table of contents

05/07/2019

On the railroad with Kai Carlson-Wee

Note: This segment serves as a prologue to the extended conversation on the topic of “The American Road”, which will air next week. In this episode, Kai speaks about how he first became a poet, and he reads a few poems from his recently published book “Rail”.    Kai Carlson-Wee grew up on the Minnesota […]

download transcript [vtt]
00:00:00.000
This is Robert Harrison for entitled "Pinions."
00:00:03.080
We have a two-part show in the works
00:00:04.920
about the literature, film, music, and photography
00:00:08.160
of the American road.
00:00:10.640
We'll be posting that new episode next week.
00:00:13.480
My guest is Kai Carlson-Wee,
00:00:16.040
whom I'll introduce more extensively
00:00:17.760
at the start of our next episode.
00:00:20.360
But as a prologue to our extended conversation,
00:00:23.080
we're offering you today a very interesting segment
00:00:25.920
in which Kai speaks about how he first became a poet
00:00:29.160
and reads a few poems from his new book, "Rail."
00:00:32.600
I know you'll enjoy what follows today,
00:00:35.080
as well as our romp through the 50s, 60s, and beyond,
00:00:38.760
that we'll air next week.
00:00:40.360
Now, can you tell us, Kai, about your own career as a poet
00:00:47.440
and something about this collection called "Rail"
00:00:51.440
that you published?
00:00:52.600
Sure.
00:00:54.280
Well, "Rail" is a book of poems
00:00:58.000
that I published this last year,
00:01:00.600
and it's been out for just about a year at this point.
00:01:04.680
And it's about a period in my life after college
00:01:09.480
when I was going through a pretty serious depression.
00:01:12.680
And I was traveling around the country a lot,
00:01:16.200
and I started hitchhiking.
00:01:18.360
I started taking road trips with friends.
00:01:20.640
I started hiking in the mountains a lot,
00:01:23.200
and I started hopping trains.
00:01:25.640
And the freight train culture and the experience of that
00:01:32.440
really kind of captured my imagination
00:01:34.880
in a pretty critical way, I think.
00:01:39.040
And there are depictions of train hopping
00:01:43.080
in various ways in American culture,
00:01:46.720
various things.
00:01:47.400
There have been some photograph projects done.
00:01:51.560
You see it in some films.
00:01:54.360
But there's not a lot.
00:01:56.280
There hasn't really been a lot of investigation
00:01:59.560
into that aspect.
00:02:01.400
And I think when I started doing it,
00:02:04.560
it was for me just to escape something in my own life.
00:02:09.720
I was heavily medicated, and I was seeing a lot of therapists
00:02:15.240
and sort of in that institution trying to heal myself.
00:02:19.280
And this kind of travel where you're traveling without plans
00:02:25.640
sort of became a way for me to heal my mind a little bit.
00:02:30.920
And especially when you're hopping freight trains,
00:02:35.480
there's this really intense sense of the American past
00:02:40.280
and the American industry.
00:02:42.560
And this sort of inability to control one's fate
00:02:48.400
that I really, really dug.
00:02:51.520
Yeah, of course.
00:02:53.560
And yeah, especially if you weren't in control of it
00:02:56.240
at the moment.
00:02:57.280
Right.
00:02:57.640
I mean, you're riding-- when you're riding a freight
00:02:59.840
train, you're riding on a 5,000 ton machine
00:03:04.000
that has no consciousness.
00:03:09.400
It feels like it has a consciousness
00:03:12.480
because it's so large and it's so big.
00:03:14.600
And it's so powerful that when you're riding a freight train,
00:03:18.360
you start kind of talking to it, and you start praying to it
00:03:23.000
in certain ways, and you start treating it like a god almost.
00:03:27.800
Well, it seems to have a purpose because it's going somewhere.
00:03:30.080
It seems like it has a reason to get somewhere.
00:03:33.280
Right.
00:03:34.280
It does.
00:03:34.840
And you have no idea what that destination is or that reason
00:03:38.280
is.
00:03:38.560
And part of the weird and fun and sort of terrifying thing
00:03:42.480
about riding a freight train is,
00:03:44.280
they do weird stuff.
00:03:45.600
It's not like airplanes where things are scheduled,
00:03:48.200
and you can kind of predict when they're
00:03:49.720
going to leave or when they're not.
