I'm not going to read any more poems which are
in the mimeographed program.
So there's no need to look at it anymore.
Well, I'm going to read, next, a number of poems
from something I have managed to really put into shape
only in the last month.
It's going to be, I suppose, a book of my shorter
poems of the last five years.
And I'm going to call it The Back Country.
And it is dedicated to Kenneth Rexroth.
The first section of this manuscript
is poems that belong somehow to the West, to the western world.
I will first read a few of those.
This one is called "Marin-an."
I start out by saying [INAUDIBLE]
of the western world.
And I have to explain that Marin-An
is a Japanese-English-Chinese poem on Marin
County in California, Marin.
But also, it means Horse Grove if you
read half of it in Chinese and half of it in Japanese.
But you can write it with the same characters.
An means a hermitage.
This was a place I lived for a while,
free, from what they say.
Sun breaks over the eucalyptus grove below the wet pasture,
water's about hot.
I sit in the open window and roll a smoke.
Distant dogs bark.
A pair of cawing crows, the twang of a pygmy
nuthatch high in a pine.
From behind the cypress window, the mare moves up, grazing.
A soft, continuous roar comes out of the far valley
of the six-lane highway--
thousands and thousands of cars driving men to work.