I guess I will read this evening in the spirit of that notion
of the little talk I will give tomorrow,
which would be half written out and half improvised.
Not a lecture, but talking with people.
In the spirit of the persons of the poem,
which is to say all those people who occupy the space that I
am supposed to be responsible for now,
in terms of my work of the shared labor of making poetry
at a given time in our history.
It seems to me now in the terribly vexed moment
we are experiencing of American history
in our imperial ambitions, that this sense of the shared
alternative space of poetry outside the discourse of power
is more important than ever, even as it becomes
marginalized by the cultural authorities or the people who
would be the purported cultural authorities.
I think and feel that it takes on a role that
is more and more essential to some alternative space, perhaps
this--
just as the poem could be an alternative space,
the stems of the room of the poem;
stems, meaning room in Italian, can be an alternative space.
I think any gathering possibly has
the potential for that alterity, that otherness, that
in the institutional culture of our time is feared
and is being denied.
So a number of these things that I'll read tonight
are in the spirit of that echo chamber
that the poem represents.
I'll start with a --
No, what I'll start with is, as a kind of a magical invocation,
I'll start with two poems for my daughter from a series of eight
poems that were composed over the period of time of her
growing up, of coming into -- first coming into language
in the incredible way that children come into language.
It's so good that if you are a poet daddy,
you immediately realize you better steal this language--
[LAUGHING]
that you have forgotten and that they are just remembering.
I'll read the first of that series called
"Song of the Round Man", for Sarah when she's older.
And this must have been written when she was around two years
old, I think, or something like that.
I don't know.
And this series sort of accessed the wonderful literature
of children's songs and the nonsense
and the magic speech that is involved in--
just open the Oxford book of nursery rhymes and so on.
"The round and sad-eyed man puffed cigars
as if he were alive.
Gillyflowers to the left of the apple, purple bells
to the right and a grass-covered hill behind.
I am sad today, said the sad-eyed man,
for I locked my head in a Japanese box and lost the key.
I am sad today, he told me, for there are gillyflowers
by the apple and purple bells I cannot see.
Will you look at them for me, he asked,
and tell me what you find?
I cannot, I reply, for my eyes have grown sugary and dim from
reading too long by candlelight.
Tell me what you've read then, said
the round and sad-eyed man.
I cannot, I replied, for my memory has grown tired and dim
from looking at things that can't be seen by any kind
of light.
And I've locked my head in a Japanese box
and thrown away the key.
Then I am you, and you are me, said sad-eyed man, as if alive.
I'll write you in where I should be,
between the gillyflowers and the purple bells
and the apple and the hill.
And we'll puff cigars from noon til
night, as if we were alive."
"This Time," another for Sarah.
"Once I fell in the ocean, when I didn't know I
fell in the ocean.
Then mama got me out.
This isn't true, only something I remember.
Once in the park, I broke in half
and lost one half, which half I don't remember.
Once I was in a room that grew larger and larger.
Why?
I don't remember.
One time I turned blue all over, then got clear as glass.
This really happened, but not to me.
Once I couldn't see for a while, so I listened lying down.
Another time, I looked out the window
and saw myself at the window across the street.
This time it was me."
That's an instance of children having
a problem with schizophrenic splitting
of their subjectivity.
I mean, gee, the more the merrier, you know?
Even now, I'm learning about where the parts of this
are going.
This next one, these few opening poems
I'm reading from a book of mine called The Lion Bridge, which
is selected poems from 1972 to 1995.
And the next one I'll read is an overwriting, not a translation,
but a kind of writing over the top
or under the bottom of a poem by Rilke
called "Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes,"
which is a very striking piece of work involving
the figure of Orpheus descending to retrieve Eurydice
with Hermes as the messenger figure passing between them.
But of course, Hermes--
I've been thinking about it for the last couple of days.
He's the bearer of the secret, the hermetic doctrine,
from one world to the other, from the place
that the poem outward and in some way, of course,
it's an impossible job.
You can't do it.
It can't be done.
In another sense, it has to be done.
So the Rilke poem is remarkable because what it involves
is this law of recognition.
Eurydice has passed into another world of the imagining,
into a dream world or an after world
in which the appeal of Orpheus, the soul of Orpheus,
is no longer recognizable.
She's passed into a different sphere.
