Welcome.
I'm glad you came out on this holiday
night, and sorry for the inconvenience
with scheduling here in the building.
Before tonight's reading, I'd like
to make a couple of announcements
of upcoming events of interest.
One in particular, I think many of about Arts Reach, which
is a program here in Tucson that teaches creative writing
to Native American children.
There's going to be a reading by some
of the kids in that program this Sunday at 2 o'clock,
at the Poetry Center.
So that should be a lot of fun, and an opportunity
to give some support to some young American Indian poets.
So I hope that some of you will come
by for that, that's 2 o'clock Sunday at the Poetry Center.
Friday this week, there's a reading
in the Chax Press Here and Now series,
by playwright Migdalia Cruz.
And next Wednesday here, will be Denise Levertov.
Tonight we're delighted to welcome Judith Barrington.
She was born in Brighton, England
and has lived in Portland, Oregon since 1976.
She's founded there The Flight of the Mind, a summer writing
workshop which is held in the Oregon Cascades.
I think she's left some literature about that writing
conference, if you're interested in it.
It's a conference for women, that's held every summer.
And she's also in the process of founding a writing retreat
for women called Soapstone, which sounds like it's going
to be absolutely exquisite.
Some very rustic little cabins on a piece of very wild land,
in that part of the country.
And I think they're based on that too.
And if you have an interest in supporting her in that effort,
I know she needs help at this point in the young life
of that operation.
Judith has published two lyrical books
of poetry, which also includes some prose
memoirs, both of which are published by Eighth Mountain
Press.
The first in 1985, Trying to Be an Honest Woman.
And in 1989, History and Geography.
She's also edited the anthology, An Intimate Wilderness:
Lesbian Writers on Sexuality, which
makes an important contribution to our understanding
of recent lesbian writing as a literary movement,
as Judith says, with its own themes and preoccupations,
and with its own emerging influences on form
and language.
She's beginning to sound like a very busy woman, isn't she?
She's also done translations of the Uruguayan Poet, Cristina
Rossi, some of which have appeared
in Translation Magazine.
While she's been here visiting some classes on campus,
we've been talking about the impossibility for her,
of separating her literary interests
from political interests.
And that's been particularly true in relation
to the issue of gay rights, where a particularly important
battle has recently been fought and won against Ballot 9.
[APPLAUSE]
Well, don't forget there will be other battles.
That interest and commitment to both the
literary and political, is finding its form
most recently in a collaborative book
that she's working on with Ursula Le Guin.
Which is about homophobia, as she describes it,
for well-intentioned liberal heterosexuals.
We're delighted she's here with us tonight.
Please welcome Judith Barrington.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Alison.
And before I begin, I'd like to thank
Alison Deming and the Poetry Center
for bringing me here, for my first visit to Tucson, which
is brief, but enjoyable.
And in cooperation with Carla Elling
at Arizona State, where I'm going to go later in the week.
So thank you for all the work to do that.
I'm going to start by reading--
can you hear me?
Is the-- good, OK.
It's a great sound system.
Usually I'm used to hearing a lot of echo and click,
and buzz and all of that, but it just--
I don't even know it's working.
I'm going to start with a poem from History and Geography,
which is a poem about the experience of moving
from England to the United States, which I did in 1976.
People always ask me at parties, well, why did you move here?
As if it's a question that has a one sentence,
and I'm still trying to figure it out actually.
It wasn't something that was an easy or even
a conscious decision, but this poem
does address that just a little bit.
The first part of the poem uses as a metaphor, the London
underground train system, so it has the name
of a couple of the lines.
If you've been in London, you'll remember
that the maps have all these different colored lines
to indicate what line of the train you are on.
And also that people in London, refer to the underground trains
as the tube.
"Countries."
"Changing countries midlife is a bit
like changing trains midtown.
You step off the Bakerloo train, that muddy brown path
on the map where suspicious eyes peer over newspapers.
Why are you leaving?
Where are you going?
And board the District and Circle,
whose green and yellow lines drag memories of springtime
across each tube plan, above each vicious sliding door.
Stand clear of the doors, and they hiss with gusto
as you stumble towards a new life.
Hoping they will not catch you, and squeeze you
in their impersonal grip.
And the whole train watch as you cry out,
stuck with one foot in each world.
To change countries midlife is to change meal times, tax
forms, the shape of mailboxes.
And to discover that green and white chalk hills falling down
to the gray sea, are etched into your heart.
Dutiful at first, you admire forests of Douglas fir,
but they roll away on such a grand scale,
that you long for an unassuming pigsty or a shearing
shed between narrow pathways of mud.
You miss leaning on gates to discuss them
with strangers, and the private lives of back gardens.
You miss a particular smell of salt and chalk,
carried by massive winds from the channel.
And the almost white cliffs, turning blunt
faces towards France.
