david very generously helped her with developing the managed care that became her go uptown to town in the center of things and i know she was greatly appreciative of david's generosity with  very much i appreciate being here and you hear me i assume you're not hearing anything from these mikes ok i've been working on a speech for a week so i'm going to read it it's a war between plain speaking poets and others and the ones who believe poetry is made of a secret language that only a few have access to i recently heard s author of brown girl dreaming the national book award for young people people's literature for two thousand and fourteen a book written all in verse and terry said with what seemed to me like a great surprise in her voice it's actually easier to read then if it were in prose is it a not to be untangled or simply a story to be told i vote with those who simply tell stories what's wrong with that not complex and any magic enough portree should at least be as clear as prose robert rowell of all people said once and within my hearing it's easier to read then the if it were in prose the line breaks actually help you  there's a reason it turns out why the lines don't make it to the right hand side of the page they help clarify the meaning of the sentence here's a very famous quote from he said once if two poets came to him and one said he wanted to write because he had truths to tell and one said he loved language the one who loved language would be the poet on the other hand here is my favorite quote from all the nolan a canadian poet from the maritimes when you read my poems forget about the words words mean nothing to me what can ferns concerns me is the on on on on on on other of all loneliness of the human heart he said words mean nothing to me and you imagine any american poet or any other poet from anywhere saying such a thing why does language have such a hold on poets my buddy joel oppenheimer now dead used to say poetry is not about language it's about something as gray says in june of on both those things goddammit not just one only current political points of view about literature set up a hierarchy in today's academic poetry climate for poetry personal poetry is superior to political poetry and political poetry is considered propaganda inferior which of course it not always was when pablo casals was famously refusing to play his cello in public as as long as the world series of poetry with poets now and in ancient china saying undoubtedly the two greatest poets and chinese were to f there were hundreds of wonderful poets thousands of wonderful poems then as now why are we always trying to decide who is the greatest the best the first for dark age between the so called great writers yet his poems are there for anybody to read better loving heartfelt and sad with sweetness and regret here's truman capote to me the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it is about but the music of the words make why do people say withdrawn which is to say sophisticated active writing in for itself art for art is considered day were gay or uncool not detached sophisticated enough ray society's weaknesses its ills its perils he or she must be actively involved in shaping its present and its future this was quoted in the new york times  five may two thousand and nine later that year he was assassinated by his government i don't like to read i mean reading is so difficult for me i don't like doing it i'm learning disabled and in a lot of ways i never read fiction because it's too hard too many words and they and when i read i read so slowly i get in for incredibly frustrated by so many words on a page and the writ of the page is so full of words words words all of which is why i like poetry best there are fewer words when reading poetry you're supposed to read slowly stop and think and you've you realize you visualize you step inside the poem go ahead move your lips you can't speed read poetry you've got to read it slowly go ahead do what you're never supposed to do with prose move your lips phoney read it out loud after all poetry is mad for the ear more than the eye anyway this makes it a perfect medium for learning disabled people like myself you have to honor in the language each word its position in the relation to the others the method by which the poem is put together and the writer who put it together in order that to do this you've got to go slowly what has the academy done to poetry the way they cademy has captured poetry in the last fifty or seventy five years has done many negative things to the art first it's made  if you have to have if you have to teach something you have to have something to say about it something to teach therefore endless analysis and lists commentary become more important than the p and subsequently poets take this attitude as well now we have poets who spend twenty minutes explaining in ticket and hidden meanings in a haiku this up to solution a way of writing has gotten so bad that now is standard for poetry is whatever is not what it means or or did i mean to say whatever it means is not what it says poetry offers nuggets kernels little knots of intense imagery a vivid moment of clarity about it and then in this world little lyrics that accumulate into a narrative either consciously telling a story or unconsciously revealing a life in the best cases this is not an ego maniacal to many points stick in our faces but rather something more or less more in the ancient chinese style where a poet sees himself herself as so much like everyone else so common ordinary so in touch with the species feelings that what they see hear feel has got to be what others see hear and feel also eighth century poet from china for example was so concerned with being clear that he tried his poems out on his illiterate cook and if he and she couldn't understand them he wrote them so that his cook understand them i don't like up to his poetry i don't like john ashbury of poetry for example i to lucille clifton off how good poets who are committed to making clear english sentences that are not difficult to understand the concept within the sentence may be difficult but the sentence itself is not this desire to be deliberately obscure as always been with us new wrote essays about essays against it in tang dynasty china in eighteenth century japanese poet real said the literati shape their compositions with such elegance and grace and in touches that are striking and new but they never write the things that are in their hearts every writer needs to decide understood or as i say in one of my poems advice to myself never be deliberately obscure life is difficult enough don't add to the confusion still i still like reading poetry best or listening to it such as every morning on n p r s the writer's