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Morton Marcus: This is KUSP community sponsored radio on 88.9 FM on your dial. We broadcast to Santa Cruz, Monterey Bay, Salinas, and Pointe south. Stay tuned for the Poetry Show.

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Good evening, everybody. This is Mort Marcus and this is the Poetry Show. And tonight a very, very special evening, we are being visited by Mary Norbert Körte, who, twenty years ago was probably one of the two, three most popular and dynamic poets

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in the Santa Cruz area. She had published a number of books and her readings here and her workshops were legend. And it was at a time when poetry in Santa Cruz was enormously dynamic, there were large crowds anywhere a poetry reading or a

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workshop was put on. And tonight we are going to be talking with her, talking about what she's been doing in the last twenty years, and we're going to hear some new poems. But first, we will set the mood:

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Mary Norbert Koerte: In another life, she was one to pray a breviary, the small worn leather bound book, which contains the daily songs, readings, and prayers of the divine office, a system of monkish devotion, which arose in Christianity

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sometime between the first and tenth centuries. All sorts of people use this prayer book: kings and dukes had fancy ones with jewels, like her grandmother's prayer bookcase, only better. The bishop had his breviary read for him, and the

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poor novice monk had to run back and forth from the fields to the big one in the monastery chapel, that great wood-covered manuscript whose pages were so heavy they had to be turned with both hands. The breviary could be put into an overcoat pocket.

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It divided the day into a neat movement of stopping everything to pour out at rapid pace, while the mind struggled to rein itself in, some of the most ancient, hideously beautiful language on Earth, full of, "I will not vanquish my enemies,"

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and so forth. She was pulled in. She was seduced by the mystery of bowing in another language, and she was scared that she got it, that she would eventually go beyond bawling out prayers at prescribed moments, to bawling them out alone in the woods, to

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finally silence after all those words that were supposed to ring her around with grace. But in those days of praying, which were really this life, she in some dumb uncomprehending way, she took and kept in herself the fact that she was, in fact,

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praying profoundly magic language that came from the everyday magic lives of people who flew in the face of God, and she was one of them. Eddie made the cook dream, Sister Mary ran off with Alan

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Ginsberg. The halls were dark, long, hard enough to have survived the [unidentified] earthquake where survival was measured by the sound of mother superior's rosary beads. She dreamed. The cook dreamed; the other nuns dreamed impossible

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dreams of silver, visions, pelagic noises in the groaning night. Dreaming was a mission she could not renounce night as a place to see all freedoms looming ahead, like a sweet dragon, like a cross with its circling tail. She ran away in

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everybody's dreams, calling out like a booming flame. Running, running into the lines of bards and lions, lovers and birds, running with her arms out wide into the bright and flapping dark.

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RECLAIMED LINES The neighbor children believe her house is made of gingerbread. She wonders about this, as the moon, moon slides into her skylight, shows her the chair is another person who

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wants to live with her in the night. When the neighbor, neighbor's children come to visit she heats her house with the cook stove oven all winter long, into freezing river falling trees broken with frozen snow. She has been asked, told,

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inquired of as in interrogated that question, tears out tunnels, barricades, doors to the inside, hound of heaven, truth she has fled forever. Are you? Well, are you? Are you this we have dreamed? Are you this we have feared? Are you this we

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have known since the first life, last life journey down the birth canal into the next life, as into vows, as in virgins embarrassed by spring? But winter stars crowd in on her silence like watchers at an accident. The neighbor children

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always hear her oven door cry. The neighbor children believe her house is made of gingerbread. They point to the ghost in the trees. They climb over her like a plague of elves. They come bearing the messages of adult men who then stand in

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her front yard, telling her what's wrong with the place. And drinking her coffee, and drinking her wine, and drinking her dry of love, they never, never, never, never see, never see that her house is made of gingerbread and has been so for

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a thousand years. Morton Marcus: Well, that was tonight's guest, Mary Norbert Körte and Mary, welcome back home. Mary Norbert Koerte: Thank you, Morton. It's wonderful to be

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here. Morton Marcus: Well, it's just- we've been just reminiscing about old times, new times, and different times over dinner with our co-host, Joe Stroud, who as you probably know has been here

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for three straight weeks and just has a lot of papers he's got to catch up with and things like that, or he certainly would have been here. Mary, just to let people in, when was it you moved down to Santa Cruz?

