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Len Anderson: AFFECTION FOR THE UNKNOWABLE Let's chop down the beanstalk climbing into the sky of "I Am Sure." Let's roast the giant in the holy fires of doubt and make our song, "We Are Not Sure." At age seven, I lived in the

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presence of God. When the priest asked me to confess my sins I could only answer, "I'm not sure." How many souls burn in the flames of war because a few men are not man enough to say, "I am not sure." In ninth grade Algebra, I took as my guru x, I

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follow still its first teaching: "To know me, say first, I'm not sure." Aquinas had it all wrong, our language must describe the world, not the world conform to language. To be human is to hang on the cross ever unsure. Every atom in the universe is a

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quantum cloud of doubt. God must really like "I'm not sures." A friend asks, "Why drag God into your poems?" Early in life, I grew fond of the unknowable and one of the names of God is "I'm not sure." We speak, the tongue trembles. We sing, the whole

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body quakes. All the libraries in the world add up to: I'm ot sure. It's scary how quiet Len can be, his whole body fixed, breathing stilled, eyes turned down deep in another. I'm not sure.

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Morton Marcus: That was Len Anderson, tonight's guest, reading from his new book, "Affections for the Unknowable." And Len will be on with us for the next hour and we'll be talking about his poems and his life and career. This is an

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extraordinary book of poems put out locally by the Hummingbird Press. And this is a cooperative press that has been founded around a year, year and a half ago in Santa Cruz, and has put out the books of local poets. And the poems and the books they

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have put out have been diverse and extremely exciting and excellent. Tilly Shaw is one person who comes to mind. Ken Weisner, who was on when his book came out, really marvelous works. And tonight, Len Anderson, who, as I said, will

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be our guest. And let me read you a blurb on the back cover by Joseph Stroud, a marvelous poet himself, who was also the co-host with me of the show for a long, long while. And this is what he says about this book and it takes in so much of the

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wonderful richness of Len's work, and he says this about the book, "Len Anderson's, 'Affection for the Unknowable,' might have included a subtitle, 'News From the Universe,' for the poems in this book explore not only the personal world of

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the poet, but also the world of Quantum Theory and Heisenberg's Uncertainty. The world of physics and philosophy, ghazals of dark matter and the duende of Flamenco, the spectral lines of hydrogen and our kinship with a redwood tree. Len Anderson's

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poems manage this universe with clarity, candor, wit, compassion and intelligence. This is a book of wonder and marvels. Len Anderson is a poet who's work bridges the Twentieth Century and the New Millennium." And that- if anyone knows Joe, he

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does not write blurbs, so he obviously was very, very taken with your work. Len, if anyone saw you, they'd recognize you immediately if they've been to a poetry reading in Santa Cruz because you are one of the co-founders of Poetry Santa

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Cruz, and you are the one who's doing the work. And- but you're always in the background, so here's a chance to get you into the foreground and learn a little bit about you. Tell me a little bit about your early life, where you were born, and

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what you did with your early years. Len Anderson: Okay, I was born in Palo Alto, California, over the hill and grew up primarily in Los Altos which is a small and beautiful town that was once upon a time all apricot trees.

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When we moved there, it was all apricot trees. And I grew up Catholic, picked apricots, loved being young there, being able to ride my bicycle up Black Mountain. I lived fairly quiet, I was a very quiet person. I was interested in electronics and

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science in all manners and eventually in high school, I became interested in poetry. I wrote a poem, my first poem, which was assigned in class, in English class. I wrote about the aftermath of a nuclear war and this is about 1960 or so, and I

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showed it to my best friend and he said, what are you, sick or something? And for some reason or other, I wrote another poem after that. And I wrote a few poems in college, I actually took a class in creative writing. I felt like I had

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nothing to say, and I continued my studies being a major in physics, got a PhD in elementary particle physics as my area of experimental work, worked for three years in France after that, came back to this country, got a job after searching, got a

