^M00:00:01 >> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. >> Please welcome the Librarian of Congress, Dr. James H. Billington. ^M00:00:18 [ Applause ] ^M00:00:28 >> Dr. James H. Billington: Thank you very much. Good evening and welcome. For the past 25 years it's been my real honor and privilege to appoint the librarian, well, Poet Laureate Consultant. You can see what's on my mind here. [laughter] For the past 25 years I've appointed the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Each laureate has broadened the Library's support of poetry and shown anew how poems deepen our lives. Last summer I asked Philip Levine to become our 18th Poet Laureate. I looked at dozens of nominated poets and read scores of compelling poems during the selection process. It was tough work but somebody has to do it. [laughter] So, Mr. Levine and his work really stood out. He's one of America's most celebrated writers. His honors include Pulitzer Prize, two National Book awards, two National Book Critics' awards, Circle Awards and memberships in both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, but ultimately I chose Mr. Levine because of the way his poems give voice to Americans who I would otherwise never have heard from. You heard of but you [inaudible] heard from in the sense he has widened not just the audience for poetry but the subjects that poetry can be written about is [inaudible] aspect of American life and experience. So, Americans who get often lost in figures or report, statistics and abstract discussions, people whose heroic struggles are part of our national story but they'll often find the unique voice let alone the special voice that poetry brings. So, I believe we as a people honor the value of hard work and we see in that a dignity that binds us all. Mr. Levine's poems they represent hard work but they remind me of the work we all do to contend with the world and try to make it better in whatever way we can because poems do not romanticize or gloss over but they indeed tell the simple truth. The truth that comes out of faith and community and ultimately in our country. I was happy to see that Mr. Levine's laureateship has resonated with so many Americans. It was a success from the very beginning this announcement of his appointment was covered in hundreds of newspapers and websites and afterward his poetry collections quickly sold out. Now over the course of the past 9 months, Mr. Levine has embraced the public nature of the role reading and speaking at venues across the United States and Canada. His opening reading as laureate in this auditorium last October was one of the most memorable that I have witnessed. If you missed it, I urge you to visit the Library's Poetry and Literary Center website and check it out. Tomorrow Mr. Levine will take more advantage of the Library's technological resources and outreach by participating in a video conference with schools and libraries in 9 different states around the country. Tonight, however, we're lucky enough to experience Mr. Levine in person. He will honor the longstanding tradition of concluding his term and the Library's literary season with a lecture. He is uniquely equipped to add to this tradition in addition to his 20 volumes, 20 collections of poetry, he has published also 3 excellent [inaudible] books, Don't Ask, a collection of interviews, as well as So Ask, essays, conversations and interviews and The Bread of Time towards an autobiography. His closing lecture tonight is titled, "My Forgotten Poets." In it, he will lay claim to poets long forgotten by history who had a profound impact on him as he was just developing his craft. Mr. Levine has talked about championing forgotten poets since the beginning of his appointment and his lecture tonight will show by example how we must each make and celebrate our own canon. To love poetry is to continually seek out poems we have not yet read and experience while returning to and appreciating poems that have since shaped our sensibilities raised our imaginational horizons and also given us the beauty of language. This lecture also points to a signature strength of Mr. Levine, his great dedication and generosity. During his tenure I've seen time and again the ways he has served poetry at the Library and connected powerfully with people he meets. We are proud he's joined our great lineage of consultants and poet laureates as a historic exemplar of the art. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming someone I'm honored and humbled to call the Poet Laureate of the United States of America. Philip Levine. ^M00:06:05 [ Applause ] ^M00:06:29 >> Philip Levine: Well, now the work starts. [laughter] Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Billington. I'd like to thank James Billington and Rob Casper especially for their help and guidance in this and for the good time I've had and for the warm welcome and regard and it's been a lot of fun here and in other places as well. Yes, just before I came here to this room a woman was saying how much she enjoyed that reading that I gave in October because it was so funny. [laughter] Unfortunately, this is not so funny so you'll have to bear with my serious side, which I usually hide although you can find it in my poems. This is called, "My Lost Poets," and it reaches back. I composed my first poems in the dark. In fact, in the double dark. That is at night in a small woods that only the moon lit and also totally without the guidance or knowledge or light if you will of great or good or even mediocre poetry. In truth, I never thought of these early compositions as poems. I never thought of them as anything but what they were, secret little speeches addressed to the moon when