Jim:	I'd like to thank everybody for coming very much. My name is Jim Moskowitz. I'm Swarthmore class of 1988. I run the Philadelphia Connection, which is the local alumni organization that does various events for Swarthmore alumni who live in the Philadelphia area. I have the lucky spot of all the connections in the country because we get to do events back on campus with occasionally, if we're lucky, a professor. If we're very lucky, three professors and four alumni all coming back together to present to us their writings. I'm amazed that everyone was so eager and willing to participate in this, and I'm very glad that you came. I'm going to do everyone's introduction right now rather than getting up in between each individual speaker. Try to keep this all straight in your head, or if not, everybody's got a name tag. You can figure out who they were later on. 
	Reading first will be Nathalie Anderson. Nathalie Anderson's first book, Following Fred Astaire, won the 1998 Washington Prize from Word Works. Her second collection, Crawlers, received the 2005 McGovern Prize from Ashland Poetry Press. Her third, Quiver, was published two years ago in 2011. Anderson's poems have appeared in such journals as APR's Philly Edition, Atlanta Review, Denver Quarterly, Double Take, Inkwell Magazine, Louisville Review, The New Yorker, Nimrod, Paris Review, Prairie Schooner. She is currently poet in residence at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in addition of course to teaching at Swarthmore College.
	Reading second, Justin Kramon, class of 02. He's the author of the novels Finny, which was published by Random House in 2010, and The Preservationist, which is shortly coming out from Pegasus crime. He's a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and published stories in Glimmer Trains, Story Quarterly, Boulevard, Tri Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review and others.
	Lillian Dunn, class of 07, returned to Philadelphia after a 2000 at Fulbright in Argentina and co-founded Apiary Magazine. We will interrupt for a second short advertisement. Apiary Magazine, which there are copies available on the back table to peruse later, take with you, subscribe to, contribute to, whatever you want, is a free publication with a readership of 30,000, dedicated to showcasing the brilliance and diversity of Philadelphia's literary communities. In addition to Lillian's work as executive editor of Apiary, she helps non-profit arts organizations reach new audiences, as senior associate at Mighty Engine, an advertisement and strategy firm in Old City.
	Next will be Nick Forrest, class of 08. He's a poet, designer, and videographer in Philadelphia. He also graduated, or sorry he graduated in 2008 and also co-founded Apiary. He serves currently as its video editor. He is a digital content strategist for Alex's Lemonade Stand, the national non-profit dedicated to fighting pediatric cancer.
	Next will be Gregory Frost, writer of fantasy, science fiction and dark fantasy for adults and young adults. He's been a finalist for every major award in the fantasy genres. His latest published work is The Shadow Bridge duology, voted one of the best fantasy novels of the year by the American Library Association.
	Next, Daisy Fried, class of 89, is the author of three books of poetry, Women's Poetry, Poems and Advice, which was just published by University of Pittsburgh this year, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, published in 2006, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and She Didn't Mean to Do It, published in 2000, which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. For her poetry, she's been awarded Guggenheim, Hodder, and Pew fellowships, Pushcart Prize, and the Cohen Award for Ploughshares.
	Peter Schmidt is our cleanup hitter. Peter Schmidt is the William R. Kennon, Kenan, William R., you should know. You're the professor of English literature at Swarthmore. He teaches U.S. literature with a special emphasis on poetry and fiction in the 20th century. He's published books on William Carlos Williams, Eudora Welty, among other topics. I'm just going to read what he says verbatim with as little affect as possible. As he ages, he is less and less successful in stealing time away from other work in order to grow poems, but he still tries. Thank you all very much. Nathalie.
Nathalie:	Before I read, I wanted to say a few things about this occasion. It's such a pleasure always to see our former students and hear their most recent work. I want most particularly to thank Jim Moskowitz for imagining this reading and for bringing it to fruition so well. As always, at such readings, I find myself filled with exaltation and humility. Exaltation because just look at them, just listen, and humility because though we do all we can to assist our students as they're first finding their feet as writers, we know that it's their own intensity, their own vision, their own hard work that's brought them where they are. Though I didn't have the opportunity to work with each of these alum as writers, I've had the great pleasure of teaching every one of them. It's truly exhilarating to see what they've done with themselves since graduation. Thanks to them for sharing their work with us tonight and thanks to you for sharing this auspicious occasion. 
	I thought I would read seasonal poems this evening. I'll just ask can you all hear me okay in the back? Great. Okay, good. Seasonal poems, seasonal construed variously. Here's a poem for the end of winter, which seems to have happened in the last week. It's called The Veiling. "The last of winter's hazing, a high gale whacking through the branches. The brittle twigs scritching each other, the chaff sent flying. It's gray out there, stick against stick, each limb striking out blindly, fingers lost and thumbs, knuckles scuffed, elbows skint, arms upbraided. It's no wonder there's a fever starting, a little flush, a swelling at the joints. The tip of each twig's cock now to bursting, and stick against stick rubs itself rosy. Look up, like a cloud left hanging overnight, the grays blushing, dawning soft, a mauve air. Then the flocking. Leaf on leaf, stitched in and over stitched, so hastily the threads left dangling, stem stitch over laid stitch over couching, wheat stitch on feather stitch on thorn. Crows foot over fly stitch on spider's web. French knot, Chinese knot, whipped satin. Thus the sheerest tulle layers into veiling, the palest fern [mantia 00:07:07] muffles into mossy chenille. What was winter up to that seemed so raw, so cruel? It's all grown hazy. Leaves cowling out, clouding over the hard, hard wood, shrouding the skeleton."
	Now I'd like to read next a poem about Japan in the spring. It's title Shisen-Do is the name of one of the premier gardens in Japan in Kyoto and extremely hyper cultivated space. Shisen-Do. "For every slightest quaking leaf, a gardener to lull and hush it. For every flighty gust of green, a gardener to sleek it, clip the wing. For every spree of branching limb, a gardener to rein it, bend back the wrist, twist the arm in. No sprig evades their blading. No frond their fondest scrutiny. Comes one in cloth boots so not to mar the mosses. Come one in cloth hands so not to bark or bruise. Comes one in a hat, sloped like a hillock, the eye tinted always to the task, comes the calipers, the sequiturs, and one with a twig broom whisking back into air the falling rain."
	"It's here I learn from my companions, their proper names for azalea, iris, maple, the neighborly plants of my childhood, plants I clearly only thought I knew. I bow, bow lower, gardeners quick in the cadres pluck and plump the plush green pillows, silent wire pullers, harrowers, the hidden hand, the henchman fit [inaudible 00:09:22] for this house of the immortals papered with poems, pruned back to the bud, pruned back to the branching. Listen. A bamboo pipe gulps, swallows its mouthful, balances, balances, falls with the weight, then gulps again. Its slow sips and sudden slaps, a gentle feint to scare away the deer."
	This next is a poem about spring cleaning, Householder. "It's a bright day, dry at last, crisp rather than cold, just about perfect for re-papering. He takes his sweet time with it, laddering down and back, half a dozen times, hefting his material. Leaves from the copper beech still burnished have bagged deep against the back fence crackling again now the snow's left us. He straddles there, foraging, lifting out thick handfuls, turning them so the rot falls away, mouths them, leaning a while at fence post and cross bar, airing them out for the ferrying, pawing them side to side and round about before skittering mouth full up to the nest. Entering trunk side, tail pluming out like smoke from a chimney. While inside, he's doing all the things one does, calculating, eye-balling, rearranging, testing for weak spots, trying out color on color, pounding them in so hard he shakes the house. Last fall one fell, old nest, stormed down open having outlived its usefulness but sturdy even still, slow to disintegrate. The walls papered thick growing pale and smooth as parchment. He can rest on his laurels. He knows his business. Or she, one of those things you can't tell from looking."
