Before I introduce Dr. Baker, I have a few hundred
announcements to make.
Next Wednesday night, we'll have the first
of our series of student readings in this auditorium.
And three of the candidates for Master's of Fine Arts in poetry
will be reading, Tom Cox, Kim Meilike, and Martha Ostheimer.
And November 1st and 2nd, in cooperation
with this Academy of American Poets and Arizona State
University, we are co-sponsoring a festival of Southwest poets.
And I have some flyers on that I put out
on the refreshment table, so I hope you'll pick up a flyer.
The first day of the festival, there'll
be a panel discussion here with six poets,
and that evening three of the poets
will read in this auditorium.
The next evening we'll all trek up to ASU and the other three
poets will read there.
But the poets who are participating in the festival
are N. Scott Momaday, Naomi Shihab Nye, Peggy Shumaker,
Alberto Ríos, Joy Harjo, and Richard Shelton.
And as with everything the Poetry Center sponsors,
the readings are free.
And we have punch and cookies.
A week from tonight, the Russian department
is sponsoring a very special reading
by Russian emigré Igor Chinnov.
And he will be reading in Harvill Building room 203
at 8 o'clock.
Harvill is that building that's kind of hard to find.
It's over there.
And you wander around in the maze for hours
before you find where you're supposed to be.
And don't go by yourself because it's
dark and strange over there.
It's a pleasure to welcome Dr. Baker to our campus.
I had read his vitae and expected an elderly gentleman.
I was quite surprised to be introduced
to this nice young man.
Houston Baker is the director of the Center
for the Study of Black Literature and Culture
at the University of Pennsylvania.
He's published three collections of poetry--
No Matter Where You Travel, You Still
Be Black, Spirit Run, and Blues Journeys Home.
He's written or edited 17 other books,
including Black Literature in America,
which is an anthology of Black American literature
from folklore to the present, A Many Colored Coat of Dreams:
The Poetry of Countee Cullen, Modernism and the Harlem
Renaissance, Afro-American Poetics, and most recently,
Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American
Women's Writings.
His numerous honors include the 1986 Distinguished Writer
of the Year Award from Middle Atlantic Writers Association
and fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim
Foundations.
I hope you'll stay after the reading,
and have some refreshments and get acquainted with Dr. Baker.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you very much.
It's wonderful to be here.
One of the reasons it's wonderful to be here
is because I've not been here before
and so it's nice to go to new places.
Another reason it's nice to go to be here
is because I have a lot of friends here
who have for years been in a semi-chamber of commerce
capacity, saying if you've never been there,
you've been nowhere.
And after being picked up and shepherded around last night
and today by Annette Kolodny and Dan Peterson,
seeing Barbara Babcock and Ken Hensley
and other people who have made the day very pleasant,
and hearing a wonderful talk by my wife, that's
the best of the team today earlier,
I told her not to be so good because it
would make it tough tonight.
But it's been a wonderful day and the weather's cooperated
and so forth.
And I'm glad you all came out tonight.
In this capacity, in the capacity of poet,
I never have felt comfortable and I don't feel comfortable
now.
So you have to bear with me as I make my way into this.
And one of the reasons I don't feel comfortable
is precisely because it seems to me
that my forte, what I do best is probably a literary criticism,
and the poetry is a secondary process.
Now, I had a person who agreed very much with me
in this for a good deal of my apprenticeship as a poet.
She is now my wife and has been for 28 years.
I would pass on things to her and I would say,
you see, here's my latest poem.
And she would look at it and she would say,
ontologically imbibing the late night--
what is this?
This is not a poem.
And I would go from poet to poet in my literary classes
and try to emulate them and write my own poems
and put my own words.
And she'd keep handing them back to me.
And at one point after I had published a volume of poetry
and gotten a little bit down the line,
it seemed to me that summarizing a lot of experiences
might be those words that she used to say to me,
and that is, this is not a poem.
