The lack of exercise has opened the day and we're expecting it to be done in the next two weeks. And again, with the delivery of these products. Thank you. Good morning, I'm a big general here in Austin, from 3rd grade International Service Force. And I'm just proud to be here sitting alongside my Philippine counterpart and look forward to answering your questions today. Thank you. One of the burning questions in this year's Malikatan exercises would be probably the ongoing tensions with China. Does this affect in any way the conduct of the exercises moving forward and of course in the years to come? Would this in any way affect the Malikatan exercises at this point? The Malikatan exercises affect in no way the effect of the tensions going on around us. Particularly, I want to say something. Because the Malikatan is the year and the year TPD of the U.S. and the armed forces of the Philippines as a part of the U.S. military support and security and future network in TPD. And the exercise is just slightly our interoperability and our cooperation in the TPD. So it doesn't in any way affect the tensions and it should be seen as separately between other regions. I would just reinforce what I was just saying is that we've been doing this for 38 years, every April. And it is a tremendous and important chance for us to train together as allies and partners. But it is in no way drive to any of the ongoing tensions. Sir, just a quick follow-up. Would there be a scenario also between the U.S. and the Philippine troops that may possibly prepare both sides for a possible attack or an invasion? Not naming anyone, but would that scenario be also practiced for prayers? Not really, but the FDX and the military exercises are geared towards strengthening the interoperability because we will be working with the headquarters to meet in the morning at different levels. So we need that to be cohesive so that we can achieve a degree of efficiency in the process of the exercise. So it might be or it may not, but I think the challenge around us, our interoperability, it is, but for us it's better to be prepared as our partners. One comment, I think it's important to understand that the Philippine armed forces, plus any Americans, are rapidly modernizing right now. So one of the opportunities that we have in this exercise is to learn about how we can be interoperable with many of our modernized capabilities. I think it's important to point that out. An example is the fact that we're, for the first time, going to work through a cyber defense scenario that's been mentioned. And also from the U.S. side, we have two new formations. The third, we're in the total arrangement, which is a new formation that we're going to exercise in the first multi-domain task force from the Army. And then we're going to experiment with it as well. So a lot of important experimentation and better understanding how our modernized forces will work together. Thank you, sir. I wish to ask you about riding a higher exercise, which is going to be interoperable on the 26th. The higher exercise is part of the exercise, the exercise of the Army. It talks more about past techniques and figures. Because we'll be using different ornaments, how it will be ordained in the Air Force from all sides, from all sides. So we need the interoperability of communication systems to be able to teach them the internetifiers. And secondly, the invitation of standard of guests for them. We have to send them the communication to the standard of officials of the affidavit of the President. We also send them the invitation of the President. This is usually a further communication of them. And of course, the other affidavit might be very sweet. The live fire is, in fact, one of the items, but there are many habits of this exercise. And we will work through the command and control of different weapons, as was just stated, and the interoperability of our armed forces. So it'll be a good opportunity to learn from that. But there's so many other things that are going on that may not seem as exciting, but they are. I'll give you an example. There's logistics, which is tremendously important to all of us. Maybe now it's exciting. There's a live fire exercise, but something we're going to get after this exercise. Good morning. I'm David Santos. Thank you for everything. This is what we're going to be discussing. We understand that each evaluation of the body that happens is not in the USA, but in the USA. But maybe you can just say what the minimum cost is with the process of this ID. I mean, this is quite a good exercise in the South. This is the biggest ever, and there are about 17,000 participating troops, 12,000 from the US Armed Forces. And we will ask you the process of just deciding on the sheer number of participants in the work that you're going to do. And to also certainly ask, what do you need to decide? There are 12,000 American troops, only 5,000 of the 50%? I would just tell you, two things. One, we value any opportunity to train with our allies and partners. So, given the opportunity, we are training across the joint force from the US perspective. This is a wonderful opportunity for us, which is why many of us are here to participate. What I don't have a good answer for is I don't know what the specific decisions were made to, plus another one from previous public attendance. So I apologize. The decisions were made since last year. It was a joint study conducted in the US at the building site of here in Hawaii. And the last study, I think, was in December, where obviously it was here now, where the place has got areas to be laid out, includes the tidal effects, building exercise, and of course, the CPX. And the Dubai, Nicaria, city-class clients. The HCA activities already started last month, and the partners were decided last December. And they include the other exercise details. And as we come closer, as we came closer, we decided, and the whole process of the activities is already in the Air Force. So it was also decided to be serious. So it's a community and ongoing process of planning, whatever planning and discussions to be held. I'm just a follow-up question. As you can see, there are a number of day-to-day projects, and I think that there are types of groups, left-wing groups, and cross-sector groups, that are concerned over the huge volume of participating groups and also concerned with their relationship, citing various instances. Unfortunately, in the past, how do we respond to this criticism from left-wing and cross-sector groups? I've created a site for the cross-sector groups, that we would like to sign. It's a meeting of their part, of our part as members of the art forces. As mentioned, we have to be working together, strengthening our cooperation as we go on, the interoperability on the technical, tactical, and procedural levels to be done. The inter-sector groups, they believe such, because it's a part of the movement process and so on. But, evidently, we, as the people of the nation, the communities should be united in a way that we support the art forces of the communities, as part of the protection of the environment. Thank you very much. I was just going to add, as I was stating, that we'll leave the political discussion to the politicians, but what I will say is, from the U.S. perspective, we're just grateful to be here and intend to be good stewards. We certainly understand that bad behavior can be a bad thing for our relationship. Now, with your population, we're sensitive to that, and we fully intend to be good stewards throughout this exercise. Thank you so much. Thank you. Sir, can you give us, we know that there is great penetration, multiple sources of penetration in the region. So, can you give us a density of how you feel about the urgency of doing this, by this accolation and in this massive, when the ship's sinking at your side? What is your sense of urgency that you must do this life, that that is in this size and in this intensity? We don't feel urgency based on any tensions. There are tensions, we all understand that. But what we do feel is a true value into the partnership with allies and partners throughout the region, and see that as a tremendously important part of the role that we, as Americans play in the peace and security and stability in this region. So, we're really happy to be here. The tensions, all of us are trying to ease the people on the political team in this state. But for us, the armed forces, it's more of making ourselves as an armed force be more efficient and effective. So, it's not any, it's not terrorist violence, no reason for any challenge that is definitely based. Definitely, our country faces the future. So, we should be prepared in any dead body, the future, whatever it may be. Definitely. Thank you. Sir, as a fact, this is the 30th activation of the body defense. Can you give us a sense of how working together in a large situation is always far from perfect in many years? Can you give us an idea of how, because of the emphasize, that the two forces have improved their response time to any possible crisis during Taiwan and the South China Sea and the operation of the interoperability? So, I'll give you two aspects that are very important. One is there's a technical aspect that our systems have to work together, which is something that we struggle with within the ONU at our own force in the United States. And it's also something that we have to work at and work hard at and exercise with our allies and partners, and we're going to do that in this exercise. So, working those systems out from a technical perspective is important. The other thing I would tell you that's probably more important is relationships. And I mentioned it in my comments about an hour ago, that you cannot search trust. So, the relationships that we have that we build through these exercises are what make us best posture to respond to conflict, crisis, humanitarian assistance to a disaster relief when need be at speed. I have been in Taiwan before. It's more of the technical part than the humanitarian part. For us, we've been working on relationships for and taking steps, taking steps into the the new differences in our world, our friends, and in our world, we became allies. That's how we develop our relationships in Taiwan. And on technical exchanges, on technical expertise, the SMEs, the experts talking together, our experts, the American experts talking together, their most chief operation on interoperability, on the opposite sides, developing other communities definitely and depending on the procedures as we go on. So, I think that's about it. Thank you. Thank you. Right here, at the end of yes, it's next year, it's going to be tomorrow. And tomorrow, I think it's going to be another day, just a bit. Yes. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you again. So, we learn from the personal ones. We learn from our counterparts. So, that's how to develop our cellular impacts in the New York region. So, it would mean that at the future, we would develop2020 expertise of people maybe something to be able to efficiently address the cellular vulnerabilities earlier that the fact that we're exercising the cyber defense is testimony to the changing character of warfare and the fact that all of our services have to modernize and adapt to meeting the threat that exists across the world. And in the distance of this, we all understand that cyber space and information are domain so we now have to work in as armed forces. And I also stated that we've got two new formations that are exercising here that are more focused on all domain, which is the Marine Littoral Resident and the multi-domain task force from the U.S. Army. So we have to understand how those have been within the construct of this exercise and it really is a special opportunity to learn about these new formations and new capabilities in the context of the changing character of warfare. Thank you. Thank you very much. Congratulations. Good morning, sir. From what we understand, the Marine Littoral Resident, one of the Marine Littoral Resident in the valley again, was supposed to be at Ilamos, Mardin. And then it was moved to Dumballi, I think it's a live fire. So what happened in Ilamos, Mardin? The night before our war was a disaster because the air here was a sensation with the air in Ilamos, Mardin. So we located inside the Ilamos location of this training, a particular war for the aroments that would be cast to be during the passage of the live fire. So it's more of a security procedure and preparation for the airmen. Thank you. So next class is Dumballi. Thank you. Thank you very much. Last two questions from Sekali Gide. Good morning. Let me clarify the context for meaning of the exercise. So my question is very simple. Does the exercise include island maintenance operation or island recapture operation or single activity? Thank you. Yes, because the part of the activities is the continuous operations. We also have the applied joint logistics over the sea operations that set me that these things over the sea, over any shorelines. We have the amphibious operations that we conducted in some way allowing the part of amphibious operations. So the answer is yes. We have the data as part of the probability development of the day that everybody is. Any time we can exercise with an expeditionary mindset whether it be amphibious operations or others, it drives a collaboration that is a really great tool for the exercise. Because as stated, you have different components, different services that have to work together. So there is great opportunity to do just that in Balcutan this year. