WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.750 align:middle line:90% 00:00:00.750 --> 00:00:03.150 align:middle line:84% I told her not to get your hopes up. 00:00:03.150 --> 00:00:09.090 align:middle line:84% Thank you, that's good you fixed it. 00:00:09.090 --> 00:00:10.695 align:middle line:90% You need wizards in this world. 00:00:10.695 --> 00:00:17.430 align:middle line:90% 00:00:17.430 --> 00:00:21.270 align:middle line:84% In that wonderful class yesterday, 00:00:21.270 --> 00:00:26.490 align:middle line:84% in the course of wandering wildly as I do, 00:00:26.490 --> 00:00:29.670 align:middle line:84% I spilled to them the truth about the sources 00:00:29.670 --> 00:00:33.000 align:middle line:84% of some poems for me, namely that I wake up 00:00:33.000 --> 00:00:35.880 align:middle line:84% in the middle of the night with the last lines. 00:00:35.880 --> 00:00:40.110 align:middle line:84% And it occurred to me to wonder why that should be. 00:00:40.110 --> 00:00:43.830 align:middle line:84% Why not wake up with first lines? 00:00:43.830 --> 00:00:47.850 align:middle line:84% But I-- something in me has always, from day one, 00:00:47.850 --> 00:00:49.680 align:middle line:90% recognized the last line. 00:00:49.680 --> 00:00:53.500 align:middle line:84% I have a much harder time recognizing a first line. 00:00:53.500 --> 00:00:55.980 align:middle line:84% In fact, a lot of the process of revision 00:00:55.980 --> 00:01:02.490 align:middle line:84% is writing back to a start from the end, oddly for me. 00:01:02.490 --> 00:01:04.950 align:middle line:84% And I think that accounts for why I wanted-- today-- 00:01:04.950 --> 00:01:09.120 align:middle line:84% just to glory a little in some poems 00:01:09.120 --> 00:01:14.070 align:middle line:84% that wallop me with their administration of last lines. 00:01:14.070 --> 00:01:16.950 align:middle line:90% 00:01:16.950 --> 00:01:20.340 align:middle line:84% "I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather, 00:01:20.340 --> 00:01:24.120 align:middle line:84% not screaming in terror like his passengers" 00:01:24.120 --> 00:01:28.770 align:middle line:84% is an Emo Philips line that so pleases me, 00:01:28.770 --> 00:01:31.590 align:middle line:84% that it becomes the source of many of my meditations 00:01:31.590 --> 00:01:32.910 align:middle line:90% on endings. 00:01:32.910 --> 00:01:35.910 align:middle line:84% "I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather 00:01:35.910 --> 00:01:41.190 align:middle line:84% not screaming in terror like his passengers." 00:01:41.190 --> 00:01:44.340 align:middle line:84% For me, the whole-- why do I love this so much? 00:01:44.340 --> 00:01:46.920 align:middle line:90% Let me explain myself. 00:01:46.920 --> 00:01:51.570 align:middle line:84% And the arts of poetry and comedy are not unrelated. 00:01:51.570 --> 00:01:54.870 align:middle line:84% You need to be a good designer in either case. 00:01:54.870 --> 00:01:57.960 align:middle line:90% Timings do matter. 00:01:57.960 --> 00:02:04.500 align:middle line:84% Withholdings matter, even more than in taxes. 00:02:04.500 --> 00:02:08.550 align:middle line:84% I love this Emo Philips line in the way that I love the elegant 00:02:08.550 --> 00:02:12.300 align:middle line:84% paragraph written by Abd ar-Rahman III-- 00:02:12.300 --> 00:02:15.150 align:middle line:84% and which you have on one of your handouts here, 00:02:15.150 --> 00:02:19.710 align:middle line:90% I believe it's the second one-- 00:02:19.710 --> 00:02:25.530 align:middle line:84% who was the 10th century Caliph of Andalusia, that golden-- 00:02:25.530 --> 00:02:29.340 align:middle line:84% the golden age in the South of Spain. 