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Mary Norbert Koerte: I came down to Santa Cruz in 1970. I was here from '70 to '72 and loved every minute of it, I really did. Morton Marcus: It was an exciting place then.

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Mary Norbert Koerte: Yes, it was. Morton Marcus: Lots of readings and lots of people attending them and things like that. Then in 1972, and I'm sure there are a number of people out there who remember you and who wondered,

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"Well, gosh, yeah, Mary Norbert Körte, what happened to her?" What did happen to you in a capsule version? Mary Norbert Koerte: Well, I disappeared into the backwoods in Mendocino County. And it really is the backwoods. I mean,

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you're way down at the bottom of the canyon, on a riverbank, underneath the redwood trees, and have been there ever since, working my trade, teaching and writing and working as an environmental activist, doing- I haven't done any tree sitting

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yet, but I've done some bulldozer sitting and some- Morton Marcus: And did I read that you had been incarcerated, young lady? Mary Norbert Koerte: Ah, yes, yes, yes. Yes, I actually have a

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wonderful poem about that. Morton Marcus: Well, do read it. Mary Norbert Koerte: If I can f nd it, I don't know that it's ri ht here so perhaps later on in he program we'll find it. T

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e experience was, I thi k, spiritually uplifting. I wai ed twenty-five years to com it civil disobedience. And, and 'm glad I did. We did save he logging for the rest of t at season at any rate, and the battle still goes on. Pe

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ple have, you know, come ne t to sacrificing their lives, Judy Berry was blown up. The eath threats are starting a ain, things are getting really t ght. 90% of the forest in Mend cino County is

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Morton Marcus: 90%? Mary Norbert Koerte: 90%. 90% of the cuttable forest. 90% of industrial lands, I should say. And then there's some in parks and then there's some small private holdings that people are

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trying to hang on to, in spite of the tax base and so forth. But it's been quite a battle. Morton Marcus: Well, I was up there in 1962 and '63 and we were battling it back then, so that's why 90% of it is gone by

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now. Mary Norbert Koerte: Oh, yeah. Yeah, they just, you know, walk in and take. And it's the point of view that the trees are there for our use. And the pity of it is that it's not understanding

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one's place in the world, one's place in the scheme of things, we're only one life form on the planet. I have a little poem about that that actually goes with the set that I read earlier. And it's called, "There's No Such Thing As An Ex

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Catholic." A friend for her master's thesis at San Francisco State did a huge triptych of quilts about eight by ten feet. And the panel on the left side is the spotted owl, the panel on the right side is the chainsaw, which is this incredibly

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wonderful shimmering phallic symbol, the bar of the chainsaw. And then in the middle of the triptych is the spotted owl besieged by chainsaws. So she also was part of the thesis, made the spotted owl and chainsaw scapular. So I wrote

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this book, she asked me to write a poem explaining what a scapular was. Scapulars, worn next to the heart, contain relics of martyrs. Martyrs are those who have lived and died with heroic

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virtue. Heroic virtue is a condition to which we are increasingly called by the abuse of technology. Technology must be put in its proper place only one life form among all those others who share this planet. This planet will survive only if

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all recognize a common mission. The common mission is mutual respect. It's a pretty prosey poem, but it's more a declaration, more aof manifesto than anything else. So that's what I've been

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doing for twenty years, Morton. Morton Marcus: Well, for those people who don't know you, you were very, very famous in San Francisco at the turn of the 60s as Sister Mary Norbert Körte. Why don't you tell us a little

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bit about that and bring them up to date if you want to? Mary Norbert Koerte: Well, I was in the Dominican order for sixteen years of my adulthood and I kind of came to life at the Berkeley Poetry Conference. And am realizing now, the poems,

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what, twenty-five years after I left, I'm now beginning to be able to write about it, which I find very interesting. Morton Marcus: Do you have any of those poems here tonight? Mary Norbert Koerte: Well, the three that I read in the

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beginning, I'm trying to put them into a book called, "A Breviary In Time of Drought," and make the set of nine poems with the preface that I think will echo what has happened to me in the woods, which is that I have come to the belief that I

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am meant to discover who I really truly am and what my really truly antecedents are as far as the Celtic roots in those North Coast woods, which I think is really interesting that one would set out to find one's Celtic roots in a redwood

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forest. But there is also something that I believe about all the forests of the world having some kind of unity among them, not just in species but- you know, like there's a fungus that goes across the the northern United States that's

