Well, I'm going to read a few more minutes
and then we'll have a 5 minute break.
Then I'll come back and read again.
I'm going to read a different sort of a poem now,
some poems that touch on politics.
We've known for a long time that poetry can touch on nature.
That's been the discovery, when humanity
lived, as it did for thousands of years, in nature.
That there's an intimate, and secret,
and mysterious connection between certain emotions
we have and nature.
And then also, we found out that there's
a connection between poems, poetry and love
that's [INAUDIBLE],, so that love poems are done again and again.
But there's no reason that the politics and the political life
of the nation is just as natural a subject for poems
as either love or nature.
It surrounds us in the same way.
There's a certain political mood,
there's a substance just as real as a leaf or a tree, that
surrounds you all the time.
And that's the psyche of your own nation.
And the psyche has changed, in turn like fools you have this--
they're not the same now as they were 10 years ago.
Something's changed.
Their eyes look different.
So I remember the Second World War very well,
I was in the war.
I thought it was a just war, I enlisted.
And I remember the pride that we felt at the end of that war.
And I think it has something to do with-- the number of poets
we have in this generation-- has something to do
with the pride we did feel.
There's no poet right without tremendous pride
in his own country.
And all of the poets I knew at the end of the war
felt that pride.
But now that's changed, I don't feel that pride anymore,
in what the United States is doing.
And it began about seven or eight years ago,
and something dark just started to come in
and it started to change.
A certain kind of despair began to come into the United
States, a harshness.
So this is a poem that talks about that.
"Come with me into those things that have
felt this despair for so long.
Those who removed Chevrolet wheels that
howled with a terrible loneliness,
lying on their back in the cindery dirt,
like men drunk and naked, staggering off down a hill
to drown, at last, in the pond.
And those shredded inner tubes, abandoned
on the shoulders of throughways, blast and collapse.
Soldiers who tried, and burst, and were left behind.
And those pearly steel shavings, scattered
about on garage benches.
Sometimes still warm.
Gritty when we hold them.
Who have given up, and blame everything on the government.
And those roads in South Dakota, that
feel around in the darkness."