That's a poem from Transcendental Studies
which is what I'm going to read from tonight.
It is, like many of the poems in this book, basically a collage.
It really started with my being given
a job at my school, in which I had to direct a department.
And it isn't that it was a difficult thing to do,
it just took all the possible time that there was
and for no very great satisfaction, I must add.
And it wasn't difficult.
And so you know, I did it a while,
and I had to take over when director before me
was going batty.
And I realized after a few months
that among other things that were wrong,
I was simply not writing anything because there was
no, I had no time of my own.
It was all this job.
And usually, since I didn't usually
write before midnight anyway, I decided that I
would make a break in the time.
And at midnight, I would not think
about my job, or the school, or anything of the sort.
I would just end then, and I would do my own work.
The problem is that if you decide
not to think about something, it's
what you're thinking about.
And that didn't get me very far.
And at some point, since that didn't work,
it occurred to me that I should do
some kind of writing that didn't require me to think.
And so I decided to do some collages,
but of a very specific sort.
I brought down a batch of books of various kinds.
But they were all prose books, and no two
of that we're very much alike.
And I put these books on the table,
and at midnight, I would start out
by taking three books, more or less at random,
but they are always different kinds of books.
I might have one novel, one psychology book,
and one whatever happened to grab
when I was pulling down books.
And I would simply open them, and find phrases,
and write down, and then see what I had.
And what I would first do is to try to get a stanza.
And if I felt after four lines, well, that's sort of a stanza,
I would say, all right, so I'm doing four-line stanzas.
And I would do four-line stanzas from those same three books,
usually using something from each of them,
but not necessarily.
Sometimes, it was all from one, sometimes from two,
but mainly, I was just using them.
And after some time--
sometimes half a page, sometimes two or three pages,
but not longer than that--
I would get tired of that poem.
And so I would--
I was writing all this down by pencil--
I would take it upstairs and type it up.
And when I had a group of these poems--
oh, well, when I had all these stanzas typed up,
I would rearrange them alphabetically.
And then I would go down and make another poem.
And it's not a way I recommend particularly, but it can work.
And besides that, I wasn't too much worried
about it turning out wrong because I
knew I could always change it.
And indeed I wasn't trying to prove anything
about collage, which I had done many times
before in different ways.
And I had no great questions about it.
I didn't, it wasn't that I thought it was the great thing.
It wasn't that I thought it needed to be proven.
I was just doing it I was looking
for poems not for ideas.
Eventually, actually rather strikingly soon, I had a book.
And so I put the poems together.
And I forget how I got the titles for the poems,
but I arranged the poems then alphabetically by their titles.
And nobody would publish it.
Nobody wanted this book, and I sort of understood that.
And that seemed, that seemed fair enough.
I enjoyed it what do I care whether other people didn't
like it.
I went on and figured out some other ways to use the collage
and came up with actually three volumes, of which this book
Transcendental Studies is actually the three
volumes, plus a little more.
Now, as I want to emphasize, I didn't tell myself
this is what you have to do.
I just did it as long as it seemed something
that I could do.
And when it got to the point where I was thinking,
oh, this is awful, I stopped.
Why not?
And the problem is, one problem was
that this job lasted for four years,
but anyway, it was over eventually.