Maxine Kumin is a poet, novelist,
writer of children's books, essayist, and teacher.
She's the consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress.
Her books of poems are, The Retrieval System, House,
Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Up Country--
which was the 1973 Pulitzer Prize winner--
The Nightmare Factory, The privilege and Halfway.
The most recent of her four novels is the Designated Heir.
She has taught at the Bread Loaf writers conference
at Columbia University, Brandeis University, and Princeton
University.
Her other honors include an American Academy
in Institute of Arts and Letters Award,
First prize in the 1976 Boston Mountain awards,
and a National Council on the Arts Fellowship.
Maxine Kumin.
"Shaking her chignon, suck you must not
or the tailor will chop.
And here is smart Robert, the flying boy, bad one.
We have a storm blows and coughs in the treetops.
Mama has told him today he must stay in.
But Robert slips out with umbrella and rain cap.
Now he is flying.
The wind sucks and pulls him.
See he is carried up smaller and smaller.
His cap flies ahead of him.
No one can help him.
Therefore, says Fraulein, smoothing her collar,
"Mind me," says Fraulein, "God stands up in heaven.
See how he watches?
He snatches the bad ones."
[APPLAUSE]
Well, thus emboldened, I'd like to read
another very early poem.
That poem is from my first book, Halfway,
which Holt, Rinehart, and Winston published in 1961.
And in the way of first commercial poetry books,
printed 1,000 copies, sold 300, shredded the other 700,
and we then moved on.
But here's another early poem.
This is, I guess, my World War II love poem.
It's called Casablanca.
It's of course based on the film of the same name.
But if you missed Casablanca on The Late Late Show,
maybe you have seen Play It Again, Sam so
that you pretty much know the plot of the old movie.
Casablanca.
"As years unwind, now reels unwind, gray springs out
of the hair, cheeks refill and eyelids lighten,
Bogie, beautifully indifferent, seduces a cigarette
and womankind.
Ingrid in perilous rain, intensified by angle shots
is Juno, fair and fair.
When France falls and gates clang shut,
she faithfully misses the final train.
Now, Vichy is dead, and Peter Lorre less cowardly.
And Greenstreet has gone with the parrot.
And I knew a boy with sandy hair,
could do the dialogue all blurry, cigarette dangling,
cheeks sucked hollow, hands in his jacket pockets,
could do the dialogue for drinks at any party.
Went down with his destroyer, swallowed and the other half
of that real war.
The tough guy lately dead of cancer holds the girl,
and then they kiss for the last time.
And time goes West, and we come back to where we really are."
Now I thought maybe I would just sort of skip around
thematically because it is said--
and I think with some truth-- that the poet has one song
and sings it over and over.
With that in mind, I thought I might read the title
poem from the retrieval system and then jump off from that
into some other poems.
And you'll see what the linkage is with the Casablanca poem.
The Wethered Goat.
This is W-E-T-H-E-R-E-D. It's a castrated goat.
Goats are very commonly kept as pasture, pets for horses.
They get on very well together the two species.
And this particular goat used to run
under the belly of a large Palomino gelding I had.
Large meaning fat, Palomino gelding I had once.
And I used to wince every time I saw him do it because he
had elaborate horns and I--
and he-- and the clearance was extremely tight.
But somehow or other, he never did manage to scrape Jupiter.
The Retrieval System.
"It begins with my dog--
now dead-- who all his long life carried about in his head
the brown eyes of my father, keen, loving, accepting,
sorrowful, whatever.
They were daddy's all right hand it on except
for their phosphorescent gleam tunneling
the night, which I have to concede was a separate gift.
Uncannily when I'm alone, these features
come up to link my lost people with the patient domestic
beasts of my life.
For example, the weathered goat who runs free in pasture
and stable with his flecked agate
eyes and his minus-sign pupils blats
in the tiny voice of my former piano teacher
whose bones beat time and my dreams,
and whose terrible breath soured country gardens.
Humorous and unplayable bar.
[LAUGHTER]
My elderly aunts wearing the heads
of willful intelligent ponies stand
at the fence begging apples.
The sister who died at three has my cats faint chin.
