Carolyn Brown: 
Good evening.  I am Carolyn Brown.  I am the director of the Office of Scholarly Programs and the John W. Kluge Center, and the Poetry and Literature [ Center ] program is part of the Office of Scholarly Programs.  And it is my pleasure to welcome you here this evening for what will certainly be a most wonderful reading.  

Many of you probably know Patricia Gray, who is a poet herself and has been at the Library [ of Congress ] for many years; unfortunately not doing poetry, but I have had the great good fortune to snatch her for the detail in the Poetry office.  And she is also the - and she organized the "Poetry at Noon" program, which I think probably some of you have attended from time to time.  But in any case, Patricia is going to introduce our two poets this evening.  So we have a poet introducing poets; seems only appropriate.  Please welcome Patricia.  

[ applause ]

Patricia Gray: 
Hi, everyone.  Tonight Galway Kinnell will be reading, and also reading will be David Tucker.  David Tucker's poems are marked by careful and tender observation of both the mundane and the extraordinary, and they are suffused by the newspaper man's understanding of just how fleeting all of this is; the extraordinary successes, the extraordinary failures and even the simple and often unremarkable pleasures of the everyday.  Tucker studied with Donald Hall and Robert Hayden, and is a graduate of the University of Michigan.  In 2005 his volume of poetry, "Late for Work," won a Bakeless Prize from Middlebury College Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.  

Tucker has worked for 28 years at leading newspapers, and is a member of the New Jersey "Star-Ledger" team that won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news.  I thought it would be interesting to ask some of his journalism colleagues to comment on both streams of writing talent in this man, so here's what two of them said.  Josh -- Margolin?  Is that how you -- okay.  He's a political reporter at the "Star-Ledger," and he said, "Those of us who know David from the newsroom were surprised to learn that he is as good a poet as he is a newsman.  Then again, when it comes to the written word it seems there's almost nothing he can't do except stop."  

[ laughter ]

And another staff writer, Amy Ellis [ Nutt ], really nailed it.  She said, "His nose for news is matched only by his ear for language, and a capacious heart always seeking to plumb the human truth in both.  The only thing amiss with his collection, "Late for Work," is the title.  Whether it's the paper or poetry, David has always been right on time."  And so he is.  He's right on time, and here's David Tucker.  

[ applause ]

David Tucker:
Thank you, Patricia.  I'm really honored to be here, and especially honored to be reading with Galway Kinnell, whose work I have followed so many years; since my days in Michigan.  And I thank my colleagues at the "Ledger."  Never give a reporter a chance to go on, or they'll never shut up.  I'm going to start by reading a couple of poems -- three poems that come out of my hometown.  I was raised in a small rural town called Linden, Tenn.; population about 1,000.  

AndI was raised in, at least my parents were raised in a time -- and I'm sure many of you are familiar with this -- when learning in high school was all about memorization.  And so in a town of 1,000, where there were about, maybe, 30 Baptist churches, you could hear the Bible quoted quite succinctly and constantly.  But you also heard Shakespeare a lot, and my father was in the latter group.  

This poem is entitled "My Father Quoting Shakespeare against a Sea of Troubles" [ This poem's format may differ from the poet's original format ].


	Other fathers may have also lived 
	a work in progress entitled 
	"I Blame the World for Everything," 
	that began soon after dinner and 
	ended near bedtime.  
	But how many were also bent 
	on reciting every line of Shakespeare 
	Learned in high school?  
	"Let me have about me bald, 
	slick-headed men such as sleep at night.  
	Yonder Cassius--"
	My father strides across the cracked linoleum 
	of that drafty house, 
	Trying to remember the rest.  
	-- "has a lean and hungry look." 
	Dutifully seated on the couch 
	with the cigarette holes in the vinyl arms,
	My brothers and I glance at each other;
	One of us must be Cassius-like,
	 with Cassius thoughts so obvious.  
	Then came the sea of troubles speech, 
	as he crumpled his bank statement into his fist 
	And added his own troubles to the sea.  
	"Do you know what the bank can do with this?  
	Do you know where they can put this?" We knew.  
	Miles away, a semi truck began the long climb 
	up Highway 100 towards Nashville. 
	Crickets sang out by the fence, 
	safe from anger and Shakespeare.  
	But there was a faint grin on my father's face,
	 so pleased he was to remember 
	Golden lines in those hard days.  
	"The quality of mercy is not strained;
	it droppeth like a gentle rain," he said, 
	As he turned for bed and waved good night 
	And made, I think, a slight bow to the crowd.  