So I wrote a poem called This Is Not a Poem, which
is about a lot of things.
Maybe it's about how all of us come
to be poets, which I think probably everybody is.
This is not a poem.
This is not a poem nor aesthetic experience.
This is a story of my grandmother's hands chapped
from white folks' wash, an account of her back spasmed
from scrubbing floors.
This is not a poem nor icy art, emotion.
This is a narrative of my father's father
scraping pennies from a rocky economy, depression baby
devouring everything in sight.
This is no poem nor a subtle tingle down your spine while
shaving.
This is a tale of my mother rebuked for calling a Black man
gentleman.
"Lizzie, tell your daughter that Black men are never gentlemen."
This is no poem, nor am I blessed to be impersonal.
I will make no attempt to distance you.
Had you been there, any of you, while I was growing up
or even in the thin warned time of their decline,
I would have introduced you, allowed you to share
the fine goodness of ancestral caring.
But that's not a poem.
When I began to think about what it was that constituted not
only a poet, because if you walk around in the United States
with melanin, unfortunately you can't be a poet, right?
You can only be what?
Right.
A Black poet.
So I thought, well, OK, I got one hurdle here done,
and right, this is not a poem.
What is it that makes you a Black poet?
The most recent installment on that answer,
an answer to that question, is the blues.
But there were earlier responses.
And it seemed to me that the title of that first volume
of poetry, No Matter Where You Travel, You Still Be Black,
was at least a process of definition.
And the signature poem for that volume,
and probably in most gatherings that I go to, is that--
goes no matter where you travel, you still be black.
You carry all your history on your own damn back.
Now, your mama raised you proper.
Your daddy caused you pain.
You understand Beethoven, but you still love Trane.
And I found out that Martha was from Carolina,
and she was looking at the front of the volume here,
a table of contents having embarrassingly
asked me where one of the poems came from, which volume.
And I had to look at the table of contents
and she said, my goodness, Carolina, Coltrane and love.
I'm from Carolina.
And I said, well, I read Carolina, Coltrane, and Love.
So Carolina, North Carolina was a significant experience
because I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky
and have been trying to outgrow that ever since,
including language and dialect because we called it Louisville
at that time.
And I was told that I could not say literature when
I went to Howard University.
So I've been working on all these allusions and things
that you do.
But getting back to North Carolina for our research
here at the Research Triangle Park
was great, because the flora, the fauna
reminded me of Louisville, or Louisville
and it helped the writing of Blues Journeys Home.
So Carolina, Coltrane, and Love is a family poem.
Gray autumn squirrel scoots across a distant branch,
sunlight flashes, trees revealing textures in Saturday
light rare as Earth itself.
In my living room, John Coltrane plays
Naima, the old gold and stubborn green of Carolina
are flavored by a neighbor's smoke.
There is a shaman on this album chanting, torturous,
older than Earth, as my son awakens with a boisterous yawn.
A horn is invoking chaos, creating comfort,
ordering old African spirits.
Today, my son and I will complete his African project,
working together at rituals ancient as the seasons, old,
those chordal progressions of Trane, blast barriers.
The shaman gives birth to the world.
The squirrel is on our deck.
Dry leaves and sheets of sound.
We discuss my son and I, forest and rivers,
older than the signs of man.
On that disk, Naima gives way to ohm,
a single hand clapping, Charlotte awakens,
stretches toward the sun.
She is motion, she is energy, embodiment of spirits
called, the ending is black, the ending is love,
the ending of African genius is always, always love.
Caroline and Coltrane and love.
[APPLAUSE]
Well, where did it go?
This is the title poem of second volume of poetry
that's called Spirit Run.
It's about running, which is really strange for a poem,
to say spirit run and to be about running
because there's a standard poetical rap that you all have
heard that the poet does is a kind of entr'acte.
And it goes, gee, I don't know what I'm going to do next.
But I was visiting my mother out in Seattle.