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Can I have the video from the AFP? I'm not sure. Hi. What's your name? I'll ask on behalf of that. I'm Ron Lovers, the video from the AFP. The Chinese military is included in the military exercise, simulating an attack and a blockade of Taiwan. I just wanted to know how significant is that to the way you plan this military exercise and what role will the Philippines have in case they want to question what you're going to say. It's a reality. The Chinese military is included in the military exercise on the Taiwan attack and blockade. I just wanted to ask Mr. Ren, the exercise, does this training in case that happened and what will the Philippines do in case that happened? Well, it's not an advertisement. I'm paying a lot of money. The attention of the Philippines is here and here, an activity. And it's an activity in the U.S. and the Philippines coming years. The activity from the Chinese side, it's their activity. So, a little guidance is needed on that side and the need that is for the leadership of each other to manage those things in the process. But for us, the meaning is that in our forces, we try to develop more between the context of capacity development and interoperability with our partner forces. All right. How much more? Can you see? I'm from the U.S. I just wanted to ask how can this body-to-body exercise help in terms of protecting the Philippines and the U.S. and the U.C.? The body-to-body exercise, as we mentioned, is in the case of the U.S. and the U.S. and through the years, the AME and our partner allies develop things as we grow up to be incredible art forces. The art forces also contribute to the recognition of the U.S. and so on. So, we need to test around more competencies and focus them in the process of their exercise. So, what I mean is that the art forces, the Philippines in itself is still growing as a nation to include the art forces and we will try to learn from others, especially from the U.S. side. Technically, the technology change, the expertise exchange that are going in, those are the forces that we should be able to do the rest, how we think, and be able to develop the art forces as the potential forces of the future. I think that's the way for us. Thank you. I would just say that this training provides a better team, force, allies to respond to any crisis or contingency. And the last time I served in the Third Korean Expeditionary Force, I was proud to respond to a typhoon in partnership with the Philippine Armed Forces. And it's events like that have been very fast and that we were able to respond to in a very timely fashion. That's one example, certainly, of the benefit of this exercise. We were just very proud to be here. So, thank you sirs. Thank you to all of you guys. Thank you to all of the sponsors. Thank you very much. To all of the media. By the way, don't worry because that is our concern. We just want to tell you that if you are any concern that combines and commissions with you, we are here to monitor Alec. We are here to assist you and whoever you are and whoever you are to give you the information to be about the United States and very important. And I want to underpin your number. Just ask for a comment. Sir, thank you very much. Thank you sir. Thank you.


As part of measures to find in a lasting solution to cases of structural defects, building collapse and other building contraventions, Lagos State Governor Babajide Somolu has launched the rebranded Certificate of Completion and Fitness for Habitation. The launch, according to the General Manager, Lagos State Building Control Agency, Bulahoki, will further strengthen the state's vision of zero tolerance for building collapse. Lagos State Government House Correspondent Love Ikuku Oyodekon has more in this report. In recent past, Lagos had witnessed geometrical leap in incidences of continuous building collapse with attendant loss of lives and property. Nonetheless, Lagos still remains the rallying point of all construction professionals. The launch of the rebranded Lagos State Certificate of Completion and Fitness for Habitation might just be the antidote needed to change the narrative. We act in the interests of the public at all times without fear of favour, to prevent needless loss of human lives and, in many instances, save valuable properties. Therefore, many of these parties that have become the order of the day, such as abandoned buildings, distressed, haphazard, non-conforming and structural defect structures, will no longer be environmental and economical viable. The Commissioner for Physical Planning and Urban Development, Idris Salako, said the ministry will not rest on its oars to further improve the building construction industry. The state government under the able leadership of Mr Gavno Babajide Olishola Saowulu has high regards and priorities for the lives and properties of the populations. This is exemplified by the very creative and innovative measures being implemented to safeguard the populace. In his address, Gavno Babajide Saowulu said the state will not hesitate to start treating some house owners, contractors and other relevant stakeholders as being responsible for building collapse in the state should they fail to obtain certificates of completion and fitness for habitation on their buildings. We'll do everything to ensure that the laws of the states, you know, that we abide with them as citizens, because indeed we have a responsibility that not only are you as developer, but we as your regulator, we as an agency of government have to protect other citizens, you know, and so that's why we see this effort and this collaboration as important. We Gavno explained that the essence of the certificate is to ensure that quality control measures are not compromised and the need for the continuous monitoring and engaging officers in the coverage of their activities. From Lagos, Love Ikuku Oyeduku reporting for PLASTV, Africa.


Welcome everyone, this is the Sieg-Release, Kubernetes Sieg-Release maintainer's track talk. My name is Carlos Panato. In my right side here is we have Kat and Joseph, and in my left side, if I can do the hands correctly, it's helpful. We're going to introduce the Sieg-Release itself, the team. It's composed by two teams, like two sub-teams. One is the release team, that's our fancy and everybody loves it, and nice. And the other one is the release engineer, that's like we're under the ground. Like no one wants to work with us, but I think you should join us. I'm gonna pass the next slides to Kat. Hello, I like this mic better. So the release team changes a lot over time and we're getting better at it every cycle. Every cycle something goes wrong and we fix it in the next one. So previously, until this current release, version 130, the release team was made up of six sub-teams, but when we moved all of our internal planning and project management to GitHub project boards, it reduced the workload for the bug triage team so severely that they had almost nothing to do. So we decided to merge them with the CI signal team into the new release signal team. Which is going pretty well. It's a little bit stressful because that is a team that is busy like the entire cycle. They always have something to do, but it is better than having one team doing nothing for the whole release. So we consider ourselves to be doing a good job when we manage to automate a team out of existence. This is the second time we've done it, I think. So we're pretty proud of that one. This team is also changing the way we handle documentation. So documentation is not optional. If your KEP has user-facing changes, those changes have to be documented. It is a hard requirement. And we're gonna be pretty inflexible on that one. To make this more clear, we have introduced a docs freeze. Previously, the last deadline for documentation in a release cycle was called the PRs Ready to Merge deadline, and people treated this deadline as though it was very soft. It's always kind of a struggle to get to documentation in and reviewed on time, which is real stressful for both the release docs team and SIG docs who have to review that documentation. So to make it clear that this is a requirement, we've moved the docs deadline more in line with our enhancements deadlines. So like enhancements freeze and code freeze, this is a real hard deadline, and if you're gonna miss it, you have to file an exception request. You have to tell me how much more time you need. You have to justify it. We have to talk about how risky it is, and we'll approve or deny that request. So this is active in 130. We'll see how it goes, because the docs freeze deadline is next week. I'm moderately anxious, but it'll be fine. And this is also the announcement for our release theme for version 130. This is version 130, ooh, ooh, Bernadies. I made a joke on Twitter like three years ago that if I was ever allowed to lead a release, I was gonna name it ooh, ooh, Bernadies. And I didn't think that it would actually happen, but it did, and I don't want it ever said that I can't commit to the bit. So that's me committing to the bit. That's my cat, Espresso. She will be 22 this year. Thank you. I'm going to pass it off to Joseph. Thank you so much. And yeah, so I want to just briefly kind of give them just a little bit more of an overview. I think we got a good introduction about Sig Release, and there's also Release Engineering. And just, you know, I'm from a product background. Primarily though, before that I was an engineer. So I wasn't on this dark side very long, but the one thing that is really in common is that having a roadmap and really trying to understand the problems that you're trying to solve is gonna give you direction. The theme of the talk is about planning for maturity. And think about, a lot of us have been in this community for a long time, 10 years for some of us, and we're now getting into our teen years. And so it's important for us now to kind of evolve, to kind of grow. And that's really what's been happening in Sig Release. So real hard work, kudos to Laurie Apple, to Marco here who also worked a lot as Sasha who's not here with us, and many other members of the community in Sig Contrabex for helping us really to define what this roadmap is gonna look like for us in 2024 and beyond. And really the focus is that we wanna really provide really a robust framework that's fast and flexible, release pipeline for Kubernetes. And the reason why we want these things to be like that is because there's a lot of projects that we feel are important that's gonna help the broader Kubernetes community, not just for the release that this team works on and cuts, but that we can support them so that as we evolve and as we grow, it'll help this platform become even more resilient, it'll help releases come out with less friction, and ideally it'll be more secure. And so I have a link in there, take a look at the roadmap, because there is some interesting things in there. Some of the deliverables, things that are currently in progress that are contained in there that kind of highlight opportunities for you to be able to possibly get involved with Sig Release or Release Engineering. And I think as Kat mentioned earlier, she talked about the release team, it's kind of the real introduction really to the Sig Release is what I would say. And if you really want to take advantage of it, coming into these meetings where these action items are being discussed where we're trying to make artifact validation more robust, we're also kind of working on recently on the package building and that's been a long-term project. But if you want to really dig in and find out how I can get involved, how can I really get up to speed? Because that's something I sometimes find as difficult is where's my entry point? How do I know I can help here? Do I have the skills? So I would highly encourage you to take a look at this hard work that's been put into it. And there's other ways you can get involved. Just recently Marco had and Lori, they worked on a survey along with many others where we need your input. So if you really want to help us, to take the survey, it's going to be open until the end of April 30th. This is going to help us, especially define our roadmap, some of the deliverables