"She says into the dark, almost a question.
She says, don't see things.
This bridge.
Don't listen, she says, turn away, don't turn, and return.
Count no more lines into the poem.
Or could you possibly not have known how song broke apart
while all the rest watched?
That was years ago.
Don't say things.
You can't say things.
The ground is smooth and rough, dried, wet, pull the blue coat
tightly around you.
There are three parts to you.
I'm not the same anymore.
I'm not here where I walk, followed
by the messenger, confused.
He's forgotten his name.
I'm not here as I walk.
Not anywhere on this path.
But a figure of walking, a figure
projected exactly this far, followed by the messenger,
confused.
He's forgotten his name.
Don't say his name for him.
Don't listen to things.
You can't listen to things.
Some stories unthread what there was.
Don't look through an eye thinking to be seen.
Take nothing as yours."
A few poems from "The Promises of Glass,"
which was my last collection.
And then I'll move on to a new book
that'll be published next year.
This is called "The Metaphysician
of Prague, Autobiography 11."
Frances mentioned this autobiography series
is in so many different voices.
The figure in this particular one is a figure named Quod,
Q-U-O-D, which has a lot of different meanings in Latin,
for example, it can mean "because."
It can mean a number of other things.
Also in English slang, it means prison.
I was reading a lot of biographical notes--
no, I guess it was an interview with the great British poet
named Basil Bunting and Basil was talking about--
he died about ten years ago, I guess, 12 years ago.
And he was talking about getting a little bit batty in France
during World War One.
Fighting in World War One, getting a little bit drunk
and getting arrested by the French police and put in quod.
But this actually is a composite figure
who runs through different parts of "The Promises of Glass."
Quod libet, of course, means "whatever."
And also, in music has a certain meaning about what follows.
But I remember, there's a great Italian philosopher
named Giorgio Agamben.
And Giorgio was staying at our house once.
He had been teaching at--
lecturing at the University of California, Berkeley.
And he came over and was lecturing on the Whatever.
And he came over to stay with us at our house in San Francisco
after he was done in Berkeley.
And my daughter was sort of in her Valley Girl phase
and so every third word was, "whatever."
[LAUGHTER]
It was really a story.
A school of philosophy on the West Coast.
[LAUGHTER]
So anyway, this figure develops that includes
Agamben and many other people in a kind of composite.
"The Metaphysician of Prague."
"The metaphysician of Prague, whom I will call Quod,
short for quod libet.
Do you remember?
Do you recall Quod, his corpse at the lock?
Quod as dust, Quod the transparent,
Quod the empty elogist, Quod in love,
Quod in love with the sentence.
Quod in love with an enormous breast,
suspended, illuminated, overhead.
Quod the perplexed.
Quod as dreamed by the burning well.
Quod at the work of possible worlds
and among the young girls.
Quod and the watch, stopped.
Quod of departures.
Hungered headless Quod in search of time
passed, in a forest of glass.
Quod the obscure.
Quod the stammerer.
Inebriate, incurious, Quod of the vacant hours.
Quod of the marsh, the sand fire, the scallop and crab
cloud the hut of reeds.
Quod of life, Quod of fog.
Quod of the single eye and the braided tongue.
Quod the metaphrast, the leveler, the fractionist.
Quod of the mist, at the bridge, anaclitic Quod,
seated with jug.
Quod the erect.
Quad as abjection.
Quod of the customs house.
Quod the mute.
Saint Quod of the forgotten paradox.
Quod of the fragment, at the crossroads,
where the lovers meet.
His lies and withered lungs.
Quod of the street of screams.
Quod as vertigo, his works and days, numbers and names.
Quod of the paper cross, the wind through that house.
Quod before a door.
Quod of the last light, the soil that shifts.
And Quod, whiter than white, whiter than the page.
Do you remember the page?"
This is in the same series, it's called "Sao Paulo Sighs,
Autobiography 15."
And it's-- it's dedicated to a poet named--
a Brazilian man named Regis Bonvincino.
I was in Sao Paulo to introduce an anthology
of contemporary Brazilian poetry that I'd
helped translate and edit and Sao
Paulo this extraordinary self devouring city,
in the words of one of its poets, Mario de Andrade.
Self-cannibalizing city.
Unzoned in all senses.
