That was a very kind introduction I received.
It skipped one distinction.
I think that I am probably the only American poet currently
with a city council resolution passed against him.
[LAUGHING]
I come from a small town between Gary and Chicago originally.
And my high school class had a 20th reunion in 1964,
and I couldn't go.
But I thought about it, and I should
explain that my hometown is in Standard Oil of Indiana,
not the other way around.
Because Standard Oil is larger, richer, stronger
in all kinds of ways, certainly with its odors.
And it has been automating recently,
and a lot of the people that I used to know
are losing their jobs.
So I thought about that, and I wrote this poem,
and it was published.
And the Chicago Sun Times reprinted it
in their Sunday supplement and did a special issue
about my hometown using excerpts from the poem as captains
for awful photographs of this place.
And the newspaper was subsequently boycotted.
And there were all sorts of commotions involved with it.
Let that be a kind of explanation.
This is called "A Valedictory to Standard Oil of Indiana."
In the darkness east of Chicago, the sky
burns over the plumber's nightmares red and blue.
And my hometown lies there, loaded with gasoline.
Registers ring like gas pumps, pumps like pinballs,
pinballs like broken alarm clocks.
And it's time for morning, but nothing is going to work.
From cat-cracker to candleshop, from grease works
along the pipeline, over storage tanks like kings
on a checkerboard ready to jump the county,
the word goes out with refined regret.
We suggest you sleep all day in your houses shaped
like lunch buckets.
And don't fill up at the automated gates.
Something else will tap the gauges without yawning
and check the valves at the feet of the cooling towers
without complaining.
Standard Oil is canning my high school classmates.
And the ones who fell out of junior high
or slipped in the grades.
What should they do gassed up in their tempests and comets,
raring to go somewhere, with their wives scowling in front
and kids stuffed in the back.
Past drive-ins jammed like car lots,
trying to find the beaches but blocked by freight for hours.
Stopped dead in their tracks where
the rails, as thick as thieves along the lakefront,
lower their crossing gates to shut the frontier.
What can they think about as they
stare at the sides of boxcars for a sign,
and Lake Michigan drains slowly into Lake Huron.
The Mills level the dunes, and the eels
go sailing through the trout.
And mosquitoes inherit the evening,
while toads no bigger than horseflies hop
crazily after them over the lawns and sidewalks.
And the rainbows fall flat in the oil they came from.
There are two towns now, one dark, one going to be dark,
divided by cyclone fences, one pampered
and cared for like pillboxes and cathedrals, the other vanishing
overnight in the dumps and swamps like a struck sideshow.
As the laureate of the class of '44, which doesn't know it
has one, I offer this poem, not from hustings or barricades
or the rickety stage where George Rogers Clark stood glued
to the wall but from another way out like Barnum's This Way
to the Egress, which moved the suckers when
they'd seen enough.
Get out of town.
[CLAPPING]
Thank you.
That poem kept a number of public relations men
busy for some months.
If giving gainful employment to American industry is a virtue,
I'm one of the more virtuous poets.