My cat's inscrutable squint and cried cat like in pain.
I remember the funeral.
"The Lord is my shepherd."
We said.
I don't want to brood.
Fact, it is people who fade, it is animals that retrieve them.
A boy I loved once keeps coming back
as my yearling coat, cocksure at the gallop racing
his shadow for the hell of it.
He runs merely to be a boy who was
lost in the war 30 years ago, and buried at sea.
Here it's 40 degrees and raining.
The weather man who looks like my resident owl, the one who
goes out and in by the open hey now,
appears on the TV screen with his heart shaped face.
He is also my late dentist's double, donnish, bifocaled,
kind, going a little gray, advising this wisdom tooth will
have to come out someday.
Meanwhile, filling it as a favor.
Another save.
It outlasted him.
The forecast is nothing but trouble,
it will snow fiercely enough to fill all these open graves."
Now I'm going to do sort of what I said and go back.
We may as well start with the dog.
The upcountry book opens with a series of it's--
the hermit palms.
And there are eight of them all written
in the same male persona.
And I must say now from this vantage point of some years
after, that really the only reason
I think I wrote them in a male persona
was that I didn't think the world was ready to take
a female hermit seriously.
The hermit in each case is me.
Or should I say to Herman in these cases I?
[CLEARS THROAT]
And this one is called The Hermit Meets The Skunk.
"The hermit dog skitters home drunk with it once every fall.
The whites of his eyes marbled from the spray,
and his tail tucked tighter than a clamshell.
He contracts himself to a mouse under the hermits bed.
The hermit on sticks him with a broom
and ties him outside to a tree.
He is a spotted dog, black rampant on white.
And as the hermit scrubs, the white ghost
satiny with love of soap, the black brightens
to a boot black shine.
Next, a dose of tomato juice stains the white like a razor
cut under water and purples the black.
And after that, the whole dog leeches moon colored
under a drench of cornstarch.
The hermit sniffs him.
Skunk is still playing as a train announcement.
So he is to be washed again, rinsed again, powdered again,
until the spots wink out again under the neutral white.
Inside his mouth, the hermit knows--
and knows from what is visible under the tail--
dog is equally spotted.
But in the interior, gray on a pink field.
If he were to be pinned down, his four legs held
at four corners and slit open by the enthusiast,
the hermit knows the true nature of dog spotted layer by layer
would be laid bare.
Afterward all night, skunk sleepwalks the house.
Skunk is a pot of copper pennies scorched dry on a high flame.
Skunk is a porridge of dead shrews stewed down to gelatin.
Skunk is the bloat of chicken got left 10 days
to sweeten in the sun.
Skunk is the mother bed, the ripe taste of Carrion,
the green kiss."
Oh, well, there's the dog and in one instance.
Here's a little poem about that same dog.
It's a dream poem called Making The Connection.
"Looking for good news to skate out
with over the ice pond of sleep, I'm
tricked instead to think I hear them whimpering in the kitchen.
His ghost comes on metal toenails,
scratches himself, the thump of thigh bone on linoleum,
ghost laps, water whines.
Soon he will howl in the prison of his deafness.
That paranoid strangled sound waking the grown children
who all live elsewhere.
I sit up breaking the connection like hanging up on my brother.
I am 10.
I go down terrified past a house full of bubbling breathers,
the cellar door go further down in darkness
to lie on old carpet next to the incontinent puppy.
His heart beat, my heartbeat comfort us.
And the fluttering pulse of the furnace starting up, stopping.
And the vague percussion of pipes
that buzz in the far corner.
Brother, brother dog, is that who you were?
Is that who I was?"
Well, bear with me.
This is this is a sort of a new experiment.
I even have a goat poem, so I think
maybe I'll try reading that.
This is a very kind of nostalgic pastoral poem.
And it's just called Caught.
"Late August, the goats keep leaving Eden.
Identical twin Toggenburgs, they swim to freedom,
climb tree stumps.
Maybe they fly.
While I boil my hands red skinning beets.
Their color bells sound distant telephones.
Intercepting the call, I go with grain
to rattle in a coffee can.