Their toupees of bright green turf,
threatening to lift and sail away.
You know how to love those soft valleys, in spite
of the miseries you know they hide, where you simply
happened to be born.
There your heart knows the difference
between a politician and an oak tree,
but here when your heart begins to stir in the arroyos
and mesas of O'Keeffe, giant mouth of petal
hinting at stamen.
Sandstone canyon and dwelling, words
carved out of rock and insects rolling their Rs.
You wonder, can you trust your heart's response?
You adopt this new landscape, this powerful sky.
And is to choose a land also to choose a people?"
I just started to wear glasses recently,
and I can never remember if they're
supposed to be on or off.
I can't see back there, or I can't see up here.
It's one or the other.
This last January, I went to Florida for the first time.
And I was at the Atlantic Center for the Arts
in New Smyrna Beach, which is a wonderful art center where
they do workshops and retreats in all different art forms.
And encourage collaborative work between different kinds
of artists.
And while I was there, there were
a group of composers working there
and I was part of a group of poets.
And that was one of the reasons that I
had to go at that particular time,
because I've been doing a lot of work
with musicians in the last few years.
I was fortunate enough to be commissioned
to write the libretto for an oratorio in 1990,
and I've really loved working with composers.
So I was there, and the sort of famous composer in residence
was a man, a Polish man named Zygmunt Krauze.
And one evening the poets were invited
by Amy Clampitt, the poet who was also there
to meet with the composers for the evening in her cottage.
And the composers played us tapes
of some of their work, the compositions.
And afterwards, we all talked.
And this guy, Zygmunt Krauze, I think
in the spirit of playing devil's advocate
or getting some lively debate going,
put out some remarks about poetry
that were somewhat irritating.
One of which was that the reason that poetry
no longer has an audience, which we
are disproving at this moment, is that people
don't know how to read poetry.
He said that when you buy a poetry book,
you have no idea how the poet intended the poem to be heard
or to be read.
Unlike music, which of course, is notated in such a way
that the rhythm is already set up.
And when there is silence, it tells you
how long the silence should be.
He said, this is very confusing.
In poetry, you're just sort of left to do that by yourself.
And he figured that this was a rather bad thing.
So many of us argued for several hours,
and my response was to go back to my room
and write a poem for him, which I gave him the next day.
It was done in a good-- well, a good-natured spirit,
but he didn't take it quite that way.
It was a little embarrassing.
He announced to the company at large that night,
that I had written a poem for him.
He said, it's the first time a woman has ever
written a poem for me.
He said, I've had many poets write for me,
but never a woman before.
So the good-natured aspect died a little at that point,
but it was a good-natured poem.
[FROM AUDIENCE] I hope you wrote another one.
No, I will though one day.
Here's my poem for Zygmunt Krauze.
It's called "Instructions to the Reader of Poetry."
"First, rehearse the pure iambic line
that spans this empty page like stepping stones
across the creek.
Study their width apart, their surface, slick with moss.
The wobbly one that wants to pitch you into the melted snow.
Now you have reached a punctuation mark,
observe its single dot.
Let silence fall, and do not ask me how to measure it.
How long to let that snow hang in the air,
or when to begin again, precisely when.
These things, your body knows.
As the body knows exactly when to suck the waiting
air into its lungs, to wrap around the word
that will always find its way out of the mouth.
And into some sentence riding the back of the breath.
Now consider how to pace yourself, without conductor,
metronome or marks.
When pen in hand, I send you on your way.
Give you a little shove from the crumbling bank, hoping you
won't end up in the icy stream.
There's more than one way to step from stone to stone.
Some people leap and some step cautiously,
while others wobble around on one shaky leg, their arms
like a tightrope walker.
Sorry they came, but knowing it's
harder to turn than just to go on.
Yes, that was another period, didn't you see?
By now, you have probably got the hang of it.
And if you haven't, there's nothing more I can do.
Your body knows the music of words
that we shall breathe and speak, a step and a leap
and you're there."
[APPLAUSE]
Well, it was good-natured, wasn't it?
I mean, who could be offended at that really?
This next poem was triggered--
I always say that word.
And it's about horses, and it's really
a mistake to use that word in the introduction.
It was inspired by an article in our daily newspaper,
The Oregonian.
A rather horrible article, but of course,
if you read the newspaper every day,
it's full of horrible articles.
So sometimes you don't even notice them anymore,
but this one I think because it was about a horse,
it stood out from all the other ones which were probably
about violence towards children and other people.
And it stayed with me on my mind,
so I wrote a poem about it.
And I used a piece from the article
as an epigraph, which reads, "Undercover investigators
in Tallahassee, Florida watched two men
break a Thoroughbred's right rear leg with a crowbar
at 10:10 PM."
The men were part of a nationwide ring,
that injured horses to collect on insurance policies.
