Actually, I'm not a very prolific writer.
It's just that my books are very short.
And so I come out with plenty of them.
I'm very pleased to be in Arizona,
but it upsets all my generalizations.
I was saying to somebody earlier this evening
that when I met Dylan Thomas, he was on the wagon.
And when I come to Arizona, it's pouring with rain.
[LAUGHTER]
Still, that's all right.
[LAUGHS]
I'd like to start with a few fairly old poems
and then go on to some more recent stuff,
largely for selfish reasons in that I'm
more interested in what I've been
writing in the last few years and feel more involved with it.
And so I read it better.
But maybe that's not selfish.
If anybody at the back cannot hear me at any time,
please shout out, even in the middle of a poem.
Because there's very little point
in sitting in an audience when you can't hear somebody.
I'd like to start with a poem I usually start
with called "The Goddess."
And it turns out the goddess is Proserpina,
or sometimes known as Persephone,
who is a kind of fertility goddess, I guess.
You remember she was picking flowers innocently
when suddenly Pluto--
not the dog but the god of the underworld--
[LAUGHTER]
--rushed up and carried her off to hell and raped her--
Hades, I mean-- and raped her.
And her mother, finally, after much beseeching,
got her back to the Earth for part of the year.
But she has to go back every fall.
And obviously, she stands for fertility.
And she has to die, or at least go under the Earth,
like the plants every fall and then come back in the spring.
But I'm using her here not just as a fertility goddess but as
kind of a goddess of energy and, in that case,
maybe as a kind of muse, too.
"The Goddess."
"When eyeless fish meet her on her way upward,
they gently turn together in the dark brooks.
But naked and searching as a wind,
she will allow no hindrance, none, and bursts
up through potholes and narrow flues, seeking an outlet.
Unslowed by fire, rock, water, or clay, she after a time
reaches the soft, abundant soil, which still does not
dissipate her force, for, look!
Sinewy thyme, reeking in the sunlight, rats breeding,
breeding in their nests, and the soldier
by a park bench with his greatcoat collar
up, waiting all evening for a woman, any woman,
her dress tight across her ass as bark in moonlight.
Goddess, Proserpina, it is we, vulnerable, quivering,
who stay you to abundance."