I told her not to get your hopes up.
Thank you, that's good you fixed it.
You need wizards in this world.
In that wonderful class yesterday,
in the course of wandering wildly as I do,
I spilled to them the truth about the sources
of some poems for me, namely that I wake up
in the middle of the night with the last lines.
And it occurred to me to wonder why that should be.
Why not wake up with first lines?
But I-- something in me has always, from day one,
recognized the last line.
I have a much harder time recognizing a first line.
In fact, a lot of the process of revision
is writing back to a start from the end, oddly for me.
And I think that accounts for why I wanted-- today--
just to glory a little in some poems
that wallop me with their administration of last lines.
"I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather,
not screaming in terror like his passengers"
is an Emo Philips line that so pleases me,
that it becomes the source of many of my meditations
on endings.
"I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather
not screaming in terror like his passengers."
For me, the whole-- why do I love this so much?
Let me explain myself.
And the arts of poetry and comedy are not unrelated.
You need to be a good designer in either case.
Timings do matter.
Withholdings matter, even more than in taxes.
I love this Emo Philips line in the way that I love the elegant
paragraph written by Abd ar-Rahman III--
and which you have on one of your handouts here,
I believe it's the second one--
who was the 10th century Caliph of Andalusia, that golden--
the golden age in the South of Spain.
Both of these constructions, the Emo Philips joke and the Abd
ar-Rahman paragraph, profit from designs
that pack a punch at the very last moment.
Let me read the ar-Rahman.
Do you have that?
There on the second--
separate page.
"I have now reigned about 50 years in victory and peace,
beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies,
and respected by my allies.
Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have attended me,
nor does any earthly blessing seem
to have been wanting to my felicity.
In this situation, I have diligently
counted the days of pure and genuine happiness
that have befallen me, they amount to 14."
[LAUGHTER]
You've got to love it.
This kind of writing takes strength.
At first glance, it appears it won't have taken strength.
It's a gush, but this is an administered gush.
Here's the case where the gush is admonished
in the very last words.
And thus, it becomes of use in thinking about poems, I think,
whose nature is so often misconstrued by laypeople to be
the nature of a gush.
Part of my intention in talking about it
here is a bit to admonish that notion.
Obviously, the kind of strength I'm talking about that--
I say this writing takes strength--
that kind of strength in can obtain in prose as
surely as in poetry, since sentences and paragraphs are
as susceptible of design as lines and stanzas are.
But the emphasis on verbal material
as graphics set against the negative space
in the visual field is far more emphatic in lineated poems,
naturally, making beginnings and ends more conspicuous there.
A poetic material is constitutively literal, that is
it's made of letters, it cares about letters
in more than one sense.
It is also in many ways semantically literal.
Its interests are in letters-- as I say, in both senses--
its material concerns itself, poetic material, I mean.
Concerns itself not only with what words are about,
but with what's about words.
That what it floats in, what the artifact floats in.
There isn't a lecture I've ever done
where I don't manage to think of the brilliant thing
that Allen Grossman, one of the great curmudgeons
of American poetry, said, which is that art is about something
the way a cat is about a house.
[LAUGHTER]
That's really useful just--
I mean, for me the spatiality of that thinking is delightful,
and I think part of the reason I'm a poet rather than a prose
writer is I love the space of poetry.
I love the architectonics of it.
Obviously, I'm smitten with music too.
In fact, that's a kind of Achilles heel in me,
because a babbler, after all, can be an idiot.
So-- but an architect generally isn't, one hopes.
And there's something of that spatial--
that love of spatial design.
I mean, in many ways, I could have been--
I was as drawn to graphic arts as to the poetic.
And maybe, that accounts for my emphasis here on the edges,
on the line considered not only to make a horizontal pattern,
but to also account for shapes, other shapes in the poem
sometimes, quite circular shapes.
But it's also because of that constant reiteration
of the question of the end, of the locus, the topos
of the end, that I think lineated poems carry with them,
an extra capacity for teleological, maybe even
ontological freight.
For something about the nature of
ends philosophically, and in some
ways thus, about the nature of being philosophically.
I don't mean to get too grand about all this.
I think that's sublimated, usually in the poem.
But it feels to me to be palpably at issue
in some ways in poetry--
that more in poetry than in other forms, core forms.
The lines keep butting up against the emptiness
or the silence or whatever you call it,
the margins of the peace, the way
lives keep butting up against their own non-being
in some ways, day in, day out.
And whether they're actively treating it or not,
poems are always, to some extent,--
it seems to me explicitly or not--
about the dilemma therein, as we are about the dilemma
we're in, floating in the medium of our own extinction.
All the time, not thinking about it most of the time.
Poems call a little more attention to it
by their nature, by their graphic nature.
So I wanted to talk a little about the last word in poetry
today.
Not [? de moda ?],, not the fashion
last word, but a kind of literalist last word.
Especially today, in this time of our lives
when people's bottom lines are being
so seriously savaged, and not just in MFA workshops.
