Nat:	It's a particular pleasure to welcome you to a reading tonight by our former student, the eye opening poet, Daisy Fried. Before I introduce her, however, I'll remind you of three other literary events planned for these next weeks: the fiction workshop reading on May 1st; a reading by six students who have pursued independent work in poetry this year through the directed creative writing project, that will be on May 2nd; and the poetry workshop reading on May 5th. 
	I will also mention that I have a few books for sale by Daisy Fried. I have a few books by Daisy Fried here for sale, and will happily part with them, for you, after the reading. 
	When I was last on sabbatical, I used, as prompts, a rather facetious list of directives thought up by Daisy Fried. My favorite of these - not that it produced anything I'll ever show anybody - asks you to write a bad poem, and then challenges you to revise it and make it even worse. I like that exercise because it gets you thinking about poetic moves that make you cringe, that set your fe- ... My mouth seems not to be cooperating with my tongue at the moment. I'll try that again. Poetic moves that make you cringe, that set your teeth on edge, and makes you consider why that should be so. After all, if you cringe, the poem has effected you. So how might you use that [cringy-ness 00:01:41]? How might you direct it, so as to grab the reader? 
	Over the years, I've seen how Daisy characteristically responds to drafts in workshops or to poems in progress I've sent her myself. She does not offer advice on how to fix the poem, but instead, she interrogates it with questions to get at its core, its essence, the thing you are getting at but somehow didn't quite convey. Questions that challenge the writer to intensify, to strip down, to shake the reader, to put everything at the service of that core. 
	It's interesting, then, to observe how that process manifests itself in Daisy's own work. Grace [Dewy 00:02:32], one of the students in the contemporary women's poetry class this year, commented in her blog that reading Daisy Fried's poetry was a bit like reading her diary. It's rough-edged in that way, both in its staccato style and in its raw revelations. 
	Over the years, I've more than once felt I've needed to check, after reading one of her poems, to be sure that everything was alright at home. I, who know perfectly well that you can't equate the life on the page with the life of the poet. And indeed, although her work is richly and recognizably based in her own experience, her extended trips to Rome or Paris, her time at Princeton as a Hodder Fellow, her husband Jim, her daughter [Maisey 00:03:21]. Like all good poets, she lies like a rug. She exaggerates, she intensifies, she breaks the poem open, she hones its broken edges to make it sharper. So you can't assume that anything in her work is factually true, but notice the skill it takes to make each articulation cut and grate as if she's lived it. 
	This brings me to another issue. What are these books about? We can easily see their general frames. 
	Sorry, I'll lift them up. 
	Girlhood, young womanhood, motherhood. Each book contains multitudes. So many voices, so many venues, so many perspectives. The contemporary women's poetry class has explored a number of works lately that we might think of as concept albums. Louise Gluck's Meadowlands, for example, Rewriting the Odyssey in Contemporary New Jersey, or Natasha Trethewey's Bellocq's Ophelia, a book that offers letters and diary entries supposedly written by a mixed race prostitute in turn of the century New Orleans. 
	What do we make, then, of Daisy Fried's most recent book, Women's Poetry: Poems and Advice, which begins with a saga of a Princeton creative writing teacher, pregnant and hyper aware of it, who finds herself on the train with students. Her students. Just back from interviewing in New York, oblivious to her, obsessing about their privileged yet precarious lives. A book that features poems about muscle cars, about making messy love in a hotel room while a Korean monster movie plays on the TV and the baby snoozes on the other side of the room, about feeding feral kittens by flashlight in the backyard in nothing but your underpants, about catching sight of Henry Kissinger at the Louvre. A book that rewrites Milton's L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, Marianne Moore's poetry - that's the poem about the muscle car, Wallace Steven's The Snow Man. A book that incorporates a poetic sequence set in Rome, where neo-fascists march and menace, where gypsies are swept off the street, where pre-teens, teens, just about everybody, proves their love by fixing padlocks to the lampposts and throwing the keys in the Tiber. A book that ends with an in-your-face advice column about poetry that my student, Alexandra [Noise 00:05:59] calls "The funniest thing [he's] read in print. So irreverent, so sarcastic, so biting. I laughed, despite feeling Fried was in part mocking my own flaws". 
	While one would be hard-pressed to characterize such a book as a concept album, for me, Women's Poetry, like She Didn't Mean to Do It and My Brother is Getting Arrested Again before it, is unified by its sardonic take on the world. Daisy Fried is perpetually asking: "Can you believe that just happened? Can you believe I, flawed and jaded as I am (on the page), was somehow there, was part of it? Can you believe how it signifies? And if we turn it this way, add this, take this away, can you believe how it signifies even more disconcertingly?" 