00:02:29.340 --> 00:02:35.080 align:middle line:84% Both of these constructions, the Emo Philips joke and the Abd 00:02:35.080 --> 00:02:39.210 align:middle line:84% ar-Rahman paragraph, profit from designs 00:02:39.210 --> 00:02:41.430 align:middle line:84% that pack a punch at the very last moment. 00:02:41.430 --> 00:02:44.700 align:middle line:90% Let me read the ar-Rahman. 00:02:44.700 --> 00:02:45.810 align:middle line:90% Do you have that? 00:02:45.810 --> 00:02:47.220 align:middle line:90% There on the second-- 00:02:47.220 --> 00:02:49.410 align:middle line:90% separate page. 00:02:49.410 --> 00:02:54.360 align:middle line:84% "I have now reigned about 50 years in victory and peace, 00:02:54.360 --> 00:02:58.860 align:middle line:84% beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, 00:02:58.860 --> 00:03:01.680 align:middle line:90% and respected by my allies. 00:03:01.680 --> 00:03:05.160 align:middle line:84% Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have attended me, 00:03:05.160 --> 00:03:08.100 align:middle line:84% nor does any earthly blessing seem 00:03:08.100 --> 00:03:10.740 align:middle line:84% to have been wanting to my felicity. 00:03:10.740 --> 00:03:13.320 align:middle line:84% In this situation, I have diligently 00:03:13.320 --> 00:03:16.440 align:middle line:84% counted the days of pure and genuine happiness 00:03:16.440 --> 00:03:20.280 align:middle line:84% that have befallen me, they amount to 14." 00:03:20.280 --> 00:03:23.402 align:middle line:90% [LAUGHTER] 00:03:23.402 --> 00:03:24.300 align:middle line:90% 00:03:24.300 --> 00:03:25.650 align:middle line:90% You've got to love it. 00:03:25.650 --> 00:03:28.260 align:middle line:90% 00:03:28.260 --> 00:03:31.380 align:middle line:84% This kind of writing takes strength. 00:03:31.380 --> 00:03:34.860 align:middle line:84% At first glance, it appears it won't have taken strength. 00:03:34.860 --> 00:03:38.340 align:middle line:84% It's a gush, but this is an administered gush. 00:03:38.340 --> 00:03:41.490 align:middle line:84% Here's the case where the gush is admonished 00:03:41.490 --> 00:03:43.860 align:middle line:90% in the very last words. 00:03:43.860 --> 00:03:50.700 align:middle line:84% And thus, it becomes of use in thinking about poems, I think, 00:03:50.700 --> 00:03:55.830 align:middle line:84% whose nature is so often misconstrued by laypeople to be 00:03:55.830 --> 00:03:59.010 align:middle line:90% the nature of a gush. 00:03:59.010 --> 00:04:01.530 align:middle line:84% Part of my intention in talking about it 00:04:01.530 --> 00:04:03.720 align:middle line:84% here is a bit to admonish that notion. 00:04:03.720 --> 00:04:06.980 align:middle line:90% 00:04:06.980 --> 00:04:09.332 align:middle line:84% Obviously, the kind of strength I'm talking about that-- 00:04:09.332 --> 00:04:10.790 align:middle line:84% I say this writing takes strength-- 00:04:10.790 --> 00:04:15.590 align:middle line:84% that kind of strength in can obtain in prose as 00:04:15.590 --> 00:04:19.700 align:middle line:84% surely as in poetry, since sentences and paragraphs are 00:04:19.700 --> 00:04:23.900 align:middle line:84% as susceptible of design as lines and stanzas are. 00:04:23.900 --> 00:04:27.170 align:middle line:84% But the emphasis on verbal material 00:04:27.170 --> 00:04:31.520 align:middle line:84% as graphics set against the negative space 00:04:31.520 --> 00:04:36.140 align:middle line:84% in the visual field is far more emphatic in lineated poems, 00:04:36.140 --> 00:04:44.126 align:middle line:84% naturally, making beginnings and ends more conspicuous there. 00:04:44.126 --> 00:04:48.880 align:middle line:84% A poetic material is constitutively literal, that is 00:04:48.880 --> 00:04:52.120 align:middle line:84% it's made of letters, it cares about letters 00:04:52.120 --> 00:04:55.960 align:middle line:90% in more than one sense. 