00:03:51.360
Trains will stop in a random town in the middle of Montana
00:03:55.040
for two days, and you're stuck on that thing.
00:03:57.520
And you don't know if you're ever going to leave.
00:03:59.760
Sometimes they'll be going one direction,
00:04:01.480
and they'll box swap in a yard, and they'll just start
00:04:04.320
going the other direction.
00:04:06.040
And you're like, OK, now my journey's going backwards.
00:04:10.520
Were you on them legally?
00:04:12.760
Or were you hiding out?
00:04:14.680
Very illegally.
00:04:15.680
Illegally.
00:04:16.280
Yeah.
00:04:16.640
OK.
00:04:17.200
It's a very illegal thing.
00:04:18.920
However, I will say when you're doing it,
00:04:22.360
and you're kind of engaged with the workers in the yards
00:04:26.320
and the conductors that drive the trains,
00:04:30.520
they have a sense for the history of it, too.
00:04:33.240
And although the bulls who are the cops of the railroad
00:04:36.720
yards do try to catch you, and they
00:04:38.600
will rough house you a little bit in ways that other cops
00:04:43.640
won't, because in every railroad yard,
00:04:46.880
they're on railroad jurisdiction, and it's under railroad law,
00:04:49.640
which is not federal law.
00:04:51.560
It's separate.
00:04:53.160
And that's one of the reasons you hear
00:04:55.320
about these violent things around railroad yards
00:04:58.880
throughout the history of them.
00:05:00.120
It's because the bullcops aren't subject to the same laws.
00:05:04.240
But despite that, they do have a sense for the history
00:05:09.800
of train hoppers.
00:05:11.120
And there's sort of a tenderness to that dynamic.
00:05:16.000
Even though you are doing something illegal,
00:05:18.080
it's definitely wrong.
00:05:19.880
There's a feeling, a thought, that goes back to the 30s,
00:05:26.600
that if there's a hobo on your train,
00:05:28.680
it's a good luck thing for the train.
00:05:31.120
So a lot of conductors actually don't mind people jumping
00:05:34.720
on the trains and riding.
00:05:36.520
And you kind of play this cat and mouse game that is
00:05:41.280
affectionate in a certain way.
00:05:43.960
So how many times were you caught?
00:05:46.400
I've been caught maybe like four times.
00:05:49.760
Four times.
00:05:50.400
OK.
00:05:51.120
I mean, I'm pretty good at hiding on these trains at this point,
00:05:54.560
but I have been caught a few times.
00:05:57.840
The funniest situation was when I was caught in Minneapolis
00:06:03.040
a few years ago.
00:06:03.920
And the guy handcuffed me and was kind of trying to intimidate me.
00:06:11.680
And I said, this is the first time I'm doing this.
00:06:15.200
I'm sorry.
00:06:15.560
I'll never do it again.
00:06:16.920
I'm trying to talk my way out of it.
00:06:18.880
And he took my idea and went and typed something
00:06:21.800
into his computer and came back.
00:06:23.800
And he said, you say, this is the first time I ever doing this.
00:06:26.200
And I said, yeah, clearly I got caught.
00:06:29.280
I don't know what I'm doing.
00:06:30.320
And he said, well, what about six years ago?
00:06:33.440
And I was like, six years ago.
00:06:34.720
I don't know what I was doing six years ago.
00:06:36.320
And he said, well, I know what you're doing.
00:06:37.600
You're hopping trains because I'm the one that caught you
00:06:40.000
last the last time you were doing this.
00:06:42.040
And was that true?
00:06:43.320
It was true.
00:06:43.880
Yeah.
00:06:44.160
I had forgotten that this guy was the same guy.
00:06:47.440
But it was pretty embarrassing.
00:06:49.080
And I almost was put in jail that time,
00:06:52.680
but ended up talking my way out.
00:06:57.200
That's great.
00:06:58.840
So do you have some poems that you've chosen for us?
00:07:03.000
Sure.
00:07:05.560
Yeah, this-- I'll read two train poems, because we're
00:07:07.960
talking about road trips.
00:07:09.000
And we're talking about these kind of journeys.
00:07:11.480
I'll read the title poem of the book, which is called "Real."
00:07:15.360
And this is about a trip-- or it's set on a trip
00:07:19.200
that I took with my brother across the country
00:07:22.240
when we were a little bit younger.
00:07:24.320
And it's partly about this American landscape that--
00:07:31.440
you see in films like "Easy Rider" in ways.