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miles and miles and miles long, and it's one solid root, and it just goes underground for miles and miles and miles across the north woods. Well, I think that all the woods of the world are united in that same way. So at any rate, this one's called:

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EARTH WITHIN EARTH She has walked out into ragged lights, smoothing edges of her eyes with shadow again and again, the perilous ashes in her throat sing lullabies. She is cast out into the indefinite,

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into dawn like the mirrors in the barber shop, amorphous and full of hair. This head of clouds makes a glass world going in on itself, layers and layers of clear to pearl glass, thin, the center's spiked with sun, layer by layer, a pearl smoke

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edge of eye, singing grace, standing like woods, stuck to the dark lane in the long, long journey down. Persephone had to do it only twice a year, go in and out of the world, go up and down in a circle, like a mouse caught in the middle, caught in

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the middle of the highway, had to climb out of that great hole, had to pierce those mirrors of earth within earth to go home. Try to be a good little girl. She does it every day. Steps out to make peace with spring, with fall she turns around inside the

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wastrel light. She rings the passing bells for that light that kept her safe, that light hiding in winter dark, that bare embrace -- earth within earth within mirrors, amorphous and full of hair.

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Morton Marcus: It's interesting these women you're talking about who I have to think are some reflection of you. You're- you choose to talk about them in the third person. Mary Norbert Koerte: The she?

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Morton Marcus: Yeah. Mary Norbert Koerte: You know, it's interesting. I would say about- oh, maybe twelveyears ago, I stopped writing in the first person. It just stopped and I can't do it anymore.

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Morton Marcus: Do you have any reason behind it? There's a reason that I'm asking this. Mary Norbert Koerte: I don't know if I have a reason other than age. I think maybe it's just age.

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Morton Marcus: Now, okay, but I don't understand that answer, so- Mary Norbert Koerte: The she in the poem is me as every woman, as everyone. But for some reason, I just stopped writing

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in the first person. Morton Marcus: Fascinating. The reason I ask is that I made that very conscious choice to do that in my last book in which I talk about myself as the boy in the third person as though I'm a

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character in a novel, that it was done to distance myself. Mary Norbert Koerte: Yes, yes. That- I started to say that. Yeah, there is an objectivity and there is a handling of the material that before this, only time gave me that objective

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correlative. And I think in the third person there- and I've Morton Marcus: In the second alternative newspaper called, tried to go back and change poems that I wrote earlier that I thought, well it's going to sound better if I don't have so

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many I's in it. It also- when I was living down here and Froud(?) pointed it out to e, Froud(?) who was a great poet and sculptor who lived down here for a while and edited "The Th " and did all those wonderf l thing

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"Sundays-" Mary Norbert Koerte: Right. Morton Marcus: -here in Santa Cruz. Mary Norbert Koerte: Right.

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Morton Marcus: Froud(?) got in in the editorializing as a very young student, actually of mine. And he talked them into putting out a poetry page and it was called "The The," he just did "The The." And everyone in Santa Cruz was publishing in there and

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it really kicked off a lot of the bandwagon that had already started- Mary Norbert Koerte: It was a lively lively poetry page, it was great. And Froud(?) pointed out to me once, I think he did

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even a whole poem of all the first person signators(?) that Rob McEwen had in his book, and I think that planted the seed because it was maybe two or three years after that that I began writing in third person. And I still think that age has

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something to do with it, Mort. I haven't quite figured that out. But there is a stance and objectivity that comes with -- one hopes it's maturity that comes with age -- that enables you to handle the material more cleanly. It's about the best way

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I can say. Morton Marcus: I can understand that. If Shelley had lived, if Keats had lived, I'm afraid they would have to have gone to that. Mary Norbert Koerte: Well, I think so, Wordsworth did, yeah.

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You know, so- yeah, I really think so. Morton Marcus: And with that, we're going to take our first break, but I will tell everyone out there who just tuned in, we are talking with Mary Norbert Körte, back here really for the

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first time in around eighteen years, and we're hearing some of her new poems. And in the next half hour, we're going to hear Mary talk about writing dangerous poetry and we'll find out what that means, but first we will take a musical break.

