And lastly I very seldom write poems
from recounting personal experience directly.
Here's a fairly new poem and it's an exception to that.
I think the reason that I don't like to write poems
from experiences is when you write a poem you
not only recreate the experience,
you create something new about it and therefore you destroy
or I feel as if I destroy something of what
the real experience was.
In this case though, I've been finding myself
feeling very claustrophobic.
Partly through teaching partly through emotional circumstances
and things like that.
And I remembered very clearly in an emotional way and a place
where I desire to be a place that
reflected I suppose a kind of psychic freedom
at the time, which was a Little Bighorn called by the Indians
the Greasy Grass, the place where Custer was defeated.
Where my wife and I had stopped on the trip from Iowa City,
a long trip that we took camping out on the way from Iowa City
out to Portland.
What I liked about the place I think
what remains so strongly with me was
that a tremendous feeling of expansiveness relatively flat
somewhat rolling land high grass.
And you could just see just as far
as the horizon in every direction.
The poem is called, "Rosebud".
It's kind of a talky prosaic poem.
Basically recounts this experience
of the drive in a couple of things within it
particularly that place.
One other thing I should mention.
There's a Sioux holy man mentioned within the poem.
This is Black Elk.
Really gorgeous-- one of the most profound books
that I have ever read.
First, because he's a visionary and second
because he was an extremely human and tragic figure,
is the biography of a Sioux medicine
man by the name of Black Elk.
If anyone's interested in getting the book,
it's called Black Elk Speaks and it's
published by the University of Nebraska press.
He was a man who had visions when he was a child
and again when he was an adult of ways to--
mystic ways rituals to act out to save his people
from the White man, to recreate the land that they were
losing to recreate the buffalo.
During the ghost dances, the messianic movement
in the 1890s, the Indians were in such a state
about losing their old life.
Their culture has been totally destroyed.
They're in a far worse position than any other minority
group in this country I think.
There's nothing of their old culture is left essentially.
They were doing things like the government was providing them
with cattle on the reservations.
And they would instead of simply butchering and eating
the cattle, they would let the steers go one by one
and hunt them as they had the buffalo before.
There is something beautiful but very tragic in that.
They believed as a part of the ritual of the ghost dancing
in the 1890s which our government eventually put
down, stopped them from doing, that the land that the White
man had come to inhabit would move out from beneath them.
The Indians would rise up in the air, they, their families,
their possessions would rise up in the air.
The land would move out beneath them
and they would come down again in a new continent which
moved underneath them, which would be the America that
was before the White man had destroyed
so many of the resources within it.
And I think some sense of whatever emotion
is in this poem is also about that.
In a funny way I don't feel close to the land
particularly probably because I grew up in a city.
But I do in a general way feel close to it.
And the sense of us destroying it as we are right now
is such that you can almost get a feeling
that we're like among the last people who
will have a sense of nature.
Who will have the opportunity to have a sense of nature.
And that's what this poem is essentially about to me,
"Rosebud."
It refers to an--
the title refers to an Indian reservation
the Rosebud reservation where Black Elk lived.
There is a place in Montana where the grass stands up
two feet, yellow grass, white grass.
The wind on it like locust wings and the same shine.
Facing what I think was West, I could see a broad valley
and river miles into the valley that
looked black and then trees.
To the South was more prairie, darker
than where we stood because the clouds covered it.
A long shadow like the edge of rain racing toward us.
We've been driving all day and the day
before through South Dakota along the Rosebud
where the Sioux and now farmers and go to school
and look like everyone.
In the reservation town, there was a Sioux museum and trading
post.
We drove back and forth through the town in the heat looking
for something and stop there.
There were some implements inside.
A long bow of shined wood that lay in its glass case
reflecting light.
The walls were covered with framed photographs.
I can still see them.
The Oglala Indians posed in fine dress
in front of a huge few huts and some horses nearby.
A feeling even in those photographs the size
of a book of spaciousness.
I wanted to ask about a Sioux holy man
whose life I then recently read and whose vision had gone
on hopelessly past its time.
I believed then that only a great loss
could make us feel small enough to begin again
and I still do though it does no good.
The woman behind the counter talked endlessly on.
There was no difference I could see between us so I never
asked.
The place in Montana was the Greasy Grass
where Custer and the 7th Cavalry fell, a last important victory
for the tribes.
Though the number of men killed it would seem to us small,
we have been driving all day hypnotized.
And when we got out to enter the small flat American tourist
center, we began to argue.
And later walking between the tall grass and reading
plaques my wife made an ironic comment.
I believe it hurt the land not intentionally.
It was only meant to hold us apart.
Later I read of Ben Stein and Ross and those who escaped.
But what I felt then was final, lying down
face against the warm side of a horse
and feeling the lulls endlessly.
The silence is just before death.
The place might stand for death.
Every loss rejoined in a wide place.
Or it is rest as it was then after the long drive, nothing
for miles but grass along valley to the West
and living in history.
It is just a way of living gone, like our own every moment.
Because what I have to do daily and what
is done to me are a number of small indignities,
it was important to write this.
I think many things we all say to each other and not
intentional but every indirect word
will accumulate over the Earth.
And now when we may be approaching something final,
it seems important not to hurt the land.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]