I don't feel heir to any particular poetry reading
tradition.
I think it's all up for grabs.
Anybody can do anything they want.
Start off with a cold weather poem since you all
braved the evening to come out.
I thought what I'd do tonight is instead of explaining
the poems, which is becoming typical,
I'm going to explain the titles.
And the reason I'm going to do that is
because I don't give much thought at all to the titles
to my poems.
They sort of happen somewhere in the course of the poem.
And not that I pick a line.
I just sort of start referring to it
as the poem about Mayakovsky or the Mayakovsky poem.
And that's the one I want to start off
with a little poem called "Mayakovsky".
"Across the tundra, heartbeats leave imprints.
A drum and dying calls for another revolution
to be reborn.
Nothing stir but bones of words, ignored,
I had been anxious for the marketplace.
And now, in the clamor of verbose crowds,
have come to love a married woman, my anarchy.
Comrade, our twin lands talk of suicide.
But I haven't the swagger to get up and die.
Now, "Mayakovsky"-- right, he was the Russian poet.
And I don't know how this poem came to me,
but it came to me somehow in relation--
did I kill it?
There it goes.
The use of Mayakovsky's life--
what happened to him was he fell in love with a married woman
and wound up committing suicide.
But he was the poet of the revolution.
And what I really want to get into in this poem
is the idea that we live a private life,
and we leave a public life.
And there's sort of a responsibility of a poet
to handle, in some way, the public,
the political situations.
But it doesn't necessarily mean that the revolution
has to be violent.
That's what I was, in a way, saying in my poem.
And yet, at the same time, I was saying
that this whole business about being ignored,
anxious for the marketplace, is that after a long period
of writing or retreating, you do have a great need
to go out and do something, to read your poems or--
this is one of the reasons why I'm into this program
right now--
the traveling to all the high schools
and seeing all the Indian students.
And we've seen Mexican-American students and just
regular high school students.