	I'm going to conclude with a few more comments from the student blogs. Cecilia [Posha 00:06:55] calls Fried, "A master of the mundane. She sets a scene with the perfect details to accurately depict an average moment, then injects an emotion or feeling subtly and powerfully, leaving me jolted, without being able to determine exactly where or what the jolt came from". 
	Anna Gonzalez writes, "Daisy Fried's kinetic poetry grabs hold of the everyday material of life and refuses to let go. Her poems speak with an expansive consciousness, one which passes by people on the street or on public transportation, and imagines their entire lives". Anna goes on to praise the way Fried's poetry "manages to be rich with images without coming off as merely imagistic. It makes concrete her worlds and the worlds she imagines. Almost a tactile poetry that you can touch, taste, smell, and feel". 
	[Sona 00:07:50] [Kumar 00:07:50] notes just how unsentimental Daisy Fried's poetry is. "The book's title, Women's Poetry," she says, "is quite misleading. It gives the impression of poetry only accessible to women, only producible by women. It sounds a bit gossipy, a bit like an excerpt from Cosmo or some magazine like that. And then, of course, the poetry is actually quite wonderfully quick and to the point and so very aware of itself". 
	And [Kumiya 00:08:17] [Digs 00:08:17] says, "Oh, Daisy Fried is fun. Reading her books was like talking with someone I'd just met, but felt very comfortable with". 
	Daisy Fried's first book, She Didn't Mean to Do It, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Award at Pitt. Her second, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, was chosen as one of Library Journal's 10 best poetry books of 2006, and her third, Women's Poetry: Poems and Advice, is one of Library Journal's five best books of 2013. Daisy has received the Guggenheim, [Hader 00:08:52], and [Pew 00:08:52] Fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, and the Cohen Award from Plowshares. She's taught at a [cazillion 00:08:59] places: Bryn Mawr, Haverford, Penn, Smith, Villanova, Swarthmore, and she's on the faculty of the Warren Wilson MFA program, and teaches regularly at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Jason [Gureo 00:09:13], writing for PN Review - that's a British journal - says that "Women's poetry locates Fried as one of the masterful American poets of her generation". Please join me in welcoming this masterful poet back to Swarthmore. 
Daisy Fried:	[inaudible 00:09:36] masterfully [inaudible 00:09:36]. 
Nat:	[inaudible 00:09:38]. 
Daisy Fried:	Is this good? Okay. 
	So, I actually thought I would go backwards a little bit and read a couple poems from an earlier book, and read from my latest book, and some new poems, and then at the very end, Natalie's going to come up and help me with a little segment, so. 
	I don't actually know where any of the poems in my older books are anymore, so let's see. Doll Ritual. Spanking the bad, kissing the good, that’s a thrill, poor things. Mornings I lay out all the teds and dollies with their bald spots, coy looks, rag bodies, hysterical eyes. Some with chewed-off noses. Some, patches where snot, pee, has dried. The one I name Ti-Anne, my favorite, my doll afraid of all the others, with broken eyelids supposed to flip up stuck shut? Her I sit to one side to watch the whippings. Her namesake, Ti-Anne (don’t ask), my best enemy (I have lots of enemies, she’s the only one I name a doll for) has eyes those same types of hysterical colors, changes them daily. She licks her fingers before she tries to stick them in my eyes. No one yells but someone sings ha ha. “Ti-Anne, Ti-Anne,” I call, “you stink!” and you know the bad girl smashes my lunchbox thinking it’s my face. I’m thinking about this, I see my pattern:  incitement, paralysis, incitement, paralysis. Why can’t you ever handle what you start, little girl? See, I have never been poor at all, except just an indigence, also a mendacity, of heart; and the way I think it’s otherwise.
	The next poem has a date at the end. Two dates. One is May '01 and January '02. I started this poem, I was just in Paris for a month and we had a cheap apartment there and I was just taking notes and it was shortly after 911, a few months after. In fact, Paris was mostly empty of Americans 'cause everybody just sort of canceled their plans, travel plans. And then I think I actually finished the poem somewhat later than those dates imply, but I'm going on about this because the end of the poem refers to the Americans' war in Afghanistan, so I sort of wrote the poem in two parts and ... Anyway [inaudible 00:13:13]. 
	American Brass. But there was an American marching band in Paris, playing in the Jardin du Luxembourg at this time, when there were almost no Americans in Paris. 