My poem is in four short parts, and it's called
"Horses and the Human Soul."
"One, the bay mare lifts her head and listens.
There is darkness.
The new moon barely revealing trunks of scrub oak
beside her meadow.
A car door has slammed.
The mare shifts her hoofs in the wet grass, her belly round
with a sweet spring growth.
Frogs filling a backdrop of sound,
as much part of her world as the post and rail fence,
against which she scratches her rump.
Or the stamp, stamp of Bess and William
in the afternoon, when the sun is up and the flies biting.
A figure steps from the oaks, metal scoop in his hand.
He holds it out, jiggles it till the mare
hears the familiar sound of sifting oats.
Two, they say, when you dream a horse,
that horse is your spirit.
Once the horse I dreamed looked out
of a trailer, pulled by an old Volvo.
The driver, a woman who one day would teach me
something about the spirit.
She drove carefully.
The horse was safe.
When you dream a horse, it had better be safe
or we are all in trouble.
Three, did the investigators find those same scrub oaks?
Did they wear gray suits and carry notebooks,
as they pushed their way through the lush undergrowth?
Did their ballpoint pens carry the name of their company?
Did they smoke as they waited for the sound of the car?
Or did they talk about money or football,
or the girls in the office?
Did it occur to them then as the man led the mare back
to his friend with the crowbar, that they could stop this
before it happened?
Did the new moon shed enough light for them to see,
as the crowbar hit the right rear leg just below the hock?
The blood spurted, the rich brown hair
mixed with splintered bone and the mare screamed.
Or did they have to note which leg it was later,
after the arrest?
And what happened to their souls?
What happened to them?
I want to know that.
Four, the brown mare dreams of Bess and William.
In her dream, they stand nose to withers,
nibbling the itchy spots on his backs.
Swishing tails across hindquarters.
Later, all three of them gallop.
Heads up, and she feels the wind on her chest
and the sky all around her ears, and the scent
of hay in her nostrils.
She bucks as she did when she was a yearling.
And when she barks, her right rear leg
reaches up as if to kick a hole in the sky.
Then in her dream, a man leads her in a trailer.
She has never thought of kicking a hole in a trailer
or in a man, and she does neither in this dream.
She knows nothing of the state of human souls.
In her dream, the man drives carefully and she is safe."
I'm mostly reading from a new manuscript.
I'm going to read a couple of poems out of History
and Geography, but as we who write,
I expect there are a lot of you here who do,
know that it's always more exciting to read what
you've written more recently.
It's kind of dangerous too, because if you've just
written it, then you usually think
it's the best thing you've ever done.
It takes about a week to realize that it isn't, but I'm not
reading anything that new.
I have in this manuscript, a section
which I'm thinking of at the moment as the family album
poems.
And they're poems which are based on real old photographs
that I have stashed away in a drawer,
or some of them actually at the moment are on my refrigerator.
And this one is taken from a real photograph
that I have in my possession.
And I think I won't tell you about the photograph,
because the poem tells you about the photograph.
"Photograph, Scotland, Circa 1950."
"It's rain[ing] of course, all contrast washed into gray
and more gray.
Grainy and flat, insufficient light
in the lens of the cheap Kodak Brownie.
I stand small in huge wellingtons.
For once my mother leans into me,
as if to encircle my six-year-old body
with her bulk.
Both our raincoats are like armor.
Somewhere inside the stiff gabardine,
behind buckles and belts.
Under layers of wool and stretchy hidden things,
our skins' aroma of soap and longing
yields to the rubbery smell of mackintosh.
Our skins pretend they are strangers.
Surely it wasn't always like this,
though I have no memory of being held.
No umbilical trace, no aftertaste of that sudden milk.
How did my cheek learn to forget the particular planes
of that breast?
And what else of love and the body was forgotten?
Even by that sixth year on a dock in Scotland,
my mother sitting on a bollard, rope trailing into the mist.
Insufficient light on my upturned hopeful face."
This next poem I wrote, I was at the beach in Oregon
at the coast.
And it was at a time of year when there
are millions of spider webs.
I forget why that happens, but it seems like that everywhere
there are these spider webs.
And I wrote it during the Gulf War.
And while I was writing it and immediately afterwards,
I thought I had written a poem about spiders.
And then the first time I read it aloud, I
realized that perhaps it was a poem about the Gulf War.
Even though it wasn't what I thought
I was doing at the time.
What it really is, is a poem about attitudes.
And it's in particular, a poem about four different attitudes
that people have to getting rid of things that are in their way
or are inconvenient.
And it did seem to me that there was
a lot of my anger about the Gulf War
that was getting into this poem.
So I acknowledged it with the subtitle, "Four Reasons
for Destroying A Spider's Web: A Meditation
During the Gulf War."
