OK, now I'm going to read--
the work from now on will be in my new book,
which is coming out late this spring from Harper & Row.
I wish I could tell you the title.
I've gone through many.
I could give you five to possibly look for.
That won't help.
These first ones that I'm going to read
are from a little chapbook that was published last winter
called Magritte Series.
And that will be included in this larger book.
These poems were written in response
to the sensibility of the painter, Rene Magritte, whose
paintings I've felt deeply in contact
with for a very long time.
He's not really a painter that painters
get very excited about.
And I understand that.
Because I love painting for itself, too,
and I have lots of friends who are painters.
But he's a very literary painter.
And he also isn't, from a literary point of view,
he's not obvious.
His surrealism, he's lumped in under that title.
But it's not gross like Dali or something like that.
It's very-- excuse me if you like him.
[LAUGHTER]
I mean, it's just a very exact rendering.
But there's always something just slightly
strange happening, which is like my life.
And so I identified pretty strongly with the paintings
and decided, when a student of mine
gave me a wonderful, big collection
of Magritte paintings, that I wanted
to try to work with the book.
And what I did, I decided to arbitrarily
name the poems the names of the paintings.
But I'm not trying to talk about exactly what's going on
literally in the painting but to enter
into some kind of dialogue with that unconscious thing that's
coming up in his paintings.
So I'll read you four of those.
I might just read you the little quotes
in the front of the book.
And these are from AM Hammacher, who wrote
the text for the Magritte book.
The first one says, "Even in the realm of the half conscious,
his urge was toward control, consciousness, exactitude.
Like Ouspensky, he was familiar with those delicate, brittle
states of lucidity during sleep in which the sleeper is
conscious of himself."
And the second quote says, "This evolution
in Magritte's work of pre-Renaissance space in which
movement is frustrated and the depth uncertain
opens up to him the possibility of inventive play
with imaginary spaces."
"The Secret Life."
"Suddenly, there were bruises at various places
along his left thigh and just below the kneecap.
He could see the freckles holding their bits of brown
as the purple flesh turned to yellow.
But mostly he knew when the bruised parts of him
came into contact with other firm objects and a light
but definite sense of pain surprised him,
and he stopped to locate it, to understand the source,
and recapture some set of moments in which his flesh had
received blows distinct enough in precisely those spots he
understood now as tender.
All his body was tender, but most of it did not know."