the moon was visible and when the moon was not visible to all those parts of creation it crowded around and above me as well as those parts that alluded me; the parts I had no name for, no notion of except for the fact they were listening. I was 14 years old and living for the first time on the outskirts of my city, Detroit, in an almost completely undeveloped area that's still contained the trees and untended undergrowth a boy could transform in his imagination to an untamed wilderness. If you stood in the crotch of a copper beach and inhaled the thick atmosphere after rain or just before rain and closed your eyes, you might come to believe you were in that fabled garden we were given and later lost and you might want to speak to all the wonders of our human inheritance. You might even want to say thanks for being a creation in a world of other creations. You might want no longer to be alone and misunderstood and for that you needed poetry. Sadly enough I did not know poetry although it was on hand. Had I gone to the book shelf in our tiny study at home I could have taken down a volume of Robert Service and read in galloping rhythmic lines how a plucky boy no older than I killed his [inaudible] tormenter, a sadistic major. Or better still my mother's favorite poet, Francis Thompson, whose Hound of Heaven she would declaim on nights the phone didn't ring or she had no gentleman callers. How she loved those lines. I fled them down the nights and down the days, I fled them down the arches of the years, I fled them down the labryinthian ways of my own mind and in the midst of tears I fled from him in under running laughter. That flight goes on, "down Titanic glooms of chasmed fears," for a couple hundred more lines and ends finally in an embrace. I've been hearing the poem since I was 7 or 8 and it wasn't getting any better. [laughter] Boys that age are tough critics and savage when it comes to the taste of their parents. If that was poetry, I didn't need it. What were my models for my dark time Psalms? Let me describe my compositions. They were Whitmanian without the benefit of Whitman. [laughter] That good, gray, gay poet was not taught in the public schools of Detroit at least not in those I attended and no living poet was taught not even the poet laureate of Michigan. I referred to our newspaper poet, Edgar Guest, who gave us the immortal off quoted lines, "it takes a heap of living in a house to make a home." [laughter] Somehow the people's poet as he was then called never made the snooty anthologies. Those works still appears in the Readers Digest. Who was taught in the public schools I attended? We memorize a 60-line passage from the prologue to the Canterbury Tales and also stunning passages from Macbeth, but you had to have the genius of John Keats to accept such giants as an influence and even at 14 I knew I was not a genius. Let me be clear. I had no idea that I was writing poetry and, of course, I wasn't. So let me put it another way. No notion that I was trying to write poetry. I began this solitary in the dark process which would last some years without its ever occurring to me that I was attempting poetry. I simply had no name for what I was doing, but even without a category to place these experiments in I found them incredibly satisfying. At the time I knew exactly why they thrilled me. I had discovered a voice within the self I had no idea had been there. A voice that could speak of all the things I would never have dared share with anyone, a voice to try to consider the value of being alive, the sense of what it was to be alive. Not so much as Philip Levine or any other Levine or any other Philip just to be alive. Everything I composed was joyous as though there were not a skeptical thought in my mind. Yet, in my daily dealings with the world, I was a teenager, a skeptical at times even cynical teenager just as most of you were all those years ago if you were alive all those years ago. [laughter] I did not then know that the work ahead, the writing of poetry, would take years that what I had become almost by chance in the crotch of a copper beach would become the work of my lifetime. What I would labor to perfect for 70 years now and always fail to reach perfection. Nor did I know that in order to bring that work to any satisfactory level I would need help from sources I did not know existed. Not all teenagers are skeptical or cynical. As a somewhat older teenager, 19 to be exact in the Spring of 1947, I attended my first poetry reading. It was held in a small room in Webster Hall of Wayne University and it began at exactly a few minutes after 1PM. The readers were university students and two faculty members. I had seen an announcement of the event in the school newspaper and my curiosity was aroused. I remember almost nothing of the event except for one line of verse and one fact. The fact, there existed in the school library something called the Miles Poetry Room, which held a significant collection of 20th Century poetry. Once the Library of Theodore Miles, an inspiring poet and former faculty member at Wayne who died while serving in the Navy in the Pacific during World War II. The line that I remembered, "when in a mirror, love redeems my eyes." The opening line of a poem recited by its author, Bernard Strempek. "When I a mirror, love redeems my eyes." Bernard Strempek was a tall, loose limbed boy who looked no older than 15. The recitation was in a voice the likes of which I had never heard in all my wanderings through Detroit. How to describe it? A cross between a high tenor version of Cary Grant and the call to arms of a mad warrior in a great human struggle. A John Brown or Joan of Arc voice. Whoever this Strempek was he was