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job in the industry Morton Marcus: And you actually were very concerned with finding the sensor relationship of moisture in paper, why don't you tell us a little bit about that? That is, in pedestrian terms as

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you possibly can. Len Anderson: Yeah. Okay, yeah, the paper is made by grinding up wood fiber and mixing it with water and it starts out with 99% water and 1% paper fiber and it is sprayed out onto a net,

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caught on a net, and is squeezed and dried with hot air, comes out at the end, and they've got to get that moisture just right. If they don't, it's going to cost them money to dry it if they need to dry it more. If they dry it too much, it costs

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them too much money, I should say. And if they have it too wet, then it's going to deform later on, so it's something very important for the quality of paper. Morton Marcus: Now, you were doing work in industry, you

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obviously were reading as I can tell from this, and thinking not only about science, but the philosophical implications between the experimental method and what can be known and what can be not known. When did you go back to writing?

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Len Anderson: Well, I started writing poetry again about 1986 or 85 and that was after I had an idea for a novel, a science fiction novel. And I spent six months writing it and I had 25 pages, I decided that was going nowhere. So, I thought I'd write

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a poem and- but I was, in a way, I was pulled into that by being influenced by Robert Bly by his, his translations, actually, is what influenced me and got me in love with poetry again. Morton Marcus: Great and you retired at a fairly early age, I

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gather? Len Anderson: I retired at age 53, and a year later, my wife and I moved here to Santa Cruz. And it was really at that time where I became interested in philosophical issues.

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Morton Marcus: Great, well, I- you have the whole program outlined here. Len Anderson: We can follow whatever- yeah, we both- yeah, we're gonna let it happen.

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Morton Marcus: Well, let me just say that the book is divided into three sections. The first section which is called "Kinship with Silence" bares a lot of memories of youth and the aging of your parents. And the second part, Serve- "To Serve the Lame

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God," really talks a lot about poems from the workplace, and what you live through in the workplace. And this is there are other poems scattered throughout lyrical poems, lyrical musings on nature. And finally, "The Animal is Spiritual," really are

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the mysteries of our everyday world. And the way I look at them, you probably don't look at them that way. And so this is a rich book with very, very many different themes coming in. In the end, in fact, we have some political poems, which I found

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when they were written right before the Iraqi war, were really beautiful poems, which it is not easy to do when you're talking about a political situation. And you will be reading some of those I can see from here, why don't you start

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us off and read some of the poems that you wanted to read here? Len Anderson: Okay, actually, what I'd like to read first is the dedication page. First, the dedication to my wife Elke, who

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feeds me and, of course it's as metaphoric as well as literal. And then I have two quotes below that, the first is from Bertrand Russell, "Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so

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little. It is only its mathematical properties that we can discover." So, he's saying that physics is this tiny little area of experience that can be put in mathematical terms and therefore can be verified and can be used to generate new

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predictions and those can be verified. And that is a tiny area of experience and that's the part that can be verified. And the rest of it, we don't know about much about it. And William Butler Yeats is the author of the second quote, "Man

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can embody truth, but he cannot know it." So, Yates is going even further. So, we have a- We have a Bertrand Russell, really the founder of analytical philosophy who said that everything should be based on reason, and Yates, who is a

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mystic. And Yates is really saying, well, you know, you can't know anything. And of course, Yates is right. Morton Marcus: Oh, you're saying it very definitely verifiable statement there.

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Len Anderson: Well, I mean, the thing about physics is that it works on verification, but you can only verify a certain number of instances. You have to assume that the universe is uniform, otherwise that it- and you don't know that. That is an assumption

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that all of science relies on. And it seems to be a very good assumption but you know, we have to say "seems" and we can't have complete confidence about anything. Morton Marcus: But one of the things you have done is, you

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have embodied, and would have made the author of the statement, C.P. Snow, very happy when he talked about the two cultures because he saw them as separating. And he thought it was essential that in this age, as difficult as it may be, that

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they should be joined, those two cultures being the arts on one hand and science on the other. And so, it is very interesting that you are doing this and you've done it beautifully. If people think that these poems are dull out there, they are

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very, very witty. They are very insightful, at times, very visionary at other times, they really embody so much and they embody a lot of learning as well. I mean, this is just not flights of fancy or anything like that, so please go on.

