I'm very happy to be here.
I feel very privileged to be here.
I thank Lois Shelton and Rex Veeder
especially and others who have confidence in my poems,
confidence enough to take a chance on me.
I'm delighted to read.
I'm also delighted to be able to walk around
for the first time in Arizona.
I've been ingesting the air all day.
I've got my face roughly the same color as my sweater.
I'm very proud of that.
This poem has a prologue, which is not in print.
It goes like this.
I think, I hope--
(SINGING) Let us tell you.
Let us tell you about the LTL.
We are loyal temperance workers, and we're doing mighty well.
We are working.
We are working for a cause that is just.
Come and help us fight this battle for when it we must.
[APPLAUSE]
We used to sing that in fourth grade
when the loyal temperance, legion workers
came into our school to try in their own way
to prove to us that we should not indulge booze.
The irony was that the town I grew up in,
which had about 796 people in it on a good Saturday night.
On a bad Saturday night, it had 796 people in it.
It was nothing, if not, steady.
But it was absolutely dry, and I had never
heard of beer until a loyal temperance legion
workers came in.
So if I don't owe them, thanks for anything else.
And I don't.
I owe them thanks for that.
Carry A. Nation, the hatchet woman of Medicine Lodge who
spelled her first name C-A-R-R-Y.
Her middle initial was A, And she read her first name
as a verb.
She assumed that it meant that she was
to carry a nation to sobriety.
She lived up the road apiece for my hometown, 22 miles.
Medicine Lodge, and she's in this poem.
We never begrudged the temperance folk
that have worked there because it was something.
And something at home was better than nothing.
And we'd have little parties.
She would bring in cookies and Kool-Aid.
They would carry this picture of the patron saint, Carrie A.
Nation and tack it up on the wall.
And then when the party was over,
they take the picture down and take it home with them.
And we enjoyed all that.
It was a great orgy as a matter of fact.
LTL Carrie A. Nation, came into our house,
and filled it with her meagerness.
She was hung full fledged against the flowered wallpaper
of our living room.
And Mrs. Wilma Hunt who brought her
gave each of us a little wooden hatchet.
John Barleycorn is the devil, Mrs. Wilma hunt said.
And by dropping worms, headfirst into alcohol,
she taught us to hate him.
Now, let me tell you she said about the LTL.
She taught us the loyal temperance legion
song, all of it, then killed another worm
and served refreshments.
[LAUGHTER]
Our house had never been so full.
There were all of us with Carry on the wallpaper, Kool-Aid,
cookies, song, something new to hate
and several dead worms curled in alcohol.
Thank you.