almanac now most have just too many words on the page they go on forever poetry on their other hand gets up there does its job with a minimum of words and fuss belted out gets it over with and sits down i like that here's three as illustrations of what i'm talking about from my own works all of us out of the undifferentiated dow come the ten thousand things the bug in the birds mouth the bird in the the tree outside the window the window beyond the chair the chair in the room and the man in the chair was just now risen from the chair and walked across the room to look out the window at the bird in the tree with the bug in its mouth see how all of us and our own in different speeds returned to the dow oh and let us all sing praises now said we're just like bugs in a bowl all day going around never leaving their bowl i say that's right every day climbing up the steep si and sliding back over and over again around and around and back down sit in the bottom of the bowl head in your hands cry  feel sorry for yourself or look around see your fellow bugs walk away say how you doing say a nice ball and finally tomorrow we are bones and then roots of weeds poking through our skulls today simple clothes empty minds stomach falls the mic alive aware right here right now drunk on music who needs wine come on sweetheart let's go die and dancing while we still got feet wooden clogs open the poet's nor put on the wooden clogs step into his house come in make a cup of tea sit down open the book enter life i have a checkered history with academic poetry academic institutions being an egalitarian than i am i have made a point of getting every grade offered from the highest to the lowest in every school i have ever and and since then i've spent my life trying to stay away from academic institutions and academic poetry i'm a writer but i have always been a somewhat embarrassed about being a writer and artist i don't like the elite in the least air that often casts itself over our us in the arts it's obvious that many people involve themselves with the arts in order to distinguish themselves from the common people out of which i come and with whom i still fiercely identify i'm interested in the isabel people the ordinary the downtrodden the put upon and the forgotten i hate pretense i want to make art and the common people the that the will can understand use find meaningful and enjoy this all this man explain why i firmly believe that poetry is for new people and why my writing is so plain and simple and easy to understand in fact a poem in one of my books called on the road to bugaboo hood explains this ever plane or ever simple ever more ordinary my goal is to become a simpleton and from what everybody tells me i am making real if you have questions i'm here to answer what do i say jeff mentor they would write to him and ask if he would read their posts which were close and give a response and hayden being a generous gentleman of the old school as far as i know never failed anyone who asked for that and also there would be call for and letters from people like me maybe even like david long about the age of seventy he was getting kind of cranky always had been kind of cranky but generous nevertheless and he decided that he would implement a program called new wind for old far he put that on the way fridge or a new wind for old farts something like because i have my own life to live i have elected not to welcome people into my home anymore and i saw it on his refrigerator half a dozen times when i was very much sure you did tell him probably all the other people who married in your etc he loved people but he needed time for his own work that about wraps it up i don't know i think it might have something to do with the fact that people around here are just  folks i don't know what else you could attribute it to except that it's pretty hard to be in vermont and be arrogant  movement right now with spoken word poetry and poetry slam that doesn't seem to be accepted by the academia yeah it could be and and so therefore afraid to get on stage and others who really believe their work is maybe too tender to just be when you're reading as you say you slow down and you go back  performance it's a one time shot yeah that's true when you talk about how your work is changed since barking dog well i talk to ya one of the charges no no oh man well i think the biggest change is that i has a deal with hayden because when i came here i was writing and this is after barking dog which was my first book which was before i came to vermont  this is all very nice but it doesn't sound like you don't sound like you it's not funny for example and i couldn't disagree and one day i i went out to my cabin and i i had been a newspaper reporter a role some paper in my typewriter this is back in the days of typewriters i started typing a poem on a typewriter and that was significant to me because it's what i did in the city room at the newspaper and  i started writing a poem called according to armin which was the first name of the guy who became an twan and off i went in a whole new style and it was because of a primarily oh and also because of william doing an hour and a half on william carlos williams interview and  williams was talking about the american language versus the english language and how we spoke american not english and how we had to start speaking american not english and i listened to that that paid anyway that's what started me off that was about nineteen actually i don't know i know i have my my theory is it comes out that way maybe emerges from my soul or being without form attached so i don't have anything to do with it yeah how and when did you come to buddhism i realize that you know i've married a buddhist since i've been in my she's i don't i didn't know i was  don't know the difference is that i don't i don't know am i a buddhist in my eyes then guy i don't know the complicated way well there you go i think what you have to do is let people describe it describe you two weeks before the super bowl of people to send in their best type of that had to do with sports and i said fine and there were two of them actually didn't hear anything back listen the day that they were going to read off the top whatever top twenty five i didn't mention top twenty god the game came down to one player and  the the team that we all wanted to win was on the defensive they were really on their heels the team that we didn't want to win was right down on the forty yard line you sure was how are they going to get the ball across and how is our team goes stop so the quarterback drop back what collect could handoff could have been a run but then he threw a pass which was intercepted by the defensive player who ran back across the goal line a few yards onto the field and