This is the moment where we have a brief moment of silence
for our interpreters tonight who did not have that poem ahead
of time and who are doing a wonderful, wonderful thing
by being here.
We should clap for them.
Can we do that.
[APPLAUSE]
Your one and your two.
I was at a reading some years ago where
Mark Strand was reading.
And Mark Strand's a very narrative poet.
And he had given the ASL interpreters his poems
before and so they stood up in their turn and they interpreted
and it was fine.
And then they had a very different poet Rae Armantrout.
Do you know Rae Armantrout?
I don't know-- I know Rae Armantrout
but I don't know her poems because they
don't want to be known.
And she stood up and began reading one poem after another
without any commentary in the middle.
And I watched I actually read ASL or I can interpret it
and I watched the ASL interpreter
and she became more and more excited and frantic in attempts
and finally she started making things up.
She started making things up and things went on
and finally she just gave up and she went like this.
And she stood there and faced the audience
for the rest of Rae Armantrout's reading
and Rae Armantrout was never the wiser.
[LAUGHTER]
And I often think that maybe that
was one of Rae Armantrout's best readings
and she didn't even know it.
It was such a pity to miss that.
This poem is called "The Black Pickup Truck of Death
is Driving Away."
And I wrote it and I showed it to a friend of mine,
another friend.
And she read it and she looked back
at me said must the pickup truck of death be black?
And I said yes, it must.
You'll see why.
This is one of those moments.
Sometimes life just gives you something
and all you have to do is write it down.
And it's a poem.
And these are fantastic moments.
They're gift moments.
I tell my students you don't have
to make-- if you're afraid of making things up,
my students are so desperately scared of the imagination.
I mean they might actually do something that would make them
different from other people.
And that would be a great tragedy they think for them.
So I tell them you just have to listen.
Just listen.
They say you mean like eavesdrop.
I said yes, that's what I mean.
I was walking behind students changing classes.
Those of you who are students are you
on your cell phones between classes?
You are, aren't you?
You are.
I was walking behind one the other day
and I heard her say into the cell phone what mayor?
And there was a pause.
She was listening and then she said, oh, you mean
that mayor, the other mayor.
And I was like-- it was the same thing
with the Sherpas of Canada.
I thought the other mayor, I have to write this poem.
You don't have to make anything up if you are paying attention.
This is called "The Black Pickup Truck of Death
is Driving Away."
And for those of you who were frightened by the last two
poems, we're going to go back to poems that tell stories now
so it'll all be fine.
It'll all be fine.
In this dream only it's not a dream
you are about to give a lecture in a storefront in Grosse Point
Park, Michigan.
The lecture is about metaphors say
and you can't seem to get the audience quiet or seated.
And then there's this honking from the street outside
and you turn, everybody turns and it's
a parade of little leaguers in pickup trucks.
The streets of Grosse Point Park,
Michigan are almost deserted at this hour,
swept clean by an early morning thunderstorm.
The trucks are just trucks.
The sides plastered with hand-drawn placards,
the Nationals, the Mariners, the Lansing Lug Nuts,
and the beds full of young boys in uniform who scowl and shout
and hurl candy, something they've apparently
been told to do to the crowds.
Only there really aren't any crowds only us
and a few people who were out walking their dogs.
And anyway, the boys aren't throwing the candy
into the imaginary crowds.
They are throwing the candy at the imaginary crowds
so that it hits the pavement and the plate glass of the shops
and what bystanders there are like stones or hail.
One woman covers her face to protect herself
from the barrage.
Another picks up the candy and starts hurling it back
at the boys.
And then suddenly in the midst of everything
there's a truck with no boys in it, no placards.
And it's a black truck.
And you can't see the driver because of the dark tint
of the windows.
And you think this is the black pickup truck of death.
And somehow you're pretty glad to see it.
You think this is my team.
You even laugh a little.
But then the parade turns East and the black pickup guns
its engine straightforward.
It was never actually part of the parade.
Its owner lives in the neighborhood
and was making a Saturday morning run for milk or lumber
or cigarettes.
He just got caught up in the festivities.
He was probably impatient to get somewhere else
away from the mansions of the 1920s, the broad pavements.
Memories of the auto industry and the fires
away from the screaming boys and their candy
and from the plate glass behind which you are still
standing in this dream.
Only it's not a dream.
With the audience settling down now and wanting
to hear more or less what you have to say about metaphor,
which is that it is not a game.
Which is that it is an alchemy of expression
of what it means to be human.
A bridge between the things that are human
and the things that are not.
Between the living and the dead.
And that out there beyond Grosse Point Park, beyond Detroit even
we are fighting a war again.
And that out there further out beyond the war history
continues to circle.
And that we are given a small amount of time and materials
and we do the best we can with them.
And sometimes one thing is like another thing.
And sometimes it isn't.
And that once the trucks and boys have passed somebody
has to remain behind to pick up all the candy
from the sidewalks.
And that some of us wake with bruises
and have no idea how we got them.
And some of us wake with bruises and know all too well how
we got them.
And that somewhere out on the edges of the dreams
that turn out not to have been dreams at all the black pickup
turns its headlights on and keeps
driving through the nearly deserted city in search
of something, good Mexican food maybe.
And it is not about you or the boys or the war.
Except that when that same evening you finally do lie down
to sleep it's the screams of the boys
you keep hearing inside your head
and the thud of the candy like the report of a gun.
And this is not a metaphor.
None of it.
Not a dream but you wish it were.
And out of this wish you write a poem.
And out of your fierce rejection of this wish you write a poem.
And sometimes it's the same poem around which
history circles trying like us to forget parts of the story.
The plagues and the defeats, the blood sacrifices.
Like us dreaming of a sweetness come down
from the sky or some god or a heaven.
I think that's enough.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]