that we have. The other thing I was going to mention is, sometimes on the release team, and I thought, crap, she's been on this tenured for a very long time. I did before that for about five, six releases. But one thing you know, and especially as we're downsizing the team, because we're really automating it so that we don't need as many members, you may not get accepted to that team. So what I encourage is there's a blog post that was made by an individual who actually had that same situation, and he really showed how he found a way into the release team, got an internship, and made great impact. So I highly encourage that. We're right there on Slack, jump in, you can follow the channels, conversations, and then we hold meetings every Tuesday. So we have one that is like EU, Asia-Pac friendly, as well as one for the West Coast. So really look forward to seeing you join us there. I'm going to now hand off, because we're going to get a little bit more into some of the projects that are actively in motion. I'm going to give this to Carlos. Thank you. I'm going to maybe switch mics. Don't want to shake it all in the mic. Okay, now we're going to talk a little bit about the release engineer, and we always try to seek the Holy Grail, but maybe we're going to see. One of the things we've been working the past cycle is, for me, is one of the big achievements that we had in the past year, is that we are now also, now building the package in the community side, or not anymore like depend on Google, to build the package and publish those. And one of the things we've been working, like Exclusion and Marko, which is here, like dedicate a lot of time to move this forward. We decided to use the open build service from OpenSuzi, and Susie, thanks for Susie to provide and host everything for the platform for us that we can do the success. It's hosted on paykgs.kates.io, and you can scan this QR code that goes to a blog post that explain in detail how you can migrate on this. But quickly, you just add the key ring for the new one to your Kubernetes.list and then download the GPG keys for the download stuff. Notice that here, we are pointing to the 1.8, 28 release, you just replace this to the release you are interested to use. Next one is like the things that the release team was working is some release actions for the GitHub actions workflows that is reusable. We like put out that you guys can use in your own side projects, on your own projects in the GitHub that uses GitHub actions. We have actions that automate the provenance, the S-bombs, the check the padduses and stuff that we all use this internal inside the Kubernetes ecosystem, but we are also like providing these two bother projects outside the Kubernetes itself. Like it's easy to use is I think is well documented, but we can talk this later. And I want to call action here is like most of the people doesn't know like what the release engineer like take care. Those are a few projects that we run and maintain. And I'd like to like have someone from here or from the community to help us to maintain those projects here. The key code here is scans for the list from GitHub that all the projects we have. And we have like from release SDK that contains, for example, GitHub wrappers or Git stuff to do Git operations easily. The release is more like as the name says, it is like a side functions that help us. There's the tele-holded for the provenance data, bone for the build of materials, the release action itself, the OBS CLI to interact with the OBS service that we just showed before. That project needs, we have like a lot of stuff to do here. And we have site guys, promo tools. We have a bunch of things here that I would like to, if you want to work in one of these projects, you are really well welcome to do this. Please join us to maintain those projects. Oh wow. Okay, I'm gonna pass this to... Yeah, you find out unexpected? So this is my vision for the future, a fantastic fantasy land of things that we would like to release and maintain. So part of the work that we've been doing over the past 10 or two, three years has been taking all the code that we've been building and trying to make it reusable for their projects. Like Carlos showed how we've been splitting some of that code into other projects. And we've held some initiatives together with CNCF to also start spreading those tools, particularly in the security space to other projects under the Kubernetes umbrella. So we held the CloudNet Security Slam in December where we had a bunch of students and volunteers that jumped in to help build security features into other projects on Kubernetes and like in grenades and genetics and gateway API and others. And that went really well. But there's, we currently have a little bit of a problem. So we're building fantastic things for Kubernetes and also some of our other releases. Like we have ESPOM, so which is great. We also have provenance, which is fantastic. And we have signing in most of the artifacts in Kubernetes and it's fantastic. But if you're generating all of that with the data but no one is consuming it, then what's the point? So that points to maybe a shortcoming in our tools which is we've become, I don't know, very good at generating some of that metadata but we're also lacking practices and tooling to better consume those information, that information. So when we put all of that work to generate ESPOM's provenance and all that and no one answers that, no one is using it, well, makes Carlos here very angry. And so he will not be having that. So what do we do? We propose to start dog fooding all of that information. So if you saw all of those repositories that we have, what we would like to do is start using that information internally so that we can secure our internal releases and then so that we can provide you with better ways of consuming that information because everything that we do internally, we try to make it also available externally to other projects and anybody who wants to do that. So how do we do that? As I said, first dog fooding, but then how do you make sure that you're finding everything that you need? Well, we are working on a new project to redesign the security feed for Kubernetes. And for those of you who may not be aware of what the security feed is, let me give you a super brief introduction. I have a quote here from a scholar about what it is. So it's an ongoing stream of data describing how vulnerabilities affect piece of software. So this is the process. We'll work a little bit the same way that we currently Kubernetes as a security feed, but we're working together with security to redesign the tooling and the formats. So the way it works is you have a security researcher that starts poking around Kubernetes and maybe finds some vulnerability and that person will report that to the project and the security response committee who is this fan fellows here, they do a great job triaging those reports. Well, in the new version, what they'll do is they will take that report, triage it, and if they find that it's valid, they will assess the severity of the vulnerability. And now they will create, using a new CLI that we're developing, they will create a document in the OSV schema, open source vulnerability schema, which is a project under the open SLEF. And based on that information, they can assign a CVE number. Kubernetes is a CVE number in authority, so we have the capability of generating our own CVEs. And using that information, we can feed it to the old classic vulnerability feed that we have in JSON today, but we also start building a new feed based on OSV. So the format is much a lot more flexible and I won't go into the details because we have very little time, but the idea here is once we have this feed, we can start doing fantastic things. So the first one and obvious one is we will port the release process that we have today to read from that new feed and then start generating things like, for example, the release notes, where currently we have a custom format in YAML that we exchange, but the idea is to have one single feed that ties everything together. Then the next one is what can generate VEX documents, which is information and how those vulnerabilities affect or don't affect the project because we already have the triage that the SRC generates so we can turn that into VEX. And then finally we can modernize our S-bombs and find, I won't go into the details about what S-bombs is, but I'm happy to talk about it like endlessly. So the idea is it's a document that contains all of our components. So we will not have the capability to tie together the components that make up Kubernetes with vulnerabilities that we publish in the OSB feed. But the real benefit here is that once we start publishing those new enhanced S-bombs, things like our own applications will be able to look at the S-bombs and tie them back to the feed so they can do better decisions whether they want to, for example, ingest a dependency or wait for a release or whatever. So those applications will be able to, by using the S-bombs, tie it together to the vulnerability feed and the VEX information that we will publish. I know it's a lot, but I try to do it step by step. And yeah, so to make that happen, we need you. The release engineering team, we love building stuff like it's kind of, I think it's the passion of everybody working there, but there's also lots of maintenance work that we do. Most of the time that we devote today is managing dependencies, updating the base images, Go versions, things like that. So we can always use some help. So if you're interested in some of those areas that we just showed up, feel free to chime in on Slack. We're also looking for enthusiastic folks, no technical level required. And also, you wanna talk about the release team? Sure, I can talk about the release team. So the 131 release team, the application for shadows is not open yet, but it will be open soon-ish. The 130 release is currently scheduled to come out April 17th. So sometime within like two or three weeks of that date, you can keep an eye out in the SIG release channel and the SIG release mailing lists for updates on the 131 release and the shadow application and any changes we might make for 131, but please do apply. Any closing thoughts? Other than just if you have any questions, like we have our contact information. I like I said, I think when they talked about just entry point, like I'm probably that example of you'd probably call me a SIG release stand. But the one thing I learned is that it's a very helpful group.  We'd love to have you. Thank you. Any questions? All right, go for you. Well, very simple question, but very difficult answer, I guess. You have many repositories there. What's the most urgent repositories that you wanted to have help on? On the project, on the projects I didn't get. The most of all of the repos we listed, which ones the most urgently need to have. So the one that needs the most urgent, that has the most urgent needs, is PromoTools, which is, PromoTools is the image promoter for Kubernetes. That project, the code race is fairly complicated is, I don't know if you can see that in the mouse, this one PromoTools. So that's the image promoter. So all of the projects in Kubernetes release their images to staging repositories and then that tool takes them and carries it over to the production registries. That code has a large tech depth and has some docs in it. And so any help refactoring that one, it's a steep learning curve, so for warning, but it's one. Yeah, we are about to start planning and create a roadmap for that because in the past months, we've been adding more registries that we are thinking, like we are thinking now in AWS and other regions on GCP. And that promote this tool is doing all those stuff as well. Like we need to think a little bit better how to improve and be faster. Because in the past, like sometimes when we do the release, I think was 128 or 129, the release process was taking more than four hours and that's not good. Like we need to speed up on this part, but for that we need to refactor everything. Yeah, it was designed for a world where we have three registries, now we're close to 30, I think. So real quick, all of the repos that we have here are important. They all exist for a reason. So I think dependent on your skill set, like show up, we'll figure out what you can do, what you want to do and we'll point you in the right direction. But all of those repos exist because they're serving a need. If you are a front-end developer, we have the download Kubernetes, one that is mainly UI. Yeah, and there's also the release node sites. I don't think it's listed here, but that one is in some front-end in, I don't know, in JavaScript and none of us know how to handle it. Yeah, we need help there. Yeah, we need help. You are using a web developer. Yeah, you're using chat tpt to help us out. Yeah. Any other questions? Thank you. Enjoy your lunch.