And in her backyard, there's this really interesting
Japanese maple.
And the deer come each year.
So this is a poem about my mother and the deer.
And then they read something like cosmology's birth scene,
the tone is rain and gone, but this is really
a poem about running, which I was fanatical about not so long
ago, called Spirit Run.
Stones in the path are no object,
darkening skies offer no retreat,
and my legs stretch farther, pace quickens as first rain
begins to fall.
The mine revives a moment long passed by a lake.
In a country of red, we sat, grandfather.
You told of kin battered and sold.
You mapped the land's holy spaces,
you bestowed upon my boy's self blues notes of our survival.
I mount the final hill reflecting
that the land's now contour holds no record, coded message,
secret name, the blatant fact that we have run
is signaled by the single shoe prints.
In the sun, trees grow still.
My flapping soles are the only sound for miles around.
A moment of revision is at hand.
Approaching the low ground's clearing,
I remember the Korean tribesmen chant,
"On this day of good sun and brilliant moon,
we leave this for you to eat.
Shadows of the spirit house, descend.
Imagination reigns.
And as I cool into the blues of Southern summer dusk,
I dedicate this poem and present run to you.
You who worked the levees, you who worked the long rice
fields, you who taught us the graceful stride
of this American race, run.
You don't have to do that.
And that's what-- I'm paying the honorarium.
I can do anything I want.
I'll clap when I want to.
Someone wrote to me recently just out
of the blue, which is unusual, at least for me,
poetical experience and said, I've read your poetry.
It was great.
But I thought, wow, OK, it's happening.
But this one person who wrote to me
also said that he liked poems in a section of Blues Journeys
Home that are the section called Guardians.
And again, last night as we traveled on the plane
into Tucson, I asked Charlotte which
ones I should read in this.
I'm going to-- oh, here's one of my favorite.
This is a poem for Gus Cannon.
It's not C-A-N-O-N. It's C-A-N-N-O-N, Gus Cannon,
who was a reviser in his own right though.
And Gus Cannon was a blues man and played the guitar.
And in the Blues, there's a guy by the name of Barry
Pierce who's written a book about this,
there's a standard story.
Musicians want to play their music
but their mothers and fathers say it's sacrilegious
and they won't let him play it.
They won't buy him instruments, and so they
have to make their own first instrument,
so they have an uncle somewhere who's not far away,
and they steal his guitar and their adventures
like having to jump out the window
and leave the guitar behind because they've
been messing with somebody's wife,
and you get these stories of Bluesman.
And Gus Cannon's story is not unlike that
when he tells it about his early days
and how he came to the guitar playing.
But he used to play in Memphis, and he had a group
called the Jug Stompers, Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers.
And I saw a picture once of Gus Cannon, and Gus was bad,
I mean, he was definitely bad, the way he dressed
and so forth.
So he seemed to me to capture not only the standard story
of the blues man, but also in a sense
implied or suggested the lifestyle.
So a poem for Gus Cannon.
A raccoon skin scraped thin for resonance, a guitar-neck
and an old bread pan made you a Stomper, medicine show
traveler, jug band man for Southern barbecues
and rollicking barrel houses.
Your long frame became an instrument of pure delight.
Men in plantation fields held you in awe.
Brown girls with big eyes hummed at your strumming, Gus.
And around Memphis, everyone took pride
in your new store-bought guitar and sharp-creased pants.
Gus Cannon, you would say, Gus Cannon and his Jug Stompers,
here to let you know what country Blues is all about.
And then you made them Gus drop down mama,
sweet as the showers of rain.
Go you, got you there.
This is a person in another tradition as guardian
of the culture, as guardian of the law,
as guardian of the word.
This is a poem for Hosea Hudson.
H-O-S-E-A Hudson, who is a Black communist worker and will tell
you that he is still a black communist worker.
