Thank you.
Julie, I'm honored by that introduction.
Thank you.
Thank you, Tyler.
And my thanks to--
to all of you for being here.
Wow, there's something operatic about the open wall
and people in the back.
It's the Santa Fe opera feeling.
It's good.
It means a great deal to me to come
to Tucson and to the Poetry Center, which
has played a very genuine and profound role in my life.
When I was in high school and a troubled, intensely awake,
but intensely conflicted kid from a very chaotic family,
I had the good luck of having a high school drama teacher who
just looked at some of my poems and did not quite believe
that I had written them, not because they were so good
but because there weren't a lot of kids around
at Rincon reading Blake, and Garcia Lorca, and E. E.
Cummings, and showing some influence from them.
And my teachers took my poems to Dick Shelton,
and Shelton said I'd like to meet this young man.
Hey, hey, more?
OK, closer?
Better?
OK.
Oh, I just got bigger.
OK.
I got a lot bigger.
Do I need to start over?
No?
OK.
So here I am, rather desperately in need
of being rescued at the age of 15 or 16,
and Richard Shelton invited me to come down to the Poetry
Center to meet with him there.
I walked in the door of that little adobe cottage
on Speedway, before the street was widened.
The walls were covered with photographs
of poets, handmade broadsides.
Dick was this sort of redheaded satyr, bearded satyr who
looked as if he'd been slightly dusted with powdered gold,
and he was wearing a pair of leather pants
that had the brand still on them.
I'll never forget that detail.
He talked to me about my poems a bit, but what he really did
was to be a poet, to be a person who centered
his life around this art.
I've never known anyone who did that.
He talked about Keats, and Shelley,
and André Breton and Pablo Neruda as if they were his
friends, and indeed, he was part of a community with them.
A community not bounded in space or in time, something
that anyone might join.
And he seemed to be holding the door
open to me, to that community.
That I could come to the Poetry Center anytime I wanted to
and read.
I could come to readings.
I could hang out there.
I used to sit under the shade of an olive tree in front
of the poet's cottage and wait for a glimpse of Allen
Ginsberg, or Philip Levine, or Diane Wakoski,
or Galway Kinnell.
I was far too shy to talk to them,
but I would wait and watch them go by.
Dick invited me to come over to his house
to work for him one weekend.
I was going to clean his garage.
And as I was working, I needed a drink of water or something.
I walked through the house.
It was the first time I met Lois Shelton.
She was sitting at the piano, grand piano.
She was singing Pirate Jenny from the Threepenny Opera
in German, playing a piano.
And I think I probably almost dropped
whatever I was carrying.
It was so beautiful.
I didn't know there were people in the world I
lived in who did that, who sang arias
in German with their pianos.
They were for me introductions to a cultural life
and forever grateful to that and to them and to this place.
I'm going to read for you this evening some
poems from a new book.
It's called Deep Lane.
It came out this spring.
I guess what I want to tell you about that
is that this place, Deep Lane, is it's a real road.
It's in Amagansett, New York, out at the far end of Long
Island on the south fork.
It's a very handsome little country road,
but what I really loved about it is the name.
The two monosyllables, the long vowels, deep lane.
The sense of going forward and down.
I've been spending time there for the last seven years,
and that name increasingly enchanted me, compelled me,
became something of a mantra.
It is a place, which like this one,
has a certain spell it might cast.
Beside the sea, beside the fields, in the green shadows
and shade, and the changing weather,
there is an opportunity to come closer to the inner life
in some way.
Landscape, in the best of landscapes,
is not outside of us, but enters in
and we share, we partake of it.
So a number of these poems are called deep lane
as you will hear.
And this first one has to do with the work of the gardener.
How many of you are gardeners here?
If you have this passion, you know that you're never done.
There's always more.
And should you inherit a garden, it's never right.
Right?
Everything needs to be moved.
So this poem begins in that process of moving everything
to get it right, and it remembers the late Deborah
Digges, a wonderful poet who left us now
about four years ago.
"Deep Lane"
"When I'm down on my knees, pulling up wild mustard
by the roots before it sets seed,
hauling the old ferns further into the shade,
I'm talking to the anvil of darkness.
Break table.
Slab no blow could dent.
Run with the making.
And out of that chop and rot comes the fresh surf
of the lupins.
When the shovel slips into white root flesh,
into the meat coursing with cool water, when
I'm grubbing on my knees, what is the hammer?
Dusky skin of the tuber, naked worms
who write on the soil every letter, my companion blind.
All day we go digging, harrowing, rooting deep.
Spade plunge and trowel, sweet turned-down gas flame,
slow charring carbon out of which
sprouts the wild unsayable.
Beauty's the least of it.
You get ready like Deborah, who used to garden in the dark,
hauling out candles and a tall glass of what she
said was tea, and digging, and reading,
and studying in the dirt.
She'd bring a dictionary.
If study is prayer, she said, I'm praying.
If you've already gone down to the anvil,
if you've rested your face on that adamant,
maybe you're already changed.
That foam started when I had ordered something
from a garden catalog."
Yeah, can you hear me?
It's still hard to hear.
It's still hard to hear?
OK.
All right.
So we're going to get really close here,
thank you for telling me.
Yes, OK.
So what we're going to do is this
Yep.
OK.
Cause when you're looking up at the crowd
OK.
And then lose me.
OK, wait.
When I'm looking at it now, you're hearing me now?
No.
It's got to go higher.
Right?
It's got to be up here.
It's got to be higher, but when you're--
I think, it's in your face comes down.
When my face comes--
OK, so if the book's up here, all right, and I'm up here, OK.
All right, OK.
So now I'm going to tell you--
All right, now we're going to do this.
We're going to get this right, OK.
This could be fixed.
And l I'm going to tell you a story about the poem,
and then you'll hear it again.
OK, those who didn't hear it the first time,
you'll hear it for the first time.
So I ordered something from a garden catalog,
and if you've ever done this, you
know what happens the next day?
Is you get 250 garden catalogs to choose from.
Right?
And in among the 250 was the catalog for bearded iris,
which are the most hybridized outrageously colored flowers.
And there's one of these called anvil of darkness.
Now can you imagine choosing to grow the anvil of darkness?
So I was going to write this little sort of comic poem
about that idea, and this is what happened.
"Deep Lane" June 23rd--
Oh, that's the next Deep Lane.
"Deep Lane"
"When I'm down on my knees, pulling up wild mustard
by the roots before it sets seed, hauling old ferns further
into the shade, I'm talking to the anvil of darkness.
Break table.
Slab no blow could dent.
Run with the making and out of that chop and rot
comes the fresh surf of the lupins.
When the shovel slips into white root flesh,
into the meat coursing with cool water, when
I'm rubbing on my knees, what is the hammer?
Dusky skin of the tuber.
Naked worms write on the soil every letter, my companion
blind.
All day we go digging, harrowing, rooting deep.
Spade plunge and trowel, sweet turned-down gas flame,
slow charring carbon out of which
sprouts the wild unsayable.
Beauty is the least of it.
You get ready like Deborah, who used to garden in the dark,
hauling out candles and a tall glass of what she
said was tea, and digging, and reading,
and studying in the dirt.
She'd bring a dictionary.
If study is prayer, she said, I'm praying.
If you've already gone down to the anvil,
if you've rested your face on that adamant,
maybe you're already changed."
So you could hear that?
You could hear that?
OK.
Yeah.
OK.
All right.