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Transcript |
Thank you very much Mr. Parker. I feel after that introduction that maybe I don't need to do anything; I will just sit down, program is over. But here I am all wired for sound so I might as well go ahead. I'm feeling a little bit like a much needed gap today and I don't know; some of the poems I'm going to read today, I've read only a week or so ago in Kansas City and Kansas City seemed to like them very much. When I read them over this morning, I couldn't really quite see why. You know this sort of fraternity of poets, I don't mean that it's a very close fraternity; most poets hate other poets but -Well last night we were at a party and suddenly there were some poets on the telephone calling me. I didn't even know them and then they said; "Hello, we're in Washington." Well I didn't really care but there they were and they felt they should call out since they were in Washington.
I think that there is a kind of common code among poets aside from this odd friendship, they are all sort of armatures by profession and some of us make a good many public appearances, some do not but when we make public appearances, we try not to do it well. We hang on to the feeling that we're not really at home on the stage and so we don't do very well on the stage and this may be one of the reasons why poetry readings have a way of keeping people away in droves.
Now I don't mean this about all poetry readings, I will try to give you different one than that. But I think it is an uneasy forum to work in. And it's not -although I was ridiculing amateurism among poets, it's not easy to think of yourself as a professional declaiming some great lines which happen to be your own. You have a funny - I assume you can hear me alright?
I'm going to start off, I'm going to read three longest poems in the process of going through this our hear, but I will start with a couple of short ones and sandwich some other short ones too. Here is a poem about a Sunday since it is on a Sunday, and this is called "On a Summer Sunday." It's an old poem of mine.
On that midsummer Sunday of naps, birds, children and slamming doors, the mind withdrew to its den in a green wood and listened and did not listened to the desultory sandy anarchy of neighbors.
Into the den, Shakespeare and Dante and soft fury poets slipped and laid down, out of it sauntered miscellaneous nonsense in stocking feat.
And that day, the somnolent, summer, Sunday day crept away, crept away to deep but delicate distances.
As the den and the wood and the mind unobtrusively darkened, and the birds and the children slept and the doors were still.
But I'm not -My chief subject today isn't Sundays but God's teachers and poets in no real order. Let me read you another old poem, short poem about a teacher. This poem takes its start from a line in the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, about the cleric of Oxford; and gladly would he learn and gladly teach. He is a good teacher but the teacher I'm describing isn't like that. This teacher is thinking of his students.
He hated them all one by one. But wanted to show them what was important and vital. And by God, if they thought they never have use for it, he was sorry as hell for them, that's all. With their genteel and mercantile main street barbit, bush wild barbaric faces, they were beyond saving clearly quite out of reach. And so he "gurr" got up every morning and the "gurr" ate his breakfast and "gurr" lumbered off to his 8'O clock gladly to teach.
And another short poem about teachers; this one more recent, in it I was thinking as a teacher, of how rapidly students go downhill when they get to be sophomores. They're so nice when they are freshmen and then suddenly they're so sophomoric. So this is a description of freshmen building a home coming bonfire during the football season, and being plagued by the sophomores and so on. It's a sonnet.
The profs have closed and changing their courses, bickering. The juniors and seniors are plotting a sunset of empire. The staffs are whispering, dickering, lickering and snickering. But the frosh, the lovely frosh are building a fire.
The frosh are building a fire bigger than mountain. The frosh have eyes that kindled for Phi Beta Capa. Ears that listen, souls that splurged like a fountain. The frosh are the salt of the earth and the pepper.
The flames of the frosh's fire upward slog into the lickerish night of the snickering soffs, into the sinister junior, senior smog, into the windless caves of the clouded profs. If sofs would frosh ward turn, not soft word frosh.
What world were ours? What fire gosh?