overpoweringly serious about what he regarded as poetry. Why that one line I was struck by this boy's willingness to openly acknowledge his narcissism, and I loved the music and movement of the line, the way the [inaudible] began surprisingly and turned to a flow that crashed on the shore of the word love. I had never attempted such mastery of rhythm. In my writing, I was concerned with narrative and imagery. I so worried Stempek's single line in my head that the rest of that poem and the poems of the other poets passed as noise. I was too shy or too humbled by these brazen poets to attempt to speak to anyone. I went home totally confused by the experience. The next afternoon I decided to visit this new discovery, the Miles Poetry Room. At the time the university library was housed in the 2nd floor of [inaudible] stately four-story gothic that once housed central high school before there was a university in Detroit. The room itself was a comfortable one with high windows that looked out on a good deal of auto and truck traffic but a quiet room nonetheless. On that first occasion, I encountered a single reader while immediately recognized as young Strempek. I picked a book up from the shelves. There were literally thousands of books and pretended to read. Suddenly Strempek turned to me and said, "Listen to this. I've discovered a new master." He read from a slender collection, "My brother came, the wounded," and he paused. "What an amazing opening," he said. "Why didn't I think of it?" [laughter] I was surprised to discover his speaking voice was the same as his formal presentation voice. The same original accent, the same trembling seriousness that seemed to say, yes, I am a poet, don't fool with me. [laughter] "This is a discovery for me," he said. "You have any brothers?" I did. "Then this poem was written for you," and he handed me the book as he rose to leave. "Abel". This is the poem he had been reading and I will read to you. "Abel" by Demetrios Capetanakis written in English by a Greek. "My brother, Cain, the wounded, liked to sit brushing my shoulder by the staring water of life or death, in cinemas half-lit by scenes of peace that always turned to slaughter. He liked to talk to me. His eager voice whispered the puzzle of his bleeding thirst or prayed to me not to make my final choice unless we had a chat about it first. And then he chose the final pain for me. I do not blame his nature; he's my brother. Now what you call the times our love was free would be at any time but rather the ageless ambiguity of things which makes our life mean death, our love be hate. My blood that streams across the bedroom sings, "I am my brother opening the gate!" At the time I had no idea this poem would stay with me for the rest of my life as would the memory of that encounter with this original and generous young man. I called him a boy earlier and he was. He was 16 years old majoring in French, which he spoke fluently. When later I asked him why French? I got a one-word answer, Rimbaud, for the boy genius of French poetry was his idol and along with [inaudible] the model for his poetry in his life. Who was Capetanakis? And why did this poem stick to me for over 60 years? He was born in Smyrna in 1912, studied economics at the University of Athens and later received a doctorate in philosophy from Heidelberg. He came to England in '39 on a scholarship from Cambridge and almost immediately became a protege of Ida Sitwell. Whatever small recognition Capetanakis got it was due to the efforts of the writer and editor John Layman, who became his close friend and published in his magazine new writing. After the poet's death of leukemia in '44, Layman brought out a collection of his writing in English under the title, "Capetanakis, A Greek Poet in England." The volume is largely essays on literary figures including Rimbaud, [inaudible], as well as translations of contemporary Greek poets and 16 of his original poems written in English. To answer [inaudible] question 60 some years later, yes, I have brothers and one is a twin, an identical twin brother, who still resembles me physically and perhaps in other ways, but I don't think one needs a brother to be struck by the poem "Abel". In fact, all one needs is an ear to hear it and the knowledge that brother killing brother is one of the oldest and saddest truths of the human mythology and history. At 19 I had never heard or read a poem that recreated a mythic character's speech in contemporary English. Not only does Abel use the words I might use if I were more fluent and accomplished, he says things I might say for I also saw those scenes of peace that always turned to slaughter and the feelings of that day or for that matter the films of this day. At the time I had recently stumbled into modern and modernist poetry so the whole question of form with utterly new and confusing to me. So much of what I read was inspiring and incomprehensible that I was both lost and found. Found that in the language of Yeats, Elliott, Pound, Crane, Dylan Thomas was thrilling and lost when I attempted to discern what they were writing about. I had adopted a mantra I had found in Elliott. One understands a poem before one understands a poem. One gets it in the gut and the rational understanding eventually follows. Of course he didn't exactly write that but that was the useful and self-serving translation by Levine. [laughter] ^M00:23:34 It might have been true for Elliott but it wasn't true for me. Forty years later I still don't understand half those poems. The poem "Abel" however puzzled me not at all. It was written during the dark days of World War II in a country under siege and it finds the root of the horror and eternal and intimate