WEBVTT

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Now I want to read a poem.

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When we talk about poetry moving
into new areas, what we're

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talking about is American
poetry in the last 10 or 15

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years becoming
stronger and stronger,

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moving out into one
area after the other.

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In many ways, it has taken the
place of fiction in many areas.

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Fiction somehow is failing to
describe the life that we live.

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Nobody knows why.

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Maybe their life is too weird,
and fiction cannot describe it.

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Fiction did marvelously
in the 19th century,

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and the essay did marvelously
in the 18th century.

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And now, in the 20th
century, poetry somehow

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comes closest to being able to
describe the strange changes

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in life that have taken place.

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And this is evident
in someone like--

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not only the poets I mentioned,
like Stafford and like Dickey

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and like Roethke, who
talk about the Americaner;

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and younger poets like Ed
Dorn, who do the same thing;

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and poets like Ginsberg,
who write about how it feels

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like to be a
Columbia boy and then

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realize that everything in
Columbia that you learned

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was not--

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didn't help you in life.

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That's what "Howl" means.

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He's howling at
the academic poets.

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Anyway-- and also
men like Gary Snyder,

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who is the first Buddhist
poet we have ever

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had in the United States.

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And it sounds
laughable, but we must

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remember that that was an early
spiritual direction of America.

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Emerson went in that direction.

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All of Whitman comes out
of the Indian philosophers.

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So, again, we're picking
up something that is indeed

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in American history before.

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Gary Snyder is a
great religious poet.

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But also, for the first
time in many years,

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we're being able to
write poetry about things

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that are not noble.

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And we're being
able to write poems

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about tiny details, things
that we live through in life.

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That's the great
thing about Issa

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writing a poem about the
flea in his bed in the city.

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That's different
than writing poems

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about normal
mountains in England,

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or needing the death of a great
man in order to write an ode.

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So I'm going to read you a poem
by the great Chilean poet Pablo

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Neruda.

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He's probably the
greatest poet alive now.

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He was 62 years old this year.

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The greatest poet
in South America,

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along with César Vallejo--

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those two stand out
head and shoulders

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above everything else in
South America, greater poets

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than we've had in
England in this century,

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greater than Eliot
greater than Pound.

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But we don't translate
them very much

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because we figure that the
South Americans are exactly

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as we have them in our movies.

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Little guys, you know,
that cower in the corner

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and have this funny accent.

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But Neruda will probably get
the Nobel Prize this year

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or next year.

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He lost it to Steinbeck by one
vote a couple of years ago.

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And this is a poem
called "Ode to My Socks."

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It's an ode to his socks.

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And the socks were given
to him by a shepherd woman

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in Southern Chile.

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It's a marvelously funny poem
and a marvelously human poem.

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And it shows the movement of
poetry out getting stronger.

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"Maru Mori brought me a pair of
socks which she knitted herself

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with her sheepherder's hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.

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I slipped my feet
into them as though

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into two cases
knitted with threads

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of twilight and goatskin.

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Violent socks, my feet
were two fish made of wool,

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two long sharks sea-blue, shot
through by one golden thread,

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two immense blackbirds,
two cannons--

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my feet were honored in this
way by these heavenly socks.

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They were so handsome
that for the first time

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my feet seemed to me
unacceptable like two

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decrepit firemen, firemen
unworthy of that glowing fire,

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of those wonderful socks.

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Nevertheless I resisted
the sharp temptation

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to save my feet somewhere
as students keep fireflies,

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as learned men
collect sacred texts,

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I resisted the mad impulse
to put them into a cage

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and give them each day birdseed
and pieces of watermelon.

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Like explorers in the
jungle who hand over

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the very rare green deer to the
spit and eat it with remorse,

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I stretched out my feet and
pulled on the magnificent socks

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and then my shoes.

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The moral of my ode is this--

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beauty is twice
beauty and what is

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good is doubly good when it
is a matter of two socks made

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of wool in winter."

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So thank you very much.

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[APPLAUSE]

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