	This is a poem of irritation, seasonal irritation. It's called Lawn Boys. "I swear it's the mayhem that gets them going, revving those little motors without the first shred of a permit. This latest one runs through two gas cans easy, just tanking around, rearing the housing up on its hind wheels, towing its nose smack down into the borders, throttling, choking. Yes, a cart blanche invitation to destroy. Whatever gets them off the couch. It's not the lawn itself. These guys aren't gardeners. Can't read the line dividing sod from shrub, grass pot from seed bed. They'll put the pair of tulips to the blade, slice right through violets and fern breaks yet leave untouched a pride of thistles, a bristle of dandelions. So pretty. Nor is it the money else they'd be here more often. First of spring I call and call while the grass thickens to pasture then to wildwood then to spinning." 
	"This latest one has set his phone to seem he's answered. Wait a sec. My battery's low. I'll just grab the extension, then a long pause. Then some well-recorded fumbling. Then more mutters just before the razzy beep. I leave him long, detailed messages I know he won't play through. That's why must be that rise by the front walks raised raw again, but the side yards gone to briars. Take care, I'll tell the phone, there's deadwood falling. That won't slow him. He won't pick up sticks. Grinds through whatever's in his way, shredding plastic bags and paper, shattering branches. Once, even a brick, to see it splinters scatter and fly. My daddy mowed sedately, sober as a farmer guiding the plow behind the plodding mule, methodical, meticulous. These guys are rough riders, lathering their broncs up San Juan hill. I must like that better. Mayhem. What else do I get? What else do I pay him for?"
	I'll close with a poem for the semester's end, which is to say the way I am at the end of a semester, which is to say my grouchiness. This is a poem called Troll. "Troll under her bridge raw from clawing up her rankling, swollen green with drudgery, feeling on her spine each splintery plank, each trip trap tramp, each neat little goat's hoof. She's a cat fit rash for rocketing, back always up, hackles always bristling. She's the worm in your apple, thorn in your flesh. When troll meets troll at day's end, what ecstasy of grumbling. Says this, one trove before me gratingly slow and the last parking place filched thievously, had the gall to ask then for directions. Troll face. Troll face. One won't ask again. I'm the fly in your ointment, snake in your grass, skeleton at your feast."
	"Uh-huh says that. I've claimed my window seat when two come giggling, want seats together, want me to trade. Troll tongue. Troll tongue. Two won't ask again. I'm the stick in your craw, boil on your backside, edge on your tooth. Uh-huh, says this. Troll fist. Uh-huh says that. Troll fang. Back and forth. The bad blood, the belly aching. Where do they get off, those billy goats calling themselves gruff? Here they come again, traipsing so innocent with their butt heads, their daggers, their bulldozer shoulders. Ha. Dunk her or drown her. She pops right back up with her havoc and hoodoo. She's the mange in your manger, iceberg in your bath. She's your nil wind. She's your own weevil star." Thank you.
Justin:	All right. This is great to get to read with everyone. I really enjoyed getting to hear you read again, Nat. My name is Justin Kramon. Sure. Also thanks to Jim so much for organizing this. I'm going to read just a little bit from the beginning of short story that I recently wrote. There's not really much to know. I'm going to read from the beginning. The story's about a stalker and his victim, so another healthy relationship I'm able to bring into the world by the grace of my fiction. There's not really much to know. The stalker's name is Dale, and the victim or the woman who appears to be the victim at the beginning of the story is named Molly. I just mention that because sometimes I know that in life I can sort of resemble a very drunk person kind of fading in and out of consciousness. If that happens to you, you can come back and know where you are. Okay. 
	Pursuit. "He's been waiting for 10 minutes in a persistent drizzle when she finally came up the driveway from her apartment. Even if he hadn't seen her hurrying, fumbling with her keys and purse, he would have known she was late. He'd memorized her schedule. It was cold for this time of year, mid-November in Cambridge, icy rain prickling his face. His hands were numb, jammed in his pockets. He hadn't brought gloves, having counted on a shorter wait, and in his thin nylon jacket, he felt exposed, vulnerable to the cold slaps of wind. Another thing he hadn't planned on were the kids. Molly's apartment was on the bottom floor of a house set off the street, tucked into a block of two story homes across from the school. Dale had always left and arrived at odd hours because of his work. He decorated cakes, slipping out of Molly's apartment like a robber at four in the morning, so he rarely saw the school in session.
	"Now he could hear car doors thudding, children shouting goodbye to their parents and greeting their friends as they entered the low brick building. The children were too far away to hear anything. The sound of them was an intrusion on the privacy he demanded. Molly had her hair in a bun, damp from her shower the night before. She slept on her back with that fist of hair pushed into the pillow staining the fabric. So many rituals and habits and preferences. Those little private resolutions you discover only when you observe someone closely for a long time. The only other person he'd known so well in his life was his mother who's spent most of the last two decades in an institution. A disturbed brain, a social worker had once said to Dale, who had been young when his mother was sent away and probably seemed in need of an explanation. But, the phrase "a disturbed brain" had stuck with him unreasonably all these years and always gave him the mental image of a pot of scrambled eggs. He thought that's what you'd find if you opened up his mother's skull, possibly his too if the condition were hereditary.
	"Now when Dale waved to Molly, he could see frustration pass like a shadow over her features. It squeezed his heart how much she hated him, or not hated. Hated would have been bearable implying investment. She put up with him, withstood the shock of his presence like a pothole in the street or a line at the bank, some tiresome obstacle in the way of what she needed to get done that day, the kind of thing you had to keep your cool about. 'Let me talk to you,' he said when she was close enough he didn't have to shout. He was still concerned the children might hear. 'I'm late. Can we do this another time?' She was walking quickly, the heels of her boots clicking the pavement as if she could dispense with him without even breaking her stride. 'When?' 'Could you back off Dale? Could you leave me alone?' He stepped off the curb, into the driveway, meaning to get her attention, but the motion caused her to flinch.
	"It wasn't entirely unpleasant, her recognition of him. 'I need to tell you some things you might not realize about what happened.' 'You don't need to explain.' 'I do.' 'I prefer not to hear it.' 'You need to.' Without realizing it, he was blocking her path. He never thought of himself as a menacing person but realized he could be seen that way, large as he was, thick arms and sloped shoulders, a shadow on his jaw. 'You look like a pervert,' he heard a woman's voice say in his head. It might have been his mother's. Molly stopped walking, dropped her arms to her sides as if she'd given up. Water beaded on her glasses. 'Okay. What? What do you want to say? Tell me everything.' He knew that voice, that flat delivery, the sarcasm. She was a thousand miles away. A car door slammed in the school driveway, and a boy yelled, 'I've got it. Keep your shirts on.' A way Dale could never have imagined speaking to his own parents. 
	He'd had it all figured out, the steps he could retrace, guiding her along the path he'd taken, his reasons, so that even that last violent act would seem justifiable, unavoidable. But, he didn't know what to do with Molly's acquiescence. It was like a door flung open on a giant empty room, and he couldn't imagine filling it with the cheap furnishings of his thoughts. That's the way he'd always felt around her, inadequate. 'Asshole,' said the voice in his head. 'You can't do this to me,' Dale said, 'Put me on the spot like this. How can you expect me to explain it all in the middle of the street? I need time. We need to go somewhere. How about a wine bar?' 'A wine bar? Jesus Christ Dale, are you kidding? It's 7:30 in the morning.' She started to walk around him, and he almost thrust out his arm to stop her but knew enough not too. Physical force would have been a mistake right now with the children across the street.
	"He just said, 'You're going to regret this.' It was something he'd heard in movies, and it sounded like the kind of thing you say in a moment like this. 'I already do,' she said, walking away from him, which seemed like the response you'd get in that kind of movie. Dale passed the Starbucks, the store 24 where the man who smelled like urine held the door for you and asked for change. The man begged in such a gentle voice with such deep sadness in his eyes. You could almost cry yourself, but if you refused him, he'd berate you. He'd once told Dale he was going to find him in his bed with a box cutter and slit his trachea. Dale remembered the incident because of the word the man had used, trachea, the accuracy of it. These were sites Molly would have seen five minutes before on her way to the T, to which Dale was following her. 