00:07:34.200
And you see in films like "Badlands,"
00:07:35.840
this sort of detritus of the American West.
00:07:38.600
However, on a train, you see a side that's
00:07:41.440
just not visible from the highway.
00:07:43.040
It's a little even more in decay.
00:07:46.040
So it's about that landscape.
00:07:49.440
I'm going to go to the railroad rail.
00:07:51.840
I find it here in the wild Elthelfa,
00:07:55.480
head full of anticycotics and blue rain.
00:07:59.640
Twenty years old on a freight train
00:08:01.840
riding the soy fields into the night,
00:08:05.320
leaning away from the short grass prairie,
00:08:08.520
the black Mississippi of dream.
00:08:11.720
My brother asleep on the well, well beside me,
00:08:14.960
nodding his head to the sway.
00:08:18.720
What home are we leaving?
00:08:21.200
What distances blur the electric fence?
00:08:24.680
What hundred low, thundering wheels of darkness
00:08:27.840
are coming to carry us there?
00:08:31.000
Rain and the singing wind over the auto racks,
00:08:35.160
staring out west at the stars of our gods
00:08:38.120
and the lonely dark stars of our hearts.
00:08:42.200
Bored it up storefronts, burned down apartments,
00:08:45.880
highway signs that only name the dead.
00:08:50.600
We cross the station tracks, the broken legs of Sunday chairs
00:08:54.960
left rusting in the yards.
00:08:57.240
We know the way the story ends.
00:09:00.720
Still, the whistle blows.
00:09:03.720
The flare stacks whip their excess methane candles
00:09:07.160
against the night.
00:09:09.120
The wheels that brought us this far still role,
00:09:12.520
still churn the polished iron ash.
00:09:16.200
The road goes on.
00:09:18.200
The highway turns a deeper shade of black.
00:09:22.760
And as the sun sinks down on the eastern Montana hills,
00:09:27.080
peppered with horses and gunshot cars,
00:09:30.480
the rails still lead us somewhere else
00:09:34.320
and shine in the falling light.
00:09:38.000
That's terrific.
00:09:39.840
That's bad lands territory, right?
00:09:43.400
That's right.
00:09:44.200
Yeah.
00:09:44.720
The eastern Montana.
00:09:46.360
So how did you become a poet, kind?
00:09:49.040
Because that's really accomplished poetry.
00:09:50.560
And the rhythms are--
00:09:53.200
it has that feel of the chucking alone.
00:09:57.200
Exactly.
00:09:58.040
Well, I'm glad you picked up on that
00:09:59.880
because not a lot of people do.
00:10:01.920
The rhythm in a lot of these poems is anapestic meter.
00:10:05.400
So it's too unstressed and then stressed.
00:10:08.240
And so it sounds like--
00:10:10.000
did it, did it, did it, did it, did it.
00:10:12.200
And I did that because I wanted
00:10:14.160
to replicate the sound of trains and sound of that clic-clacking.
00:10:18.160
Sound and also feel when you're on it,
00:10:20.480
you probably are moved in that rock-me-baby,
00:10:25.720
like a Southbound train.
00:10:27.360
It's that feeling.
00:10:29.520
Well, I started writing when I was young,
00:10:32.200
when I was in elementary school,
00:10:33.360
because I started writing love poems to people in class
00:10:37.520
that I had crushes on.
00:10:39.240
And that's honestly how I started.
00:10:42.840
And it was awkward.
00:10:44.360
It was sort of a creepy thing to do, I think, in some ways.
00:10:48.600
But it was effective sometimes too.
00:10:51.560
You kept 'em to yourself, or you--
00:10:53.680
Well, I would give 'em to these people.
00:10:56.480
I would leave 'em in there.
00:10:58.400
If you give it, it's not creepy.
00:11:00.280
Right.
00:11:00.760
Well, it just--
00:11:02.560
It would look creepy back at it.
00:11:03.760
It could have come to yourself.
00:11:05.800
I would put 'em in their desks or in their lockers.
00:11:08.480
And sometimes this did work, and sometimes it was a little weird.
00:11:14.320
But that's how I started.
00:11:15.480
There's a funny story about--
00:11:16.920
I don't have to go into it.
00:11:17.840
There's a funny story about what really kind of kicked us off
00:11:21.480
from me in poetry, but I know we're short on time.
00:11:24.360
Go ahead.
