I'm going to read you the title poem
since you have to kind of work up to the title poem.
Somebody asked me to read this at 9 o'clock
in the morning in Ireland and--
the women in Ireland are just beginning
to move into their "something's wrong here" phase
in women's liberation there.
I talked to the wife of Shauna Phelan and Eileen Phelan.
And she said that she thought that
in the English-speaking world, Ireland
was maybe the worst place to have been born a woman.
I said, "Well, how did you escape?"
She said, "I had no mother.
My mother died early."
She said that it's all passed down through the mothers.
They teach the women to be very servile.
And she was--
I thought I was just going there to meet Shauna Phelan,
but I really enjoyed her every bit as much.
She had been a bicycle messenger during the 1918 revolution.
I guess the war helped liberate, too.
I wrote this after a poetry reading by the way.
A man was reading it to St. Lawrence University.
And he came two hours late-- no, one hour late and very drunk.
And then he proceeded to read for two hours.
And then he sat down next to me afterwards.
And there was a very buxom woman that was sitting next to me.
And he reached over and grabbed both breasts.
And then he turned to me and he said, "Do you
write poetry, honey?"
[LAUGHTER]
I said, "Yeah, I write some poetry."
But I went home.
And I was going to write a poem against that kind of poet.
But I-- a lot of other things got into the poem.
I was reading Lizzie Borden's--
the trial of Lizzie Borden, the record of that.
Later, it all was televised and everything, the play they did.
But this was before that happened,
that it got so popular to read about Lizzie Borden.
So she gets into the poem a little bit, too.
Yeah, she was a champion of the suffragettes, those of you
who saw that TV production.
She was actually convicted by poetry, by that little rhyme,
you know.
You all know that.
"Instructions to the Double."
This is about taking risks.
"So now it's your turn, little mother of silences,
little father of half-belief.
Take up this face, these daily rounds
with a cabbage under each arm, convincing the multitudes
that a well-made-anything could save them.
Take up, most of all, these hands
trained to an ornate piano in a house on the other side
of the country.
"I'm staying here without music, without applause.
I'm not going to wait up for you.
Take your time.
Take mine, too.
Get into some trouble I'll have to account for.
Walk into some bars alone with a slit in your skirt.
"Let the men follow you on the street
with their clumsy propositions, their loud hatreds
of this and that.
Keep walking.
Keep your head up.
They are calling to you--
slut, mother, virgin, whore, daughter, adulteress, lover,
mistress, bitch, wife, cunt, harlot, betrothed,
Jezebel, Messalina, Diana, Bathsheba, Rebecca, Lucretia,
Mary, Magdalena, Ruth, you, Niobe, woman of the tombs.
"Don't stop for anything, not a caress or a promise.
Go to the temple of the poets, not
the one like a run-down country club, but the one on fire
with so much it wants to be done with.
Say all the last words and the first: hello,
goodbye, yes, I, no, please, always, never.
"If anyone from the country club asks if you write poems,
say your name is Lizzie Borden.
Show him your axe, the one they gave you with a silver blade,
your name engraved there like a whisper of their own.
If anyone calls you a witch, burn for him.
If anyone calls you less or more than you are,
let him burn for you.
It's a dangerous mission.
You could die out there.
You could live forever."
[APPLAUSE]