Good evening, I'm Tom McCone, Executive Director of the Kellogg-Harvard Library. It's great to have you here with us for this poem city event. The library in the month of April is hosting 35 poetry events. And this turnout tonight, this is what's happening like every day. So it's really fantastic that poetry is so popular. Tonight we would especially like to thank Vermont College of Fine Arts for hosting us. And also for being one of the sponsors of poem city. As you can imagine, this is a really large undertaking for the library. So our sponsors are really important. So I will mention them briefly. Of course, right here, Vermont College of Fine Arts, Vermont Humanities Council, National Life Foundation Group, Goddard College, Hunger Mountain Co-op. We're all sponsors and help to make this possible. Also, the taxpayers of City Montpelier and the towns of Calus East Montpelier, Middlesex, and Worcester. Also, so, thank you to all of them. So Ryan Walsh grew up in West Virginia. He is the author of the chapbooks Reckoner and the Sinks. The Sinks won the 2010 Mississippi Valley Poetry Chapbook Contest. Ryan's poems have appeared in Blackbird, Ecotone, Field, Forklift, Ohio, Narrative, and Elsewhere. I'm not familiar with Forklift, Ohio, but the title captures my interest. Ryan earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. And in 2011, he won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. It was a finalist. He is currently the Development and Writing Program Director at the Vermont Studio Center. And he lives in Burlington, Vermont. Would you please welcome Ryan Walsh. Don't get your- I'm not going to read a poem, but with that kind of intro, I should. I didn't bring one. However, thank you all for being here. This is a great turnout for poetry on a Wednesday night. So give yourselves a round of applause, really. Or give poetry a round of applause. Now, my role, as Tom just said, I'm the Director of the Writing Program at Vermont Studio Center, which is a really wonderful place. We're way up in Johnson. We host visual artists and writers from all throughout the U.S. and around the world.  Many people have- all of our readers have, obviously, yeah. So a lot of friends in the audience. And so what we do is, yeah, year round we host folks from all over the world, typically for a month, but two weeks to 12 weeks. And it's a really great community and a good feeling. And people just have that undisturbed time to dive deep and all day, just think about what they're going to be writing or the next piece they're going to work on. So all of our readers tonight, who I imagine are all very well known throughout the state of Vermont, have been to VSC in one capacity or another. And probably, I think in every case, have been there at least two or three times, if not six or seven. And so it's a real delight to be able to introduce these folks. And this is how we do our resident readings at the Studio Center three times a month. We have six really talented writers at all different stages of their career. And we just say, hey, you get 10 minutes to read. It's a sampler. It's kind of a conversation starter. And the poets always have the advantage because in 10 minutes you can read a few poems. If you're a novelist, it's different. So tonight we're celebrating poetry. All these fine readers have been to Vermont Studio Center. I will introduce them upfront as a group. And they will read in alphabetical order one after the other. And I will try to keep this short because really, in pretty much every case, they need very little introduction. And we are representing most parts of this beautiful state and very creative state of Vermont. With Kristen Fogdahl reading first, she lives in Morrisville and I think has been to VSC six times if my database count is correct. Her poems have appeared in really great illustrious journals such as The New England Review and The New Republic, Slate.com and Poetry Magazine. She's working on finishing a book-length manuscript that will be a remarkable debut. I'm waiting for it every day. It's going to be incredible. Kristen Fogdahl will read first. Followed by Major Jackson from South Burlington, who of his four volumes of poetry, his latest collection, Roll Deep, is just out last fall from Norton. He's a professor at the University of Vermont, also teaches at NYU and is the poetry editor of the Harvard Review. We're very honored to have Major Jackson with us tonight. Followed by Laurie McPhee, who works at the Vermont Studio Center. Laurie lives in Johnson, has spent the past year as one of our staff, artists and residents, helping me with the writing program and now she's stayed to be our grants coordinator for the foreseeable future, which is great. She also is working on a book-length manuscript to be titled Bone Music. Again, look for it soon. It will be out in the world. And other poems have appeared in Forklift, Ohio and Brush Fire and the anthology Change in the American West. After Laurie, we have Karen McHaden, winner of the inaugural Vermont Book Award last year that VCFA sponsors for her book Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes. I think she's been to VSC twice, twice. I thought it was three or four times. We just read together, so I see you a lot. It's twice to VSC. She lives here in Montpelier and teaches at Montpelier High School, so very local. I'm really glad to have her as well. Julius Shipley is here from Craftsbury. She is the co-founder of Chickadee Chaps and Brods, wonderful, beautiful letterpress here in Vermont. And her debut full collection, Academy of Hay, is out now. It's really wonderful as well. She's also an author of Nonfiction. And Diana Whitney will follow Julia. Diana's here from Brattleboro, so we do have some Southern Vermont representation. She's been to VSC, I think, six times. Yeah, I got that one right. Her debut collection, Wanting It, came out last year and won the Rubri Book Award in Poetry. She's also an author of Nonfiction, and I believe has a collection of Nonfiction ready to go in the works, as we say. So Diana Whitney. And last but not least at all, Baron Wormser, who also lives here in Montpelier, a former poet laureate of the state of Maine, author of many collections of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. And his latest book of poems is Impertinent Notes. So we're really delighted to have all seven readers, Kristen Fogdahl, Major Jackson, Lori McPhee, Karen McHaddon, Julius Shipley, Diana Whitney, and Baron Wormser with us. So please give them all a hand, and Kristen will come up first. Thanks for coming out. I moved to Vermont about six years ago, and at that point I really thought that I might not write any more poems. I'm not exactly sure why, but it's easy to let the day-to-day demands of life that we all experience kind of crowd that out. But I think if you're an artist, you know the feeling of your own voice kind of going dormant inside of you, and that's a really hard feeling in many ways. And what happened for me is that a friend suggested that I go to the Vermont Studio Center for, or apply to go for, Vermont Week. And I found myself waking up, and so I'm always going to be grateful to the Vermont Studio Center for that. It's really been an incredibly special place, and I happen to live in Morrisville, so it's just down the road, and it makes it sort of too easy to hang around and try to get there. I'm going to start with that in mind with two poems that actually take place at the Vermont Studio Center. The first time that I was there for a fellowship, I hurt my back somehow, and I ended up, the cook ended up giving me a whole bunch of ice, getting constant ice out of the ice machine in the kitchen. And as a result, I got to watch a lot of the sort of day-to-day ins and outs of running the dining hall over the course of that one day. And this is one of the things that I saw that I thought was pretty emblematic of the place as a whole. Right now the title is Spring Arrangement. I'm not sure that's the right title. You can give me suggestions afterwards if you want. Spring Arrangement, Vermont Studio Center for G. Todd Hawn. Morning rush done, sunlight stains the dining hall, stretches another blank canvas. Under the raw post and beam, an old mill scale stares into space, round clock face at a standstill. Outside, clouds from a vast kettle burst over metal roofs, sodden snow mantles.  Now the quiet breaks to the clip of your garden snips, reckoning out what doesn't bloom. You plant them in vivid water jars around the room. In a week, green leaves by the hundreds will explode, coaxed like code sent overnight, fatal and elated. As many of you know, the river that runs through Johnson and right through the campus of the Vermont Studio Center is called the Guion River and it's also one of the four rivers that left the garden of Eden. The Guion River. Four ways out of the garden and I chose you. At night, I open the window for company. Your voice sounds like wind. Someone saying the same words again and again, a rhyme that only rhymes with itself. At the table, one lamp to turn on. There we are, reflected in the glass. You share my body, but keep moving past. It's not for you to dwell in any single place. I thought exile would change everything. Maybe it does where you are going. For now, tell me one more time about the rain, how it waters the tree of heaven, how it will never go back. My own business and I do a ton of driving and so I have a lot of poems that take place in the car. I've been thinking about putting them together in a chat book and just calling it Drive. And this is one that came out of that. A New Testament. Farmland, bleary as a page, written out, erased. Stumps of old volcanoes on the sky. A hundred miles back, elevators, boards, sigh, double room, double window, three deer walking single file behind the pane. Scrubby trees, train tracks, the woods had nothing to give. Now, fields ticking by, photos in a deck, and who am I with the lens, letting in corn stubble, busted hay wane. Once I expected a new heaven, new earth, everlasting life and a kingdom without end. Tonight, just this single lane.  