One has got an ancient pea vine in her mouth,
the other trails are plate sized bloom of squash.
When they circle me wary but gluttonous,
I pounce snaring one which flops like a great warm fish
against my breasts, then stiffens, then goes limp.
I carry her off to her fenced half acre.
Meanwhile, the other perfectly cloned trots
at my side and interjects staccato
sounds of displeasure at not being
carried at the genetic misfortune of having
to duplicate her sister's act.
They give me a Bronx cheer sendoff,
scoot to the top of the boulder ridge,
long hidden and raspberry cane, now eat and clean,
and forget for a day or two how they came out in the world.
Late August, truce this instance--
no.
Truce this instant with what's to come.
Everything caught.
This moment caught.
My horse at the paddock fence making that soft ingratiating
knicker that asks for supper.
No older and no riper than was planned, the sun staining
the West, my matching hands."
Oh, we have now covered the dog and the goat.
And
[LAUGHTER]
I guess the next thing we have to cover are the ants.
[LAUGHTER]
House bridge fountain gate has a series
of Amanda poems, which are horse poems.
And I'll read a couple of those.
And the first one I'll read will be the one
that refers to the maiden ants.
It's called Brushing The Ants.
In New England, they say ant.
It may sound very strange to you here.
But an ant is a little insect.
[LAUGHTER]
"Consider Amanda, my sensible strawberry roan.
Her face with its broad white blaze,
lending an air of constant surprise.
Homely Amanda, colossal, and mild, she
evokes those good ghosts of my childhood
brillo-haired and big boned, the freckled maiden aunts.
Though barren like her, they were not petulant.
Peaceable dears, they lay down alone.
Mutant giraffes in my mother's house,
fed tramps on the back porch after the crash.
Pantomimed the Charleston summer nights
in the upstairs back bedroom and dropped apple peels
over their shoulders to spell the name of a marrying man.
Remembering this, I bring Amanda windfalls that season again.
The power of the leaf runs the human brain,
raising the dead like lamb clouds in the sky.
The power of the thorn holds the birds late nests, now
strung like laundry from the blackberry cadence where
parts of Amanda recur.
Her body fuzz is stickered in the oreo cups.
Copper hairs from her tail hang the packages up.
All fall as I drop to the scalp of sleep,
while the raccoons whistle, and the geese cough,
and Amanda grows small in my head.
The powder streak of her face, a blur 70 passengers off.
The ants return letting down their hair.
It hangs to the custard of Harriet's lap.
It tickles the spine of Alma's girdle.
And the dream unwinds like a top.
In four-four time, the way it was once,
I am brushing the carrot frizz gone gray.
100 ritual strokes one way.
100 ritual strokes the other.
We dance the old back bedroom dance
that rattles the shakes of my mother's house,
till Amanda jitters, yanking her tether,
her eyes green holes in the dark,
her blaze a slice of moon looming at the gate,
and the latch flies up on another night."
Now I understand that there was a request for "The Agnostic
Speaks To Her Horse's Hoof."
So I will read that.
And I'll just gloss the word frog in the first line in case
horses are not your thing.
You might not know that it refers
to the soft under portion of the hoof
and not to inhabitants of the pond.
"The Agnostic Speaks To Her Horse's Hoof".
Come frog reveal yourself, surface out
of the poultice, the muck, and manure pack.
Make your miraculous V to stand up.
Show me as well the tickle place that cleft between.
The good book says, a man's life is as grass the wind
passes over and is gone.
According to the National Geographic
the oceans will lie down dead as cesspools in 60 years.
Let us ripen in our own way.
I with my back to the trunk of a butternut that
has caught the fatal red canker, and on my knee
this skillet of your old foot.
The hook pick is God's instrument as much
as I know of him.
In my hands let it raise your moon, Amanda, your nerve bone.
Let us come to the apocalypse complete without splinter
or stone.
Let us ride out on four iron feet.
And I have to look and see what else turns up in that.
Oh, yes, here is the owl.
The owl poem is called "Insomnia".
Sort of fitting.
And it has a little epigraph, "To hear the owl
is the poet's prerogative."
