^{The three poems that bear your signature were written more than 30 years ago. They are not archive documents. They are living speech. It is one order of speech to say “wild Democracy” (that’s what they called it in 17th-century London), another to practice it in person. No individual ever practices anything political except their everyday life. You recorded the reading on the iPad. Seven minutes. Seven minutes for Seven Lines? The students read for twice as long. Did you want to limit the size of the audio file? Four. The four corners of. Any room is a sacred space when a poem is in the air. Do you believe that? Audio must capture the live element, the presence of an audience. You say things you don’t expect. You see things you don’t expect. The Sonnet’s “golden words worth all the world” mean something different now than thirty years ago. You were paging through the costly hardcover in Moe’s, Margaret Cohen’s Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Martin Jay signed off on it. Doctoral dissertation. University of California Press, 1993. Three-page index. The line that enraged you at the time you cannot find: “the enlightenment horizon of his thought.” Jameson: “poststructuralist doxa” (The Benjamin Files). Thirty years ago you wrote: What horizon was he supposed to have had? Last night you read: “golden words worth all the world.” The enlightenment horizon of universal human rights. Birthright. Proletarians defend good ideas. Proletarians dispute bad ideas. Politics is public debate. Listening to the audio, surprised by the clear, careful enunciation of the Sonnet’s last two lines: “The tramells of / coapt.” Introducing Queen of the Air you couldn’t remember whether the Tedium Drum letter was seven or eight pages. Relieved to find later that there were eight pages, staring for a long time at the handwriting drawing your first name twice. But you surprised yourself: nineteenth-century letter. Enlightenment horizons. But the pain: Don’t know if she ever read it. The letter alludes to an earlier conversation, ongoing conversations, a terrible gossip. Reading Jack Straw, you said the title had nothing to do with the poem when it has everything to do with the poem, remembering Langland. This idea, or method, that you can just pluck people out of their pages and make them walk again. It is not hauntology. It is activation. You got the speed right in the middle of the poem, the parentheses, but stumbled after “mourn for your son.” You introduced the poem by saying you wrote it when he was an infant, and the poem already knows the future (or, vexed: do the poems create the conditions for the future?) Difficult for the voice to rise to the lilt of the closing couplets. Then Seven Lines: translation? appropriation? What are you doing? It had better not be Baudelaire’s Poe. Full of youth and standing fair for <<Petit, blond>> C.T. Onions ‘ A Shakespeare Glossary, enlarged and revised throughout by Robert D. Eagleson, Oxford, 1986, the same year as the third congress. Standing fair. Fraser writes you from France the same year the younger brother falls, in the field. Will you ever read “the look of a field in a land” without thinking of. The name is pronounced like Spanish. Hard g, like the hard g in your damned last name, and the r is rolled hard, again, like Spanish. Yet you say the name three different ways in the audio, searching for the sound. Your voice breaks at the sound of the name of the unknown land. Yet you know of a nearer unknown land now not to read Leopardi’s, “the savageries of slaves / in the city of Rome,” your Lakota students having taught you the word means genocide. Leopardi, like the page from the diary, remembers the slave revolts Perry Anderson researched. But how did the English peasantry learn about them in the 14th century? Langland’s class, the lower clerics. This is one source for your animus towards the 21st century university hierarchy. Books are forbidden to read. Forensic exhibit and Refutation:}