Gus was around during those days when
the Communist Party in the United States
endorsed a separate Black nation, a nation
within a nation, and suggested that people
should organize among workers.
And Hosea Hudson worked in the whole southern region
when you had to do the kinds of things
that you have to do again in the 1960s, and who knows,
you might have to do again in the 1980s, and the 1990s,
and in the 2010s, and whatever.
But he was eluding always one brigade of people threatening
to beat up Communist Workers.
And he was a person who read the literature
and who was deeply and deeply invested,
and still is, in the Communist Party and in its possibilities
in the United States of America.
A friend of mine by the name of Nell Painter, N-E-L-L,
and despite the word painter, who is a brilliant Black woman,
historian, now at Princeton, wrote a book called The
Narrative of Hosea Hudson.
And she afforded me the privilege one
day of going with her over to Atlantic City
where Hosea Hudson lives while she taped and interviewed
and talked with him about the Communist Party and his work.
And I wrote a poem about that day and about Hosea Hudson.
For Hosea Hudson, Black Communist worker at age 79.
The pungent odor of Vaporub and too many hours without sun
or the season's quick wind through broken screens
was your room.
The compact chairs were bursting their limits.
Their stuffing exposed to bright dim gray ancestors
across the walls.
The browning of a bare bulb on the table
laden with political affairs.
Refrigerator clicks, hums low in a farther room
as a counterpoint, as low, signifying voice
without judgment, and the tape recorders
whirring and your voice.
Not everyone can be in the party.
Now, the party don't mind your having a friend, even
a lady friend.
I mean, they didn't want you hopping around from limb
to limb like no Bantam rooster.
The cassettes change, scene unfolds in mute significance,
eyes along the wall on the table glass on a mantle's ledge
become family.
And you resume.
That's my mother.
She is faint, unripe candidate for his dark voice.
And the cousin I told you about, her daughter and aunt,
my mother's sister.
He is drawn back by the sharp fight of dogs outside.
Every afternoon.
Every afternoon, them dogs, but that wasn't my point.
My point you see is now ain't no such thing
as high ups in the Communist Party.
What you got is Democratic centralism.
The majority decide and everybody got to shut up.
Dogs crackle through the room releasing violent eyes
along the wall, avoiding the frame
of his dead wife in coffin.
I inquire about the overalled Black man
and his solemn Black companion.
Yes, sho, that's Sarge Garfield.
His brother-in-law down in Baton Rouge.
Before he lost his strength, the light dims and resumes.
I'm old now, but I still believes.
[APPLAUSE]
I think now what I like to do is, before reading
one of the poem in this volume, a couple of other poems
in this volume, try some things that are recent and fairly new.
They all have stories of one sort or another,
but I haven't made them up yet, so I take it as it comes.
This is a poem that's called After All That Happened.
And I think in a sense, this poem
is a kind of break that moves away from Blues Journeys Home
and offers an opening into a different kind
of poetical world and different themes.
After all that happened.
You have come back to me through legends, rumors,
wars of the self, analysis, tears, and blood,
the agony of operations incalculable,
the severing of heads and tearing of flesh,
the mightiness of your suffering is beyond question or doubt.
When they pushed you farther than the mine could bear
and you took residents outside your skin
to behold their sick violence, I was bound hand and foot
beneath ashes of despair.
I heard your tears but could not move.
The sun, the next morning rose as though nothing was wrong,
but your blood was a screen across it.
My eyes were the color of milk.
You touched my forehead but cringed
when I reached for your face.
You knew it was no longer there, and now you
have come back to me through caverns of despair.
You are not afraid of man monsters who
walk midnight streets with their flags
waving, killing women and children across the Old City's
moons.
You have come back across deserts of loneliness
and depressions set in stone.
You are moving across gleaming mirrors,
your image rejoined to solid flesh.
Your mind is a flowering garden now,
and I love you more than ever.
And I love you more, more, more than ever
before all that happened.