	"How could have it gotten to be this? It started in such a golden place. That's the word that came to mind when he thought of his time with Molly, golden. A golden era. It was a word she sometimes used herself with that deadpan delivery, when she meant that something was okay or just fine. It was what she said that time when they'd met at the lab when Dale was delivering the cake. It had been a fluke. It wasn't even Dale's job to deliver the cakes, but Hank called him at the last minute saying he was tied up and could Dale do him a solid. The rest of Molly's lab was out at lunch to celebrate their boss's birthday, the reason for the cake. Molly had stuck behind to tend to the experiment. That's the way she was, always offbeat, stepping left when everyone else stepped right. It was something Dale adored about her, though Molly despised it in herself. 'Is it okay if I leave this here,' Dale had asked about the cake, gesturing to an open surface on one of the lab benches.
	"Molly was replacing a mouse in its plastic cage, her gloved fingers pinching the tail. 'Golden,' Molly said, not looking up. 'Are you sure? I don't want to mess anything up.' Molly released the mouse, which skittered into a corner of the cage. She snapped off her gloves and came to peek inside the box. 'I've heard about you,' she told Dale as she set the box down on the surface for him, parting the lid. 'The cake guy. Wow. It's gorgeous.' Dale had painted a city scene on the cake, only the city was filled with mice instead of people, mice driving cabs, in bellhop uniforms, opening the doors of fancy hotels, a blind mouse playing a keyboard for tips on the street corner. It would have been unappetizing to most people, but Molly's lab used mice all the time for their research, so they thought it would be funny. 
	Dale was known around Boston for these elaborately detailed cake paintings, which he created by loading food coloring into a spray paint canister. 'It's really not that difficult,' he told Molly. 'It just takes patience. You'd be surprised what you could do.' 'You'd be surprised what I couldn't do.' 'No really, you have beautiful fingers, long and thin. I can tell you'd be precise.' He meant it as a statement of fact, but when he looked up, he could see Molly was glancing down at her fingers. Color had risen to her cheeks, lighting her pale skin like a bulb under a sheet. It was the way Dale always treated Molly's body, with honest admiration. He couldn't have imagined a body he loved more than hers, the straight angle of her nose, where her black plastic framed glasses sat, the dark, tightly coiled hair on her head, and the unexpected silkiness of the hair between her legs, which became tressed like a horse's mane when they had sex. Her thin wrists and small breasts, the nipples stiffening at the slightest touch, hard as the top joint on his pinkie. 
	He never understood the obsession most men had with large breasts. To Dale, they were sacks of jelly, a necessary imperfection far less interesting than the solidness of Molly's hips and her athletically square shoulders, the surprising power of her slender arms. In his loneliness, all those years, what Dale had missed most was the heat of another body, the resistance, not the yielding. Holding Molly in bed was like wrapping his arms around a tree in a wind storm. Watching her sleep, Dale marveled at her trust, the ease of which she handed over the keys to her most precious self. I could do anything to her, he'd thought on occasion and then chided himself, knowing it was weird and possibly a little wrong to be thinking things like that." Thanks. The next reader is Lillian Dunn.
Lillian:	Now I need to find out what happens next. Thank you to Jim for having us here tonight. It was really fun planning this. Thank you to Nathalie and Peter for being teachers, getting me here. I chose three poems, and each one has been affected in some way by all the poetry I've heard in Philadelphia as a listener and a writer here. This first poem, Gold Bug, came out of a sematic poetry workshop with C.A. Conrad, who's a local poet. You guys should all go Google him up and see if you can find and take one of his workshops because they're truly extraordinary. They involve sort of physical exercises that then turn into writing space. This poem completely surprised me. We had a very intense, I think it was everyone had to hold each other's hands and say own together with one person sitting in the center or something. This poem, this set of memories and this poem came out.
	Gold Bug. It's a hot spring in Idaho. "Cavern mouth, two arms, wait the pine tree is swaying in photo time, mindless moss hanging from the branches. Nobody's this tiny or warm, but somehow the hair is growing up from the gravel of the spring, twining slick and knowing among aluminum cans and thousand year stones. We sit two pink chairs stacked in hot water, steaming from the gut of the earth. You bored, tangling my hair over and through. We float unshed, re rinsed in our own film, surprised our polite lens, stumble pale in the churn of it. Follow knee bone to ankle pin to taproot, taproot to dirty tin can, tin can to potato bug, its opaque machinery burrowing to the earth's core. 
	"Like these stone walls love the spring or trees lack the steam coating their needles, I'm sinking here giddy with the absence of a name for the space between us. I want to show everyone how time is growing from my throat and bristling through my ribs. Heavy my head falls back on your breastbone, listening, listening for the sawing of wind in the pines. One day the turtle, its bony ship sent harrowing too quickly, let stars spin away. Unmoored men and women drift to the shore. We began with forgetting. Turtle swam on. Head to its scaly breast, investigating again."
	This next piece was written after a really great spoken word slam that I went to go to on first Friday. It's called Pigeon Presents: Philadelphia Poetry Slam, another Google able. Golden Dollar. "I reached between my lips and pull out a golden dollar. The people in the park turn their heads as I kneel stacking them one by one. The gentle people point and whisper. I try to smile, but my mouth is full. The pile grows higher and still the coins come counting, cold off my tongue, metal against metal against metal. You rise in my sight, thick and golden as butter. You block out the sun in the square. The pigeons flutter away. They have good sense. I am busy. I am working. Can't they see? I am tithing you in the currency of sorrow. [foreign language 00:33:06] for the road across Argentina, the wildness of being known beneath a strange sky. Here is a quarter for kissing in the CVS just because we were so fucking in love, and a CVS is the very best of capitalism. The demise of which of course our love would live to see. 
	"Here is every red cent of every last time I moved out of myself for you, out of my own ribcage, willingly emptied out my own treasure in fistfuls to make room for your gilded bricks of guilt. Here is a roll of dimes, thin and hard as pride. Here is a pocket full of change and a spare carpenter's nail for the house you'll build for someone else. Here is a ball of lint for making me believe I can't build my own damn house. Here, and here this coin heavy and shining for how you made me feel light and liquid in my own lean limbs. For my best friend, for how hard we tried, for each sorry, sorry, sorry. It is dark, and I am saying sorry although to you or myself I do not know, just that the corners of my mouth are red and chapped as I reach in again and again down my own throat and pinch up coins in my fingers. Here I choke up another. The park is empty, the benches deserted. I am almost finished. I am almost finished. And another, and another."
	This last piece comes from a workshop with Leonard Gontarek, a poet with whom I run the Greenlight poetry series at Locust and 45th on the third Tuesday of the month. [inaudible 00:34:59] "One Ariadne. When did we know? Not when you were born, fat baby boy following your own trail of crumbs, not when bad dreams came and you burrowed compact as a bullet in our parents' bed. Not even when we hurled ourselves to the living room floor, two enraged skydivers throwing tear blind punches. No, it was the night I learned the grownup art of laughing at your anger, the night I outran you to the kitchen door, crouched listening for your thwarted cry against the lock. Nothing. Then a bellow, floor shake, door split, rough black horns piece white paint, plywood. When they finally opened the door, I sat curled on the linoleum, lips repeating your name." 
	The workshop exercise was to base upon a myth, so I went with the Minotaur myth, Ariadne is the brother is the Minotaur. Two King. "Yes we have a family history of monsters, things half divine. My uncle spent his youth swishing his white tail at all the rich old men. Later we winced at the bleeding telephone, just that month's rent, just this once. We gave it to him, pitying his withered hocks, his wrecked myrtle mask, and mother took to her bed one day while father wept to see cold, silver sliding up her legs, squatting in her frigid scales, she became the glassy-eyed mermaid we knew always underwater by three in the afternoon. I've insulted no gods. I gave tribute to Sundays at the office, lawnmowers, slammed doors, birthday cards, birthday parties, credit cards, good throws and bad moves. Yes, we have a family history of monsters. By now I know their cruelty, how their eyes glisten with love, how soft and human their hands feel on our faces.
