Thank you, and good evening.
That was such a beautiful introduction.
I didn't want to get up here.
This is the second time that I've been here in Tucson.
I was here in 1983.
If you had asked me, I would have said 1988 or something
like that.
But I've reached the point where if I think it's two years,
it's five years.
If I think it's five years, it's 10 years, and so forth.
And may you reach such maturity.
I'd like to thank the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry
Center, Alison Deming, Karen Falkenstrom, and all of you
whose names I don't know who are responsible for my being here.
And I'd like to thank all of you who are before me for giving up
a television show, or something that you have to study for,
or something you have to write and coming
to spend an hour with me.
And I'll try to make it worth your while.
Without you, I, like any artist, am nothing.
And as I mature, I appreciate this increasingly.
I thought I would open with some prose,
but I hope it's poetic prose for you to just introduce my origins
and how I got interested in poetry.
I've spent quite a bit of time running
around this state talking about poetry and its importance.
The fact, for example, that it's enjoying an explosion right now,
a vitalization, revitalization.
Not since the 19th century has poetry
been so dynamically present in North American life.
Many people don't know this, you'd
know if you read Dana Gioia, among others.
The 19th century was actually a wonderful time
for poetry in America.
It sold like crazy.
Whittier got rich writing it, Longfellow got rich writing it.
When Longfellow went to Buckingham Palace
at the invitation of Queen Victoria,
she not only wanted him to autograph
her morocco-bound copies of his books, Hiawatha and so forth.
But all of the--
she has in her journals that the maids
and the people who worked around the palace,
they had their little cheapo editions of his works.
They wanted autographs, too.
So he was cooking.
But I mention that just because people think of poetry
as being rarefied, and I think you can really
get that impression if you are around the Poetry
Center, or an MFA department.
And I just want to remind people that poetry belongs
to everyone and to no one, and it is one
of the primal human languages.
And this is how it came into my life.
This is from a piece from Drowning
in the Sea of Love called "Somebody Done
Hoodoo'd the Hoodoo Man."
And I'm only going to read a portion of it.
Some of you might recognize that title
as being from Junior Wells.
Junior Wells was one of the second generation--
member of that second generation of South Side Chicago blues
people.
The first generation properly starts
with the migration from Mississippi Delta as early
as the late 1920s, but principally
in the '30s, which gave us people like Muddy
Waters and Howlin' Wolf.
Well, the second generation was people
like Junior Wells and James Cotton, and people like that
who electrified the blues and who
gave the Beatles and the Rolling Stone
a head start on their American counterparts.
I grew up in homes where the verbal jam
session was a floating and usually festive fixture.
Clusters of people were forever talking with one another,
telling stories, sharing experiences, observations,
jokes, riddles, conundrums, and swapping lies.
Our talk was musical.
The old folks often quoted scripture
and we all mimicked the voices and gestures of others,
marbling the fat of our utterance
with lean strips of proverbial wisdom.
A dog that'll carry a bone will bring you one.
They used to say stuff like that and we'd look at each other
as kids, what are they talking about?
Much later I would become aware of the Kenyan proverb that
goes, talking with one another is loving one another.
For then it was enough to take delight
in the pictures and emotions that flooded my imagination as I
went about learning, by ear and by heart,
the nature of the world that lay beyond my childhood walls
and fields.
I used to curl up on floor pallets in a corner,
or in warmly quilted beds with the door ajar,
and while pretending to be asleep, listen
to the grown folks carry on into the night
by kerosene lamplight with crickets, or rain,
or wind in the background way back up in rural Pachuta,
Mississippi and other distant settings.
Language and its stitched together
patterns of sound, and beat, and melody, and pitch,
was real for me.
Those crazy quilt patches of bright
and somber and giddy sound formed the literal fabric
of my tender world.
They were to be taken every bit as seriously as the very tree
stump by the side of the dust road winding into town,
that stately chinaberry stump where
Uncle John, my maternal grandfather's brother,
boasted that he'd seen a hair-raising haint trot past one
autumn long ago, hundreds of midnights before I was born.
He was riding on a moon-white steed, said uncle John.
And he was as close to me as you sitting from me now.
Old Jack seen it, too.
Like to scared him half to death.
Reared back, commenced to bucking and jecking so bad,
I got goose flesh.
But I knew Old Jack.
He was still alive, and he was Uncle John's favorite riding
mule.
And I knew what papa, my grandfather,
meant when he'd haul off and say, in the dead of winter,
I'm tired of hurrying down there to see about John's mules.
Only thing John's mules suffering from
is the miss-meal colic.
It was all as clear and mysteriously evident
as lightning bugs pinpointing the summer-starred nights,
winking out their starry morsels of code.
My cousin Jesse and other kids even held long discussions
about this.
That was probably the way fireflies
talked with one another.
We figured there had to be some luminous cipher involved that
was none of people's business.
All the same, we spent hours trying to break the lightning
bug code.
That is, when we weren't dashing around trapping them
in mason jars to make our own special flashlights.
The rise and fall of locust choirs on sizzling afternoons
was equally magnetizing.
