That's that.
I just finished writing a book, a prose book,
which is a memoir about growing up in Saint Paul,
with my Czech grandmother, who is
sort of a negative, positive influence.
It's about a lot of other things.
And about eventually going to Prague after she died,
and finding there not my roots--
if there is such a thing--
but, a whole lot of other connections
that had to do with poetry in the West,
to connection with European culture.
It's a book very much by a provincial, a Midwesterner,
a woman, all those things are considered in the book.
And I've had a hard time this week
deciding what to read to you from it,
because I wanted to represent the book,
and I'm almost going to have to give that up
because I don't know how to give you what themes are and just
read a little here and there.
I won't read from the Prague part of the book
because I'm going to finish the reading with a short story that
concerns Czechoslovakia, so I'll just
let that speak for the Prague part of the book.
But in the end, after all my hemming and hawing
I've decided to start at the beginning, the way things do,
you know.
And so, I'll begin, and just read you the first chapter
and one other scene.
The first section is called Saint Paul,
this is the first chapter of that section.
I was five and was sitting on the floor
of the vestibule hallway of my grandmother's house
with a one bookcase had been pushed.
The bookcase wasn't in the house itself,
it wasn't a reading family.
I was holding in my lap a book of sepia photographs bound
in a soft brown cover, stamped in flaking gold with the title,
Zlatá Praha Golden Prague, Views of the 19th Century.
The album felt good, soft, first the hard shiny castle
and its gardens, then a close up of the astronomical clock,
a view of the Baroque jumble of Molastrana.
Then a whole series of photographs
of Little River, each showing a different bridge, photograph
after pale photograph, like a wild
rose that opens petal by petal, exposing itself effortlessly
as if there were no such thing as regret.
All the buildings in the pictures
were hazy, making it seem that the air not the stone
held the contour of the baroque villas intact.
I didn't know how to read yet, and the Czech captions
under the pictures were no more incomprehensible
than English would have been.
I like the soft, flesh like pliancy of the book.
I knew the pictures were of Europe, and that Europe
was far away, unreachable.
Still it has something to do with me, with my family.
I sat in the cold vestibule turning the pages of the Prague
album, I was flying, I was somewhere else.
I was not in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and I was happy.
My grandmother appeared at the doorway,
her hands were on her stout hips and she wanted me to come out
of the unheated hallway.
She wanted me to eat coffee cake in the kitchen with everybody
else and I'd been hard to find.
She said, "come eat", as if this were the family motto.
[LAUGHTER]
As she turned to go, she noticed the album.
In a second she was down on the floor
with me, taking the album carefully in her hands,
turning the soft felt pages.
Oh, she said, "Praha".
She looked a long time at one picture,
I don't remember which one, and then
she took a white handkerchief out of her smock apron pocket
and dabbed at the tears under her glasses.
She took off the wire rimmed glasses and made a full swipe.
Her glasses had made deep hollows
on either side of her nose, two small caves,
they looked as if with a poke, the skin would give way
like a ripe peach, and an entrance would
be exposed into her head into the skull, a passageway
to the core of her brain.
I didn't want her head to have such wounds, yet I like them.
These unexpected dips in a familiar landscape.
"So beautiful", She was crying melodramatically
over the album, "So beautiful".
I'd never seen an adult cry before.
And I was relieved in some odd way
that there was crying in adulthood, that crying
would not be taken away.
My grandmother hunched down next to me in the hallway.
She held the album, reciting the gold stamped captions
as she turned the pages and dabbed at her eyes,
she was having a good cry.
I wanted to put my small finger into the two little caves
of puckered skin, the eyelids sockets
on either side of her large drooping nose, strange wounds.
I wanted to touch them, I wanted to touch her, my father's
mother, she was so foreign.
Looking repeatedly into the past,
you do not necessarily become fascinated with your own life,
but rather with the phenomenon of memory.
The act of remembering becomes less autobiographical, it
begins to feel tentative, aloof, it
becomes blessedly impersonal.
The self-absorption that seems to be the impetus
and embarrassment of autobiography,
turns into or perhaps always was a hunger for the world.
Actually it begins as hunger for a world, one gone or lost,
you faced by time or a more sudden brutality.
But in the act of remembering, the personal environment
expands, resonates beyond itself,
beyond its subject into the endless and tragic recollection
that is history.
We look at old family photographs in which we
stand next to black boxy fords, and are wearing period
costumes, and we do not get as fascinated because there we're
young again, or there we're standing as we never will again
in life, next to our mother.
We stare and drift because there we are historical.
It is the dress, the black car that
dazzle us now and draws beyond our mother's bright arms,
which once caught us.
We reach into the attractive impersonality of something more
significant than ourselves.
We trust memory against all the evidence,
it is selective, subjective, cannily defensive, unreliable,
as fact, but a single red detail remembered, a hat worn in 1952,
the nail polish applied one summer day by an aunt
to her toes separated by balls of cotton
as we watched, has more real blood in it,
than the creatures around us on a bus as for some reason
we think of that day, that hat, those bright feet, that world.
This power of memory probably comes
from its kinship with the imagination,
in memory each of us is an artist, each of us creates.
The kingdom of God, the nuns used to tell us in school,
is within you.
We may not have made a religion of memory,
but it is our passion, and along with, sometimes in opposition
to science, our authority.
It is a kingdom of its own.
Psychology, which is somehow our science, the claustrophobic
discipline of the century, has made
us acknowledge the value of remembering even
at the peril of shame.
But it is especially difficult to reach back
into the merely insignificant, into a family life where
it seemed nothing happened, where there wasn't
the ghost of a pretension.