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Mary Norbert Körte, our guest, a very old friend and a dear friend who makes me feel young again, not for old memories, but because her energy and her radiance just are still there. They have not in any way died away, even though you live under

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the shaded trees. Mary Norbert Koerte: Under the shaded trees, that's right. Morton Marcus: Mary, we were talking before about the fact that you are now embarked on writing dangerous poetry. Could

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you define for us what that is? Mary Norbert Koerte: Well, I hope that I didn't talk myself out of dinner, you know one can do that. It seems to me that the dangerous poem, or the dangerous

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line- the dangerous poem comes when you accept the dangerous line. And the dangerous line comes to you as a, you know, as a direct forked lightning, and it's the kind of line that when it comes into your head, your immediate reaction is "Oh, no, I

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don't want this. Nevermind. It's all right. Life was very peaceful, very happy, well regulated and ordered before this line came into my head, and now I have to do something with it. I didn't ask for this." For instance, the line, "The

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neighbor children believe her house is made of gingerbread," you know, or or that, "She was reading the prayers of people who flew in the face of God and she was one of them." Or the line that really has appalled me is the one, "And I will live to

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be ninety-six." That's actually the last poem I wrote in the first person. I forgot about that. I will live to be ninety-six, and I thought, how arrogant. How can you say things like this? How can things like this happen? What I've realized

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is that living in the woods, living in the presence of trees that pump seven to nine tons of water every day, there is an energy there, there is a force there that you must reckon with, you must find your place, or the woods will find it for you and

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put you in your place very rapidly. And that if you don't find your place, and you don't settle in, and you buck against these lines that come, there will be other dangerous things that you have to go through. And I think it's partly because it's

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the nature of the hero's journey, and I think that each of us -- especially writers, especially artists of all kinds -- have to be heroes in our own ways, we have to make the heroic journey. We have to go down into the dark and come up, back up

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again into the light. And I think that's what I mean by dangerous poetry, that which leads you on the hero's journey. Morton Marcus: So, if I can oversimplify it, which I want to do, it really is facing your demons, but in this case, it's

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facing your demons by suddenly coming up with disturbing lines of poetry and following wherever they take you. Mary Norbert Koerte: That's right. That's right. Yeah, yeah. Morton Marcus: Yeah, I agree. That's great, very frightening

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too to do that. Mary Norbert Koerte: If I may- Morton Marcus: Would you like to read? Mary Norbert Koerte: This is an excerpt from my latest book

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called, "Throwing Firecrackers Out the Window While the Ex-Husband Drives By." This is about in the middle and I think that everyone has gone through this: She litters her front yard with the corpses of old loves. The

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dog rolls in them, drags them in by the horns, rank, thickets of huckleberry, redwood, clover, twining into ankle-snaring traps, the snap back of branches warning of what lies by the river, the carcasses of old loves. Her father, the sailor,

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Jesus, the man who deflowered her, he who was afraid she had fallen in love with him. He who drank, the poet who said she was death, he who sat silent under he gas lamp for days, he who ade her into mother Collie who ived in Berkeley, she who rode

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is bike as he left town for the ast time, the dog who would not tay, coyote in a Savile Row uit. He who said, "I love you," efore he disappeared. The orpses of old loves -- tossed, attered, observed, assaulted, ged, cut down in the prime of

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ife, old loves -- corpses that ie outside with her in slow ummer nights, tangled in osquito netting, making love ithin the sound of crickets, he radio, river in the trees. The corpses of old loves lined up on the front doorstep, one

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for each day of the week she has been gone. The corpses of old loves. Winter nights, she lets them in, incubi scratching at the windows to get out of the rain. They drape themselves all over the house. They wait for service. They slide into the

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kitchen, nudge an elbow. How the hell are you? She says tapping the shoulder of the dark coyote in the dark, the one forever in the dark. How the hell are you? At last, at last into the house there on the table in the house at last in the house they come,

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he two of them. Her unknown ace beneath his, her unknown ody unknown knowing all over is, there on the table, within he curve of her arm tries to rame the words, the everlasting ords, the words that always ome out of his mouth, out of

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er mouth, out of nowhere, owhere and form into corpses. orpses of corpses, all the arcasses of old loves, floating ver all the years and little eaths before her, exploding, cattered all among the random rees, orgasmic in the

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aspberries, murderess in the madrone, glow worms, sparkler, fireworks in the sky. Fireworks in sky to make little moths eating out her heart in summer heat. The forest burns with them. The forest grows inside them, the forest dies from holes

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in her heart. I would like to read one more section because it tells a wonderful backwoods story. You know what mochi is, don't you? D most people know what mochi is Okay, mochi is beaten swee

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rice, looks awful, is the mo t wonderful energy food in t e world, gives you tremendo s energy and is beloved f macrobiotics and is a traditional Japanese food. f you can get fresh mochi, you a e blessed indeed. It really is