Linden was a very poor town.  It is still a very poor town; 96 counties in Tennessee, it's the smallest, most sparsely populated.  It is also usually around 90th or 96th on the poverty list that comes out each year.  This poem is called "Columbus Discovers Linden, Tennessee."  

	The Santa Maria is moored in the red dust.  
	She looks like a huge wagon of flowers
	jostling the gray shacks out there at the end of a flat world.  
	There are, as it turns out, no dragons here-
	only scrawny women who dump the heads 
	of chickens into kettles, hungry children peeking 
	from cardboard windows, rows of men out of work, napping 
	on fly blown porches.  I claim this paradise 
	for my King.  And these gardens of dust, theses palaces 
	of sage grass, orchards of junked cars, 
	I claim for Queen Isabella. This scent 
	of rubber tires burning, dazzle of shriveled sunflowers, 
	stacks of oil drums, vistas of stunted turnips-- 
	all these treasures in the name of Ferdinand.  
	And I claim these ragged bean farmers climbing 
	out of scorched fields, their mules bellowing 
	at the red sunset.  and this odor 
	of soup made of grease and bone, drifting 
	from clapboard houses,  I take for Her Majesty.  
	Mattresses and shopping carts piled up in the weeds, 
	mangy dogs fighting in the street
	derelicts wearing Bible verses on their chest--
	all for good Ferdinand.  
	The OxyContin zombies, meth heads, and gun toters 
	gathering around the fire barrels, these too, these too.  
	And all the silk and incense there is 
	in Linden, Tennessee, and all the ivory 
	and all the jade and cinnamon too.  

This poem is called "The Brief Life of the Box," a poem started, really, in a time of total writer's block.  And sometimes a simple line, which is put down almost playfully or out of frustration, can lead in surprising places, which is what happened to me with this poem.  

"The Brief Life of the Box"  
	A long time ago a box 
	lay on a trash heap behind a blue jeans factory 
	in Linden, Tennessee.  It was nothing, 
	just an ordinary, useless occupant of the light.  
	A bland statement: "Union manufacturing" stenciled in bold 
	black letters on its side like an urge 
	to be important. Then one day 
	a man in a green pickup noticed the box,
	 stopped, and threw it on the truck bed, 
	took it away. That afternoon 
	he filled it with leaves from the hill 
	behind his house, hauling load after load until nightfall.  
	The next week he burned the box in a garden 
	where he had been burning leaves and junk 
	for years. His son, always looking around 
	for signs like this, saw the fire 
	and thought of Abraham and sacrifices 
	as the box obediently became smoke 
	and ashes. The man sprinkled the ashes 
	on a tomato bed and the tomatoes were eaten 
	in August. Eventually they fed a few words and a prayer
	 that sounded like, "O help us, Lord."  
	It was a summer for strange events like that.  
	The boy's mother was in the asylum hearing voices.
	 Boxes became heroes; tomatoes made you pray.  
	It seemed she would never come back.

This poem is called "City Editor Looking for News."  

	What did Nick the Crumb say before he died? What noise 
	did his fist make when he begged Little Pete
	not to whack him with a power saw? Did it go thub like a biscuit 
	against a wall or sklack like a seashell cracking open?
	Did he say his mother's name? Has anybody even talked 
	to his friggin' mother? Is she broke, or sick and abandoned?
	Is she dying of a broken heart? Do I have to think 
	of all these things by myself? How about a story 
	on which female commissioner the mayor is screwing?  
	How do we get that?  Or what about the rumor 
	that he's taking bribes off the gay architect from Parsippany?
	Write me something about the bums
	 living under the bridge at Second and Callowhill;  
	Go sleep in cardboard sleep shacks,  
	wear some Bible verses on your chest--go dirty and drunk.  
	Tell me what it's like. Make me fall in love 
	with the dirtball murderer in Kensington;The wasted life 
	of the sixteen-year-old crack-dealing honor student 
	who might have been a star for UCLA, the priest 
	who tried to save him, the boy's chalked silhouette 
	fading on a rainy street, the killer who shot him 
	because he wanted his shoes, 
	And loved nothing in this life 
	But the crazed Rottweiler he kept on a silver leash.  

