That has been my life, literature and no other life.
No other interests whatever, because all interests
are oriented around literature.
I'm deeply interested in horse racing.
I'm deeply interested in the psychology of a channel
swimmer.
And in fact, I've even thought of writing
a novel about that very complex and beautiful subject.
I'm interested in politics.
I'm interested in baseball.
I'm a bird watcher.
I'm a people watcher, but everything
centers upon literature.
And there is not world enough and time really,
for anyone who is totally dedicated to the creative life.
There is not world enough and time,
so you see I have to contradict my happy face.
Now I-- after--
Prismatic Ground was a very unimportant little book,
teenage book, I began to enlarge my concept of poetry.
I became very deeply interested in reading
science of ornithology, psychology, mythology,
all kinds of subsidiary fields.
And out of that, grew a book which remains
recognized among poets today, as the day it was published.
In fact, there are many who have not forgiven me
for leaving lyric poetry.
I don't think I'd take a stroll along Bleecker Street,
and some mad poet does not approach me
and say, why did you leave us?
They had not read Miss MacIntosh My Darling when they
were making that statement.
Now they've read it, and admit that Miss MacIntosh is also
a poem.
One of the-- when I write a book,
I'm through with it really.
I'm always astonished when I read it,
and I usually, I defer that experience for two or three
years.
I wrote a book upon a--
which came out just at the same time,
Angel in the Forest, which is a critique of all the illusions,
hours of judgment, fantasies, forms of idealism
and of disappointment, and of realization, which
enter into too utopian communities, which did actually
exist in the early Indiana life.
This is to be republished by Scribner's in April
of this year.
I was astounded then, it was a great critic success
and I was astounded to read it.
I had written a book which was a critique of communism,
because I never once thought of communism,
except that the barber in the book says,
he doesn't like Stalin who wears a pink shirt.
He thinks that the pinks where the people who wore
pink shirts.
I will tell you a little anecdote in relation to that.
I was astonished to read a great fabulous review,
praising the book in the Daily Worker.
And [INAUDIBLE] I must say that I also
received a fabulous [INAUDIBLE] of Miss MacIntosh
from the Daily Worker and other communist magazines.
And this startled me very much.
There's no political-- direct political content in this.
A very delightful critic came to interview [INAUDIBLE]..
And I said, please don't say that I'm a communist,
you love this book so much.
And then I finally said, why do you love it so much?
He said, because when I was a young man, I was madly in love
with Rose O'Neill, who did the kewpie dolls.
And this book brings it all back to me,
but I'm trying to put a little communism into my review,
in order to justify it for the Daily Worker.
And now I understand he's in Moscow talking it up,
so maybe we'll have a Russian publication.
Well, to get back to Moderate Fable, when I read this book,
I'm always astonished that I was literally
proposing certain attitudes and themes, which
you will find developed not only in Angel in the Forest,
but in Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.
One of them is a lament.
One theme which runs through all my work,
is a lament for the farms of creation,
which are disappearing from this planet due to man's
carelessness or to his aggression.
For instance, I'm a great lover of Rachel Carson's Silent
Spring, even though I met a Bengala just
on the train, who was laughing that she was dead.
And he of course, didn't realize that I too share her concerns.
Not only in the Angel in the Forest,
but particularly in Miss MacIntosh, My Darling,
you will find that I seem to say that man proposes those values
by which he lives and dies.
And that many of the farms of creation are in our hands,
and that we make reality by the way we live and think.
And so here I have a poem, which is later pursued in--
through all my work.
For instance, in Miss MacIntosh, there
is a chapter about the passenger pigeons.
The death of the last passenger pigeon
Martha, who died in a Cincinnati Zoo in 1917.
I understand-- and I was very delighted to see
just after that, that someone has
written an entire book about Martha,
called the Passenger Pigeon.
So I have my chapter on Martha, she-- this is her year,
shall we say.
This is death by rarity.
Came from reading many, many bird books,
and knowing a great deal about birds.
I fear, I fear the rarity of nighthawk, swift ruby-throat.
I fear extinct of the roseate spoonbill,
and snowy egret slain by no known enemy.
Slain by no known war of devastation to all and one,
the Flamingo the heath hand and wild trumpeter swan.
However covert they are, slain wherever they are.
For rarity precedes extinction, as sickness comes before death.
There is weariness within the perfection of the shell,
and the perfect bird never will be born.
I fear that rarity, overwhelming all marvelous names
of birds whose names are poems.
As the rarity of this so personal blood,
sleeps in the golden vein.