Now I want to read a poem.
When we talk about poetry moving into new areas, what we're
talking about is American poetry in the last 10 or 15
years becoming stronger and stronger,
moving out into one area after the other.
In many ways, it has taken the place of fiction in many areas.
Fiction somehow is failing to describe the life that we live.
Nobody knows why.
Maybe their life is too weird, and fiction cannot describe it.
Fiction did marvelously in the 19th century,
and the essay did marvelously in the 18th century.
And now, in the 20th century, poetry somehow
comes closest to being able to describe the strange changes
in life that have taken place.
And this is evident in someone like--
not only the poets I mentioned, like Stafford and like Dickey
and like Roethke, who talk about the Americaner;
and younger poets like Ed Dorn, who do the same thing;
and poets like Ginsberg, who write about how it feels
like to be a Columbia boy and then
realize that everything in Columbia that you learned
was not--
didn't help you in life.
That's what "Howl" means.
He's howling at the academic poets.
Anyway-- and also men like Gary Snyder,
who is the first Buddhist poet we have ever
had in the United States.
And it sounds laughable, but we must
remember that that was an early spiritual direction of America.
Emerson went in that direction.
All of Whitman comes out of the Indian philosophers.
So, again, we're picking up something that is indeed
in American history before.
Gary Snyder is a great religious poet.
But also, for the first time in many years,
we're being able to write poetry about things
that are not noble.
And we're being able to write poems
about tiny details, things that we live through in life.
That's the great thing about Issa
writing a poem about the flea in his bed in the city.
That's different than writing poems
about normal mountains in England,
or needing the death of a great man in order to write an ode.
So I'm going to read you a poem by the great Chilean poet Pablo
Neruda.
He's probably the greatest poet alive now.
He was 62 years old this year.
The greatest poet in South America,
along with César Vallejo--
those two stand out head and shoulders
above everything else in South America, greater poets
than we've had in England in this century,
greater than Eliot greater than Pound.
But we don't translate them very much
because we figure that the South Americans are exactly
as we have them in our movies.
Little guys, you know, that cower in the corner
and have this funny accent.
But Neruda will probably get the Nobel Prize this year
or next year.
He lost it to Steinbeck by one vote a couple of years ago.
And this is a poem called "Ode to My Socks."
It's an ode to his socks.
And the socks were given to him by a shepherd woman
in Southern Chile.
It's a marvelously funny poem and a marvelously human poem.
And it shows the movement of poetry out getting stronger.
"Maru Mori brought me a pair of socks which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder's hands, two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them as though
into two cases knitted with threads
of twilight and goatskin.
Violent socks, my feet were two fish made of wool,
two long sharks sea-blue, shot through by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds, two cannons--
my feet were honored in this way by these heavenly socks.
They were so handsome that for the first time
my feet seemed to me unacceptable like two
decrepit firemen, firemen unworthy of that glowing fire,
of those wonderful socks.
Nevertheless I resisted the sharp temptation
to save my feet somewhere as students keep fireflies,
as learned men collect sacred texts,
I resisted the mad impulse to put them into a cage
and give them each day birdseed and pieces of watermelon.
Like explorers in the jungle who hand over
the very rare green deer to the spit and eat it with remorse,
I stretched out my feet and pulled on the magnificent socks
and then my shoes.
The moral of my ode is this--
beauty is twice beauty and what is
good is doubly good when it is a matter of two socks made
of wool in winter."
So thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]