That little provocative statement
was said to me by a young man who was visiting
a daughter at the farm.
And I remember coming down for breakfast
and saying that I hadn't slept all night because the owls had
been relentlessly hunting and hooting as they killed.
And it had kept me awake all night in this
and he very respectfully said, and I
thought it was a wonderful line, well,
to hear the owl is the poet's prerogative.
And so that's how the poem came to be "Insomnia".
In the hand me down of dead hours
I hear him moving up the mountain tree
by tree insistent as a paranoid calling out his one verse,
raising the brake bone alarm like those quaint East
European churches that told their non-Sunday bells to usher
in the pogrom.
Finally, he settles in my basswood.
We both doze listening for each other going out
to help my horse up in the first light.
I see him hurry into the hey now,
furtive as an old border flapping along the corridor
to tell his secret to the toilet.
Oh red eye sit tight up in the rafters,
hang on safe as a puff ball, tonight another chapter
the promise of hatchets.
OK, I think that sort of explores
what I was trying to say.
The retrieval system has a whole section
of poems that are built on dreams,
and this is something I've been playing with a whole lot more
in recent years and commanding it to my students
to keep track of, write down dream material,
and then try to use it in poems.
I don't think it works unless you're
able to solve the dream in the process of writing
the poem, which is to say you have
to solve the puzzle that the dream proposes.
So maybe every dream is clearly not
going to give rise to a poem, but from time
to time you get them.
And this is one that was astonishing to me
because as I wrote the poem it became very clear what
the dream content had been saying.
Unfortunately when I wrote this poem it was long before Iran.
And as an example of a tacky unfamiliar town I use Tehran.
I guess I'm going to have to find a replacement for that,
but I'll read it the way it was originally written.
This poem is called "My Father's Neckties".
Last night my colorblind chain-smoking father
who has been dead for 14 years stepped up out
of a basement Thai shop downtown and did not recognize me.
The number he was wearing was as terrible as any
from my girlhood, a time of ugly ties
and acrimony, six or seven blue lightning
bolts outlined in yellow.
Although this was my hometown it was tacky and unfamiliar.
It was Tehran or Gibraltar.
Daddy smoking his habitual square
in the mouth of cigarette and coughing ashes
down the lightning jags.
He was my age exactly.
It was wordless, a window opening
on an interior we both knew where we had loved
each other, keeping it quiet.
Why do I wait years and years to dream this outcome?
My brothers in whose dreams he must as surely turn up
wearing rep ties or polka dots clumsily knotted
do not speak of their encounters.
When we die all four of us in whatever sequence
the designs will fall off like face masks,
and the ray unravel from this hazy version of a man who
wore hard colors recklessly and hid out in the foreign bargain
basement of his feelings.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Another poem which uses a dream, uses
some green material is an elegy I wrote 1974
when my very close friend Anne Sexton killed herself.
Actually, I've written a series of poems over the years
about her and even a recent one to her.
This one is called "Splitting Wood At Six Above".
And it contains a whole there's wishful dreams you have
after you lose someone dear to you.
It was a very simplistic dream I dreamed she had called me
on the phone, but couldn't reveal
where she was calling from because she
was calling from the other side as she said.
It was a wonderful childish dream I thought.
And then the poem kind of came after.
"Splitting Wood At Six Above".
I open a tree in the stupefying cold ice on bare flesh
or scald I seek the metal wedge with a few left handed swipes.
Then with a change of grips lean into the eight pound sledge.
It's muslin overhead snow falls as heavy as salt.
You are four months dead.
The beach log comes apart like a chocolate nugget.
The wood speaks first in the tiny voice
of a bird cry, a puppet squeak, and then all in a rush,
all in a passionate stammer, the papery soul
of the beach released by wedge and hammer flies back into air.
Time will do this as fair to Hickory birch
black oak, easing the insects into a rot
and freeze combine to raise out of wormwood cracks
blue and dainty the soles.
They are thin as an eyelash.
They flap once going up.
The air rings like a bell.
I breathe out drops cold morning ghost puffs
like your old cigarette cough.
See you tomorrow, you said.