And so I was reading the work of Mario de Andrade,
this early 20th century vanguardist poet
from the 1920s who was a Sao Paulisto.
And experiencing the eroticism and disorder--
maybe they're the same thing--
of Sao Paulo.
And this poem came about.
"Sao Paulo Sighs, Autobiography 14."
And there's quite a bit stolen from Mario de Andrade
in this poem and also from a great poet of the '60s
and '70s, a Brazilian poet named Paulo Leminski.
"Our sighs in Sao Paulo sounded something like this--
a kiss is just a kiss, be it rain or simply mist.
The animal alphabet passed overhead with its 23 wings,
rhythming a samba for the dead.
We walked and walked and we saw a rock star
without his rock, two pictures of a rose in the dark.
We saw the shorn locks of a nun beside an abandoned well
and we peered into our porous hearts,
where militiamen secretly dwell.
We walked and walked, we three.
The professor of everything, the professor of nothing, and yours
very truly.
We witnessed the theoretical arrival
of the worker's paradise by means of its statuary.
We examined a woman's skeleton, perfectly drawn.
Skeleton of everything, skeleton of nothing,
on a blue light bar room wall.
And we noted the sun's utter failure
to explain anything at all, regarding
the mist and the rain.
There's no cosmic close out on raincoats,
no discount on drizzles, so you must remember this.
When Sao Paulo sighs, a kiss is just a kiss."
I refer to the professor of everything
and the professor nothing in that poem.
I had two other editors with me working
on this Brazilian anthology and one of them
I named the professor of everything
because he had a library of 20 or 30,000 books, all of which
he had committed to memory.
[LAUGHTER]
And the other was a figure of 100 negativity in denial.
So, when you asked the professor of everything
what he thought the weather would be like tomorrow
in Sao Paulo, he would begin by explaining
the history of meteorology.
[LAUGHTER]
In Brazil.
And its derivations from the sun sciences, and so on.
Then 24 hours later, we'd of course,
be in the weather of tomorrow.
And you would say, well, it looks like it's drizzling.
[LAUGHTER]
And the other one was the exact opposite.
We would ask him a question, like, what time is it?
He would say, how do you expect me to know a thing like that?
[LAUGHTER]
Nothing.
And I can tell you--
an extraordinary adventure never,
I hope, to be repeated, to try and edit
an anthology with these guys.
This is called, "Untitled, May '99."
I guess it's really dedicated to do a friend who's
a New Vaudevillian named Geoff Hoyle who,
among other things, does an extraordinary three-legged
dance, where you can never tell what the phantom limb is.
[LAUGHTER]
But then, of course, I realized as I was writing this,
I had Jeff--
someone in my mind, and his magical performances,
and sad performances.
Like all great clowns, he's a deeply sad man.
He makes people laugh and it makes him sadder and sadder.
[LAUGHTER]
But then, of course, I also realized--
this was years after finishing the poem--
that it had something to do with the riddle of the Sphinx
and the end of our lives as three legged men, and so on.
"Untitled, May '99."
[INAUDIBLE]
"The dance of the three-legged man.
Oh, yes, I remember that.
His many colored coat, his hat--
I remember that better even than my own name,
if not as well as the required equations implanted
in my youth.
That youth, I'm now told, I never actually had.
And better than the rumble of streetcars,
causing our beds to tremble even as the heavy guns approached
the city's crumbling walls, guns that remind us of harpsichords,
plucking out their variations, seemingly once again
for the final time.
One last dance, three-legged man."
So, it's old age but it's also youth.
It's the whole spectrum.
Which is, of course, the case in the riddle of the Sphinx.
"That youth, I'm now told, I never actually had."
There was an extraordinary thing that happened
about 15 or 20 years ago.
I worked at a dance company.
And this is how poems become greedy in a funny way
as you go along.
I worked with a modern dance company
in San Francisco, Margaret Jenkins Dance Company,
and the company went to perform in New York at City
Center or something like that.
This must have been 15 years ago or more.
And Margaret, the choreographer, the head of the company,
called me up and said, well, we're in New York.
And I said where are you staying?
And she said, we're staying in the Hotel Wentworth.
And I said, no, I'm not staying in the Hotel Wentworth.
She said, why are we not staying at the Hotel Wentworth?
I said, it's because I grew up in the Hotel Wentworth.