	American Brass. The percussionist is the only skinny member of the American high school marching band playing the Luxembourg Gardens bandstand under overspreading horse chestnut-trees. The massy, meat-bound, milk-fed teens hold their tubas like dads hold pubescent daughters. Like they're too big to be held. Lie they love them like babies. Now the boy trombonist steps forward. His band jacket hangs open around a heavy belly he's too young for. He begins a solo designed to shoe how slow he can play, and how fast. Impossible to know why French people stay for these ineptitude. But they do, and we do, Jim and me, tap our feet and kindly clap. Ah, their children run around in the dust. They run with sticks. Lummox clouds push over, abut, stay put, drop drizzle that hardly manages its way through the cover of hand-shaped leaves that touch and touch together. Ah the Paris children are running under them with sticks in chic baby clothes: not pinks, not blues - oranges, oxbloods, olives. The man who announces the songs is proud of his translations. "Et main tenant," he says, "'Home on ze Range.' Ou, 'Mason sur l'espace ouvert.'" House on the Open Space - gets me and Jim giggling. And I think, as the boy takes up his trombone again, the French see in American brass the U.S.A. they loathe and love: something beautifully crass. 
	We all love what others have done wrong to. Last night we went to hear writers of serious American westerns at an English-language bookstore - upstairs room, chairs shoved among shelves, too many books, people, carpet grubby - stories where Indians and bears kept wandering and seeking. At the Q&A, the half-mad bookstore owner kept abusively asking, "ze bear in your story, he symbols somezing, no? American violence? Ze bombing of Serbia?" I whispered to Jim, "Yeah, well, what about the French in the '60s in Algeria?" (I was so pissed). In the metro that night, four cops hassled an Arab, machine guns strapped to their backs. The Arab: resigned, half-scared. Everyone just kept looking away, going by. But here I am now, under these trees with this iffy, distant weather, thinking about, well ... swans, wishing for tragic swans to land their alien selves under this green bigtop, walk among us, do a comic dying swan act - real swans in their feathers, not girls in their tutus, and they'll dance Swan Lake - to "Home on the Range."
	What if they pecked and plucked the sticks away from the children, laid their pellet-heads in the lap of, say, that man there with his dark blue, red-piped, gold-buttoned blazer and perfect white hair. Or in the lap of my husband, Jim. Now trombone boy pulls to a shaky end - we ought to go but we sit a long time more, holding hands, listening to American brass filling up all of every thing, the trees, the park, these interrupted spaces, paths, kids, dust, the French, our hearts, with its sound like money, like bombs falling in air, bombs falling now on Afghanistan. 
	Which is actually still relevant, so. Let's see. This is an intelligence test. Got it. Okay. Alright. I've never read this one out loud before, but Nat said I should, so. She is my first and only poetry teacher, so I do what she says. Okay, so this poem refers to Wallace Steven's poem, which is The Snow Man, which starts, "One must have a mind of winter", and it ends with a line from a Valery poem, which is in French: "Un long regard sur le calme des dieux", which is more or less "A long look on the calm of gods". And somebody in it talks about une bonnefemme de neige, which is supposed to be a snow woman. Bonhomme de neige is a snow man, and I asked my French-speaking neighbor, "How would you say snow woman?" She said "[inaudible 00:19:10]. Bonfemme de neige", but she was sort of making it up, but ... 
	So this is A Snow Woman. A window on a side yard in winter. I’m reading Stevens, as usual not into it. I decide again not to get pregnant. The neighbor’s child’s sandbox still out there, lid on underneath snow: White barrow burial for troubled life’s embraces. Romance: I see them: Upstairs - Jeff begins a snowman with Thérèse and the kid, and we go out and help and we’re in an Eddie Bauer winter catalog, dumping snow on one another to show we’re harmless, grinning with open mouths. Parsnip nose, jalapeño smile, habañero eyes. Thérèse’s sloppy velvet hat. “Regardes, Doudou,” Thérèse just-tenured in the French department (specialty Valéry), “la bonfemme de neige!” Doudou flails, struggles, nearly two, down out of Maman’s arms, drives a fist deep into the snow woman’s middle, right deep into it. One must have a womb of snow, an eye of cold. One must have a blue bright beret. Un long regard sur le calme des dieux! 
	Alright, so now I'm going to try something new. This is called Forcefeeding and the title kind of refers to the force feeding of Guantanamo prisoners, although the poem doesn't really refer directly to that anywhere, the hunger striking Guantanamo prisoners. 