You lied, we're far from finished.
I'm still talking to you, last night's dream.
We'll split the phone bill it's expensive
calling from the other side even waking it seems logical.
You're a small, round, stubbornly airborne
so that sun yellow daisy heart slipping the noose
off its pod scooting over the tightrope none
the worse for its trip to arrive at the other side.
It is the sound of your going, I drive into heartwood.
I stack my quartered cuts, bark down open yellow face up.
Well there are about six others of these poems.
But recently I had the occasion to talk with the woman who
Houghton Mifflin has signed a contract with
to do a biography of Anne Sexton.
And she was someone I liked immediately upon meeting her,
and I think she's very bright and very honorable
and she'll do a very sort of non sensational and good job
of the biography.
And after she left so many things had
been raised in my head that this poem started
itself and it's called "Apostrophe To A Dead Friend On
Being Interviewed By Her Biographer".
Little by little my gender drifts away,
leaving the bones of this person whose shoe size was
your size, who traded dresses in our pool of public occasion
costumes, yours the formal length Jersey,
mine the cocktail wool, and your dead mother's mink coat
that I always said looked like muskrat.
It fades the glint of those afternoons we lay in the sun
by the pond, paler the intimate confidences.
Even the distances we lapped in poems
have shrunk no more parapets.
The men have grown smaller, drier, easier to refuse.
Passion subsides like a sunset urgency
has been rung from the rendezvous.
Now that the children have changed
into exacting adults the warmth we
felt for each other young takes on the skin tone
of plain daylight.
However well-fed and rosy they are no kinder or wiser than we.
Soon I will be 60.
How it was with you now hardly more vivid than
how it was without you.
I carry the sheer weight of the telling like a large infant
on one hip.
I who am remaindered in the conspiracy doom,
doom on my lips.
It's the first time I've read that to an audience.
It's--
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
I said to a friend before this reading
that one good thing about being far from home
is that it gives you the courage to try out new poems.
Somehow it's like I guess like taking a new show on the road
you open in New Haven or Philadelphia or whatever
before you go to Broadway so that's one.
Well I guess I should back up a little and maybe read
something else from upcountry.
There's a little lyric I'm still fond of-- a little country
lyric called "Watering Trough" that I'll read.
Let the end of all bathtubs be this putting out
to pasture of four Victorian bow legs anchored in grasses.
Let all long-necked browsers come drink from the shallows
while faucets grow rusty and porcelain yellows.
Where once are nude forebears soaked up in this vessel.
Come cows and come horses bring burdock and thistle.
Come slobber the scum of Timothy and clover on the cast iron lip
that are grand sires climbed over.
And let there be always green water
for sipping that muzzles may enter thoughtful
and rise dripping.
[APPLAUSE]
And here's a very watery poem.
This is an early poem of mine written in rhyming couplets
and goes back to a time in my life
when I had ambitions about being a professional swimmer.
And worked at summer camp and used to get up at reveille
and swim a mile before breakfast, gone are the days.
And it's just called "Morning Swim".
Into my empty head there come a cotton beach,
a dock where from I set out oily and nude through mist
in chilly solitude.
There was no line, no roof, or floor
to tell the water from the air.
Night fog thick as terry cloth closed me in its fuzzy growth.
I hung my bathrobe on two pegs.
I took the lake between my legs invaded and invader I
went overhand on that flat sky.
Fish twitched beneath me, quick and tame in their green zone
they sang my name.
And in the rhythm of the swim I hummed a two-four time
slow hymn.
I hummed abide with me.
The beat rose in the fine thrash of my feet, rose in the bubbles
I put out slant wise trailing through my mouth.
My bones drank water.
Water fell through all my doors.
I was the well that fed the lake that met my sea in which I
sang, abide with me.
And then I might read another wet one.
I spent about six weeks in 1973 as poet
in residence in Danville, Kentucky.
And out of that experience came a whole series
of Kentucky poems.
I'll just read I think probably just that one.
At Center College in Danville, Kentucky,
they don't have a swimming pool.
They have something called the Boles Natatorium.
It's quite splendid.
And it was sort of a dreary lonely time for me.
