Boy.
OK.
I would be happy to answer questions if you have them
or to hear comments.
If you have questions or comments,
maybe you could raise your hand and then see
if it's a little dark out there.
And so if you'd wave your hand, I could see you more easily
and recognize you.
Yes.
Why are you so fascinated or how--
when did you become fascinated with Billy the Kid?
And being with those kids for your party?
Did you all hear the question?
When did I-- how is it that I became--
when and how is it?
When did I and how is it that I became interested in Billy
the Kid?
I guess, I don't know.
I grew up in Billy the Kid country.
I had heard all of my life stories about Billy the Kid,
and he became in time--
This happens to children I think,
especially children who live alone.
I was an only child and consequently I
spent a lot of my time alone.
And I made up games on my own and I
learned how to exist in that way on the strength
of my imagination.
And so Billy the Kid was just made to order.
He excited my imagination when I first heard about him.
And then I began to draw him into my experience
to appropriate his presence as I imagined it
into my sphere of instinct as it were.
And then the fascination grew.
And there came a time when I researched Billy the Kid.
I began reading things about him, looking for things
and really trying to get some possession
of the details of his life of which as you know
there are very few.
We know very little about him.
His name was really Henry McCarty, apparently.
And we know very few things about his life.
So he is appropriate to imagine.
He lends himself to an imaginative realization.
And I have indeed lived a long time with Billy the Kid.
I know him probably as well as any living man does.
I also know Genghis Khan.
We won't get into that now.
I'll just tell you this much.
I was sitting in the Bolshoi Theater one night
and Genghis Khan was sitting directly in front of me.
And I was chatting with a friend seated on my right
and directly Genghis Khan turned around
and he fixed me in his gaze and he memorized my face.
It was the most incredible stare I have ever encountered
and it became excruciating.
I can't tell you how I squirmed under that man's gaze.
I knew more about that thing I was reading to you about Billy
the Kid's gaze after that experience.
And I know that was Genghis Khan.
It could not have been anyone else.
You can't imagine that.
I don't know, maybe you can, maybe it has happened to you,
I don't know.
But he looked at me for what seemed fully five minutes.
Just no expression, just looking at me, fixing me in his mind
somehow, memorizing me.
And boy, I didn't move a muscle.
Just sat there and was miserable.
Are there other questions?
Why aren't you asking questions?
Yes.
Could you give me your views on the difference poetry
and prose?
Well, I think yeah.
Could I give my views on the difference
between poetry and prose?
Poetry is an expression that is composed in verse.
And that's about as much as you can
say I think about the technical distinction.
Prose is not measured, is not metrical, poetry is.
One of the controlling devices in poetry
is the length of line, and that simply
is not a factor in prose.
Beyond that, I think all you can do
is talk about characteristics, alliteration,
rhythm, what we call the lyrical quality, accrues to poetic--
to poetry more readily, let us say, than it does to prose.
But as far as I can tell, the two expressions
are very closely related, very closely related.
I think there is a kind of prose which might as well be called
poetry, simply because the characteristics, the texture
of the language is such that it has
the sound and the appearance of poetry.
Not the stanzaic appearance on the page but everything else.
And I'm thinking of such things as Moby Dick, the chapter
on the spirit spout, which is almost
overburdened with alliteration.
But you read through that, and you hear it,
and that becomes the essence of it.
The sound.
It is a poetry.
It is poetry of a kind, I think.
Isak Dinesen too in such a work as Out of Africa.
That's very poetic and there is very little
to choose between that and poetry of a very high order.
Anything else?
Yes.
Whatever poetry you read?
I read Wallace Stevens, and I read Emily Dickinson.
I read E.A. Robinson.
I read Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams.
And among the contemporary poets I read Thom Gunn, of
whose work I--
some of it I think is very, very fine.
I have read Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.
I read J.V. Cunningham, again, a man whose talent
I respect a great deal.
Edgar Bowers who is perhaps a little too--
are we being taped?
I shouldn't say anything like that.
He's great, he's fantastic.
Those are the people who come first to mind, though.
At one time I fell hopelessly in love with Emily Dickinson
and I read--
I'm one of the few people in the world
to have read Emily Dickinson in manuscript.
And I spent a year doing that.
