Alan Feldman also comes to us from Massachusetts
where he teaches at Framingham State College.
His first collection of poems, The Happy Genius,
was the 1978 Elustondo prize awarded at the University
of Cincinnati, Alan Feldman.
[APPLAUSE]
Friend of mine once told me, when
you go far away to read your work,
bring everything you've ever written,
and seem to have done that here.
I'm going to read first from my collection, The Happy Genius.
The title is taken from the Carlos William's poem,
Dance Roos.
It's a poem about domestic happiness
and loneliness all mixed together,
and in case there are some here don't know it,
maybe I should recite it for you.
Williams writes "When my wife is sleeping,
and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping,
and the sun is a flame white disk in silken
mists above shining trees, if I in my north room
dance naked grotesquely before my mirror,
waving my shirt around my head and singing softly to myself,
I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely.
I am best so.
If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks,
buttocks against the yellow-drawn shade,
who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?
[APPLAUSE]
And the poems in this book are continuous in a way
they tell the story of love's joys and difficulties, bearing
children, losing parents.
This is an early poem.
It's called Debts.
In all the things I kept from you, the loss was mine.
Unreturned library books, a grapefruit knife
left in the rain, girls I saw on the subway
and thought I would marry though in love with you.
In all, nearly 20 sins which I could name and you could not.
Though some were sinned in your presence.
Like the time I thought you ugly as you
came home from the hospital and kept silent.
I never told you of a meal of ice cream cones
I ate before the supper you made me of ice cream cones.
This at great expense to both of us.
I, who could not praise the meal, and you,
all tears and screams.
This poem was written after a very awful date,
and I tried to sum up in it all the wisdom that I had gathered
about why men and women could not possibly
ever get along together.
You have to listen very carefully, complicated.
A man and a woman.
Between a man and a woman, the anger
is greater for each man would like
to sleep in the arms of each woman who would like to sleep
in the arms of each man.
If she trusted him not to be schizophrenic,
if he trusted her not to be a hypochondriac,
if she trusted him not to leave her too soon,
if he trusted her not to hold him too long.
And often, women stare at the word men
as it lives in the word women as if each woman carried
a man inside her and a wall and has crying
fits that last for days.
Not like the crying of a man, which lasts a few seconds
and rips the throat like a claw.
But because the pain differs much as the shape of the body,
the woman takes the suffering of the man for selfishness.
The man, the woman's pain for helplessness.
The woman's lack of it for hardness,
the man's tenderness for deception.
The woman's lack of acceptance and act
of contempt, which is really fear.
The man's fear for fickleness.
He had cars come off the bridge in rivers
of light, each carrying a man and a woman.
[APPLAUSE]
This next is really two poems from a series of four
written in late October of, oh goodness.
Does anybody remember the year that the Cincinnati
Reds and the Boston Red Sox were playing in the World Series?
1975.
Thanks, John.
God, I don't know what I would have
done without that information.
They were playing very late in the year in Boston.
The weather was quite dismal and awful.
And I was writing a poem almost every day as a kind of diary.
These are the last two.
The poem is called The late October.
And this is sections 3 and 4 from it.
Nothing but rain all weekend.
More and more leaves down until the lawn, the roads,
the woods are all covered.
Sixth and seventh games of the World Series postponed.
No winner yet, and it's nearly November.
Nearly our third anniversary end of this month, but the marriage
feels tenuous.
She's feeling trapped by the rain
and runs out the minute it's Rebecca's nap time,
and she screams from the caged height
of her crib for the green bead that's
fallen, for the blanket that won't
cover her doll because she herself is lying on it.
And I storm in a second time and storm out again cursing,
I hate this life, so the whole house can hear me yelling.
How many times a week do good marriages go to the brink?
[LAUGHTER]
Is it the rain?
I remember once some explorers of another planet where
it was always raining started to go
deaf, started to get suicidal, started to drown in wet air,
and only the toughest found his way to a sun dome.
I'll get you a sun dome, I tell my wife.
Four, this is the final one.