I got a lot of writing done, which is what
happens when you isolate poets.
And every day I went and swam a mile in this beautiful pool.
And whenever I came if the team was practicing the coach
would blow his whistle and say clear lane 6 for the poet,
and they would all move over.
It was really wonderful.
The most striking thing about being in Danville Kentucky
was being in hard shell Baptist country,
being in the heart of the Pentecostal evangelical faiths.
And I wrote a whole lot of Jesus poems about this experience.
This is only very slightly, well,
it is elusive but it's not a real personal Jesus poem.
Some of the others really are.
It's called "To Swim To Believe."
"The beautiful excess of Jesus on the waters
is with me now in the Boles Natatorium.
This bud of me exults giving witness.
These flippers that rose up to be arms.
These strings drawn to be fingers,
legs plumped to make my useful for.
Each time I tear this seam to enter all
that I carry is taken from me shoved
in the dive, lovers, children, even words go under.
Matters of dogma spin off in the freestyle earning
that mid-pool spurt like faith.
Where have I come from?
Where am I going?
What do I translate gliding back and forth erasing my own stitch
marks in this lane?
Christ on the lake was not thinking
where the next heel toe went.
God did him a dangerous favor whereas Peter the thinker sang.
The secret is in the relenting, the partnership.
I let my body work accepting the dangerous favor from this king
sized pool of waters.
Together I am supplicant, I am bride."
And now that we're sort of into body poems
I thought since this we're well past the midpoint
of this reading I thought I might read an audience
participation poem, which is called "Song
For Seven Parts Of The Body".
It's a riddle poem and you're supposed
to guess the answers to the riddles.
"Song For Seven Parts Of The Body."
I have not planted the answer to the first riddle, which
I usually do, because I'm nervous that everyone
will be quiet.
But this audience is so responsive,
I don't think I have to worry.
One.
"This one, a common type, turns in was once attached fed me
as sweetly as an opium pipe.
Oh, birthdays on limber us, eyes sit back ears go indoors,
but here nothing changes.
This was, this is."
Very good belly button.
Stanley Kunitz said to me, that one is hard
because mine turns out.
[LAUGHTER]
So you see, all right.
Two.
"Mostly, they lie low, put up shells, sprout hairs,
and if they sing they know only leather cares.
Blind marchers five abreast left,
right silent as mushrooms or puff paste
they rise up free at night."
Toes.
Very good, toes.
OK, three.
"I have a life of my own, he says.
He is transformed without benefit of bone.
I will burrow, he says and enters.
Afterwards he goes slack as a slug,
he remembers little the Prince is again a frog."
[LAUGHTER]
Four.
That seems to be self-explanatory.
Four.
"Here is a field that never lies fallow sweat
waters it nails hoe the roots.
Every day death comes in with the winner.
Every day newborns crop up like asparagus.
At night, all night on the pillow
you can hear the narrow sprouts crackle
rubbing against each other lying closer than lemmings.
They speak to their outposts in armpits.
They speak to their settlers and crotches.
Neighbor, neighbor they murmur.
Hair, that's right.
OK, five.
They have eyes that see not.
They straddle the valley of wishes.
Their hills make their own rules.
Among them are barbers, melons, fishes, doorknobs and spools.
At times they whisper touch me."
Yeah, breasts.
Six.
"Imagine a mouth without you pink men,
good fellow, a house without a kitchen,
a fishless ocean, no way to swallow."
Tongue, yeah.
And seven, the last one.
These nubbins, these hangers on here not.
Wise men tugged them and thought lovers
may nibble each others, maidens, gypsies, and peasants
make holes in theirs to hang presents.
Yeah, earlobes.
Yeah, very good, you were very good.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
And this will be a very different point
this is a political poem.
When I wrote this poem I was teaching
at a small liberal arts college, a little Catholic college
for women.
And I remember one of my students
came up to me with tears in her eyes and said after I read it,
poor God everybody puts everything on to him.
Oh, I suppose that's true.
This poem is called "Heaven As Anus".
[LAUGHTER]
Wait till you hear it.