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Len Anderson: Well, I'm going to talk a couple of minutes about two of the lines in that first poem that I wrote, I'll read them again right now. "Aquinas had it all wrong. Our language must describe the world, not the world conform to language. To be

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human is to hang on the cross ever unsure." So, I'm saying something, which sounds very ordinary, in a way our language must describe the world, but in fact, that's something that has been contested a great deal. There's a whole history about

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it, but what I'm talking about in regards to Aquinas is, the Roman Catholic theologian and philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, he proposed a cosmological proof for the existence of God. He said that there we see cause and effect in everything, every

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effect must have a cause. And if you trace back effect to cause, and then the cause of that, and then the cause of that, and then the cause of that, all the way back to the beginning, there has to be something to start that whole thing off. And it's got to

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violate this cause and effect relationship, therefore, it can't be physical and therefore it's spiritual and that's God. In physics, of course, we wouldn't say that that's a proof, we'd say that's an interesting hypothesis because

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we'd say, you know, if somebody derives something mathematically we say okay, how can we do an experiment to show this? Because mathematics always has assumptions in it and Aquinas is- I think as full of assumptions. One of them is

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about this thing about cause and effect. And, in fact, 20th century science has shown that there is an acausal nature in the physical world, and that is demonstrated in what we call quantum mechanics and in the behavior of very small things

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like atoms. You have a radioactive atom, it will decay when it when it decays, and there's no way of predicting when it happens, there's an acausal character to its decay. So, our language must describe the world. That's, that's a very

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difficult thing to do. We have to prove that our language is describing the world. We don't know anything, any other way. So, that's a little bit about epistemology. Morton Marcus: But to be human is also to, the metaphor that

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you pick up, to be Christ-like, and to be always in a position of crucifixion, and to be unsure. Father, why do you forsake me? Len Anderson: And indeed Yes, we are forsaken. We are here in

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this world and, and we're animals. And we have a great many things which have helped us survive, but we don't know how we got here. We can talk about evolution and that gives us some understanding of how things evolved but we don't know how

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anything got here, why there's anything here. Morton Marcus: One of the things that's marvelous about this is that in all of these poems, you accept the mystery of things. And that is not what is done, at least in the everyday world. I

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mean, we want definite answers to things but one of my readings for example of a film like Citizen Kane, which is trying to make you know the character of Citizen Kane by showing him through all different eyes through different parts of his

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life. In the end, what you really find out is that you can never know who Kane is if you really look at the film. And so, he escapes you, he is a mystery as all of us are mysteries. Len Anderson: So, I'm going to read the poem, "The Nature of

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Things," on page 72. ON THE NATURE OF THINGS The squawking crow flies down from the redwood tree to tell me he is not a crow. Not bird, not passerine bird of the family

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Corvidae, nor mind nor body nor thing. And not a crow. In fact, he says he hasn't even been discovered yet. When I was young I dreamt I climbed marble stairs toward the room that held "The Book of What Each Thing Is." Golden light poured down those

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stairs from a room so high I could never see it. From that book I would learn what is crow, what is redwood, what am I. Crow tells me the black of his wings is deeper than any book. Friends, there are hours I have no greater grief, no greater

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joy. I will never know what I am. Crow flies down often to tell me so. So, I'm saying that the nature of the world is fundamentally unknown and we certainly- we start out from that position.

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And I'm even willing to make the argument that fundamentally, we can't know what the nature of the world is. That once you have some statement that you have about the nature of the world, then I can ask what's the basis of that nature? I can always ask

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questions, you know, justify your assumptions. So, you can always push to a deeper level and look for a deeper nature. And we talk about matter, we talk about spirit, we don't really know that those two things are anything separate.