relationship in which love turns to hate. For Capetanakis the wounded one is Cane, the victim of his own circumstance and nature. The tragedy of the Book of Genesis is reacted in a bedroom, my bedroom or yours in 1940 or tomorrow. As far as I can recall, what I reacted to 65 years ago was the language and the imagery. The phrasing for the most part appeared to be casual, almost off hand but the diction is so precisely there that I found myself memorizing the poem effortlessly and at first believing the poem was transparent only later questioning what the conclusion could possibly mean with its blood that sings and the anthem that it sings in the domestic setting, I am my brother opening the gate. I learned to love the mystery of it. I still love the mystery of it. I also learn to take pleasure in the mystery and not to constantly demand an understanding of my world. To paraphrase Keats, "I was not beset with an irritable searching after final truths." The first true poet who mattered to me was Wilford Owen, the poet of the great war who died in action on the western front a week before the Armistice. My marvelous high school literature teacher, Mrs. Purperno [phonetic], one afternoon read the class Owen's poem, "Arms and the Boy." This took place in the autumn of '44 and most of the boys in class expected to be drafted as soon as they graduated. How Mrs. Purperno divined that I was a secret poet I don't know but for some reason she asked me after class if I would like to borrow the book over the weekend. She would let me take it if I promised to wear white gloves while reading it. [laughter] Huh, I said? "It's a metaphor, Philip," she said. "Don't spill soup on it." [laughter] Why did Owen's poems matter so much? I suppose it was the first time I had encountered in print attitudes like my own toward that war or any war. Only in secret did I admit to myself that I lived in dread. At that time a shameful dread of the waiting combat. We were all taught to feel quite differently, that it might be a privilege to fight and die for our country. That was the constant background music to our coming of age except in the classrooms of plucking Mrs. Purperno, who seemed determined to ready us for lives we might actually live. Owen, however, had no influence on what I wrote at 17. His often exalted diction was not mine, the wizardry of his craft was utterly beyond me and in the poems there was such wisdom earned through experience I was simply left in awe. In describing the inner life of one who has survived the hell of war, he wrote, "Alive is not vital over much, dying not mortal over much nor sad nor proud nor curious at all. He cannot tell old men's placidity from his. If I ever knew this, I learned it from Owen's poetry. Owen, of course, is not a lost poet. Even after his mental breakdown in 1917 then called shell shock and before he went back to the front to die, his poems had been read and praised by two official soldier poets of the day, Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon, who was the more celebrated of the two, tells us in his memoir that he knew immediately Owen's war poems were better than his own. Today Owen is regarded as the greatest war poet in our language. I was obsessed by the poetry of war especially the English poetry of the two wars because perhaps one of the few facts I knew regarding my father's life -- he died when I was 5 -- was that he had enlisted in the English Army in 1916 although why he did this I never learned. In the Miles Room, I went hunting for more war poetry. The books were everywhere in a great jumble. There was no catalog to tell where anything else. Since I had no idea what names or books to look for, I found the situation comfortable. I just worked my way through the shelves and the piles left on tables and chairs and found what I wanted or didn't want and then I made a most singular discovery, a tiny, cheaply printed, badly bound wartime English edition of poetry with an astonishing title, "Ha Ha Among the Trumpets", a line I later learned from the Book of Job describing the cry of the war horse as he charges into battle. The book was published by Allen and [inaudible] of London with an introduction by Robert Graves. In fact, there were two copies and neither had ever been checked out. [laughter] One I'm ashamed to admit is now in my study in Fresno. [laughter] I admit this in a library. I'm nuts, you know. [laughter] It was authored by a Welsh poet, Alun Lewis, who died in Burma before the book was published in 1945. All these years later the poet is still largely unknown in our country. Like Owen, Lewis was an Army Lieutenant. Like Owen, he chose to go to war only to discover he did not belong there, no one belonged there and like Owen he failed to survive the war but his poetry is nothing like Owen's or for that matter any of the well-known poets of the Great War, Sassoon, Graves, Rosenberg, Ivor Gurney, for one thing it does not contain scenes of combat and slaughter. For another it's largely a demotic poetry and at its best personal and intimate. For some reason he had felt obligated to enlist to defend his England just as Edward Thomas had done 20 years before and so deprived us of more of his great poems. Like Edward Thomas, he was well married, but unlike Thomas he lived long enough to regret his decision to enlist. His first foreign and final posting was India and it was from there he wrote a letter home defining his spiritual and ethical situation in two brief telling sentences. "Acceptance seems so spiritless, protest so vain, in between the two I live." Though his work is humble he's able to amass enormous rhythmic power that can transform his usual voice into one of vernacular power