Now I'm going to read something which is a little longer
than anything that I have read tonight
and which I probably should therefore finish up with.
I forgot to ask Lois Shelton how long this reading should last.
But I think it's hard for people to listen
to awfully long readings.
I know sometimes it happens that stimulated
by a very large audience people sort of go on all night.
And I don't know, maybe some people like it.
But I think it's really hard to take
in that many poems at a go.
So I think I will close after this poem
that I'm going to read.
However, after that for a short while
because I know that there's also this reception so it probably
shouldn't get too late.
But after that if there's something that somebody really
wished I had read and they want me to I mean,
I could still do that.
The audience could leave and those
who want me to read two or three poems more I could do that.
Don't please feel politely obliged
to ask me to do it because I've said that though.
That's--
[LAUGHTER]
Even as I say it I feel embarrassed by suggesting it
because it might put people on the spot.
So don't feel like that, you know.
I mean actually enough is enough, right?
[LAUGHTER]
So this poem, I just want to tell you about its publication.
This poem has been published in a little book.
I'm advertising the little book because it is a fundraising
effort for a movement press in Cambridge called the Holy
Street Press.
And I'm going to leave at the Poetry Center
a little card with the particulars of what it's called
and how much it costs and stuff like that.
And all the money from this book,
which was collectively produced will
go to the press which does very useful work in the Boston area.
We have also the New England Free
Press in Boston, which many of you
may know of because for one thing
it was the press which first produced that book which
has now been reissued by a big publisher,
Doubleday I think it is or Simon Schuster.
The one called, Our Bodies, Ourselves.
It was produced by a women's collective.
And I mean it was written by a women's collective
and printed by the New England Free Press.
The Holy Street Press is in no way in competition with the New
England Free Press.
They work together, they borrow each other's equipment
and they help each other out.
Holy Street is a bunch of very young printers
who are living on subsistence-- sometimes don't eat very well.
And as I say they do very useful work.
They also printed, and I'll leave that
a notice about that at the Poetry Center.
They reproduced a very beautiful poster, one of the number
that I brought back from Hanoi.
These were silkscreen posters and they reproduced it
by the offset system and that can also be obtained.
It's a poster which says "Protect
the culture, the literature, the arts and crafts."
And it's kind of blue and green, mostly blue and green design
and just really a lovely poster that costs $2.
So I'm going to leave the information at the Poetry
Center.
And naturally I wouldn't be advertising anything
that was not a fundraising effort for a good cause
but that's what these are.
The poem is called "Conversation in Moscow".
And it came out of a trip to Russia two years ago, which
was not at all a sort of-- not like my trip to Hanoi,
a kind of political trip.
This was just a literary jaunt and a kind
of wonderful unexpected vacation.
For this one, well there were a number
of moving things that happened there
like visiting Yasnaya Polyana on Christmas day of--
it'll be three years this Christmas.
Yasnaya Polyana was the home of Tolstoy
you know and occurs in so many of his books.
And that was a very marvelous thing
of seeing the little doctor's office of Chekhov,
a man whom if I could choose who I could meet
in some other world, would certainly
be one of my very first choices and to see his doctor's
office and his various things and his funny inkwell
which a patient once gave him.
Quite ugly but it was her most cherished possession you know.
And she couldn't pay him so she gave him
this incredible huge brass inkwell
and he cherished it because this poor woman had given of him.
Things like that were very moving.
But I guess the conversation out of which this poem came was,
for me, the most Russian, the most moving, the most
sort of connected with all my love of Russian literature
and with my feelings about poetry
of any of the things that occurred
for me during that trip.
It presented a challenge in the writing
because it was a conversation that
involved several people and an interpreter.
And the interpreter was not speaking for herself but only
as an interpreter and yet she was a very important person,
an important presence, without whom of course the conversation
couldn't have taken place at all.
And her intelligence and sensibility really
informed the whole occasion.
So how to get a silent participant
into this, a virtually silent participant
even though everything was coming through her voice,
how to get her into the poem was a big challenge.
I don't know if I have successfully met the challenge.
Also just its dramatic quality insofar
as there were different voices and I
wanted to differentiate them as far as possible.
And then I'm not at all sure that I have met--
I can do it a little bit when I read it aloud
because I can change my voice pitch.
But at any rate it was a poem that
was very stimulating to me.
One which suggests to me a kind of poem
that I would like to attempt more of.
So far I haven't.
"Red wine from the Black Sea.
Glasses filled and refilled.
Georgian shishkebab has been eaten, plates pushed back,
voices of other diners surround us.
Sometimes the five of us speak at once.
So much is lost.
We are all in our 40s.
It is perhaps ten at night.
The woman who is our interpreter knows.
She knows poignantly now is the night she must speak for us.
People look around to see who's come in,
all members of the tribe of the word.
Chairs are pushed back.
Swing door lets out moments of kitchen clatter.
She knows she must be each of us turn by turn and each at once.
I see the eyes, the fat poet I barely know but surely love
who pours the wine quietly, his eyes kind,
small, and sorrowful.
Blue, blue eyes in a tan face, the veriest azure eyes
I've looked to ever.
The poet's trusted friend, historian
fresh from the re-examined lives of the nihilists.