	"Three Ariadne. Do you know how we smelled? Like human sacrifice, sweet grass, burned hair. Your bedroom door stayed closed, but the scent licked us like your new rough tongue, your musk on my sweatshirts, jeans. The girls pinched their noses when they saw me coming. All the neighbors chatting on their lawns, watching as I biked by. For, brother. The best part is I take an arm, suck a socket. The best part is if I don't know where I am, nobody can. No one else sees night sidewalks shine, doors puncture thin skin, morning their faces melting. They watch me from holes in wet paper. Tonight a word, stays in my mouth, alone or home or no one. Maybe I was never there at all. Queen. The last time I touched him was when he hooked his horns into the dining room table. He fell to his knees in a swamp of white linen and broken dishes, laid his head on my lap, crushing my legs, immense nostrils dribbling. My hand caught in his greasy ruff, wool, gristle, wet leaves. I swaddled this ceaseless tide. I nursed this hurricane. 
	"Departure. Money disappeared from all our wallets. Blue light from the television told us which town you'd appeared in that night. They brought you to us, fur matted, ribs showing, eyes black fire and stone. Facility. All the experts assured us it was the only thing to do in our situation. Weeping we built the labyrinth and spared no expense. The experts stood with clipboards ready and we told you how you made us feel. You roared, and we disappeared behind the glass door. Ariadne returns. After years in a foreign kingdom, strange dreams of black sails from which I awaken weeping. I remember a latch, a click, footfall on carpet. Home again the palace is empty. I open the dusty door. The high flowering sound of glass sings up from below. 
	"How long have you lived down here, gathering walls and like sheets, the smell of grease, sweetness of iron. We belched of our sorrows, and you swallowed them whole. A step further into the labyrinth's deaf ear, I speak to your ridged spine, anthracite hills of your shoulders. Your feet trample picture glass, shred our paper faces. Clutch razor shards, bellow, whole scarlet string away from your face and forehead. Now turn. Mazes blossom in your eyes. You're no animal, but you are a stranger. Take what you recognize, my voice, my hand, come closer. Do I betray you? This very moment, a thread leading you to yourself. I wield a mirror, a shining knife. Come closer. Brother, I strike." Thank you.
Nick:	Thank you Jim for organizing this. It's so good to be back here, so good to see you Nat and Peter. I first met Lillian in Peter's workshop when I was a freshman here. We've been friends ever since. I can't think of a better person to follow. I think all these poems I wrote, I was living in Montana last year, felt really out of place and scared and just terrified of nature. Thought I was going to be attacked by a bear the whole time. I ended up coming back, and I'm really happy to come back and read these to you. The first one I wrote is called the Truvel, and it's about an imaginary animal. I was very much inspired by the poet Henry Michaux. 
	"Climbing up, out, around the blistered back well and all of her legs of your wonderfully decayed estate, the truvel. The truvel and her mouth too full of golden teeth for most truvels have been toothless all their lives and women. Some are men, but disguised. Invite the truvel for a late lunch if, say smart things to her when you want, and the truvel will return. Respond always elegantly and offer up one of many antennae. Accept it as you would a single rose, invitations to parties. If it wasn't for the perpetually rotting outer shell of a truvel, she would emerge more frequently, misty moonlit nights et cetera, secrets told with late champagne and such for the truvel is always celebrating something. 
	"The truvel should not be confused for decadent pastry although she would accept this as high compliment. Certain chefs have taken note. Popular holiday costumes this season include the truvel. The latest in hair design this season, the truvel. The season's top baby name, truvel. Troops of truvel, richly tailored traveling truvels. If you were to eat a truvel for her taste is acquired and soon we must. Imagine eating your grandmother's jewelry, coated in fine perfume, dipped in moss and hung to dry in twilight on a summer's night as a last of the truvels dance on the tines of a fork."
	This next one is untitled. I could tell you how I wrote it, but it's embarrassing. I pulled a tarot card out of a deck. I'm like, "Oh my god. I hope it's the death card," and it was the death card. I was really out of ideas of what to write, so that's what I relied on. It's called Number 13. I'm embarrassed by that title, but that's the way it has to be. It's a sonnet. I wasn't going to say that, but it's a sonnet. "I wanted everything. It was the first day, the time, the cold, the cash folded over. Hide it. It's only ash, ashing still. I wanted everything, the thirst over full mouth dry and despite the worst intentions, nothing stopping. For all that trash, I trashed it was just throwaway words. The cash badly in need of emptying. Let me nurse desire for desire's sake. No, now please let me take back what I said. All I wanted another breath to breathe a while. What I wanted, a state to leave, to run, to heave, to follow straight, no to wind, to snake, a change, a union, a death."
	This next one, I found this weird object. It's important to know that the word Tom is just all caps in this poem. It's a big block of text. I found this weird golden half of a phone. It had the word tom on it. It's corny to say, but this weird phone spoke to me. I was really inspired for a second. This is called Found Object. "Tom knew very few things. One of the things Tom knew was, Tom wouldn't say. Tom remembers youth fondly like so many others. Tom once threw confetti into hot night air shortly before meeting the love of his life. Tom and the love of his life fell naked in the grassy fringes on the beach that evening. Tom and the love of his life drove in a convertible on a seaside highway, like in a film. Tom was very happy for a short time then. 
	"The love of Tom's life would later drive in the opposite direction on the seaside highway, away from him like in a film. Tom slowly turned inward then. Tom was often found drinking alone at bars staring at flickering back lit beer signs. Tom took up smoking but stopped after a week. Tom began to fear something. The love of Tom's life drove back but not in a convertible many years later. The love of Tom's life had changed drastically, had also taken up smoking but stuck with the habit much longer than Tom had. Tom soon knew for certain that he and the love of his life had become strangers, like in a film. 
	"Tom first painted his skin on a freezing winter evening by the seaside. Tom did not know why. Tom did not know of any films in which this happened, but Tom dragged the brush down his arms and chest and legs without stopping. In a certain light, Tom could easily imagine he was poured of gold or even silver, like a hood ornament of an old car he thought. Someday Tom would buy an old car, like the cars in films about lovers driving away from each other and back again and then away again like sea touches sand, like the lines waves leave. Tom had been still for many years when we found him. Under a certain light, at a certain angle, most people believed he was merely a small gold hood ornament from an old car like the ornaments you would steal if you lived in a poor neighborhood of a large city near a place as beautiful as this beach. 
	"Many visitors wondered about Tom and grew to believe that this odd piece of small golden statuary drew in small breaths every now and then. Nobody was sure about Tom. Tom still knew very little and feared that when he tried to speak to passers by, his words were confused for the shifting of sand or the sound of beach towels open in the wind, or the slather of lotion on bare skin, or the small thoughts you have under a certain light at a certain time at certain places such as this, remembering as if in a film small scenes of yourself doing the things you thought you had forgotten." 
	All right, and this last one is inspired by the photographer Zoe Strauss in Philadelphia who I think actually C.A. Conrad had a sematic exercise where the poem about Zoe Strauss, inspired by her photos. I was really, really homesick, and I opened up her book and just looked at a bunch of photos, and that's where this poem's from. It's called Fragments. "A cashier framed by stacks of cigarettes and candy in Wyoming notices another car pulling in by the hum of engine. The cashier framed by stacks of cigarettes and candy in New Jersey notices a car leaving by the cough of exhaust. They both have recently dyed their hair red but for different reasons. When fog rolls thick over river with smell of sea and fish, rattle of boxcars lifted to the air, far over the white gray salt piles heaped against the banks, imagine Appalachians glaciers couldn't reach, still biting at the sky with their small mouths too full of teeth. I will buy you useless things dear, and then I will buy you more useless things. Everything is not one dollar, love, and here's where we'll find everything." Thank you.
Gregory:	My name is Gregory Frost. My badge is on my jacket that I just soaked. Never mind that. I'm going to read an excerpt from the middle of a story just to confuse you. This is a story called No Others Are Genuine. The reason for the title of it, strangely enough, appears in this section of the story. It's going to be published in Asimov's Magazine in the October issue this fall. Just to give you some background, so you know where we are, what's going on. It's 1893 Chicago. We are in Mrs. Claymore's boarding house where Eustus, a 10 year old boy lives with his mother. Across the hall from him lived a young woman, a piano teacher named, ready, Miss Kamuzee. It's a private joke, Nat. Anyway, and Peter and a few other people. Anyway, Eustus was fiercely in love with Miss Kamuzee as only a devoted 10 year old can be. He was certain that when he got to be 20, she'd marry him, that kind of thing. He'd become a fixture at the music store where she played piano and where he saw for the first time the exotic Edison wax cylinder players. 