Follow the sirens I hear wandering down Locust Street.  
Are they headed for a fire? 
A shooting?
An armored car heist in broad daylight, 
With the money flying down the street?  

Write about the quiet in this place on a late summer afternoon.  
Write about the sneeze I just heard, 
The dusty light in this place, 
The old papers piled high and falling from every desk.  
Stop scratching your ass and loafing.  
It's almost deadline. 

This poem is called "Messengers," which is my personal tribute to reporters.  Over the years I have seen reporters do some amazing things at newspapers.  And one of those is, reporters have this gift for forgetting that poets also have.  And I think good reporters have a little bit of poet in them; an ability to put aside who they are and invest themselves completely in the story; to put their ego completely on the shelf, at least till the story is over.  They are perfectly capable of being jerks when it's all finished, but they do amazing things.  And their dedication is often not to their bosses or the newspaper, just to the story.  

"Messengers"  [ This format may differ from the poet's original. ]

Gone since morning to cover the fire that killed two little girls 
Left alone and locked inside an apartment 
that had been without heat for days, 
And ignored by city inspectors for years.  
They come back now,  
One by one, 
Looking down at their notebooks and rubbing their eyes 
As they slouch into their desks, coats still on, 
And begin to punch in the names.  

Serena, 7, Natasha, 9  
Name of the landlord, 
Names of the inspectors, 
Names of the parents, 
Staring at their keyboards, smelling of smoke.  

Poem about doing nothing, "Days When Nothing Happens."  This is from an earlier book.  Most of these poems, except the first one, are from the book 
"Late for Work." This is an earlier poem from a chap book called "Days When Nothing Happens."  

On days when nothing happens
A jet loafs overhead, an hourglass of smoke fanning out behind it.  
On days when nothing happens
A paper sack plays in the street, your overcoat sags and forgets you.  
The wind chases the leaves and they clatter off the porch, saying 'Hurry.'  
On days when nothing happens
The mantle clock calls the small noises back into the house
And a daughter's red sneaker sits all afternoon on the windowsill 
Trying to be quiet. 

In the same vein, "Putting Everything Off."  

	The objectives for the day lean against sagging fences now, 
	the shovels and hoes are covered in dew. 
	Parking tickets from places barely remembered go
 	unpaid another day.  Tax forms from years I'm not sure 
	I ever lived slip a day closer to being forgotten, 
	along with letters stamped but never mailed, 
	their thoughts obsolete, their news old;
	lone socks and quarters are hiding out in the dust 
	under the bed like the strays that won't come in.   
	Here are the windows I once thought of as dirty, but that 
	was an old list of things not done, their dirtiness 
	is relative now to the other urgent tasks left undone 
	and therefore not very dirty anymore.  May we always 
	have mountains of things that have to be fixed, acres 
	of the unfinished.  Let us hear as long as we can 
	the kitchen faucet that drips all day with its one 
	inscrutable syllable, and let us have joyous screen doors 
	with a rip in the corner, like this, an amusement ride
	the flies dive through, while the moon glowers down 
	and stacks of things not done grow beautifully deep. 

Two love poems.  First one, "Oh."  

	Late in the woolly afternoon, 
	When the sun was going "ping" against the skin, 
	When every thought worked up a sweat, 
And the goldenrod leaned back in unison
When the cattails down by the river clattered gently together 
And oak trees bent in a crowd of whispers,
"Oh," said the woman I love, "What a nice breeze."  

And the heavy lilacs applauded as she ran her hands through her hair;
That "Oh" was so sudden and full.  
A leaf left over from September finally let go of its oak,
Gave in and drifted onto the terrace.  
An apple hanging from the creaking apple tree gave in, saying, 
"Oh," as it met the ground, 
"Oh," with a hard kiss.

