Thank you.
It's a real pleasure and a privilege
to introduce one of my mentors.
A couple of years ago, when her most recent book, Virgin Time,
was released, I went to the bookstore
here in Tucson to purchase a copy.
And first, I looked in the autobiography section
because I knew it was a type of memoir.
And I was not successful in locating it there.
So I thought, well, I'll try the nonfiction section.
And again, there was no copy of the book.
So I thought, well, I'll try religion.
It was not there either.
So I asked the clerk to help me.
And I asked if they had a copy of the book.
And she said, well, yes, we do, but we
didn't know exactly what sort of book to call it.
So we placed it under general interest.
And I think that Patricia Hampl's work
is general interest in the very best sense of the term.
She writes about things that I think really matter
and that everyone can relate to, issues of family and faith
and skepticism and the contemplative life.
Among her books are A Romantic Education,
Spillville, Virgin Time.
She's also written two books of poetry.
And I'm told that she's just finished a screenplay.
So she continues to branch out into new areas.
So I hope you will help me in welcoming Patricia Hampl.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Well, he's taller than I am, anyway.
We know that.
Excuse me.
Hello.
It's great to be here.
I am not responsible for your bad weather
in spite of the fact that I come from Minnesota,
which is the bad weather place for a lot of people.
I'm hoping it'll be sunny tomorrow, though.
I feel that as a guest of the Poetry Center,
I should at least read a poem or two
before I launch into prose, which is what I've
been up to for a long time now.
So bearing in mind that I do come to you from Minnesota,
I'm going to read you a kind of Minnesota late winter poem.
You know that because there's a lot of slush in this poem.
And then I'll read one other poem
before I launch into some prose.
And this, by the way, this poem has
been done up as a broadside.
And I'm giving the broadside as a gift to the Poetry Center.
The poem is called "The Moment."
"Standing by the parking ramp elevator a week ago,
sunk stupid with sadness, black slush puddled on the cement
floor, the place painted a killer pastel as in an asylum.
A numeral 1, big as a person, was
stenciled on the cinder block.
Remember your level.
The toneless bell sounded.
Doors opened, nobody inside.
Then, who knows why, a rod of light at the base of my skull
flashed to every outpost of my far-flung body.
I've got my life back.
It was nothing, just the present moment occurring
for the first time in months.
My head translated light.
My eyes spiked with tears.
The awful green walls, I could have stroked them.
The dirt, the moving cube I stepped into,
it was all beautiful, everything that took me up."
And the other poem I want to read you is from--
I can't really call it my latest book
of poems, given the fact that this book was
published in 1983.
But in fact, it is my latest book of poems.
I want to read it in the spirit of something
that I think lies at the heart of literary enterprise.
And that is the friendships that sustain many of us
over long years when there isn't a whole lot
of other recognition of what it is that we're up to.
And I know there are many people in the room who
know about that, who have been sustained
and who are sustainers of others as they give their lives
to this [INAUDIBLE] of writing.
And I'm thinking particularly of my colleague
Ted Wright, who has moved here from Minnesota
at his retirement, and Alison Deming, a new friend,
and others here--
Dick Shelton, who brought me here in 1980 the last time
I was in Tucson.
This poem is called "Last Letter."
And it's for a poet perhaps not known to too many of you named
James White.
Not James Wright, but James White, the author of,
among other books, The Salt Ecstasies.
And he was a guy who lived in Minneapolis
and was a friend of a lot of other writers,
and he died at the age of 45, about in 1981,
very early, of congestive heart failure.
And I was at the north shore of Lake Superior
when I heard about it.
And I wrote this poem for him.
So although it's an elegy and I don't
mean to rope all of you people into an elegy in terms
of the fellowship among poets, I do
want to honor that fellowship that I think
sustains writing over the long term.
So this poem, called "Last Letter."
"Everything is more beautiful today.
I'm sorry.
It's not right when you're dead for the first time
this morning.
