Oh, OK.
That's fine.
Thank you.
It's an honor and a pleasure to be here.
Dick and Lois Shelton have for some time
been asking me if I could come to Tucson.
And I said yes, finally, and ended up this afternoon
in Phoenix.
And poor Lois was being paged.
And I said, why don't they come?
And finally got word from the Poetry Center
that she was waiting for me in Tucson.
So it's been a very interesting afternoon.
Excuse me.
I also would like to thank everyone for coming out
for a reading on a warm--
very warm-- Wednesday night in September.
I think that's honorable.
I know some of you have guns to your heads, maybe.
But I hope that you'll find that it will have been worthwhile.
As Lois suggested in her preparatory remarks,
I work in a lot of different genres.
And it's not necessarily because I feel that I'm equally
at ease in all genres.
It's just that I love writing.
I really find that it's a very stimulating and exciting
adventure every time I get at the unknown or crack some code
or come close to cracking some spiritual code, which writing
can help you do.
It's also because if you're a professional writer,
you learn to write in as many genres as you can.
Because you've got to keep the money coming in.
Dilettantes can write inaccessible, arcane stuff.
If you're trying to make some money at it,
you have to be understandable sometimes.
So I'll be reading variously from works of poetry
and works of prose.
And I think we'll probably start out with poetry because this
is billed as a poetry reading.
I don't always make the traditional distinction that's
drawn between poetry and prose.
I think that, ultimately, you're dealing
with language and human spirit and human emotion.
And it's very nice to be able to pigeonhole it and say,
this is poetry, and this is not poetry.
And of course, we all too easily forget nowadays
that in former times, everything was done in poetry
by learned people.
You wrote scientific treatises in poetry and astronomical
reports in poetry, and you gave lectures in poetry,
and you wrote botany in poetry and all of that.
And of course, you did religious services in poetry.
And I think that poetry is such a natural part
of the human makeup that we look for it--
even today, in a very prosaic era--
we look for it in human expression.
And if anyone comes anywhere near it,
we're all queuing up to get in and see them
or to buy their record or to read their column
or whatever they do that allows them
to express themselves this way.
Why do I think poetry is a natural part
of the human experience?
It's because if you look at preliterate society,
you find that poetry has always existed among all people--
all peoples, I should say-- at all times and all places.
Written poetry, that stuff in the skinny lines,
is a relatively new phenomenon and is actually an offshoot
of the printing press.
But poetry came long, long, long before the printing press.
And I feel that it's part of my mission
to restore that memory to people, that we probably sat
around for thousands of years in caves
telling each other stories and singing songs.
And it's as natural as breathing, as eating,
as working--
all of the basic human activities.
In a lot of preliterate cultures,
there's no such word as art.
I know, for example, that in most Indigenous African
languages, there's no word for art.
In the Indigenous cultures of North America,
there's no word for art.
And that's because these peoples did not
make that distinction between something that's
art, where someone stands up on stage and does a number,
and we all sit out there and applaud.
Art was a part of everything else-- of worship,
of work, of prolonging the species.
It all went together-- poetry, dance, music, worship--
cyclical, rhythmical.
And that understanding has always really inspired
me to not get too far from the word as spoken
rather than the word as written.
Let's start with a very hot night type poem.
This is from a collection called By Heart, which
hasn't been published yet.
Usually, people start out with published things
and come around to things that are in progress
or about to be published.
But I'm going to do it backwards because the heat has been
so incredible that the only thing I can compare it with
was last fall when I was working down in Houston, Texas,
at Rice.
And I was just blown away by the temperature
and by the cicadas--
or cicadas, as they call them down there--
which hearkened me back to my Mississippi boyhood.
And I remember arriving in Houston.
I got off the plane and went out to this apartment complex.
And I heard the sound.
It was a very still, late August afternoon.
And I couldn't tell what was going on.
Had some hydroelectric plant gone out of order?
It was a very exciting sound.
And then, when it subsided, I realized
that I was back among locusts.
And it started to invoke, or evoke, all kinds of memories.
Hence, two months later, I wrote this poem
called "Houston in October."
I think the only thing that I have to explicate here
is the fact that these cicadas, they're
green and kind of silvery.
And of course, you know that that's a mating call.
When they do that chirping, it's a mating call.
At the end of the season, you see
all of these male locusts in husks on the ground.
And they just sort of chirp themselves out
and fulfill their mission.
And that's the end.
[LAUGHTER]
"Houston in October."
"Or is it really October in Houston?
There's no telling anymore.
Nor does it matter that the moon, two-thirds
on the wane yet perfectly sane, belongs in a Texas song
tonight.
I love the way she's still the moving moon,
love the slow glowing quickness of her golden disappearing act.
The mood she sets in this drenching orchid heat
is sisterly and Southern.
Locusts bunched in trees and Spanish moss broadcast
their mating calls of longing on electromagnetic cycles so
powerful they short-circuit the tropical meaning
of this steaming night and even subdue
the city's oil-rich evening aurora.
But there's no getting around it.
The whirring of cicadas in this deep sea Houston heat
assails, propels, and sends me sailing toward cooling memories
of a lazy, fanning kind, memories of a helicopter,
yes, buzzing, belly up, suspended by a ladder
to the moon.
It is the power of this whir that stirs the stubborn air
with whistling karate-chop precision, that
magnetizes all sound and light within earshot of its ups
and downs.
Yes, it's this sweaty moon-fed chirping
that draws the drowsiness from October over and over
and over again until I slip deep enough into sleep to see my day
for what it's been, to soak all over again.
I dream in green and silver, drained like the cicada
and glad as any spent songster who knows how to take a fall.
I cool my heels and let go."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.