00:04:55.960 --> 00:04:59.260 align:middle line:84% It is also in many ways semantically literal. 00:04:59.260 --> 00:05:02.560 align:middle line:84% Its interests are in letters-- as I say, in both senses-- 00:05:02.560 --> 00:05:06.760 align:middle line:84% its material concerns itself, poetic material, I mean. 00:05:06.760 --> 00:05:10.300 align:middle line:84% Concerns itself not only with what words are about, 00:05:10.300 --> 00:05:13.600 align:middle line:90% but with what's about words. 00:05:13.600 --> 00:05:18.910 align:middle line:84% That what it floats in, what the artifact floats in. 00:05:18.910 --> 00:05:20.590 align:middle line:84% There isn't a lecture I've ever done 00:05:20.590 --> 00:05:23.800 align:middle line:84% where I don't manage to think of the brilliant thing 00:05:23.800 --> 00:05:26.710 align:middle line:84% that Allen Grossman, one of the great curmudgeons 00:05:26.710 --> 00:05:31.870 align:middle line:84% of American poetry, said, which is that art is about something 00:05:31.870 --> 00:05:34.120 align:middle line:90% the way a cat is about a house. 00:05:34.120 --> 00:05:37.420 align:middle line:90% [LAUGHTER] 00:05:37.420 --> 00:05:39.310 align:middle line:90% That's really useful just-- 00:05:39.310 --> 00:05:42.880 align:middle line:84% I mean, for me the spatiality of that thinking is delightful, 00:05:42.880 --> 00:05:46.180 align:middle line:84% and I think part of the reason I'm a poet rather than a prose 00:05:46.180 --> 00:05:49.120 align:middle line:84% writer is I love the space of poetry. 00:05:49.120 --> 00:05:53.020 align:middle line:90% I love the architectonics of it. 00:05:53.020 --> 00:05:55.690 align:middle line:84% Obviously, I'm smitten with music too. 00:05:55.690 --> 00:05:59.920 align:middle line:84% In fact, that's a kind of Achilles heel in me, 00:05:59.920 --> 00:06:04.720 align:middle line:84% because a babbler, after all, can be an idiot. 00:06:04.720 --> 00:06:11.620 align:middle line:84% So-- but an architect generally isn't, one hopes. 00:06:11.620 --> 00:06:15.220 align:middle line:84% And there's something of that spatial-- 00:06:15.220 --> 00:06:17.050 align:middle line:90% that love of spatial design. 00:06:17.050 --> 00:06:18.910 align:middle line:84% I mean, in many ways, I could have been-- 00:06:18.910 --> 00:06:24.670 align:middle line:84% I was as drawn to graphic arts as to the poetic. 00:06:24.670 --> 00:06:29.080 align:middle line:84% And maybe, that accounts for my emphasis here on the edges, 00:06:29.080 --> 00:06:32.860 align:middle line:84% on the line considered not only to make a horizontal pattern, 00:06:32.860 --> 00:06:38.290 align:middle line:84% but to also account for shapes, other shapes in the poem 00:06:38.290 --> 00:06:39.820 align:middle line:84% sometimes, quite circular shapes. 00:06:39.820 --> 00:06:44.210 align:middle line:90% 00:06:44.210 --> 00:06:48.050 align:middle line:84% But it's also because of that constant reiteration 00:06:48.050 --> 00:06:53.060 align:middle line:84% of the question of the end, of the locus, the topos 00:06:53.060 --> 00:06:57.650 align:middle line:84% of the end, that I think lineated poems carry with them, 00:06:57.650 --> 00:07:02.810 align:middle line:84% an extra capacity for teleological, maybe even 00:07:02.810 --> 00:07:04.940 align:middle line:90% ontological freight. 00:07:04.940 --> 00:07:06.500 align:middle line:84% For something about the nature of 00:07:06.500 --> 00:07:08.930 align:middle line:84% ends philosophically, and in some 00:07:08.930 --> 00:07:12.470 align:middle line:84% ways thus, about the nature of being philosophically. 