Welcome to our new series of readings.
I brought a stack of the semester announcements.
If you didn't receive them there's
a stack out on the refreshment table in the hall.
Now I know you can read but I fear
that you may look at the announcement
and see what you expect instead of what's on there.
Howard Moss is reading for us next week
and his reading will be on Monday night instead
of our usual Wednesday night.
And instead of being here it will
be in the Harvill auditorium.
So that's next Monday the 4th.
Harvill auditorium is at the corner of Olive
and 2nd, that big blue classroom building.
And the auditorium is on the western side of the building.
You have to go down a dark long tunnel to get to it.
Also Mr. Moss will be meeting with all interested individuals
the following day Tuesday the 5th in the Student Union, room
256 at 3:00 in the afternoon.
There's another reading next week on Wednesday night
in this auditorium.
No, on Wednesday night in the Terrace Lounge in the Student
Union.
It's is the first reading in the series that will be
sponsored by Writers At Work.
And readers are Alison Hicks who's
a Master of Fine Arts candidate at the University and Steven
Schwartz, who's a former University student,
and that will be a fiction reading.
I hope you can stay after the reading
tonight and have some refreshments
and then Silkin will be brought out in the hall.
Also we will have some Mr. Silkin's books
available for sale too.
I'm very happy that Jon Silkin could finally come.
Our correspondence dates back to 1971.
So it's taken us a long time to get him here.
His most recent book from Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1980
is his Selected Poems.
In addition to poetry, he's written Out
of Battle, a critical study of First World War poets.
He edited the Penguin Book of First World War Poetry.
For the last 20 years he's lived in Newcastle upon Tyne
where he edits magazine Stand.
Stand was founded by Mr. Silkin in 1952.
And as you know in the American literary world
so many really fine poetry magazines come and go
before you can ever get your subscriptions.
And the magazine which has been continuous publication for 32
years is a wonderful, wonderful thing.
I'm very happy to introduce you to Jon Silkin.
[APPLAUSE]
The first book was a book called The Peaceable Kingdom, which
is a title that doesn't mean much to English readers
but I think perhaps means something to you.
It's the title of something like 60 versions of a painting
that the American so-called primitive Quaker
artist Edward Hicks did in his adult lifetime.
And what Hicks is depicting is that part of Isaiah
where the wolf and the lamb and the lion will lie down together
and a little child will lead it.
And it's an image of an ideal harmonious society
such as some--
except he didn't have.
He died 11 years before your Civil War.
And clearly such as we don't have now
or perhaps I could put it in a different way
and say such as Isaiah didn't enjoy either.
That brings me to in a way the nature of the kind of ideology
that I think that first book pursued in which I
think I've continued to pursue.
I'm a Jew and we have a joke about the meaning of the word
Messiah.
You've had yours but we're still waiting for ours.
But the meaning of the word Messiah according to the Jews
is never, it's not much of a joke I realize that.
But your spirit, yes.
The spirit is willing, but the flesh is very unwilling.
[INAUDIBLE] I cribbed the title from Mr.
Hicks because nearly all animals--
nearly all the poems in my first book
have animals as their central figures.
In the position not of victims--
not of martyrs but of victims.
I think what I'm trying to say is that the martyr chooses
his or her suffering but the victim does not choose.
The victim is handed out.
That's more or less the condition
of the animals in my poems in this first book certainly.
Well, I'll read one or two from that collection.
When I was in-- when I came out of the Army in 1950,
I decided that I would become a laborer because being brought
up as a middle class gentleman I realized after serving
in the army as a national serviceman
that I knew nothing whatsoever about the way in which most
people subsisted and earned their livings,
about the urban working class in Britain.
And so I decided that there was one way to educate myself
and that was to actually become a laborer, which I did.
And in those days as now in England
under the kingdom of the Thatch, as a laborer
you can be hired and sacked very easily indeed, especially
the sacking.
And I was on my way to collect my dole money.
And as I was leaving the apartments,
the flat that I was living in London in an area
called Blackheath there were two dogs outside.
And I noticed that there were sort of lunging at something.
One was our dog, one was the landlord's dog.
They were little dogs and they were lunging at something
and then recoiling.
And when I looked down there was this dead blackbird.
And they wanted to take a lump out of it
but they didn't have the courage to do so maybe
because the bird was dead.
Who knows.
Anyhow that was an interesting tableau on the night on my way
to the labor exchange to collect my dole money.
I wrote this poem on top of a [INAUDIBLE]..
Two small dogs stood by a dead blackbird
and the blackbird was very dead.
