You see there that man's rarity, is
equated with that of the bird.
During the atomic test, I used to pace the floor at night,
thinking of the albatross.
And finally, I sat down and wrote a five page single-spaced
letter to John Fitzgerald Kennedy,
on the subject of the albatross and mankind.
I cited to him Bobby, well, Coleridge and I
even cited Moby-Dick.
And I went into long, long symbolic details.
And I received an answer from the president's aide,
that he enjoyed my letter very much.
He was going to take under consideration ceasing the test,
and he did.
But I don't know whether that was the reason,
but after all if [INAUDIBLE] left the party,
anything is possible, you see.
Then let me see, this--
there are many, many little lines here and there,
which you would find are explored in Miss MacIntosh,
because I always worry about writers who tell me,
oh, my next book is going to be totally different.
I think, what's the matter with you?
Why should it be different?
Your book should become more and more what they already were,
more and more yourself.
Never break with your former self and say, that's over with.
But rather, I'm being very scotch
about this, use what you have and what
you are, and enlarge upon it.
Amplify it, strengthen it, but don't give it up.
Now when I was at the University of Chicago,
I knew a beautiful lady who was an opium addict.
One of the major characters of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.
She was a kind of Elizabeth Barrett Browning recluse,
fabulously beautiful, fabulously brilliant and fabulously rich.
She had to be rich to be beautiful, and still
be an opium addict as she always said.
Had she been poor, she would have been in a flophouse,
but she was in a kind of place that
was like a Chinese Nightingale, that poem by Vachel Lindsay.
And she had dreams, and I was often present
during her dreams.
And here I have written one of her dreams.
I wrote a long poem about her, the only person who
ever saw it was Martin Zabel and he is dead,
and I have lost the copy.
So that's a little piece of immortality,
it's gone, gone, gone.
Like the poet James Whitcomb Riley
used to carry little scraps of poems,
I'm now writing his biography.
He carried them around in his high silk hat,
like Lincoln's speeches.
He was very absent minded, and sometimes slightly inebriated.
He would lift his hat, and all the poems would just
shower out like snow.
And the wind would blew them along the street,
and I'm sure his greatest works were lost in that way.
And it's nice to have a few lost words, it really is.
Well, this she dream that she saw, I was very young,
then she called me the prosaic sprite,
because I was supposedly the most sensible person she had
ever met, can you imagine that?
And she told the prosaic sprite her opium dreams.
She dreamed that she saw Alcibiades' head,
and was caught in a drain pipe in the house.
And that there was a rabbit also in the drain pipe,
and they were looking at each other, staring at each other.
And she told me this dream, and I wrote it.
It's in Miss MacIntosh too, her dream about Alcibiades.
This is what started the book.
I don't think it's a particularly good poem,
but then I have a tendency to reject all my former works
after a while, because I'm so busy writing the new one.
And I always love the one I'm writing, and forget the others.
So I'm having to read this after how many?
15 years of freedom from it.
I don't think I've looked at it for 20 years,
if you want to know the truth.
It's called Legend in Grass, of Innocence and Evil.
How all space could also frame a face of a drunken general,
leering vastly underground as if he were unburied still.
That Alcibiades I feared, Jochen beneath magenta blossoms,
bled with blood of John the Baptist,
who here is forever headless.
That self-same staggered face should be in a drainpipe,
looming suddenly where the trembling rabbit ran
seeing unresurrected man.
The trembling rabbit sees the bared teeth,
who's aged appetite details the wild of soft eared sensation
in the realm of night.
Rabbit who stares unblinking eyed,
at thatched and bearded face of doom, which stares at him
unblinking eye.
Believe that John the Baptist rose,
his martyred head upon him still.
That was another star than this, whereby
the sensual and coarse head which will not let him pass,
the innocent creature is detained.
Its fumes, a smoke of Sylvan breath
beneath a darkly, bleeding land and neither one
will suffer death.