Now I will get to one of the longer poems, this is a poem I wrote last summer. It really isn't a single poem; it's a series of short poems on a common theme. I was at the McDonald Colony in New Hampshire last summer for a month and I had this wonderful studio looking out on something called Crotched Mountain. And I got up at 5 O'clock in the morning, looked out and wrote. And it occurred to me that I was the active creation here; was a little bit like Gods, and I had already thought about that in other poems about the relationship between God and the poet. The poet always comes out in the second. But I decided to write my own version of Genesis, and so this is a poem called; "The Seven Days." And it goes through the days one by one and has a few interludes, lements and things in it.
Introduction: On the last day of the old world, I stretched out my bones like a fossil fathom's down and bad times on leavings cover me layer on layer and death sweep over, over me on her see gown.
On the first day of the new world, I stood on a porch on a hill in the dark with a pencil and bad there will be light in the east and took my pencil with me into the light and set to brood.
Two, I'm first looking at Crotched Mountain, New Hampshire. Take from my thoughts those shells paleo zoreck, no petrified for a metaphor yet, I'm I.
Leave all the sifting stiffening in their sea beds to live in the past, says this old saw is to die. Let a sun now be born, let a mountain be folded.
And now let the sun climb up and queerly peer over at me as I birth and eyes open to a new landscape there, a new seer here. I call these pines, pines, this ivy poison. I call on all those small birds finches that big one crow.
"But what will I call that mountain; Crotched?" Absurd. Yet Crotched it is I say so and I know.
Praise be to me not God, Him I haven't spoke yet for this new day may I now breakfast beget.
Three; I'm first knowing God. At breakfast I have French toast, I no man plate the French toast. And drink several cups of coffee, this will soon be arithmetic, and came back to my bathroom and emptied my new bowels and said to the pines; "Who is God?"
The wind was up, the pines noisy but recondite I, an ant crawled up my shirt. I took off my shirt and baked, and looked at mount Crotched and dosed.
Who was to tell me, tell me not the leaves, not the pines, not the sun, not the ant. Had I made nothing would speak to me? I went to the finch in the leaves and said someone must have to say, but he flew away.
How about you robin, you on the stump. But the robin zipped to the under brush and a hush fell on the brush, and I understood as I stood there bare to the waste on a stone that the robin had known, the stone upheld me.
To my porch, then did I walk and did to the mountain cry; "God, God I'm I."
The second day: On the second day of creation, I rose again with the sun and walked up and down the earth, I the One. But I heard the pert jay and saw the drooped birch and stubbed the stone, whose was this church.
So I came cold to my cabin and lighted a sterno can and drank tea at my desk, idle a man.
And I knew then how soon be getting turns to begot and wondered who from the first day would choose God's lot, Lement.
But who is he, said the God, said the man who is choosing? The bird and the poem takes shape and the active shaping is a dying into the shaping. The birds, God shriveling to a bird, the poems to a poem.
From the heavens the earth's begetters, Gods and poets straggle down to that earth, makers unmade and knock at the Earth's doors and go to their trade. And their trade, said the God, said the man, the God part done is to live by their bond to what was once their son. Watching the day sift down to the great sea bed, waiting those dead Gods to be dead.
Third day: There was no third sunrise Crotched was smoked up. I stayed inside at the fire, paired my toe nails looked at the veins in my legs, felt the bones nearness. The cabin was dark, the tears sulky, gray the windows. The whole had the look of a party that didn't come off because somebody put all the liquor and talk in a drawer and said sit there, be sad, concentrate.
In the bathroom, nib rock kept spelling Corbin backwards. It was a meditative God damn place, the books stacked in a corner reading themselves, and the wooden lists on the walls of writers, composers, Gods who had been there before me, now standing there. And the big table with claw feet poised by the jungle rug ready to rip something up, maybe a poet to and prove Darwin.
I did push- ups, but the younger poet was getting too old for pushups, so I went outside and the sun was out of the smoke now and the birds and the bugs were at it again world without end, so I went to breakfast.
