Next poem is about--
this is good in terms of hearing.
Can you hear all the way in the back pretty well?
Good.
Yeah.
This is a poem about Heinrich Schliemann,
who is the man who dug up Troy.
And then recently, a man came to Buffalo
and gave a lecture on Schliemann.
And he was a kind of iconoclast.
He wanted to expose Schliemann, which
seemed like a foolish thing to do, since we owe him so much.
And I think it sort of-- for me, it
suggested the sort of resistance we have to admiring people.
And this poem really is sort of a celebration of Schliemann,
and the kind of art that Schliemann was
concerned with all his life.
And the way his life itself is a kind
of unbelievable work of art.
[INAUDIBLE]
Two more?
What should I be saying?
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Nothing actually, I always have this look.
That was good.
It always helps to have a comedian here, right?
OK, one more.
One more and then we're going to-- that way,
everybody can enjoy.
There, that's it.
OK.
Thank you.
Actually, I like those lights before that way.
I mean, so if you want to turn those back,
that's fine with me.
Which ones--
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah, why don't you turn those to what it was before?
That's fine, OK.
Let's just wait a couple minutes till everyone--
[INAUDIBLE]
All right.
[INAUDIBLE]
OK, let's go home.
Fantastic.
All right, Heinrich Schliemann.
It's the main plot in his life, where
his rise from grocer's apprentice and shipwrecked
scrivener, to rich indigo merchant
with a palace in St Petersburg.
The master of a dozen languages.
It would be easy for critics like us to patronize.
Easy to grant him a place in the storybook
with Dick Whittington and the woodcutter's youngest son.
And we could pity his distance from the real world, when
he leaves the trading firm in middle age
to learn the ancient Greek of Homer.
And falls in love with an Athenian schoolgirl,
as he hears her recite Andromache's long plea.
And marries her, moving his life from storybook into dream.
As if the noise of traffic outside
the church were the hubbub on the fields around Troy.
If only he hadn't taken it into his head
to dig in a sleepy backwater village for Troy's walls
and somehow found them.
If he hadn't knelt in the dirt all day
with beautiful Sophia, chipping away crust
from the tiles of Priam's palace,
from bracelets that once circled the slim wrists of princesses.
If he hadn't proved that his dream was graspable,
that the stories he loved were fashioned in the high style.
Not to escape the world, but to remember it.
And offering to the dead, to the dead bright ones
whose gestures, vivid as they are in song,
were doubtless in the flesh more dazzling.