Our third anniversary, shopped around after work
for flowers and a silk bow to put on the light fixture Nan
wanted for painting after Rebecca's asleep.
Then went out to dinner and sat at a window
table facing East toward the reservoir and the moon rising.
Everyone was talking about the Red Sox.
We were planning the next decade stuffing ourselves
when the waitress came by our table and stopped moving.
Isn't it beautiful?
I could see her eyes growing dark and watery.
A pause for the whole self to come flooding up.
Like later when Cincinnati got the go ahead run and Boston
was losing, and Rebecca woke up with a fever,
her legs spasming, and I rocked her and rocked her and gave up
to the chair slow rhythm and her even breathing the last inning
the whole World Series.
This is a poem about birth.
It originated because my wife and I did very well.
[LAUGHTER]
We were asked to come back and talk
about it to the other expectant mothers and fathers.
[LAUGHTER]
I made notes, and I never got to say really what I had to say,
because my wife had so much to say.
So here is what I had jotted.
Notes for new fathers.
You will not want to make your usual mistakes, but you will.
The gas gauge will read empty when
you start for the hospital.
This is the night you are supposed
to remember your whole life but nothing is happening.
The water fountains stare at you silently
with paralyzed silver tongues.
In the labor room, you press too hard to rub your wife's back.
Her bed rolls away from you.
[LAUGHTER]
You suggest breathing.
Your wife breathes.
[LAUGHTER]
You are the coach, but you are not
in the game you run out for ice chips in your white suit
and pretend you're a doctor.
You're not a doctor.
When the nurse checks the fetal heart and tells you
it sounds like a girl, you don't hear anything.
Only the girlish fists of your own pulse
hammering in your ears.
There's a color TV but you don't watch it.
You watch the white sheet rising and falling.
Elsewhere, women are screaming, not your wife.
She is wrestling with an invisible wrestler.
Each around, the opponent gets rougher, some kind of angel.
After he beats her up, he'll forgive her and give her
a baby.
When the doctor comes, you want him to go away.
You've been doing fine all night.
This work has the rhythm of sleep, but it's time.
Why don't they wheel you in?
They leave you out.
They dress you in your paper towel robes
like a man in a giant napkin to sit
at the head of the table waiting for your feast.
Your wife is so naked.
She may as well be dressed.
Legs apart and lifted, brown antiseptic glue applied,
she looks like an upended piece of furniture in for repair.
But she's thrilled with her work, glowing with self-love.
She always knew her beauty was in there, now she can see it.
You drive them both home through a landscape made of diamonds.
Your wife is frail, beautiful, your first love all over.
You want to bring her tea on a silver tray with a rose.
Better save it.
First thing you know--
[LAUGHTER]
--it's waffle sundae.
[LAUGHTER]
You wake up screaming, waffles.
I'm going to make you all waffles.
Leaped from the bed, find the waffle iron in the basement,
and shine it up so you can see your face
reflected grotesquely in the crumbs.
Mixing gallons of batter, you blow a fuse,
so nobody eats for hours.
While the mix breaks down in between the grids and your wife
starts complaining, my kitchen.
My whole damn kitchen.
And you start apologizing for your childish desire
to have waffles, brown and perfect waffle
steaming on the tip of mother's fork
and heading for the lake of syrup on your plate.
Let's face it.
Berth no preparation for this.
[LAUGHTER]
But they're in the center of the table surrounded
by crumbs from waffles, a sign.
Any sign of yourself?
It's faint but there.
One success in a billion failures
come back to live with you and be your child.
[APPLAUSE]
It's a poem called Pick me up.
You think that after your parents have picked you
up all through your childhood that you're finished with that,
but you find that that's not always.
The day I moved out on my marriage
consummating it by settling into my own apartment,
I called home and broke the weighty news.
It was too much for mother.
This was men's business, divorces and settlements.
She was the comforter, but you were the one called
when there was real blood.
You drove into the city the very next day
to take me to lunch, wherever I wanted to go,
though you'd rather not park twice.
And we went to some expensive steak place
where you probed with gentle practical questions whose
decision, trial period, permanent,
but you made it plain that you liked me, though I
was full of self-blame.