"July Late at Night"
  
It's too hot to make love so we lie on our backs,
Letting the fan blow the heavy air over us.  
Then my foot touches hers 
And begins to rub her cool, rough heel;
A place I've never bothered 
To love, never kissed;
A little desert town with a loan hitching post,
Home to the armadillo.  
Hard to arouse, but vaguely friendly 
In the language of feet. 

[ laughter ]

This poem is for my daughter, the dancer, and it's called "The Dancer."  

	Class is over, the teacher 
	and the pianist gone, 
	but one dancer 
	in a pale blue 
	leotard stays 
	to practice alone without music, 
	turning grand jetˇs 
	through the haze of late afternoon.  
	Her eyes are focused 
	on the balancing point 
	no one else sees 
	as she spins in this quiet 
	made of mirrors and light--  
 	a blue rose on a nail--  
	then stops and lifts 
	her arms in an oval pause 
	and leans out 
	a little more, a little more, 
	there, in slow motion 
	upon the air.  

This is the last poem, called "Encouragement."  From the cat on the desk, sorry.

From the cat who jumps on the desk, purring like a sonnet,  
From the honest spider, knitting her treaties on Immanuel Kant,  
Spreading it out in the stalks of the white begonia.  

From the bravery of the comely moth that walks the lip of the red flowerpot 
Like Danger Girl, like tipsy John Berriman; 
Help from things that just come and go.  

From wind that wanders the shining bamboo as if about to speak, 
And from the newspaper on the table that lifts its big wings in welcome 
And from the student reading by the window; 
She and her book silent, neither of them really there,  
And from a yawn declaring its relief in a distant room.  

From the smell of cut grass that hauls its veil through the afternoon,  
The peacefulness of it, 
And from the crow who lives nearby, 
As she floats over the house, 
Coming and going as she pleases on black, shining wings.  

From the inertia of the Ford on concrete blocks, 
Weeds rising into the engine,  
And from that backyard dog who always finds a happy fight to roll in.  

Thank you.  

[ applause ]

Patricia Gray: 
Thanks, David Tucker.  That was great.  And Galway Kinnell is the next reader.  He's won so many Fellowships and prizes and awards for his work that to list them all would keep us here till midnight, so I'm going to mention a few.  He received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his 1982 selected poems, and in 1984-1989 he received a MacArthur Grant.  He was also a summa cum laude, earlier, graduate of Princeton and received a master's degree from the University of Rochester.  

Kinnell is the first state poet of Vermont after the death of Robert Frost.  And he has more than 20 books of poetry, depending on what you include or exclude.  He also has done a lot of - a number of translations of other poets' work.  He's translated the works -- actually, this is a fiction writer, Rene Hardy -- but he's also translated Henri Lehman, Fran¨ois Villon, Yves Bonnefroy, Yvanne Goll, and with Hannah Liebmann, "The Essential Rilke."  He's a Whitman scholar, and each spring the highlight of the Poets House "Brooklyn Bridge Walk" is hearing Galway Kinnell read Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry."  

If you've heard people say no memorable poems are being written these days, all I can say is they just haven't read Galway Kinnell, or read the individual poems such as "Under the Maud Moon" and "Lastness" from "The Book of Nightmares. " These poems about being at the birth of his daughter and then his son let us know what a father is capable of, and can feel on such occasion.  The poem about his son's birth has a section that goes like this: "I took him up in my hands and bent over and smelled the black, glistening fur of his head, as empty space must have bent over the newborn planet and smelled the grasslands and ferns."  Other memorable -- iconic, even -- poems are "The Bear," "St. Francis and the Sow," "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps," and "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World," and so on.  

Now, add to these -- these, the 20th -- these 20th century examples another poem written in the new century; it appears in his new book, "Strong Is Your Hold,"  "Is Your Hold," "Strong is Your Hold"  His new book is being shipped now to bookstores.  The poem, which will certainly be an icon even in the new century, is "When the Towers Fell."  It's about the lives lost in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.  Galway Kinnell read that poem at Bread Loaf in 2002, about a month before it appeared in the "New Yorker."  At that time many poems were being written about the events of 9/11; ranting poems, heartbroken poems, flag-waving poems.  