00:07:12.470 --> 00:07:14.690 align:middle line:84% I don't mean to get too grand about all this. 00:07:14.690 --> 00:07:20.000 align:middle line:84% I think that's sublimated, usually in the poem. 00:07:20.000 --> 00:07:23.900 align:middle line:84% But it feels to me to be palpably at issue 00:07:23.900 --> 00:07:25.250 align:middle line:90% in some ways in poetry-- 00:07:25.250 --> 00:07:30.890 align:middle line:84% that more in poetry than in other forms, core forms. 00:07:30.890 --> 00:07:33.650 align:middle line:84% The lines keep butting up against the emptiness 00:07:33.650 --> 00:07:35.690 align:middle line:84% or the silence or whatever you call it, 00:07:35.690 --> 00:07:40.040 align:middle line:84% the margins of the peace, the way 00:07:40.040 --> 00:07:43.610 align:middle line:84% lives keep butting up against their own non-being 00:07:43.610 --> 00:07:45.330 align:middle line:90% in some ways, day in, day out. 00:07:45.330 --> 00:07:47.540 align:middle line:84% And whether they're actively treating it or not, 00:07:47.540 --> 00:07:49.370 align:middle line:84% poems are always, to some extent,-- 00:07:49.370 --> 00:07:51.500 align:middle line:84% it seems to me explicitly or not-- 00:07:51.500 --> 00:07:57.260 align:middle line:84% about the dilemma therein, as we are about the dilemma 00:07:57.260 --> 00:08:02.060 align:middle line:84% we're in, floating in the medium of our own extinction. 00:08:02.060 --> 00:08:04.430 align:middle line:84% All the time, not thinking about it most of the time. 00:08:04.430 --> 00:08:07.430 align:middle line:84% Poems call a little more attention to it 00:08:07.430 --> 00:08:10.220 align:middle line:84% by their nature, by their graphic nature. 00:08:10.220 --> 00:08:13.290 align:middle line:84% So I wanted to talk a little about the last word in poetry 00:08:13.290 --> 00:08:13.790 align:middle line:90% today. 00:08:13.790 --> 00:08:19.610 align:middle line:84% Not [? de moda ?],, not the fashion 00:08:19.610 --> 00:08:23.090 align:middle line:84% last word, but a kind of literalist last word. 00:08:23.090 --> 00:08:26.420 align:middle line:84% Especially today, in this time of our lives 00:08:26.420 --> 00:08:29.720 align:middle line:84% when people's bottom lines are being 00:08:29.720 --> 00:08:33.919 align:middle line:84% so seriously savaged, and not just in MFA workshops. 00:08:33.919 --> 00:08:37.039 align:middle line:90% 00:08:37.039 --> 00:08:38.840 align:middle line:84% The meaning of the bottom line too 00:08:38.840 --> 00:08:42.320 align:middle line:84% is a lot less figurative in the mouths of poets 00:08:42.320 --> 00:08:46.280 align:middle line:84% than in the mouths of, say, financiers. 00:08:46.280 --> 00:08:47.960 align:middle line:84% That might surprise you if you still 00:08:47.960 --> 00:08:50.540 align:middle line:84% labor under the illusion that the drift of economics 00:08:50.540 --> 00:08:53.690 align:middle line:84% is practical or literal, and the drift of poetry, 00:08:53.690 --> 00:08:56.090 align:middle line:90% chiefly metaphorical. 00:08:56.090 --> 00:08:59.600 align:middle line:84% But nowadays, of course, people are 00:08:59.600 --> 00:09:01.580 align:middle line:84% coming to more complicated understandings. 00:09:01.580 --> 00:09:03.620 align:middle line:84% It's better to deposit your life savings 00:09:03.620 --> 00:09:07.250 align:middle line:84% with Mickey Rourke in Barfly than with Bernie Madoff 00:09:07.250 --> 00:09:08.850 align:middle line:90% in Florida. 00:09:08.850 --> 00:09:12.500 align:middle line:84% And this is because you can trust a poet 00:09:12.500 --> 00:09:15.710 align:middle line:84% to be not less, but more literal than other people 00:09:15.710 --> 00:09:17.030 align:middle line:90% when he gives you his word. 00:09:17.030 --> 00:09:19.580 align:middle line:90% 00:09:19.580 --> 00:09:22.100 align:middle line:84% And so, I even literalize, of course, 00:09:22.100 --> 00:09:25.130 align:middle line:90% that colloquial occasion. 