I went to Amherst on once upon a time,
and I divided my time between the Frost Library
at Amherst and the Houghton Library at Harvard.
And I read Emily Dickinson in manuscript.
It's a fascinating experience.
Our relationship has cooled a little bit.
But at one time I was--
it was an obsession almost.
Any other questions?
Yes.
After reading your other works, I
didn't imagine that you would be laughing or make me laugh.
I just wondered if you were something
that's new in the culture you describe especially
with Billy the Kid and you were traveling Europe?
I don't know.
No, I don't think it's new.
I don't think you can ascribe it to any recent experience.
I was funny as hell long before I wrote Billy the Kid.
But your question, I understand that question
because not until the last--
not until fairly recently have I begun to deal in humor at--
I didn't.
For example, my first poems--
I should say this too, these poems
I have maybe 45 or 50 poems here.
They will be in the collection.
It will be that size.
But 3/4 of that number are recent.
That is to say they were written in the last, say, three years.
And the other quarter poems say, 12 poems or 15 poems,
were all written long before that.
So there's a great gap in here.
I hope it's not too obvious.
But something wonderful happened to me about three years ago.
I don't know what it was but my reaction to it
was that I began to write at a much greater rate.
I became suddenly very energetic in terms of writing.
It took me about 15 years to write those first 15 poems.
And I liked to say to people that I was probably the slowest
poet around.
I took a kind of refuge in that interesting fact.
But now I'm writing much more loosely
and I don't know whether that's good or bad.
I think it is probably good in that I feel somehow it
is a greater impulse.
And humor is a real aspect of it.
I like to laugh at what I write, at least on occasion.
I also like to curdle with fear.
I like to amaze myself when I'm writing too.
After I had written this poem, "The Wound," for example,
I stood back you know and I wondered
about that for a long time.
It was amazing to me that I had written that poem
and I liked being amazed in that way.
So I looked at it, read it a lot,
carried it around and read it to people,
accosted people on the street.
And said, listen, listen to this.
So I don't know.
I don't know really the answer to that.
There is very little humor in much of my writing
but there is a good deal in my more recent writing
and I don't know how to account for that.
Yes.
When you won the prize, did you make the acceptance speech?
No.
Could you comment on that?
Yes.
The question is, when I won the Pulitzer Prize,
did I make an acceptance speech?
No.
As a matter of fact, you don't.
You're not given the opportunity.
I should have been glad to make an acceptance speech.
I was rather hoping that someone would ask me
to make an acceptance speech.
But as it happens, the Pulitzer business is all very secret.
This is true.
Most people find this hard to believe
but I did not know that I was under consideration
for the Pulitzer Prize.
It never occurred to me.
And so the news came out of the clear blue
and I was taken completely by surprise.
I could not have been more surprised.
I had just never thought about the Pulitzer Prize.
I never thought that I had had something
that the Pulitzer people were considering, were judging.
And one day, the 5th of May.
The 5th of May, 1969, my editor at Harper and Row,
Fran Monson McCullough, called me on the telephone.
I was at Santa Barbara at the time.
And she called me in the late morning,
it was 11 o'clock, say.
And she said, Scott are you sitting down?
And I said, yes, Fran.
What is it?
I wasn't.
I was standing.
I was standing up, was a wall phone.
And she said, you've just won the Pulitzer Prize.
And I said, sure, I have.
But then she convinced me of it and I was just dumbfounded,
just really, really dumbfounded.
But it's all very secret.
To this day I don't know who the people were on the committee
except for one or two.
I've managed with great effort and brilliance,
I might add, to discover the identities of one
or two people on that committee.
Because I am indebted to them.
But it's all very secret.
They notify you, I think by wire, right?
You hear about it though before you get the wire.
It was on the radio just after Fran called me.
And people started running up and saying,
I just heard the news.
And I said, me too.
And then the awards are made, as you probably
know, by Columbia, the trustees of Columbia University.
And they mail you a check for $1000 and a certificate which
says the trustees of Columbia University award the Pulitzer
Prize in fiction to so-and-so, this day,
and there's a seal on it.
But they send you that in a plain brown wrapper
and that's all there is to it.
There is no ceremony and I didn't have the opportunity
to make an acceptance speech.
Wonderful things happened to me just after that, but not
as a part of the Pulitzer business.