	Miss Kamuzee disappeared some weeks ago, and the adults will not discuss it in front of Eustus. A man, a very strange man as far as he's concerned, has moved into her former rooms, a Mr. Schulder who arrived with his very own wax cylinder Edison phonograph cabinet. Worse Franklin Schulder has proven attractive to Eustus's mother, and he does not like that one bit. Further on the day that she vanished, Miss Kamuzee had promised that she had a surprise for Eustus. One night after she had vanished, he was sure that he smelled the rosewater perfume of her in the hall. Because of all this, he feels he has to get into that room across the hall. That's our situation as we start. "Eustus could not explain to mother his need to enter Miss Kamuzee's room. He refused to think of it as anything else. No one else knew about her promise of a surprise for him, whether she had left something behind, a final sheet of music, a farewell letter, a valentine, or not. It didn't matter though he truly believed the two of them had been too close for there to be nothing. She had promised.
	"Plus, that man Franklin was now clearly courting mother. He was thus the enemy of everything. Schulder went off each morning at 7 to his job, which was to do with what he called phosphorescent lighting at the Columbian exhibition that had just opened in Jackson Park. He returned each afternoon after 3. His routine was established. Eustus awoke the next day and pretended to be sick, not so sick that mother needed to remain with him but just sick enough to warrant the day home in bed. A prepared hot water bottle provided his fever. In secret, he laid it across his forehead, so that when mother placed her hand there, she agreed that he felt warm. The door to Miss Kamuzee's room was of course locked, but Eustus had prepared for that. One of the curious benefits of being a child was that adults often disregarded your presence while they performed some private act, which was how he knew where Mrs. Claymore hung the spare keys.
	"By pretending to mope about the house, he had already secured the one he needed. However, Mrs. Claymore had promised to look in on him throughout the day, and that presented him with an unforeseen impediment to his plans. All he could do was lie in bed and wait. It wasn't long before she checked up on him. Providently, she apologized that she needed to go out, a visit to the butcher, in order to make their dinner. She wouldn't be long, an hour perhaps. He assured her he would be fine with a whole volume of Stevenson to read. The moment the front door closed, he was out of the bed and across the hall. There was no one else about. Mr. Vanderhoff was traveling. Mr. Rider had his accounting job. Eustus unlocked and entered the room. Everything stood immaculate. Carefully he searched for anything from Miss Kamuzee. At the very least, the rosewater that he'd smelled. The narrow closet held two suits, one formal black suit and one brown tweed and two pairs of shoes, one with spats. He felt under the mattress, looked beneath the bed but found nothing, no secret message nor forgotten item of hers. 
	"Yet, he had smelled her rosewater. He was sure of it. There must be a handkerchief or a stocking or a bottle of perfume hidden somewhere. Eventually, he'd investigated every place but the phonograph cabinet. It stood beside a hardback chair that he climbed up on in order to remove the cover. Standing there with the latches thrown, he balked at touching it. He must. There might never be another opportunity. He lifted off the lid, climbed down and placed it carefully on the bed, then got up on the chair again. Close up, the mechanism looked far more complicated than the Edison players in the store, even one that had recorded Miss Kamuzee at the piano. For one thing, a cluster of copper tubing ran behind the mandril and down into the cabinet. The tubes were almost as thin as mother's bone crochet hooks. They emerged out of a steel block with a row of fins along the back. Below the fins was a bank of switches that he could not comprehend and what looked like two receptacles where something might be fitted in. 
	"The reproducer itself lay tilted back on its articulated arm revealing the sharpest stylus he had ever seen. It shown like glass. He extended a finger but hesitated to touch the tip. The extra elements of the phonograph presented a mystery all their own. He climbed down to the front of the cabinet, opened both the doors. Inside were shelves of cylinder records and their cartons. He drew one out, the label proclaimed Edison records. As he rolled it out, it showed a photograph of Edison himself and the words, 'No Others are Genuine.' On the end cap it said, '4035 original [inaudible 00:54:54].' He worked off the cardboard cap and carefully slid the cylinder out. It was brown just like the ones in the music store made of carnauba wax. He could see that it had been played many times. The grooves were worn. He recapped and put it away. He didn't need to hear it. More than likely he had heard it. He squatted down and looked at the lowest shelf, only more cardboard cylinders. 
	"He finally closed the doors and reached to get the lid off of the bed. That was when he saw the other door. It had been assembled into the side of the cabinet so that it looked like nothing more than a split panel except that near the top and bottom lay two tiny brass hinges. There were no knobs to pull like on the front, but when he pushed, the panel moved a little and clicked outward. He drew it open. The cylinder cartons here were like nothing he'd every seen, shiny black leather. He drew one all the way out. It bore no label at all, and the cap had an unbroken wax seal around it. Eustus replaced it, and tried another and then another until he pulled out one that had been unsealed. Carefully, he worked off the cap. There was a cylinder inside. As he had been taught to do, he inserted two fingers into it and tilted the carton to slide it out. The cylinder was blood red. 
	"Eustus stared at it in awe. It bore not a trace of writing, no etched words and no label on the inside either but it was grooved all around, not a blank. What was it made of? He knew from the music store salesman that Edison was perfecting better cylinders. Now curiosity took over. There was still plenty of time before anyone would return to the house. With great care, he again climbed up on the chair, slid the red cylinder onto the mandril, locked it in place. Then gathering a deep breath he drew the knob and let the cylinder spin up to speed. He lowered the glittering reproducer. The cabinet hissed with a sound like an exhalation that rose and fell. Then within it, a single small helpless moan. There was no music at all. Then quite suddenly she was in the room with him. His whole body sensed her nearness. Roses were everywhere. The air grew charged. It sizzled against him, making the hairs on his arms jump. Sparks danced before his eyes, swirled into a vision ghostly as a visitation, but visible, transparent before him. 
	"It was her shape. It stood stiffly like someone reciting or singing in a choir, but only the breathing emerged. The crackling of the cylinder matched the shimmering aura she threw off of tiny sparks that stung his skin, a swell of energy thrum through him. He might have flown around the room on it if he hadn't been rooted to that chair absorbing it. Miss Kamuzee was inside him. Her skin slipping along his own like oil. He shook and sweat popped out upon his forehead, trickled down from his hair. His eyes closed, and he was about to swoon in a fever no longer contrived. Then all at once it stopped. The stylus had come to the end of the groove. Only the crackling remained as it rode around and around in place. With trembling fingers he drew the reproducer away the way he knew he should, but his fingertips were moist and it slipped in his grasp. Terrified, he clutched and pulled it back. It took all his will to slide the knob and stop the spinning. 
	"He collapsed in the chair like a ragdoll. Sweat stung his eyes. He wiped his hands over them. Time must have passed. He shivered not from fever but from energy that he could barely contain. It was as if his muscles wanted to swell and burst through is skin. She's still inside me, he thought. His legs jittered. He couldn't sit any longer. Put the lid on. Get away. That's what he had to do, but the cylinder. He couldn't leave that there. He got onto his knees, put away the locking arm and then carefully pushed the cylinder out onto two fingers. As he returned it to its sleeve, he saw the damage, the reproducer had done when it slipped. The stylus had cut a gouge across the middle of the delicate grooving. His fingers hovered over it. Was there some way to smooth it out? He dared not touch it and finally put the leather case away, closed the secret compartment. Then with a strength he had never possessed before, he lifted the lid and held it in one hand while he climbed back up on the chair, lowered the lid, snapped the latches. 
	"Jumping down, he scanned the room to make sure it looked undisturbed. He ran to the door, listened with his ear pressed against it, uncannily able to hear the emptiness of the whole boarding house. He locked the door and stole out and across the hall to his own room. He tried to sit but seconds later jumped up, paced, sat again, shaking, and finally madly rushed out and down the stairs, outside across the walk, and down the street. The sun was so warm, the colors so bright. Passing voices assailed him. He winced, their sharpness building shadows, the stink of sweat, a fresh laundry drying on the line, strung across the alley overhead. He could smell it out there. He walked and walked until he came to rails, and his attention was pulled along them by the smell of the train that had passed by within the hour. A stink of stockyards, blood and offal, the yards lay nowhere near here. By then he crossed the tracks, walking in whatever direction. It didn't matter, but finally east toward the lake, which lay flat and blue across the horizon. 