And me, pointing headlights past the stands, wishing consolation to victors and the stunned, dependent as they are on one another. Drumming up a hope for all scenes held together in loose confederation. Mill towns, neon lights, bugs dancing across the all night grocery screens, steeples, prayer circles, a man slapping a boy outside on the lawn. A strained, involuntary hope in perfusion, absolute nothingness. I'm also really fond of persona poems, and I'll end with this. A few months back, I was in a bookstore and happened to come across a book with a lot of photographs of relics of a particular famous writer. And one of the pictures was of a ring of hair. And in movies and TV, it seems like human clones are constantly being made out of hair in some form. And I started to think, what would it be like if you really could do that? You could clone a famous writer or artist or whatever. What would happen? And this was the result of that question. The poet as human clone. This is no monster story. I never spoke with invisible gods behind a one-way mirror. My mother ignored the questionnaires. My father taught me to change a tire. No tile corridors. Later, a representative did display the lock of hair, her dress, which could stand of its own accord as if it remembered. Now that I'm grown, I do the paperwork alone in the window of a coffee shop waiting for a train. I've come to see all existence as translation. Sometimes I even prefer the earlier version. Do I constitute progress? I can tell they're waiting for me to bloom. Lately, what I like most is to ride the buses at dawn, right out of the city. Telephone poles beginning to flick the sky, my features swimming on the surface of the pain. Bits of cloud arrange themselves like notes on the wires where one could write the most magnificent score in a key previously unknown, unrecognized, even by the next me. Poems. Really delighted to read under the auspices of the Poem City and the Vermont Studio Center, which has been quite the gift for me here too in Vermont. I have had the pleasure of kind of writing there myself. But I want to read a poem about another kind of residency, which is the Robert Frost House in Franconia, New Hampshire. And every summer they invite a poet to live there. And when they invited me, they didn't tell me that there is a sign off Route 93 saying next exit Robert Frost House. And so at all times of the day and night, I would get visitors or guests, people peeking in. And sometimes they would come in the morning, which was always a surprise to them and me. Because, well, you can imagine the looks on their faces when they saw me walking around. And, well, here's the poem. I've arisen, this is from an excerpt of a long letter to the poet Gwendolyn Brook. So this is a letter poem or a pistolary poem. I've arisen to dawn at the Frost Place. I've Jerry rigged a desk by the window overlooking a trail. I'm the new face of mountain poetry.  The worst is when I munch a bowl of frosted flakes, pacing in my briefs, and a right curious family pierce in.  I am the old man's ghost. As were 26 beforehand, summers we come to haunt the porch. As Billy Matthews put it to scorch off morning fog, which I poke with my pen and swirl. It gathers cob webby-like round thoughts I curled and write to their inn. The broccoli-top trees I see down straight after that to Route 93. Tourists abound this time of year. I wish I could install on deck, I've not the word for what they're called, one of those standing boardwalk binoculars requiring a quarter that opens a shutter. Then suddenly the ocean's particulars are as intimate as your face. Buttery midday light, they'd see my mind sputtering to complete these stanzas stacked like bricks. Or mornings when I am my own exhibitionist, catching me in the mirror dancing nude, or touting my hands or stirring brown sugar in my tea. In any case, my back, rootily to their probing eyes. To protect my chi, I'd hang a sign, beggars disallowed, or peace god, or shh, poet at work.  This is Enchanters of Addison County. We were more than gestural, close listening, the scent of manure writing its waft on the leaves off Route 22A. By nightfall, I'll gaze fleck like loon cries, but no one was up for turnips nor other routes, not least of which the clergy. Romanticism has its detractors, which is why we lined the road with tea-lit luminaries and fresh-cut lemons. We called it making magic, then stormed the corners and porches of general stores, kissing, whenever cars idled, at four-way stop signs, or sought grade A maple syrup in tin containers with painted scenes of horse-drawn farmers plowing through snow. The silhouetted, rusted farm equipment gave us the laid-back heaven we still often wished, and fireflies bequeath earth stars, such blink and blank and bunk-a-bunk-bunk. And of course we wondered if we existed, and also, too, the cows and the ancient pastures and the white milk inside our heads, like church spires and ice cream cones. Even after all that, we still came out of swimming holes, shivering our hearts out. That's okay. Let's go to a book. This is a poem about, I've been reading quite a bit this month, National Poetry Month, and I like reading this poem called Some Kind of Crazy. I haven't stopped reading poems from my first book a while ago, but it's about a guy in my neighborhood who used to walk around like he was driving a car, and in the process of walking around like he was driving a car, he would make the sounds of the engine, and he would literally pantomime making turns and downshifting and speeding up whenever, I guess he pushed it in the fifth, he would suddenly start walking really fast. But this was a great delight for my friends and I whenever he would turn the corner because we knew it was going to be some fun. And girls often ask them for a ride. Some kind of crazy. It doesn't matter if you can't see Steve's corvette, turquoise color, plush purple seats, gold trim rims that make little stars in your eyes as if the sun is kneeling, kissing the edge of sanity. Like a Baptist preacher stroking the dark underside of God's wet tongue, he can make you believe it's there. His scuff wing tips, ragged, shuffling concrete could be ten inch Firestone wheels. His vocal cords, fake and eight cylinder engine that wags like a dog's tail as he shifts gears. Imagine Steve, moon struck, cool, turning right onto Ridge Avenue, arms forming arcs, his hands a set of stiff seas overthrowing each other's rule. His life body and head snapping back, pushing a stick shift into fourth, whizzing past the stop and go, whizzing past the pawn shop. Only he knows his destination, his limits. Can you see him? Imagine Steve, moon struck, cool, parallel parking between a pacer and a pinto. Obviously the most hip, backing up, head over right shoulder, one hand spinning as if polishing a dream. And there's Tina wanting to know what makes a boy tick, wanting a one-way trip to the stars. We the faithful never call him crazy, crack-brained, just a little touched. It's all he ever wants, a car, a girl, a community of believers.   Maybe some of us owned one here. This is my last poem and it's a monastic. This is a poem, one of the poems in this book that I decided that I've been giving my students at UBM writing assignments for years. Assignments I've never done. So this writing assignment was to write a one sentence poem and it's called a monastic. And if you look it up, you'll see like, you know, very simple sentences. But in the early 21st century poets are trying to outdo each other by writing a long one sentence poem. And my students know that they lose points if it's grammatically incorrect. So it has to retain integrity as a sentence. And it's a poem of great motion and cadence that I learned after writing it myself. So feel free to check my grammar, I'm okay with that. But the poem is about a group of guys who played chess in my neighborhood. They were known as the bad bishops. But a movie was made about them and it was called Mighty Pawns, of which I named this poem Mighty Pawns. If I told you, Earl, the toughest kid on my block in North Philadelphia, Bo Lake, an ominous, could beat any man or woman in ten moves playing white, or that he traveled to Yugoslavia to frustrate the bearded masters at the Belgrade Chess Association, you'd think I was given to hyperbole. And if, at dinner time, I took you into the faint light of his section eight home, reeking of onions, liver, and gravy, his six little brothers fighting on a broken love seat for room in front of a crack flat screen, one whose diaper sags its a wonder it hasn't fallen to his ankles and the walls behind doors exposing sheetrock, the perfect O of a handle and the slacks of stairs missing where baby boy gets stuck trying to ascend to a dominion far into you and me with its loud timbales and drums blasting down from the closed room of his cousin whose mother stands on the corner on the other side of town all times of day and night except when her relief check arrives at the beginning of the month you'd get a better picture of Earl's ferocity after school on the board and Mr. Sherman's class. But not necessarily when he stands near you at a downtown bus stop in a jacket of size too small hunching his shoulders around his ears as you imagine the checkered squares of poverty and anger and pray he does not turn his precise gaze too long in your direction for fear he blames you and proceeds to take your queen. I've been here in Vermont for maybe 10 months so I feel like I'm the newest addition to this group I came here in April of 2015 and luckily actually got to spend a month with Karen and Diana Vermont slivered under my skin, I came back in June to be the writing program coordinator for a year got a chance to meet Major and Julia and so it really feels like I've landed somewhere that's a family and I'm super happy to be here super grateful to Ryan. I'm going to start with a poem you don't know VSC was an old crisp mill so this is called I step over to enter the threshing a knee high board slid between grooves in the jam wheat caught by slumber our floor lies numb grain littered from chaff in a barned corner of the house barn owl this room two eyes and sharp beak mortis and tenon woken shoulders molting tongues in the hold broken open this next one is the first one I actually wrote coming back in June anybody who's been to Johnson this is called jogging the rail trail past Parker and Stearns a woman bends the distance then rises stoops and rises her body the treadle of stairs a child at her side steel blade and olfactory cut biting timber at the mill the nausea of limbs sawed to lumber to dust just more memory Vermont pressed like sap into an Oregon coast town and the child isn't a toddler but a dog though I saw a child so clearly I wonder where in the forest he has gone as the mutt pulls leash towards my hamstring the woman says wild strawberries holds her cupped hand out flattened to dish says have one they're my secret the dog nosing my sweaty crotch strange whiskers to Lycra I take the unwashed dimple in my mouth swallow my thanks I look down next to the trail see pimples hidden under clover my hands brushing poison Ivy that won't begin to peacock a warning until August each very smaller than my smallest fingernail a pink pearl at the eraser's end the picked bruise making skin sweat juices and in five minutes I'll have jam I eat them singly at first then touch toss the batch onto my tongue spit stems like the first time my brother taught me to spit in front of his friends hands always stained with something 4,000 miles let this be what running brought me all of these I've written at BSC I've been so lucky to be there for 10 months have a studio and have the privacy and time and space this one's called blue coat maybe I was wanting curious yes running fingers along my shoes shiny vinyl playing with the buckle lost in the beach with my big brother sand wedge between toes water's thunder over my shoulder it scared me how no one watched us go an elderly couple tried to call the phone books thickness so many words why couldn't they find Claire and Dan jangle of the dime as it kept dropping the slot everyone packing and drunk my five-year-old brother cried so that snot dripped distance voices screaming our names until twilight our bodies pulled close so when a neighbor laid his hands on my shoulders pulled me close and stuck his tongue in my mouth I didn't know I should bite when the scared butterfly tumbled my guts to be held by a man who pretends to be a grandfather peppermint ice cream and carnivals on the grass and eventually all he asked for was a kiss don't you kiss your parents good night until his tongue found my ear and he asked me to sit on his