One, it is in your way.
Strung across a doorway, or between the forest
walls flanking your trail.
It floats like a mantra, across the steps down from your deck.
And you cannot duck under, or walk around the other way,
you've tried.
There is no secret password at which, when you utter it,
one filament will let go and the whole web swing intact,
closing silently behind you.
Two, you don't like spiders.
It's not a violent dislike, just the kind
that makes you shudder when you feel the web caress your face.
Where is the spider?
You wonder as your smallest hairs prick up.
And somewhere in your brain, a picture of that arachnoid body
dropping inside your shirt, opens
like the iris of the camera's eye, gone before the thought.
You try to be careful as you break the web at one corner,
and its tenant falls away glaring.
Three, spiders belong in the wild
and yours is human territory.
Sterile, cleansed of everything that
grows outside your control.
You scrub lichen and moss from bathroom tiles,
smother the prolific Earth with concrete
and watch out for those beasts that swim through the plumbing.
Somewhere in your immaculate brain,
you know the spider's web is a symbol.
Not the great grandmother spread across the sky,
but wayward nature getting the better of you.
You keep a special broom for the ones slung, gaudy with dew
between your sculptured shrubs.
Four, killing things gives you a fix.
So you tear out the web one wild grab of your hand,
and watch the small body plop down.
When it's scuttles away, one step,
one foot grinding it to pulp and you smile.
Something in your brain gives a little, eases up.
Sometimes you speak to the body, flattened
to a smear on the floor.
Little bastard, you sneer.
And the thing in your brain hums a sweet song,
or goddamn black fucker, as you grind your teeth and grin."
Yes, I didn't know I felt that way about spiders,
so I really think it must have been the war.
Maybe to lighten the air a little bit
after that, this is one of those poems
that you say when you write it, where did that come from?
One of those poems that just falls out of nowhere in a sort
of zany way.
And actually I think it's the sort of child in the poet that
brings these poems up sometimes, and I wish I had more of that.
I think that poets need to have their child self present,
and mine tends to get subsumed by my earnestness
and seriousness from time to time,
but it happened to come out here.
"Word Bank."
"Where do all the words go when they leave our mouths?
Rise through crowds of nouns and verbs,
jostle and shove and elbow small prepositions out of the way.
Then float for a moment on an up current, before they disappear.
Sometimes driving under the freeway ramp,
I think I see the ones that got trapped hanging from concrete
like huge swarms of bees.
Bitter words that someone regrets.
All mixed up with sweet nothings,
and the gaudy overblown remnants of a politician's speech.
Fragments of greetings flap on sharp twigs of winter trees.
Each hi, and how are you doing?
Caught fast like a child's kite that no one can free.
Even the eves of my house have captured
the remains of the neighborhood calling in its cats.
Hey kitty, kitty.
Hey kitty, kitty, kitty.
These are the casualties, the ones
that didn't make it to the rest who went, but where is that.
Just another bank I suppose, like a blood bank or a sperm
bank where teapot, linoleum, glacier and hysteria wait
patiently in alphabetized drawers.
Along with, shut up, break a leg and so sorry.
Oh, so sorry."
[APPLAUSE]
Alison mentioned the Ballot Measure 9
that we were fighting in Oregon recently,
and this next poem very indirectly
has a connection to that.
It's a poem that I wrote.
I think it came out of teaching a class that I've
been doing for a couple of years,
a writing class called Landscape and Memory,
which is where people use places to get
into writing personal memories in poetry or in prose.
And of course, that class has made
me think a lot about nature writing.
Writing about the natural world.
And this past summer, I taught the class again.
And really got a different perspective on it,
after I talked with a friend of mine who's
an African-American writer, who had written
an article about why are there so few Black people
in the environmental movement?
And in that article, she wrote a lot
about her own personal experience of wilderness.
And said that, she was reading a lot of these books that
are coming out now, about the writer's relationship
to wilderness and nature.
And she said, it struck her that for those people,
it was often a very nurturing environment.
A place of going to find a spiritual kind of healing.
And she said, me, my racial memories
are of lynchings and of being hunted by dogs in the wild.
And it's not a safe place, and it's
a place that's very frightening for me to be.
And she said, that doesn't mean that it
can be something else for you, but I
think it's good that people understand that that's
a cultural experience.
And there are cultural differences about it,
just like there are about everything else.
And that really made me think a lot about this whole question
of writing about nature, and what it means to some of us
and how it means something very different to others.
And it also made me think about my own relationship
to the natural world, and that word natural.
In the Oregon Ballot Measure, the proposition
was to change the Oregon Constitution to declare
that homosexuals are wrong, abnormal, unnatural and
perverse.
That was the wording that they wanted
to write into our Constitution.
And the word unnatural just really rang a bell with me.