00:11:25.400
Well, when I really, really realized that poetry was something
00:11:29.280
that I wanted to take seriously was one of these instances
00:11:32.760
with a love poem when I was in fourth grade.
00:11:35.880
And there was a girl in my class named Jill,
00:11:39.240
who I developed as crush on.
00:11:41.400
And on the last day of school, I wrote her this eight-line poem,
00:11:45.720
"Love Poem."
00:11:47.080
And I left it in her locker.
00:11:48.800
And I didn't sign it, and I thought, maybe she'll know it was me,
00:11:53.240
maybe she won't.
00:11:55.240
But anyway, I want her to know that I'm thinking about her
00:11:58.760
in this way.
00:12:00.600
And I left on the bus, and the last day of school,
00:12:03.560
and went home, and didn't hear anything over the summer.
00:12:06.960
And I was sort of expecting her to call or something.
00:12:09.400
And next year in fifth grade, I didn't hear anything.
00:12:13.000
And even though I saw her, and we were still friends,
00:12:15.840
sixth grade, didn't hear anything.
00:12:17.480
Seventh grade didn't hear anything.
00:12:18.800
And just, I assumed either she didn't get it,
00:12:21.600
or she didn't like it.
00:12:23.200
She thought it was weird.
00:12:24.640
But my family moved when I was in ninth grade up to Fargo.
00:12:29.880
And so I left that town behind.
00:12:32.280
And my dad's a Lutheran pastor.
00:12:35.080
And I am required to do stuff.
00:12:38.800
Or I was required to do stuff with the church when I was a kid.
00:12:42.760
And when I was a sophomore in high school,
00:12:45.760
there was this youth group trip that was going down to New Orleans.
00:12:49.760
And everyone in my church had to go.
00:12:56.800
And I had to go, because I was the pastor's kid.
00:13:00.280
But we loaded this big van up and drove down to New Orleans.
00:13:05.000
And it was kind of a road trip along Route 61 down south.
00:13:09.920
But I was sort of a bad kid.
00:13:13.840
And I was skipping the required things in New Orleans.
00:13:17.320
And hanging out with some friends.
00:13:19.040
And I ran into my old church.
00:13:21.200
And some of these kids recognized me and said,
00:13:24.600
hey, Kai, how's it going?
00:13:25.720
Do you want to come back to our hotel room
00:13:27.560
and we're having a little party?
00:13:28.960
I said, sure.
00:13:30.080
So I go back to the hotel room.
00:13:32.240
And this girl, Jill, is there who I haven't seen for many years
00:13:36.120
at this point.
00:13:37.800
And we kind of reconnect a little bit.
00:13:39.520
And she asks me how my life is.
00:13:42.320
And I say, well, it's not so good,
00:13:43.960
because I'm living in Fargo now.
00:13:45.480
And I miss everyone from home.
00:13:50.360
And she says, well, do you want to go into the bathroom
00:13:53.920
with me and smoke a cigarette?
00:13:55.720
And I said, sure, because people smoke cigarettes back
00:13:58.720
in this age.
00:14:00.800
But we go into the bathroom.
00:14:03.520
And she takes out this new port menthol cigarette,
00:14:06.640
because that was the cool cigarette of the time,
00:14:08.440
a sort of minty, fresh.
00:14:10.680
And she starts stuffing a towel beneath the door
00:14:14.520
and she turns on the light.
00:14:15.680
I mean, the fan in the bathroom so that the smoke
00:14:18.560
can get sucked out.
00:14:20.240
And I see her shoulders start to sink.
00:14:24.000
And I can hear her breathing heavy.
00:14:27.600
And she seems distressed.
00:14:29.040
And I say, Jill, are you OK?
00:14:31.080
Like what's going on when she doesn't say anything?
00:14:33.800
And I say, Jill, is everything all right?
00:14:37.760
And she turns around to face me and there are tears in her eyes.
00:14:41.440
And she says, I have to ask you a question.
00:14:45.000
And I say, OK, what is it?
00:14:47.400
And she says, did you write a poem for me in fourth grade?
00:14:51.880
And I said no.
00:14:53.880
And she said, well, it was a weird thing in high school
00:14:57.960
to be writing these poems.
00:14:59.440
And it wasn't cool to be a poet back then.
00:15:02.560
And it's always cool to be a poet.
00:15:05.400
Well, I was a little sheepish.
00:15:08.840
I didn't know how she was going to react.