My father was the manager of the Hotel Wentworth.
The landscape of my childhood was
this semi-sordid little hotel on 46th Street
between 5th and 6th Avenue.
And so Margaret said, I'll get back to you.
[LAUGHTER]
So, naturally, being the energetic person
she was, she interrogated everyone
who worked at the Hotel Wentworth
and she finally found a man who had been there
when I was there as a child.
And she said, you know, what was Michael like as a kid?
And this person, named Paul [INAUDIBLE]
said, oh, he was never a child.
[LAUGHTER]
I thought about that.
Because I came into my second childhood
in order to overcompensate for this.
Yeah.
I'll read from a new book of mine called Company of Moths,
which, I think, New Directions is
going to publish in 2005 if they're still in business.
[LAUGHTER]
After they publish, whether they're going to be in business
is another question.
[LAUGHTER]
It begins with an epigraph from Carlos Drummond de
Andrade, the great Brazilian modernist
poet, which reads, "Enter into the kingdom of words
as if you were deaf."
The first one is called "And," A-N-D.
And it came about a few years ago.
A wonderful, ungovernable and kind
of lunatic gathering of notes by the scholar, a thinker,
a poetic thinker named Walter Benjamin,
was published as the Arcades Project, finally translated
into English.
And it's his notes towards an impossible summation
of 19th century commodity culture
and the Paris of the 19th century,
the Paris of Baudelaire, the Paris of the shopping arcades
and the arising of the commodity.
But more than that, it's a meditation
on the phantasmagoria that we've --
of materialism, all the stuff with all these obscure objects
of desire as they're put in front of us.
They're first celebrated in a particular way
in that 19th century Paris as the new shopping malls.
The arcades were the predecessors of malls.
And the great stores began to arise
and Bourgeois culture suddenly has all the stuff
that they ever needed to buy, which they can--
anyway, so it's a beautiful book to pick up and put down.
It's not a book you read through.
"And."
"This ship, what was her name, its name?
Was it The Moth or The Moth that Electrifies Night?
Or The Moth that Divides the Night
in Half in its Passage towards the Fire?
The fire of forgetting, that is, as we remember it.
While in the scatter song of dailiness, as it eddies out,
near turns to far.
Beeches, red cedars and oaks, dating to the revolution,
and the few long before, suddenly in unison
are seen to fall for so somewhere it is writ.
And your project, abandoned in fragments, there
beneath the elements, the snow of the season unfolding it,
the flames of the season consuming it, improving it,
hashish.
The tales it tells.
The scented oils and modern festivals,
the Sphinx-like heads and the shining ornaments,
for ankle, waist, neck, and wrist, dioramas, cosmoramas,
plaeoramas (from pleo "I sail", "I go by water").
The hierophant in wax, the iron and glass,
the artificial rain and winds, mosaic thresholds,
all of this bathed from above in diffuse light.
We share the invisible nature of these things, our bodies
and theirs.
And the moon did not appear that night."
It's dedicated to the memory of a suicide, Benjamin
having killed himself when he was
failing to cross the border between France and Spain.
And afterward, [INAUDIBLE] and felt
that he was going to fall into the hands of the Gestapo.
He was a Jew.
So in 1943, I think it was.
This is a poem called "Stone".
And it's a kind of homage to Osip Mandelstam,
the great Russian poet of the '20s and '30s
who died in Stalin's camps and who thought of poems as stones.
And a number of the images are drawn
from a collection of his book, Stone,
one of them being the notion of the wolfhound at his back.
Well, the wolfhound was Stalin and did catch up with him.
"Stone."
"What of that wolfhound at full stride?
What of the woman in technical dress
and the amber eye that serves as feral guide and witness
to the snowy hive?
What of the singer robed in red and frozen at mid-song?
And a stone, its brokenness?
Or the voice off-scene that says, note the dragonfly
by the iris, but ask no questions of flight,
no questions of iridescence?
All of this, and the faint promise
of a sleeve, the shuttle's course, the weave, what
of these?
What of the century?
Did you see it pass?
What of that wolfhound at your back?"
"Untitled, February of 2000."
A wonderful poet, Canadian-born poet,
who lives nearby me in San Francisco, named Norma Cole,
came to me one day a couple of--
well, three years ago now, and said,
I've just see an extraordinary thing
that I want to share with you, which
was on a street very near us.
