Well, I come from far away.
Oregon.
I want to read an Oregon poem, "In The Oregon Country".
From old Fort Walla Walla and the Klickitats
to Umpqua near Port Orford, stinking fish tribes
massacred our founders, the thieving whites.
Chief Rotten Belly slew them at a feast,
Kamiakin riled the Snakes and Yakimas, all spurted arrows
through the Cascades west.
Those tribes became debris on their own lands:
Captain Jack's wide face above the rope, his Modoc women
dead with twitching hands.
The last and the most splendid, Nez Percé Chief Joseph,
fluttering eagles through Idaho, dashed his pony-killing
getaway.
They got him.
Repeating rifles bored at his head and in one
fell look Chief Joseph saw the game out of that spiral
mirror all explode.
Back of the Northwest map their country goes,
mountains yielding and hiding fold
on fold, gorged with yew trees that were good for bows.
In a way, I have my comeuppance this program
for slighting diction earlier, because I
feel an exuberance about words.
So I take back part of what I said.
Sometimes it's just fun.
I guess fun is the word.
At least you're engaged in something.
Reverberating just with sound.
And there are words that have--
that are poems from their syllables.
And I want to say one other thing,
since we're all from the West.
When I wrote this, I formed it so it has sort of a rhyme.
Well, at least, Klickitats, whites, east, west, lands,
hands.
Then I came to an emergency.
There's a line that says, the last and the most splendid,
Nez Percé.
Well, there is this little accent, you know.
"Nay Persay," perhaps.
So I put it in very carefully when
I sent it to an Eastern editor, who took the poem.
And I've often wondered whether he knew how to pronounce Nez
Percé.
And if he did know how, maybe he would
have thought it wasn't pure enough to publish.
I don't know.