Thank you Lois Shelton and your great Poetry
Center for bringing me here.
A poet I've always admired, Robert Frost,
once gave some advice to anybody fool
enough to stand up in public and say, hey,
look at me I'm a poet.
Frost said, you want to start by reading something funny so
that the people won't think that you take yourself
too seriously, but I'm not going to do that tonight.
I have never had this problem somehow,
but my problem is usually the opposite.
I have trouble persuading anybody that I'm serious.
And I guess some of the confusion in my own head
comes from the fact that I really
don't know the difference between so-called light verse
and serious poetry.
I've always liked the kind of poetry
in which seriousness and levity are
kind of all mixed up together.
Poems like Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress":
had we but world enough and time.
That funny poem, which is also so moving and touching.
And in humor, my touchstone for humor
has always been that scene at the start of Charles Chaplin's
classic film Limelight, which if you
happen to recall it shows Charlie Chaplin as a broken
down vaudeville hoofer living in a ratty
boarding house in London.
And the opening scene shows Claire Bloom
playing a young actress who in despair
because she can't get parts on stage
has decided to end it all.
And she's sniffing the gas from the gas jet
trying to take her own life.
Chaplin comes home drunk, but the camera
shows him coming in the front door.
And the first thing he does he sniffs
and he smells the gas from Claire Bloom's suicide attempt.
And he looks at his shoe to see if he stepped on something.
And that to me is a great moment in movies.
You don't know whether to laugh or cry.
The fact of Chaplin's looking for dog dirt at the same moment
that a life is at stake leaves you in a curious suspense.
It is this kind of I don't know what to call it, is it humor?
Whatever it is I like it.
And I think that is part of my problem.
Well, rather than run on about this problem in the abstract,
I'd like to read you a few poems, some early, some late.
This is an early one that may illustrate
what I'm talking about.
It's called "First Confession."
And it is a memory of a Roman Catholic boyhood in Dover, New
Jersey, when at the belated age of 12
I made my first holy communion and first confession.
In those days, confessing your sins to the priest
was a matter of squatting in a dark confession booth
and telling this terrifying presence
all these dirty little secrets that you had saved up
all your life.
And I knew that in the darkness sitting
there to listen to my dirty little secrets
was Father Mahoney, the most terrifying looking
priest I had ever seen.
Now Father Mahoney had had some kind of liver trouble
so that all his hair had fallen out,
leaving his bald head all sort of pock marked and cratered
like the surface of the moon.
And when you knelt down in the dark,
in the confession box to spill your sins,
you saw Father Mahoney's bald pocked head leaning down
to hear your confession.
It was as if the moon or some planet
was bending down to listen to you.
Oh, it was just an overwhelming thing.
Well, all that is in the poem, so here it is.
First confession.
It's got the kid me creeping timidly
down the aisle of the church toward the confession box.
Blood thudded in my ears.
I scuffed, steps stubborn, toward the telltale booth
beyond whose curtained portal coughed
the robed repositor of truth.
Oh, I should just bust in a moment
here and explain that the robed repositor of truth--
that this is just a highfalutin way of saying the priest.
This is an old poem, very early poem.
I think if I were writing it today,
I wouldn't say the robed repositor of truth.
I would figure out a way to say the priest.
But I find as maybe you poets have
found that when a poem gets past a certain age,
it's hard to go back and fix it up
without lousing up what little bit of good may still be in it.
So anyway, the robed repositor of truth and he
opens the slat of his confession box.
The slat shot back, the universe bowed down his cratered dome
to hear enumerated my each curse.
The sip snatched from my old man's beer, my sloth, pride,
envy, lechery, the dime held back
from Peter's pants with which I bribed my girl
to pee that I might spy her instruments.
Now comes the judgment.
Hovering scale pans, when I've done,
settle their balance slow as silt,
while in the restless dark I burned bright
as a brimstone in my guilt, until as one feeds birds,
he told: seven Our Fathers and one Hail, which
I, to double scrub my soul, intoned twice at the altar rail
where Sunday in seraphic light I knelt as full of grace as most
and stuck my tongue out at the priest, a fresh roost
for the Holy Ghost.