00:15:10.680
And she looks at me a little harder.
00:15:12.440
And she says, I know it was you that wrote me that poem
00:15:15.240
in fourth grade.
00:15:16.960
And so I fessed up and I said, yeah, that was me.
00:15:20.080
And she proceeded to recite this back to me.
00:15:23.560
Word for word, line for line.
00:15:26.680
Just off the top of her head.
00:15:28.320
And I was totally blown away.
00:15:32.120
Because I hadn't heard that many people memorized poems.
00:15:35.920
We did it in class, but it wasn't really a thing.
00:15:39.360
And I burst into tears.
00:15:41.320
And she started crying.
00:15:42.960
And we sat down in this bathroom and smoked
00:15:46.840
this cigarette together.
00:15:48.440
And we didn't really talk that much about it.
00:15:51.600
We kind of hugged and kissed a little.
00:15:53.240
But it wasn't much more than that.
00:15:55.560
And we smoked this cigarette.
00:15:56.760
And I just had a kind of--
00:15:59.760
it was a turning point in me as far
00:16:02.440
as the way that I related to poetry.
00:16:04.560
So I realized how powerful it could be and how intimate it
00:16:07.280
could be.
00:16:08.200
And the relationship that it could have privately
00:16:10.920
within people.
00:16:12.720
And I also realized that writing these poems
00:16:17.240
that I had done in the past to kind of get dates, I guess,
00:16:21.240
wasn't really about me and achieving something.
00:16:26.160
It was about what other people needed to hear.
00:16:29.400
And what they carried with them in a private way,
00:16:36.320
away from these poems.
00:16:37.840
And so I started taking it a lot more seriously
00:16:41.040
after that happened.
00:16:42.440
A kind of poetry that's aware of what it does for others.
00:16:46.280
More than--
00:16:47.280
Exactly.
00:16:47.480
This kind of solopistic self-referential poetry.
00:16:50.120
Exactly.
00:16:50.680
And even if the poetry is about the self,
00:16:53.640
is about the inner weather of the self,
00:16:56.720
and a lot of poetry is, it still is--
00:17:01.160
it's purpose is to find a place inside somebody else's
00:17:05.520
imagination or somebody else's soul.
00:17:08.600
And I think that's one of the things that drove me
00:17:14.240
later on to want to really become a poet.
00:17:17.040
And because to become a poet is a long process,
00:17:20.920
it's really annoying.
00:17:22.040
And it takes forever.
00:17:23.640
It's not like you get inspired and you practice writing
00:17:28.040
for a year and then you start publishing poems.
00:17:29.960
It just is a very difficult sort of contentious world
00:17:36.680
and it's full of drama and everything like every other art
00:17:40.560
world is.
00:17:42.000
But I don't know if that created some kind of idea of a call
00:17:45.760
in me, but I do think about that moment
00:17:49.240
when I think about what I'm doing with my life,
00:17:51.440
like scribbling notes in a cafe,
00:17:53.720
trying to write these poems.
00:17:55.920
Do you still have that poem?
00:17:58.520
I remember what it was about.
00:18:01.320
I mean, it was about the girl's show,
00:18:03.560
but I didn't remember what it was until she recited it
00:18:10.520
back to me.
00:18:11.160
And then I remembered the lines that I had written many years
00:18:14.120
ago.
00:18:14.960
It was very objectifying.
00:18:16.680
It was like--
00:18:20.600
I was midwestern, so I was comparing her to farm stuff.
00:18:24.640
So I was like, your hair is golden-weeed and that type of thing.
00:18:32.600
So you can't read it for us, obviously.
00:18:34.880
Right.
00:18:35.720
Well, it was probably terrible, to be honest.
00:18:39.280
Did you study poetry formally?
00:18:42.360
Yeah, I got my MFA at University of Wisconsin Madison.
00:18:47.480
And I studied it in my undergrad.
00:18:51.360
I just took classes and I went to--
00:18:53.520
The most important influences for you
00:18:55.200
with the poets that I studied with.
00:18:57.280
Well, that you-- that you most influenced by.
00:19:00.640
Well, I'm in some sort of lineage, I think,
00:19:04.600
that goes back to the sort of automatic,
00:19:08.520
inspired occult writing that Yeats did.