But those of us lucky enough to hear Galway Kinnell read "When the Towers Fell" knew that only a master could have written such a stunning work.  The good news this evening is that you can find a copy of that poem in his new book.  The bad news is we were hoping to have it for you tonight, but sadly we couldn't make that happen.  However, our shop will order it for you and ship it straight to you as soon as possible.  Now, we don't have the book, but we do have the real thing; a master poet, one of the absolute best of our time, Galway Kinnell.  

[ applause ]

Galway Kinnell: 
I don't know.  Maybe I need a little table or a chair, even, to put this upon.  I think it might --

Patricia Gray:
Did you get some water?

Galway Kinnell:
I got water and glasses and a pitcher, but I need this.  Thank you.  Thank you very much.  Well, thank you, Patricia, for your lovely introduction, and David, for reading those wonderful poems of yours, and Donald Hall, although he's not here -- our poet laureate -- for organizing these readings.  Yes, evidently -- is it true a box, a carton or two holding my books, arrived here this morning, or yesterday? 

Patricia Gray:
Yesterday.

Galway Kinnell: 
Yesterday.  And for some reason of homeland security, they were rejected and sent back.  Isn't that altogether -
[ laughter ]

Patricia Gray:
I'll tell you all the details.
[ laughter ]

Galway Kinnell: 
You will, and more details than that. 

Patricia Gray:
I'll tell you all of it.

Galway Kinnell: 
I'll wait.  Yeah.  So in other words, I'm going to read, nevertheless, some of the poems that appear in this book that could not be delivered.  And because Donald Hall is our -- was Donald Hall here last week?  

Patricia Gray:
The third of October.

Galway Kinnell: 
The third of October, and reading from this -- in this very room? 

Patricia Gray:
Yes.

Galway Kinnell: 
Yes.  I'm going to read a poem in which he appears.  The poem is called "The Stone Table."  In Vermont, where I live, we can see off into New Hampshire where Donald Hall lives.  We can't see his house, of course -- it's quite some distance away -- but we often, we often think of him.  And probably you also know that on the grave - on the gravestone of Jane Kenyon are engraved the words, "I believe in the miracles of art, but what prodigy will keep you safe beside me?"  The town I live in is Sheffield.  "The Stone Table."  Can you hear in the back?  

Here on the hill behind the house, 
we sit with our feet up on the edge 
of the eight-by-ten stone slab 
that was once the floor of the cow pass 
that the cows would use to get from one pasture 
to the other without setting a hoof 
on the dirt road lying between them.  

From here we can see the blackberry thicket,
 the maple sapling the moose slashed 
with his cutting teeth, turning it 
scarlet too early, the bluebird boxes
 flown from now, the one tree left 
of the ancient orchard popped out 
all over with saffron and rosy,
 subacid pie apples, smaller crabs grafted 
with signs of old varieties. Freedom,
 Sops0of-Wine, Wolf River, and trees 
we put in ourselves, dotted with red lumps.  

We speak in whispers; fifty feet away,
 under the red spruce, a yearling bear
 lolls on its belly, eating clover.  
Abruptly it sits up.  Did I touch my wine glass
 to the table, setting it humming?  
The bear peers about with the bleary undressedness
Of old people who have mislaid their eyeglasses.  
It ups its muzzle and sniffs. It fixes us, 
Whirls, and plunges into the woods--  
A few cracklings and shatterings, and all is still.  

As often happens, we find ourselves 
thinking similar thoughts, this time of a friend 
who lives to the south of that row of peaks 
burnt yellow in the sunset.  About now,
 he will be paying his daily visit to her grave, 
reading by heart the words, cut into black granite,
 that she had written for him, when they 
both thought he would die first:
I BELIEVE IN THE MIRACLES OF ART BUT WHAT
PRODIGY WILL KEEP YOU SAFE BESIDE ME.
Or is he back now, in his half-empty house,
Talking in ink to a piece of paper?  

I, who so often used to wish to float free 
of earth, now with all my being want to stay, 
to climb with you on other evenings to this stone, 
maybe finding a bear, or a coyote, like t
he one who, at dusk, a week ago, passed
 in his scissorish gait ten feet from where we sat-- 
This earth we attach ourselves to so fiercely, 
like scions of Sheffield seek-No-Furthers, 
grafted for our lifetimes onto paradise, root-stock.
 