	Forcefeeding. One year the parade came soon after a girl we knew died. They said it was a stroke. Later, we knew it wasn't that. The armory at the end of our street spat out tanks with soldiers to drive them, setting forth with thunderous clammerings, on inexorable caterpillar tread, past our house as past our neighbors houses. Apartment hives cut out of near-mansions. Students mostly. Some with signs: "U.S. Out of Nicaragua", "No Nukes". Some with bandanas, joints, Corona, and Bud. Most years my mother shouted and broke out into dubious kindnesses. She could be good for a snuggle, if seldom. My brothers and sister developed communities of blankness. If I were excluded, everyone becoming what they would be. My father with a book. Edward Hopper monograph or The Way of All Flesh. Watched white-boot majorettes with flinging legs and flung batons. Cub scouts, their blue, their [badgy 00:22:42] bling, yellow neckerchiefs knotted neatly. Rows of reservists in camouflage and boots with poles braced in holders just above their groins, flags straining to furl and fold. Ruined men in reflector sunglasses, beards, and wheelchairs. Placards that said Vietnam, or names of other wars: Korea, the World Wars, in diminishing numbers, the first. My father got out of the peacetime draft by being too tall. We were a family that didn't favor pleasure. I learned this another far day. I was hungry for popsicles, saltines. 
	One year a woman stood near us crying and said, "I always cry at parades. I always have. I don't know why". One year a women stroked my sister's faced and crooned, "Jesus loves you", and my mother came shrieking, "My daughter is Jewish", which wasn't perfectly true. That's how we had our own parade before the real parade, by living where the tanks were. That's how we didn't lift a finger. Deep cracks opened in our [Macadam 00:24:09] from tank weight. The vibrations as they rolled towards us, vibrations that came back to us after they were no longer in sight, pumped into our bodies, rammed in, made us shatter and shiver with sour and mash and choke, [slushing 00:24:36] through our narrow passages and vessels, nerve and vein. 
	[inaudible 00:24:40] is called Where Not to Put Things. Failed poems about sex, ball of yarn twists from pink to green to tangerine, good for baby hats, years left over, dump of deadly drafts stinking of the notebooks, forms to re-register for government help, sew-your-own-clothes manual, unused, abuts, it always does, T.J. Clark’s unread The Absolute Bourgeois. Battered metal water bottle Beth left at Jim’s book party, we were drunk or drunkish and the kids grew fractious on quarrel and sugar, I took it, the bottle, half not intending to give it back and didn’t give it back. It leans unused on the sill towards the postcard from Arezzo pushpinned to the wall, Piero fresco detail shows (why I bought it) the balls of the man who bears the load of the wood of the cross getting buried. 
	Peach pit, wet fibers still attached, inch-deep in coffee mug residue. Solar powered Queen Elizabeth II figurine waves inanely backwards. Friends keep leaving. Receipts. Poems about failed sex. Report on post-Fukushima Pacific fish. “Groaning laughter outside like a school bus trying to get up a mountain” from the list I keep of failed and orphaned metaphors and titles. “Where Not to Put Things.” I stop reading Fukushima. Bit of wax from off a cheese, cracker dust, roll of dusty barely-sticks-anymore masking tape, cracked pencil box holding up the window slipping down its tracks. Teapot: leaks when poured, oh well. My daughter’s sweater on the floor. Making Their Mark: Women Artists Move Into the Mainstream: An old book, very '80s. Which, when I flip it randomly open, reports the artist broke through to her mature work when ... I lose interest, fiddle with tissues, my wicker purse, poems without ends, ball of yarn, instructions for Reduction of Taxes Due to Insolvency Worksheet I can’t understand. Sometimes it’s: how can I write in this mess. Sometimes: that’s the point.
	Someone was asking me today at the class, like, "What's your day like", and that explains it. I should have just read that poem, [inaudible 00:27:42]. Alright. So, my next poem is a longish narrative poem which sort of moves around. It's set on a train, but it moves around a little bit and goes inside and outside the speaker's mind so I'll give you a cast of characters just to help you follow it. The speaker is an adjunct pregnant creative writing teacher. Nat mentioned the poem. And on the train are students, Princeton seniors, coming back from their Wall Street interviews. They've just been interviewing for jobs. And two of those students are actually students of the speaker and their names are Justin and Brianna. And there's also a character named [Soon-Ji 00:28:36] who is not on the train but is constantly being sort of referred to. And there are minor characters like a midwife and a prenatal yoga teacher and Paul Krugman, the New York Times economics columnist. Justin has written a poem called Torment, which is seven pages long, and my poem is also called Torment, and it is also seven pages long. [inaudible 00:29:21].
