Well, think I'll read later one more poem from this book.
And I want to devote the rest of my two hour reading.
[LAUGHTER]
Now, if I called these American songs or little songs-- which
is one of the meanings of sonnets-- nobody
would've given me any trouble.
That I called them American sonnets,
because I felt they were indeed sonnets,
albeit sonnets of a different order
than you might be used to, from the eighth grade.
Many of the academics gave me trouble, that's not a sonnet,
it doesn't have 14 lines, doesn't
have either the Petrarchan or the Shakespearean organization
of rhymes et cetera.
It doesn't rhyme, but it does have
what's called a volta, switch, change, turn, in the Midlands,
though sometimes there's no turn apparent.
At any rate, there are 20 lines or 18 lines
and, I'm going to change the next book,
I'm going to call it American Song.
Except, I got a lot of attention because it
was called American Sonnets, because people
wanted to attack it.
[LAUGHTER]
And, the sonnet tends to be very personal, and it tends to be--
generally speaking, Shakespeare's sonnets
are an example, and or Petrarch.
I mean, by the way, Shakespeare violated
all the rules of the sonnet when he wrote a sonnet,
having Petrarch turning in his grave.
And--but this, sonnets as I say, tend to be personal,
even solipsistic, that is they are about things that other
people might not understand.
Mine are autobiographical, they all tend to be about early days
in my life, which happened to occur in Pittsburgh,
and for some reason, I saw when I
finished these sonnets, that they all
took place in the winter.
There are no spring songs, they're all about the snow,
I don't know why.
That's not a deliberate, 'Mr. Stern chose to write sonnets
about snow', when you read that in some critical appraisal
of me or anybody, you know what?
Stupid.
But these sonnets I want to read,
I want to dedicate this reading to my little granddaughter,
Rebecca.
One of the sonnets in this book I wrote for her,
and when she was about four months old at the time.
Where's Rebecca?
She went outside.
Well, she can't hear me.
And my apologies to Jane Miller who was here,
and who might be embarrassed but her--
her name is in this poem because, my poems are always
deal with the truth, and this actually happened.
So here we go.
"It was Jane Miller who called--",
I was lying on the floor.
Before that, Jane was lying on the floor.
"It was Jane Miller who called my lips beautiful,
but that was the only because she was comparing me
to my darling Rebecca who has a mouth like a red peach,
a red finch, a salmon, who laid beside me amused and puzzled,
with her small head drawn back, taking
part of the world in the way her great-great-grandfather did
in Poland, and her great-great-grandmother
in Pennsylvania.
As they stood there, charily waiting for her birth oh,
a century ago, though one of them
looking into a steaming marsh, one
of them walking through a frozen valley, for all I
know their lips beautiful too.
And I can't wait till she is old enough
to root through some pictures she will find in her mother's
house, or Anne Marie's house, and spread them out
on the floor.
Something from Prague of course, or something from the wedding,
me with a broken shoulder and a black tuxedo,
ridiculous naturally in her day.
But maybe touching, that she could sit down and stare at,
or hold against her cheek, her first trip East."
It's called "Rebecca".