00:09:25.130 --> 00:09:29.450 align:middle line:84% In John Donne's time, poetry was called "the art of numbers," 00:09:29.450 --> 00:09:33.320 align:middle line:84% and that too may seem mystifying for casual readers 00:09:33.320 --> 00:09:36.860 align:middle line:84% today, in an era when metrical considerations are 00:09:36.860 --> 00:09:41.090 align:middle line:84% no longer considered indispensable to the art. 00:09:41.090 --> 00:09:44.600 align:middle line:84% But even the sternest prosaist remembers 00:09:44.600 --> 00:09:47.390 align:middle line:84% that the value of any poetic accounting 00:09:47.390 --> 00:09:51.290 align:middle line:84% is greater for its deployment in the service of something 00:09:51.290 --> 00:09:54.050 align:middle line:90% irreducible. 00:09:54.050 --> 00:09:58.440 align:middle line:84% Poetry's numbers count the way lives count, 00:09:58.440 --> 00:10:01.190 align:middle line:90% not the way lucres do. 00:10:01.190 --> 00:10:05.690 align:middle line:84% You can't count days, said Jorge Luis Borges, 00:10:05.690 --> 00:10:07.850 align:middle line:90% the way you count dollars. 00:10:07.850 --> 00:10:09.890 align:middle line:90% Every day is different. 00:10:09.890 --> 00:10:14.270 align:middle line:90% 00:10:14.270 --> 00:10:17.980 align:middle line:84% So Su Tung-p'o, who is on your handouts, 00:10:17.980 --> 00:10:21.580 align:middle line:84% gives us this little escapade in numbers. 00:10:21.580 --> 00:10:28.120 align:middle line:84% It's actually meditation on and in numbers. 00:10:28.120 --> 00:10:31.810 align:middle line:84% "One midnight in the spring, an hour 00:10:31.810 --> 00:10:35.710 align:middle line:84% is worth a thousand golden coins. 00:10:35.710 --> 00:10:41.530 align:middle line:84% The moon is shadowed, senses clearly flowering. 00:10:41.530 --> 00:10:46.780 align:middle line:84% Upstairs, unwound from flutes and throats, 00:10:46.780 --> 00:10:50.770 align:middle line:90% some silken threads of sound. 00:10:50.770 --> 00:10:56.410 align:middle line:84% And where the garden holds most still, a swing." 00:10:56.410 --> 00:11:01.470 align:middle line:90% 00:11:01.470 --> 00:11:04.320 align:middle line:84% There's a lot of smiles sort of breaking out. 00:11:04.320 --> 00:11:09.330 align:middle line:84% Isn't it amazing how delightful that last, little-apparent 00:11:09.330 --> 00:11:10.920 align:middle line:90% stasis is? 00:11:10.920 --> 00:11:14.370 align:middle line:90% It's a very moving stasis. 00:11:14.370 --> 00:11:17.220 align:middle line:90% People are moved. 00:11:17.220 --> 00:11:20.010 align:middle line:84% Here you see the art of numbers deployed 00:11:20.010 --> 00:11:23.220 align:middle line:84% as subtly, and in a way, also as liberally 00:11:23.220 --> 00:11:28.590 align:middle line:84% as blossoms in a breeze to-- whacks Chinese for a moment. 00:11:28.590 --> 00:11:31.920 align:middle line:84% Su Tung-p'o zeroes in from seasonal generality 00:11:31.920 --> 00:11:38.550 align:middle line:84% to momentous specific, to catch something of the depth of time. 00:11:38.550 --> 00:11:42.330 align:middle line:84% I materialized a little-- that reading-- 00:11:42.330 --> 00:11:44.760 align:middle line:90% by shaping the poem-- 00:11:44.760 --> 00:11:47.790 align:middle line:84% in a way that he didn't originally-- 00:11:47.790 --> 00:11:53.370 align:middle line:84% bringing it down to that point of poise at the end. 00:11:53.370 --> 00:11:55.860 align:middle line:84% But the elements in balance in the poem, 00:11:55.860 --> 00:11:59.370 align:middle line:84% in any of its incarnations, suggest an intelligence that 00:11:59.370 --> 00:12:01.380 align:middle line:90% worked behind its observations. 00:12:01.380 --> 00:12:04.380 align:middle line:84% It's not just a cumulative passion 00:12:04.380 --> 00:12:06.550 align:middle line:90% that informs this intelligence. 