I grew up in the 50s, when that was an attitude that
was very prevalent, although it was never spoken out
loud the way it has been in Oregon for the last six months.
And I realized that one of the struggles that young gay people
have growing up, is the struggle to actually assert the feeling
that they are natural.
That we are part of the natural world, as indeed are humans are
and that, that is a struggle.
And so this poem in a way, addresses that struggle
to maintain the sort of natural connection
with the outdoors and the natural world.
That I felt as a child, and then had
to struggle to maintain as I questioned
my own place in the natural order of things,
because that was the message that I
was getting from outside.
Also, it's written about a character
named The Dyke With No Name.
She is a character who came to me when
I wrote History and Geography, and told
some stories about growing up.
She bears something of a resemblance to me,
but she seemed to have her own voice
and she comes back from time to time to talk about things.
So in this instance, she came back to talk about landscape.
And like me, she starts in England
and she spent some time in Spain and in Italy.
And the last section of the poem is in Oregon,
on the banks of the great Columbia River.
It's in six parts.
"The Dyke With No Name Thinks about Landscape."
"One, at first, it wasn't landscape at all.
Where you live is just where you live.
A place to walk about in, drive your car
through on the way to somewhere.
Notice on a pretty day, when clouds [are puffs],
and grasses blowing just so.
From a horse's back, tracking the skyline, gray sea
became gray sky.
And chalky paths down the escarpment
gashed the smooth flank of the downs.
Leaning over to unhook the chain of a five bar gate,
she knew just how fast to sidle the horse
through before the metal gate swung back
with a clang and the horse twitched an ear.
Too familiar with the sound to make a fuss.
The windmills, Jack and Jill spread their sails
and grew as organic as gorse bushes or hares
on the barren plow, but their spread sails remained unmoved
by the great wind, which stirred up
a great wave in the grasses from Firle to Beachy Head.
Up there on her horse, she too grew organic as winter wheat.
Never naming the villages far below--
Poynings, Ditchling, Fulking, Steyning.
Distant clusters of roofs that revealed to her, as if
through a telescope, a particular lychgate,
a brick well, a post office serving tea.
While the winding Underhill Lane, glimpsed here and there
between copses whispered, shepherd and dog, wheat sheaf.
Royal oak, the eight bells.
Two, when she left, it became landscape.
A beloved green painting hauled around in her mind.
While the next one, ocher and sage unfolded.
Smelling of Mediterranean pine in the afternoon.
And the one after that, sepia and umber threw open its chest
and sang.
In these landscapes too, she wanted to grow organic.
Spreading her limbs to the sky, on that almost flat rock that
jutted from the river and held her between two swirling
streams.
Pinpoints of spray pricked her skin,
dried and dried between the divided waters.
While the river too, turbulence, rocks, moss, trout
and human body pried open the hot thighs of the desert,
with the persuasive pressure of wetness.
Was it then that it started?
Then she began to feel the eyes watching.
In each landscape, people grew from the shadows.
In each landscape, people belonged.
But here on her rock, head in the V of the parted waters,
the Dyke With No Name sees herself
as if with eyes watching from the hill above,
sees the desert intersected by a river.
Sees ponderous rocks, shaggy falls, the cruising hawk.
And herself, a human figure growing from shadows.
Herself in the frame on the rock, not belonging.
Three, the trouble is not nature,
but the people who tell you, there's always one of each.
Starting with Noah, and his couple-filled floating zoo.
Pistils and stamens, winged seeds from trees.
Insects were waving their various appendages.
She remembers her smudgy drawings from biology.
She knows what they left out and why.
The trouble with pastoral scenes is the lovers.
The hand in hand, one of each lover and his lass.
She knows it's more than looking wrong in the picture,
but does she know it's a matter of life and death?
Four, whose life?
Whose death?
All she wanted was to move again like the winter wheat.
To live in her skin touching the Earth's skin.
To feel spray and rock, and the finger of the sun.
Once a long time ago, she made love on a hilltop,
under copper beech trees.
Leaves turned to [AUDIO OUT] underneath her,
as she breathed the sky through her lover's hair.
And somewhere close by, a pony snickered, a friendly snicker,
an encouragement.
She still remembers what it felt like to lie in those arms.
Some of them beech roots, others human and female.
Trusting the pony like a brother.
The sky looking down the same way she looked up.
That was before the two hikers were shot.
The two women stalked for days, by the man
who killed one and left the other for dead.
One each for life and death, as it turned out.
Five, there is nothing organic about cars.
They skim across surfaces, separated from the landscape
by hard, black tarmac.
No danger of putting down roots.
Even when a car disintegrates in the ground,
blackberries filling the bent frame of its windshield,
[AUDIO OUT] sinking into the Earth,
to blue up some passing hydrangea.
Even then, its chrome and oil, and plastic seats
spurn the comfort of ordinary rot.