Locusts, in fact, provided the background music
for a signal incident that buzzes through my memory
circuits to this day.
I'd just finished feeding the chickens
and was resting on the edge of the back porch,
lazily scrawling letters in the yard dirt
with a prized stick when an old raggedy, smiling hobo
appeared out of nowhere.
He wore a faded floppy straw hat and was
carrying a burlap croaker sack.
I stood, startled, and looked at once
to see what Claude was going to do.
Claude was our sleek, black farm dog, whose jet,
keen nose usually picked up everything.
But Claude didn't stir.
He didn't let out so much as a low growl.
That tattered stranger armed with nothing
but a grin crouched at the porch steps
were Claude had been dozing and, nodding
a friendly hi do in my direction,
patted the dog on his tick-tortured head
just as gently as anyone in the family might have done.
Mama, my grandmother, was coming from her garden
with an apron full of fresh cut okra, snap beans,
and green tomatoes.
I could see she was as puzzled as I was.
Nevertheless, she put on a smile,
walked around to where we were, and she and the hobo
exchanged pleasantries.
He wasn't asking for a handout or odd jobs to do.
He was only passing through and had somehow lost his way.
Mama, her gold tooth fittings flashing in the late sunlight,
patiently rerouted him, invited him to pluck a few figs
and gather some pecans, then sent him on his way.
He seemed harmless enough.
But when he was gone, she studied Claude and looked at me,
then stepped into the shadows of the porch.
Narrowing her elusive brown eyes,
she said, I do believe that old rascal must've
hoodoo'd that dog.
She said this low under her breath,
just loud enough for me to hear.
Hoodoo, I said.
I must have been seven, maybe eight.
I'd heard the term, but never from her lips until now.
Its meaning had long been hidden from me.
What's Hoodoo, mama?
Hoodoo, she repeated with a slow smirk that wasn't easy to read.
Oh, that's the kind of magic, what you call conjure.
You burn candles, you mix these powders,
get a hold to a lock of somebody's hair,
or a piece of their clothes, and say these words over and over.
It's magic.
But it's the devil's magic, see?
God got his magic and the devil got his.
Myself, I don't like to be fooling with them hoodoo people.
Never did.
Well, how come you say that man done hoodoo'd Claude?
Because that dog ain't got no business laying up letting
that Negro pet him like that.
Didn't bark, didn't even budge hardly.
But mama, how could the man put a hoodoo on Claude
if he hadn't even seen him before?
That's what we don't know.
He could have slipped round here one night while we was sleep
and sprinkled around some goofer dust.
Might have even had some in his hand or up his sleeve
just now for all we know.
There was a song that was popular around this time
by a Chicago blues man named Willie Mabon who, I think,
has lived in Europe more or less ever since.
And it was a Chess record called, "I Don't Know."
And one of the lines, which will illuminate goofer dust
went something like, getting sick and tired
of the way you do, one of these days papa going to poison you.
Sprinkle goofer dust all around my bed,
wake up one of these mornings find your own self dead.
You get the idea.
But mama, wouldn't we'd have heard him sneaking around
the house here at night?
Don't know that either.
Them kind of folks know all this low-down stuff.
That's all they study.
The man could have run up on Claude back there
in the woods someplace and hoodoo'd him then.
But why would he want to hoodoo Claude in the first place?
Mama trained her gaze on the chickens and the chicken coop,
and said, can't answer that neither.
But I can tell you one thing.
If I hear any kind of devilment going on in the night,
y'all will hear me shooting my pistol.
This was the same woman who moaned, and hummed,
and sang spirituals all day long while she worked,
and who taught me table blessings
and the beautiful 23rd Psalm.
It was in such settings that poetry began for me.
Perhaps it is children who understand poetry best.
I know for certain that unlike most people,
I never outgrew the need or magic, or the curative powers
of language.
The quiescent greenness of those pastures
in which I pictured myself lying down is more vivid than ever.
And I can see the shapes of cloud and sky reflected
in those still waters.
I do not take John lightly when he declares,
in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God.
And the Word was God.
Even now, in the nuclear era when we're constantly
only a microchip blip away from graceless extension,
even at a time when the functions of poetry
have been denigrated and trivialized, when post literate
societies largely regard poetic expression as a mere amusement
at best, I've come to view creation itself
as the actualized speech of the divine.
Such lofty realizations have never
been uncommon among traditional pre-literate peoples,
nor among the so-called civilized.
Hindu, Daoist, Judeo-Christian, Buddhist,
and Islamic cosmologists abound with them.
Leslie Silko opens Ceremony, her fecund novel about Indian life
on a New Mexico reservation with a poem that begins,
Ts'its'tsi'nako, Thought-Woman, is sitting in her room.
And whatever she thinks about appears.
And in his moving book, Eskimo Realities,
the humanist, anthropologist, and filmmaker
Edmund Carpenter notes, in Eskimo languages,
the word to make poetry is the word to breathe.
Both are derivatives of "anerca," the soul.
That which is eternal, the breath of life.
A poem is words infused with breath of spirit.
Let me breathe of it, says the poet maker, and then begins.
I have put my poem and order on the threshold of my tongue.
Thank you.