You liked me, and it wasn't all my fault,
though I had not been like you and efficient remember
of all household errands the unfailing pair of bills.
I had worked you pointed out, I had done my best,
and you didn't blame her either just to give me cheap comfort.
You said such things were often both people's fault
or nobody's.
But why did you wait so long to tell me?
Was it that up to then you hadn't liked me
since I was forever putting you down at family dinners
or in my poems?
When mom died this fall, my first thought
was I had to fly to New York.
I called you from the airport when I landed.
Once more, you had to get into your car
and come for me waiting like an orphan on the roadway,
sitting on my suitcase, my arms, my whole mind intent
only on hugging you.
But when I leaned towards you, the steering wheel
was in the way, and you didn't intend
to risk crying when you had driving to do,
so you brushed me off stiffly.
And we sat calmly together in the car
going home talking about grandpa's hysterics
and the infuriating funeral directors trying to trap people
into buying overpriced caskets.
I chose plain oak, you told me, half asking for my consent.
Of course I said, what difference does it make?
And maybe that made you feel better.
Glad for once, you had a son.
This is a poem that I wrote about one
of my daughter's drawings when she was a little kid
and what it reminded me of.
It's called One of my daughter's drawings.
It tries to come out of the paper
and tear at me with its spider hands
and its feet like rakes and its eyes
like red targets and its green hair in flames.
And something else blue and sun like with rays
that Rebecca says, is a vagina.
Annie with the blue vagina.
[LAUGHTER]
Though when my wife prints the title,
she changes it to a Picture of Becky's doll.
[LAUGHTER]
And so it stays.
While pictures of Becky in their plastic frames grow
doll like and strange, and it's hard to remember how she was.
The pain in my penis that day when just tall enough to reach,
she bit me.
[LAUGHTER]
And I wailed and slapped her away
and she fell against the beer cooler,
and I stood alone in the supermarket watching
the customers console her.
[LAUGHTER]
Oh, the violence.
I'm out to get you, says Annie with her black parrots nose,
I will dance here on the top shelf
of the bookcase like a fury lest you forget how things
were when I first took shape.
[APPLAUSE]
I noticed that-- well, I've often
thought that perhaps the best moment of a person's life
is one that's so quiet and inconspicuous that it could
pass without you knowing it.
And I try to pay attention to quiet pleasures,
and I had a very nice weekend last year,
and I tried to write it all down in a poem.
The thing that was interesting to me
was that I kept having these war fantasies the whole time.
Someone told me that she too felt this way
that when she was particularly happy
she felt the fragility of that happiness and all
that threatened it, but I decided
that there might be something else in back of that I enjoyed
that feeling of fragility, that there was a strange pleasure
to it perhaps.
This is one of my discursive poems.
It's called Before the war.
But maybe it'd be good for you Arizonans
to hear something about skiing.
The kids are asleep in their dorm room
on upper or lower bunks.
The crowded steel bed frames, the bare mattresses,
the frosty windows, remind me of Stalag 17.
And the grown-ups arranged around the wood stove talking
about the decade of the '80s that's
upon us and that has started so badly we're not yet at war.
Nan gets up to check on Daniel.
He's sleeping 3/4 off the bed.
His head resting on the floor.
And Becky has gotten in beside him.
She too is sleeping on the edge.
We straightened them.
Though in the night, Mary Kay's Chantal
or maybe it's Ruth's Hannah, says, excuse me,
Danny fell out, would you like me to give him to you?
And she says it just like a waitress.
It's delightful.
We are served our child in our sleep.
[LAUGHTER]
He lies between us till morning swimming with mule kicks.
And the older kids flow through the Hall at dawn like a river
our kids are immersed in.
One photo I take is a Becky playing cards with Hannah
next to the stove on the porch, their light hair falling
so similarly as they concentrate,
and then all of us seated family style
at the table for breakfast, the innkeeper throwing up
his hands.
We've eaten a pound and a half of bacon.
And the group photo of everyone standing
in the snow beside the cluster of colorful skis
never comes off because I've run out of film.
But here are some others.