00:12:06.550 --> 00:12:09.990 align:middle line:84% It's not just more and more and more that matters. 00:12:09.990 --> 00:12:12.690 align:middle line:84% Look at the scrupulous counterpoise. 00:12:12.690 --> 00:12:16.530 align:middle line:84% The moon has shadows, but the senses are clear. 00:12:16.530 --> 00:12:19.470 align:middle line:84% You've got those threads of sound that lead back 00:12:19.470 --> 00:12:22.710 align:middle line:84% to human voices in an upstairs window, 00:12:22.710 --> 00:12:27.270 align:middle line:84% and threads of gravity that lead down to where the swing seat is 00:12:27.270 --> 00:12:28.710 align:middle line:90% hung. 00:12:28.710 --> 00:12:32.520 align:middle line:84% No human figure is visible in the field of the poem, 00:12:32.520 --> 00:12:34.830 align:middle line:84% but the thought of the human figure 00:12:34.830 --> 00:12:41.150 align:middle line:84% balances and informs the forces in the garden. 00:12:41.150 --> 00:12:45.830 align:middle line:84% Su Tung-p'o was a professional designer of gardens in China, 00:12:45.830 --> 00:12:48.740 align:middle line:84% but he wrote satires as well as pastorals. 00:12:48.740 --> 00:12:52.020 align:middle line:84% And because rulers are never too fond of satire, 00:12:52.020 --> 00:12:55.790 align:middle line:84% he was more than once banished into exile. 00:12:55.790 --> 00:12:59.390 align:middle line:84% A poem like "On The Birth of a Son," which I'm about to read 00:12:59.390 --> 00:13:01.700 align:middle line:84% and which I think you do not have on your pages, 00:13:01.700 --> 00:13:05.960 align:middle line:84% has plenty of political salt in it to this day. 00:13:05.960 --> 00:13:09.140 align:middle line:84% Speaking of time, it's perhaps the moment to say that in about 00:13:09.140 --> 00:13:12.560 align:middle line:84% 30 years, Su Tung-p'o will be a thousand years old. 00:13:12.560 --> 00:13:15.210 align:middle line:90% 00:13:15.210 --> 00:13:17.070 align:middle line:84% "When a child is born, the parents 00:13:17.070 --> 00:13:19.710 align:middle line:84% pray it will be healthy and intelligent. 00:13:19.710 --> 00:13:23.250 align:middle line:84% But as for me, well, vigor and intelligence 00:13:23.250 --> 00:13:25.200 align:middle line:90% have wrecked my life. 00:13:25.200 --> 00:13:27.840 align:middle line:84% I pray this baby we are seeing, walloped, 00:13:27.840 --> 00:13:30.510 align:middle line:84% wiped, and winningly anointed, turns out 00:13:30.510 --> 00:13:34.170 align:middle line:84% dumb as oakum and a soupcon sinister. 00:13:34.170 --> 00:13:36.750 align:middle line:84% That way, he'll crown a tranquil life 00:13:36.750 --> 00:13:42.110 align:middle line:84% by being appointed a cabinet minister." 00:13:42.110 --> 00:13:45.020 align:middle line:84% You see why he keeps being banished, 00:13:45.020 --> 00:13:47.570 align:middle line:90% why he kept being banished. 00:13:47.570 --> 00:13:50.720 align:middle line:84% But also what's astonishing about it in many ways-- 00:13:50.720 --> 00:13:57.230 align:middle line:84% I've obviously, slightly-- what's the word-- 00:13:57.230 --> 00:14:00.470 align:middle line:84% texturized some word choices in it, 00:14:00.470 --> 00:14:03.350 align:middle line:84% partly to emphasize a kind of global applicability. 00:14:03.350 --> 00:14:05.870 align:middle line:84% I mean, if you add a "soupcon sinister," 00:14:05.870 --> 00:14:07.550 align:middle line:90% then the French get in the act. 00:14:07.550 --> 00:14:11.390 align:middle line:84% If he's "dumb as oakum," the Albanians get into the act. 00:14:11.390 --> 00:14:15.080 align:middle line:84% You get the fun of hauling in other landscapes 00:14:15.080 --> 00:14:17.450 align:middle line:84% entirely, if you're a translator, if you 00:14:17.450 --> 00:14:23.300 align:middle line:84% have a choice of available terms where the sense is faithful. 