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a great food. And my neighbors w o were very strict macrobioti s also got tired of beating moc i by hand which is beaten in a great big wooden vat and o forth. And so he invented a mochi machine, the motor had o be slow enough not to burn ou

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, but it had to grind the ri e very slowly and beat it, cru h it rather than grind it the w y a regular grinder would. So th s mochi machine was very specia She drives the road with that look on her face, the one she

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gets from sex or dope or the look on poet's faces when they listen to music or their own words. She passes the neighbor front yard filled with a thousand dollar truck, thousand dollar dead of winter Valentine's Day truck, shining,

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shining, gleaming in pre-dawn fog, gleaming with the blood of muddy backs and country front yards or collections of dead cars, stock landscape, like Tyrannosaurus Rex. That truck gleams once again after months, pounding other people's nails,

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glad to get the work. And when the mochi machine stands there outside the house, there in the very pickup, the neighbors know it is serious moving. After years, he's screaming, "You gotta love me!" She is going, running, running away with the

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hired hand and the mochi machine. It is serious moving. She leaves the boy to take up the sword. She takes the mochi machine, the girls, the baby, nothing else matters. Nothing else matters. She leaves his voice screaming into the trees.

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"I am king of the hill, king of the hill! I am king of the hill!" He proclaims himself from Texas, sets off firecrackers at her fence and takes up guns. They ride his hip like a kid's Lego laser magnetic electric flash fire lightning. "Pow,"

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this super special cop mows down every errand weed in his way. Yes, we have have exciting adventures in my neck of the woods as well. Morton Marcus: So this is actually one long poem.

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Mary Norbert Koerte: This is one long poem, yeah. Morton Marcus: When did the book come out? Mary Norbert Koerte: The book came out too soon, actually, 1991. And, as has happened with every book I've ever put out,

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there are sections of this poem that are not in the book that belong there. So when the second edition comes out, I'll put them in and then do it right. But that's happened to me every time. I've put off putting together a book and put it off

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and put it off, and put it off and then said to myself, you've got to finish it, you finally got to get this together and do it. And then the realization that a book is not merely a collection of disparate poems, it really has to hang together,

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and I start working on it, and it's fine. And I get myself to the deadline, and I get everything into the publisher, and then poems start happening. So, I don't know, I don't think anything's ever finished maybe, I'm not sure.

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Morton Marcus: Well, it's a Dylan Thomas saying, I agree with him. But this may be just your pattern that you- really part of the creative pattern is to get it all together and get it out. And then really what's happening is it's all ready to

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begin again, so. Mary Norbert Koerte: That's right, that's right. It just continues. Maybe one or two more sections of life in Mendocino County, here.

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The scene is a Highway 101 town, you go- Highway 101 goes right through the middle, there's no freeway bypass there yet or anything. It's a cow town, it's a mill town. There's still Saturday night shootouts and the reading- the reading methods,

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the teaching of reading methods in the schools are from the 1950s. I mean it's- yeah. She tries to pawn the ex-husband's pearls. She goes to the pawn shop in town, she parks in the back. She pushes her

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robot way around the building to the new front door right on Main Street. She is offered $47 for the ex-husband's pearls. She offers the family silver, her grandmother's watch. The pawnbroker talks about the other pearls he got in last week, she

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thinks these are the new wife's pearls. These are the pearls she is pawning. All the women in town or pawning the ex-husband's pearls. "Got any guns?" the pawnbroker says. And she goes on the books. Gets the straight job, glad to get the work, is

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visited by Fish and Game, sheriff, forestry, state, Board of Equalization, my god, the army. "Looking for poachers, ma'am." Soil samples, apple mega traps, coyote, 1965 pink and white Lincoln Continental involved in Lake County murders

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driven down her road, disappeared into the river at one hollow of prohibition and polo fame. Disappeared into GP, LP, hometown, Milltown, gypo timber, and gardens the loggers refused to touch, touched everywhere by good old boys,

00:42:03.120 - 00:42:24.930

hunters, kids, mad avengers, thieves who stalk the dark from Pine Mountain to the hole. When the ex-husband comes back after seven years, pretending nothing has happened, the dog snarls at his knees. She pushes the new wife off the couch. She steals