Will you have ice cream?
The waiters returning and leaving again.
Pale eyes of the biologist, pale face,
white beard though not old.
He's OK, a good guy.
But the others know things he doesn't know.
He has an aura of limits.
I'm looking from one to the other trying to read language
in gesture, grasping what Russian words I know,
turning to her who so often looks either acutely
anxious or deeply amused.
My sister the medium interpretress, oracle,
to give me what these brothers are saying.
For there's a spirit has touched us, pulled us suddenly close.
Frown lines and laugh lines leave her face.
She's looking upward through smoke to the high ceiling
and through it searching.
Each cell, the biologist says, has in it
the whole body's potential.
And I think of the module, of detail
giving to inscape its signature, the great web of analogy.
But it seems he implies some kind of determinism.
I've been saying, I don't see enough communism here,
no struggling towards a classless society.
Communism to him is only the best
we can do with the historic, the social shell
in which the creature lives and regenerate.
The historian faults him but I lose that.
People come by, greetings exchanged.
Red wine from the Black Sea.
She searches and finds the eloquent, accurate words
of translation.
The poet now out of his stillness is talking.
Poems, he says, poems are of two kinds.
Those with mystery, those without mystery.
[LAUGHTER]
And are poems without mystery poems at all?
Well, yes.
One cannot say a poem well made, effective but unmysterious,
has no value.
But for myself, I prefer the mysterious.
And Dostoevsky-- why is it he who so often clearly
reactionary, pessimistic all for personal redemption and against
common action, anti revolutionary--
Why is it he's the 19th century writer I see is most read most
loved in the Soviet Union?
Whereas Turgeniev, for instance, whose work surely--
I think of the Sportsman's Sketches especially.
Ah, but Dostoevsky, historian and poet both are speaking.
Who reached as he did into the hot and strange,
the cold and shadowy, the intricate depths of life.
We read him, we read him because in him,
in him we know our own darkness and illuminations, tortures
and ecstasies, our human reality.
Tea in glasses, thick black coffee.
Vodka, vodka.
[LAUGHTER]
To serve the people, I venture, is often
thought of wrongly, narrowly, merely as mutual encouragement.
But to serve the people in truth one
must do I think what Pasternak said one must do.
Excel oneself in order to be oneself.
To serve the people, the poet again holds us in his hands.
We are listening shells to whom a heartbeat speaks.
To serve the people one must write for the ideal reader,
only for the ideal reader.
And who or what is that ideal reader?
God.
One must imagine, one must deeply
imagine that great attention.
Only so in lonely dialogue can one reach the people.
After our musing silences have traveled away
each on its own road and returned again
to this night, this place of meeting,
island of our eternity in the bustle and clatter of passing
time, now the biologist pale, skeptical,
yet a friend, I see he's at bottom innocent as
only the trained skeptic can be whose imagination
is weak as fine hair.
Is telling, when I've asked if anyone reads Kropotkin,
that Lenin said, after he talked for hours with Kropotkin, what
a charming old man, and shook his head and added,
but he understands nothing.
Nothing.
But later, Lenin sent a train, a special train back and forth
to the place where he the old man
lay dying, only to ask each day after him.
He smiles, he's pale and gentle.
To me it seems, I say going slowly, waiting for her,
she's ready, to me it seems perhaps Kropotkin understood
half of what we need to know and Lenin perhaps knew half.
And true revolution, true revolution
must put these two halves together, a flash of sapphire.
I hear the historian's words and understand them and wonder.
My woman friend repeats in English how young, how pure.
I'm abashed though he is speaking without mockery,
almost tenderly.
I, young, pure, why?
I'm two years older than our friend here, the poet.
And what have I spoken of but doubts of perplexity.
Human doubts, human longing, he utters the words solemnly.
Human longing for ineffable justice and mercy.
In these lies purity and the worth of men's lives,
new as a birch bud in spring.
His mind has touched, moved into and out of as if into sea
curved hollows bristling with hidden spines,
venomous tentacles.
The life of Nechaev, killer, shaman.
He has known the sacrament of the absolute.
And then he says in the end we must follow Christ.
Is he joking?
I turn to my woman friend again confused.
No, no the historian says, understanding my question.
I am not joking.
I'm speaking of spirit.
Not dogma but spirit.
The Way.
Not the corrupt church, bejeweled
priests with dirty beards prostrating themselves
before the atrocious czars, its indispensable beggars
and crusting the entrances of every shrine, kissing with pus
the infinite in sensibility of relics.
Not this but the frail trust we have
when our hearts flutter and we look to each and our eyes hold.
The Way.
And the poet, it's midnight, the room is half empty,
soon we must part.
The poet, his presence ursine and kind, shifting his weight
in a chair too small for him, quietly says
and shyly, the poet never must lose despair.
Then our eyes indeed meet and hold.
All of us know, smiling in common knowledge,
even the palest spirit among us burdened as he
is with weight of abstractions.
All of us know he means we mustn't any of us
lose touch with the source, pretend it's not there,
cover over the mine shaft of passion despair somberly tolls
its bell from the depths of.
And wildest joy sings out of too,
flashing the scales of its laughing, improbable music,
grief and delight entwined in the dark down there."
[APPLAUSE]