00:14:23.300 --> 00:14:25.640 align:middle line:84% But what's extraordinary about the poem 00:14:25.640 --> 00:14:30.890 align:middle line:84% is how live it is today, how properly 00:14:30.890 --> 00:14:35.240 align:middle line:84% applicable across time, the spirit of that piece, 00:14:35.240 --> 00:14:41.180 align:middle line:84% and its investigations is, in some sense, into timelessness. 00:14:41.180 --> 00:14:45.050 align:middle line:84% I love the way a precise withholding-- 00:14:45.050 --> 00:14:46.685 align:middle line:84% you notice that "cabinet minister" has 00:14:46.685 --> 00:14:48.560 align:middle line:84% to be withheld to the very last moment for it 00:14:48.560 --> 00:14:49.880 align:middle line:90% to have its punch. 00:14:49.880 --> 00:14:51.270 align:middle line:90% It has to work that way. 00:14:51.270 --> 00:14:52.850 align:middle line:90% The whole poem relies on it. 00:14:52.850 --> 00:14:55.610 align:middle line:84% But that kind of scrupulous designing, 00:14:55.610 --> 00:14:58.010 align:middle line:84% that kind of withholding that restraint 00:14:58.010 --> 00:15:03.680 align:middle line:84% is what unlocks this uncontainability in the poem. 00:15:03.680 --> 00:15:08.060 align:middle line:84% And for me, that paradox is the whole delight of poems. 00:15:08.060 --> 00:15:13.700 align:middle line:84% It's that they are the smallest containers, if you think of-- 00:15:13.700 --> 00:15:15.680 align:middle line:84% I mean, the trouble is the language betrays us, 00:15:15.680 --> 00:15:17.810 align:middle line:84% and I've spent half of my life railing 00:15:17.810 --> 00:15:22.880 align:middle line:90% against the lexicon of content. 00:15:22.880 --> 00:15:27.350 align:middle line:84% But that the smallest verbal container somehow 00:15:27.350 --> 00:15:31.400 align:middle line:84% contains the thing that's huge, that does not contain it, 00:15:31.400 --> 00:15:33.860 align:middle line:84% releases the thing that is uncontainable. 00:15:33.860 --> 00:15:36.830 align:middle line:90% 00:15:36.830 --> 00:15:39.050 align:middle line:84% You feel the wallop in this poem that 00:15:39.050 --> 00:15:43.130 align:middle line:84% arises from withholding, the reserving of that last phrase. 00:15:43.130 --> 00:15:46.040 align:middle line:84% The last word in poetry is put there by design. 00:15:46.040 --> 00:15:48.590 align:middle line:84% It's not, again, just the end of a big gush 00:15:48.590 --> 00:15:50.840 align:middle line:90% released without supervision. 00:15:50.840 --> 00:15:53.510 align:middle line:84% Thomas Mann said that the writer is 00:15:53.510 --> 00:15:55.460 align:middle line:84% someone for whom writing is harder 00:15:55.460 --> 00:16:01.430 align:middle line:84% than it is for other people, which feels right to me. 00:16:01.430 --> 00:16:04.340 align:middle line:84% What it requires is not release, but control. 00:16:04.340 --> 00:16:08.330 align:middle line:84% And even after you have stumbled on something uncontainable, 00:16:08.330 --> 00:16:11.030 align:middle line:84% there remains the challenge of arranging its material 00:16:11.030 --> 00:16:16.190 align:middle line:84% representation in words, in mere words, in partialities, 00:16:16.190 --> 00:16:19.340 align:middle line:90% and its parts in time and space. 00:16:19.340 --> 00:16:24.440 align:middle line:84% How to prompt in readers, through parts of speech, 00:16:24.440 --> 00:16:28.970 align:middle line:84% the memory of the outburst in themselves of what Rilke calls 00:16:28.970 --> 00:16:34.500 align:middle line:84% das Ungemesse, the immeasurable, the uncontainable. 00:16:34.500 --> 00:16:35.000 align:middle line:90%