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They might be just to date two different ways of looking at the same thing. Those are really based on metaphors and all metaphors have regions where they look pretty interesting and pretty valuable but we don't know that they ever apply to

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everything. Morton Marcus: You've got a wonderful parable in this book, called "The Empty Chair," which talks about all of these things and nobility, and it's very clever. And one of the things

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that of course, you I won't say escape into, but move into as metaphor. And this is a beautifully done parable here and I wonder if you'd read it. Len Anderson: You read my mind.

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Morton Marcus: No, your notes. Len Anderson: THE EMPTY CHAIR The wealthy widow of a philosopher offered in his emory an endowment of a chair i the philosophy of idealism. A

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her request each applicant wa asked if only human beings sh uld be hired, rather than me e ideas in the minds of the ex mining committee. Each ap licant agreed and then was as ed to prove that he or she wa more than a mere idea. After th

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ee years, the widow had to gi e up and withdraw her en owment. The chicken is the eg . The widow tried again, of ering a chair in the ph losophy of materialism. Each ap licant was asked if the po ition should only be awarded to

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someone who is fundamentally di ferent from a sack of rice, an to prove that he or she was so qualified. After three years, th widow had to give up and wi hdraw her endowment. Each py amidal neuron in the human neo ortex branches to 9000 oth

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rs. She tried again, off ring a chair and the phi osophy of consciousness. Eac applicant was asked if the pos tion should only be given to a c nscious being, and then was ask d to prove that he or she was so qualified. After three yea

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s, the widow gave up and thr w a party. In her garden, she and her guests took off the r shoes and danced into the nig t. Flies have taste buds on the soles of their feet. The wid w married a philologist who had spent 40 years exposing the tac

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t metaphors underlying phi osophical religious and sci ntific theories, he was also an vid dancer, especially art ul in Tango. The physical wor d is the body of God. One nig t in the deep embrace of the r dance, he told her how the fai

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ure of Western analytic tho ght is directly due to its fai ure to incorporate the Arg ntine Tango. How all thought is dance in which we hold the wor d in our arms and it holds us. Her beauty is endless. The new yweds held a costume ball, eac

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guest dressed as a met phor. The band played, the flo r lit up like a neocortex, a dan er's whirled around an empty c air. Morton Marcus: And that metaphor with everyone dressed up as a

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metaphor and dancing around what amounts to be the neocortex. It's a beautiful, beautiful metaphor and really works and just shows the endless transformation or metamorphosis of things into other things, and nothing can be pinned down.

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Len Anderson: And yeah, exactly, we, we try to pin it down. And we always think we have it pinned down. But in a way, I think there's a way in which the arts have it over philosophy on these issues because the arts recognize in an intuitive way

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that everything is so damn complex that, you know, we don't know what we're trying to do here. And so we throw every metaphor we can at it. And some of them stick and those are the ones that we we parade around ourselves, but we we admit that

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you need many metaphors to talk about everything in the human world because the human being is so complex. Morton Marcus: Okay, where would you like to go from here? Len Anderson: I want to read a poem called, "Let's Take The

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Mind For Instance," I'm kind of concentrating on, primarily on things that I did not read at the release readings, I- Morton Marcus: Good, good. Len Anderson: So I haven't read these so much, so this is page

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75, here with the book. Morton Marcus: A poem that I really enjoy quite a bit. Len Anderson: LETS TAKE THE MIND, FOR INSTANCE No, let's start with this roll of fence wire lying on its side

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on the deck, brown with rust up close, it's the work of an impressionist. Globs of soil streaked along one half, the rest wormed through these blobs to tint them tones of gray and brown and orange. There is no painter, only one roll of wire

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that lay one season in the mud. See, how we stepped up close, broke it down to find its story, then stepped back to see the whole. So, now let's take the mind. Let's say it is like this persimmon tree with leaves chartreuse of early spring, each

