[ Music ] >> 'Poetry and Prose' is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. [ Music ] >> Well, hello everyone. I'm so happy to be here with you and I'm so happy to be invited to this book festival. I've been to this festival before and it's very inspiring. It's very large and there are so many people and so many presenters, so many readers, and so much poetry and so many new books, and so many imaginations becoming one imagination. And perhaps that duality is most important -- not just one way of thinking or one idea but many ideas that become one -- one and many at the same time. I'm so happy also that we're talking about today, we're talking about ingenuity and we're talking about what that is -- imagination, logic, reasoning. Imagine those words that we rarely use, they're all in what we're doing right now. Poetry for me involves all those things. You have to be free, number one. Your imagination has to be free and inclusive. Free means inclusive. Free doesn't mean narrow, just my idea, my little limited idea. That's not free. Free is including as many imaginations as possible, as many books as possible, as many possibilities as possible, as many ways of writing and reading and expanding and changing a poem, which is expanding your thinking, which is deepening your consciousness. See, all those things go together. And reasoning is most interesting too. It's argument and it's logic. It's deeper thinking that perhaps you and I haven't entered before, but that's really the core of all things. When we look at nature, there's not just a tree, there's not just a limb, there's not just a leaf and a little birdie on top singing, it's life teaching us a deep lesson of who we are. And for that we have to let our typical way of thinking expand. We have to enter a new way of thought, a more inclusive way of thought, as I mentioned -- as you know, as we mentioned earlier. So thinking is very big. Every time you change a poem and the linking of a poem, you're changing the thought of the poem. And a poem provides many good things to the reader but it also provides a new set of thoughts. And why are we interested in thinking all of a sudden? Why am I not talking just about poetry and its rhyming patterns and its histories? Because right now we're interested and we want and we're desiring a new idea. Who are we now, 2020? What is the nation now, 2020? Are we going -- how are you going to define this nation now, 2020? What is it saying to you now, this nation? What is it asking for now, this nation? And for that we need your new idea, not the idea you have been carrying around all along or my idea. No! There's a new idea going around. It's in danger. What is it? Can you grasp it? And that's what poetry is all about: reasoning, thinking, research, logic, letting go, freedom, imagination, and moving your hand, moving the keyboard around and searching for it and finding it. Maybe you'll find a piece of it. We can work with that little piece of it, that little microcosm of your new idea. And we need it. So I kind of went on, I kind of rambled through there, because I'm interested in thinking and I'm interested in philosophy and art and painting, language, culture, but most of all this odd thing we call poetry. And guess what? This odd thing we call poetry perhaps is the real you and the real me. Perhaps it's our inner selves speaking for once -- not our outer self, shopping and watching video and running around like I also run around. Maybe it's just our inner self, this new idea and this thing we call a poem. You know, let me read you a poem by the way, if I can. It's called 'Color Tints,' and I have it here. I was inspired by a Jewish installation artist of the early 1900s who saw her work as sculpture. I call it an installation, a term that comes later in the '60s, of putting different materials together and creating a new shape like a sculpture, a soft sculpture. But this is very early. Maybe it was like 1916. So I was inspired by that, intensely at a library at the University of Iowa, one of my favorite places to go to check out books. It's called 'Color Tints.' A fracture of power and paradigm. I had a color. There is no color. I was bronze. We do not have bronze. I was gold and sienna ochre. There are no siennas or gold and siennas or ochres here. We had colors. We have no colors. We had faces with colors. There are no faces with colors. We stood up. We danced, all the colors. There is no standing. The color dances are illegal. Haven't you heard? We had colors on our hands, in scarves. I told you, no colors. No colors or faces or noses. No illegal scarves. We held up a nation disk of the lost inscriptions and stories of our colors, our bronze. We are burning that vessel, those signs. Those were such long lines. There are no colors now. We dreamed our colors. That is not useful to dream. We dreamed about our colors. It is not useful. There are no colors now. We brought in a new time. This is a new time. We wanted our mothers to bend their ears to the lost stories, the burned stories, the fettered stories, the ones that rose up from the ancient disk. This is a new time. This eye is a new eye. This voice is the new voice. This chair with the wingspan upright is the new chair. The disk was soaked in blood. It is a new time. It was what we called for. You have the wrong time. It was our song. Your blood is wrong. It is too small. It is filled with holes. Your songs are illegal. No colors. They're not useful. Your time is filled with holes. Your time, your blood is too small. I'm walking away. That is permissible. I'm leaving you here. That is practical. I do not want the disk. What did you say? What? The color is everywhere. I do not see it. Gold and sienna spins right through you. Where? Everywhere. Your time is too small. My time is now. The time is now. [ Music ]