Thank you very much, President Shelton, and thank you all.
I was asked to talk a little bit about poetry
and the Center, which I will do.
And, first of all, I just want to thank
everyone for their-- everyone present for their support.
There's a Chinese saying that goes,
those who have the free seats, are the first ones to boo.
So I'm assuming we will have a very respectful audience
tonight.
So I'm going to talk about myself a little bit
and then talk about poetry and the Poetry Center.
I'm an only child, so I might never get to the Poetry Center.
But when I was poet laureate, one
of the things that happens when you're poet laureate
is that you're interviewed left and right.
And I thought for a while that I would
be sort of the first Christian martyr
to be interviewed to death instead of being stoned.
And I started to think that instead of the poet
laureateship being an honor, I started
to suspect that it was a government plot to silence
a poet for two years.
So the Library of Congress will identify
a poet who seemed to be doing well,
appoint that person poet laureate, and then
they wouldn't write poems for two years.
I mean, the office is wonderful.
And, of course, we have things like poetry month in April.
But we also we should be a little wary of that
because, to me, it seems that anything
that has a month or a week is basically
a sign of its neglect--
Mother's Day being the prime example,
followed by national secretary's week.
You will never have a national television month.
So no worry about that.
But when I was in these interviews, as I was saying,
the two most frequently asked questions
were the following-- one, how do you account
for this incredible poetry Renaissance in America
with open mic readings and magazines beginning and MFA
programs?
And the second question was, how come
nobody reads poetry anymore?
Well, there was a way to answer these two seemingly
contradictory questions.
And the answer was more or less that,
yes, there is all this activity taking place,
but the audience for poetry tended to be poets,
tended to be a kind of closed-circuit of activity.
Many people at poetry readings are poets themselves.
And, often, poetry readings are followed
by an open mic where the good news is anybody can read
and the bad news is anybody can read.
And often at these readings, one will
see that people waiting for the open mic
are revising their poems instead of listening to the poem.
But in spite of all that activity,
it seemed that poets were the main audience.
It would be like sort of going to a ballet in this auditorium
and noticing that everyone was wearing
leotards in the audience.
So I'll just addressed the question
kind of briefly about why a lot of people don't read poetry.
And the reason usually is tied up with the word difficulty.
Poetry is difficult.
Someone commented that it's not so much
that poetry is difficult and that's why nobody reads it,
it's that it's difficult because nobody reads.
It in other words, the more poetry you read,
the less difficult it will become, right?
It's hard to just go into it without reading a lot of it
and expect ease.
And there are, I think--
we love difficulty in so many aspects of our life.
John Ciardi once commented-- when he was talking about form
in poetry--
he said, even in our games, we expect difficulty.
I mean, that is why in chess you don't have two queens just
running around the board after each other
or in basketball, that's why the hoop is four feet high.
I mean the fun--
and that's why people do crossword puzzles or labor
over a Sudoku.
I mean, there's a self-imposed level of difficulty.
I'm not sure what the point of that is but.
You know, I've noticed in--
flying around the country, there are
kind of different levels of literary activity going on.
There's a very small percentage of people
are reading what I would consider literature,
and then there's another class of people
reading James Patterson.
And God bless him.
And then there's the crossword people and then
the Sudoku people, and then there's the SkyMall people.
It is astounding that someone would
be on an airplane for three hours,
not even bring a newspaper, and just
look at like doggie doors and lawn furniture.
I don't get it.
One thing the Poetry Center does,
and it is completely unique--
maybe not a unique institution, but certainly unique housing
for such an institution.
But one thing the Poetry Center does, just by the look and feel
of it, is remove that false sense of difficulty.
I mean, there are-- it's not there anymore.
But it looks like there are doors to walk through.
There is space.
There is light and air.
There are photographs of the poets which you saw earlier.
It wasn't until I think the '40s, when Oscar Williams put
together a little anthology of American poetry,
and he had tiny postage stamp sized
pictures, photographs of the poets on the cover.
Most people had never seen what these people
looked like before.
It really demystified.
I remember one of the reasons I'm a poet today
is because I came across a photograph.
Well, not a photograph, but a--
well, I guess it was a photograph.
A photograph of Edgar Allan Poe.
I couldn't believe what I was looking at.
I've never seen anyone who looked like that.
My parents didn't look like that.
The people they had over to play bridge didn't look like that,
and I want them to be one of those guys.
And so there you have something like 17,000 square feet of hair
and light and open shelves.
And, surely, with 17,000 square feet,
you can find a spot to sit down and read something.
There's lots of opportunities there.
So that's one thing I love about the center is
its sense of openness and availability to everyone.
One other point I would like to make
is that the odd thing about poetry
or the special thing about poetry I think
is that as wonderful as this space is,
poetry does not require a space in the way
that symphonic performance does, in the way that ballet does,
or painting needing galleries and museums
and auditoriums because poetry can be carried in the mind
through memorization.
It's the most portable and invisibly portable
of all the arts.
One of the--
I was over in England last week and this insensitive Englishman
was interviewing me to death again.
And he said, you know, is it part of being Irish-American?
Is that why you're a poet because the Irish are
so poetic?
And-- strangling this guy.
But he was responding to the romantic view
of why Ireland is so connected in its culture
and so identifiable, almost uniquely, with poetry.
The real reason is that it has to do
with 600 years of colonization.
There was no wherewithal.
There was not the material resources to buy a cello.
I mean, the Irish weren't allowed
to buy a horse that was worth more than 2 pounds
or something.
So there weren't museums.
There wasn't the wherewithal for architecture
or symphonic performance and the rest of it.
But you can't take poetry away from a disenfranchised people
because you can carry poetry in your head.
You can memorize it and install it in your consciousness
and in your body in a way and take it
with you wherever you go.
Anyway, it's great to be part of this long parade of poets
that began 50 years ago.
I looked at the list that our noble director Gail Browne
gave me the other day of all the poets that have ever been here.
And it seems to me if you sat on the steps of the Poetry
Center for 50 years, you would not get much accomplished
in your life but you would have seen every major American poet
pass through those doors.
So that's it for me.
I'm going to continue-- we're going to kind of introduce
each other.
In this program.