	I saw this scene recently in a movie where there's these guys talking about how to open a banana. Anybody remember what this is? And apparently they said [inaudible 00:29:46] if you watch gorillas, they open the banana at the other end and they just sort of pop it open, and it's actually much easier, while we're going [inaudible 00:29:46], and like, squishing the top of it. I don't know, I was just reminded of like, sort of, there must be a smarter way to drink water. It's true. If you turn your bananas over and open it from the other end, it is much easier. Who knew that? Did anybody know that? [inaudible 00:30:01] actually, so. So there is a use coming to poetry readings. 
	Torment. “I fucked up bad”: Justin cracks his neck, talking to nobody. Fifteen responsible children, final semester college seniors, bloodshot, collars undone, gorgeously exhausted,  return from Wall Street interviews in attitudes of surrender on the Dinky — the one-car commuter train connecting Princeton to the New York line. Panic-sweat sheens their faces. Justin hasn’t seen me yet. He says, “Something’s fucked with my tie.” He’s right. I see his future, the weight he’ll gain first in his face, then gut and ass, the look of bad luck he’ll haunt his bad jobs with. He tears off the tie. Elephants on it. Fatigue, swollen ankles, the midwife said. The worst discomforts of pregnancy. I wrote those down. But she’s wrong: self-pity. Strange dreams, she said. No dreams. Discarded newspapers — business section, money, real estate, auto — sift apart to quartos and folios underfoot. “Shut up, Justin,” says the girl across from him. I hardly recognize Brianna in her interview hair. She scratches her face, fingers trembling from the day’s aftershocks. “I wanted,” she counts on her fingers, performing the sitcom of her tragedy, “Tribeca loft, expense account, designer clothes so haute they don’t look it, my very own Tesla, summer home in the Hamptons I’m too busy to use.” “You wanted money,” says Justin. Brianna says: “It went down with the towers.”
	I spent my lopsided day lifting my belly back towards center, interviewing for adjunct jobs. There’s a half-moon in half-clouds up over the tracks. Justin spreads over three seats, texts with his thumb, talks: “The Lehman Brothers guy asks me, Did you ever sell anything? Sell me a bottle of water. I’m like fu-uck. To say something I say ‘Why do you like water?’ He says ... Justin fixes a diamond stud back in his ear. “They’ll let me know.” Fifteen responsible children sigh in disappointed relief. Somebody they know didn’t get the job they didn’t get. I sleep. Wake. Beautiful clothes spread bodiless before me! Tailored black suits and skirts, silk ties, ephemera of sheer and filmy stockings deflated over seat backs. Brianna looks around, no conductor coming, squats to peel off, in one motion, skirt, hose, underpants, step butt-naked into soft chino shorts I’ll never be able to afford. “Nervous crotch sweat,” she says.
	I keep trying to look not-quite-40 in a different way than I’m not-quite-40. The woman interviewer looked at my belly. “As a new mother would you have time to be literary mama to your students?” So I could sue when they don’t hire me for the job I don’t want. Justin looks up from his iPhone: “Soon-Ji got three offers. Fuck.” He flips the curl his mother’s fingers crimped, first day of pre-K into his four-year-old forelock. “He’s guessing he’ll go with Goldman Sachs.” Brianna grabs her neck in living garrote. She high-fives anybody she can reach in gloomy delight. She gobbles snack-pack popcorn, licks her fingers; bits drop yellow from her lips. “My mom will go crazy Deutsche Bank didn’t offer.” She sees me. “I didn’t realize that was you with your hair up. Look, Justin.” She high-fives me. “It’s Professor.”
	Is Brianna crying? “Don’t call me Professor,” I say, dozens of times a semester. “I’m a writer, not a teacher.” Justin grabs a Norton Anthology out of his five-hundred-dollar briefcase. “Fuck. What are we supposed to read for tomorrow?” “Prufrock, dummy,” Brianna says. “You’re a good professor.” She condescends through tears. “Poor baby,” mocks Justin, slumping so low in the seat I only see his shoe soles on the arm rest. The train swooshes through suburban tracts. The moon gets smaller. Brianna arrives mornings to workshop in a fake hurry and the sweats she slept in, probably rolls back in bed after. She hands out slight, surprising poems, apologizes, sips cardboard-container coffee in a recyclable sleeve, turns her BlackBerry to vibrate. It moans like indigestion through class.