We moved a few years ago to a place
called Belfry, as in bats, as everybody would say.
They'd say, "You live where?"
And we say, Belfry Drive.
They say, "As in bats?"
So you would anticipate the line.
So I live in bats, as in Belfry to confuse them.
But this is a place that had lots of Republicans who
were nice to us.
They left us alone.
We call it benign neglect.
And the compensation for this was
that there were lots of geese and wonderful tree lines.
And it was at that point the country,
it stopped being the country as they built lots of houses,
and now we've moved from there.
But there's a set of poems that I kind of call
the Belfry poems.
The first one is called Grandfather.
The muscles in my grandfather's neck grew slack in his 90s,
making channels through which the spirit flowed.
Black beds of wisdom where rivers rose,
his sinews were cathedral columns
lifting to radiant eyes, excuse me, where
I read the whole Earth's love and pain.
Today, winter geese at sunset recall those ancient outlets,
suggest a black and gracious gift of sound.
Belfry to Hiroshima now.
Afternoon and our chimes, our path, our wind
chimes hang melodious.
They are counterpart for wrinkled veterans
on television.
They speak of a day 40 years ago when the gay Enola rained fire
on the Orient.
We see on the tube despite the chimes' distraction, surgically
perfect faces, spotless children following old footage and more
white males talk of napping, napping while fire
set the ground boiling.
Babies dying, samurai melting.
The wrinkled man says, "Well, I was
so tired to tell you the truth.
After the mission, I went back into the back of the plane
and slept for hours.
Never occurred to me, what a great thing we had done."
Belfry's sun makes late clouds lavender and rose.
Bells of nearby churches feel like charred flesh
dropping to Earth.
I push open the screen and assault
our chimes apart with a madness that makes my neighbors stare.
I guess this would have to be Belfry 3.
I mean, logically, it would be cool if it was Belfry 6,
and everybody would say what happened
to the missing belfry poems?
A whole dissertation of speculation.
This is 3.
This is for my son, Mark Frederick Baker, who
is now a freshman in college.
And it's called Against Romance.
He might be a little embarrassed by this poem now.
This was written when he was a junior in high school
and he quite liked it then.
But it's called Against Romance.
Behind the line of trees at Belfry,
light rises, birds who should be romantic,
grackles, swifts, but are only sparrows,
dart into the sunrise like thrown objects fort-da.
My son, who should resemble romantic heroes,
but is more beautiful, has departed for the day.
The house grows hugely and I, who
should know more prestigious things to do,
have already begun planning his return.
He will arrive in the red orange of evening, a light
that silhouettes barrenness and raises
plane birds to winter perches.
He will not realize how exciting my day has been without him.
Oh, this is a poem that I have not read before.
It's for a woman by the name of Rita Watkins.
She was the first wife of a mentor of mine in college,
and she and the mentor were both extraordinarily important
to us.
The poem is called Simply for Rita, R-I-T-A.
It seems now always the same: morning and wind, the leaves
down and endlessly moving, pools undercover, boats moored,
deckchair is firmly stored.
It seems now always to last, the strangely full feeling
of having consumed too much, of having eaten more than a
fill and unable to bear the radiant weight of the hearth's
glow.
It is as though with winter nothing can be renewed.
The destroying hand of December lifting
heat and life and all nourishment
from the surface, an icy destruction that pushes away
grave covers on summer grills, rattles the new panes
in every room.
It seems now to have swallowed the good,
to have scuttled and sunk the last dry enterprise of August.
Today, word came of the same bleak endings.
I see you on a barren farm in Idaho,
sorting out what is left of your life.
The piles of books and letters for designated friends
and places, the onions and perfumes
arranged in serried rows along your dresser.
A gentle hand passing along a kitchen shelf.
Then you read once more a son's card sent long ago.
Write what they shall read of you upon that wintry discovery.
You ignite the engine.
Stuff the largest means of breath.
Await in December the same, always
the same quiet hope of death.