The Dyke With No Name kept moving.
Her rubber tires grabbing the blacktop
with a squeal, as she pushed sideways through bends,
kept everything skidding.
Tall haystacks with poles poking out
the top, dashed by her window.
She noted their shape, their resemblance
to some señorita's hair held up by a protruding pin.
She watched the show through glass,
as if she had put in her penny on the pier.
Watched herself from the hillside
above, speeding through picture after picture.
Silk headscarf flying, arm on the door tanned.
Hands turning the small leather wheel.
Sometimes when her head raged with pain,
she parked the car in a field and slept.
All doors locked, all windows up,
while the grasses tickled the hot skin of her tires.
Six, now she is lying on a blanket.
The sand below molded to the shape of her body.
Sudden swells slap the shore beyond her feet,
a barge has passed by.
Trudging down river with its load,
like a good-natured shire horse.
It's throbbing lost now, behind the breaking
of that great wave which seems to rise from the deeps.
The turbulence is quick.
A lashing of the sand, followed by September's lazy calm.
As the river moves unseen again, cows from another world low
on the far shore.
And the seagull's body, a fragile handful
dangles gently between its two tremendous wings.
The trouble is not nature, she thinks,
but the people who say I'm not part of it.
They're trying to paint me out of the landscape,
says the [INAUDIBLE] [AUDIO OUT]..
But her thighs in hot sand remember a horse's warm back,
as the wind makes a great wave from Oregon to Beachy Head."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you for your encouragement about Ballot Measure 9.
The good news about that is that, we made great coalitions.
The whole leadership of the State of Oregon
came out against it.
And from the governor through all the unions,
and most of the churches, the Catholics,
the Jewish synagogues, and so we have wonderful coalitions
in place.
The bad news is, they've already announced
they're going to do it again in two years.
So we actually have to keep fighting it,
and we spent $2 million on this one.
And I believe that Arizona is in line for these same [AUDIO OUT]
and try their measure here.
And I actually personally believe
that this is going to happen all over the country
in the next few years, so be prepared,
but good things have come out of it too.
Alison mentioned that I organize a writing workshop
for women, Flight of the Mind.
And I did leave a flyer on the table outside the auditorium.
So if anybody is interested in getting on the mailing list,
there's an address on that flyer.
If you could just copy it down, you're
welcome to drop your name and address to that address,
and you can get the flyer for next summer.
We have a great program with Grace Paley coming and Ursula
Le Guin, and a lot of really interesting wonderful writers.
This poem kind of was inspired at that workshop.
It's held on a wonderful wild river
called the McKenzie River, Oregon, at a Dominican retreat
center.
And it has this huge terrace that
looks right out over a very tight bend in the river,
so there is a tremendously loud sound of water there.
And I was sitting out on that deck
one day with my friend Teresa Clark,
who is a singer and composer.
And she said to me, listen to the sound of the water.
It's not just one sound.
And we sat there for probably half an hour,
trying to identify all the different sounds we
could hear within that sound of rushing water.
And what happened was, she really
gave me a lesson in how to use my ears.
And a couple of weeks after that, I
found myself at the Oregon Coast.
Sitting on the beach, on a sand dune
and listening to the loud sound of the surf there.
And I remembered this conversation,
and I really thought of listening hard
to the sound of the ocean.
So this is the poem that I wrote actually,
sitting there on the beach.
And it's for Teresa Clark.
"Layers of Sound."
"For example, this surf, worrying
the edge of the continent where I lie against a sand dune.
The surf that you might think just rolls in.
Making the sound surf makes when it unravels on a Pacific beach,
but this is not one whole sound.
Except in the way multicolored striations
press together, to form one whole rock.
Except in the way that days and nights, so unalike
become weeks, months, even whole years with their own numbers.
The surf breaks not with a single note,
but in a song for many voices.
At the very top, there is rustling like the grasses
blowing on my sand dune.
Or like piles of crisp leaves, whispering as squirrels
rummaged through their crinkled dark.
Below, something smooth rushes by [AUDIO OUT] strangely,
like the sound of wheat in a hot wind.
But if dry stalks and surf make the same sound,
what becomes of wet and dry?
What is the whole?
Where are the parts, and why is this
rushing so constant, so even?
There are after all, many separate waves.
Each one glances at the shore, curls
and falls before its sidles up the glassy sand.
And backs off, leaving its fingerprint,
a pattern of tiny ridges like mountain ranges under my soles.
But though the rushing is constant in the center, when
I listen very hard, the rhythm of waves drums, on and on.
Each one a bulge of sound, barely perceptible
among the rustles and the hiss.
Underneath it all, the baseline like bedrock rumbles.
At the very bottom of what I can hear,
but how many layers fall outside my human capacities?
How much more does the surf say to the whale?