	I hand her one of my self-pity tissues. My ankles are slim. Brianna hates her name. “So tacky. I’d be a Kelly if I were twenty years older.” I’d like to be able to hate her. I’m turning into my Favorite Teachers—so kind, so industrious, so interested and interesting. “Sorry I’m late with my portfolio,” she says through sniffles. She dabs her lip. “I had to prepare for,” a breath, “interviews.” A few times a semester I say “It’s only poetry.” Gumbleeds! Nosebleeds! the midwife predicted, and it’s true, my Kleenexes are measled with blood, weird hairs, stretch marks, frequent catnaps, hip joints so loose you must take care walking. The fetus dabs its fingers in the sponge of me, flails. At the second class, Brianna said, “My mom would go crazy. I can’t read all these sex poems. We’re Christian.” I said, “Poems should be about life, part of life is sex.” Two kids wrote that down in notebooks. One was Justin. “But skip any reading that makes you uncomfortable.” Next week, Brianna wrote about hanging onto stall walls in her residence hall bathroom, fucking Princeton boys one by one. Justin’s poem was “Torment,” seven pages long.
	Favorite Teachers write poems about students! Reading them is like listening to whores talk about clients; however contemptuous they sound, everybody knows who’s selling, who’s buying. I’d like to be able to like them. I sleep. Wake. “Justin’s your boyfriend?” I whisper to Brianna. My cell phone rings, screen says it’s my husband. If I answer, I’ll cry. Voice mail takes it. “God no,” says Brianna. “We hate each other, right, Justin? Never date the competition, you destroy your luck. Besides.” She starts morosely high-fiving again. “I’m a virgin.” Justin laughs. 
	She wraps her hair around her face to smell it. “I pay attention in class. Professor Krugman, he’s a real professor.” She points at a headline I just kicked. Housing Upturn Predicted. “He says housing increases don’t matter in the long run. It’s a blip, if it’s even a blip. If I don’t get a job, it’s Wharton MBA. Or teach English in Japan. But this girl on my floor told me Asian girls depilate their whole bodies, even their arms. I can’t be the hairiest person in my life.” What will I do next year without the job I don’t want? I sleep. “Hey!” says Brianna. “I could go back to Spain, smoke Ducados in okupa cafes. Be a poet! Sorry.” Laughs herself out of last tears at the idea. “I didn’t mean to get all Sylvia Plathy on you. Anyway, my trust fund is safe. Knock plastic.” She reaches to rap the tie Justin hung over the seat. I say, “In Madrid workers smoke Ducados. Reds are for anarchista Eurotrash wannabes.” 
	Brianna lips the cigarette she’ll light on the platform. “I’ll have my portfolio next week, promise.” All semester she’s revised following precisely, appallingly, my suggestions. She says “Think of me as raw talent wasted.” I’m pissed I think of her at all. Justin again, talking at no one: “Merrill Lynch says what interests you in our company? I’m amped. I’m whipped. I’m like ‘Um, I heard you were hiring?’ Nah, I’m giving him eight good reasons. He cuts me off ...” The train slows, surceases with a hiss. Fifteen responsible children stand in the aisle. Jizz, jess, fuck, markered on seats by younger, irresponsible children.
	Off the train, Justin jumps into a low Mazda coupe, yellow as Dick Tracy’s hat, parked unticketed at an expired meter, open to the rain. I autodial: “I’m at the station. Don’t come, I need the walk.” Brianna says: “Where’s Soon-Ji anyway? Flying his plane back? God, what’ll we do if nobody wants us?” Justin says: “Soon-Ji will fucking keep us I guess. All we have is Dad’s money.” Brianna says: “Mine’s Mom’s. Half of it gone in the crash. But Soon-Ji is great-grandfathered in. He’ll be richer than we’ll ever be if he never gets a job at all.” Justin says: “Professor, you hand back comments tomorrow, right? They’re important to me.” “Fuck you, suck-up,” Brianna says.
	Sometimes I forget I’m pregnant till I walk. Brianna vaults into the car, leans out: “Want a ride, Professor? Cigarette?” She puts one in my mouth, lights it with a naked boy lighter that squirts fire out his tiny penis. “Beer?” Tears a can off a six-pack choke-ring, sticks it in a baggie she pulled from Justin’s glove compartment, pops the top, shoves it in my hand. “Now you can’t walk home — pregnant, smoking, carrying a beer? You’d be arrested. Anyway, Soon-Ji is having a party. Cristal! Rappers! He produces them and brings his stable down from Queens. You have to come! He was going to take your workshop, but he admires you, but took playwriting instead.” For final relaxation in prenatal yoga, we do our Kegels squatting in a circle, shut-eyed — “for perineal strengthening,” the teacher said. Then we lie on our sides, breathe in, breathe out, bellies like dropped anchors on the floor. Our muscles tick, smoothing, loosening. The teacher reads an affirming poem. I tense up. 