and mystery. He was Welsh and perhaps he carried in his blood or his memory the music of a Bartic [phonetic] tradition. You can hear it in his astonishing poem, "Song", on seeing dead bodies floating off the Cape, and I'll read it. "Song". A woman is speaking in the poem. The first month of his absence I was numb and sick and where he's left his promise life did not turn or kick the seed, the seed of love was sick. The second month my eyes were sunk in the darkness of despair, and my bed was like a grave and his ghost was lying there and my heart was sick with care. The third month of his going I thought I heard him say, "Our course deflected slightly on the thirty-second day," the tempest blew his words away. And he was lost among the waves. His ship rolled helpless in the sea. The fourth month of his voyage he shouted grievously "Beloved, do not think of me." The flying fish like kingfishers skim the sea's bewildered crests, the whales blow steaming fountains, the seagulls have no nests where my lover sways and rests. We never thought to buy or sell this life that blooms or withers in the leaf and I'll not stir so he sleeps well though cell by cell the coral reef builds an eternity of grief. But oh the drag and dullness of myself, the turning seasons wither in my head. All this slowness, all this hardness, the nearness that is waiting in my bed. The gradual self-effacement of the dead. The death the woman foresees is not an ordinary death. It is epic, as epic as her loss. The great seas and the beasts of the seas and the birds of the air witness it in a state of shock and yet life goes on as it must. Lewis says something amazing. He creates a dialogue between two lovers separated by thousands of miles and even further separated by their condition for one is living and one is dead, but of course, the only dialogue is in the head of the survivor who recreates his lover who then asks her to do exactly what she must but cannot do, forget him. But we know eventually she will with his help for it is already begun with the gradual self-effacement of the dead. The poem ends with a profound psychological insight for, in fact, the dead don't efface themselves, they don't need to, we do it for them. Without the least apology, Lewis has taken up the voice of a woman and assume the knowledge of her grief, her double grief for she is both barren and widowed. What might Alun Lewis had written I thought then and think now had war not devoured him? A few days later I caught my boy guru Strempek in the Miles Room and handed him the book open to "Song". Instead of reading it silently he stood and declaimed it almost entirely from memory for he scarcely looked at the book. When he had finished, the two readers present stood and applauded. [laughter] I discovered he read aloud the poems of others much better than his own work. [laughter] "There should be more of this in our poetry," he said, "especially in war poetry." I asked him what he meant by this and my mentor again said a single word, "tenderness." ^M00:36:24 I had never in my life known or even guessed there would be room for tenderness in great poetry, but the moment he used the word my mind began roving over the poems I knew best and, of course, he was right. Though he was right, too, there wasn't nearly enough. He asked me if I knew Lewis's poem, "Goodbye." I didn't. It's a soldier's love poem he said. I think I can do the final stanzas. Once again he declaimed from memory a poem that deals with the aftermath of a final night together in a rented room. Everything we renounce except ourselves. Selfishness is the last of all to go. Our size, our exhalations of the earth, our footprints leave a track across the snow. We made the universe to be our home. Our nostrils took the wind to be our breath, our hearts, our massive towers of delight we stride across the seven seas of death. Yet, when all is done you'll keep the emerald I place upon your finger in the street and I will keep the patches that you sewed on my own battle dress, my sweet. Bernard was quite for a moment and then he said, "Can you imagine one of us saying my sweet in a poem?" We just don't have the nerve. [laughter] The great poets can say anything. They can use any word. Curious it was that we never questioned the usefulness of hunting down poetry that suited our taste. Somehow we merely assumed that our immersion in poetry, true poetry, would benefit our own work as well as magically benefit us, our lives, our character, our sense of self. I never talked about this with the other poets who gathered once a month in the Miles Poetry Room for I was now an [inaudible] and in truth I have no idea how the others felt. It's very possible they were as naive as I. It was lovely to think I was becoming a better human being merely by pouring over great poetry and stealing everything that suited me and hiding it in my poems where any knowledgeable reader could see it. [laughter] At our meetings we read each other's work and except for Bernard we handled the poems of others very gingerly. I suspect we needed refuge in this huge, tough city so indifferent to our occupation. Bernard utterly sure of his future in literature said exactly what he believed and we let him get away with it. Perhaps we needed one brilliant and brainy brat to tell us where we were. The regulars at the monthly Miles meetings included 4 World War II vets, none of whom were students anymore, and one of whom, Robert Huff, had appeared regularly in Harper's poetry, the Atlantic. Another, Dudley Randall, would soon found a superb publishing house for poetry, the Broadside Press. Our one elderly sage was Dick Wherry [phonetic], a Wayne faculty member. The rest of us were students and it was