elderly woman walking her dog who lives right over there who throws her hands up when she sees me and says what are we gonna do what are we gonna do people in the building are so afraid to
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get the mail out of the mailbox they go down at 3:00 in the morning in a mask can you imagine what are we gonna do the masked old man who slopes to the left when he walks as he walks alone with his limp around this park and around this park each day at 2:00 p.m. nodding to himself the woman who waves to me from her front porch right over there she may not have spoken to anyone today but a few strangers passing by and she says to me can you believe those blooms I
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scattered some seeds and I got two colors look there's white and pink it's as if this band of girls has decided their neighbors belong to another species whose lives spark no sense of fellowship they're filled to the brim with a youth they are so desperate to expend that like an automated lawnmower they force other people to step out of their way their only flicker of awareness shows when an elderly woman whose existence
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they don't register stumbles to the side frightened or furious or both and then they look at each other and smile at the fleetingness of people they don't know."
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All right, and I will finish with a short poem and a medium-sized poem from a new book, a new manuscript that I've recently completed called "Uterutopia" and this poem -- the short one -- is called "Little Death." It's dedicated to the Brazilian videographer Jonathas de Andrade whose work inspired this poem. "Little Death. When a man traps a fish he removes the hook from its side and once it has beaten its fright into the wooden boat with its strongest slaps
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he will clutch the fish to his chest and hold it as it struggles he will hold it in the tender air he will hold its tail as if it were his dance partner's waist and gaze into the fish's face for many minutes when a man seizes a fish he soothes it caresses its whole body tip to tip while it thrashes bloody against his bare chest he will clasp the fish with one hand like a newborn and hush its gasping with the other with love he will tuck it under his chin so he can
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feel its heart beat in the insistent heat that hangs above the water remember when a man catches a fish he will seduce it while he slaughters it the strength of his love can't be simulated the sound of the green water can't be simulated he will kiss the wheezing gills his kisses can't be simulated he will hold it as it struggles that little death he will hold it in the tender air." All right, last one.
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This is also from Uterutopia. It's called "Meat and Honey" and I wrote this after seeing an installation that Damien Hirst did at the Tate of basically a butterfly terrarium in a giant room that you pass into and you experience the butterflies living out their lives and then can pass out and I don't want to say more about it because I don't want to spoil the poem but I spent a long time in that room and going in and out of the room sort of
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thinking about it and this is what resulted. "Meat and Honey. Heavy rubber curtains the doorway of a human-sized butterfly terrarium we're instructed to proceed at a steady pace amidst our fellow creatures in this humid environment of birth mature mirth manure amidst the exacting children spotting gorgeous color insects feasting on fever honey this moulding mass is thrilling dismaying a microcosm of the pheromonal planet the
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room is a 3-dimensional metaphor and a climax of romanticism bringing life into art or maybe the other way around if the creatures had been house flies they would have been hideous reminding me of my own corpse rotting none of the resurrection covenant of the rainbow that's bundled into the butterfly what if he had used small foxes or cats maybe their lifespan is too long but it would make a hell of a durational piece I slide through and out and back in again
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it's impossible to think of how many lives are" -- sorry -- "it's impossible to think of how many lives are happening amidst the wriggling filaments the legs with a single claw impossible to think of those that have already happened and ended those who are hungry who are not at home who are broken who are falling right now when I first discovered orgasms I walked through the world in a haze wondering why that wasn't what everyone does all day long how can anyone talk of anything
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else now I think the same of death how can anyone think of anything else I'm terribly attached to my own consciousness I'm at home in the scaffolding of my own mind the taste of my knees the smell of my armpits the beats my feet keep and those they don't my compound eye my proboscis I imagine losing this imagine someone else passing through the rubber curtains watching me feed on sugar water spin a silk mat shrug off exoskeleton eat it like an edible overcoat and fall to the floor behind a
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trailing plant it's devastating and the crimson the orange and yellow the inexplicably golden chrysalis make a difference little angels little widgets pumping fluid into crumpled wings until they stiffen photographs are forbidden but they'd be useless anyway the point is to move and sweat losing our signatures like a dancer's unmistakable ankle how she lifts a whole shoulder with curiosity as one might lift an eyebrow my body inclines toward another I sip the air with my tubular sucking organ
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I'm a question made of meat and honey."