	"It wasn't until he jumped down from the boardwalk and waded into the coldness that his driving fever abated. The welter of sensations and limitless energy resolved and was at last contained within him. Ten years old again, covered in icy water and much, he climbed out upon the rocky bank where he collapsed. The sun whirled in the heavens. He lay panting as if he'd run the whole length of Chicago. He came to inside a large looming shadow. Sure that it was Mr. Schulder, had caught up with him, he thrashed about until a voice he didn't know said, 'Lad, there now, relax.' He focused on brass buttons, a leather belt, a holster, finally upon a badge. The policeman put a cool hand on his forehead and brushed back his hair. 'I feared you was drowned, boy. If you can sit up, I'll take you home. Where is it you live?'
	"Eustus and the policeman walked back toward Princeton Avenue, and it was only then that he appreciated how far he'd gone. The energy of Miss Kamuzee still thrummed within him but had settled now like a low wood fire in the belly of a stove. The policeman asked casually what he'd been doing. He didn't know how to answer. 'What are you sick?' Eustus nodded, tense. 'I see. Does your mother?' 'There was a lady named Miss Kamuzee. She disappeared, but then she was in the room.' The policeman stopped, leaned toward him. 'What was her name?' The intensity of the policeman's stare unnerved him. He answered softly, 'Miss Kamuzee.' 'You say she was in a room with you. When was that?' He wanted to explain or confess, but his every instinct rebelled. There was something wrong with the questions, and he said nothing. When they finally arrived at the Claymore boarding house, the policeman tried again to ask about Miss Kamuzee. Eustus might have told then, only the front door opened, and mother ran out onto the porch and swept him up in her arms, saying, 'My baby, Eustus, what did you do?' 
	She hugged him tightly. He might have told then, but in the shadows of the doorway behind her, with eyes drilling into him, stood Mr. Schulder. His slight smile bore no trace of humor, and his eyes conveyed his message so loudly that Eustus heard the words, 'I know what you did.' Those eyes shifted to his mother and then back again. Did he understand? Oh yes, he did. No word to the policeman or anybody. 'I'm sure he's all right, missus,' the policeman was saying. He's taken off his helmet, 'But you might want to keep a tighter rein on the lad. My name's Gallagher. Can I ask," whatever question he'd been about to ask, he never finished it as Mr. Schulder strode across the porch and to Eustus's horror placed one hand tenderly on mother's back. 'Officer Gallagher,' he said, 'We thank you. He's a good boy, but like all boys he does get into mischief.' This close to him, Eustus noticed a touch of gray in his temples. 'Ah, surely I know that. I've got two of me own,' the policeman replied. He tipped his cap to mother. 'I'll bid you good afternoon then.' He gave Eustus a smile, still edged in concern and walked back to the street and was gone. 'My dear,' said Mr. Schulder, 'You see. All that worry was unnecessary. He's a rambunctious boy on an adventure without concern for the feelings of others.' 
	Mother set him down. 'Eustus,' she scolded. 'You must never do that again.' He wanted to explain that he'd run off because of the energy burning inside him, Miss Kamuzee's life whirling inside him, but mother continued, 'You must never go into other people's rooms when they aren't at home, or Miss Claymore will evict us. Do you see? If Franklin,' and she turned her head and actually smiled to the villain, 'weren't so kind why he could have had that policeman arrest you.' 'I didn't.' 'Eustus, don't compound it with a lie. I found the key you stole on a chair in our room.' He couldn't remember where he'd left it. It must have fallen out of his pocket. Mr. Schulder's hand slid from her back to her shoulder, snaked along her arm. 'Miriam,' he said, 'I would never have him arrested. Eustus stared at mother in horror. How could she? Only father had called her by her private name. How could she reveal it to this awful man with his scorpion mustache? 'No,' he said and stepped away from the intimacy. 'It's all right,' assured Mr. Schulder, 'No harm done, but you must obey your mother, boy. If you wish to listen to my music, you may always ask. It would be my pleasure to have as a guest in my rooms at any time at all.' 'There Eustus, you see. You must thank Franklin for his kindness.' 
	"Franklin again. He squirmed, and there was no way out of it. He had to agree or at least pretend to agree. 'Thank you,' he said staring at their feet with miserable eyes. Mr. Schulder placed both hands upon his shoulders. 'Excellent.' It wasn't until mother had him standing in his nightshirt in a basin to wash the mud off his legs before putting him to bed that she noticed some part of his transformation. She was talking to him about his behavior when all of a sudden she fell silent. She said, "Why Eustus, your cheeks and forehead have never been so pink and shiny since you were a baby. You should spend more time out in the sun and less in this house by yourself up to mischief.' She gave him a towel and got up. He looked at his arm, his hand. He didn't see any change, but he knew what it was and blurted out, 'Don't tell Mr. Schulder.' 'What?' He saw in her perplexity that he could not stop her, that the bigger he made the issue of his luster, the more certainly she would relate. 
	"In the end, it didn't matter. As Eustus was toweling his legs dry, a howl of inhuman fury roared through the house and something shattered in the room across the hall. Mother ran out and knocked on Miss Kamuzee's door. 'Franklin,' she called, 'Franklin are you all right?' It was some moments before the door opened. Schulder stood there, his hair for once pushed into disarray. He looked drawn even stricken as he faced mother. Then he stepped forward, and his focus shifted past her to Eustus. She couldn't see his face, but for a split second the look of hatred flashed in Eustus like a lighthouse beam, so stunning that he leaned away. He comprehended then, that his enemy had not previously discovered the damaged red cylinder." Thank you.
Daisy:	This is a pleasure. Thank you. I'm Daisy Fried. I'm starting with a little ad, forgive me. In the fall, I am leading a workshop in a private home in media. We are capping the enrollment at 10 people, and we have five or six right now. If there's anyone here who's interested, or you know someone who's interested, please feel free just to ask me, or if you feel shy email me at daisyfried@gmail or Facebook me or whatever. Thank you. If you're interested in buying my latest book, I have a few copies with me. That was self-serving. I'm going to really read one poem, but it's made up of short pieces, and I don't know if I'll read all of them. We'll see how it goes. The poem is about three trips I took to Rome in 200, 2004, and 2007 and has to do with a lot of different things, but especially the expulsion of the gypsies from Rome in 2007. The backdrop you can probably guess from the dates is kind of the Bush administration and all the things that went on in that period. 
	The poem is called [foreign language 01:08:35], which I don't, as you can tell, I don't speak Italian at all well, and I pronounce it even worse, but that means, Beware of the Gypsies, and it's graffiti I saw on a train in Rome. Any Italian I come to, I will translate it immediately as best I can. [foreign language 01:08:56] starts in an epigraph from Blondie, "Pretty baby, you look so heavenly. One [foreign language 01:09:08], odori is the chopped vegetables that are a soup base, and [foreign language 01:09:13] is hospitality. One [foreign language 01:09:19]. What happened to Blanca? What happened to Rome? Is it happening to me? 2004 Blanca the gypsy looks six, rubbing against men, rubbing against women at the no-name café with red plastic chairs. Her name can't be Blanca. Everybody calls her Blanca. She catches money and cigarettes, kisses my hair, steals my colored pencils. Little bird knows, pretty smile, pain in the ass. I'm thinking about getting pregnant. 2007, Blanca, sleazy, writhing, adorable ignores me, chats with men." It always happens when I read here.