Maud and Fergus are the names of my children, and I wrote quite a lot of poems about them when they were little, but recently wrote yet another called "Everyone Was in Love."  

One day, when they were little, Maud and Fergus
appeared in the doorway naked and mirthful,
with a dozen long garter snakes draped over
each of them like brand-new clothes.
Snake tails dangled down their backs,
and snake foreparts in various lengths
fell over their fronts. With heads raised and swaying,
alert as cobras, the snakes writhed their dry skins
upon each other, as snakes like doing
in lovemaking, with the added novelty this time
of caressing soft, smooth, moist human skin.
Maud and Fergus were deliciously pleased with themselves.
The snakes seemed to be tickled, too.
We were enchanted. Everyone was in love.
Then Maud drew down off Fergus's shoulder,
as off a tie rack, a peculiarly
lumpy snake and told me to look inside.
Inside the double-hinged jaw, a frog's green
webbed hind feet were being drawn,
like divers, very slowly as if into deepest waters.
Perhaps thinking I might be considering rescue,
Maud said, "Don't. Frog is already elsewhere."

[ laughter ]

And another one of childhood; this is about Fergus's fourth birthday.  "It All Comes Back."  

We placed the cake, with its four unlit candles
poked into thick frosting, on the seat
of his chair at the head of the table
for just a moment while Ines and I unfolded
and spread Spanish cloth over Vermont maple.

Suddenly he left the group of family,
family friends, kindergarten mates, and darted
to the table, and just as someone cried No, no!
Don't sit! he sat right down on top of the cake
and the room broke into groans and guffaws. 

Actually it was pretty funny, all of us
were yelping our heads off, and actually
it wasn't in the least funny. He ran to me
and I picked him up but I was still laughing,
and in indignant fury he hooked his thumbs
into the corners of my mouth, grasped
my cheeks, and yanked -- he was so muscled
and so outraged I felt he might rip
my whole face off. Then I realized
that was exactly what he was trying to do. 

And it came to me: I was one of his keepers,
his birth and the birth of his sister
had put me on earth a second time,
with the duty this time to protect them
and to help them to love themselves,
And yet here I was, locked in solidarity
with a bunch of adults against my own child,
hee-hawing away, all of us, without asking
if, underneath, we weren't striking back, too late,
at our own parents, for their humiliations of us.

I gulped down my laughter and held him and
apologized and commiserated and explained and then
things were set right again, but to this day it remains
loose, this face, seat of superior smiles,
on the bones, from that hard yanking.

Shall I publish this story from long ago
and risk embarrassing him? I like it
that he fought back, but what's the good,
now he's thirty-six, in telling the tale
of that mortification when he was four?

Let him decide. Here are the three choices.
He can scratch his slapdash check-mark,
which makes me think of the rakish hook
of his old high school hockey stick,
in whichever box applies:

_Tear it up.
_Don't publish it but give me a copy.
_OK, publish it, on the chance that somewhere someone
   survives of all those said to die miserably every day for lack
   of the small clarifications sometimes found in poems.

This poem has a personage in it who evidently wishes to be included in the social life of poetry, and at the same time who wishes to go off by himself and write.  And the poem is called "Dinner Party."  Some of it is a little difficult to follow, perhaps, but most of it, I guess, is okay. 

 "Dinner Party"  
In a dream, as in a dream,
they sit around a round
table of them, sorry.

"Dinner Party"  

			1
In a dream, as in a dream,
They sit around a round
Table, seven of them, friends
of each other and of me, too,
including two of my oldest
and closest. They look like
a bunch so loving they have
made it into paradise, as, in fact,
in life, they actually have-so far,
Aristotle would have us add.
Chunks of tiny sakras, bright
with the light drained from
the worldly sky, fulge from
the tips of the waxen stalagmites
like heads of salamanders
that have wiggled themselves
into existence. At the table
they talk a kind of talk
I know I don't know, sometimes
they smile it, sometimes chuckle
to each other their arrays
of oral finery. At these moments
their ears bunch up in the somewhat
bizarre natural screwiness
of ears at any sudden thrill.
  		