Tell me the story of Job mom. The story of Job; was he the one with the big scratchy bathrobe or was he the man with the locusts? Mom, tell me. I want to hear about somebody like me.
Breakfast was poached eggs and a good bit of talk and the toaster pop up and down and the artist looked nervous. I thought of them I thought of all of them thinking like me of trudging each back to his God hole after the coffee, and sitting a while on the toilet, then tidying this up, and that up and smoking like mad and circling the desk like a hawk coming in with care on a smelly carcass. Gods, I went back and did all that.
What is the name of that Indian in Cooper. Who walks through the prime evil forest like a ghost. Teach me the lore of silence, how to make it creepily through the ticket on dry twigs eating dry toast. I went and sat like a stump in the 9 am sun on the least side looking south at a different Parnassus, hazy a sketch of mountain that could be cloud, and I wonder the Gods there were also dead.
Lament: Out there beyond the poach where my God country starts to get dense and godly, I am. That brown thrushes me, blasting it out in the woods, Omar, Kayam.
In the sun nude oozing out to the spouses, moths, flat beetle, stumps, boulders I lie. Pretty soon, I will be eminent in the firmament with here a bit, there a bit, everywhere bit, bit of me right there. But when the lugs from the heavenly poetry society gathering up their far flung warbler blokes to my woods come, they won't find much but some undone verse, some old smokes and an empty chair by a desk in an empty room.
Forth day: I has just one match, I lighted the sterno with it and a cigarette and made coffee, and craftily shut the sterno down to a thin flame and went to the desk and smoked the cigarette and finished the coffee made busy and reached for a cigarette and went to the sterno flame out. With the matches a mile away and no other God up, my old trivial life swept in like a mist. I fretted an hour, paced, kept looking for a matches, then padded early to breakfast, found matches.
Somebody was impaled over her poached egg to play out with gestures, the drama of climbing the Matter Horn. I backed out away from that back to the cabin and smoked, smoked. The mountains were hidden, the trees stood stony a thousand strong, so the shrubs and the grass, even the grass, each frail dried blade was fixed as if behind glass with a card in front of it of the order Gramini.
Was this the Peabody museum? Where was the guard? I remember there a wax Indian, loin cloth and tama hawk. It was I, but now wearing shorts, waving a cigarette. What will my card say? Of the order Americanus, panaceanus, ranged narrowly is it extinct those two living near Crotched Mountain quietly.
The fifth day: On the fifth day the first God made great whales and creeping things. I got up late with a head and barely made breakfast and sat in my cabin still fuzzy from too much beer wondering what I was doing there. The mountains were clear, the air had a rinsed look but the land was dry unchanged. I was still in the museum. My wife and children were half a country away. The sun kept tearing round in the empty sky, I was 45, I was old, I wanted to cry.
Lament:
On such a day of this and that and the other, the same old scene was enacted in was it Thebes. Thebes, Troy, Crotched, it doesn't matter; every God has his day nearly forever. Every God has his day everyday his God. And time and God's grow up, go down together. What the day does does the God as when they pound the same old boards in the same old epic weather.
Pound the same boards clump, clump until sea and weather, seed over their poundings and they maunder down to the layers of God day's plays in the deep water. O seas, let the makers make, let the burners burn bugger the seasons of repetition and return.
The sixth day: On the sixth day after coffee, I made man. I made him hairy, tan, middle aged, arrogant. I gave him warts, clothes, wit, phobias, woman. I put books in his hands and taught him to drive, dance, lie with woman. I put him out in the sun on the Crotched Mountain and I looked at him. He was well made would get on. He will sleep poorly at night as he got older, would forget people's names, misquote things , drink too much, rage at woman at breakfast, loose keys, with bankers , he'd be ill at ease. But he'll work hard and make money and pay his taxes and vote for the school bond issue and love woman and take children to zoos and wear tweeds; he was well made, I looked at him.