My publisher, they were overjoyed.
They hadn't had a Pulitzer Prize in 20 years or something.
So they invited me.
They were very expensive.
They invited me to New York and they put me on television shows
and things like this.
They were just overjoyed.
And I got around to asking my editor,
how is it that books are selected?
I didn't know that my book was under consideration.
How are they chosen?
Who determines which books will be submitted?
And she said, oh the sixth floor receptionist
gets together a group of books every year and sends them.
They're very casual about it.
So I went up.
I made it a point to pay my respects to the sixth floor
receptionist.
Thank you.
It's very funny though, really very funny.
I'd do it again.
Any other questions?
Yes.
Would you describe the land around rainy mountain?
The land around rainy mountain is very flat level in the main.
That area is called the Rolling Plains.
And it's called that because the land
there is an undulation to the land.
It does in fact roll.
But you can see great distances over it, of course.
And it is great plains country.
Very much like the country of the northern plains,
except that it is probably a little more undulant.
There are fewer mountains in it.
And there are many rivers, green belts along creeks and rivers.
Rainy mountain is just a little knoll.
I don't know what its elevation is but it's in the Rockies.
You would not think of it as a mountain at all,
it's a knoll, a hill.
But from the top of it, you have the sense
that you are on top of the world because you
can see great distances from the top of it.
Grassland.
At one time buffalo range.
And as a matter of fact, one of the interesting things
about that country now is that there is a game
preserve at Madison Park, which is in the Wichita Mountains
just close by Rainy Mountain.
Then there's a herd of buffalo there.
I've been chased by one of the buffalo in that herd.
I don't tell that to everybody and I
don't want it to get around.
One day my father and I were walking--
we were driving through Madison Park
and we saw the herd which you can't always
do because sometimes it ranges far away from the road.
But this time it was close.
And it was in the spring and many of the cows
had just calved.
And there were these marvelously beautiful orange colored
calves, buffalo calves lying in the grass.
And so my father and I got out of the car
and we started walking over to get a closer look.
And we got within say 10 feet or 15 feet of a calf
and then its mother took exception to us.
And she put down her head and she charged.
And we got the hell out of there.
I didn't know that my dad could run as fast as he can.
He's terrific.
He was doing about a nine, three, 100.
She didn't chase us very far.
No real enmity, she just wanted to establish her territory,
impress her calf.
Anything else?
Yes.
Just talk about where are you now?
If you have any suggestion as far as
questions as far as realizing place.
But people that like live in Tucson--
I don't know if you've been out on the street like Walmart?
[INAUDIBLE] in place.
In that kind of term--
those kind of terms, you have a suggestion
where people could look?
I think that it is possible for all of us at this point in time
to develop a sense of place.
It is easier for some of us.
And he told me--
the last time I saw him, he said,
you know they're doing some construction work out here.
They're tearing down buildings and they
were digging up a sidewalk.
And he said, it was an interesting thing
to see the children in the neighborhood.
They all gathered around because underneath this concrete,
there was dirt.
It had never occurred to them that there
was-- that Earth was there under that concrete wrapping.
And I think more and more that is happening to us.
And it will happen to us more and more still in the future.
But we can realize and must realize
that there is Earth underneath the sidewalk
and it is still possible to find it.
And we must be sure that it remains
there to be found by us, and by our children,
and by their children.
We can do that.
I think your question indicates the concern
and thank God for it.
We are really beginning to sense our impoverishment
in that respect and that's the first step.
The next is to do something about it.
I don't think legislation is the next step.
I think rather the next step is developing
a moral understanding of the landscape.
We must understand the landscape in the way
that the Indian traditionally understands it
as a vital thing.
As a thing possessed of a spirit of its own.
The Indian has always had a great ethical regard
for the Earth and sky.
And I think we stand to learn a great deal and perhaps even
to save ourselves by following his example.
Well, I could go on and on about that.
I have kept you very long time and I
appreciate your questions.
And I have enjoyed chatting with you.
Thanks for coming.
[APPLAUSE]
Professor Momaday will be in the Poetry Center which
is on Highland Street at Speedway tomorrow
afternoon from 2 o'clock perhaps until 4:00
to talk with those of you who are interested in talking
with him further.
You're invited.
Thank you for coming.