WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:01.740 align:middle line:90% Slater. 00:00:01.740 --> 00:00:03.360 align:middle line:90% Let me come home. 00:00:03.360 --> 00:00:05.400 align:middle line:84% The letters have proved insufficient. 00:00:05.400 --> 00:00:09.660 align:middle line:84% The mind cannot hang to them as it could to the words. 00:00:09.660 --> 00:00:12.690 align:middle line:84% There are ways beyond what I have here to work with, 00:00:12.690 --> 00:00:17.250 align:middle line:84% what my head cannot push to any kind of conclusion. 00:00:17.250 --> 00:00:20.430 align:middle line:84% But my own ineptness cannot bring them to hand 00:00:20.430 --> 00:00:25.650 align:middle line:84% the particulars of those times we had talked. 00:00:25.650 --> 00:00:28.870 align:middle line:84% "Men kill themselves because they are afraid of death," 00:00:28.870 --> 00:00:32.670 align:middle line:84% he says, "the push beyond end, into." 00:00:32.670 --> 00:00:35.820 align:middle line:90% 00:00:35.820 --> 00:00:36.840 align:middle line:90% Respect. 00:00:36.840 --> 00:00:40.500 align:middle line:84% They said he respected the ones with the learning, lacking 00:00:40.500 --> 00:00:45.090 align:middle line:84% it himself, Waldo Frank and his six languages what 00:00:45.090 --> 00:00:47.790 align:middle line:90% had seemed important. 00:00:47.790 --> 00:00:50.760 align:middle line:84% While Crane sailed to Mexico, I was writing, 00:00:50.760 --> 00:00:54.300 align:middle line:90% so that one betrayed himself. 00:00:54.300 --> 00:00:57.840 align:middle line:84% He slowed without those friends to keep going to, 00:00:57.840 --> 00:01:00.060 align:middle line:84% keep up, stopped dead in the head, 00:01:00.060 --> 00:01:05.230 align:middle line:84% could not go further without those things. 00:01:05.230 --> 00:01:08.070 align:middle line:84% So it was, I entered the broken world. 00:01:08.070 --> 00:01:09.855 align:middle line:90% Hart Crane. 00:01:09.855 --> 00:01:10.355 align:middle line:90% Hart. 00:01:10.355 --> 00:01:14.660 align:middle line:90% 00:01:14.660 --> 00:01:19.970 align:middle line:84% That was perhaps the first poem that I felt, for my own needs, 00:01:19.970 --> 00:01:26.660 align:middle line:84% began to hold a response to what I 00:01:26.660 --> 00:01:30.050 align:middle line:84% felt it necessary to say in the actual way I had it 00:01:30.050 --> 00:01:31.250 align:middle line:90% on the page. 00:01:31.250 --> 00:01:32.090 align:middle line:90% We've heard so much. 00:01:32.090 --> 00:01:34.298 align:middle line:84% Those of you who are interested in senses of writing, 00:01:34.298 --> 00:01:36.090 align:middle line:84% or who are interested now in writing poetry 00:01:36.090 --> 00:01:38.570 align:middle line:84% are very aware of the incredible amount of emphasis that's 00:01:38.570 --> 00:01:41.450 align:middle line:84% come to be placed on the issues of line, 00:01:41.450 --> 00:01:44.450 align:middle line:84% or all the technical aspects of poetry, 00:01:44.450 --> 00:01:46.340 align:middle line:84% and I daresay that many of you feel that it's 00:01:46.340 --> 00:01:48.230 align:middle line:90% become an overemphasis. 00:01:48.230 --> 00:01:52.190 align:middle line:84% But again, in the '40s and early '50s, 00:01:52.190 --> 00:01:57.080 align:middle line:84% there was a need to think of these things as precisely as 00:01:57.080 --> 00:02:01.220 align:middle line:84% possible simply because senses of poetry had become, 00:02:01.220 --> 00:02:04.010 align:middle line:90% more or less static. 00:02:04.010 --> 00:02:07.400 align:middle line:84% Not to make that a criticism simply, 00:02:07.400 --> 00:02:10.520 align:middle line:84% but I mean by that the formal nature of poetry 00:02:10.520 --> 00:02:13.580 align:middle line:84% had been assumed to be of this or that character, 00:02:13.580 --> 00:02:16.340 align:middle line:84% to be a formal structure of stanza, and so forth and so on. 00:02:16.340 --> 00:02:20.030 align:middle line:84% And so poets again is Williams, William Carlos Williams, 00:02:20.030 --> 00:02:22.610 align:middle line:84% or even Ezra Pound equally at that time, 00:02:22.610 --> 00:02:26.270 align:middle line:84% were questioned because of their apparent idiosyncrasies 00:02:26.270 --> 00:02:27.823 align:middle line:90% and eccentricities of manner. 00:02:27.823 --> 00:02:29.240 align:middle line:84% So that any of the younger men who 00:02:29.240 --> 00:02:33.350 align:middle line:84% are trying to find some way to register terms of feeling 00:02:33.350 --> 00:02:36.560 align:middle line:84% had to take on this whole issue of how the poem would 00:02:36.560 --> 00:02:41.840 align:middle line:84% be literally put on the page to make these emphases of concern 00:02:41.840 --> 00:02:42.710 align:middle line:90% clear. 00:02:42.710 --> 00:02:45.560 align:middle line:84% So all of the early poems in this particular book, 00:02:45.560 --> 00:02:48.780 align:middle line:84% now that I come back to them after all this is about 12, 00:02:48.780 --> 00:02:55.190 align:middle line:84% 15 years later in some cases, I can see this marked concern. 00:02:55.190 --> 00:02:56.780 align:middle line:84% Here's one for Charles Olson, who 00:02:56.780 --> 00:02:59.100 align:middle line:84% had a tremendous influence on me at that time 00:02:59.100 --> 00:03:01.510 align:middle line:90% and continues to have.