[APPLAUSE]
I'm happy to have you all here.
I would like to say a little bit about these poems
before I read them, because once I start,
I think I would like to try to give you, or try to share
with you, a poetic experience.
Because that's why a poet writes poems,
to share an experience that can only
be called poetic, because we don't know what else
to call it.
It's what I call--
or rather, what I feel I'm trying to do when I'm writing--
and I must say that I always discover these things after I
have written, not before.
I can't calculate.
I think, what am I trying to do?
I find that what I am trying to do, particularly in poetry,
is to make the invisible visible.
You all know that poetry gives you
a feeling of vision and emotion, and we all
know that the invisible, within people,
rules the world as we know it.
We know a table is invisible before it's conceived and made
as a table.
We know that we cannot move our hand without the motion coming
from something invisible, that we don't think-- well,
thinking is--
that's really still the idea.
But let me tell you a little bit about these first,
and then not say anything except the poem.
If any of you have happened to have read these poems
and would like me to read any particular poem,
I wish you'd tell me, because that would make me very happy
to read it as I heard it.
Poems are written as you hear them.
At least mine are.
Now the first group, called Songs and Exercises,
are poems that were written over a period of years.
And a couple of them were written as long ago as
when I did the Tiger's Eye.
Specifically, just after that were
the exercises when I was experimenting with form.
And not only with form as you see it on a page,
but the form of an image, or the form of what
happens in your mind to try to have--
to see if you can bring out-- or I try to see what I could bring
out-- what happens with no criticism whatsoever,
just to see what would happen.
And then there are various songs, my ideas of songs.
The second part, the Daitoku-ji poems, were written--
mainly, a few of them after I left--
in the zen temple compound of Daitoku-ji,
which is on the outskirts of Kyoto
in Japan, a place where I just happened to go.
I want you to know completely in poetry--
and it happens in anything using this word--
this is not calculated.
I do not feel poetry can be calculated,
and I don't even like life to be calculated,
and its emotional and poetic qualities, even
in its important human relations.
Now, I happened to be invited to stay in this Zen Buddhist
temple compound by an old friend.
And this stay was a great success in a very quiet way.
And I was asked, after I was there,
to live in a temple called Ryoko-in.
Now, I will tell you in advance, and read these poems to you--
But I will tell you in advance--
so I don't have to stop with the reading poems--
which poems were the ones that persuaded the priests
that I knew zen, although I never
had studied it in my life.
Never.
I have been asked time and time again since then, what is zen?
Well, how do I know what to say?
I mean, I wrote these poems.
They said, this is zen.
They weren't what I thought, what I would say.
They say, this is zen.
And I had never, never studied it.
I'd read the gospel of Buddha when
I was the age of a few students here, and never read any since.
So if you want to know what zen is, just listen.
[LAUGHTER]
And I never planned these poems, mind you.
Now, the first poem--
I will tell you these so that you catch them
when I come to them.
And this was written only because I went to tea
in this beautiful temple and I thought,
what can I do for this man?
I can't invite him where I am.
It's not so beautiful.
He doesn't want to go to [INDISTINCT].
I didn't know what to do.
So I thought, you know, the Japanese write poems.
So I wrote him a poem and sent it to him.
I didn't know it was zen then.
I just wrote zen, it was my housekeeper.
And after that, he said nothing.
He didn't even thank me, but things began to happen.
He invited me to see the famous picture, the Six Persimmons.
Now, this poem will begin closed in your garden.
Remember when we come to that.
Closed.
That's when we had tea, and the little poem I sent,
wrote out a few scripts.
Then what he did was an extraordinary thing, certainly
for me.
He invited me to a tea ceremony--
a metaphysical tea ceremony, in the zen way--
in the morning to view a painting that was rarely,
rarely put on view.
It's the one thing I wrote an article about,
how I got the call to the Six Persimmons.
Now, this painting is probably the most famous masterpiece
in Chinese painting.
And it's a treasure of this temple
and cared for in this temple.
And they only show it very, very rarely.
Well, they decided, but why did he do it?
When I got done, they were experimenting on me.
He wouldn't let me read a thing in advance.
Of course, he asked me not to, and I didn't.
Couldn't keep me from, but I didn't.
They wanted to see, again, what would happen to me.
Then they got done said, "We hope you'll write a poem".
My god.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, I'm not a poet laureate, but I
was able to write a poem, which they loved.
Now, this poem you will very easily recognize
because it starts out saying, "Muqi had Six Persimmons."
You'll hear about the Six Persimmons and what happened.
Then I will read a number of other poems
that result of living in that place and the thought
and the conversations that we had.
And incidentally, one of them that I wrote, on movement--
I'll read that, too, what moves.
When a doctor of physics heard it,
said, but that is pure physics.
I just keep repeating these things
because poetry has been greatly snubbed, as you know-- not so
much now as it was, say, 20, 30 years ago in our country.
And it is my conception that anything
you study within yourself can surpass anything.
I don't mean surpass, but just surpass the discovery
of, say, sciences.
Then the last part is just love's progress,
and these things just fell into shape of their own,
and I fell into a rhyme scheme that I liked and used.
And it's a series of 24 poems on the progress of love
of trilogies.
And I'll read some of those, and then a few--
if you're not too worn out, after that I'll read
a few I've done since then.