The two dogs stood by the bird like large lions
but they never touched the dead thing once.
They would like to have eaten the black thing
but it was very dead with red ants sawing
its neck like stone masons.
And the red ants were very much alive.
So all the time the dogs stood.
They barked there because they couldn't eat the black thing.
Something large about that black bird.
It was being eaten by red death while the two large lions--
small dogs-- just stood barking.
They never touched the black thing and the black thing
never looked at them once.
It was indifferent to two small dogs.
Maybe it did not hear those large lions or maybe
the black bird felt sorry for the small dogs.
Meanwhile, the dead went on being dead and the living,
living.
This is a poem that the Royal Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
was going to use as one of their poems for a Flag Day.
But I guess they decided that poetry was not
the best way to earn money or to raise money.
So they didn't do it in the end.
It's a poem called "Caring for Animals."
I mean the argument and is not quite as naive, perhaps,
as it looks.
My argument is based on the sort of notion
that if we could care for animals just moderately
we might come to care just a little
more than moderately for the human animal.
And that may be wrong but that was the supposition
the poem worked upon.
I ask sometimes why these small animals with bitter eyes, why
we should care for them.
I question the sky, the serene blue water, but it cannot say.
It gives no answer.
And no answer releases in my head
a procession of gray shades patched and whimpering.
Dogs with clipped ears, wheezing cart horses,
a fly without shadow and without thought.
Is it with these menaces to our vision,
with this procession led by a man carrying wood,
we must be concerned?
The holy land, the really green island
should be kindlier than this.
The animals, our ghosts, need tending to.
Take in the whipped cat and the blinded owl.
Take up the man trapped squirrel upon your shoulder,
attend to the unnecessary beasts.
From growing mercy and a moderate love,
great love for the human animal occurs.
And your love grows, your great love grows and grows.
[APPLAUSE]
So much for the Peaceable Kingdom.
In 1958, I was lucky enough to get
offered a fellowship, a non-academic fellowship
that was given to practicing poets
at the University of Leeds.
And that's some-- it was a marvelous thing because I
was for the first time in my life free of my adult life free
of worrying about money.
And that was a fairly rare thing in England,
which still is fairly rare.
They're not all that number of fellowships going for people
with no strings attached.
Anyhow, I went to Leeds and Leeds
is a city that I came to like very much.
It's got actually a 10% Jewish population, which I also liked.
Those people who don't like that refer to Leeds
as the new Jerusalem.
That's their problem I think.
But close to the City of Leeds is a very different city,
the city of York, which is of course
the capital of Yorkshire, the largest-- or what was
the largest County in Britain.
And it's one of the ecclesiastical centers
of the North of England.
And that's important to the next poem
I'd like to read because in 1190 there
was a massacre of the Jews in the City of York,
quite a number of them.
Richard the First was out trying to recover
the Holy Land for Christendom.
A number of cities used the absence of the King
to destroy the Jews in Britain.
100 years later the Jews were expelled from England
because their resources as moneylenders had run out.
The King borrowed but did not return, neither the interest
nor the capital.
Well, some people don't like the interest
but the capital well, I mean.
Anyhow they must have had very little money
because quite a number of the Jews were dumped overboard
mid channel by the boatmen.
Anyhow, well that's a bit passé, either because the City of York
appears to be a bit touchy about this.
The City of York has two industries.
One is chocolates and the other is tourism.
And the city it issues a guidebook to its historic--
I was going to say remains but the remains
are very substantial actually, they are hardly ruins.
And what they say is they make a very coy reference.
They say that the Jews of York perished in 1190
through anti-Jewish riotings.
When you think that's a very tautological statement
and it is coy.
It doesn't say very much except that the Jews died
because they were killed.
[LAUGHTER]
Well it's one of way of dying, that's true.
So incensed by the reticence of the city fathers,
I wrote this poem as a kind of Jewish Baedeker, I suppose.
The poem was called "The Coldness."
Where the printing works buttress
the church and the Northern river like moss
robes herself slowly through the cold Township of York
more slowly than usual for a cold Northern river.
You see the citizens indulging stately pleasures like swans,
but they seem cold.
Why have they been so punished?
In what do their sins consist now?
An assertion persistent as a gross tumor and the sense
of such growth haunting the flesh of York
is that there has been no synagogue since 1190,
when 800 Jews took each other's lives
to escape Christian death by Christian hand.
And the last took his own.
The event has the frigid persistence
of a growth in the flesh.
It is a fact no other fact can be
added to, save that it was Easter, the time when
the dead Christian God rose.
