I like to feel that having been writing all my life,
I have written a lot of different kinds of poems.
I like to feel free to have a certain range.
And I'm going to read next a rather different kind of poem.
I don't feel that poems, my poems,
anyway fall into a really marked off categories.
They don't feel to me as if they do.
They seem to me to come out of the same sources
and to be written initially because I need to write them
and part of my need to write because I have always
been interested in the art of poetry
is the need to make things, which can stand free of me
when made.
But the same needs to define my own,
to discover what I feel by saying it, and to make things,
can produce, at different times, very different styles
of poetry.
And this one, I think you'll agree,
is rather different from what I just read.
It's one of a number of poems which
have dates attached to them, really,
as part of their titles.
This one is called "The Day the Audience Walked Out on Me
and Why."
And it's dated May 8, 1970, Goucher College, Maryland,
which was the day before one of the big Washington
demonstrations.
"Like this it happened.
After the antiphonal reading from the Psalms
and the dance of lamentation before the altar and the two
poems, Life at War and What Were They Like, I began my rap
and said, yes, it is well that we have gathered in this chapel
to remember the students shot at Kent State.
But let us be sure we know our gathering is a mockery
unless we remember also the Black students shot
at Orangeburg two years ago and Fred Hampton murdered
in his bed by the police only months ago.
And while I spoke, the people, girls, older women, a few men,
began to rise and turn their backs to the altar and leave.
And I went on and said, yes, it is well
that we remember all of these.
But let us be sure we know it is hypocrisy to think
of them unless we make our actions
their memorial, actions of militant resistance.
By then, the pews were almost empty.
And I returned to my seat and a man
stood up in the back of the quiet chapel,
near the wide open doors through which the green of May showed
and the long shadows of late afternoon.
And said my words desecrated a holy place.
And a few days later, when some more students, Black,
was shot at Jackson, Mississippi,
no one desecrated the white folks' chapel
because no memorial service was held."