"In the Defense Department, there
is a shop where scientists sow the eyelids of rabbits
open lest they blink in the scourge of a nuclear drop.
And elsewhere, Dolphins are being taught to defuse bombs
in the mock-up of a harbor and monkeys
learned to perform the simple tasks of draftees.
It is done with electric shocks.
Some mice who have failed their time tests in the maze
now go to the wire unbidden for their job.
Implanting electrodes yields rich results.
Alley cats turn from predators into prey, show them a sparrow
and they cower.
While the white wall labs fill up
with the feces of fear where calves whose hearts
have been done away with walk and bleat on plastic pumps.
And what does any of this to the Godhead
these squeals, whines, risings, unexpected jumps whose children
burn alive, booby trapped the dead, lop ears and testicles,
core and disembowel.
It all ends at the hole.
No words may enter the house of excrement.
We will meet there as the sphincter of the good Lord
opens wide and he takes us all inside."
[APPLAUSE]
All right, I'm going to read a semi-occasional poem.
This I suppose is also slightly political.
It's interesting to let one poem just reverberate in your head
and make you think of another, and here's a later poem called
"Remembering Pearl Harbor At The Tutankhamun Exhibit".
I don't know how many of you got to see that Egyptian,
the Tutankhamun exhibit, but this is the one time
that being on a committee had a perk that went with it.
I was on the National Endowment literature panel for a while
and because we work so honorably and hard
and without reward they put us in at the front of the line
and we got to see the whole Tutankhamun Exhibit.
And it was a very strange experience
as you will now hear.
This poem is called "Remembering Pearl Harbor At The Tutankhamun
Exhibit".
"Wearing the beard of divinity King Tut
hunts the hippopotamus of evil.
He cruises the netherworld on the back of a black leopard.
And here he has put on his special pectoral, the one
painted with granulated gold.
This will adorn him as he crosses over.
I shuffle in line on December 7 to see how that royal departure
took place.
A cast of thousands is passing this way.
No one looks up from the alabaster
as jets criss-cross overhead.
Our breath cloud bookcases that lock in the gold and lapis
lazuli.
The day of infamy Roosevelt called it.
I was a young girl listening to the radio
on a Sunday of hard weather, probably
not one in seven packed in these rooms goes back there with me.
Implicit throughout this exhibit arranged by Nixon and Sadat
as heads of state is an adamantine faith
in [AUDIO OUT].
This exhibit, arranged by Nixon and Sadat as heads of state,
is an adamantine faith in total resurrection.
Therefore, the King is conveyed with a case
for his heart and another magnificent hinged apparatus
far too small for his intestines.
All in place, all considered retrievable.
Whereas if one is to be blown apart over land or water
back into the nothingness that precedes light,
it is better to go with the simplest detail across a dog
tag, a clamshell."
Well, I'm going to read a vegetable poem
and it's called "The Survival Poem".
And it has an epigraph from a Canadian novelist named
Mavis Gallant, maybe you know her work.
She lives in France but she is Canadian.
And she says in a novel called a Fairly Good Time,
I saw a picture of a market stall in the morning paper
and under the picture was written the dreaded rutabaga
has again made its appearance.
When people talk to me about the occupation of Paris
they mention the dreaded rutabaga.
I guess I should say in case you don't know this,
and you probably wouldn't know this living in a climate
where you grow crops year around.
The rutabaga it's-- a sort of an enormous smelly turnip.
And they're grown in the Midwest,
they're grown in the Northeast.
In the Midwest, they're called Swedes
because in Minnesota it was the Swedes who introduced them.
And in England, they simply call them roots.
I don't know why, but they were always
talking about how roots are good for you to eat.
"The Survival Poem."
"Welcome, old Swede, old baggy root,
old bind rag as well of Bonaparte's troops.
When the horse's nostrils are webbed with ice and out
of the hay for torpid mice, and calves go stiff
in their mother's wombs and the apple corer
cloaks the tunnel worm.
When the soldiers bandages hung out to dry,
clatter like boards in the 4 o'clock sky and the last blood
runs from the bulbs of the beets.
And the cabbages shed their 100 sheets, welcome old Swede
strong smelling bigfoot.