It is in this perhaps they are haunted.
For the cold blood of victims is colder, more staining,
more corrosive in the soul than the blood of martyrs.
What consciousness is there of the cold heart,
with its spaces?
For nothing penetrates more than admitted absence.
The heart in warmth, even, cannot close its gaps.
Absence of Jews through hatred or indifference,
a gap they slip through, a conscience
that corrodes more deeply since it is forgotten.
This deadens York.
Where are the stone masons, the builders skilled in glass,
strong first in wood; taut, flaxen plumbers with lengths
of pipe, steel rules coiled in their palms?
The printers; canopy makers--
makers in the institution of marriage?
The absence is endless, a socket where
the jaw is protected neither through its tolerance for tooth
nor for blood.
Either there is pain or no pain.
If they could feel; were there one among them
with this kind of sensitivity that
could touch the dignity, masonry of the cold northern face that
falls as you touch it, there might
be some moving to a northern expurgation.
All Europe is touched with some of frigid York,
as York is now by Europe.
[APPLAUSE]
I've written a poem about the bomb.
It was obligatory for poems to be written by poets
about the bomb at that time.
And it sounds unhappy about writing it that's not true.
In the '60s the government, it was then
a conservative government, very different government
from the conservative or perhaps I
should say Tory government we have now in Britain.
Not unlike--
There are certainly similarities between the government that you
have in the United States now and the government
that we have in Britain now.
I mean, I don't want to get political,
I'm only a poet but--
[LAUGHTER]
I'd just like to note that there are resemblances.
Yes, that's right.
Well, that's unlikely actually.
[LAUGHTER]
Anyhow, the government at that time
was sending out ladies from the home office whose patriotism
had somehow inexplicably survived the Second World
War to tell the women of England what they should do not if
but when the bomb was dropped.
And leaves that little equivocation if--
the assumption was that it would be dropped.
And that of course, since that was
the assumption it was all right for us to have the bomb
and drop it on them too, whoever "them" would be,
turn out to be I should say.
And what these ladies did was to go around the country lecturing
as I say, to the women of England telling them
what they should do, as it were, the prophylactics of defense.
And I had at that time a friend who
was a nurse who attended one of these lectures,
compulsory I must say.
And she told me the gist of what this lady said in her lecture
and I've incorporated it into the first half of my poem.
The poem is called "Defence."
It is dedicated to Ann.
And it is prefaced with a little couplet, a sort of Lysistrata
like couplet, which runs: what one in five
can do no man can quite do.
Because the lectures were aimed at reaching one
in five women throughout the country,
the lectures became only known as One in Five.
As for Lysistrata, you remember that this lady
was a woman of Athens who along with most
of the other women of Athens apparently
was a bit irritated with their men going off to war
and either not coming back or as coming back mutilated
so they held a strike, which was apparently
100% successful which said that the women would not sleep
with their men folk until they promised
not to go to war again.
And the she in the poem, my poem,
is removed from the home office.
She arrived late with this motto:
time used in reconnaissance is not time lost.
Useful hint on how efficient our defences would be.
Sent from the home office on work of some importance.
And the first thing she said is that there
will be some preparation before the thing is dropped.
You should instruct persons to stand
in the center of that room they like, for the blast,
unlike the bombs of the previous war, will draw the walls out.
There will be no crushing of flesh.
Instead on all sides walls will reveal the citizen unharmed.
Here, a question.
But no, she said.
We have from our intelligence absolute assurance
our capital is not targeted.
Total warfare, by arrangement.
And she was sure when pressed.
But there will be devastation, as we now suspect,
in radius of 44 miles.
The water will be infected.
The light from the thing, astonishing.
Which though surprised by, we should not look at.
But shelter behind some object to reduce damage
to the tissue from radiation or shelter under brown paper.
Or if you can, sheets soaked in urine.
So women who crochet, stop that.
Men laboring whose issue is the two-handed house,
set that aside.
Girls big and delicate with child, turn on your side.
You will melt.
The raveling spider and the scorpion whose prongs itch
will fuse in a viscoid tar, black as a huge fly.
The whole of nature is a preying upon.
Let man, whose mind is large, legislate
for all passionate things, all sensate things.
The sensuous grass whose speech is all in its sharp, bending
blade.
Leave not a leaf, a stone that rested on the dead
to its own dissolution.
She left then.
As if she were with her feet turning
an enormous, if man-made, pearl as means of locomotion.
Also from my first book is a poem
about the death of my first son, my first child
who died in a mental hospital when he was almost a year old.