16:24
Thank you for listening, thank you for tuning in, everyone, and now I will pass the mic to my brilliant colleague Rachel DeWoskin who also teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Chicago she is known as a prolific fiction writer but today she'll be reading from her brand-new book of poems which excitingly was just published -- it's hot off the press from University of Chicago Press and fittingly for our reading of lunch poems
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today her collection is titled Two Menus. I know she'll say something else about it. Please give Rachel a warm welcome. Thank you and that reading was so kaleidoscopic and beautiful and generous and intimate, I loved it, I loved being part of this with you and I want to echo and amplify the thanks to Jessi and Starsha and May and John and Debbie and all of our colleagues, our fearless inimitable scrappy imaginative colleagues and students who have been so creative and so generous in what is an
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excruciating moment for many of us. I'm so grateful to the University of Chicago in so many ways and to the Press for putting my poetry book in the world and to you guys, my students in particular, for showing up today to hear these poems. I'm gonna read four poems from the collection and then one poem from the trenches of the present moment and I'll end with that one. So the first poem from Two Menus is called "The Blind Massage Parlor." "Doctors Han and Wang run
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the love heart massage in one of Beijing's two and a half billion broken alleys. 'You'll recognize it by the red awning,' Dr. Han says on the phone. And when I do, I wonder who told him.Later, on one immaculate bed in a row of seven, I feel Dr. Han’s fist wedge between two innocent bones in my shoulder. He accompanies the soundtrack of my gasping with a simple statement: 'We hated Titanic.' I shift my weight on the straight, white table. And arch my eyebrows, a gesture
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Dr. Han overhears. He rests his right hand for one thoughtful moment on my spine and explains. “The story was stupid with its music. Your American Hollywood knows what about love? Nothing in that movie fit.” I make shy eye contact with a client in a bed across the row. We are the only two here today. I think she loves Titanic from the delicate way she lifts her neck to look at me, confused. I smile and replace my face into the massage table’s dark space.
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Maybe Dr. Wang and Dr. Han also smile —at each other over us, because Dr. Han says “We’ve been married for eight-teen years. We feel what other people just see.” Only after Dr. Wang, his wife of eight-teen years, giggles like a movie star in love, does he turn his attention and hands back to me. “These days we have a lot of foreign clients!” he remarks, “How do you say in English: Does this hurt?” So the second poem is the title poem, "Two Menus." Outside McDonald's downtown in Beijing I
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board a bus boundfor mountains with Xiao Dai who carries equipment, asks why I have to be so headstrong. I say nothing. We belongto a climbing club. Sheer rocks. It is better to be the head of a chicken than the tail of an ox. Men mention wisdom whenever I disagree with them. I am roped in, belayed. If we fall, we all all. My fingers are between a thin ridge sideways, gripping. I leandown to tell Xiao Dai it’s better to be neither
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I lean down to tell Xiao Dai it’s better to be neither chicken nor ox. He can’t hear me. The rope swings, flicking sparks off cliffs. Translation is insurance. With just enough to cover what we must, we we speak only where there’s overlap, conserve our syllables, expressions, every move. The restaurant in Beijing called Bitterness and Happiness has two menus: the first of excess, second, scarcity. We order flesh from one and from the other,
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grass.The Chinese language has 77,000 characters Xiao Dai regards as evidence. When I ask of what, he is putting roots on my plate. Love, he says. My footing gets rocky around these matters of fact. A word for each affair? The waiter is back." This poem is called "Without." "Without. Teach me to love without irony or violence and I’ll sing you a city with waves on the drivelike icy chimes, listen —how many notes shatter as they reach the shore. Cold enough water actually stacks. Get in with me,