My ears are tired, unaccustomed to paying attention.
My heart is tired, unused to loving in detail.
Easier to hear the ocean than the wave, says the surf.
Easier to love the world than this grain
of sand, this fragile grass."
I'm going to read the title poem from History and Geography.
If I can find it.
This is a poem that came out of the experience of finding
myself in a life partnership, with a woman from a very
Jewish family, which is a background fairly enormously
different than my own.
I come from a middle class British family,
where [AUDIO OUT].
It was an attempt to write about that.
"History and Geography."
"One, your finger skims the map, dense
with villages, towns, cities of Russia and Eastern Europe.
You lean towards the blond head of your brother-in-law,
as you search through Bessarabia.
And your father hunches over the littered dinner table,
passing on pieces of your mother's history.
Your mother was the family historian.
You all ask questions, to which mostly there are answers
or at least speculations.
Not like my relatives I think, who say, what's the use?
And the past is the past.
Two, you have your father's zany laugh.
It comes down to you from before the events
which flung him from camp to flight, to New World.
His family decimated.
That laugh rings back through Germany and Austria,
pogroms and Seders, tracking the history that is your home
as no country can ever be.
Is this why my relatives discard their history?
Rooted in land so long, they have no need of a people.
My parents, living abroad much of their lives,
were sometimes called expatriate.
Away from the fatherland, but still and always
children of that father.
For you changing countries without choice
is part of your history.
Surely there is no such thing as an expatriate Jew,
except perhaps a Jew outside history.
A Jew with no questions, wanting no answers.
Three, the discarded map lies beside pies and kugel,
as the questions and answers go on.
Leftovers become history, this table becomes geography.
This room, a small square not marked
on the map, where countries each have their own color.
Where countries each have their own, but what of this history?
This personal geography, a patchwork
of dining tables, old documents, names
culled from telephone directories in strange cities.
Whose stories are missing even from this family history?
Where one unmarried aunt in Chicago,
hides behind a post office box.
[AUDIO OUT] chosen a life that does not fit
and written herself out, because she
fears it will happen anyway?
Who will become the new expatriates?
Banished from the ranks of the banished.
Will your name be there at some future table, when they ask,
who were they, those who went before?
And will mine?
We choose not to write ourselves out,
but to record our presence here tonight.
My blond head leaning towards yours.
Our curious intersection on a map
that is larger even than the one your people
trace, with such stubborn, loving care."
I've written a lot of poems about my mother's death.
And I'm going to [AUDIO OUT] that also comes out--
this isn't really a poem about my mother's death.
It's a poem about my mother having died.
The experience that comes later, where you realize that that's
not something you deal with in a month or two months,
but you actually incorporate into your being
and take with you for the rest of your life.
And it also is a poem that comes out
of my experience of swimming.
I try to go swimming pretty regularly
at the YWCA in Portland, and there's
something about swimming that's very meditative to me
and very rhythmic.
And this poem definitely came out of the swimming experience.
And these two people who are described in the poem,
are real people I bump into all the time at the Y,
but I have never spoken to them.
"Mother and Daughter at the Y."
"They're always there together, the younger one about my age.
I pretend not to look sideways in front of the long mirror
where we blow dry.
Eastern European genes I guess, and their brown eyes
dance around as they pat and poke at each other's hair.
They look alike, even underwater.
Identical black swimsuits, against the blue tile
at the shallow end.
Last week when I came down lap 32,
I could see through misted goggles
their four feet moving slow motion.
And I knew they were talking as usual,
hands completing words in fast motion
through the light chemical air.
At the turn, my head bobbed out and I
carried a snatch of laughter away up the straight.
Thinking, what would it be like to have a mother as a friend?
Towards the end of 34, I looked left.
They were still there.
This time one pair of the younger pair
was planted feet apart, in the stance of peasant legs
that know their ground and work it.
The mother floated, arms limp, elbows sinking and abandoned.
Her daughter's hand, firm under the small of her back.
I bobbed and turned, what would it be like?
Laps 36 and 38, I look straight ahead at the approaching wall,
feeling my spine stretched thin, my chest open.
Breathe, pull, kick, I think until thought merges
with water.
And I see again, the back view of that woman
I once followed breathless through a crowd,
until she turned, and I remembered my mother is dead.
Breathe, pull, kick, I no longer think
as I carry her absence up the lane,
waterlogged yet slicing still through the pool's soft mass.
At 40, daughter's by the wall.
The mother swims a few fast strokes, arms sprawling,
head high out of the water.
The daughter laughs, and reaches out her hands."
Well, I've just a couple more poems here.
This is called "For a Friend Whose Lover Has Left."
"They say memory resides in the head,
but I say it lives in the tips of fingers.
The insides of thighs and forearms.
Yes, the concave belly remembers what it once embraced sleeping.