He was sitting out of the steps of the cabin in shorts, he had no mark on him, his body was firm, he was muscular, his hair was still black, yet had the eyes and mouth, with flesher the cheeks and forehead were old. He looked out across ages like a Saurian.
What had I made? I went into the cabin and worked but could only think of him. The afternoon came on no wind, no motion, whatever I did he was there. The hours passed, and I wrote these words and evening crept in the cabin and a hush came over things and the sky darkened and I sat in the cabin with him and he's sang; I aged at night late, sleepless, my old one hunting me, escape, the windows and doors beckon, the still pass beckon, but I lay in my dark lire breathing, itching, aging , and the old one will not leave me, I his quire I sleep for the old one. I watched him sleep. At last, I got up and left, left the cabin to him.
Seventh day and conclusion: there then was the world, the man surveyed it, he doubted it was his duty, to call it good. He knew it to be but a world like any other; he knew that his God now resting had made what he could.
So there's what you do out in New Hampshire in the summer. I, having done that I got suddenly interested in science and read a number of paperback books of science and began to do a new book of Genesis which I'm not going to trouble you with except for the first day. And I thought you'll like to see what I do with the first day if you think of the origins of the first day, in rather tricky terms. I had as an epigraph for this poem but I see I don't have it with me now. A statement from that fine fellow Einstein; I thought that would give the thing a little tone. Maybe I can sell the; poem to the scientific American.
I haven't got it here on this copy of the poem but in effect what Einstein was saying was that in thinking of the origin of things, we are neglecting perhaps the most important part of it. Namely the interval, that is the space between things rather than the things in the space. And so I began to think of the intervals and in grammar, the great interval is an and you'll see, a conjunction within, the thing in between the nouns. And so I'm working at the beginning of the world grammatically here and this doesn't take very long, it's relatively painful but it doesn't take very long.
Think of an and alone, nothing before, nothing after, nothing and nothing. The and proposes a structure and by the proposing is and makes. For nothing is nothing but nothing and nothing are spatial, temporal, the structure does it, and nothing there and here, and nothing then and now, to and fro in the space time.
But in grammar we cannot think of this; the and comes second. We need something, then and. Or if we are willing to grant without understanding, a precedent and, we still ask to know where it came from. Grammar, logic, math work in the matrix of the space time, and is the space time we in it matrix know what we do in it, where we are in it but not it.
This that we don't know, we call mind, spirit, more of it everyday is found in the physics lab by omission. It is what we tend to describe by what it is not. It is not logical, it is not metrical, it is not as I now propose grammatical, yet it is with us.
Our minds seemed made in its image, each a space time kit, for making a world up.
We cannot conceive of that mind, the and as farther, but we cannot conceive of it otherwise. In Edenton's words; to breach of causality keeps breaking the chain of influence.Sense leads to nonsense. In the beginning then was nonsense, so every beginning so far, we cannot conceive of a nothing that makes something, the and we say must be physical or electrical something. Yet that something is nothing, nonsense.
We had no grammar for nonsense, we cannot pause it, or nothing, something moving between nothings. Yet I repeat, think of an and alone, nothing before, nothing after, nothing and nothing, thereby making the first day.
And now I will switch to something like (inaudible 0:25:39). Here is a love song and the girl being addressed in poem is really America. It's all very quick minis. And this is a lovely girl, this America, and when I make love to her, she and I have a great deal of trouble communicating because we use so many different lingos. So I am playing around with some of the different lingos of America.
I know not how to speak to thee girl, damsel, not how to begin, to begin with thee to commune in all your lazy lingos oh my America.
Or say to you; honey, light of my life, doll that on you, I am sweet. America, child though of the silken fires and purple sage brush, how, huh does it fare with thee?
Are thou Wyoming, Memphis, you're art thou, what doesth the lover thirst, what idiom suffer to the apple be of your eye.
