This is one of the--
I'm back again to the theme of poetry.
One of the first that I wrote to clarify
certain points for myself.
You must realize that the openness liberality and variety
in poetry and today was nothing at all that way, nowhere
near that way, in the '30s and '40s
when this poem was written.
And I wrote this in defiance of the highly
formal and constricted manners and methods in which poems
were written in those days.
But the spirit of it, I think, has--
I think we've all caught up with that spirit now.
Anyway, here's the poem.
"Get the guys works in a poem, and you've
got the smoke and smokestacks.
The mottled red and yellow tenements
and grimy kids who curse with the pungency
of the odor of gas, you've got America, boy.
Sketch in the river and barge is all dirty and slimy.
How do the seagulls stay so white and always cloying
like a little mad geniuses?
You've got the kind of living that
makes the kind of thinking we do--
gasworks, smokestack, whistle tooting wisecracks.
They don't come because we like it that way,
but because we find that outside our window every morning
and soot on the furniture and trucks
carrying coal for gas, the kid hot after the ball
under the wheel, he gets it over the belly all right.
He lies there.
So the kids keep tossing the ball around after the funeral.
So the cops keep chasing them.
So the mamas keep hollering.
And papa flings his newspaper outward in disgust
with discipline."
[APPLAUSE]