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a window to the morning sun, yet none of us has ever seen a mind. The mind is not a thing. Indeed, there is no mind, only leaves and clouds like spring, passing in a coastal sky seen and wind, warm or brisk or damp, felt on the skin. No, let's say the mind

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is like the way leaves turn slowly a darker green, the opening and closing of towhee wings, the forming of a bud. Let's say, the mind is like spring. Morton Marcus: And you know both of those pieces are just

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beautiful uses of metaphor and really show how a metaphor can work on its both emotional and intellectual level and it really is wonderful how you did that. We're getting close to the end of the first half of the show could I ask you to read the

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Ghazal with a Black Hat? And then what I'd like to do is go to more flamenco music and when we come back, talk a little bit about flamenco and have you read some of your flamenco poems? Len Anderson: Okay, great.

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GHAZAL WITH BLACK HAT The invisible is wrapped in light, he says, with a whoosh of the black hat, or perhaps it's i here he thinks, peering into th black hat. Once upon a time whe time was still sleeping, al

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that now is or could ever be wa asleep inside the black hat. believe in the cape and gloves the rabbit and the wand, ther is no hat but the black hat. H doesn't tell his mother ho could he ever explained to he the black hat? Oh strang

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universe, almost all dar matter, dark energy, th hatter's metaphor for his ow black hat. Each of us is a tin God, deciding what to drop into what to pull out of the blac hat. The waitress thought sh was in love with him, she was i

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love with the black hat. Ever night, Freud's Unconscious an Heisenberg's Uncertainty dine o black caviar at our expense a the oh so chic black hat. We ar tiny glimpse of light in a [Flamenco music]

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greater dark, within a greater yet blackhat. Len keeps on trying to make sense of this world, he wouldn't have a prayer without the black hat. Morton Marcus: Hello, once again, this is Mort Marcus and

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you have been listening to the Poetry Show. Tonight, our guest is Len Anderson and he will return again and you will hear the significance of the flamenco music on the second part of the show. But first some announcements. This program is

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supported in part by our community of contributing listeners. T`o become a contributing listener, visit KUSP.org, thank you. Also, KUSP is seeking applicants for a part time staff position as Member Services Assistant. You can

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learn about the position and find out how to apply on our website KUSP.org, application deadline is December 5th, and KUSP is an equal opportunity employer. I want to call your attention to the show that follows this one, Billy Harris'

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wonderful From the Bookshelf tonight at nine. The wonderful and irrepressible Annie Parker will be reading Alfred the Sweet Shop Cat by James Herriot. I also want to call your attention to a wonderful photo montage art show by T. Mike Walker, which

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has opened this past weekend at the Dancing Man Gallery, which is open from 11 to 4 Monday through Fridays and Saturday 1 to 4. That's the Dancing Man Gallery at 123 Maple Street in Santa Cruz, 123 Maple Street in Santa Cruz, currently T. Mike

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Walker's Vision Fusion, a photo montage art show. And three poetry announcements: first, on December 14th, and I probably know I'm gonna put them in order here. First, a poetry reading on Tuesday, December 9th at the Davenport Cash Store that's on

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Highway 1 in Davenport. There will be a favorite poems reading and some of the people involved will be Tom Zajac, Anne Parker, Stacy Rican, John T. Hickman, Zoe Novak, Rachel Spencer, Noel Bach, and Laurie Pattern. That is, people reading their

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favorite poems at the Davenport Cash Store, 7:30pm, Tuesday, December the 9th. And then on December 14th, Poetry Speak open poetry reading with a featured reader being Marcia Adams, and that's on Sunday, December 14th, at 2pm at the Santa Cruz Main

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Library. And finally, a poetry reading on Tuesday, December 16th at the Veterans Memorial building in downtown Santa Cruz, one that I certainly urge everyone to be out there to hear Joseph Millar, a wonderful, wonderful poet, and Dorianne