I saw a naked woman playing the violin
in the window on 23rd Street.
[LAUGHTER]
And just thought I'd let you know.
[LAUGHTER]
So I thought about that for a while.
I went up to 23rd Street.
[LAUGHTER]
And I never did see her.
But I guess it didn't have to, since Norma did.
And then a couple years later I was giving a reading, actually
with [INAUDIBLE] in San Francisco at the University
of San Francisco, I read the poem and a woman
came up to me very excited and said,
I live in the Northern Valley, I saw that woman.
[LAUGHTER]
So [INAUDIBLE] projection.
She exists, but not for me.
"Untitled, February 2000."
"The naked woman at the window, her back to you,
bowing the violin behind the lace curtain
directly above the screen is not a fiction.
As the partito is not a fiction, its theme and variations
ornaments and fiddles, not a fiction.
As the one-way street still wet from all
this rain is not a fiction.
And nakedness, not a fiction.
It reads us like a book as we listen to its music
through milky eyes wide shut.
And what does this fiction think of us?
The rain, the notes, both softly fall.
Slight errors of intonation do not
matter in the faded green notebooks
where we record these things and conceal other things.
What's the name of that tree, anyway,
with yellow flowers, small silver leaves
planted in the concrete?
I used to know.
As for today, Leap Year Day, the window was empty."
This poem is called "Homage."
It's in little prose stanzas.
A couple of years ago a famous American poet
came out to the University of California
at Berkeley to give a reading to--
an event to support the--
there's a wonderful writer and painter named
Joe Brainard, a collagist.
And Joe died maybe 10 years ago.
And Berkeley had put on a wonderful retrospective
of his very lovely, somewhat light-hearted work.
And this poet came out to do a benefit reading for the show.
And he gave a beautiful reading and there
were hundreds of people there.
And there was a dinner afterwards,
and we were seated at separate tables.
And after the day was over, I went up
to the famous American poet and gave him a hug
and to thank him for the reading and for coming out generously
to do this benefit.
And his words to me were, I'm sorry, Michael.
I know I'm a terrible poet.
And--
[LAUGHTER]
--all I could think to say was, we all know we're terrible.
[LAUGHTER]
And so this little piece grew out of that moment.
And somehow it became overrun with rats.
[LAUGHTER]
My editor in New York at New Directions
was a wonderful reader in a sweet way.
It was right at the time at the beginning of the Bush
administration, which immediately
rendered this [INAUDIBLE].
And it has turned out to be one.
It's called a "Homage."
It starts with a couple of sentences in quotation.
Quote, "The rats outnumber the roses in our garden.
That's why we've named it the rat garden," unquote.
[LAUGHTER]
"A discussion of the sublime ensued.
Aunt Klara served her ginger peach tea.
At 96, many of her parts still worked.
Quote, "It is life that should inspire fear, not death,"
she would say, quoting the Dietrich once again.
It was the first May Day of the new millennia,
but no one could recall what that day meant.
Quote, 'Perhaps it is the day when the rat lies down with
the rose,' tiny Perdita remarked.
All were aghast, as these were the first words she had ever
uttered.
The sky writers were active that near windless day,
their most frequent message in cursive, 'Rats rule.'
[LAUGHTER]
Slowly, the letters would thicken
and belly out toward the East, then
dissolve into illegible smoke.
The sun declined.
The May flowers made their entrance and the sedulous bats.
Then the great evening feast was placed
before us, pea soup with pork knuckle, the little elver, baby
eels, almost transparent, quickly boiled and served
with mashed turnip.
And, of course, the goose, stuffed
with Nuremberg sausage, chestnuts, onion,
chopped carrot and cream.
And, finally, a Black Forest cake, that baroque confection
of chocolate, whipped cream, sweetened cherries, and Kirsch.
It was over coffee and brandy as the evening drew to a close
that Uncle Johann suddenly blurted out, 'I'm sorry,
I know I'm a terrible poet.'
[LAUGHTER]
At that moment, Perdita formed the second sentence of her
inchoate life, 'All poets know that they are terrible.'"
I'll move to the third section now of the book.
The first section is called Company of Moths.
The second-- or the first section is called Stone.