		2
In space as yet untracked
by feet of flies, still unpurged
by Pontic waters or by the Ajax
of the love of things earthly,
they look up, and smile.
'This empty chair. It's for you.
Come.' O my dears. Yes, except
of course I'm only dreaming you,
the impossibility of you, of being
one of you. I can't. They take
the straitjacket off. So what?
The lunatic continues to hug himself.
Across the table I clink
eyeballs with several of you.
Space sings. My ears gaggle. Why?
I'm making you up, as I glidder
through the human dream.
Sometimes, rising from my desk
thick with discarded wretched
beginnings, the only way
I know I'm alive is
my toe- and fingernails grow.
O what I could have written! Maybe
will have written . . . Tonight
I will work late, then bed,
then up, then . . . then we'll see.
By then the busgirls and busboys
may have already come and lapsed
me into the lapping waters of ever
more swiftly elapsing time, and then
sat me down propped up on a chair
alone with knife, fork, and spoon
and many bright empty glassfuls of desire.

Well, here's a, here's a poem in a kind of form that  I -- I can't say I invented the form, because it's really been invented by playwrights, I guess; just two people talking to each other.  It's called "Conversation" for Maud.  So I'll just pause between the voices.  

		For Maud

-How old?

-It was completely inadvertent.
I was more or less, sorry.

-It was completely inadvertent.
it was more or less late afternoon
and I came over a hilltop
and smack in front of me was the sunset.

-Couldn't you have turned around and gone back?

-Wherever you turn, a window
in a childhood house fills with fire.

-Remember the pennies we put on the tracks,
how the train left behind only the bright splashes?

-Everything startles with its beauty
when assigned value has been eradicated,
especially if the value assigned is one cent.

-Does the past ever get too heavy to lug around?

-If your rucksack is too full it could
wrestle you down backwards.

-Does it ever get lighter?

-Yes, when so-called obsolete words start
falling off the back end of the language.

-Is it easier to figure things out when you're old?

-I once thought so. Once I said to myself,
"If I could sit in one place on earth
and try to understand, it would be here."

-Nice thought.

-Yes, but where was I when I thought it?

-Where do you think you might have
ended up if you had turned around?

-Where the swaying feet of a hanged man
would take him, if he were set walking, nobody knows.

-Maybe only half of you is a hanged man.

-An individual conscious ness would be much
more dangerous if it had more than one body.

-Do you feel a draft?

-It could be a lost moment, unconnected
with earth, just passing through.

-Or did I forget to shut the front door?

-Maybe a window exploded.

-Have you noticed the light bulb in the cellar
blows about every two months?

-When ordinary things feel odd
and odd things normal, be careful.

-I like it best when everything's
doing what it's supposed to.

-Kissers kiss, roofers roof, matter matters.

-Don't forget to call your friend in Des Moines.

-I called him. He said he's feeling good.
He said he had just finished eating an orange.

-Where would you like to be just now?

-I'd like to be at McCoy Stadium
watching a good game of baseball. And you?

-Me, too. I like it when there's a runner on third.
At each pitch he hops for home
then immediately scurries back.

-If it's a wild pitch, he hovers
a moment to be sure it's really wild
and then is quick-like a tear,
with a tiny bit of sunlight inside it.

-Why the bit of sunlight?

-It would be his allotment of hope.

There's a poem here I'm not going to read, but I mention it because there's some French in it, and I need to have the advice of a French speaker.  So if any one of you is a French speaker -- a fluent and native French speaker -- perhaps you could see me about this; consult with me about this poem, at the end of the reading.  

This poem is called "How Could She Not," and it is written in memory of Jane Kenyon, 1947-1995.  

"How Could She Not"  

The air glitters. Overfull clouds
slide across the sky. A short shower,
its parallel diagonals visible
against the firs, douses and then
refreshes the crocuses. We knew
it might happen one day this week.
Out the open door, east of us, stand
the mountains of New Hampshire.
There, too, the sun is bright,
and heaped cumuli make their shadowy
ways along the horizon. When we learn
that she died this morning, we wish
we could think: how could it not
have been today? In another room,
Kiri Te Kanawa is singing
Mozart's Laudate Dominum
from far in the past, her voice
barely there over the swishings of scythes,
and rattlings of horse-pulled
mowing machines dragging
their cutter bar's little reciprocating
triangles through the timothy.