In the camps, all ate from the same rank pot.
Let me dine with praise on you alone.
Pray the Lord lay me down one more time like a stone.
One winter more from my musty bed pray
the Lord raise me up in the morning like bread."
You know, I'll just read a couple more
and I'd like to read a couple of new things.
Here's a little tiny vegetable poem in a different voice.
It's called "In the Pea Patch."
"These, as they clack in the wind saying castanets, saying
dance with me, saying do me dangle their intricate nugget
scrotum.
And these with the light shining through
call up a woman in a gauzy dress young with tendrils of hair
at her neck leaning in a summer doorway.
And as the bloom of the lime green pod rubs
away under the polishing farm.
In the interior suite for the taking
nine little fetuses nod their cloned heads."
And I'm going in the wrong direction.
Here's one more horse poem.
This is a poem about jumping.
It's called "Never."
It's really a metaphor, it's not--
I mean it can be anything.
"Good for you, he calls beside me
as I take the chicken coop, the in and out,
the double oxer all without sucking back, springing off
my hocks as if at Ledyard, an Olympic champ.
Down the mudslide I whirl, clearing the drop jump,
the one my heart lurches over clinging to my soft palate
where it sounds like a snared rabbit.
Oh, heart, we are a pair of good girls hurtling
the ditch at the bottom of the chute, and up the other side
good for you victorious not over fear my lifelong border morose
sculpture about the house but over time.
The large child inside leaps up for daddy's loud kiss,
for daddy's lollipop.
Body on body riding hard, good for you
I play to spin this game out to the end never coming
to the part where we stop, where the jumps are
set to high and darkness wins."
[APPLAUSE]
You may have noticed that the poems get
darker and darker as the poets get older and older.
Here's a poem called "The Poets Observe The Absence Of God
From The Saint Louis Zoo."
I wrote it for my friend Howard Nemeroff.
I was at Washington University in St. Louis for a while
and we did go to the zoo.
And it seemed to suggest this.
I wrote it about a year after the fact,
that's what Wordsworth said, emotion
recollected in tranquility.
"The Poets Observe The Absence of God From The St Louis Zoo."
"November, that time of year the Lord created and forgot.
The big cats lurked diminished in the mouths of their made
caves.
Most of the pink has been bleached
from the huddled flamingos.
The camel squat over the nest of their folded legs.
To this place, the aging poet's old friends
neither quite dressed for the morning chill come flailing
their arms in thin sunlight.
They stroll through the kingdom of roars and smells.
They shelter in the murk of the aquarium.
Peer into the mouths of ancient sea turtles.
Follow the bursts of minute tropical fish, but do not
raise the eternal questions.
Is utility the one criterion for creation?
Does form follow function?
Neither chooses to cite the neck of the giraffe,
the rhinoceros horn.
Nothing is said of the opposable thumb by means of which
in the next pen, a muscular attendant
in souwester and boots.
Force feed dead fish to the penguins.
Cramming the smells headfirst like grain being tamped down
the craw of a Strasbourg goose.
Oh, deus absconditus the tamed formal birds
glutted for the day and balancing
without shoulders waddle about their confines.
Each of the poet's notes how helpless
the natty creatures look, how that in itself
is pathetic fallacy.
They move on arms wrapped around each other's backs
both are writing this poem in their heads
in a tight-lipped month between extreme weathers
while their lives speed by like outbound traffic."
And I think maybe it's getting on.
I think I'll just read one little one to close on.
If you fly a lot, you'll recognize
the title of this poem.
It's called "Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief."
It's going to be the title of an upcoming collection of poems
in late spring of '82.
"Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief."
"Blue landing lights make nail holes in the dark.
A fine snow falls.
We sit on the tarmac taking on the mail,
a quick freight trays of laboratory mice coffee
and Danish for the passengers.
Wherever we're going is Monday morning.
Wherever we're coming from his mother's lap.
On the cloud park above strewn as loosely as parsnip or celery
seeds lie the souls of the unborn.
My children's children's children and their father.
We gather speed for the last run,
and lift off into the weather."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]