And how long have I been reading for?
Where did we stop?
[INAUDIBLE]
I'm sorry.
[INAUDIBLE]
OK.
Well, then, yes, I want to read really two poems
to conclude with--
or two things.
One, people often ask how you write poems.
This doesn't really describe how you write poems,
but I think it's rather amusing.
It describes thinking of a poem and trying to write it down
during a long--
well, a rather long day's journey in a snowstorm.
And really what happened was that, about a year ago, I
started--
I realized my memory was getting rather bad,
so I thought I'd better write down
everything I did every day.
[LAUGHTER]
Which now takes practically all day to do.
[LAUGHTER]
And doing this, some of the things,
often it seemed quicker to write it down in verse
than to-- or in some kind of poetry,
because it's often quicker than to write it down in prose.
But anyhow, this is a rather odd day, really,
between Dartmouth and Little Rock.
You can imagine the journey.
Well, let's see.
First of all, I was supposed to leave Dartmouth.
I'll read the prose bits, you see,
and then you'll see how the poem comes
into my head, which I write down while I'm in a bus
and on an airport.
And you'll see, really, how it happens
and how elements from outside, which
have nothing to do with the idea of the poem, enter in.
What happened was that the plane didn't go from Dartmouth,
so I therefore had to take--
because of the snowstorm, so I had to take a bus to Boston.
That explained time on the bus.
"Riding on the bus through the snow falling outside
and the snow covering the landscape, except for patches
of soggy grass, from which it seemed not so much to have
melted as to have died away, wearied
with a long, long winter.
I felt nothing to be less likely than that I should end up
that day in Little Rock.
It would be after midday when I had reached Boston.
The two ends of a line connecting
New Hampshire with Arkansas seemed to me
to have been severed.
And on the bus, I was as disconnected in my journeying
as a piece of rope thrown down casually on a vast plain.
And this gave me a sense of liberation far stronger
than my concern about getting to Little Rock, which
I regarded as an operation in which I was the patient
and had to perform no active role.
The result was that mood of ferocious idleness
in which the mind races.
This lasted all day on the bus, on Boston airport,
and on the flight from Boston to Little Rock.
Realizing that, unless I wrote them down immediately,
ideas would vanish as mysteriously
and completely as they arrived, I
made notes on the back of the envelope
containing my air ticket.
Mysterious connections-- the first stream of thought
seemed to have nothing to do with my present life whatever.
They were of a tea party to which my father must have
taken me when I was 12 or 13.
I have no conscious memory of the occasion."
So here's the beginning of the poem.
"She was, my father said in an aside, a great beauty
40 years ago.
Out of my crude childhood, I stared
at our tottering hostess, trembling in her armchair,
pouring tea from Silver.
Her pink silk dress, her pale blue gaze.
I could not see the girl my father saw.
The connection of this untracked memory with my thoughts
of today suddenly appeared.
Now that I'm older than my father then
was, I go with lifelong friends to the same parties, which
we have gone to always we do the same things always,
although the parties sometimes change
to funerals that sometimes used to change to christenings.
Boston airport.
When the bus, emerging from snowy landscapes, arrived
there was in bright sunlight.
The problem of getting to Little Rock was suddenly solved.
I would arrive there by a different flight, but only
an hour behind schedule.
Meanwhile, I had to sit waiting for an hour, during which
the people I saw fed what I think
were probably irrelevancies into my train of thought.
A face"-- I wonder, should I just
read the first lines again.
In order that you can get the continuity,
I'll just read the first--
just as a continuous poem.
"She was, my father said in an aside, a great beauty
40 years ago.
Out of my crude childhood, I stared
at our tottering hostess, trembling in her armchair,
pouring tea from silver.
Her pink silk dress, her pale blue gaze.
I could not see the girl my father saw.
Now that I'm older than my father then was,
I go with lifelong friends to the same parties
which we have gone to always.
We do the same things always, although the parties sometimes
change to funerals that sometimes used
to change to christenings."
This is then Boston airport.
"A face retains the image formed to the moment
when we first see it and, if it's seen once only,
remains fixed in that moment.
For example, here in the airport,
where I am writing this, the man with a great stomach billowing
under his flowered t-shirt surmounted by his face spouting
sweat.
The dear old lady squeaking that she's
sorry to be so helpless to the dark suited stranger who's
picked her bag up for her.
The child snatched squalling by his mother
from the jaws of a mouth spewing luggage onto a rotating band.
All these will stay the same, this moment when
they're snapshots on my brain."
These detached thoughts on a bus and an airport,
or on an aeroplane, are like speeches
by some ghost out of one's past speaking
from the boards of the theater of one's subconscious.
As I wrote above, I think the scenes on the airport
were an intrusion, seeming to continue,
but rarely interrupting the thoughts on the bus.
Better perhaps to strike them out and go back to the earlier
sequence, which then, were the airport scenes admitted,
would continue something like this,
which I wrote in the motel bedroom that evening.
"Faces we've once loved fit into their seven ages of man
as Russian dolls fit into one another.
My X-ray memory penetrates through the seven covers
of the successive dolls back to the face that I first saw.
So when the exterior final doll is laid into its final box,
your glowing face, first seen, shines through them all."