Then there's a tiny one.
Lois mentioned Henry Moore, I wrote about him
and spent a lot of time with him.
And I know that working, thinking about, writing
about his sculpture, living with him
as he worked on things, made a tremendous amount to me
as a poet, both because I saw a great artist working
and talked with him.
But because of the nature of the sculpture,
the wonderful, wordless, opaque, loquacity of the great work,
I wanted to make poems as hard as bronze.
I made a little one called "Reclining Figure"
and Henry Moore has made more than 100, some of them
are mostly the wooden ones and some of the lead ones
are long and skeletal, root-like.
But most of them are blocky and like mountains and landscape
made out of bronze and stone.
And this is one of the latter kind.
It's very short.
"Then the knee of the wave turned to stone.
By the cliff of her flank I anchored, in the darkness
of harbors laid-by."
One of the first times I read this,
I think perhaps really the first time I read it,
was out at the University of Washington at Seattle.
Just a few months before Ted Roethke, great poet,
who taught there, died.
It was just two or three months before he died.
I don't think my reading had any connection with it really,
despite rumors.
But when I began the reading, Ted Roethke,
whom I knew a little bit, wasn't there and I was really mad.
I was furious he wasn't there.
And then he came ambling in--
[SNARLING]
--and then I was terrified because he was there.
And he sat over in the left-hand side, where Dick is over there
and he did something that very few people do.
He kept making noises after a poem.
I might finish a poem in Ted would go [WOOFS]..
But you couldn't really tell, at least
I think you couldn't tell whether he meant
that's a pukey, horrible poem, or whether there's
something good in there and I hate you, you know?
I'm mad.
You couldn't really tell.
I mean, he had lots of little jealousies and vanities.
And he was a terrific man.
But he liked to talk out of the corner of his mouth.
So when I finished reading this poem,
he said, read that one again.
Read it slower this time!
[LAUGHTER]
So every time I read it, I have to read it over again.
It's the Ted Roethke Memorial rereading.
[LAUGHTER]
"Then the knee of the wave turned to stone.
By the cliff of her flank I anchored, in the darkness
of harbors laid-by."