His name was Adam.
And there's a lot to say about the poem
but it's not that I'm being coy, I
don't really want to spend the time talking too much about it.
I think the thing I want to say is that the poem was written
immediately after Adam's death.
There are other poems which I've never really published
although I published them in magazines,
which were about Adam and about the nature of madness.
And Adam was what they called a defective, mentally defective.
And it was in as much as I can say
with a poem which was written so soon after his death, that
is to say immediately after his death,
indeed the last line of the poem went through my head
as he was dying.
Though I didn't know he was dying if you see what I mean.
He was doing things, these huge tears fell out of his eyes.
He was doing this--
and since I've never seen anybody die before,
I didn't know whether that was death or not
or perhaps I didn't want to know whether it was death or not.
Perhaps that's the point really.
But even though the poem was written as I say immediately
after when we got home from the hospital,
I think what I was trying to do in the poem--
whether I succeeded is another matter-- was to try and argue
with people like my mother, for instance, who because she was
so shocked and hurt by the whole business
said in an unguarded movement that she thought that Adam
should never have been born, which
implied that Adam had no value.
And I think the point about this poem
for me was that I was trying to put into the poem the value
that I undoubtedly felt Adam undoubtedly had.
Anyhow, the poem is called "Death
of the son who died in a mental hospital, aged one."
Something has ceased to come along with me.
Something like a person, something very like one.
And there is no nobility in it or anything like that.
Something is there like a one-year-old house,
dumb as stone, while the newer buildings sound like birds
and laughed, understanding the pact
they were to have with silence.
But he never sang or laughed.
He did not bless silence like bread, with words.
He did not forsake silence but rather like a house in mourning
kept the eye tuned in to watch the silence
while the other houses like birds sang around him.
And the breathing silence neither moved nor was still.
I have seen stones, I have seen brick.
But this house was made up of neither bricks nor stone
but a house of flesh and blood, with flesh of stone
and bricks for blood.
A house of stones and blood in breathing silence
with the other birds singing crazy on its chimneys.
But this was silence.
This was something else.
This was hearing and speaking as though he
was a house drawn into silence.
This was something religious in his silence,
something shining in his quiet.
This was different.
This was altogether something else.
Although he never spoke, this was something to do with death.
And then slowly, the eyes stopped looking inward.
The silence rose and became still.
The look turned to the outer place
and stopped, with the birds still shrilling around him.
And as if he could speak, he turned over on his side
with his one year, red as a wound.
He turned over as if he could be sorry for this.
And out of his eyes, two great tears rolled like stones,
and he died.
[APPLAUSE]
I think I've gone on writing poems about Adam.
It very often suggested to me that the writing of the poem
was, in some sense, a catharsis, a release and a relief
from the pressure of that death.
That may be true.
I've no way of knowing.
I certainly was not conscious of being motivated to write
the poem for those reasons.
And indeed I can only say that the writing of the poem
etched that event sharply into my mind.
It did not provide any relief.
And indeed I think that's probably right.
There are no shortcuts to grief.
I wouldn't have thought so.
And the poem in any case, as I perhaps
rather heavily and painstakingly tried to suggest,
is not a poem about my grief.
The grief, if it is there in the poem, is incidental to it.
But then I was reading that poem.
I do cut a lot of readings in schools in England.
And at the end of it a young girl said, that's fine.
She said, what about the mother?
Well, that's perfectly true.
The mother is not in that poem.
But I had in fact got around eventually
to writing as I have several poems about Adam
and this was another one of them, part of a longer poem
call.
And the poem opens with something
that simply did happen as we were
entering the grounds of this mental hospital where Adam was.
The grounds were filled with the mad people.
That seemed-- it was tremendously crowded.
And as we were walking around, there was this woman,
I don't know how old she was.
She had breasts but her face was--
had no determinate age.
And she came up to us and then she took her to my hand
very gently and kissed it.
Raised it to her lips slowly kissed it, released me
courteously and left.
In other words, she wanted to give love
and she saw no reason for not doing so.
Of course that was rather ticklish questions you know.
And if that is how the mad are then perhaps
we need more people like that.
And which side is one, all of that division between the mad
and the allegedly sane and so on and so on.
All the questions that I think we probably
all ask ourselves, which are not easy to answer.
I don't think.
Anyhow, here it is in this poem.
Air that pricks earth with life and turns with it
returns to darken in the year's midnight, thins
in a chill distraction.
Winter sun burns a low arc through the horizon
and is absent.