The meaning of the bottom line too
is a lot less figurative in the mouths of poets
than in the mouths of, say, financiers.
That might surprise you if you still
labor under the illusion that the drift of economics
is practical or literal, and the drift of poetry,
chiefly metaphorical.
But nowadays, of course, people are
coming to more complicated understandings.
It's better to deposit your life savings
with Mickey Rourke in Barfly than with Bernie Madoff
in Florida.
And this is because you can trust a poet
to be not less, but more literal than other people
when he gives you his word.
And so, I even literalize, of course,
that colloquial occasion.
In John Donne's time, poetry was called "the art of numbers,"
and that too may seem mystifying for casual readers
today, in an era when metrical considerations are
no longer considered indispensable to the art.
But even the sternest prosaist remembers
that the value of any poetic accounting
is greater for its deployment in the service of something
irreducible.
Poetry's numbers count the way lives count,
not the way lucres do.
You can't count days, said Jorge Luis Borges,
the way you count dollars.
Every day is different.
So Su Tung-p'o, who is on your handouts,
gives us this little escapade in numbers.
It's actually meditation on and in numbers.
"One midnight in the spring, an hour
is worth a thousand golden coins.
The moon is shadowed, senses clearly flowering.
Upstairs, unwound from flutes and throats,
some silken threads of sound.
And where the garden holds most still, a swing."
There's a lot of smiles sort of breaking out.
Isn't it amazing how delightful that last, little-apparent
stasis is?
It's a very moving stasis.
People are moved.
Here you see the art of numbers deployed
as subtly, and in a way, also as liberally
as blossoms in a breeze to-- whacks Chinese for a moment.
Su Tung-p'o zeroes in from seasonal generality
to momentous specific, to catch something of the depth of time.
I materialized a little-- that reading--
by shaping the poem--
in a way that he didn't originally--
bringing it down to that point of poise at the end.
But the elements in balance in the poem,
in any of its incarnations, suggest an intelligence that
worked behind its observations.
It's not just a cumulative passion
that informs this intelligence.
It's not just more and more and more that matters.
Look at the scrupulous counterpoise.
The moon has shadows, but the senses are clear.
You've got those threads of sound that lead back
to human voices in an upstairs window,
and threads of gravity that lead down to where the swing seat is
hung.
No human figure is visible in the field of the poem,
but the thought of the human figure
balances and informs the forces in the garden.
Su Tung-p'o was a professional designer of gardens in China,
but he wrote satires as well as pastorals.
And because rulers are never too fond of satire,
he was more than once banished into exile.
A poem like "On The Birth of a Son," which I'm about to read
and which I think you do not have on your pages,
has plenty of political salt in it to this day.
Speaking of time, it's perhaps the moment to say that in about
30 years, Su Tung-p'o will be a thousand years old.
"When a child is born, the parents
pray it will be healthy and intelligent.
But as for me, well, vigor and intelligence
have wrecked my life.
I pray this baby we are seeing, walloped,
wiped, and winningly anointed, turns out
dumb as oakum and a soupcon sinister.
That way, he'll crown a tranquil life
by being appointed a cabinet minister."
You see why he keeps being banished,
why he kept being banished.
But also what's astonishing about it in many ways--
I've obviously, slightly-- what's the word--
texturized some word choices in it,
partly to emphasize a kind of global applicability.
I mean, if you add a "soupcon sinister,"
then the French get in the act.
If he's "dumb as oakum," the Albanians get into the act.
You get the fun of hauling in other landscapes
entirely, if you're a translator, if you
have a choice of available terms where the sense is faithful.
But what's extraordinary about the poem
is how live it is today, how properly
applicable across time, the spirit of that piece,
and its investigations is, in some sense, into timelessness.
I love the way a precise withholding--
you notice that "cabinet minister" has
to be withheld to the very last moment for it
to have its punch.
It has to work that way.
The whole poem relies on it.
But that kind of scrupulous designing,
that kind of withholding that restraint
is what unlocks this uncontainability in the poem.
And for me, that paradox is the whole delight of poems.
It's that they are the smallest containers, if you think of--
I mean, the trouble is the language betrays us,
and I've spent half of my life railing
against the lexicon of content.
But that the smallest verbal container somehow
contains the thing that's huge, that does not contain it,
releases the thing that is uncontainable.
You feel the wallop in this poem that
arises from withholding, the reserving of that last phrase.
The last word in poetry is put there by design.
It's not, again, just the end of a big gush
released without supervision.
Thomas Mann said that the writer is
someone for whom writing is harder
than it is for other people, which feels right to me.
What it requires is not release, but control.
And even after you have stumbled on something uncontainable,
there remains the challenge of arranging its material
representation in words, in mere words, in partialities,
and its parts in time and space.
How to prompt in readers, through parts of speech,
the memory of the outburst in themselves of what Rilke calls
das Ungemesse, the immeasurable, the uncontainable.