Well, I want to read a poem that's harder because this
is the age of complex poetry--
some of it bad, some of it good.
Sometimes it's so complex, you don't know if it's bad or good.
And that's both a virtue and a fault. And it gives many of us
trouble.
I've always enjoyed when students do that and explain
to you what they're doing.
Not to be mean.
I'm going to read a poem called "Blue."
My colors and your color, probably.
But this is a poem about a painting by Philip Guston, one
of my favorite painters.
And the painting is in the museum at Iowa City.
And I think the painting is called "The Wrap."
But I call it Blue.
And so, I always resisted writing poems about paintings
and photographs.
I always hated that.
I thought it was a cheap trick.
And I hate it when teachers gave that assignment.
Is this sounding all right, or?
Yes.
But I couldn't resist because I got money for this.
And so I wrote this poem.
What am I doing?
Like that?
OK.
Hello.
So I'm going to read this poem.
You know this painter, Guston, towards the end of his life--
last 10 years of his life-- he started
to paint a different kind of painting
than the other ones he was doing earlier,
which were abstract, expressionistic.
And he sort of was seen as a kind of betrayer
of the rest of the crowd.
He started to paint the strangest things--
sort of cartoon characters, with X's for eyes and shoes
with nails in them sticking out, and cigarettes and ashtrays--
but in a beautiful pattern and design.
I just loved his paintings.
Raise your hand if your know his paintings.
One, two, three.
OK.
What I was hunting for--
OK, now I do mention here a silver ball.
My brother-in-law Charles, over there,
will remember that during what we used to call The War--
that's World War II.
Bush's war we called--
Anyhow, we used to collect silver balls.
We did.
We'd take the insides of cigarettes, or Hershey bars
and add them to the silver ball.
And we would sell this silver ball.
Do you remember that, Charlie?
Of course.
And we'd sell that silver ball.
Then they would throw it away.
It was the idea to make you feel you're doing something
important for the war effort.
That was true of all the things they did-- the meat
stamps, the shoe stamps.
You didn't know this, did you?
"What I was hunting for was a skeleton key and an old pack
of Luckies wrapped in foil, so I could add to my silver ball.
The blue that lasted, lasted for years.
In fact the sky at the end was almost dark.
There was no wind, and the clouds were puffs at the most
and in a sort of childish formation.
I did this before.
I walked through a mountain.
I climbed some stairs.
But this time there was no let up.
I couldn't walk over the brooms.
I couldn't get either under or over a fallen tree.
And saltwater almost made me blind.
I wanted to match the blues.
It was that simple.
I had a kind of larkspur love.
You understand that blue, even if dark, was my connection.
I would have sworn, if someone asked me,
that my blue was like the other one.
And all my bitterness was just the result
of some stray degradation--
brooms in this case, a knife or two.
Can I mention, my ear was pink?
Can I talk about that pink?
But can I say that it was you that
just spread from ear to ear?
But can I say it listened to everything.
It was pink and listened to everything.
Though I only needed one cloud to hide behind,
one puff, one puff lifted me up.
It sort of sucked me in.
And though my leg was exposed, the cloud concealed me.
White was my face, and then some.
Fog was my forest.
Smoke was all around me.
There I was, holding my dress up with one hand,
banging through the roof with the other.
Green was my rotten liver.
Blue were my bloodshot eyes."