	Brianna: “We always say Krugman’s one of the few Professors we’d friend on Facebook. But, Daisy, we’d friend you too.” Memory: Favorite Teachers at our college house parties, slow-dancing with us, doing lines in our bathrooms. When are they going to grow up, we said. I wave, walk, drop the cigarette in the beer, the can in the trash can, relieved to be embarrassed, triumphant, sorry. Justin drives along beside me, Brianna rides shotgun standing like a surfer on a breaking wave. Justin — “Fuck” — floors it, roars past me, away. I don’t know how to end this poem. On “Torment” I wrote: “You may want to find a way to suggest ironic distance between the poet and speaker.” I couldn’t figure out what else, to responsible children, there was to say.
	I don't know if I should come back to the college I went to and read a poem like that, but ... Nobody in this room is being referred to. Really. 
	Okay. I think I'll read one more poem and then we'll do our thing. So Marianne Moore's poem Poetry, in its shortest version - thank you - goes like this: "I, too, dislike it. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine". Thank you. 
	So, my poem is called Women's Poetry. Women's Poetry. I, too, dislike it. However, I was trying to not think when out of the gaping wound of the car-detailing garage (smells like metallic sex) came a Nissan GT-R fitted with an oversized spoiler. Backing out sounded like clearing the throat of god. A gold snake [zizzed 00:44:21] around the license plate. Sunburst hubcaps, fancy undercarriage installation casting a pool of violet light on the pocked pavement of gum blots. Was it this that filled me with desire?
	Okay. So, the [poetus 00:44:44] answers questions in the book. The advice part of the title is an advice column called Ask the [Poetus 00:44:50]. The [poetus 00:44:53] gives advice on poetry and life and people write in to her and she's kind of a know-it-all narcissist with a heart of gold. Doesn't resemble anyone I know. And, what else can I tell you? So, like her colleague Dan Savage, the sex columnist, people will write in and sign their names in amusing ways and she'll sort of shorten those or make acronyms out of them. For example, Poet Mom-to-Be becomes [Po-Mo 00:45:32]. Mother Addicted Relentlessly to Young Rascals becomes MARTYR, and [nullapara 00:45:40] is a word for a woman who's never been pregnant, and she writes back to that person as Null. She's not a very nice person, sometimes. 
	Okay. 
Nat:	So ...
Daisy Fried:	So, Natalie is all the letter writers and I play the part of ...
Nat:	And all the really stupid letter writers. Sorry. 
	Dear [Poetus 00:46:04]: Who do you think was the greatest [poetus 00:46:08] of the 20th century, Sara Teasdale, or Adelaide Crapsey? Wondering. 
Daisy Fried:	Dear Wondering: A usage note at dictionary.com states: "Many critics have argued that there are sexist connotations in the use of the suffix 'ess' to indicate a female in words like sculptress, waitress, stewardess, and actress". The heart of the problem lies in the non-parallel use of terms to designate men and women. The [poetus 00:46:56] has long felt that women's equality should be founded in the notion that a women is no worse than a man. So it stands to reason that men are just as bad as women. The [poetus 00:46:56] applies the term [poetus 00:46:56] to men and women, good [poetuses 00:46:56] and bad. It's true that few poems surpass Miss Adelaide Crapsey's subtly [apostrophed 00:47:07] lines from her cinquain, November Night. "Like steps of passing ghosts, the leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees and fall". Or Miss Sara Teasdale's A November Night: "Think that every path we ever took has marked our footprints in mysterious fire, delicate gold that only fairies see". 
	What is a [poetus 00:47:30] without ghosts, fairies, mysteries, and other consolations? So, Mr. Charles Bukowski: "I was always a natural slob. I liked to lay upon the bed in undershirt (stained, of course) (and with cigarette holes) shoes off beer bottle in hand". From the great slob. He is our greatest [poetus 00:47:53]. Love, The [Poetus 00:47:55].
Nat:	Dear [Poetus 00:47:59]: But seriously, what's the difference between a male [poetus 00:48:03] and a female [poetus 00:48:03]? It's the chromosomes, huh? 
Daisy Fried:	Dear Itch: Okay. There is one difference. A male [poetus 00:48:17] can say, "Gettin' soft, dude. Gettin' soft", while delivering a punch to another male [poetus' 00:48:21] expanding gut. A female [poetus 00:48:24] can never, ever, ever, ever say this to her sisters in poetry, with punching or without. Love, The [Poetus 00:48:31]. 
Nat:	Dear [Poetus 00:48:39]: My poetry teacher keeps saying things like, "Poetry is what you get when your language aspires to be more than utilitarian. Install power words to produce jolts of feeling. Recently, I noticed he does this with his eyes closed. Who should I report this to? 20th Century Poet. 