00:19:11.400
And then some of the Whitmanian sort of exuberance
00:19:16.880
and very Americanness of Whitman, that then extends up
00:19:22.320
through Theodore Ruttke, that goes to Robert Bligh and James
00:19:26.600
Ruttke, and the deep images and Larry Levis in the '80s.
00:19:33.000
And it's sort of a confessionalist style
00:19:37.400
that also is really propelled by the sublime and ideas
00:19:44.200
of inspiration and musical cadence that carries the lines.
00:19:50.640
Well, can we hear another one?
00:19:51.920
Sure.
00:19:53.000
I can read either a love poem or another train poem.
00:19:56.440
Well, I just read both.
00:19:57.720
OK.
00:19:58.240
Start with the love poem in the moment.
00:19:59.160
All right.
00:19:59.560
And with the train poem.
00:20:01.040
This is a much more adult love poem
00:20:03.000
than the one that I wrote for Jill.
00:20:07.080
But this is about love after a relationship is over.
00:20:10.120
And the love is gone, but it's also still lingering there
00:20:16.120
somewhere.
00:20:17.520
It's called Secret Air.
00:20:20.840
I know no God, no ghost, no code that
00:20:24.920
turns the burning engine back.
00:20:28.200
I know a highway field stars above the sleeping corn.
00:20:33.520
The river rolls the world spins alone.
00:20:38.160
We are not promised love like this.
00:20:42.280
We don't decide what brighter angel comes,
00:20:45.280
what water climbs the banks.
00:20:48.320
It could have been a different year, a better pill,
00:20:51.560
a weird forgotten dream, a song I heard behind the neighbor's
00:20:56.200
door, the barking dog again.
00:20:59.960
But it was you, the only one to make it last,
00:21:04.960
to hold my head like this, to lead me back inside myself,
00:21:10.840
to know, to be the sadness of a summer horse unbridled
00:21:16.840
on a hill, departing air, the farmhouse crumbling
00:21:21.040
in the wind.
00:21:23.200
I could have lived 100 lives and never known a real kiss.
00:21:28.480
I could have gone without your winter stars,
00:21:31.320
your street light tinted breath.
00:21:35.000
But it was you, the one who made the darkness real,
00:21:40.240
the highway blue, the roses hollow thorn.
00:21:46.360
I know we die alone in separate rooms with cancelled eyes
00:21:51.040
and some disease inside our hearts.
00:21:55.040
But still, we knew a love like this.
00:21:59.000
We knew.
00:22:01.320
And all the nights I sleep in someone else's arms,
00:22:05.160
the rhythmic dark, the drifty San Francisco
00:22:08.440
nights I wander with the crowd, from here
00:22:12.040
to there to somewhere else.
00:22:14.800
The Safeway lines and subway lines and traffic streaming west.
00:22:20.320
I return again.
00:22:22.880
I remember you and only you like this, your careless grip,
00:22:30.440
your pale eyes beside me in the corn,
00:22:34.040
the sheet of plywood for a bed.
00:22:37.480
It is what is.
00:22:40.280
Among the crickets song, the muddy river rising up the banks.
00:22:46.440
I meet you there.
00:22:48.480
I turn to hold you in the secret air that only you will know.
00:22:55.960
That's great.
00:22:57.440
That also has a very distinctive rhythm,
00:23:00.000
not the same anapestic heavy anapec--
00:23:03.560
yeah, I'm really impressed with your poetry kind.
00:23:06.440
I have to say the rhythm, the cadences, the images,
00:23:11.280
and it doesn't ever flirt with either a mockish sentimentality
00:23:17.480
or a kind of poetic grandstandings.
00:23:21.920
That's great.
00:23:22.360
Thank you, Robert.
00:23:23.440
Yeah, it means a lot.
00:23:25.720
How about one last train poem for us?
00:23:28.400
Sure.
00:23:29.080
This is a poem that I wrote.
00:23:31.520
After I had done a lot of train hopping
00:23:33.840
and people would sometimes ask me why I was doing it
00:23:37.240
or what it was about.
00:23:39.320
And this is an attempt to kind of explain in a poem
00:23:44.680
why it has been significant to me.
00:23:47.520
It's called Where the Feeling Deserts Us.
00:23:49.520
I wake somewhere on the outskirts of Portland.
00:23:56.040
The crickets are singing.
00:23:57.760
The train is refusing to breathe.
00:24:01.160
Often the distance a truck gears down on a service road
00:24:04.760
bordered in trees.
00:24:07.280
The river beside me, babbling kind.
