It's a great pleasure to be here.
I'm running for office.
Oh, that was a lie.
I'm running for sheriff of this county.
[LAUGHTER]
What is the name of this county?
Pima
What?
Pima.
Pima, what a silly name.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm gonna change the name of the County when I become sheriff.
[LAUGHTER]
First thing.
Well I'm going to do the standard 45-minute reading.
We're a little late in starting, but that's always the case.
We can pretend we're in New York where, I was just
telling Jane Miller, we were reminding each other,
the people don't come early, they
start showing up at an 8 o'clock reading around 9 o'clock.
And I'm going to read from three sources, basically.
One is from this book.
And I'm not going to read the whole book.
I'm going to read four or five poems from each one.
It's called This Time.
And from this book called Last Blue, which is after this book,
this book called American Sonnets.
I design all my jackets so I'm very proud of that.
It's always for me a great pleasure
to come here to Tucson.
It's for me, one of my cities, in a strange way.
I have relatives here.
Friends.
And I love this place in spite of its shortcomings.
[LAUGHTER]
I love the poetry audience, for me in particular.
If I was a chiropractor, I'd love the chiropractic audience.
[LAUGHTER]
I think it's, in its way, the most important poetry
center in the United States.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
And I will be a good sheriff, I promise.
[LAUGHTER]
I think it's replaced Iowa as the real center of poetry
in the country, at the the University level,
and you're lucky to be here and to have the marvelous
teachers and the institution behind you
that you do in the remarkable Poetry Center.
One of a kind.
And so encouraging of poetry.
40,000 volumes.
Take you at least a week to read all this.
I'm going to read, then, from these sources
and I want to say that I'll read mostly
from my most recent books.
Poets, as you know, you fellow poets who are here,
are always most excited about their recent poems.
Their great poems that they wrote earlier,
they forget and ignore and say, oh
that, that was just preparation for this.
And I always get nervous and disappointed
and kind of irritated when people say, would you
mind reading "This chestnut, that chestnut,"
and I say, well, I'll see how it goes.
I want to dedicate this reading to a dear friend who died,
betimes.
His wife is here.
His name is Bruce McGrew and he was born in 1937
and died in 1999.
Great painter.
Really very important American painter.
He taught at this university for many, many years, a great soul.
And suddenly he was gone.
And those of us who knew him well,
think about him all the time and grieve his absence.
And if you hear baby noises from time, excuse me,
I wouldn't say that.
If you heard young girl's noises from time to time,
it's merely my granddaughter, Rebecca.
Hi honey.
So when I read this poem for Bruce,
which is one of the sonnets in the 59, one of the American
sonnets, and it's called "Bruce",
and it's for Bruce McGrew.
He and his wife and family and friends
lived in Oracle, north of here in a great, ancient, beautiful
commune.
I was just reading today in a book,
I meant to ask Fox about this later, and the biography of--
who was I reading today?
Warhol.
Andy Warhol.
I was reading that he was a movie maker in the second half
of his career.
Made some awful, boring--
he loved that they were boring.
Monotonous.
Because I knew him well.
My former wife went to college with him,
and I drove him to the train station
when he went to New York to make his fortune.
And I'm writing an essay about him.
And I discovered today reading, that he
went to Oracle to make a film that was called Cowboys or--
Lonesome Cowboys.
What?
Lonesome Cowboys.
I was astonished and excited about it.
And he made the cowboy--
the movie in that place you have Old--
Old Tucson.
And then he went to Oracle, and of course they
were just doing everything to aggravate them.
The sheriff in this movie, for example,
is a cross-dresser and all that stuff,
and the local people were horrified.
The FBI came by.
You know how stupid they are.
[LAUGHTER]
They took notes.
I read their notes.
It's hysterical.
But the movie wasn't.
I haven't seen that movie.
I've seen some of the others.
It's as bad as the others.
OK.
"Bruce.
Though if it were a bluebird and not a bunting,
I would have been surprised, too.
Nor did he actually flush the bird out of the pine the way
we did those peacocks in the ditches
and fields of Pennsylvania.
But only there were four of us, talking, and coming near so
certes we disturbed him, maybe brooding, which
given our grand beliefs, we would have been
a little ashamed of, certes,
shocked by the sudden burst of wings,
and maybe being humans, surprised that there were no
cries, for we would have cried.
And Bruce did make a little sound.
If you know him.
If you knew him, you'd know just what that sound was like.
And almost pleading, he asked us not to tell Fox.
For she would have missed her only chance.
I almost couldn't hear him.
His eyes did most of the pleading.
I know they were gray.
We walked carefully over the stones.
There had to be one or two sticks among us.
The bird would have flown to a safer tree.
I kept it from Fox until we talked on the phone
last night, 20 years later."