This morning did she wake
in the dark, almost used up
by her year of pain? By first light
did she glimpse the world
as she had loved it, and see
that if she died now, she would
be leaving him in a day like paradise?
Near sunrise did her hold loosen a little?

Having these last days spoken
her whole heart to him, who spoke
his whole heart to her, might she not
have felt that in the silence to come
he would not feel any word
was missing? When her room filled
with daylight, how could she not
have slipped under a spell, with him
next to her, his arms around her, as they
had been, it may then have seemed,
all her life? How could she not
press her cheek to his cheek,
which presses, which presses itself to hers
from now on? How could she not
rise and go, with sunlight at the window,
and the drone, fading, deepening, hard to say,
of a single-engine plane in the distance,
coming for her, that no one else hears?"

[ Percy Bysshe ] Shelley.  It often is said that it doesn't matter what wreckage a great artist of any sort leaves behind, provided that artist achieves the great work.  And Shelley had, I think, that kind of an idea of himself.  And so I'm going to read this poem, which kind of sort of perhaps illustrates the limitations of that point of view.  

[ "Shelley" ]

When I was twenty the one true
free spirit I had heard of was Shelley,
Shelley, who wrote tracts advocating
atheism, free love, the emancipation
of women, and the abolition of wealth and class,
a lively version of Plato's Symposium,
lyrics on the bliss and brevity 
of romantic love, and complex 
poems on love's difficulties, Shelley
 who, I learned later--perhaps
almost too late--remarried Harriet,
then pregnant with their second child,
and a few months later ran off with Mary,
already pregnant with their first, bringing
along Mary's stepsister Claire,
who very likely also became his lover,

and in this malaise ‡ trois, which Shelley
said would be "a paradise of exiles,"
they made their life, along with the specters 
of Harriet, who drowned herself in the Serpentine,
and Mary's half sister Fanny, who, fixated 
on Shelley, killed herself, and with the spirits 
of adored but neglected children 
conceived almost incidentally
in the pursuit of Eros-Harriet's
Ianthe and Charles, denied to Shelley
and sent out to foster parents; Mary's
Clara, dead at one; her Willmouse, dead at three,
 Elena, the baby in Naples, almost surely
Shelley's own, whom he "adopted" but then
 left behind, dead at one and a half,
and Allegra, Claire's daughter by Byron,
whom Byron packed off to the convent
at Bagnacavallo at four, dead at five-

and in those days, before I knew
any of this, I thought I followed Shelley,
who thought he followed radiant desire.

So I'm going to conclude with a poem called, a poem called "Why Regret?"  

Didn't you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn't it a revelation to waggle
from the estuary all the way up the river,
the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,
the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?
Didn't you almost shiver, hearing book lice
clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old
Webster's New International, perhaps having just
eaten out of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
What did you imagine lay in store anyway 
at the end of a world where the sub-substance is
glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn't it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
broke open and the imago, the true adult,
somersaulted out and took flight, seeking
the swarm, mouth-parts vestigial,
alimentary canal come to a stop,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova took up the platter
of linguine in squid's ink and slid the stuff off the platter

I felt very much regret that he did so, because he was quite hungry and would have liked to sit down and eat it with his beloved.  I couldn't get away with it; I have to admit, the last page is missing.

[ laughter ]  

Female Speaker: 
"Why Regret?"

Galway Kinnell: 
"Why Regret?" yes.

Female Speaker: 
"Why Regret?"

Galway Kinnell: 
"Why Regret?"  How could that be?  Oh, I found it.  

[ laughter ]

Or when Casanova took up the platter
of linguine in squid's ink and slid the stuff
out the window, telling his startled companion,
"The perfected lover does not eat."
As a child, didn't you find it calming to imagine
pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn't you glimpse in the monarchs
what seemed your own inner blazonry
flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren't you reassured to think these flimsy
hinged beings, and then their offspring,
and then their offspring's offspring, could
navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn't it outdo the pleasures of a brilliant concert
to wake up in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

Thank you.  

[ applause ]

[ end of transcript ]


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