As we trudge the area where our child is lying,
the soil is trodden by the mad who, at the next spring,
but that is, at the next world, may with its flexible sense
elide by that stark light, the vacancies
in their main circuits.
If no world unfolds these dead may rise to,
Their half buds of flesh that does not know itself
and does not open in a separate flowering
and touch your signs which touch without a trace
of human correspondence in this world, will have to do.
She who drifts with her group of friends as if we beckoned,
leaves, and is behind us both.
Her shape bends gently down.
Her large quiet hands, her breasts hardly there.
An independent mildness at the mouth branch
past the cheekbones, blushes to the eyes, widening in hunger.
She gazes and lifts my hand up slowly to her lips.
Then kissing it, releases me with care, gently, and leaves.
That gentleness forming without submission
as she kisses my hand bravely.
Who shared in that kiss?
In which instant sane or defective?
Shame at my dividing question.
Walk a bit onto the ward.
Out of its souring brick birdlike, the mad alight,
shake.
and fold then their movements to their bodies, gazing clearly
or quiver in recognition, timid but pressing
on us to touch us over our hands or faces
or touch us with their eyes.
While everywhere their mild untrained gaze
forms the unsure part in creaturely connection.
And as I feel her hand, all the forms
shed their flesh leaving this bare.
12 almost, to test my sanity, I squatted on the pavement
and put a marble on my tongue, closing my mouth on it.
If I could swallow this and die, I was insane
or if I left it balancing on my tongue,
then I'm mad to do this.
Our child, for them, is mad.
We reach the twilit ward.
Adam lies in a bed as if an adult.
Through his face his blood making the skin chill,
dampening it, stirs.
He breathes, yielding a change to breath.
We label it and press it, the lungs that can't be relieved,
letting it from them.
She rises and slowly, as she brings her mouth to him,
her lips widen.
Lightly, and light, as if she were withdrawing,
as she sinks beside his silence breathing,
she lifts up his head and lightly kisses the eyelids,
his mouth then as she puts her finger to his palm
turning his head to us.
The eyes, eyes with a firm breath in a changing form
move through them flickering softness in its shape.
Over and not obscuring that, the moisture of his body swelling
the eyes and widening them brings the life
that concentrates, searching itself to grow connections
in him.
Forming him, formed and held like this,
it connected us to him holding us until that moisture pressed
with a thick movement from him.
I wrote a number of poems about flowers, wild flowers
mainly when I was living in Leeds.
And I'd just like to read two of them.
They didn't start off as a group.
What happened was that I'd let the garden that I was living in
is a university flat and it was very productive, the flat.
It grew well outside and grew an enormous amount of fungus
inside as well but I could never get the University to clean it
up.
And besides which I was writing poetry
I had much more important things to do of course.
And so a garden grew as well.
And the grass got enormously long
and as I walk through a lot of frogs would leap up.
And then I had a fit of bourgeois conscience
and I thought I ought to try and do something about what
had once been a lawn.
So I started to try and pull the dandelions up.
But as you know, if you don't [INAUDIBLE] around the roots
you might just as well forget it because they just break off
at ground level and that's it.
And they just grow fine.
And so what I did on this occasion afterwards
unsuccessfully pulled the dandelions up,
I had noticed this time that the plant exuded this thick viscous
milky fluid which is like the plant's blown up after that.
And I wrote a poem about dandelion shortly after that.
And then I perceived that the garden
was full not only of flowers but also potential poems.
So I started to write poems about the flowers
in the garden.
And I tried to describe as accurately as I could
what I saw.
And then came the obvious problem of anthropomorphizing.
That really you can't help but say be saying something
about the human creature while ostensibly saying something
about other creatures.
So I decided that perhaps the best strategy
would be to be frankly anthropomorphic, so
that with one eye I try to describe what the flower looked
like and with the other to try and visualize a human type
or human situation which paralleled the creature that I
was looking at.
Well, I'll read a couple of these poems.
This poem is called "The violet."
And it's about courage which I think
is a commodity that is in fairly short supply.
I should know.
The lobed petals receive each other's nestling shape.
We share the sun's beneficence.
Frost, men, snowdrops.
Then the violet unfolds: not an uncasing
of the corolla, each petal compliant to the purpose
of survival, obedient to that.
But as it feels the sun's heat, that puberty
pushes out from its earlier self clasping
two distinct clenched halves.
Stiffens them.
These fluttering portions that made the bed separately
elect to be the flower.
The violet halves itself, pushing apart
in separate forces.
It divides up itself.
It becomes two violet portions.
That is not a confirmation of members,
each petal a tooth, an eyelash.