lap he wanted to play cards every time someone lost they had to remove a piece of clothing butterscotch candies waiting on the table my shoe on the floor he lost three times in a row dropped his pants I didn't run in the coldness of this winter I unzip my belly and tuck her inside I'm her blue coat now this is Vermont the days are growing longer and she can wander anywhere this one's called little fractures it's for my mom and anybody I don't know there's the wonderful lineage between mothers and daughters and I have one is two as well and so this is this is little fractures and it's for my friend her mother my friends died blue hands cut the liquid spill on sidewalk we sidewalk around the twig man a mucus plug we fell out of women hole then broken when they leave we are left little fractures my friend isn't a mother doesn't know the beauty of a daughter how I hope that for her be balm in the back garden then tea my mom disappears in tiny pieces sloughed not an earthquake the plaster shattered soon air will come in a can she'll claw like the Red Cross after a tornado her cilia tossed flattened her own lips the vortex how can I blame her how can I forgive her slow motion destruction if I could curl back inside I'd push her ribs aside I'd stay there ripening eyes open in the beginning just have a couple more my anybody who has a child knows how they can sort of read your mind and so my daughter had this dream a week before I had some great news just great big news to share with her so this is called my daughter saved me while flying and that's from one of her dreams for Sarah in her dream my daughter saved me while flying invisible harried my body from danger in her arms and fought Voldemort the part where she bled his leg more vivid I wonder what I looked like curled inside her airy embrace a sleep but a conversing with twilight maybe a feather for once instead of brick of course she knows not in any way more insistent than specter her knife ready to chop a stump from tormentor vivisection clean his one husk on marble such a Darth Vader moment the bandaid yanked clean off hair I've decided on next week seven more days of fair weather until I unhinge my children's future I got this sweetheart nights wrapped my pillow sown into a tool belt so sleep little canvas dream and my last one bone music couple things you need to know about this if anybody knows about bone music it's in the 1950s American music was banned from being taken into Russia and so people would import it vinyl was also used by the government and so nobody had vinyl so they would steal x-rays from the hospital they figured out how to transcribe the music onto these x-rays so and that was they were called bone music and beyond that let's see two other things you need to know typewriters you had to register with the police in the 50s and also that this is for one of my close friends Laura Lauren and her boyfriend Oliver who is a trans man so this is called bone music if you're the man I think you are will press our ashes in vinyl sound etched like ribs around lungs manicured by scissors used to cutting cuticles to the quick central burn a slow cigarette after the scratched rhythm of blues in a hidden kitchen bubbling with vodka stew your skeleton a bootleg metatarsals scapula and clavicle sacrum nestled to a beat boy thrum I'll stand on your feet as we dance in the library no police to forbid an underwood our royals free to miter and clack under phalanges blown pinwheel and sideways one couch two lamps a mutt with brown eyes the golden dog walked daily journeys and if you're the man I'll trace uncensored circles on your back dissident x-rays you'll take illegal notes invisible vowels howling our tongues a record another tattoo my coat your mandible song thanks everyone and I want to thank the Vermont studio center for some lovely time and some really productive work I was trying to figure out my first book and I had trouble organizing and I trouble feeling like I was getting it right and so I broke into an artist's studio while I was there and bought a box of pushpins at a general store and spent eight hours over three different days I spent about 25 hours walking in a circle and moving poems and walking and walking and the whole book was in a circle around the room I highly recommend it sorry Vermont studio center this first poem is called passerines and it's out of the word passerine is the order of songbirds scientific name for the order of songbirds passerines I want to tell you about the thud against the back door that my man says bird that later we see its tail sticking out from underneath the siding that its tail feathers shine like oil shifting purple to blue and we are kneeling on the wet decking the yellow of its stomach making it something more than the brown birds everywhere a tiny prize for kneeling there for prying back the vinyl siding to find a yellow bellied flycatcher its cheek bloodied I want to tell you how he held it said passerine before it took flight little passerine songbird before she left I brought my daughter to Sanjanae there were swallows like boomerangs near dark like here like everywhere I go I want to tell you about the neighbor the scientist who said they were swifts not swallows swallows are passerines but swifts are not passerine I thought passerine a more future verb tense for to pass a tense I can't know yet a passing I can't understand the order passerine is a mess the scientist said it's impossible to track its evolution I want to tell you I don't understand evolution any of it even mine becoming the mother I will be next the one who lets go once I stood on a bridge and a man taught me to call sparrows to eat from my hands told me he was a sinner that what he did for me was atonement which is a thing I might understand I want to tell you there is nothing like their tiny grip the way they quiver while they pack at your palm wanting to fly out of reach I want to tell you what happened when I let her go but I don't understand it yet I want to talk about this morning the little yellow bird in sudden dizzy flight the trees full of yellow how I lost sight when I was at the studio center I was struck by how quiet it is in the artist's studio where you're not allowed to talk and you play music it's in headphones and I was struck by how quiet it is because I realized quite suddenly how loud the ringing is in my ears and how that would accompany me for the entire month and I thought about it every day all the time and then I had to go get headphones so that I could not hear it and it became my constant companion I wrote this poem at the studio center it's called against the ringing and it's hard to read because it's not punctuated and it leaps across a valley in the middle of the page it's a two column piece you have to jump across so we'll see if I can I can read it without making mistakes that's kind of the point though that it would be hard to read right be hard to concentrate with the ringing against the ringing that I am able to sleep at all is a song for the ear it's office products tacking up and sorting what they can Malleus and Incas and States doing nothing to earn their bread ear poor translator if I could hear you I would I horn my hand at the table your elephant sister locust beetles all over the road carcasses and still the high wire hum of electrics when I tell you to cut you cut unholster the wire cutters and cut the nerve do it even though you are afraid there is nowhere I can go to be rid of it no sleep dream party or walk in traffic anything in sand is quiet but me singing this song to myself that never changes bell on repeat and multi-tracked high tension wire hum voltage in the woods behind the school where you walk to say this was my home learn to watch the mouths move as a new language I've come as a tracker before the snow falls knowing the faces work here is a song for the middle ear ossicles and semicircular canals and I want to say bone bone bone against the hiss dumb cilia bad dog cochlea not fetching all day I have done nothing I just moved to my pillar from Plainfield Vermont where I live next to a wonderful cemetery where I like to walk this is called the dead they worry I won't keep the graves when they're gone see my mother brushing off brushing off her hands at her mother's grave surveying lots approving and disapproving care and neglect my father deep in thought the trees above them are the gods of Massachusetts big handed and quiet tall fathers approving the play of children in the yard somehow the graves meant new stories about who was buried underneath our dead becoming more real not only more gone when I walk with the dead here in my village I want them to say more than their names and relations lambs on children's stones more than the dates that must mean influenza or some illness that doesn't kill us anymore I don't want to rock walk the rose anymore wondering what shape stone I want which says more the obelisk or the square marble or granite and am I the wife of someone or am I not I want something to happen here some kind of story maybe the little ghost from my house will pick up her dress and run to show me her name or a flood will wash away the riverbank and a knot of bones or slow motion a hand will work its way up through the grass something the graves can do to us the way they trip me when I walk over them the soil a bit lower where they have settled these long dead I can play whimsy with unlike the dead my parents will be unbearable and new are we two more homes late winter in a handful of seasons water and cold and dirt get under the paint and it falls from our houses like old bark the river sends smaller and smaller flows of ice downstream crocus making their way up rocks are inside my shoes by the time I'm home five winters now I run my hands under your shirts start at the top to split the buttons from their catches and the cold my hands make a set of wings under the placket moth or hawk I don't know which I am this last poem is a choose your own adventure it's got numbers down the side of the line so that you can go to the different numbered lines when the instructions invite you to it's called choose your own adventure loneliness I'm lonely you say to the wall at night in the village you forgot to pull the shades and you feel even lonelier with the world so big around you pretty soon you are really small from all the thinking about the universe that happens there on the red couch your knees up under your chin by now to get up and get a snack continue to line nine to get even smaller go to line 18 the cupboard with the peanut butter and graham crackers is really really far away 35 feet by your estimation and you reason that this is closer than most of the things you were just imagining like asteroids and gaseous belts and undiscovered civilizations so you go get a snack flipping light switches on as you go because it had become dark while you were thinking to run out of food go to line 32 to disappear go to line 43 your knees are like two mountains the kind that sheep graze treeless and you look at them until they are mountainous and you are still looking down at them because you are flying over them in a single engine plane a two-seater but you are alone people looking up can't see the temporary sunlight flashing against your wings aluminum you are curious about clouds that are coming in from the ocean mountains and clouds and you the little speck people can