But it's not always the same, is it really?
Nelson Mandela had a birthday, and people put together
a collection of poems for Nelson Mandela's birthday
to be sent off to, hopefully to him but certainly
to South Africa and this is called A Birthday in the Dust:
for Mandela in his 70s.
The dust and great trees mark the contrast.
Brown sediment settles over ripe savannas.
Lush growth bounds its space.
Dust is an itinerant reminder of soil possessed,
people dispossessed.
Its element is wind, rustling trees carrying fine grains
everywhere.
Forest of Johannesburg are a rich burgeoning
of stone and steel, white settlers
are lush reducing black and brown life to the invisible.
Wind riding out of Bantustans and urban bistros.
Wind blows majestic clouds like prophecies of change.
Speckles are what you catch, Nelson Mandela.
In the sunlit stream of your cell,
a swirl of brown and black that reminds you of the day
the Earth was born.
Cosmic matter.
That will not abate.
You are a grain no bounded moment can contain,
no great and subtle trees resist.
This is a poem about my father and experience in youth.
Has trees in it, but they're not maples and there are no deers.
On a cold Saturday full of gray sidewalks and first steps
of real youth, I was no more than four,
my young dad promised a nickel for each piece of firewood
that made it to the backyard in my arms.
Suddenly the elm was gone.
I went, bravely loaded underwood, feeling rich already
when pieces began to fall.
The dime I made is luscious today.
At your death, I thought of the oxen yoke and lacquered wood
you urged upon us always.
The elm was suddenly no more.
The shining coins of memory you bestowed, the example
you were that fall day when your bulging arms lifted me
toward a gray sky like a very tree of glory.
This is a poem that Annette will appreciate since we started out
in New Haven together.
I don't think this is a very deep poem,
but there's something sardonic about it
and I couldn't even tell you.
I think anyway, I hope there is something sardonic about it.
It's very short.
It's called Girl At the Bar after Manet.
A white arm, blue veined, and draped across a table.
Sundays in New Haven are like that.
That's it.
A more romantic poem in place.
It's called Citing, C-I-T-I-N-G, Eric the Red,
who found Greenland.
We were flying back actually from Nigeria
and then from London to the United States.
And we crossed over this huge amazing site.
And the pilot came on and he said,
this was the first real estate hustle.
The guy named it Greenland and told people
they could come and live the good life there.
So this guy citing Eric the Red, who found Greenland.
When I'm finally finished, I want Fulani maidens
to reduce my bones to ash and deposit them
on caps and peaks of Greenland.
At last, I will live in the shadow of glacial valleys
with Eric the Red.
We will invent melodies for ice floes and harmonies
for singing whales.
Earth, wind, and fire will keep us going forever.
And a couple of the most recent poems, and then I
think I'll read one last one from the other volume.
This is called Me and William Carlos, Enough Said, as my son
says to me sometime.
A violet tinged pink softly takes
place behind belfry trees.
I am writing poems today only about what one can see.
Imagination need not apply.
Brown sticks, black birds have fallen fence
around the garden where someone's sandy paper has
been redistributed by a socialist wind.
A place where a red wheelbarrow might stand, if only
it would rain.
This is called Mountain Radio--
thanks-- Mountain Radio in Winter.
This is the Poconos.
The curve and spread of these hills
was a surprising as the diverse memento or your telephone
call from a suburban town, voice and music spreading like light
in winter places, Yo-Yo Ma's, with the stringed grace
of December love.
This is my William Carlos Williams poem.
If this does not remind you of William Carlos Williams,
I don't want to know about it.
Don't tell me.
It's called A Blessing of Horses.
A touch in January of spring brings chestnut horses
to the field dry as sage.
One stretches for water, creates a sculpture at rest
with water, and the startling grace of winter Earth.
From Blues Journeys Home.
This is a poem for my wife.
We had a dinner party once and we had a very nice Chablis
or something.