The second one, which involves a series of poems as done in kind
of collaboration with a German poet
named Gerhard Richter is named Scale.
And the third section is Company of Moths.
So I'll read a few from that.
"Letter to a Vagrant."
I was having lunch with a painter
in a kind of assimilationist French cafe in my neighborhood
in San Francisco.
And I was going to write a catalog introduction
for her work, and we were getting together
to talk about that.
And since we were in an assimilationist cafe,
I decided to order the assimilationist frogs' legs.
And this provoked from her a story
about when she was growing up in El Salvador.
And there was a homeless person in the neighborhood who
would come around and scare the children by saying "there
are frogs in my stomach."
[LAUGHTER]
His name was Cupido.
So I thought this is too good to miss.
It's called "Letter to a Vagrant".
"Cupido, the frogs in our stomachs are singing as one.
Cupido, there are madeleines in Saks, there's lava in Ghana.
Each day, new elephants on parade.
Each night, new slings, new arrows,
new weapons of mass affection.
So far from silence have we come.
And we no longer make out faces in the clouds, Senor Cupido,
who sails in the lengthening shadows.
Still, a mantis, at least pale green on the garden wall
this morning, now gone.
And their empty words continue to echo,
it seems, between the facing cliffs,
even if there's no one left to hear them, the tourists
having long since departed with their noise machines
and extraterrestrial clothes.
And our war against the mind seems
to be proceeding nicely and against the Earth, Cupido.
All our ducks in a row, prophets surpassing forecasts
like drizzle, sirens and the first of the hyacinths.
So stop you growling, stop scaring the children,
and eat your bread soup and wipe your mouth, Cupido.
Prepare to board the burning boat and sail forth
eyes closed."
"Untitled, Three Days."
"Yes, I changed the light bulb myself,
so no more jokes about poets and light bulbs,
or poets and light.
No more combing the unconscious for its corybantic folds,
its flows, and no more talk of the bitter wind.
It will do what it must to summon and confound all at once
and rattle the wings of moths at dusk.
Did we not, that same night, carve the voice into parts
and remember that one then one plus one and so on.
Tea from the leaves of mint, the tiny sizzle boats
adrift in shifting currents of error, as if elegy
were endless.
Three days, one light bulb, now this."
It did take me three days, but the thing broke off.
[LAUGHTER]
Later someone told me, all you've got to do
is take a potato and stick that in the fixture and then just--
but--
[LAUGHTER]
--too late.
How are we doing?
OK.
Well, this is called "Arc," A-R-C.
And it's in memory of the great German-born novelist WG Sebald.
I was working who--
by coincidence, had a [INAUDIBLE] editor
in New Directions, so I started seeing his work very early on
as it came into American publication.
And he was a marvel of a kind of new voice in prose.
He wrote in German and bless the good translators.
In any case, I was in the midst of this book,
and I told someone that the title was Company of Moths
and that I was working also in collaboration
with a painter around various crepuscular insect themes.
And this woman said, have you read
Sebald's Austerlitz, the last book
to appear while he still alive.
I guess it was right after his death, was it?
And I said I haven't.
I've had it for months and I haven't gotten to it.
She said there's a beautiful passage on moths.
Amazing passage on moths in the book.
And so I pulled out the book and it opened to that passage.
By then, of course, Sebald was dead.
I had been planning the next time
we were going back to England to meet with him in Istanbul.
So I recommend his work to any of you
who are interested in great prose fiction
at the end of the 20th century.
"Arc," in memory of WG Sebald.
"There is the above and the below of each, their wings,
the lining underneath.
There is our daily speech, so clear and meaning-free,
and meaning itself to be erased almost successfully.
There's the red rose and its double in the dark,
avid to swallow us.
The dancing woman, many armed in folds of cloth and gold,
and below her silent counterpart undisclosed.
The tree in full leaf and the tree ablaze are one,
we're told, by the riddling, riperian dream, a dream
I dreamt against the River Wye.
Do you remember how quiet the skies
became that while before the clanging began again?
The wild poppies, their caps, the sentinel owl, the crescents
and veining, windrows and slopes.
Below, they're tracing an arc or enlacement that can't be shown.
'No contrasts, no shading, anymore...'
They're in the dark."
I'll just read a few more.
"Este Mundo."