see from below as a kind of cross whining overhead to give up continue to line 32 to give life meaning go to line 40 there is nothing here you think exposed as you are and and alone as if it is a kind of portent the map flipped open nearby tells the way to many places none of which feels possible no dot on the horizon any better to arrive at than this be hungry if you want nothing will fill you after flying over the mountains of your knees you consider shrines how still they are the human monument you spend a little lifetime as a shrine a limestone woman holding her son on the side of the road fenced in for safety so no one can take him from you like your ex-husband just did where the visitors and the curious consider you less than they do themselves their offerings not really for you anyway so I think it was 1997 I've been working on vegetable farms for a number of years and that means that once the harvest was in I had to find new work and one year I applied to the Vermont studio center and was accepted and so finish the harvest and came to the Vermont studio center and while I was there the place that I was going to move into for the winter was sold I was going to have an apartment there and they sold the building so back then before the internet you went down to the kitchen and there were little mailboxes with with notes in them and and mine said we we sold your place to live so I kind of took that after lunch and went for a walk and thought about things and then I I went up to the office and I said would you hire me and they did so I kind of came to Johnson because of those people that sold the apartment I was going to rent and and then I naturalized after working at the studio center I continued to live in Johnson and then after five years I moved just 10 miles away anyway I'm still here so I was thinking this afternoon I right I realized that the very first public reading I ever gave up poems was at the Vermont studio center and sort of appropriately enough it was outside in the garden by the Guion River and then like three years later I grew potatoes there on that same plot so a lot of a lot of my work is concerned with food and nourishment but now it's starting to kind of think about the body so here are sort of three three poems that sort of are kind of on this track I'm taking sort of exploring you'll see this is soap lady and she is at the Mutur Museum in Philadelphia if you care to visit her behind the curtain at the museum we meet her fat concretion a mixture of the night of the earth and the salt and lexivius liquor of the body coagulated procuring someone in nerd to do composition not exactly the stuff of Dove but near enough let's say it in layman's her earthly corpulence plus site specific acidity caused her to suponify so she remained with us a real colonial dame exhumed from Philadelphia inside freaker emeritus but it's not the cake of her raw body which disturbs as her dropped jaw her pre-natural ongoing howl about all of this I have never liked eyes on my thighs and at least 20 pair stare daily more strangers than she met when she was animate in her horror is a parent de facto her displeasure is war has worn out her mouth I can hear her soprano or ratio all these miles away but when I open my book to shut her up there she is in the picture of the Vesper Sparrow above her young each with its raucous famished life demanding I would never sign her for Twitter and then when I had to identify myself right like activist but this feels like an activist poem that came out it's called explain foie gras it's like Monsieur on Coney Island scarfing down 62 hot dots in ten minutes that's one tube steak on a bun abducted every six seconds his body is sobbing them coughing them down his fist a century at his lips keeping the thing he's shoved in in he's hunched his eyes are squeezed close as he crams he nods he's almost dancing his cheeks bulge he convulses like he's vomiting them but inwardly so there's no pause just dog after dog this is what it's like for the goose who has the benefit of a feet who has the benefit of a feeding tube but who does not choose to feast and who cannot refuse and this last poem has five parts and it feels less like a poem than a conflation of tampered plagiarism so it's two things coming together juxtaposed one is the life histories of thrushes you know volume 12 Arthur Bentz histories he did these amazing books where a lot of citizen scientists wrote in with these incredible observations and then the other you'll kind of see is from news reports about drug mules so it's called oral history and the first part is eating habits I arranged it like Arthur Bentz would in his chapters so eating habits snowberries were found in six stomachs apple and three California honey suckle and two and juniper berries wheat amaranth blackberries fillery pepperberries poison oak buckthorn and nightshade were examined in one stomach each in the form of fruit or seeds she practiced swallowing green grapes and baby carrots then she filled the condom with white powder taped it into a pellet dipped it in honey no problem so she swallowed 91 more an average drug mule can swallow between 80 to 125 pellets professor Biel examined the contents of the stomachs of 4013 olive backed thrushes from widely scattered localities in the US and Canada the food consisted of 63% animal and 36% vegetable matter beetles of all kinds weevils ants wild bees or wasps snails so bugs angel worms Daniel found the thrush a 19 worms between 8 30 and 1 p.m. Matthew started out with 15 pellets and built up from there he was detained with 86 pellets of cocaine lodged in his stomach juveniles according to Cordelia the fledglings give a clear sweet whistle a soft husky breathing sound the 12 year olds the 12 year old boys journey began in Nigeria where the drug smugglers gave him the condoms to swallow if we 1000 miles carrying heroin this caught because his body began to pass the condom the drug was hidden in while he was in the taxi if you pass midway you wash it off and swallow again she told the stewardess she swallowed 61 pellets courtship a young bird kept in confinement would when a little over a month old suddenly mount an object hand a foot pencil press its body down close upon it flutter its wings and open its beak the male pursues the female in swift flight his crust feathers erect and bill gaping he often bursts into passionate songs the two dodged swiftly through the thickets Stuart studied the song of one of these thrushes he figured that it's saying 4,360 songs per day or on average nine times per minute instead of swallowing them she put them in a hollow dildo which she inserted inside her vagina the eggs are short of eight in shape five and six are the commonest numbers and sets of seven are not extremely rare on May 27th the third egg in this nest was laid and the incubating sparrow then sat very closely it would not leave the nest when the bush was hit with a stick Franklin had to shake the bush violently before the bird would leave Rita agreed to be x-rayed and the results showed that she was carrying 39 drug pellets nestled in the wings of her pelvis a clutch it sang without pause for about 15 minutes first later snatches of songs successively shorter intervening pauses longer each note grows out of nothing swells to a full-tone and then fades away to nothing I'm honored to be reading amongst such fabulous poets I'm also proud to be representing Southern Vermont although for six years I lived up in the Northeast Kingdom and that time burns bright in my mind so I thought I'd read a summer poem that takes place right on the border of South Albany and West Glaver Vermont maybe some of you have swum in this pond it's called hindsight it was the kind of night June was made for a night worth twice its weight in syrup lemon balm air like a soft damp cloth rung and rung by capable hands it was a thick night you could eat alive a souped up night of steam and ginger a night no one quite believed was real except it was there and ripe for the picking cash crop of love under the butter moon the boys and girls slipped out of their skins took the dark lake like a side long glance parted the curtains of cedar wood as the firefly meteor shower began one boy on the shore cupped a bug in his hands it was cold light perfectly efficient he showed it to the girl dripping oil and water how the bulb kept pulsing but gave no heat the night spread a rumor but the girl believed it her heart was a peach in a bowl of bones his heart was the stone and he hunted for insects spelling her name in fire on the sand he said look the moon's drawing water meaning forecast meaning rain but she heard you are the halo the weather the circle of cirrus conjuring change then the night stepped out of its black chemise and lay its head across their laps the pale night shown like a coin in a crack and they fell to their knees to palm it night of fingers night of tips shameless night that would not sleep pastel night she put under her tongue and sucked the sugar till sugar was spit then he slipped it quickly into his pocket and it balled up small picked up lint it swallowed its pride and turned to a pebble then a piece of gravel then a speck of grit so I had the good fortune or perhaps a misfortune of returning to my old high school to give poetry reading to AP English class and for me this was a really big deal and I was very concerned about what to wear and some people have heard this story before I felt like it was a phoenix from the ashes moment because I felt very invisible in high school and there I was coming back with my first first book but when I got there I realized that didn't matter whether I'd worn jeans or a dress because there was it was last period on a Friday afternoon and they were about to have a pep rally so there was this stamping and clapping going on in the gym while I was trying to read some poems but it was I wanted to read them a poem that was set in the halls and it's kind of a racy poem and I thought me would talk about power dynamics or identity in high school so I'll read you what I read them and then I'll tell you what happened so this is called wanting it wasn't I beautiful wasn't I desperate didn't I give a shit about world peace inner peace only wanting it wanting it secret graffiti spelled out in lip gloss on the locker room wall the new underwire bit into my ribs pushed me up and I caught the mirror wanted it cocked a hip wanted it front seat back seat down on the floor brag of bruises blooming like plums on my neck tender bad and legitimate I wanted to ditch it wanted to drive alone in the car for the first time silence such concentration my hands tongue to the wheel I could see the brushstroke of each yellow line could feel my tires crush pieces of gravel and my 10 toes alive inside my shoes firm and quick on the pedals there was an orange lodged underneath the clutch squeeze it and shift squeeze it and there those boys who juice the halls with slouch and through their bodies around the field they watched when I punched it to second third burn my tracks along the high school tar they looked at me as if I could kill them they wanted to kill me back against a locker I could feel my body jammed up on metal my skin in ridges where the greats dug in my skirt hiked up my muscles like fish my third eye watching from the outside in I was some other girl I was anyone's candy so I thought we'd have a good good