On the other hand, the violet is torn apart.
It increases by dividing.
Its stiffened petals push further apart.
It adheres to its nature.
It has no maturity other than this.
It requires courage and finds that in this unclasping
of its self worship.
Two palms tentatively open.
Going both ways, they absorb a huge circle
of violated air and intent movement of embrace:
created, exposed, powerful.
The air is colored somewhat violet.
It costs itself much.
One other of these poems.
This is something called Harebell which is a poet--
a flower that looks like, from an angle, a poet's lamp.
I don't know whether you have it in Arizona.
Looking at the vegetation in your desert
I would be very surprised if the Harebell could
manage to get this far South.
And in Scotland it's called the Blue Bell
but that shouldn't confuse you.
And what I admired about this little plant was its reticence.
I just had in mind you know Hazlitt, the 19th century
critic, could never forgive Wordsworth
for changing political sides.
And in "The Spirit of the Age" he wrote of Wordsworth:
"If Mr. Wordsworth is garrulous now it was not his wont."
Well, fancy having that said about you
when you were alive, fancy that surviving your death.
And indeed I suppose if one were true to one's words one
would not write more poems.
But it's the spareness of this flower, its spare beauty,
that I like enormously.
I mean poets are permitted to write about flowers as well,
aren't they?
As I was leaving a restaurant there
were a couple of guys, about five large guys
and they'd heard that I was English
because the people with us had said, when are you going back
to England.
And as I passed they said doesn't speak like one.
And then there was a pause and he
said he doesn't smell like one either.
[LAUGHTER]
The Harebell is one flower, its solitariness
bespoke by its color.
Not blue nor violet, hovering between, precisely.
It is a spare delicate bell.
Inside it are three pale sugary stigmas welded to each other
at equal angles, not seen until looked for.
Its stem is thin as wire.
The flower looks down, and if lifted,
looks fixedly at the admirer.
Its silence halted between primness and beauty,
its shape is wrung from the sounds of life
round it as a bell sound forms the bell shape from silence
and resumes its demure integrity.
More precise, more shaped than the Blue Bell,
more venturesome, more stirred, ungarrulous.
Stern as a pin.
In 1965 I moved further North again from Leeds
to the City of Newcastle.
And again something occurred through the auspices
of a different conservative government.
And that was what was called the Industrial Relations
bill, which sought--
I mean you must surely have been saying something
about the long miners' strike in England.
Well, that conservative government sought at that time
not to prohibit, but to inhibit strike action.
And incidentally, what I have just
said whenever I read some of the poems
that I'm going to read now for example on television,
my commentary was cut out because the television people
feared to be actually taken to task by the government
and even sued for supporting a political view which
was antipathetic to their own.
We do have democracy, that is we elect our leader.
Here's a point.
My wife and I, we went around Finland.
And we came across some--
one of the many railroad tracks that have
been pulled up in Britain.
I mean, you are aware of this phenomenon in your own country,
aren't you?
The disemployment of certain ways
of getting about the country.
In England it matters a great deal more.
And indeed I think you would be surprised to find
how remote quite a number of our rural communities are.
Because what then happens is that the buses are withdrawn.
And then if you don't have a car you're really in difficulties.
And that's basically the fate of the county north of Newcastle
where we live, Northumberland which
is the last county you pass through
before entering Scotland on the east side of England.
The city that I live in, [INAUDIBLE]
is the last major city on the east side of England
before you get to Scotland.
So it's Newcastle, Berwick, Edinburgh, that little route.
Anyhow, if you're going on them on the freeway
it's from Newcastle to Edinburgh.
And where we spotted a disused railway line which ends
and then the little station and some [INAUDIBLE] cottages.
And we were wandering around the station.
Up comes this guy and he starts to talk.
And he said, yes I welcome this [AUDIO OUT]
it's Newcastle Edinburgh, that little route.
Anyhow if you're going on them on the freeway it's
from Newcastle to Edinburgh and where we spotted
a disused railway line which--
and then the little station and some [INAUDIBLE] cottages.
And we were wandering around the station.
Up comes this guy.
And he starts to talk.
And he said yes, I rode on this line for 50 years.
And my friend and I used to gang,
that is to say to look after a section of this line about
eight miles of it.
And 50 years ago I helped to build this track
but you can't see it anymore of course and so on and so on.
And gradually what I realized was
that he was talking about the destruction of his adult
working life.
Not complaining about it, simply talking about it.
And I thought that I wanted to write about it.
And there was something else that was very odd.
He said my friend, his friend with whom he worked
ganging the railway line.