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Laux. Actually they're man and wife, not a team because they're very different poets. But Dorianne is just a fantastic poet and they will be down from Oregon and they will be giving a reading. They gave a reading last June and they will be

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giving a reading at the Veterans Memorial building, Tuesday, December 16th at 7:30pm. You have anything to add to that? Len Anderson: They are great, don't miss them. Morton Marcus: Really, really phenomenal. Now we are going to

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hear some more flamenco music and then we are going to talk flamenco and read poetry flamenco. Unknown: [flamenco music] Len Anderson: LISTENING TO ANTONIO MAIRENA WHILE THE WAR

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RAGES Legendary Gypsy flamenco singer, 1909 to 1983. He tells me we are living off the blood of God and the dead are dancing barefoot in the violet dust to the Siguiriyas

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from the skeletons of guitars. He leads me to the old well of his village, lowers the bucket, draws it up, brimming with tears. I, the blinding sun, the blinding sun of Andalusia. He pulls the same dagger out of his heart seven times and shows me

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the forge in his father's blacksmith shop where he was apprentice to lightning and thunder. He takes up the hammer and counts out for me the cost of one heartbeat. He shows me the silver trees dancing on the Rio Guadalquivir and begs a

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gypsy girl to bring back from the dark cave the moon she had once hung in the sky. I, the blinding sun, the blinding sun of Andalusia. I follow him down step by step into the copper mine. We pick axe at the walls for centuries. We cross the

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Sierra de Almijara, arrive at the door to the great silence, we drink liquor, distilled from the bitter root to the bitter tree and mourn that day when the last rose will die. It is a mad world, what can we do? I ask. He puts his hand on my shoulder and

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tells me, we can tell what we see, we can make beauty from pain, we can live until we die. Unknown: [flamenco music] Len Anderson: So the gypsies are the people that created

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flamenco. They came from India originally through the Middle East to Andalusia in southern Spain and lived there for quite a period with the Jews and Christians and the Moors together in a dynamic way, shall we say, but there was definitely

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tolerance. In 1492, Isabella and Ferdinand decided that they want to pull together Spain and make it all Catholic, and so they set down a decree that all everyone in Spain had to be Catholic, had to be Christian. And that meant that the Moors, Jews and gypsies

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had to either convert, leave Spain, hide or face the inquisition. A lot of the gypsies went and lived in caves and they banded together with the Moors and Jews and criminals and other outcasts and created this music and dance form,

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blending together the music of those- all those peoples. And my wife and I became enamored of Gypsy music, of flamenco about 15 years ago and have been members of the Flamenco Society of San Jose and we're actually both taking dancing lessons, we

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dance the Sevillana, which is a couple's dance based on Spanish folk dance. And we have danced that on the streets of Santa Cruz for five years in a row on First Night parade, and now we're learning the Bulerías, which is the Fiesta, end of

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every Fiesta is we dance the Bulerias, so my wife, Elke, and I are learning that now. Morton Marcus: Well, what I love about this poem is that the heart of flamenco is something called duende and it is really

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the expression of all the pain and all the joy that a human being goes through, and has been likened that I think really poorly to the blues. And what this poem does is it really to me gets into the heart of expressing duende. And the

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strategy you use is one of the ways besides the imagery, which is so astonishing and is as shifting as it would be in the song that Mairena sang on the cut that we heard. It's, what do I want to say here, the strategy here is to be having a

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conversation with him and it is though he is talking to you in the music, and it makes it so immediate, the immediacy of art, the immediacy of poetry, but the immediacy of his demonstrating instead of telling you, demonstrating what duende is,

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what the soul of this art form is, and really all art forms, and just it works beautifully. I think the language works beautifully throughout. Len Anderson: Yeah, the notion of duende, and this is described

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wonderfully in an essay by Federico Garcia Lorca, the wonderful Spanish poet, it's called "The Play and Theory of the Duende" and it's in a book of essays of his, I forget the title.

