Maybe I'll read another poem about the academic world.
I'm going to start--
would anybody mind if I take my coat off?
It's much hotter at this end of the room than at that end.
[INAUDIBLE VOICE FROM AUDIENCE]
Thank you.
Well, all right.
If I promise to sort of stop at that, is that alright?
[LAUGHTER] I'm known as the middle class man's Allen
Ginsberg.
I take off my suit coat.
This is a poem about the time when
I was a graduate student at the State University of Iowa
in Iowa City.
And I had just been there forever.
I was there so long that they said
I was the only graduate student with tenure.
This poem is about the year that my tenure ran out.
They finally-- they came to me-- you know,
I've been there for years and years doing what graduate
students-- how everybody else on January 1st makes long lists
of resolutions and how they will stop being mean to their wife
and they will get to work on--
and that lasts for a day or so.
And, well, graduate students do it on September 1.
And you make a long list of books you will read that year.
Languages you will learn that year.
All those pious things and that, lasts for a day or so.
And then you get busy doing something else,
and all of a sudden the years gone by.
And, you know, then you feel very guilty because you haven't
read any of those books.
And so the next year, you make a longer list.
And I've done this for about 10 years at Iowa, you know.
And so that I really was one of the very finest list makers
that they had there.
However, I hadn't read any books.
And they came around and said, look, you know, Snodgrass,
it isn't that we don't like having you here.
But if you're going to stay this year, take the examination.
So I packed.
I mean, in 10 years, I had learned one thing,
I wasn't ready for that examination.
Now look, no wait, that's no small thing to have learned.
I mean, a lot of my friends--
You know, I mean, I was only--
I wasn't psychotic, I was only neurotic.
I knew I hadn't read the books.
A lot of my friends went totally out of their skull
and went and took the examination.
I mean, you know.
And were surprised that-- they hadn't read any more books than
I had, but somehow they felt they were-- no,
I knew I wasn't.
I knew that if they were going to act that way,
I just had to leave.
Well, before leaving, I sort of had
to take a sort of personal inventory of myself
and my own qualities to try to avoid--
to find out where in the world to go from there.
And also to try to avoid making such failures as I had,
at least in some sense, made there.
In some ways, it was a terribly valuable time to me.
But I sort of hated to leave without having done the things
I at least said I was going to do,
even if I should have known I wasn't going to do them.
I didn't want to make that kind of goof up again.
So, you know, I wanted to know what
qualities I had that were some good
and what were the rest of my qualities
that I had to guard against.
This is called "April Inventory."
And I guess before reading it, I ought
to say that it says some absolutely terrible things
about scholars.
I don't mean them.
I only felt them, I mean.
And, you know, it isn't the same thing at all,
but it's the kind of thing you have
to face when you're writing.
You've got to-- you feel all kinds of things
that you don't approve of for a minute.
And you got to put them in the poem or else
it means you cleaned up the picture of yourself
and you tried to clean up the world
and make a tidy or neater, more flattering one
than the one that's there.
And the poem all leaks away.
You just got to put all those ugly things, like envy.
I mean, I was mighty envious.
I mean, guys who could get doctorates, like Sam, could
get jobs and I couldn't get a job, and that made me mad.
That doesn't mean there's something wrong with scholars.
It may very well mean there's something wrong with me.
Even worse than that, I was very mad at them
because they could be scholars and I couldn't, you know.
I could have done anything to be a scholar,
except read those books.
So I was mad at them, but, you know.
What I'm trying to say, really, I guess,
is some of my best friends are scholars.
"April Inventory."
"The green catalpa tree has turned all white.
The cherry blooms once more.
In one whole year, I haven't learned a blessed thing
they pay you for.
The blossoms snow down in my hair.
The trees and I will soon be bare.
The trees have more than I to spare.
The sleek, expensive girls I teach,
younger and pinker every year.
Bloom gradually out of reach.
The pear tree lets its petals drop
like dandruff on a tabletop.
The girls have grown so young by now,
I have to nudge myself to stare.
This year they smile and remind me
how my teeth are falling with my hair.
In 30 years, I may not get younger, shrewder, or out
of debt.
The 10th time just a year ago, I made myself
a little list of all the things I'd ought to know,
then told my parents, analyst, and everyone who's trusted,
me I'd be substantial.
Presently, I haven't read one book about a book
or memorized one plot or found a mind I did not doubt.
I learned one date and then forgot.
And one by one the solid scholars
get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars, and smile
above their starchy collars.
I taught my classes Whitehead's notions,
one lovely girl a song of Mahler's.
Lacking a source book or promotions,
I showed one child the colors of a luna moth and how to love.
I taught myself to name my name, to bark back,
losing love and crying, to ease my woman
so she came to ease an old man who was dying.
I have not learned how often I can win,
can love, but choose to die.
I have not learned there is a lie,
love shall be blonder, slimmer, younger.
That my equivocating eye loves only by my body's hunger.
That I have forces true to feel or that the lovely world
is real.
While scholars speak authority and wear their ulcers
on their sleeves, my eyes in spectacles
shall see these trees procure and spend their leaves.
There is a value underneath the gold and silver in my teeth.
Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives,
we shall afford our costly seasons.
There is a gentleness survives that will out speak and has
its reasons.
There is a loveliness exists, preserves us
not for specialists."