I just don't want the poems to be taken
in a purely negative sense.
So we'll start out with what's probably the starkest poem
in the book, I think.
It's a poem called "Creative Writing."
I was--
[LAUGHTER]
--which is a stark situation, right?
I was teaching a creative writing
class at a small university up in Portland and--
it's a Catholic University and it's
a small university and a relatively conservative
university and the students tend to be
fairly-- not conservative, just simply naive in certain ways.
And in teaching creative writing,
which involves so much--
some kind of a self-realization or exploring oneself,
honestly, it's terribly difficult to do with students
who not only have never done this,
but don't particularly want to or don't have the groundwork
to.
So I decided that I would assign my class a death poem to write,
a poem involving their own deaths.
And I did the assignment at the same time.
Talks about the relationship with the class too.
"Creative Writing."
The heart is a violent muscle.
It opens & shuts.
The subject is death.
The subject is also laughter, the bravery
of girls, nine in a row.
In each face a hole opens.
Nine tiny stars of nervousness spin languidly out.
Sweethearts, death is blind, he'll
run up & down your bodies.
Death, with a dog's face, goes running
through the Women's Dorm.
He has neither breasts nor jewelry.
The counselors run in his shadow, shouting Here,
we're all Christians here!
In the old country, everybody was Jewish.
Everybody had the smell of clothes soaked in a hot tub
and they learn to lament the fallen, the falling, the about
to be born.
Birth was painful, a long vibration
like the intake of breath after laughter.
I don't want to trouble you.
You're entering history.
Your flesh is the moon's, gradual & broken.
Those boys are no consolation.
They'll circle you, inscrutable calligraphy,
with no place to land.
I'm going to think about death until my mouth runs.
I'm going to look at death with a face terrible as his own.
I don't want to scare you.
After death there are two alternatives, both heartless,
memory and forgetfulness.