to one of these, Ruby Teague, of Berea, Kentucky, I owed my discovery of the poetry of Naomi Replansky. I'm not sure where she found the poem she loaned me. It had been copied she told me from its presentation, "in a literary periodical." What she meant was she had typed it out for me. This was 1948 and 4 years would pass before Replansky would publish her first book, "Ring Song." Here is the title poem the one that Ruby handed me. "Ring Song." When that joy is gone for good, I move the arms beneath the blood. When the blood is running wild, I sew the clothing of a child. When that child is never born, I lean my breast against a thorn. When the thorn brings no reprieve, I rise and live, I rise and live. When I live from hand to hand, nude in the marketplace I stand. When I stand and am not sold, I build a fire against the cold. When the cold comes creeping around, I seek a warmer stamping ground. When that ground becomes too small, I come against a stony wall. When that wall is not to climb, I chalk on it a burning rhyme. When the ryhme can work so spell, I know the circle of my hell. When my hell does not destroy, I leap from ambush on my joy. Reading it 60 some years later I hear clearly why Ruby chose it and why it gave me such delight. Replansky does something I never dared to do. She writes in the shadow of a great poet, William Blake. She makes not the least effort to hide her allegiance. In his great poem, Auguries of Innocence, Blake uses the same couplet form to utter his truths. "The bat that [inaudible] close of eve has left the brain that won't believe. He who shall hurt the little wren shall never be beloved by men." Replansky has modeled her poem on exactly the right poem, Auguries of Innocence, for her Ring Song is an utterly innocent poem, an utterly original one. The child is alive in Replansky, alive and in control of the poem. She goes even farther. She marries Blake to surrealism. She must have known the work of David Gascoyne, then the most famous surrealist poet in our language. "The drums of the hospitals were broken like glass and glass were the faces in the last looking glass." The end of the quote. For flavor Replansky adds a sprig of Mother Goose. So this tough envisionary poem feels completely good natured. Auden [phonetic] was doing something similar in his ballad poems written in the 40s when Ring Song was also written, but Auden was one of the major stars in the ferment of poetry in English and the book Ring Song was the first book, a remarkable first book, nominated for the National Book Award but still a first book with the charm that first books often have with their lack of cohesion and any defense system as the poems fly off in different directions sometimes arriving at beauty and other times arriving at cliche. At that time, 1948, I do not believe I understood the perfect justice that Ruby Teague, a gracious, rural, southern Baptist should bring me the gift of a poem by Replansky, a New York Jewish leftist. The truth is Ruby was not who I thought she was. I was put off by her manners, her genteel speech, her looks. She turned out to be a warrior for human dignity and Replansky was her poet. Ruby was both surprised and delighted by my response. She had given this very copy to Bernard. Oh, yes, he had read it but he labeled it "kid stuff." I was more than a little surprised for with is obsession with French poetry he must have known at least some of the work of the surrealists of [inaudible] and Company. It turned out he did know their work, had once admired it, but his sensibility had matured. He actually used those words. [laughter] In fact, except for a [inaudible] he told me he had little use for 20th Century French poetry. Looking back on it I'm amazed we let Bernard play the role of Samuel Johnson. [laughter] Perhaps someone had to. He derived so much pleasure from his pronouncements it seemed churlish to deny him. By this time I knew he was playing a part. The boy poetry wonder and sage of the Motor City and the rest of us pretended to require his counsel and, of course, I now recognize he was laughing at himself and, of course, us. ^M00:45:54 A few days later Ruby brought me a second poem by Replansky clearly the work of the same poetic imagination and yet a remarkably different poem one that enacts a small drama before our eyes with characters formed out of nature and dreams. A tree, a river, a child, a word brought together by the poet for a singular ritual. The title is, "The Song that Went on During the Tragedy." "Let them now bother me," said the tree by the river. "Why did they bother me with their howling by the river? "Let her not carry me," said the child deep inside. "Why did she carry me with that sorrow deep inside?" "Let them not utter me," said the word in the throat. "Why does he utter me as though I blistered his throat? But he in his shouting and she in her fury they never heard how could they hear the word in the throat, the child deep inside the tree by the river?" In searching through the American poetry of Replansky's era I can find no other American poet who seems so powerfully able to incorporate the lessons of the best surrealist poets. In the late 1940s, most of us didn't even know it existed. Today, example, the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo [phonetic], is accepted as one of the greats of the last century but still no one other than Replansky has been able to employ his tools without sounding like a parody of the original or a stumbling, foolish imitator. Yet 60 years ago Replansky could do it and sound like no other poet alive. When there was 1 kiss against 10 curses and 1 loaf against 10 hungry and 1 hello against 10 goodbyes the odds stalk your crooked steps