We were talking about the wonderful Mexican poet
at dinner, Pura López Colomé.
And by coincidence, Pura is a friend
whom I met some years ago at the Berlin International Literature
Festival.
And she then became my Mexican translator.
And so we were invited down to Cuernavaca
for her 50th birthday party a year ago or so.
And I got her-- she read here one--
Just before that.
Two weeks before that.
OK.
And so this poem I wrote for Pura's 50th birthday.
It's called "Este Mundo."
"This world with its sounds and that other, with its other,
where words, then solid things, melt into sounds.
Enough?
This writing inside the lids of the eyes enough?
This table enough?
These words enough?
A sip enough?
A glimpse?
Oars spinning.
The broken notes enough?
The drunken boats?
And the idol asleep in the mountain,
his nurse's milk on his lips, he's dreaming of peacocks,
meteors, pyromatic moths, dreaming
of serpents and pyramids, worlds hanging from clouds, the wine
jug, the lover's spine and fire as it
claims the edges of the page.
Bastante?
This world in the fold of an echo,
you can hear them beneath the mown field, the restive songs."
"Untitled, October 2002", is the title.
"Eva Braun advised me in a dream to always be kind to dogs.
So I gazed at the room with fresh eyes,
the rust on the apple, the sliding sun,
our hard-won freedoms here at home.
Then a famous physicist proudly proclaimed
that this century would be no less exciting than the last.
Not a dream.
So I set a match to my obras completas, all 13
pages, that sad house of paper, and let loose the finch
from its cage.
Next a woman in red, not undressing,
said, stop playing the flaming fool.
But how exactly is that done?
So I summoned my dog, name of Bob,
Marley dog, tossed him a glamorous bone,
told him he was not alone."
[LAUGHTER]
"Untitled, February 2003."
"It's true that I've sometimes used the word
raisin in place of reason.
True that I'm surprised each time by the sudden progress
of the seasons and that often when all is said all comes
undone.
Look at how the worms turned into gods before our filmy eyes
and how the lyric war machine sings
in the grayness of the morning.
And the name of its song?
But here we are among the dogs, large and small,
of the after dome.
Is it possible to make love in such light
or read from the first pages of silence?
The bright early butterflies and Pura's place under the volcano,
campesinos blockading the roads.
Es bueno."
I'll read two more poems.
This is called "Una Noche."
"Then El Presidente, uncoiling his tongue," quote,
"'You cannot stop time, but you can smash all the clocks.'
And so seeking paradise, we have burned the bright house
to the ground, a necessary act.
We have invented glass and ground a dark lens
and in the perilous night, we continue to dance.
The tarantella, the tango, the passadoble
and the jig, the bunny hop, the Cadillac,
the Madison and serabande, mazurka, and the jerk,
the twist on table tops.
Rolling our eyes, flailing our limbs, it's how we keep time.
Our feet never stop."
I'll read one final poem.
It's after a poem by Carlos Drummond de Andrade.
It's another [INAUDIBLE] whom I quoted
in the epigraph at the beginning.
He was a modernist poet.
And it's a poem about poetics.
And it's sort of perverse because we're
getting all these appeals, which I approve of in solidarity,
to write poems against the war and to join up
with poets against the war.
And I'm a poet against the war, et cetera.
At the same time, a lot of this poetry is real shit.
[LAUGHTER]
And so we feel, are we having poetry against the war
or a war against poetry?
[LAUGHTER]
So, anyway, I found this poem of Drummond's, which
is a kind of perverse poetic.
It's very ironic, of course.
And I call this one "Your Diamond Shoe," after Drummond.
There's a line in it, don't write about your diamond shoe.
"Don't write poems about what's going on,
murderers and liars, dreams and desires.
They're always going on.
Leave them outside the poem.
Don't describe your sad-eyed summer home or wide-eyed winter
home.
Don't write about being homeless or your home away from home.
Don't write about war, whether you're against or for.
It's the same fucking war.
Don't talk about language.
Don't talk about loss.
Don't mention truth or beauty or your grandpa's bones.
No one wants to know how your father, brother, lover
deducted himself, razor, rope, or gun.
What's the difference?
Whisper nothing of the smell on the Contrescarpe,
nothing of moths, their fluttering arcs, or the towers,
how we watched them fall.
Don't write at all."
Thank you.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]