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Thank you Lois Shelton
and your great Poetry

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Center for bringing me here.

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A poet I've always
admired, Robert Frost,

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once gave some advice
to anybody fool

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enough to stand up in
public and say, hey,

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look at me I'm a poet.

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Frost said, you want to start
by reading something funny so

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that the people won't think
that you take yourself

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too seriously, but I'm not
going to do that tonight.

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I have never had
this problem somehow,

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but my problem is
usually the opposite.

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I have trouble persuading
anybody that I'm serious.

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And I guess some of the
confusion in my own head

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comes from the
fact that I really

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don't know the difference
between so-called light verse

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and serious poetry.

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I've always liked
the kind of poetry

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in which seriousness
and levity are

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kind of all mixed up together.

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Poems like Andrew Marvell's
"To His Coy Mistress":

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had we but world
enough and time.

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That funny poem, which is
also so moving and touching.

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And in humor, my
touchstone for humor

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has always been that scene at
the start of Charles Chaplin's

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classic film
Limelight, which if you

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happen to recall it shows
Charlie Chaplin as a broken

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down vaudeville hoofer
living in a ratty

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boarding house in London.

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And the opening scene
shows Claire Bloom

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playing a young
actress who in despair

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because she can't
get parts on stage

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has decided to end it all.

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And she's sniffing the
gas from the gas jet

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trying to take her own life.

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Chaplin comes home
drunk, but the camera

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shows him coming
in the front door.

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And the first thing
he does he sniffs

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and he smells the gas from
Claire Bloom's suicide attempt.

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And he looks at his shoe to
see if he stepped on something.

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And that to me is a
great moment in movies.

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You don't know whether
to laugh or cry.

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The fact of Chaplin's looking
for dog dirt at the same moment

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that a life is at stake leaves
you in a curious suspense.

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It is this kind of I don't know
what to call it, is it humor?

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Whatever it is I like it.

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And I think that is
part of my problem.

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Well, rather than run on about
this problem in the abstract,

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I'd like to read you a few
poems, some early, some late.

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This is an early one
that may illustrate

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what I'm talking about.

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It's called "First Confession."

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And it is a memory of a Roman
Catholic boyhood in Dover, New

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Jersey, when at the
belated age of 12

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I made my first holy communion
and first confession.

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In those days, confessing
your sins to the priest

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was a matter of squatting
in a dark confession booth

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and telling this
terrifying presence

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all these dirty little
secrets that you had saved up

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all your life.

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And I knew that in
the darkness sitting

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there to listen to my
dirty little secrets

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was Father Mahoney, the
most terrifying looking

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priest I had ever seen.

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Now Father Mahoney had had
some kind of liver trouble

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so that all his
hair had fallen out,

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leaving his bald head all sort
of pock marked and cratered

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like the surface of the moon.

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And when you knelt
down in the dark,

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in the confession box
to spill your sins,

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you saw Father Mahoney's
bald pocked head leaning down

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to hear your confession.

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It was as if the
moon or some planet

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was bending down
to listen to you.

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Oh, it was just an
overwhelming thing.

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Well, all that is in
the poem, so here it is.

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First confession.

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It's got the kid
me creeping timidly

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down the aisle of the church
toward the confession box.

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Blood thudded in my ears.

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I scuffed, steps stubborn,
toward the telltale booth

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beyond whose curtained
portal coughed

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the robed repositor of truth.

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Oh, I should just
bust in a moment

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here and explain that the
robed repositor of truth--

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that this is just a highfalutin
way of saying the priest.

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This is an old poem,
very early poem.

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I think if I were
writing it today,

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I wouldn't say the robed
repositor of truth.

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I would figure out a
way to say the priest.

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But I find as maybe
you poets have

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found that when a poem
gets past a certain age,

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it's hard to go
back and fix it up

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without lousing up what little
bit of good may still be in it.

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So anyway, the robed
repositor of truth and he

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opens the slat of
his confession box.

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The slat shot back, the universe
bowed down his cratered dome

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to hear enumerated
my each curse.

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The sip snatched from my old
man's beer, my sloth, pride,

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envy, lechery,
the dime held back

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from Peter's pants with
which I bribed my girl

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to pee that I might
spy her instruments.

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Now comes the judgment.

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Hovering scale pans,
when I've done,

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settle their balance
slow as silt,

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while in the restless
dark I burned bright

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as a brimstone in my guilt,
until as one feeds birds,

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he told: seven Our Fathers
and one Hail, which

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I, to double scrub my soul,
intoned twice at the altar rail

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where Sunday in seraphic light
I knelt as full of grace as most

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and stuck my tongue out at
the priest, a fresh roost

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for the Holy Ghost.

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