and you turn no corner without heart tightening and against 10 cannon you had 1 fist and against 10 winters you had 1 fire. Like her masters Blake and Vallejo, Replansky is an intensely political poet appalled by the cruelty, greed and corruption of the masters of nations and corporations, appalled and enraged. I was drawn first to her lyricism but I sense to have the rightness of her vision but though I absorbed her vision I was totally incapable of transforming it into poetry. I could with consummate ease rant and rant I unfortunately did in poems or pretend poems that thankfully no longer exist. [laughter] By the time I was 21 years of old I begin to think of myself as something of an accomplished poet. What I lacked among other things was a recognizable consistent voice for my poems. For the most part American poets make the search for a voice automatically. It's part of our native Yankee gift for marketing. [laughter] The straining active voice that will make one's poetry side utterly unlike the work of other poets and, hence, a unique commodity. It is something like the equivalent to sight another Detroit effort in the same direction of adding gigantic tail fins to our cars. [laughter] Like the tail fins it's a mistake. [laughter] When I read my own poetry loudly enough to myself, it was clear it was not pros. That it was not poetry was clear to most everyone else. [laughter] Fortunately the voice of my poems was in a constant stage of change. Years later I realized developing of voice before you knew what you needed to say was pointless at best self-defeating at worst. You could spend years trying to sound as lyrical as Edna St. Vincent Millay or [inaudible] Crane only to discover you wanted to write poetry incendiary enough to burn down General Motors at a Pentagon. I'm not talking about myself. I'm a lyrical sweet poet. [laughter] The Miles Poetry Room subscribed to a number of literary periodicals, several from the UK, and one of these I came upon a poet I had never heard of whose gumption and directness fascinated me. The work was musical enough but it did not aim at song but rather at speech. Not exactly everyday speech but something that could pass for the usual or since I'm lecturing the quotidian. At that moment American poetry was carrying on a brief adulterous affair with Dylan Thomas. [laughter] Who, of course, was carrying on any number of adulterous affairs. [laughter] Many of our practicing urban poets had suddenly discovered the Hayricks in Central Park, the meadows peppered with spotted horses, some heard owls swooping down at night on the Chicago Trade Mart. We seemed hypnotized by his brash lyricism and even brasher behavior. It was thrilling to suddenly awaken to an equally brash poet from England whose work was 180 degrees from Thomas's, work that verged on the unpoetical, poems that aspired to be hard and factual, at times even brutal and almost always sounding offhand and reckless. Let me read the first one that I read. "Simplify Me When I'm Dead" is the title. "Remember me when I am dead and simplify me when I'm dead. As the process of earth strip off the color and the skin, take the brown hair and the blue eyes and leave me simpler than at birth when hairless I can howling in as the moon came in the cold sky. Of my skeleton perhaps so stripped a learned man will say "He was of such a type and intelligence," no more. Thus when in a year collapse particular memories, you may deduce from the long pain I bore the opinions I held, who was my foe and what I left even my appearance but incidents will be no guide. Time's wrong way telescope will show a minute man ten years hence and by distance simplified. Through that lens see if I seem substance or nothing, of the world deserving mention or charitable oblivion not by momentary spleen or love into decision hurled leisurely arrive at an opinion. Remember when I am dead and simplify me when I am dead." This is a curious poem in spite of its subject and imminent death there is such calm at the center. A paragraph would go I spoke of its author as reckless. Yes, I believe that's the right word to describe the way without apology he charges into the matter of his death and then takes up his finality in such a factual manner you wonder if he's serious and, yes, he is serious, deadly and calmly serious. Does he truly want to be seen objectively as the little that's left when his history and even his flesh are stripped away? It would appear he does. "See if I seem substance or nothing," he asks "and if nothing, let it be nothing." One could take it as youthful bravado for the author Keith Douglas I read 60 some years ago in the contributor's note wrote that poem in 1941 when he was 21 exactly my age when I first read the poem. Poetry has a way of constantly humbling us it's acolytes, but young as he was he had to think seriously about his death for at the time he was a junior officer in the English Army training for service in the Middle East. Within 18 months he would serve in Palestine, be wounded, hospitalized, returned to service and then take part in the desert warfare in North Africa as a tank commander. That experience would soon find its way into his writing in a poem that had enormous impact on my work. The poem, "Vergissmeinnicht" German meaning "Don't forget me, forget me not." Vergissmeinnicht. "Three weeks gone and the combatants gone returning over the nightmare ground we found the place again and found the soldiers sprawling in the sun. The frowning barrel of his gun overshadowing. As we came on that day, he hit my tank with one like the entry of a demon. Look. Here in the gunpit spoil the dishonored picture of his girl who has put Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht, in