When I read my poems I like to read by the Monty Python
principle.
You've seen that show some of you I know,
and they're always moving from segment to segment by saying,
and now for something completely different.
This is another poem which I think I probably
read seven years ago.
It's my poem about poetry readings,
and I love to read it at poetry readings.
It's a new genre of poetry by American poets,
the poem about poetry readings.
If you write out of your life and spend
a third of it doing poetry readings
you're bound to get to it sooner or later.
They are always very snotty and superior poems
about poetry reading because poets love poetry reading
so much that they are ashamed to admit it.
This poem is called to a waterfall.
So you may have heard of it.
Yeah.
Waterfall enters and exits rather quickly.
Women with hats like the rear ends of pink ducks
applauded you my poems.
These are the women whose husbands
I meet on airplanes who closed their briefcases
and ask, what are you in?
I look in their eyes.
I tell them I am in poetry.
And their eyes filled with anxiety and with little tears.
"Oh, yeah," they say developing an interest in clouds.
My wife she likes that sort of thing.
Ah.
I guess maybe I'd better watch my grammar.
[LAUGHS]
I leave them in airports watching their grammar
and take a limousine to the women's goodness' club
where I drink Harvey's Bristol Cream with their wives
and eat chicken salad with capers with little tomato
wedges.
And I read them the erotic crocodiles and eating you.
Ah, when I have concluded the disbursement
of my sonorities crooning high on thy side I cry high.
And so forth.
They spank their wide hands.
They smile like jello.
And they say, "Ha, ha, ha, my goodness, Mr. Hall,
but you certainly do have an imagination."
"Thank you indeed," I say.
"It brings in the bacon."
But now my poems now I have returned to the motel,
return to the l'eternel retour of the Holiday Inn, naked,
lying on the bed watching Godzilla sucks Mount Fuji.
Addressing my poems, feeling superior, and drinking bourbon
from a flask disguised to look like a transistor radio.
Ah, my poems, it is true that with the deepest gratitude
and most serene pleasure and with hints
that I'm a sexual Thomas Alva Edison
and not without collecting an exorbitant fee
I have accepted the approbation of feathers.
And what about you, you laughing,
you in the blue jeans, laughing at your mother who wears hats
and at your father who rides airplanes
with a briefcase watching his grammar.
Will you ever be old and dumb like your creepy parents?
Not you.
[APPLAUSE]