My friend's in a home now.
And the way he went on to talk about it
made me feel that what he was saying very delicately
was that his friend was in a mental institution from which I
surmised that perhaps what happened
was this that faced with the destruction of your adult life
you either bear or break.
And the man we were talking to, who we went to see again quite
a few times, he's dead now, did survive that destruction
but his friend didn't.
And that accounts for the end of the poem
where his friend writes to him.
And he says Sam, why are you writing to me?
Who are you, what do you want?
I've actually cribbed this with words
because in the 19th century, there
was another agricultural working man who was also a poet called
John Clare who went mad, yes and was
incarcerated in the Northampton Mental Institution.
And John Clare was intermittently mad
or intermittently sane according to where you stand.
And in one of the letters he writes, Dear sir, I am mad.
I suppose that was when he was in bed.
And then he completed-- and then he says and so I bid you,
you obedient servant John Clare.
Well, I've used a portion of that letter.
And I'll try and with an alteration in my voice
convey that it's Middlemass's friend replying
to Middlemass from the asylum.
The poem is called "Platelayer."
And Middlemass does most of the speaking in the poem.
I did not serve, but was skilled for 50 years,
laying plates measured as carefully apart as seedlings.
The line came West from Morpeth crossing
the third road for Scotland.
At Knowesgate, which is the little village he lived in,
at Knowesgate, four houses group on a bank, set away.
A station was built there.
I laid plates for eight miles, but short of Morpeth,
sledging chucks that held the rails;
kept them so, although this has gone now.
Yet here are four pines of the five I put in.
And here I helped to concrete that that was the bay.
My dog has 16 years.
We both suffer the heat.
And yet her owners had said that she must be put down.
I did not say that.
And the lupins strike through the platform;
with a better chance I think they'd have not done well.
But what I think is that my work was finished up.
Five years past the track taken apart.
No, not so.
Now with cranes to hoist the lengths that we laid down,
form on form.
Also gone a certain friend, who finished when I was made free.
I shan't work any job twice.
And this is strange, having the letter from the man,
although it was not him.
Yet surely as like him as the bolts drove in.
I can't think of your name or what you are.
You must excuse me and I have nothing to tell you
and why I am shut up here I can't speak of with nothing
to speak about.
But still, I am certain the track we built
was skilled, although you can't tell that.
[APPLAUSE]
If I read two, three more would that be--
if not all right then I'll stop.
I will read a poem which I think is a difficult poem.
Well, maybe I don't know.
And this is a permanent attempt to braid together
two narratives.
The narratives are very different.
One is about when I came out of the army
before actually getting a laboring job I
was on the streets.
I'd actually managed to starve very efficiently
and ended up with malnutrition.
I merely mention this because although we do have a welfare
state in England, there are people within the welfare
state, which Maggie the Thatch is busy
destroying who nevertheless starve whether or not
she destroys it or not.
I was lucky.
I always knew that I would get on my feet.
But walking down Great Peter street
which is where the hostel was that I was staying at,
the Salvation Army hostel.
And there was a dustbin there.
And the guy that reached there first
and decided that he didn't like the contents very
much of the dustbin so he left them and I got there
and I agreed with him.
But the part of the story is surely
that the man that I was looking at
would probably never be able to quit his poverty so it seemed
to me, I think that was what stood out most of all
in that experience.
Anyhow was one strand of the narrative that
is about that and about my failure as a human being
within that context.
And the other is about my loving another human being.
Well, the English language, British and American languages
have two words which overlap, which
express the disjunction of the two narratives in this poem.
And one of the words is compassion;
the other is passion.
And they do overlap but they don't overlap a great deal.
And I think what I'm trying to say
is that the poem is about the impossibility of bringing
those two strands of love together
in any meaningful way, which doesn't mean we don't try--
what one comes back to Hebrew prophecy again, you know,
Nevi'im, but that doesn't mean you don't try.
And I couldn't find a title for this poem.
So as you can see it's a bit difficult.
So I call it "Untitled poem."
I see that the narratives breathe in and out
of each other so I move from one to the other.
The perfume on your body and the musk of it.
The second is on me.
I smell the first on you as a sign.
I wear the undelicate odor.
Shuffling through the city, my mildness deceit.
Hungry and lightheaded with venom.
The adder silks to refuse bins.
Fastened to the street: the working men's
hostel past two bins.
A man beat me to those.
I was afraid, and the pulps he left stayed unfingered.
I had not thought of you.
Timidly I spent my pence.
In a dormitory, my body covered my trousers.