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freeze, suffer, thaw. Let me love you without believing as I used to that we’re safe, may last. Instead, let’s peel, strip raw, find what matters, move against each other and whatever this is. If I could dissolve the words I use to hide, I would write you hovering above me, tubes moving fluid from wounds I could not see without the lights in my mind shorting they short here to go black and yet you looked. You took those drains on, stripped them, tackled the project of my
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body by way of language, measured, counted milligram chances, wishing to statistic us straight back to the other oblivion, you stayed you after magicians sawed me open, sewed me back together you kept all that we agreedon when we — stunningly young —said no matter what. Who knows what what becomes, how vast impossible, how much of our own blood. In plastic bulbs, on gowns, still moving through us, submerged, blue. Teach meto love the way you do,white tape, clean gauze, let me see
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endless, see so many hazy days now clearing, now the lake is ice again, now winter. Frozen waves are chipping at each other, sharp and gray. But high up we are dancing, reassembled, brave because surprise keeps us — our minds and marrow lit -- alive." I'm gonna read the last poem from Two Menus and then my short social isolation poem to finish. The last poem in Two Menus is called "Too." "Sing a song of sense, this surface of the lake, roiling water, lolling cusp of
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summer, maybe dawning wonder we are late to join. Chorus of us. Women spackled, rageful, wracked, we sparkle undercurrents of unutterable bubbles coming up. Come up. From buried, sunk, from fear, link words, make stable something, here: when we don’t, when we do, when this, when shut up, when beat wordless, when we’re silent with what’s senseless, bound toward dirt, erased, diminished. When we erase to sleep, swim, cope, when we learn how to choke down rage, pain, want, when
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not allowed to name, when eating (is a) failure, when daring, flawed, disgusting or averting too, when, too, then flee it, flee. Come with us. Ride this grief, ride pride to some reach safe from eating our own, from hunting what we never meant to be. Mean it. Don’t pack words in your furious marrow, shout shout out what we made: language, all the babies, hell, ourselves." And then my final poem is called "Social isolation, spring" and before I read it I just want to say how
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vulnerable and generous, Rachel, I found your reading your new work and how more and more I want to try to do that and I want to encourage our students to read out loud your beautiful works in progress and to submit some of them to Working Document, our magazine, which honors process because how writers talk to each other about what we're making when we're still making it before it's so polished that we're not embarrassed anymore is very meaningful and in
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this moment when polish is maybe not the point I think we can oxygenate our conversation and our willingness to show each other our drafts even more so here's my draft: "Social isolation, spring." "If time, if change, if anything at all can bloom: if lemon, iris, if this distance is a silent highway, blinding sunrise, call out from our pods some notes, a chance to move through tunnels of shared terror, hope, if echoes, if please let me hear
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your voices carried on this weirdly icy breeze, if what connects us keeps, we may be on our knees, in pure despair—but also might from far away be synchronized, our breathing, prayer." Thank you. Oh my god that was fantastic, thank you so much for that reading and you had this moment of thinking about being synchronized at the end of your last poem so we kind of connected through that imagery in our work that was really beautiful. Thank you for sharing something in
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process too and making me feel less alone in that and thank you to everyone for tuning in and for being here and being together in these moments that we've been reading right now the in Chicago the sun came out, it snowed and the sun is back out again for what I can see out the windows so hang in there through all the changes and the ups and downs that we're all weathering right now and please tune in next time same time same place
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YouTube and 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time with poets John Wilkinson and Nathan Hoks and we welcome your feedback and comments on the YouTube channel page you can make comments you can visit our Facebook and again you can find us at creativewriting.uchicago.edu. So thank you all, be well, stay healthy, be kind to one another and see you next time. Thank you.
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