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Morton Marcus: "Cante Jondo," I think that's it. Len Anderson: Well, it- no, that's a book of poems. It's in a book of essays, about of Lorca's essays, and it has something to do with duende. But anyway, it's a wonderful essay

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and part is, you know, he expresses himself in a very surrealistic way, I guess. But we would- I would say that it's something, it's spirit which comes in, possesses the performer while he's doing the performance. And it's based on

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his struggle with his work, there's something impossible that he has to do and the duende comes and takes over him. And part of the sense of it is that he is facing death, that death is- you can smell death in the room, so that the person, the

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artist, feels the impossibility of what they have to do. Morton Marcus: Well, okay. Len Anderson: So, I think I'm going to read a couple of more war poems. I think we, we, some of us have a sense now. I mean,

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in the first half, I talked about epistemology, about the theory of knowledge, and I think more of us have a sense that there's some relationship between epistemology and war and so, I put these things together here.

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This poem is called WHERE WE ARE HEADED, I wrote it in April of 2002. From my dining room table, I can see a young carpenter and a new plywood roof two stories up. Lift a 12-foot two by four,

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balance it on one shoulder, carry it across, bend, and place it right on the edge. I turn and shout over the radio with a president who's telling me where our troops are headed next. Just tell me once, how many we have killed so I can mourn them too.

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Like so many, I try to speak for God these days. As near as I can tell, God is not overly impressed. Outside, the succulents my wife grows have leaves like tongues, taste the mercy of the drops of fog, hold it in as long as they can while

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the angels who would save us if only they could pretend they don't know us. The Gate of Heaven is in the Temple of Loss, its arch waist high. One day, we may meet there, you, my wife and I, the carpenter, the president. Now is the time to practice

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bending low. Morton Marcus: And could you explain the last two lines, "now is the time to practice bending low?" Len Anderson: Well, the Gate of Heaven is in the Temple of Loss.

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And we of course, we don't know where the Gate of Heaven is. This is a metaphor for my own way of talking about something, but we have to lose everything in leaving this world. And we, and we can't really fully appreciate what's beautiful and

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mysterious and perfect about this world unless we experience loss, that's just the nature of our psychology, unless we open up enough. And the only way we're going to get into that place is by forgetting about some of our goals and how smart

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we are and how much money we want and all these things, how great we are, and how much we need to control the world. We're going to have to, we're gonna have to eat our words, we're going to have to eat all the things we've done and we're

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going to have to squeeze our way in there somehow, or else we're not going to make it. Morton Marcus: So, the bending low is almost a Buddhist gesture, but it's certainly a gesture of humility.

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Len Anderson: It's certainly a gesture of humility. And the thing about the angels pretending they don't know us, that's again our sense of, you know, we're here and we don't know whether we're getting any help or not, we're just in

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trouble. Morton Marcus: All right, keep going. Len Anderson: So, I'd like to read another poem that I wrote this spring at also the time that the war was being brought

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to our doorstep, and while it took over. WHY DERVISHES WHIRL This morning I woke ravenous with a hunger I cannot name. The wind blew in furious gray light, flailing the spindly arms of the

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fence roses while a gang of crows scattered dancing wildly. The steady rain mimics the rumble of distant armies martialed by men with an extravagant taste for power. Soldiers taught how to brush in boot camp all die with clean

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teeth. We, who love them, shield our eyes with our hands, weep for ourselves, believing we weep for them. The whirling dervishes turn with arms open the right hand up toward heaven to receive, the left down offering to earth. The spiral galaxy

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where we live is driven by a team of black horses racing around its center, always hungry. Only so long as those great arms of light wheel will everything not fall toward the mouths of the horses.