	"2007," it's perfectly okay. Don't worry about it. You can go get wine too if you want to. "2007, Blanca sleazy, writing, adorable, ignores me, chats with men who pat her face and belly. At the produce stand the Nigerian fruit seller yearns at a Ferrari idling curbside. Blanca shivers and snickers when he puppy scratches behind her ears, play slaps her cheek. The Ferrari barks down the [inaudible 01:10:45] farting into Rome traffic. The color is [foreign language 01:10:50], titanium silver, costs I looked it up 185,000 euros base. I love that its noise says, 'Who has the money deserves me.' Blanca palms an enormous camus. The fruit seller bellows. She bites to ruin it. He stamps at her. She waves it in her hand, walks smirking away. He mutters back to his cash box, sucking his lip up under his nose, chops odori for the minestra. 
	"Yesterday, the wife of a naval officer was robbed, raped, and murdered in his neighborhood. A gypsy is arrested. 'Animali, animals,' says the mayor. '[foreign language 01:11:36], no hospitality for these animals,' say crude posters in ugly red writing, flaunting the fascist tri-color flame. Gypsies are beaten in the street, the government of ex-communist Romano Prodi loads gypsies in buses, returns them to Romania. Overnight all Rome's beggars are gone. We'll never see Blanca again. This is not a tragedy. It only feels somehow pointlessly sad. Empty gypsy camps are bulldozed by the authorities. A stench of casual outdoor shitting remains. The dollar hits 1.40 against the euro. I turn 40. Maisie is 11 months old.
	"Two Padlocks Suicidal. Padlocks multiply on the footbridge Ponte Milvio. They look like a swarm of bees that shine, clip to chains, clipped to one another. A novel began it. Lovers wrote their initials on a lock, attached it to a lamppost, through the key in the Tiber. Lovesick or loving, copycats followed. 'We must keep this new tradition alive,' said the mayor when lock weight pulled a lamppost down. A mafia construction company donated stronger poles and cement. Padlocks of love fall on the ground. Bangladeshis, Rome tolerates its illegals, arranged locks for sale on crates. A girl buys the smallest, one euro, thumbnail size, surrounded by her girl gang. No lover necessary. Giggling like the barely burbling river, then solemn, smoothing back pearl edged hair. 'Rita,' screamed her friends when her key twinkles, falling. A goth couple grinds and kisses, flesh fat showing through intentional rips in grommet spangled jeans, grackle hit colored hair mingling. Two men in suits tongue each other's teeth. The Nigerian's radio sings beautiful girls, he'll have you suicidal.
	"Three Sunday morning night. Smashed beer bottles, crunched Marlboro packs with [foreign language 01:13:55] which smoking kills, in enormous letters across the front. Rita Gianni Sempre, Rita Gianni forever in permanent marker, glitter pink nail polish hearts underneath. Love lock graffiti has wiped out all others. No more USA [foreign language 01:14:13], circled A, hammer and sickle, fascist rifle scythe, not even Napoli [foreign language 01:14:20], soccer fan jeers. Workers in maroon and orange jumpsuits painstakingly scrub the bridge clean. Rita Gianni is back before they're halfway across. Slow Italian day waning. Apartment blocks cut out silver dusk. Sparrows fly rearing and bucking, past construction cranes, shimmering tinker toys laboring into evening. 
	"The yellow crane unspools wire cord, bows to lower a parcel of eye beams. The sparrows fly over the junkyard, the New York steakhouse. They funnel and swoop past the sports bar, smart car dealer, truck bed full of flowers and porcini, past the girl on the parked motorcycle, sitting side saddle, the better to show the clean yellow triangle of underpants. Swirl down among Tiber plain trees blurry camouflage. Maisie zoning in her cut rate stroller that sticks on bridge stones, lain down fan form. 'Birdie,' she jerks alert, points, knees locked, body arched. Birds shriek panicked apart, contract en mass into an umbrella pine's black green deepnesses. Crazed every time the sun goes down, thinking it won't rise again.
	"Four Histories Umbrellas. Rare days of rain, lock vendors sell five euro umbrellas by the bridge, water streaming down their faces. 312 AD Constantine saw a dream cross in the sky, defeated Maxentius at Ponte Milvio through him in the Tiber where he drowned. In 1849, Garibaldi blew up Milvio to keep the French out of Rome, lost the revolution anyway. Umbrellas smoke in the downpour. Kenneth Rexroth circa 1949 rode in on his bike. Quote with his Rexroth. The Tiber appears and then a sign, Ponte Milvio, we enter Rome in the tracks of the first triumph of barbarism and religion. My umbrella blows to pieces most times, halfway across the bridge. I buy another on the other side.
	"Five Shame and Go Home, 2004. A year into Iraq, Bush arrives in Rome. The huge cheerful protest march winds past Campidoglio, Colosseum, [inaudible 01:16:57], Circo Maximo, and the Baths of Caracalla. A better tour of ancient Rome than any bus. We walk with a Norwegian couple naming ourselves tourists against the war. The Norwegians are surprised we speak pretty grammatical English for Americans and know as much as they do about US politics, politely ignoring that we can't and they can recite the names of every member of Bush's cabinet. Bush as monkey, Bush as Hitler, Berlusconi as Mussolini, American flags with swastikas painted on, signs of the time. [foreign language 01:17:35], throw the bums out, shame and go home. Pictures from Abu Ghraib photoshopped to show Bush grinning over a pile of naked bodies. Condoleezza Rice, holding a prisoner on a leash, Cheney urging a dog to attack a man's naked crotch. [foreign language 01:17:58]. 
	"Woman in prolific skirt hitched hook and eye at her hips, little mirrors sewn in, doped mosquito bit baby sleepily sucking in her lap. Foot of the down escalators Flaminio metro station. Man in the doorway of a church collecting rice thrown after weddings, sieving it for cigarette butts. Beggar woman, kneeling unmoving in July sun, ass in the air, face to pavement, weirdly clean fingernails neatly manicured little crescent moons peeks sideways to see who's coming. Prepubescent boy plays accordion on the tram, small and sulky in a wife beater, never on Sunday virtuoso. He raises his arms, armpits of thick black man hair.
	"Six Histories 2000 July. My first time in Rome, our honeymoon a cheerful place. Jubilee year, slaves and prisoners are released, debts forgiven. God's mercy is particularly manifest and Catholics are absolved of their sins if they walked all seven basilicas. They troop in footsore double group tour lines behind a woman holding aloft a pink umbrella. She murmurs facts to her mic. They wear headset receivers. There's no more cacophony in art places, just watery hiss of tour guide whisper. In the Palazzo Doria Pamphili, Mary resting on the flight to Egypt bends wearily over her four square baby, his tiny penis pointing from the canvas, innocent and clean as a cap gun. 'Are you hungry sister,' says a fat guy to a nun. 'Would you like some Mcdonalds?' History hasn't happened yet. On the crowded flight home I sit next to a Texan who's never been out of Texas before. She went to Lourdes then Rome. She's sinless. We fly over New York, [foreign language 01:20:09]. What are those two tall buildings down there?" I'll skip ahead a couple. They encounter a neo fascist demonstration calling the gypsies to be expelled from Rome, and I'll read the last two sections.
	Part 9, [foreign language 01:20:41] in English means clap, clap your hands. "At the café Umberto, the tweedy Sicilian travel agent who came to Rome many years ago loves to hold Maisie on his lap. We call him Umberto Umberto." Sorry. "He teaches us a song, clap hands, daddy's coming. He's bringing cookies and Maisie will eat them. Settling down in his red plastic chair he says, 'I don't like to see any group targeted,' stirring and sipping his [foreign language 01:21:17]. On the other hand it looks to tourists these shit piles along the Tiber. Tonight I sing [foreign language 01:21:24] to Maisie, my mosquito bit big-eyed baby. We walk down the bank to the next bridge. [foreign language 01:21:32] then back up the other bank, a half mile. [foreign language 01:21:37], to get around a demonstration. [foreign language 01:21:42]. Something in the weather, a lightness. It's fall but feels like spring. Rome rushes back, shapes itself around me. What do I have to be anxious about, I say. Singing, I pick Maisie out of her stroller, my back aches. Maisie leans and writhes. 