Daisy Fried:	Dear 21st Century Poet: Is your teacher an adjunct with a double full-time teaching load at $2500 per class, without health insurance, job security, or other benefits? Overworked teachers generally have a talent for teaching while sleeping. I'm surprised you noticed. In my day, students universally practiced their own versions, listening while sleeping. Love, The [Poetus 00:49:27]. 
	And now Natalie is going to be three different letter writers and The [Poetus 00:49:35] will answer all three at once. 
Nat:	Dear [Poetus 00:49:39]: Now that I'm pregnant with my first child, friends and strangers put their hands on my belly and say things like, "You're a poet. Don't worry. Having a baby is like writing a book". Is this even true? Poet Mom-to-Be. 
	Dear [Poetus 00:49:59]: I love being a mom, but my husband, we met when we were both creative writing MFA students. My husband complains, I'm short-changing myself and my talents because my attachment parenting techniques - holding the children 24-7, co-sleeping, breastfeeding still going strong with Wystan, seven, [Menoloy 00:50:22], four, and the twins, Walt and Emily, two - have made some of our adult activities impossible. He says, "You never want to ... Anymore". He doesn't use the word right, but I'm pretty sure that's what he means. Mother Addicted Relentlessly to Young Rascals. 
	And then, Dear [Poetus 00:50:48]: Why do mothers think they're so special? Anybody can pop a child out. Writing a book of poems is much harder. [Nullapara 00:50:56]. 
Daisy Fried:	Dear [Po-Mo 00:51:00], MARTYR, and Null: Treat the poem as the child, and the child as the poem. Failed babies should not be thrown away. Instead, tuck them in a drawer or save them on a memory stick. Who knows when you'll want to dig them out, pull them apart, and work them up again? Finished babies should be given classic or clever names, stamped "Diagnostically Approved by the Pediatric Industrial Complex Committee on Random Developmental Milestones", and multiply submitted to kindergartens for publication. 
	Meanwhile, poems should be burped, diapered, and placed on their backs to sleep, however much they may scream and try to turn over. Corporal punishment is not recommended, but if you must spank the poem, never do so in anger. The community remains divided on whether or not a daily vitamin is useful, but those Baby Tennyson: Teach Your Poem to Rhyme Before it Can [inaudible 00:52:01] and Baby Avant: Teach Your Poem to Experiment Before it Has Even Skimmed Patterson DVDs have been thoroughly discredited and may be returned for store credit. And remember: you can't finish a child or book without making lots of mistakes. 
	Confidential to Mr. MARTYR, nagging will get you nowhere, in bed or out. Try champagne, oysters, and mopping the damn floor for a change. Love, The [Poetus 00:52:34]. 
	Thank you. 
	And now onto the important business, the poetry prize winners. The first thing I want to say is when I was an undergraduate here, and I entered these contests, I submitted my poems and did not win any of the prizes, so keep writing. And before naming the winners, I'd like to name a couple of honorable mentions for the prize, and if you're here, let people know that you're here, okay? Danielle [Charet 00:53:15] and Cara [Ellenfeld 00:53:16]. Wonderful work. 
	So, two awards are made for the John Russell Hayes Poetry Prize, and the John Russell Hayes Poetry Prize of $300 for poems of skill and variety, myth and domesticity, surrealist surprise, and lyric pleasure, attentive to landscapes of the world and of the mind, from a retelling of a Hebrew folktale to a meditation on risk and safety to a series of poems about dangerous innocence and innocent danger in friendship featuring a singing porcupine, Jacob [Owet 00:54:01]. 
	And the John Russell Hayes Poetry Prize of $400, a haiku with a lovely leap in a completely different sort of performance, a different voice, justice fully inhabited, instructions for making apple wine, a headlong wedge of words full of sensory detail dealing with the still points in a time of transition and a translation from the Tang dynasty poet, forgive me, [Wang 00:54:39] [Juan 00:54:39] and a glowing squib, which seems to me to dovetail beautifully with the poet's original work, Tina [Jeu 00:54:48], is Tina here? 
	And the Lois [Morell 00:54:58] Poetry Prize of $500, for poems of great energy, casual rigor, precision description, a bright and attentive eye, an ability to use narrative musically to get at complexities of experience, plenty of wit, and because she can write about tattoos, cows, family, meth labs, and pianos with ease, and also make all the N-words in a sonnet rhyme with each other: domino, Drano, porno, casino, inferno, Latino, while still making of that sonnet a fine poem, Jocelyn [Holly 00:55:29]. Is Jocelyn here? [inaudible 00:55:35]. 
	And thank you to everyone for submitting your work, and I really loved reading your work and I really mean it when I say, please keep writing and enjoy yourself. Okay.