And then we had people who said, "Do you
have any more of that Chablis?"
And we did.
And we opened some more of the Chablis
and suddenly everybody was just turned toward the spot where
my wife was sitting because she was talking about her past
and things that I knew nothing about or, of course,
would never have married her.
But actually she was talking about her youth.
She used to go down to North Carolina in the summer, which
was a familiar practice.
Northern families who had migrated
Black would send the kids back South to be with grandparents.
But I hadn't heard these stories.
So this is called Socializing Roots:
When My Wife Surprised the Dinner
Party With Talk of Her Youth.
I see you in North Carolina dawns, your knees rattling
against the morning chill, yellow pump
water in your six years' hands.
Your city-born mom has launched you
South with toothpaste, toilet tissue,
warning off dirt in the country.
You return from the field with foaming mouth,
the butt of rural jokes with flattened toilet
rolls in your possession.
No Sears catalog for your tender bottom.
Undaunted, you meet the sun with your own etchings in dust,
shell-dried corn for your grandfather's biddies,
tough birds all.
Your words return southern accents,
sources of your excellence hidden until now.
Thank you for your attention.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much, Dr. Baker.
Dr. Baker will be lecturing tomorrow afternoon
in this building Room 14 at 3 o'clock.
And I understand you've changed the lecture topic, what's the--
It's about rap music.
About rap music.
Great.
That's at 3 o'clock tomorrow in 14.
Why don't you join us for some refreshments.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
What a night?
Oh, yeah, we weren't.
We have.
Two in a row 3 we had one last night.
Wow.
Thank you, I'm Bob Houston.
I teach fiction.
Hi, how are you?
Very, very pleased.
I understand that we were conflated last night.
She said it?
Yeah.
Robert Houston and then she said Houston will read and then we.
Gather with a real writer I felt like his name was Baker.
When we got married, she was Sharon Houston Baker
Is that right?
[OVERLAPPING VOICES]
So are you from do you ever get back to Louisville?
I have been back within the last couple of years.
Do you know about Belmont?
No, but I used to know people at Belmont.
I mean, Belmont was, of course, a school of choice
when I was growing up.
Personally?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, a couple of people came to me
and said, Why are you leaving Louisville?
I mean, right here you have Belmont College
that you should go to.
No, yeah, I was--
I rode there.
I spent a weekend residency, and was really impressed.
It's his friend Thomas Martin's papers.
It's connected with that kind, of I have a reputation.
I mean, with Louisville and you were in there.
But I mean, it was right a lot of people.
You're a really good by the way.
Oh, listen, thank you.
Thank you.
Forget thank you credit.
OK, just say it's worth it.
Thanks.
It's always tough.
The process is getting easier of writing and I'm liking it more.
But to get up and do it, it's still really tough.
And there were poems that I knew I was going to read tonight.
I mean, because I've begun, I've got
a whole thing about the muse and their loved ones right.
And I thought that'll be the principal thing of the night.
And I couldn't do it.
I couldn't get enough.
But you're one of my closest friends.
A guy named Paul Moriarty, William Carlos Williams,
and for years we've been talking about Paul's
life-saving scholarship, And I'll
tell you the same thing I told Paul, "Write poetry."
Because he's so good at it.
Thank you.
He's so good at it.
Lovely.
I mentioned Joseph Hudson, that was him.
He was a-- he and my grandfather were friends.
Were they?
No kidding.
My grandfather was an old Wobbly and CIO organizer in the South.
Yeah, then there aren't many people that know it.
How was he?
Jose?
He calls it that.
Yeah, Jose.
He calls himself Jose.
Yeah, because you think Jose, any other kind of pronunciation
could come up, but Jose Hudson is what he called it.
Oh, I love it.
Tough man.
Wouldn't you love to have a name out there?
I would love to have a name like it.
It's so worth.
That's right.
Hi, I'm Jose Hudson.