a copybook gothic script. We see him almost with content, abased, and seeming to have paid and mocked at by his own equipment that's hard and good when he's decayed. But she would weep to see today how on his skin the swart flies move; the dust upon the paper eye and the burst stomach like a cave. For here the lover and killer are mingled who had one body and one heart and death who had the soldier singled has done the lover mortal hurt." Let me call this a tough poem and let me make it clear it is the toughness I admired 60 years ago and still admire and not the very neat for me far too neat conclusion. I can forgive him that conclusion you might well ask who the hell am I to forgive Keith Douglas? [laughter] The answer is no one. A reader and no more. The poem is a bit slipshod in its phrasing and its rhyming, but it survives whatever weaknesses it possesses because there is pure magic in the details in a dishonored picture of his girl, yes, his girl in the frowning barrel of his gun, in the copybook gothic script in that swart flies moving on the skin perhaps a descendent of the one Emily Dickinson heard buzzing as she died. There is magic in just that dust on the paper eye and in the cave of the burst stomach. After all that precise, frighteningly neutral rendering the poet has a right to poeticize, to speak of the marriage of the killer and the lover and conclude on the rhyme of one heart with the hideous mortal hurt. Pure genius. I was not surprised to discover that Douglas was also a visual artist and often accompanied his poems in his notebooks with drawings. By the way he died on the 3rd day of the Normandy invasion. "Simply [inaudible]," Bernard said in response to my presentation of Vergissmeinnicht. [inaudible]. I had never heard that term before. This was at the next meeting of the Miles poets. Ruby looked away just the least quick little shake of her head told me the poem had affected her but not in any way she welcomed. For perhaps the fifth time Ulysses Wardlaw [phonetic] said after I presented the poem, "Levine, you've got to get into Whitman." Of course Ulysses is absolutely right and I can't explain why I waited so long to discover our greatest poet. Perhaps I simply wasn't ready to absorb a vision as broad, challenging and profound as Whitman's. Perhaps I never would be. Perhaps that autumn day in 1949 I showed my disappointment for their failure to respond to my discovery. I can remember how I felt but not how I behaved. I know I did not rebuke them for by that time at age 22 an aspiring poet for almost 8 years I knew I needed them. Had I known then how quickly I would lose them, how surely they too would join the ranks of my lost poets I probably would have reacted differently. I would have been animated by the fear of losing them and lose them I did. In his early 30s, Bernard would die in an auto wreck and leave enough poetry for one tiny posthumous collection, a collection without that singular, naked line when in the mirror love redeems my eyes. A line that may live now only in this talk. Ruby would silence her own talent and delicate sensibility that gave us poetry. She who once wrote, "the bread I eat and call my own is coarse, cross-grained born of an old woman's sighs and groans it sleeps within me like a stone." Within 5 years she would be driven by the need to ease the suffering of others and so taken her talent and herself into the wilderness of Latin America and vanish. Unappreciated, unpublished, out of sync with the America of the 1950s the America of Jim Crow, the Ed Sullivan Show, Elvis and the politics of [inaudible] and Joseph McCarthy, Ulysses Wardlaw would be silenced. All his youth idealism and lyrical belief in our country would suffocate. Back then I didn't know just how much I needed them now how much they already had given me. I needed not merely their encouragement, their criticism, their intelligence and dedication and their soulfulness for these were powerfully soulful people, and their fellowship and our ancient discipline. I think more than anything I needed their belief that we would share in the singular glory of poetry. Where would I have been without that belief? Without Bernard, Ruby and Ulysses, my lost comrades whose words inspired me, whose belief in me kept me going. Where would I have been without all of them, without Capetanakis and his strange vision of our origins, without Anul Lewis and the song she hurdled in death's face, without Replansky and her righteous indignation, her struggles to resurrect the true Americas of William Blake and Cesar Vallejo, without the calm and surgical poems of Keith Douglas, without the dreams of all my lost or forgotten poets, my brothers and sisters in madness and glory who shared with me their faith in the power of the perfect words the words we knew as children and then forgot. Thank you. ^M01:03:35 [ Applause ] ^M01:04:17 >> Thank you again to our 18th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, Philip Levine, for a remarkable and stunning talk and a wonderful conclusion to the literary season here at the Library of Congress. We do have literary events coming up though as spring turns into summer. To find out more please visit our website at www.loc.gov/poetry. We hope that you will join us in the great hall for a reception and book signing. Mr. Levine will be happy to sign your books but we ask that you limit yourself to two signed copies so the line can move in an orderly fashion. Thank you again to our Poet Laureate and to all of you for coming out to hear him and his historic lecture, and we hope to see you again soon. ^M01:05:03 [ Applause ] ^M01:05:06 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^M01:05:15