Your limbs remember skin.
In sleep, you reach for someone whose name you have almost
forgotten.
It is not your brain that recalls
the hollow above her collarbone, and the shoulder
blade like a wing.
You say the brain cells die with age.
You will forget the number you dialed over and over,
but one day your finger will remember as mine once did.
Leaping deftly from the six, to the four, to the one.
You will not pay attention to the voice that says, hello,
because memories lurk among whorls
and scrolls of fingerprints.
Sorry, you'll say, and hang up, but still your palm
will hold the exact curve of her cheek."
Yeah, I've got two more poems for you.
This is called "Why Young Girls Like to Ride Bareback."
I've been getting a lot of horse poems lately.
I was one of those horse crazy kids, actually a teenager too,
but it's difficult. I've been getting a lot of animal poems,
and it's sort of difficult to be taken seriously
when you are a poet who writes about animals.
So I've been reading Mary Oliver a lot,
because she does that and people seem
to take her fairly seriously, but it's not always easy.
This is not a very serious poem however.
"Why Young Girls Like to Ride Bareback."
"You grasp a clump of mane in your left hand.
Spring up and fall across her back,
then pulling on the wiry black hair, which
cuts into your palm and fourth finger,
haul yourself up till your right leg swings
across the plump cheeks of her hindquarters.
Now you hold her, warm and alive between your thighs.
In summer, wearing shorts, you feel
the dander of her coat, glossy and dusty
at the same [AUDIO OUT].
Greasing up the insides of your calves.
And as she walks, each of your knees in turn
feels the muscle bulge out behind the shoulder blade.
Trotting's a matter of balance.
You bounce around, unable to enter her motion as you will,
when the trot breaks and she finally
waltzes from two to three time.
Nothing to be done at the trot, but grab again
that mane that feels, though you don't yet know it,
like pubic hair.
And straddle her jolting spine with your seat bones.
Knowing that when the canter comes,
you will suddenly merge, you and that great,
that powerful friend.
She, bulging up behind, rocking across the fulcrum,
exploding forward onto the leading leg and you
digging your seat down into the sway of her back.
Your whole body singing, we are one, we are one, we are one."
I want to end with a poem that I wrote
at a wonderful place called Cottages at Hedgebrook, which
is a woman writer's retreat up on Whidbey Island,
north of Seattle, where I was in 1988.
And I got to be in a beautiful cottage that was brand new,
and had just been built, made out of white oak.
And somebody brought my lunch in a basket,
and it was quite heavenly, the whole thing.
And I got this poem in a way that I've never
been given a poem before.
It's one of those things that probably
doesn't happen, probably never happens more than once to me.
But I'd been there for three or four weeks,
and I was very mellow and I was out in the woods.
And I woke up one morning with this poem in my head,
and I just walked to the keyboard and put it in.
And I really only had to make a few adjustments,
and tinker around with a few words, but it was there.
And I think that the reason that happened or one
of the reasons that happened was,
what I was working on while I was up there,
was trying to put the manuscript of this book together, History
and Geography.
So I had all my poems all over the floor,
and I was trying to think, what are the themes?
In what order should they go?
And I had come to understand that one
of the major themes in my work for this book,
had been the whole question of leaving people, leaving
places, leaving things behind.
And what I came to understand was
that, this poem resolved that issue for me
and it belonged at the end of the book.
And part of understanding that, came
from talking to the craftsman.
The man who had built my cottage, who was still there
and building another one.
And he told me that the reason I was
hearing sounds in my cottage at night,
was because they were using this wood that had not been steamed
dried, so basically the wood was still alive and was still
part of the forest.
It was still being a tree, while it
was being my cottage and that message [AUDIO OUT] important.
And I put together that you don't leave things behind,
that you take them with you.
The poem is called "Listen."
"If you walk north from the cottage into deep woods,
and happen to look up at just the right moment,
and if when you look up there, your heart
is full of what you do not yet know, then
perhaps you may see the owl crouched like a cat
in the fork of the tallest fir.
If you stand at the west window, there
may be a blue heron fishing beside the bench at the pond.
If you decide to learn patience today and wait with her,
motionless, for the careless fish,
soon you will find your eyes piercing weed,
as one shadowy carp slides below.
And everything, but it's gliding flesh, falls away.
The cedar tree close to the south window is never still.
She shakes from the tips of her fronds.
She drapes branches across the view,
but it is her trunk that has reassured me morning
after morning, its huge weight soaring.
It's two perfect female fissures moist again,
with the secretions of the dew.
If you lie at night by the east windows,
where the roof slopes down, and if your heart is
full of what you might one day know,
you will hear the oak beams sing.
For seven years, the sap will move,
as the wood lovingly shaped to its new task
sings of the forest it left behind.
If you listen, you will learn there
is no such thing as leaving."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]