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So, there I'm drawing on my physics to bring in the fact that the galaxies including our own Milky Way, have a black hole at the center which sucks into it all the mass in its close vicinity. And it's really only this mass rushing into the

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galaxy and into the black hole that allows us to see that bright black hole at the center. And it's an incredible hunger of sorts in my metaphor. And I think we all have that it's only by some exercise of reaching out and then and the poem I'm

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bringing in angular momentum, conservation of angular momentum in my way of thinking, which says as long as you're whirling, you're gonna keep on whirling, but you stop whirling and then gravity will suck everything in.

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Morton Marcus: And you do it with that beautiful whirling dervish metaphor in the end, really, because what they're dancing is a metaphor. Len Anderson: Yeah, what they're dancing is a metaphor for this

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relationship they have with accepting from God and giving to the earth and they're being a conduit for grace. Morton Marcus: Okay, let us go on. We unfortunately only have five minutes left, so I will let you choose out of the seven

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poems that you had left around two of them that would get in, you know, the different aspects of your work that you want. Len Anderson: Yeah, I'm going to read, I'm going to go back to the title poem, "Affection for the Unknowable." Hopefully, we

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have some set- some sense of what this is, again, to not know what's going on. Morton Marcus: By the way, people may be hearing the repetition of words in some of these poems more than they think

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and that's because you're using a form here. I don't want to take up much time going here, called the Ghazal, and that calls for the first two lines actually ending with the same word but then the last line of every couplet thereafter using

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the same word. And this is couplets, which are not really connected in a narrative connection, they really are separate. Len Anderson: AFFECTION FOR THE UNKNOWABLE

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Let's chop down the beanstalk climbing into the sky of I am sure. Let's roast the giant and the holy fires of doubt and make our song, we are not sure. At age seven, I lived in the presence of God. When the priest asked me to confess my sins, I

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could only answer, I'm not sure. How many souls burn in the flames of war, because a few men are not man enough to say I am not sure? In ninth grade algebra, I took as my guru x. I follow still its first teaching, to know me say first, I'm not

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sure. Aquinas had it all wrong, our language must describe the world not the world conformed to language. To be human is to hang on the cross ever unsure. Every atom in the universe is a quantum cloud of doubt. God must really like I'm not sures. A

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friend asks, why drag God into your poems? Early in life, I grew fond to the unknowable and one of the names of God is, I'm not sure. We speak and the tongue trembles. We sing, the whole body quakes. All the libraries in the world add up to

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I'm not sure. It's scary how quiet Len can be, his whole body fixed, breathing, stilled, eyes turned down, deep in another, I'm not sure. So then I'll do the last poem in the book,

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Morton Marcus: Which is another Ghazal? Len Anderson: Which is another Ghazal, it's an OPEN GHAZAL and this I do with a conga drum. Kiss the hand and cheek, kiss the lips that open. Kiss the

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eyes and tears, kiss the wounds that open. The nuclei of our atoms are so small, we are mostly nothing. Whoever made them made our stone walls out of windows always open. A bag too dark to see, too big to lift, too familiar to walk away from

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deep in a thicket. God grant me strength to drag it into the open. 6:10, stuck on the freeway again, love is singing with window and throat wide open. My friend who refused to greet the stranger in black was brought to the surgeon who cut his heart

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open. Go ahead, I dare you take another breath, each one is full of what 14 billion years ago blew this world open. We save cracker poets sand fingertips past long nights in our knees, all to feel those clicks that mean the door will spring open.

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Len says, I love the night sky, I adore the Milky Way. It is the edge of her robe, see how gently it opens. Morton Marcus: And that was Len Anderson who we have been talking about and with tonight on the occasion of his the

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publication of his book, "Affection for the Unknowable," on sale on all bookshelves in Santa Cruz. This is Mort Marcus saying this has been the Poetry Show. Stay tuned for From the Bookshelf, hosted by the inimitable Billy Harris, who

00:57:49.160 - 00:57:56.450

tonight brings us the inimitable Anne Parker, reading the inimitable "Alfred the Sweet Shop Cat" by the inimitable James Herriot.