Your suitors grow old, old, their lyrics sadden and their passions fizz in the soft wresting rhetoric. But you, O nick nak nappy, Dairy Queen, from your southern cow to keep main green. You still or so that tellest me, me?
And here is another one out of last summer which I wrote after going up to Maine to see some friends in early July; we went clamming. And so this is a poem about clamming in Maine.
I go digging for clams every two or three years just to keep my hand in. I usually cut it, and whenever I do so, I tell the same story, how at the age of four, I was trapped by the tied as I clammed a vanishing sand bar.
It's really no story at all but I keep telling it so that I may add in the end the coming place rescue. It serves my small lust to be thought of as someone who's lived. I have a war too to fall back on and some years of flying as well as a staggering quota of drunken party, a wife and children. But somehow the clamming thing gives me an image of me that soothes my psyche like none of the latter events, me helpless alone with my sand pale as fate in the form of soupy Long Island sound comes stocking me.
My youngest son is that age now, he's spoiled, he's been sickly, he's handsome and bright, affectionate, he's demanding. I think of the tides when I look at him, I've had him alone in Seagurt , poor little boy, the self what a bruit it is, it wants, wants. It will not let go of its even most fictional grandeur, but most grope, grope down in the muck of its past for some little squirting life and bring it up tenderly to the low and behold of death.
But it may weep and pass on the weeping, keep it all going. Son, when you clam watch out for the tides take care of yourself, yet no great care, lest you care too much and talk too much of the caring and bore your best friends and inhibit your children and sicken at last into opera on somebody's sand bar. When you clam son, clam.
So you see I've had a few Gods in here and a few teachers. And really of course I have been talking about poets all the time because poets are always talking about themselves. But I would like to read you one other long poem then I will see how the time is, it isn't too long. But it's a poem about teachers and I wrote it last fall for a meeting of Phi Beta Capa at William and Mary College. And I thought this will be a great time to blast the English departments of the world off the world and so I took the occasion to kind of write an essay poem, which is something I have been experimenting with lately. I like to write essays and I like to write poems, but when I do these two things at once, it sort of economical.
So this is a poem called; Return Alpheus. A phrase from Milton's Lycidas Milton has been raging against the church and the state and a few other things in the middle of Lycidas, and suddenly he calms down again, he returns to his pastoral mood and he says return Alpheus. This is described as a poem for the literary elders of Phi Beta Capa. And it has as an epigraph a statement from Wallace Stevens, a poem about tradition could easily be a windy thing.
Let me invoke no muse here, then member of Phi Beta Capa, though always respectful of the past or surely weary of muses as I'm I. It is winter, the muses are dead in their stead, are only latticed sections of board sky in our windows.
I appeal to those windows, I ask them to help me sing for a moment quietly of what is gone, not to celebrate pastness or re invoke it, but to put it before us briefly that we may sigh briefly and then take up the sad business of what we do with it.
Gone then are the musses, and dozens of water and wood nymphs as well as Zues and the old Duse. Gone too are cutty and colon clout Pan, Zersis, Ceribrus, Proteus, Morpheus, Orpheus except in the movies, Rosseland, Cynthia, Cupid, Midas , Aureoles, Streppon, all of the Alesion, most of Spencer, many nights, Shepherds, wizards, bold crowns, maidens in towers, dwarfs, spells, emblems, unicorns, basilisks, genie, sonnets mostly, rhetoric mostly, and crossed stars. And with these poor dead things are gone as well, the old laments that grace their morning for passing.
Alas, gone is alas poor Euric's friend, nor will, nor one, nor tether now mend.
That's what we call a heroic listic. So here we are students, teachers, scholars, distinguished except for myself for our grades and intelligence; I'm not a member of Phi Beta Capa. And wed to the many great virtues out of the past such as honor, tolerance, manners and breath of vision that our institutional fund raisers make much of.
With our books piled up to the ceiling and our pens and keys and funny old pipes and prints |
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