00:24:10.760
Headache, earache, all I can see of the field
00:24:14.560
dissolves in a stale white blanket of moon.
00:24:18.440
Nothing moves.
00:24:20.200
Even the cold machinery seems to be riding itself
00:24:23.600
in a dream, sliding away from the steel retainer walls,
00:24:28.520
box cars stalled on the next four strings.
00:24:32.520
The train is my shepherd.
00:24:34.760
I finger a dead leaf.
00:24:37.160
Starlight stance in the field beyond my cage.
00:24:41.840
We are never returning to the field itself, only the mystery
00:24:46.280
hidden inside.
00:24:48.600
Night after night in the speed of your leaving,
00:24:52.080
soft of your vamed hands tracing my thigh.
00:24:56.360
The flavor of dust or the feeling diserts us
00:25:00.040
may be the blonde heads of needlegrass, swaying,
00:25:03.760
bodies of cows in the next field over.
00:25:08.000
I pull up the blanket to cover my bare arms.
00:25:11.640
Cool air filled with the pressures of falling do.
00:25:16.680
This is the best I can give for a reason.
00:25:20.560
The metal accepts you, whoever you are.
00:25:24.440
The train you are riding will only go forward.
00:25:28.560
The straight line is perfectly clear.
00:25:31.320
We've been listening to Kai Carlson.
00:25:36.680
We read his poetry from his book, "A Rail,"
00:25:39.960
and he's joined me for this extended conversation
00:25:43.480
on the American road.
00:25:45.200
And it sounds to me like the American road
00:25:47.440
has a lot of road ahead of it with that kind of poetry
00:25:51.320
if we're continuing that tradition.
00:25:52.800
So thanks a lot for coming on to Entitled Opinion's Kai.
00:25:56.960
And all of you listeners of Entitled Opinion's,
00:26:00.920
stay tuned.
00:26:02.240
Bye-bye.
00:26:03.080
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:26:06.120
♪ This is the motor running ♪
00:26:20.040
♪ Head out on the highway ♪
00:26:23.440
♪ Looking forward, damn sure ♪
00:26:26.200
♪ In whatever comes our way ♪
00:26:30.280
♪ Yeah, I'm not in trouble ♪
00:26:31.680
♪ Maybe it happened ♪
00:26:33.640
♪ So well in a loving place ♪
00:26:36.640
♪ My all of the guns ♪
00:26:38.480
♪ Come on, son ♪
00:26:40.080
♪ It's loaded to space ♪
00:26:42.880
♪ I like talking like ♪
00:26:46.280
♪ Every bit of fun ♪
00:26:49.480
♪ The rest of the wheel ♪
00:26:52.480
♪ And I'm feeling that I'm ♪
00:26:56.400
♪ Yeah, I got it for me ♪
00:26:58.160
♪ But I'm running ♪
00:26:59.800
♪ People world in a loving place ♪
00:27:03.200
♪ My all of the guns ♪
00:27:04.800
♪ Come on, son ♪
00:27:06.400
♪ It's loaded to space ♪
00:27:08.800
♪ And I'm the true of the nature's child ♪
00:27:12.200
♪ But we were born for the divine ♪
00:27:15.440
♪ But we can climb so high ♪
00:27:17.840
♪ I never want to die ♪
00:27:22.640
♪ Born to be wild ♪
00:27:26.280
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:27:29.680
♪ Born to be wild ♪
00:27:34.680
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:27:39.680
(rock music)
00:27:42.180
(rock music)
00:27:44.600
(rock music)
00:27:49.600
♪ ♪
00:28:06.320
♪ ♪
00:28:15.200
Head out on the highway
00:28:18.060
♪ But look at forward venture
00:28:21.060
♪ And whatever comes away
00:28:24.060
♪ Yeah, I got a gold make and have fun
00:28:28.060
♪ Check the world and the young and the brave
00:28:32.060
♪ Fire all of your guns and guns and it's loaded with space
00:28:38.060
♪ Said I took two on the nature's shine
00:28:41.060
♪ We were both brought to be right
00:28:44.060
♪ We can climb so high
00:28:46.060
♪ I never want to die
00:28:50.060
♪ But won't you be wild
00:28:56.060
♪ Won't you be wild
00:29:02.060
♪ ♪
00:29:13.060
♪ ♪
00:29:18.060
♪ ♪
00:29:23.060
♪ ♪