Along your flesh drifts your hair.
A tree bearing concupiscience.
And your smile shows.
This is enough almost.
Arms are slim, your fingers' amazing strength.
The tree's whole self blurts through long hair.
It's not grief, not joy.
Saffron spills milk on the road.
A friend working through television
gave me a brass thruppence.
I bought tea with it, bearing nausea.
In Jerusalem, the hills bare.
Soft haired goats made of teeth; all the shoots are champed.
Hunger drifts through plains, over the declivities of London,
delicate smoky flakes of it.
On the rock splinters cold air; a coward
felt another's bruises in his groin.
He fears the cold air, its true match.
Love, I love you.
Can I mean more?
You smile among four friends, three of us
speak and you say nothing.
It hurts; your speech is a silent woman.
Each night the kicked man screams.
If I help you, if I can lift you.
His stain over stone is blue, feather light.
The feet of police emboss the sidewalk.
Linked by my penis, our child could grow.
Fear synchronizes with us.
I enter you, local as a root.
I wait for you to get your breath.
We measure each other.
We are prepared, lassitude melts.
The hair is naked.
The piled spaces of hunger.
And I touch our candor.
The flesh in abandon robes gently the tenderness.
The camera's flame curves around its inner light.
Your hair is seaweed, smile monstrously.
Memory flushes me through.
Your salt skin rustles on me.
Of love, this entirely is not what we were taught.
Thin black coffee in a pan flicks beads of heat.
The flaking city mounds stillness, and amiable sleep
spreads our flesh.
We will not last, love, as we are.
Love, I would have us stay ever like this.
My conscience, my fear, and our sex, stir.
I'll read as I said just two more.
This poem I wrote in 1980 when I was--
I'd done a three month stint at the University of Louisville
and I was planning to go back to England
and not altogether looking forward to it.
And the poem is called "The ship's pasture."
In the sun, the leaf, hesitant but active.
This fluorescence of plain wood.
With joy I saw the fields of England,
as new, chartered shapes, bargained for and so snipped
with standing sheep, their snowy garments
by the limestone walls, bulbous fossils.
Their thick inert forms braids dangling
the soft wealth of England.
Selah.
Except some people here are brutal.
The fist, because of standing in the wrong place,
at the cheekbone.
Fist or snide arrowy word.
I rose from England much refreshed but returned
at evening; much undone that was once good prior
to this mean juncture.
It was joy, beside myself, to see the new fields.
Whose is this land that, like waiting flesh,
turns with a kiss, domestic, but yet is
a local habitation with no substance or name sustaining
it?
It is the ship's pasture.
Its interlinking husk of submarine,
sea-spike, the sleeted fields of destruction: for payment,
for emolument.
I am a part of this, the bee, cutter of wood,
whose timbered house is unimaginably hospitable.
This is what it is.
Northwards a new Jerusalem with the lamb
lies separate, its shade dense and lovely.
The woman starts again as though each portion of this
were knit afresh.
Now, I've remembered poems I read last night to a group
of Steve Orlen's writing class.
It's the area that I mentioned, Jesmond,
and this is the last poem.
It's an area very near more or less
absorbed by the center of Newcastle now.
An area that is mainly composed of urban bourgeoisie
of which I'm one.
And it's about the caring for children really.
That's what it's about I think.
And I mention also a Russian writer here,
a writer called Zamyatin, who, during the First World War,
worked in Newcastle and lived in Jesmond.
He was supervising the construction
of icebreakers for the Czar, on Tyneside,
which is one of the traditional industries of Newcastle, that
and coal mining.
Neither of which survive with much profit now.
The poem is called "The Achievers."
And that the story Zamyatin satirized the Jesmond folk
and it's a story called The Islanders.
Behind the front door stairs without turn or landing,
run into a back attic in one flight.
Breath, breathing go diagonally as if hand
in hand through the house.
Red stair carpet separating two wheels
that build extensions of light into the roof.
This is Jesmond, Zamyatin made in his Islanders
as a Russian jest of--
shifting the tedium of yards as he
oversaw the construction and constitution of Russian ships.
1916, the pole of the year.
Its ice, a dithering of ocean, the Czar's icebreakers
follow dark water.
In a front room siding the stairs,
a boy fingers a flute, and a young woman,
circumscribed in a circle of light,
shed from a lamp like a green bonnet,
stands a little to the side, back a bit, and bends above him
to read the notes, their closed dots and fins silently filling
the page as stairs fill the house, climbing
a magnitude of soft despair and achievement, coming on.
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]