I hope this mic is on.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
All right, good.
I think I'm allergic to mics.
I always have been.
Usually try not to use them.
I want to introduce the woman who
was director of the Poetry Center for 20
years, my wife, Lois Shelton.
[APPLAUSE]
Our son called this morning from Oregon.
And what he called to tell me was, don't forget your glasses.
He's still running our lives.
I'm very much aware that this is the opening
reading of the 50th anniversary of the Poetry Center,
and I thought about what poem to read first.
And none of mine were good enough,
so I thought about some other poems.
And I thought, well, since Robert Frost read
that first reading, I should read a Robert Frost
poem to start with.
But, unfortunately, the poem of Robert Frost
which is my favorite is a very heavy poem.
But I'm going to read it anyway.
You know, Robert Frost, the sort of myth around him
has grown up that he was this kindly, sweet, old,
white-headed poet.
And, well, he was white-headed, but that was about it.
He was a curmudgeon of the first order.
And I'll tell you a story that happened here
when he was reading here in the Centennial Hall, which
wasn't Centennial Hall then.
It was the main auditorium.
He was right in the middle of a long poem.
I think it was "The Witch of Coos," but I'm not sure.
And a young man, photographer from the Wildcat newspaper,
came down that long, long aisle with hundreds of people
on both sides.
And he was jockeying around to get into position
to take a photograph.
And in those days, of course, the cameras were big and bulky
and there were always flashbulbs, which blinded us.
We dreaded flashbulbs because then you
couldn't see the next line unless you had it memorized.
But anyway, this guy got down, just ready to take the picture,
kind of squatted down, and Frost leaned over the podium.
And he fixed him with a gaze that would have fried leather.
And he said, young man, young man,
I can't have you doing that now.
Get your ass out of here.
[LAUGHTER]
And the poor man had to turn around and go back up
that long aisle, with all those people snickering and laughing.
You know, Frost was a classicist, that
is, a student of the classics.
He knew them very well.
Looking through his work, I can hardly
find a decent thing he has said about the Christian god.
He believed-- I think, I firmly believe,
anyway-- he believed in the Greek gods.
And the Greek gods, as you know, they
could do just about anything they wanted to.
They have temper tantrums.
They punished people unnecessarily.
And they were just whimsical, totally whimsical.
And I think that carries over into his work,
and you see it all the time.
When he asks about what is causing the stones to fall off
the wall, he says, I could say elves,
but it's not elves exactly.
It's those underground gods that have gone underground
when the Christian god was legally made the God.
Anyway, this poem reflects that, I think,
or maybe even worse, by our standards.
And there's a line toward the end
that you don't want to miss.
It goes by so fast.
The line is, "Or someone he had to obey."
The poem is from his last book, The Clearing.
It's very late Frost.
And it's called "The Draft Horse."
Draft horse being, of course--
only the young people might not know this-- a horse
that pulls a buggy or a wagon.
"With a lantern that wouldn't burn, in too frail a buggy,
we drove behind too heavy a horse
through a pitch-dark, limitless grove.
And a man came out of the trees and took our horse by the head
and, reaching back to his ribs, deliberately stabbed him dead.
The ponderous beast went down with a crack of a broken shaft,
and the night drew through the trees
in one long invidious draft.
The most unquestioning pair that ever accepted fate,
and the least disposed to ascribe any more
than we had to to hate, we assumed
that the man himself, or someone he had to obey,
wanted us to get down and walk the rest of the way."