Now, I read some of my own poems.
The first poem I'll read is called "The Whole Story."
And there is a story behind it, not a very long story.
It's one of the earliest poems in my second book,
but that's not the story.
I was a student at the University of Iowa briefly
and I knew a poet who lived in St. Louis whose work I admired.
His name was Donald Finkel.
And I decided I go down to visit him and bring
my poems because I was curious to know
what he'd think of them.
And I went down and we spent most of our time
in the St Louis zoo.
He said don't worry about your poems,
I'll write you the letter and you'll
know what I think in a couple of weeks.
And he did write me a letter.
And he said-- what he said in essence was that my poems are
redundant, not that one repeated the other exactly
but within a given poem, I tended to repeat myself.
And then they drew a little sketch in the letter.
He said it was--
as though I were traveling by train
and I was sitting next to somebody and
I saw a fire outside of the window.
And then this is a quote from the letter, which
was the epigraph for the poem.
Speaking about the person next to me on the train he said,
I'd rather you didn't feel it necessary to tell him
that's a fire.
And what's more we can't do anything about it
because we're on this train, see?
[LAUGHTER]
That didn't seem like an adequate response to my work.
So I decided I'd answer him by writing a poem
and calling it "The Whole Story."
"How it should happen this way?
I am not sure.
But you are sitting next to me minding your own business
when all of a sudden I see a fire out the window.
I nudge you and say, "That's a fire.
And what's more, we can't do anything about it,
because we're on this train, see?"
You give me an odd look as though I had said too much.
But for all you know, I may have a passion for fires
and travel by train to keep from having to put them out.
[LAUGHTER]
It may be that trains can kindle a love of fire.
I might even suspect that you are a fireman in disguise
and then again I might be wrong.
Maybe you are the one who loves the good fire, who knows?
Perhaps you are elsewhere, deciding that
with no place to go.
You should not take a train.
And I seeing my own face in the window
may have lied about the fire."