conversation going but everyone was kind of just staring down at their Xerox copies of the teacher had made can you still hear me one boy raised his hand and he was on red paint and he had a Santa hat on and he said so what's the secret graffiti and he wanted me to explain the image in my poem like he could maybe he could get it right on the AP test so I had to tell him well that's just the point no one knows what the secret graffiti is you first of all it's written on lip glass they can't even see it on the wall but no one really knows how to express you know truth in high school but then it was time for the pep rally they had to go so I'm going to read two more I tell the story a lot and now I'm kind of writing a chapter about it in my memoir and you'd think that once you're like in your 40s you'd be over high school but there's a lot to figure out for me at least so I just got back from visiting my mom she has Alzheimer's and it was a hard visit this is a dark poem but I'll try to finish up afterwards with a later one it's in three parts and I actually chose it because I thought Jodie Blatting was going to be here and she helped me revise it it's called ice house one hazard lights in the breakdown lane three semi-stuck halfway up Searsburg mountain the state trooper bending to set flares treacherous ice roads winding slow east-west over the ridge where my mother is relearning how to knit her marled stitches furl into a ribbon loose scarf for an imaginary child another project she'll never finish she carries the soft cowl from room to room couch to chair with the mystery she's been reading since August two why aren't the windmills turning when we pass they've raised the ridge line but those giant blades stand sentinel above the riddled snowpack tensions just trapped energy the teacher says rubbing the knot at the nape of my neck I want to believe her I breathe into the interstices imagine I'd be different with a different man would soften like a rag beneath his grip three out on the meadows the fishermen arrive in darkness live bait in littered buckets they light the wood stove in the metal house bore a hole through the ice revealing the nether world murky reese and black mud the promise of slow perch in cold water they hook a minnow below the dorsal fin and it swims around the hole all day tethered to an invisible line battering the smooth walls the only way out is to be consumed the only freedom of mouth darker and colder than this frozen river so the last poem is the first poem I ever wrote about my kids I used to really prose was about you know I could write these sort of late-hearted essays about being a mom and then poetry was sort of like the mythic experience out in the woods but this one may be cross-genres so that was the good news that I wrote it and then the bad news is now my older daughter who's ten-and-a-half has forbidden me from ever writing about her I guess so we'll see if I can keep to that it has an epigraph from the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy resistance is useless curiosity on the northbound lane following the river I try to explain about horse paths cart paths earth eaters the first dozers and rollers laying hot tar over centuries of dirt my daughter still believe whatever I say mind me for knowledge practical and vast could the moon have a moon Eva asks and I don't know it probably could have some asteroid ship or space station trash snagged into orbit natural satellite a crushed coke can or a bottle cap but it wouldn't last we can't steer the mothership the girls want me always in the kitchen like a planet steady sphere with gravitational pull slow burn on the horizon all night anchoring their dreams and flannel and cold cream they want me cut loose on the tramp big crazy bounces playing Simon says and moonwalk chase curiosity the Mars rover found water in red dunes trace molecules ices thin film in fine dust we hunted the meteorite deep on museum bedrock pitted hunk of solid iron radiant in the velvet dark 34 ton heart from the asteroid belt burned into being four billion years old carmen ran pel mail through the hall of human history past chrome magnet skulls and femur bones past DNA spiraling slow in a glass case to see what she'd been promised to lay her cheek against the cool hard evidence of space actually I just realized I wrote that poem at the Vermont Studios Center a couple years ago so so much gratitude to that place and to Ryan so we signed up for it I'm going to read through it and we'll call it an evening this is from my latest book Unidentified Slime Objects this is a villain now it's called climate Elise age nine worries about the ice and polar bears with no place to go she lies in bed a learn to her fraud life downstairs her mother weeps the words wife unfair too long elongate and explode Elise age nine worries about the ice her father tries to soothe this endless strife he talks like that full of what he calls whoa she lies in bed alert to her fraud life where no beautiful animals entice little girls to live in homes of snow Elise age nine worries about the ice it glues melt mother's mother knife the empty kitchen air paste to and fro she lies in bed alert to her fraud life what's been done is done not so much in spite as fear love marooned on a flow Elise age nine worries about the ice she lies in bed alert to her fraud life there are a number of odes in this book and I'll read one of them this is called the ode to the DC five which some of the elders in this room may recognize as the Dave Clark five you read that the basest in the Dave Clark five has died and think you didn't like the Dave Clark five that much they were peppy but not a whole lot more overdoing their British notion of joy that were thin in two minutes because it lacked sex and darkness that to the Brits credit the stones would soon provide but you're sad anyway because you feel how even nostalgia slips away how no one knows what George Washington was really like will never sniff his breath or watch him clack his dentures or hear him say a word like constitutional and that hurts not because you're afraid of oblivion which would be silly but because it's a drag how every story has to have the same ending that's the beauty of poems though how they don't care about that poems just care about a teenage guy fumbling around with a base and then starting to get the clunk clunk hang of it and meeting some other guys and starting a band or joining a band and thinking hey this is fun and hey I'm going to get laid and lots of good thoughts like that which come away before death and that are immaterial because although the music isn't immemorial it doesn't have to be because nothing has to be its failures are alluring as its successes maybe more so since genius is so rare the chance of some genius liver puddling coming together being about the same as you buying a powerball ticket and winning 63 million dollars which still wouldn't buy immortality but we'd give you a great stereo system to listen to the Dave Clark Five no after a while you'd realize you don't need a great stereo system to listen to the Dave Clark Five that in fact it makes the experience worse because you keep expecting something musical that wouldn't be the Dave Clark Five or its bass is thumping along like a flat tire and that pimply is spree feeling pretty bogus as the decades go down in a hail of gunfire and grief or quiet bank accounts or grandchildren but poetry doesn't care about that it's not an obituary it's a life jewelry which in its way the Dave Clark Five was getting at how swell it is to be young and full of snappy sap and not knowing anything and not listening to anyone and being that much more than a gyrating body homing in on some homely lass who swims with delight at the opening bars of catches if you can even though she knows the Beatles are way better than this stuff it doesn't matter there are moments in life when anything will do and you just go with that you say yes to whatever is breathing hard in your face its breath may be like George Washington's because he lived in some moments once upon a time and though he never heard an electric bass he must have wanted to rock out as a kid because kids always want to rock out that's what their bodies are telling them to pick up a bass or another person or a constitution or a nation and start rocking start plunking away and feeling that though it's just you some second person figment that one uncharted did will dissolve into the listless ozone doesn't matter because no one's counting how many ecstasy buttons you've pushed because one is enough people come up and say why didn't you like the day part five okay this will be the last one I read a lot of poems that are of collisions of a somewhat bizarre nature this is called Jerry Lee Lewis and Nuremberg there was a movie called Judgement in Nuremberg about trials after World War II Spencer Tracy was in the movie you'll hear that in here I think that's all I have to explain Jerry Lee Lewis had it you know if you don't know Jerry Lee Lewis God help you Jerry Lee Lewis at Nuremberg thank you all so much for coming out this evening thanks to all the wonderful poets in unreal time as when a head dices up decades, centuries, millennia while slowly sluicing into the netherbog of sleep Jerry Lee Lewis also titled The Killer for among other things his pianistic prowess appears at Nuremberg in a stiff wide lapel suit he could have bought at Lanskis in Memphis if he was from Memphis but he wasn't standing there with that too cool hairdo to confront the modest panoply of Nazis who are standing in for many Nazis who are there to take the rap and glad in there we are the superior raceway to do that since it was a service to Arians to cleanse the earth of scum which by implication included musicians humping pianos and 13 year old cousins while braying like country western boogie woogie banshees Jerry Lee has no time to dig this whacked out ideology he doesn't give a teenage shit about the tatters of their goose stepping zee hiling murder machine what matters is the sweet drugs in his love exercise mind an undressed woman and some get down hands hurricane a keyboard which is what a mind should hold so that when Gurren starts in with his witty repartee Jerry Lee says you are one sad motherfucker and the world for once gets what it is to be American and unafraid of what anyone thinks especially some Nazi slime ball who believes he's better than anyone else because he's from Europe and has a lot of unhappy history up his vicious asshole that got made into more history that soldiers like my Uncle Nathan paid for with his life on the beach at Anzio his precious blood vanishing into the grievous sands of silence Gurren says something smug but Jerry Lee is busy waggling his eyes around the courtroom no chicks or pianos being serious is fucking boring being serious has killed a lot more people than not being serious the dream ends here in Hollywood Times Spencer Tracy is talking about the real complaining party in this courtroom which is civilization everyone nods at this large last word it sounds good like maybe you could use it in a song each syllable taught yet sibilant in its brief articulate leap though it doesn't rhyme with much though it feels like some wish something badly out of touch and to Palm City which is such a truly unique thing in the world to celebrate poetry all month long so long may it last thank you