Small Becky striding through the smooth loaves of snow
around the loop Hannah and I have made for her, then sliding
into a wire fence and rescued by Hannah, who
just lifts her skis dangling.
Or skiing with Mark Mary Kay and Chantal with Daniel on my back.
And Chantal goes downhill into a tree and starts to wail.
And nobody's impatient.
She keeps asking for more tissues.
She's 11.
She's never been so weepy.
They think it's hormonal.
I see them standing still on their skis, their tall daughter
calming down, and they look like a new wise race of snow people.
And suddenly, I see that I'm happier right now than when
I was 11.
Something I never thought would happen,
though the straps of Daniel's pack press into my shoulders,
and I'm the heaviest and slowest of the skiers, sweating
and panting, but in a safe place among my friends.
And calm today too.
Riding home, my muscles seemed used and eased,
and I love the land we pass under its snow.
Looking like something in history, the villages
and pastures, a man tries to fix in his mind
before going off to war, and which it is good to have had.
Like my daughter's explanation of why the low sun follows us
across the hills and the syllables of my son's
inscrutable speech.
And my wife's flushed beauty beside me
on the front seat and my own love of poignance.
Sure that I've reached the exact happiest moment
and that I can save it as it slides away
by imagining tanks churning up the snow, fireballs mushrooming
on the hillsides.
I showed that poem to Alan Duggan, and he said to me,
you are not taking into consideration
the reality of nuclear war.
[LAUGHTER]
So next time I'm feeling happy I can go further.
[LAUGHTER]
Why I shot the president.
Let's watch the tape again.
[LAUGHTER]
Clearly, I didn't mean to hurt him.
He waved to me, so I wanted to reach out and touch him
with one long lead finger.
He noticed.
Right there where the smile blew out like a burst light bulb,
it was clumsy of me, but I kept squeezing off shots
till I got what I wanted, to be held.
It didn't matter that they called
me motherfucker, a big fist went through my belt
and lifted me toward the lights, cameras.
So while I'm still here, I want to dedicate this shooting
to my mother and my father and to the girl I love.
I hit as many people as I could, and I'm sorry for them all.
The president's chest opened up like a cavern,
and I felt safe for the first time.
I hope he likes the hospital, as I already like prison.
Before, I would buy a gun on credit, an airline ticket,
and travel those long red arteries
across America hoping to get established,
better than graduation and all that other shit.
You hit your man and you have a safe career forever.
That's a nutty poem I try to write a poem every Thursday
afternoon.
[LAUGHTER]
I was sitting in a bar and these two detectives
are talking about the shooting, and I suddenly felt,
I guess, more sympathetic with the man who did, I don't know.
I want to read two more.
This one obviously is new.
Oh, here it is.
I was telling a class you say my poems are getting fatter.
It's a very large piece of paper.
This is called House gift poem for Richard Shelton.
I had this strange feeling.
Lois told me that he was going to meet us at the plane,
and I saw him meeting us in those reflecting sunglasses
that he has with his Western hat on.
I said nothing could be stranger than that.
And he didn't meet us actually.
But I wanted to write this poem for him,
because anybody who would meet somebody at 2 o'clock
in the morning, 3 o'clock in the morning at the airport I
thought deserved a poem.
So I wanted to write this.
But really it's about the strange occupation
of being a poet where you write some poems
and then suddenly you get flown across the country
to read them to people.
But you can find out about another poet
by reading his book.
It's like Whitman says, who touches this book touches
a man, and so I happened to be reading Richard Shelton's
book that afternoon.
And there are some lines in a poem of his
that I would use as an epigraph.
In some small land town, a stranger
waits for me to arrive he will take charge of everything.
He will drive expertly down Main Street out of town
toward open country where the sky is half the world,
and those beautiful lines are from the last poem in Shelton's
book bus to Veracruz.
In Cambridge mass, two Jets are heading Southwest
over the steeples, and light from your part of the sky
strikes the wall of a big yellow apartment house,
making it look ripely and alive like a Puebla.
There are a lot of jets, there's another one, the sun off
it's far off body makes it glare like a star.
