Well, I'll read one more in this vein
and make a little turn on the process.
Several autumns ago, students, where I teach,
came up to my office and said, we
have a project for the weekend we
think you should take part in.
I'm a veteran teacher.
I didn't flee, nor did I say yes.
I said, what is it?
They said, it's a peace walk downtown Portland.
I saw immediately that's right.
So I went down and I wrote this as a kind of documentary.
At that time, there was a strike at The Oregonian newspaper.
Everyone in the world seemed was testing atomic weapons, weapons
that are very much including the United States.
This is the account, "Peace Walk".
"We wondered what our walk should mean,
taking that on march quietly.
The sun stared at our signs--
'Thou shalt not kill.'
Men by a tavern said, those foreigners
to a woman with a fur but turned away, like an elevator going
down, there look at us.
Along a curb, their signs lined across a picket line
stopped and stared the whole route to the street at ours--
unfair.
Above our heads, the sound truck blared by the park
under the autumn trees.
It said that love could fill the atmosphere.
Occurred, slow, the other fallout.
Unseen on islands everywhere, fall out falling unheard.
We held our poster up to shade our eyes.
At the end, we just walked away; no one
was there to tell us where to leave the signs."
[APPLAUSE]
A point I wanted to make about this
was, once the most impressive person
I ever heard talk about writing was J. Frank Dobie.
And he said, I remember, is making this point.
It seems from outside as if the problem
is to get things to put in.
But the problem after you've been added for a long time,
if you really go at it for a while.
The problem is what to leave out.
And in this peace walk, of course,
millions of possibilities are present in any documentary
like this.
But I remember one, especially enticing element,
just for an illustration.
The person, a student, apparently standing ahead
of me, probably a Portland State College student,
had in his hip pocket.
While we were listening to the soundtrack,
he had a paperback edition - the works of Aristotle.
And I thought it would be very good to get that in my poem,
somehow, but I couldn't figure out how;
or I just use that as an example.
I didn't know how to do it.