00:42:24.930 - 00:42:43.980

the ex-husband's lunch. The ex-husband takes to making twice monthly walks past her house. He stands at the gate for the legal minute. He puts one hand on the gate, he wants something, she wants him to leave town. Oh, god, how she wants him to leave

00:42:44.010 - 00:43:07.650

town, to go west, to ride fire into the next life. She wants him to die. This goes on, sometimes daily, sometimes yearly, sometimes a long time, sometimes never, never at all. Never as in death, never as in turning the back, never as in

00:43:07.650 - 00:43:27.480

finding his cast-off jockey shorts for the last time. She drives against fog into town, she remembers on the road, she remembers driving to the civil service desk, she remembers she has the tendency to mutter aloud and mutter aloud pieces of text

00:43:27.660 - 00:43:42.960

when she writes. How will she write in that stale room the way she wrote in school? My god, will she start to mutter, to [unidentified] in public like the mad nun at vespers, the one whose paintings cried aloud, whose sculptures sat in attics

00:43:42.960 - 00:43:58.650

in the uncertain light of rafters, the vast pitched shingled belled roofs, whose demons chase themselves around her brain like firecrackers. Lots of true stories in there.

00:44:00.270 - 00:44:17.940

Morton Marcus: Made into a composite character? Mary Norbert Koerte: Made into a composite character, yes. She is every woman and the ex-husband is every man in that and there are lots of women, including myself in that. And everything

00:44:18.390 - 00:44:29.440

that happens in this book actually did happen to somebody close to me. Morton Marcus: How many people do you know up there? I mean, is it a real, you know, community-community, even though

00:44:29.440 - 00:44:47.620

it's spread, let's say, over a forty mile long- Mary Norbert Koerte: Yes, actually. Willits has a thriving poets community. They were actually on a- Humboldt Street is three blocks long and the years that I was working on

00:44:47.620 - 00:45:10.420

Humboldt Street, there were one- two poets living on Humboldt Street and three poets working on Humboldt Street, just in this little two block area. The mailman is a poet. We have a thriving poetry series. When I teach creative writing,

00:45:11.380 - 00:45:35.680

generally I have about thirty people in the class and that's- the usual number for Willits folks in classes is fifteen, maybe. So it's really exciting. There's a lot of good writing happening, a lot of self-publishing and thriving

00:45:35.680 - 00:45:55.150

poets in the schools program. So what is the community like? It's working class, dominated by logging, the yuppie vineyards are coming in a little lower. Actually, when you get as far north as Willits, it's not very good for vineyards anymore, so

00:45:55.150 - 00:46:18.400

you don't have them up there. So it's really 99% logging, small- some small businesses are moving in. I think the main business of Mendocino right now is trying to stave off decay. All the landfills are filling up, we don't know what to do with our

00:46:18.400 - 00:46:37.570

garbage. Everything is logged over, campus pretty well ruined the marijuana industry, so what is there to do except write and, you know, keep the garden going? Morton Marcus: Great. Well, we have several more minutes, but

00:46:37.570 - 00:46:45.070

it's amazing how quickly this hour has gone. Mary Norbert Koerte: Yes, it is. It is. I wanted to read one short- Morton Marcus: Sure.

00:46:45.130 - 00:47:10.480

Mary Norbert Koerte: And then I wanted to read this for Bill Everson whom- I don't know if Bill listens to the radio or not, but perhaps he's listening tonight and this was a birthday poem for him that I have never read aloud yet. So the title is:

00:47:10.000 - 00:47:33.130

WHAT IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN THE PERFECT PALINDROME, and a palindrome is a word or phrase that spells the same way forwards and backwards like Yrekabakery, or- I can't think of another one. This one is in some kind of corrupted Latin and

00:47:33.130 - 00:47:53.770

it goes, "Sator arepo tenet opera rotas." And it's on a boundary stone somewhere, was found somewhere in southern France on a boundary stone and probably has to do with the God of the harvest and the fields and the planting. And Bill

00:47:53.770 - 00:48:19.030

Everson reminds me of the perfect palindrome. What grace and baptisms, coarse, silent inside skin of redwood. Slide down river, just before phantom salmon come back, breaching waters of their birth. Fury of bears, of stickleback,

00:48:19.390 - 00:48:46.720

of ruby-crowned kinglets in huckleberry roll silent, circumscribed as fall fog, as landslides, as footsteps in creek bed six years dry. It is enough to make flesh glad for the years of it for his green roaring glory, for his

00:48:46.750 - 00:49:09.570

wind-rushed spiral, rising voice, sky beyond -- oh, yes, beyond any turning hands. Morton Marcus: That was Mary Norbert Körte, first time in Santa Cruz in eighteen years. Mary, great seeing you.