And there are two inscribing parallel lines west.
I'm feeling transcontinental.
Soon to get on a plane with my new yellow pants
and my shoes from Poland, my wife,
my daughter with her Dr. Seuss encyclopedia,
and by midnight, we'll be asleep over Texas,
and near dawn, we'll descend to Tucson
and you will meet us stepping out of your sunglasses
and a sweat stained desert hat.
A minute ago, under the amber light of the reading room,
the new leaves of the New England
spring creeping like green locusts from their buds.
You just told me that a man who can't walk on water
will go to the desert.
You don't joke around.
[LAUGHTER]
I mean, you wouldn't consider swimming or doing
the dead man's float.
How strange that we are brothers then when I remember
so well the 40 years wandering with distaste that I've
vowed never to live more than 30 minutes from water?
You plant your desk under a cactus under the moon,
and I am at this moment among the heavy eternal furnishings
of the library where your books tilt along the wall a bit
to the east of mine.
How odd?
I write this letter, a seed that will grow my voice
and the polished stone stanzas of your Knights
are in my hands.
You bite off some pain and some love.
I've talked to your wife several times on the phone.
I liked her accent, the way she says groceries.
[LAUGHTER]
I see a bag of groceries in the back of the Dusty Jeep
and I've just read your anniversary vow,
the one I think is for her after 14 years.
I mean, you could have made it up
or you could have married again since then.
But it seemed true about going out into the desert
and finding a beginning place as I will soon
be doing with my own wife in that light of chalk.
Maybe you and I won't like each other,
or maybe we'll write to each other till the next century.
Pen pals of the great spirit.
You all say it's that we're among those who still use words
as if they matter, even though we don't use them the same way.
You are probably taking a walk in an Arroyo.
I am going to take a walk in the rear limpid April sunshine here
in Cambridge, and then get on a plane
and fly to Tucson, where I am depending on to meet me.
Like some helpful scout in a Western,
you will show me how you get water by listening to the Earth
and shaking a cactus.
[LAUGHTER]
At dawn, the desert wind fluttering my light clothes,
I will be standing in the dry foothills
where you make your home.
[APPLAUSE]
And it was very lovely, because tonight Richard,
who is babysitting for our daughter and couldn't be here.
And I started to explain spontaneously,
without him knowing anything about this poem, how
you got water out of a cactus if you should be dying of thirst
and it was just so accurate that.
I knew he would say that at some point.
[LAUGHTER]
This is the last this is a poem called The personals, meaning,
of course, the classified advertisements,
where people in their loneliness send out feelers
to try to come up with somebody else.
My wife reads them.
She wants to keep abreast of what's available.
Like a person who owns a house but still follows real estate,
I imagine her back on the market, because I've died
or I've slept through garbage day again.
[LAUGHTER]
Or one fatal time too often, I've turned away in our bed,
insisting on the right of a depressed, anxious person
to freedom from happiness.
[LAUGHTER]
The happiness she is always trying to give me.
And how would she advertise?
Humorous carefree man needed for a life
without inexplicable descents.
When she comes back exhilarated from evening class
and tells me all the dirty jokes she's
heard in carpool, like the one about,
how do if elephants have been copulating in your backyard
at night?
And she turns to me in the dark and tells me
she has the hots for me.
And I just want to be alone in my bitterness,
and she just wants to romp with someone in her liveliness.
I think of the personals and I surrender,
though I'll be damned if I'll talk to her.
[LAUGHTER]
And I concentrate on stretching apart my toes
and letting the pleasure sparks dart around between them.
She doesn't seem to notice how furiously quiet I am.
And anyway, I'm not furious.
I'm a sour sensitive 35-year-old writer teacher
searching for an attractive even-tempered woman interested
in the arts.
[LAUGHTER]
And as well-made as I'll ever be, I drop off to sleep.
In the morning, she rises to our son's first cries,
and I rise to the groan of the garbage truck.
And think about nothing.
I was so blackly thinking of last night,
except how you can know elephants have been copulating
in the backyard, because you get up in the morning
and find that some of the trash can liners are missing.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]