But the rain hits the black asphalt
like a hoofer, exhausted, heavy under the transparent
strokes of dance.
The pink geraniums-- do you like pink?
I want to know if you like pink--
are hanging in a basket from the cafe awning as dry as tissue
paper on a package.
The lights of things have turned on
more intensely just now as yours has clicked immaculately off.
The women at the next table are saying
something's cute, real cute, one of them
with earrings the shape of hearts.
No way would I follow that oaf around like she did.
They're talking about love, the only subject, darling,
except for this new one of yours.
Here's what I meant to do--
call you this weekend, go for chicken
salad sands at the Sky Room, and you'd whisper again the truth.
The really great waitresses always chew gum.
You approved of their dismissal of us, charmed always
by any artist who couldn't be charmed.
You posed glamour as the first honor of friendship,
and we said "darling" to each other like movie stars.
Your white, naughty smile.
Tell me again, Trish darling, how
we're going to claw our way to the top.
The woman with the hearts at her ears
is saying that after 30 years of marriage, you can't expect,
and that the girl wasn't a gold digger.
She says, when you order prime rib,
you just better not think you're going to get it medium rare.
But the only words today are endearments.
Darling, sweet one, caro, caro.
We liked to be affected and spoke all languages
for their flair.
Just this instant, a cat streaked by outside,
wet and matted as carpeting in a vestibule.
His brown and black stripes were green in the rain.
A green cat, Jim.
Bet you never saw that.
And the hearts are gold, pressed tight against each lobe.
Not hanging, in case you thought I meant the hanging kind.
No, pressed like two kisses.
And she's looking at the cat, too.
She may be thinking about the cat or about something else.
I can't say for sure.
I'll keep describing things, getting the colors right,
taking down the dialogue, packing the report
with metaphors so it's art, watching the world be
unlikely and eccentric.
I call it honesty, as you do.
But today, I call it keeping you alive just a little longer,
using the present tense that's dishonest now.
And it is unholy, darling, to hold you a second longer
than you held onto us."
The first little prose piece I want to read you
is from a book called Spillville,
which is named for a town, Spillville, Iowa,
where the Czech composer Antonin Dvořák spent
the summer of 1893.
And in fact, it's from this book that I wrote the screenplay
that Dan was mentioning and which
I hope someday will actually turn into a movie.
And I can wear that nonexistent gold lamé gown
that I keep imagining myself showing up in somewhere,
sometime, somehow.
Anyway, this one, I want to read--
this consists of a lot of very short chapters.
I mean, they aren't even really chapters.
They're just little flashes of prose with different titles.
And I want to read this one [INAUDIBLE]
in honor of Dan Cooper Alarcon, whose work on travel
and tourism is engaging a lot of interest in a lot of students
here.
So I'm going to throw this one out,
my little piece about travel and the idea of travel
in relation to the Midwest and to Antonin Dvořák.
The piece is called--
and also, it figures later in a couple of other things
I'm going to read to you.
The title of this little piece is "Pilgrimage."
"God, the sky is blue, and the air is shot with gold.
A moment ago, we passed a farmyard where a girl about 12,
wearing a blue and white dress, stood waving,
dwarfed by a lilac bush whose blossoms were already rusted.
She seemed to beckon.
But of course, she was just waving at the world, us,
passing by.
She would have been alarmed if we'd stopped.
But the impression remains.
She was inviting us in.
Now, on another side road, we've decided to stop for a picnic,
spreading our provisions on a patch
of rocky pasture overlooking the clean geometry of the fields
below.
Pilsner Urquell in green bottles, the heavy gold
of Bohemian hops, cheese and salami
set out on butcher paper sweating in the sun.
We rip off hunks of sourdough from a big loaf,
grimacing like men tearing the Manhattan telephone
directory in half.
For dessert, there's Belgian chocolate so bitter
it makes my eyes hurt.
This trip is a variation on a theme.
Even for Dvořák, the theme was already stated.
Even he was making a pilgrimage.
He sought the familiarity of his own language
in the wilderness of English.