00:49:10.320 - 00:49:22.460

Mary Norbert Koerte: Wonderful being here. Morton Marcus: This is Mort Marcus and I will be back in two weeks. Next week Joey will be here. And I would just like to say one more announcement announcing a Central California

00:49:22.460 - 00:49:42.020

writing project, writing workshop, "The Heart of the Word, poetry and the imagination," with Santa Cruz poet, Patrice Vecchione. And that will be limited to fifteen participants and it will be given at Oakes College so- I'm

00:49:42.020 - 00:49:58.820

trying to find out where this is here at Oakes college. At the UC Women's Center, just inquire up there I would gather. So and that will be with Patrice who is marvelous and has been here. And also I want you to keep in mind that Ellery Akers, Sarah

00:49:58.880 - 00:50:19.010

Rapkin(?), Patrice Vecchione, and Steve Wiesinger, "Writers and Their Work" will be the series on April 29th at Louden Nelson the end of this month. So again, I'll see you in two weeks. Again, thanks to Marian Norbert Körte, and we're going

00:50:19.010 - 00:50:44.720

to go out by actually starting the next program, which is "Out front, Outback," with the master of tunes and that is Larry Blood. This is Mort Marcus on KUSP, 88.9 FM Santa Cruz, the Monterey Bay, Salinas, and point south into Big Sur. Stay tuned

00:50:44.720 - 00:51:06.470

for "Out Front, Outback." Connectedness of the generations and the continuity of our history, period. And of lecture number eight. And now, a big jump to the final lecture, which is lecture number fifteen okay?

00:51:06.800 - 00:51:24.920

And it is titled, "Into the 90s, a Return and a Farewell." Film underneath it, Field of Dreams. And then this beginning to the text: The technology that advanced with such lurchingly rapid

00:51:24.920 - 00:51:41.900

movements throughout the century, comma, huffing and chuffing, that's C-H-U-F-F-I-N-G, and steaming into the 90s with a breathlessly accelerated pace, comma, changed more than the gadgetry and material luxury in our lives,

00:51:41.930 - 00:52:00.740

comma, more than our physical comfort level, comma, more than the medical advances which suppressed so many crippling diseases and extended human life so dramatically, period. This technology changed the basic fiber of societies everywhere,

00:52:00.980 - 00:52:21.560

comma, breaking down social, comma, economic, comma, and religious institutions, which had been in place for centuries, comma, if not longer, period. It changed the face of the planet, comma, wiping away forests, comma, draining marshes, comma,

00:52:21.740 - 00:52:39.380

scraping away hillsides to make room for housing units and cities, period. New paragraph. I am not talking here about our century, comma, but the 19th century, comma, which ground into its final decade, like some

00:52:39.380 - 00:53:03.140

giant ribbit stitch that some joined by hyphens, locomotive seizing and panting, comma, straining to advance into the 20th century, unaware of the wreckage it had left in its wake, comma, as its frock-coated proprietors scurried about

00:53:05.090 - 00:53:28.210

barely able to restrain it, period. I'm sorry, barely able to restrain it, no period, or imagine the long term results of what they had created, period. New paragraph. It is fitting that a hundred years later, we pause and

00:53:28.210 - 00:53:47.890

consider the dilemma most of those men were unaware of, period. And it was a dilemma, comma, for to go forward into the modern was to destroy the past, comma, to wrench up the floorboards of tradition, comma, a frightening undertaking no

00:53:47.890 - 00:54:07.030

matter how rusty the nails or rotten the wood, comma, since the whole house might collapse without its foundation in place, comma, a foundation which seemed to many attached inextricably to the flooring, period. New paragraph.

00:54:08.050 - 00:54:25.690

Many of the dilemmas of our century, dash dash, from environmental and overpopulation issues, comma, to the rise of fundamentalist thought in all societies, comma, which is really a form- no comma, just put this in parentheses, which

00:54:25.690 - 00:54:45.250

is really a form of standing against that straining locomotive, end parentheses then dash dash, have been caused by the advances of technology. New paragraph. It is also fitting that a hundred years later we pause

00:54:45.580 - 00:54:59.740

because it was barely a hundred years ago that the motion picture camera was invented and, comma, in its way, comma, with its word [cut-off].