Transcript: Poems on Air, Episode 14 - Dorothy Barresi

[Music intro]

LYNNE THOMPSON: Hello! My name is Lynne Thompson, Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles and I’m so happy to welcome listeners to this installment of Poems on Air, a podcast supported by the Los Angeles Public Library. Every week, I’ll present the work of poets I admire, poets who you should know, and poets who have made a substantial and inimitable contribution to the art and craft of poetry.

LYNNE THOMPSON: This month, as the school year comes to a close, Poems On Air celebrates teachers. In particu-lar, I want to celebrate the teachers who have influenced and impacted not only my development as a poet but that of so many others. Although many of these teachers toil in academia, they also reach out to non-traditional students in private workshops and summer conferences. One of those is Dorothy Barresi. Barresi is a professor in the English Department at Cal State Northridge, a two-time Pushcart Prize winner, and the author of five collections of poetry, most recently What We Did While We Made More Guns. For more than 10 years, she’s presided over a workshop for a group of poets of which I am happy and proud to be a member.

LYNNE THOMPSON: Today’s poem is “El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles" by Dorothy Barresi.

El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles

The brown rats that shimmy
up thatched, hula-shirt palm trees

live closer to the divine,
high in the whispering, razoring fronds.

To them, our glance is a blow.
To scurry their fate.

Half-dissolved in moonlight, released from the ground,
they are astronauts wedged in

capsules of fur and rabies;
they are the true romantics, or else

why would they love so rapaciously
in a paradise unkind?

In all the bungalows below them,
in mansions where the sacred is simple

and the profane complex,
they witness the rhetoric of family: who will shower first,

who folds the clothes,
who feels misused.

Who kisses who goodnight, and how.
Déjà everything!

A woman gives herself over to boozy abandonments.
A man lies down with the lamb—

forces himself, actually.
Last week, something precious, a child or a luxury sedan,

disappeared from a driveway.
The rats know who did it, but aren’t talking;

no one thinks to ask them.
And we, who choose to believe ourselves

fundamentally ratless,
hump and snout and the scaled reptilian tail trembling,

mean no harm,
though harm will be done.

LYNNE THOMPSON: The Los Angeles Poet Laureate was created as a joint program between the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs and the Los Angeles Public Library and this podcast will be available on the Library’s website. In the future, episodes will be available on iTunes, Google, and Spotify. Thanks for listening!

[Music outro]

  • Back to Poems on Air: Episode 14

    • DISCLAIMER: This is NOT a certified or verbatim transcript, but rather represents only the context of the class or meeting, subject to the inherent limitations of real-time captioning. The primary focus of real-time captioning is general communication access and as such this document is not suitable, acceptable, nor is it intended for use in any type of legal proceeding. Transcript provided by the author.

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