And he came to the farmland and woods
his secretary, Kovařík, promised would remind him of Bohemia.
A good place to compose away from the city.
He had spent the school year in New York.
All that, true enough.
But he sought as well, I think, the higher
pitch, the experience of immigration itself.
He could have found peace and quiet closer to New York.
He could even have found other Czechs nearer to hand.
But he could not have replicated his countrymen's experience
of immigration without crossing the wider stretch of land.
Dvořák understood, it is clear from his letters,
that poverty, not idealism, was the heart of immigration.
"The poorest of the poor," he said,
describing the background of the settlers of Spillville.
He spent most of his afternoons in Spillville
after his work was done for the day,
talking to the oldest townspeople.
He wanted to hear their stories.
Dvořák came not to be an immigrant.
That was, of course, not possible for such
a celebrated man.
But he could touch the experience, at least
the hem of its cloak.
Perhaps his coming here, best understood as an oblique homage
paid to immigration, the cruel, kind song that beguiled so many
of his people.
The summer of 1893, he made his brief bow to what he knew
was not only his countrymen's emigration
but their banishment.
The paradox-- there can be no pilgrimage
without a destination.
But the destination is also not the real point of the endeavor.
Not the destination, but the willingness
to wander in pursuit characterizes
pilgrimage, willingness to hear the tales along the way,
to make the casual choices of travel,
to acquiesce even to boredom.
That's pilgrimage, a mind full of journey.
It's an adagio movement, the slow, lyrical mode of travel.
Everything fits, as now, lying here, eyes closed.
Winter face to the spring sun.
Flies attracted to the sticky smell of flat beer left
in the green bottles are making a low sizzling sound
near my head.
A wasp has zoned in on the salami.
And I realize, touching my hand to my forehead,
that my brow is furrowed.
Somebody has put Dvořák's "American Quartet"
on the tape deck and turned the volume up to the max.
Our theme song, the piece he sketched his first few days
in Spillville.
The scherzo, modeled on the song of the scarlet tanager,
is drilling itself over the pasture.
A happy man wrote that.
Dvořák ventured this far from home.
The American Midwest was the farthest reach of his travels.
Such an unlikely explorer.
He was so hopelessly daunted by the carriage traffic in Prague,
it is said, that he would ask a student
to help him cross the street.
What kind of pilgrim is that?
A fearful one, the most authentic kind."
Needless to say, when I was approached
to write a screenplay about this very uncinematic movie,
I thought I should maybe console this producer a little bit
about the wisdom of this.
But the screenplay is very different in tone and, in fact,
has a lot of different characters in it
from this book.
But that was an interesting experience
to write, also, very separate from this.
Now, having spoken about Dvořák coming this way,
I'd like to go the other way.
And out of this book, A Romantic Education,
I'd like to read you my first impression of Prague
when I went there in 1975.
I should mention that the other two
books I'm going to read from, A Romantic Education and Virgin
Time, are both memoirs.
One is a memoir about growing up in a Czech family
and going back to Czechoslovakia.
And the other is about--
Catholic.
And I don't know.
You don't grow up deciding that you want to be a memoirist.
I think a lot of people grow up wanting to be writers,
but I don't think they think, I think I'll write my memoirs.
It's just not what you think of doing.
And so to find myself locked or at least living in the genre
seems very strange.
And I always had a notion in my mind
that I had two books I had to write before I
could write the real books.
And one was about being Catholic,
and the other was about this Czech background.
And I saw these two books as like those lions
outside the New York Public Library,
Prudence and-- what's the other one called?
Faith and Prudence?
I don't remember, those two lions out there.
And I thought, when I write these two books,
I can begin writing the real books.
I didn't know it would take me till I was almost 50
to do them, of course.
So I don't know what I had in mind about the real books.
At any rate, I'm still waiting for the real books.
I'll read you just a short description of Prague.
Of course, it's the pre-revolution Prague
I'm describing.