	"At Ponte Milvio the demonstration breaks up. There's running, a stream of thug boys weaving through traffic down the path to the Tiber bank where human stink remains. Face masks, bandannas pulled down, one has a metal rod. Here are the infinitives, [foreign language 01:22:17], to push your teeth in where you want, [foreign language 01:22:21] to say nothing, [foreign language 01:22:24], to not care, [foreign language 01:22:28] to have a people who are the only ones who matter, [foreign language 01:22:34], to get away with it you need to get away.
	"10 Rome at its night. I want Blanca back. Go away, we'll tell her each time she gets near. She'll steal from us if she gets a chance. Why wouldn't she? We'll have a bad feeling about the sway of her hips, her pushing mostly up to men. We'll tell her go away. We can't tell her to go away. The gypsies are hounded out of Rome. Sparrows level out, the net with the sparrows as nuts. 15 men run out of orangey streetlamp light at the [inaudible 01:23:14] alley's edge. [foreign language 01:23:15], down the river path. Who they chase gets away because here they are coming back to the street. They pull off their hoods and bandanas. The crazy guy in the gold lame vest with the shopping cart and the cross around his neck shouts at the black crazy guy who drinks wine out of a carton lying around on planters all day. Maisie sleepily points at them. She likes to point. 
	"There go Altadonna and Giuseppe. They got across. Fascist boys going different directions now in groups of two and three. One I just noticed alone, bend down at down below his chin. He has a puckered asshole for a mouth. Holds his cache loose by his side, [foreign language 01:24:04]. He looks around at sparrow noise, sucking itself down into a tree. [foreign language 01:24:11], he waves the cache. It's heavy. He walks head down. He thwacks at weeds, young beautiful frail as Blanca. He has a cross around his neck. That has nothing to do with what I wanted to say. On a metro platform a crazy woman banging her head against a pillar. What do you do? Just look away. 
	"Bad things happening make you feel alive. The moon high up is a Roman sight. Umberto, Umberto at the awning edge, at the edge of night, watches away from the thugs, the traffic, not wanting to have this in his life. The last of the sparrows sweep into the tree in a panic of similes, a choral cutoff, a visual thump, like our 21st century and afterbirth. Rome, at its night, breathing like a man on an oxygen tank, tubes shoved up his nose, opens and shuts his mouth, fishily rhythmically trying for more air." Thank you.
Peter:	Thanks for coming. All star team here. I don't know about cleanup hitter. We're playing national league rules tonight. The pitcher bats last. This is an affectionate and somewhat curmudgeonly poem, elegy really in honor of beat writers. Just some notes for background in case you're not too familiar with their stories or that era of the 50's through the 70's. I'll mention a few things that are in the poem, references. A lot of things are taken from accounts of their life or lines from their writings, poems and fiction. The main characters I'm referring to are William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Bob Kaufman. I mentioned yard bird, that's Charlie Parker, the great jazz alto saxophone player and composer and bop as in bee bop jazz, key to the 50's and the folks like Kerouac and others were really into that great music. William S. Burroughs was notorious for apparently killing his wife while drunk while they were playing William Tell. She had an apple on her forehead, the legend goes. He had a rifle, and he shot her dead. Who knows what was going on with that, but anyway there's a reference to that. 
	I refer to Canuck, which is sort of derogatory slang for French Canadian, which Jack Kerouac was. Let's see. Mashugana, good Yiddish word, can mean crazy like a fox or just crazy crazy. Jeremiah, as in the Old Testament prophet, Hanuman, a Hindu deity, shape shifter, often appeared in the form of a monkey but has many other shapes and guises. Also famous for writing great sentences and for being a slayer of demons. Walt Whitman shows up briefly. In the Bob Kaufman section, he's from New Orleans but spent most of his time in the bay area. He lived a lot in SRO hotels as in single room only, usually all men. A lot of them would be in monstrous shape, and one particular one caught on fire. He lost most of all of his possessions except for some manuscripts that were carefully preserved from the fire because they were bound in heavy Moroccan leather, protected them. A lot of the stories from the Bob Kaufman section come from stories about his life that were told at St. Mark's church in Lower Manhattan in 1996 during a memorial for his life. 
	Near the end there's a reference to Ginsberg coming to Swarthmore to read in the 1990's. He was a sound check tyrant. He had precise instructions about the chair, what should be on the table next to the chair. He spent about 45 minutes making sure the sound system was correct. I had to adjust lots of things. It's a fond and somewhat angry memory of his power there. One last thing, at the end of the poem there's references drawn from a wonderful article that Patti Smith published on Gregory Corso. She remembered visiting him, I think it was in the Chelsea hotel and climbing up the stairs to his apartment to be interviewed by her, he mooned her, which she thought was meant to scandalize her but she found hilarious. She wrote this memoir in The Village Voice back when it was actually a newspaper that people looked forward to. If you don't know Patti Smith, you must read her work. I highly recommend especially of course her songs are great on things. The memoir just kids about her time with Robert Mapplethorpe in 1970's New York there. There's also a reference to poets becoming stars after they die. Legend has it that that's what happens. Some I guess are supernovas. The most famous example of that is in Shelley's poem to Keats Adonais. 
	Anyways, so here goes. This poem is called To the Deadbeats. It's got an epigraph from Gerta that's quoted in Burroughs's novel The Western Lands. "It's when you don't have this dying and becoming, you are only a sad guest on the darker. The attitude you said and beaten down, but you forgot to mention what you really craved was to be the country's beat and riffs, alive with envy over yard birds. Searching negro streets for an angry fix, even leaping on negros like some Rambo on his mission to Africa. Instead you sent suburban hipsters howling to the city for a shitty high. All of you were gypsies of good migrant stock. You had a lover's quarrel with America and haunted Blake's sunflower in rusting railroad yards or ozone horizons and the epileptic word. One a drunken William Tell, making his wife a cut-up, then flying away to Tangiers where brown cock was cheap. A trust fund calculation machine become a virus. Thuggies and deceivers in business again. Yet inside your violence was a frightened tenderness, your horse monotone soft to the touch as shed snake skin. 
	"Another, a gone angel, shining through dark Canuck eyes, who agreed with Baudelaire that beauty was an accusation. English as a second language helped you hear its chunky music. Though as each year passed, your wings grew harder and harder to lift. You wrote bop is the language from America's inevitable Africa, but your groupies thought dharma bum meant white and male and with your conquered lass, the black lash lovely, what really turned you on was soused and subterranean jungle amour. Then there's that poet who lived as if mashugana was a missing book in the Torah scroll. Half Jeremiah, half Hanuman, in Uncle Sam top hat, rabbinical beard, these vortex sutras of anger and light cut tornado swaths through the country's heartland. Godfather Walt haunted your every chest bearing move, and you never could quite match his 28 young men by the shore, his democratic vistas and lacy jags. Everyone made guilty by Bob Kaufman's song goes boom, [inaudible 01:33:41] de bop, bop. 
	"Beaten up in one cell and then another for peeing on a cop in the coexistence bagel shop. Brief beautiful shadows burned on walls of night. The ancient rain is falling through SRO hotel inferno, pages singed and soaked but safe in side Moroccan leather. During a vow of silence, you dream of the day you return to crackling blueness. A payphone rings as I pass it on the street. It's Jean Carton with a collect call for me. I accept, but all he says is, 'The blood of the poet.' Dying old or young, you all succumb to the vices that made you proud. The only one who actually got rich tends a growing Buddha belly and becomes a sound check tyrant. Hosts must verify again and again your voice will carry to every corner of the hall if not eternity. At the end of the performance poems that were your lives, you were forced into heaven against your will and suddenly stardom was not what you wanted. Restless again on your spirit road, you traversed the night and moon us all." Thank you.
Jim:	The breadth of the many, many different kinds of expression that these four alumni and three professors have given us are I think a wonderful example of the many different directions that exist within Swarthmore and afterwards. I'm going to make my normal plea for ideas. I run alumni events, and I've been running alumni events for long enough that I've sort of thought of everything I can think of and would love to know more ideas of people to bring to Swarthmore, places to go in the Philadelphia area, alumni or professors who we might do some sort of event around. Rather than have a formal question and answer session right now, I think if we could just have some more informal talking with everyone who can stay over remaining wine and cheese and fruit. Thank you all very much and one more big round of applause for our seven readers.