That is a steelier resistance, because to break through
what is unimportant, and as anonymous as dirt,
a greater sense of worthlessness must be overcome.
At least shame is interesting, at least it is hidden,
the sign of anything valuable.
But for a past to be overlooked, discarded,
because it was not only useless but simply
without interest, that is a harsher heritage,
in fact, is it a heritage?
It seems as if I spent most of my 20s
holding a lukewarm cup of coffee,
hunched over a table talking.
Innumerable cups of coffee, countless tables,
the booths of the Gopher Grill at the University of Minnesota,
where probably around 1965 I first heard myself
use the word relationship.
[LAUGHTER]
A little later, the orange formica table
of a federal prison where the man I live with,
there still is no other term, was serving a sentence
for draft resistance.
And the second hand tables of a dozen apartments,
the wooden farmhouse table of a short
lived commune, table after table,
friend after friend, rehashing our hardly ended or not ended
childhoods.
I may have the tables wrong, maybe the formica one
was in the farmhouse, and the oak one in the prison.
Maybe the chairs in the prison were orange and the table gray,
but they are fixtures nailed down not to be moved, memories.
This generation has written its memoirs early.
We squeezed every childhood lemon for all it was worth,
my mother this, my father that.
Our self-absorption was appalling, but I won't go back,
not yet, on that decade.
It was also the time when my generation, as a generation,
was most political, most involved.
The people I sat with, picking at our individual paths,
wearing nightgowns till noon as we analyzed
within a millimeter, our dreams and their meaning,
that is how they proved this or that about our parents.
Finally, I guess it must be true.
Finally put on our clothes, went outside,
and in various ways that are too easily forgotten,
tried to end a war which we were the first as a group
to recognize was disastrous.
In fact, our protest against the war
is what made us a generation, even to ourselves.
Perhaps no American generation, certainly not
our parents who were young during the Depression,
had a childhood as long as ours.
The war kept us young.
We stayed in school endlessly it seemed,
and our protest kept us in the child's position.
We all ultimately rebelled, and then pestered the grown ups
to give us what we wanted, an end to the war.
Those who fought the war had no such long self-reflective
youth, childhood belonged to us, who stayed at home,
and we became the 60s generation.
Our certainty that the war was wrong
became entangled with our analysis
of our families and our psyches, not
only because we were given to self-reflection
and had a lot of time on our hands,
we combed through our dreams and our childhoods with hume's men
and as symbols at the ready, and we were looking for something
I now think which was neither personal nor familial,
and perhaps not even psychological.
We had lost the national connection,
and were heartsick in a cultural way.
I don't think I knew that, I don't think
we knew that, I didn't anyway.
But at home, I didn't talk psychology, I talked politics.
Arguing with a kind of angry misery
whose depths confused me, and made my family
frightened for me and probably of me.
But there was no real argument, I did all the talking.
My family gathered for Sunday dinner, looked glumly
at the gravy on their plates, as if
at liquid Rorschach blots that might
suggest why I, the adored child, had come to this strange path.
They weren't for the war, but the belligerent way
I was against it dismayed them and caused
them to fall silent waiting for me
to stop, and perhaps go away.
I had opinions, I spoke of my position on things.
One night my uncle, trying to meet me halfway said, "Well,
now when I was in Italy during the war,
how do you defend that analogy?"
I snapped at him.
Perhaps, partly because for them the war
was still the Second World War.
My family couldn't seem for a long time, to focus on Vietnam.
But my uncle, retreated in the face of the big guns
of my new English major lingo.
On Thanksgiving, one year, I left the table
to find I.F. Stone's Weekly, and read parts of it
to the assembled family in a ringing triumphantly
angry voice, but my father said when
I finished, as if eye of stone had been compiling evidence
about me and not the Johnson administration,
but he used to be so happy, "You were the happiest person I ever
met".
"What does that have to do with anything?"
I said.
But he was right.
My unhappiness, but I didn't think of myself
as unhappy, was a confusion of personal and public matters,
and it was made more intense by the fact that I had been happy,
the happiest person, and now I couldn't
remember what happiness had been, just childhood?
But many childhoods are miserable,
and I couldn't remember exactly how the happiness stopped.
I carry from that time, the feeling
that private memory is not just private, and not just memory,
yet the resistance is not against memory,
but against the significance of memory remain strong.
I come from people who have always
been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever
happened to them.
They have worked, raised families,
played cards, gone on fishing trips together,
risen to grief and admirable bitterness,
and then, taken patiently.
The early death that robbed them of a brother, a son.
They have not dwelt on things.
To dwell, that appropriate word, as if the past
were a residents.
Faintly morbid and barbaric, the dwellings of prehistoric men,
or the language of the Bible, the word
was made flesh and dwelt amongst us.
I have dwelt though, to make a metaphor,
is to make a fuss and I am a poet,
but it seems that is something one cannot claim for oneself.
Anyway, I write poetry.
I'm enough of them, my kind family,
to be repelled by the significance of things,
to find poetry with its tendency to make connections,
and to break the barriers between past and present,
slightly embarrassing.
It would be impossible to look into the past,
even a happy one, especially a happy one,
were it not for the impersonality that dwells
in the most intimate fragments.
The integuments, that bind even obscure
lives to history, and eventually history to fiction, to myth.
I will hold up negative after family negative, to the light.
I will dwell.
Dwell in the house of the dead, and in the living house
of my relatives.
I'm after junk.
I want to make something out of what my family says is nothing.
I suppose that is what I was up to, when my grandmother called
me out of the vestibule, away from the bookcase,
and the views of Prague, to eat my dinner with everybody else.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you very much.