And then I'll read you another portion from an afterword which
I wrote for a new edition of this book after the revolution.
A Romantic Education came out in 1981.
So the first thing I'll read you is from that time.
And then my publisher suggested I go back after the revolution
and write an afterword.
And so I'll read you a little brief section from that,
which dates from 19--
what, '92, I think.
"Here I am in Prague.
Prague stopped my tourism flat.
The weight of its history and the beauty of its architecture
came to me first as an awareness of dirt,
a sort of ancient grime I had never seen before.
It bewitched me, that dirt, caulked
in the corners of Baroque moldings
and decorative cornices.
And especially, I loved the dusty filth
of the long, grave windows at sunset
when the light flared against the tall oblongs
and caused them to look gilded.
I walked around Prague hardly caring
if I hit the right tourist sites, missing Baroque gems,
I suppose, getting lost, leaving the hotel without a map
as if I had no destination.
I just walked, stopping at coffee houses,
smoking unfiltered cigarettes, and looking out
from the blue wreath around me to other deep-drawing smokers.
Everyone seemed to have time to sit, to smoke as if smoking
were breathing, to stare into the vacancy of private thought,
if their thoughts were private.
I was in the '30s.
I'd finally arrived in my parents' decade--
the men's soft caps, the dove colors of Depression pictures,
the acquiescence to circumstance,
the ruined quality.
For the first time, I recognized the truth of beauty,
that it is brokenness.
It is on its knees.
I sat and watched it and smoked--
I don't smoke, but I found myself buying cigarettes--
smoked a blue relation between those coffeehouses and--
for this sadness turned out to be, to me, beautiful.
Or rather the missing quality of beauty,
whatever makes it approachable, became apparent in Prague.
I could sit, merely breathing, and be part of it.
I was beautiful at last.
And I didn't care at last.
I stumbled through the ancient streets,
stopped in the smoke-grimed coffee houses,
and added my signature of ash, anonymous and yet
entirely satisfied.
I had ceased even to be a reverse immigrant.
I sought no one, no sign of my family
or any ethnic heritage that might be mine.
I was simply in the most beautiful place
I had ever seen, and it was grimy and sad and broken.
I was relieved of some weight, the odd burden of happiness
and unblemished joy of the adored child.
Or perhaps I was free of beauty itself as an abstract concept.
I didn't think about it.
And I didn't bother to wonder.
I sat and smoked.
I walked and got lost and didn't care
because I couldn't get lost.
I hardly understood I was happy.
My happiness consisted of encountering sadness.
I simply felt accurate."
The Prague that I went to and discovered and wrote about
was, of course, the Prague before the Americans
came to it.
In fact, I ended this book talking about
how, if only the American expatriates could
find this town and live in it, they would overwhelm it.
But of course, that would never be possible
because it was a communist country.
And it would not be possible for people to come there.
Well, now there are something like 30,000 Americans living
in Prague right now and two English-language newspapers.
When I went back in the early '90s,
I discovered a very different Prague.
And I met some friends there, a hardworking doctor
who took me on a tour and an American who'd returned,
having escaped in 1948, to receive
his degree, which had been denied him
when he'd been arrested.
I want to read you about another person I met there in '90--
what was it, '91 or '92--
another person like me, returning,
although this had been his home originally.
"The next day," meaning after some other things had happened,
"I managed to find the antiquarian book shop
in the warren of tangled streets behind Old Town Square, where
Anna, my doctor friend, had admired a children's
encyclopedia.
I snapped up the whole set--
The Animal World, it was called--
for $15 as a farewell gift for her.
Then standing outside the shop, trying
to open my umbrella in a driving rain,
I realized I would have to carry this bag of bricks
around the rest of the day.
It was this dispiriting awareness, I think,
that caused me to decide on the long, expensive lunch.
I dragged The Animal World to Prague's only kosher
restaurant, a place that used to be cheap and [INAUDIBLE]..
But it had become popular with tourists,
and the prix fixe menu was now out of reach for most
of the people of Prague."