Well thank you very much.
I'm grateful too, to the Stephan Poetry Center
for inviting me down here.
For one reason, I've never seen Arizona, and it's a wild place,
and I'm enjoying every minute of it.
It's a little odd not to see snow around,
but you can't have everything.
And they've got a wonderful little poet's cottage
over there, where they put these lunatics when they come.
And it was sweet.
When I went in, I said, well I feel at home.
More and more, there's places in the United States
where the poets feel at home.
And that's a bad idea.
You'll probably get more of them.
But anyway, it is good to feel at home.
And I have felt more and more at home in the United States.
After all, Eliot and Pound did not feel at home,
and that's why they went to Europe.
That's why Eliot took out English citizenship.
But something strange is happening in the United States.
In the Eliot and Pound generation,
they went to Europe, and they stayed there,
and they sent back poems, magnificent flowers,
tremendous plants.
But they sent them in flower pots,
because after all, they were abroad,
they had to get a big ship to carry something
like "The Wasteland" over.
But they got it over here, eventually.
But still, it's in a flower pot, and it never
really took ground in the United States, never really took root.
And then we had, in the depression,
the poetry began to go down.
And finally, in the '40s and the '50s
we had this horrible time of academic poetry,
everyone pretending he's not a man, but he's a machine,
or he's an iambic machine, or he's a University machine,
or something like that.
But now, something else is happening,
and out of the ground in the United States are coming poems.
William Stafford from Kansas has written magnificent poems
about Kansas, and now about Oregon.
And men like James Dickey have written marvelous poems
about North Georgia.
And there are poems coming out of this area of the country.
Thomas McGrath in North Dakota has written marvelous poems
of all things about threshing [machines?].
In Roethke, in Michigan, those tremendous
poems about greenhouses, and finally,
the poems about Oregon.
So that's what we're trying to do
is to start poetry all over again,
this time getting the plant into the ground.
And that's what makes me so hopeful about the future
of what's going on.
This is all just something going on by the idea
of feeling at home.
Professor and Mrs. Robins took me in yesterday
up to the mountains, and I saw those insane cactuses
in the [INAUDIBLE] ground and the moonlight.
And they also took me out to a farm
where their daughter had a horse.
And eventually [I meet?] the daughter and the horse.
And the daughter was better than horse,
but it was a pretty good horse.
So I'm going to begin with a poem
for her, though I expect she's home studying,
called "September Night With An Old Horse."
Tonight, I rode through the cornfield in the moonlight.
The dying grass is still waiting for winter
and the dark weeds are waiting as if under water.
In Arabia the horses live in the tents near dark gold and water
and tombs.
How beautiful to walk out at midnight in the moonlight,
dreaming of animals.
So there's a certain, when you have a human being,
and a horse, and moonlight, it's just like a triangle,
and some mystic meaning in that triangle, those two
things, a horse and moonlight.
Well, there was another night in which I
saw my horse wandering around.
It was after midnight, and he's eaten his grass down
in the pasture pretty close.
So it is another poem that started with the same thing.
If I think of a horse wandering around sleeplessly,
all night on the short grass covered with moonlight,
I feel a joy, as if I have thought of a pirate ship
plowing through dark flowers.
The box elder trees around us are full of joy,
obeying what is beneath them.
The lilac are sleeping and the plants are sleep.
Even the wood made into a casket is asleep.
The butterfly is carrying loam on his wing.
The Toad is bearing tiny bits of granite in his skin.
The leaves of the crown of the tree
are asleep, like the dark bits of Earth at its root.
Alive, we are like a sleek water beetle
skating across still water in any direction
we choose, and soon to be swallowed suddenly
from beneath.
Well, that's what dying is, being swallowed suddenly
from underneath.