[INTERPOSING VOICES]
This is real close up television.
OK.
I want to make a few announcements
before the reading.
Next Wednesday night in this auditorium,
poet named Robert Mezey will read,
that's Wednesday, February 18 at 8:30.
The following week, I guess, March 4th Wednesday, March 4th.
A New York poet by the name of Charles Simic will read.
And tonight, we have Mr. Jon Anderson.
Anderson is on a--
is here under the auspices of the Southwest creative writing
project, which is sponsored by the National
Endowment for the Arts.
Which means, he'll go on a tour for two weeks
reading poetry to high school students
all over the Southwest.
And new Claremont asked me to give you
some of the names of the people who'll
be reading on that program because also read here
or most of them.
Charles Simic, Ruth Stone, J.D. Reid, Jim Harrison,
William Meredith, W.S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Peter Wild,
and Louise Glück.
This is over a 12 month period, so you'll
see announcements about it.
OK.
Jon Anderson grew up-- was born in 1940,
grew up in Massachusetts, got a master's
of Fine Arts degree in poetry from the writers workshop
at the University of Iowa.
Taught in the graduate program there for a year
and has been teaching in the last two years
at the University of Portland in Portland, Oregon.
He has one out by the University of Pittsburgh press
called Looking For Jonathan, which
was the runner up in the United States of America contest 1967.
He has another book coming out in, I guess next fall
to be also by Pittsburgh to be called, Death and Friends.
He's-- Jon's one of my best friends,
so I don't really know what to say about him or I have too
much to say.
He-- the only thing I can think of
is that this latest book from which he'll probably
read most of his poems, the poems
are depressing I guess, that most of them are about death.
And he said to me once that he giving a reading I
think in Eugene, Oregon that he apologized before the reading
because he didn't want to depress the audience,
he was very hesitant to read them.
But there's also a great deal of compassion
in the poems, a open honesty, and ultimately I
think a joy in that.
So I give you Jon Anderson.
[APPLAUSE]
I'm not used to such large audiences for poetry readings.
Which gives me confidence because someone
is bound to be pleased.
I want to begin with a poem, which
is completely different from anything else that I'll read.
That I want to dedicate to Steve,
because it's a poem that comes out
of our common experience, our almost common experience.
Steve worked one summer when he was a student in the writers'
workshop up at the University of Iowa for Hallmark cards,
writing greeting card verse--
[LAUGHTER]
Which I guess nobody knows about here, right
[LAUGHTER]
But he was well paid and reasonably happy
and he told me confidentially that he
was pretty sure they had not used any of the verse
that he wrote.
[LAUGHTER]
So I thought when the next summer came along
that I would try to get a job there too, but both of us
had-- had won prizes in their [? Palma ?] contest
that they won every year.
And I'd won it for two years in a row, so I was very confident
and thought I was a shoo-in for it.
But to my surprise, they sent me up a writing test
to see how fit I was for writing greeting card verse.
And the upshot of it was, I did not get the job.
And discovered that writing greeting card verse
has an aesthetic of its own, which I did not really
understand.
[LAUGHTER]
For instance, I was directed as a part of the test
to write a poem, a birthday poem for a child.
And I wrote the poem and after I'd sent it off,
I showed it to a friend and he pointed out to me
that the theme of this poem seemed
to be that it was unnatural to grow older.
[LAUGHTER]
I hadn't written any rhymed verse for a long time,
the demands of it was such-- well,
this same friend was very amused by another one of the poems
that I wrote for this test and he copied it down,
and we had a falling out recently, and he sent it to me.
[LAUGHTER]