You saw this thing?
Yeah, I did.
You should be so close.
It's a Chairman pleasing things, you know.
Now that you got it where you want it, I'll mute it.
Yeah.
I apologize for your inconvenience tonight.
Somewhere along the way, there was a failure to communicate,
and I think it was probably me.
And the auditorium was double-scheduled.
Robert Houston said he's been on campus for 17 years.
It's the first time he's ever been
on this part of the campus, so I think
it was good to get him over here anyway.
I hope you'll stay afterwards and have some punch and cookies
and talk to David Kirby.
I'd like to announce some upcoming meetings.
Yes Livermore?
What?
Why not move down a little closer?
Next Wednesday night.
That's what happens when we turned up.
I'll go, yeah.
I'm going on.
I'll be out louder.
Next Wednesday night we have our first student reading
of the semester in the Modern Languages Auditorium.
And tomorrow night, in the Modern Languages Auditorium,
the poet and scholar Houston Baker
will be reading from his poetry.
He's the director of the Black Studies
at the University of Pennsylvania.
He'll also will be lecturing Friday afternoon at 3 o'clock
in Modern Languages Building.
And upcoming is a two-day festival
of poets of the Southwest, that's November 1 and 2.
And I've put a lot of fliers about this out on the table.
Maybe to convince myself that I'm still
alive because they do sound a little bit like obituaries,
don't they?
But that's not the only mixed up feeling
I'm having this evening.
I would say that I'm at a loss for words
but that will not be the case as you will see.
I've been in Arizona for a week now,
thanks to Alan Woodman at NAU and Karla Elling
at ASU and Lois Shelton here, and thanks to the father
of us all, the National Endowment
for the Arts, that that's making this trip possible,
and tonight's my last night.
This is my last reading.
Many things are luring me home.
The prospect of a biweekly paycheck is one.
I'd stay forever if I could get them to send it out here,
but I better go back.
But what could be better than meeting people like Steve
and Bob Houston and Jane and Jon Anderson and Dick and Peter,
it's like meeting movie stars in a sense
and that you encounter someone for years
through a certain medium and then you
see this person up-close and you say,
oh, you're a real human being.
It's a real treat.
I know you don't feel that way if they gave you a C on a test,
but I'm talking about me right now.
This is my time and I'm telling you
it's wonderful to meet these people.
But if I don't go back, how will I
be able to walk down to the end of my driveway
and get my copy of the Tallahassee Democrat
every morning?
Whence comes the following original work of vers libre.
This is a poem that came from a the newspaper,
the local Florida newspaper that I was reading.
So I ask you now to picture the professor of creative poetry
sitting there in his smoking jacket with his Ascot
and reading his Tallahassee Democrat
and sitting bolt upright when he realizes that he
has the subject of a poem.
What I was reading at the time was a little article
on the country of Paraguay that said that Paraguay
was the most landlocked country in the world, which struck me
as a metaphor for something.
But what?
Well, the only way to find out what I thought
would be to go to the library and get out all the books
on Paraguay, which I did.
There were two of them at the time I wrote the poem.
There may be a third now but at that time, there were only two.
And I began to read and take notes much like someone
writing an essay or a term paper and found out
some absolutely fascinating things
about the country which has an official language, Spanish,
and an unofficial language, Guarani,
the Indian language, which is the language that everyone
uses.
They use the unofficial more than the official.
If you saw that movie, The Mission,
with Jeremy Irons and Robert de Niro, the Indians,
they were the Guarani Indians and speaking that language.
I found out also that they have an unusual theology.
There's a God named Tupang who is in everything.
I mean, he's in everything.
The Judeo-Christian God is sort of--
he's in every building and he's in the air,
and he's all around us.
But Tupang is in this microphone, in this poem,
it's in your shoe soles.
Literally his spirit is infused everywhere.
And as I began to read and take notes on this complicated
and often conflicted country, I realized
that what I was working--
by the way, the landlocked country business
had long since disappeared.
That was that was no longer of any interest or use to me.
I found out that I was putting together a love poem,
and so the poem is called "I Think I'm Going
To Call My Wife Paraguay."
I think I'm going to call my wife Paraguay for she is truly
bilingual, even though she speaks
no Guarani and, except for Cucaracha and Taco,
hardly any Spanish at all.
She has two zones though, one a forest luxuriant with orchids
and the smell of fruit trees where the Indians worship
the pure and formless Tupang, who shines in the lightning
and roars and the thunder.
And another zone, a dry place, a flat plane
with the sole of a mountain, motionless and hard as a rock.
During the day, the sun blazes on the red dust of Paraguay
as dark-eyed straight-backed women walk home
from the river with bundles of laundry on their head,
hoping to avoid trouble, for the Paraguayans are always
fighting, young conscripts lolling in faded cotton
uniforms, have no idea whether they
will be summoned next to overthrow the government
or defend it.
My wife, Paraguay, and I ourselves
had to fight the War of the Triple Alliance.
Although in our case, it wasn't Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina,
but Harry, Edward, and Morris, her former boyfriends.
I won.
War does not silence Paraguay or dismay her
in any way for still her people shout on the football fields
and whisper declarations of love on the darkened patios
of the old colonial houses, just as my wife, Paraguay, says
that she loves me as the parakeet and toucan fly over
and the perfume of the lime and orange tree blow
through the windows of our big house, which
I call South America because it contains Paraguay and is shaped
like a sweet potato.
I'm trying to do something in my family life
by watching my children grow up and identify the precise moment
when children stop having pure moods.
If you can remember, when you were about eight or nine,
someone would hand you an ice cream cone
and you'd be transfixed with ecstasy.
You'd look like that Bernini statue of Saint Teresa
as she becomes, becomes Saint Teresa.
Whereas if you take a child just a few years older
and say look, look, keys, car keys, car keys,
the child will look at you, like, what's the catch?
Who's going to pay for the gas?
Because they begin to become like us.
Their moods begin to penetrate and become
bittersweet and sweet and sour and they get all mixed up.
So I was looking for a metaphor for this mixture of moods
and I settled upon overcast skies
because that's the best condition for driving, when
it looks as though it's going to rain
but it's not yet wet because there's no glare.
You can drive without skidding off the road,
but it's not bright either.
So let me tell you about a couple of things in the poem.
I like to give you sometimes a little rough chronometer
of the three or four things they're going to show up.
So as they do show up, you can check them off
and you can feel yourself approaching the end
of the poem with relief.
There's a French phrase, le bonheur humain,
which means human happiness.
The foreign language is I guess a blessing for the poet
and a curse for the readers because sometimes something
will look corny or stupid in English
and you always just throw it into another language
if you know it.
But then the poor reader's got to deal with that.
So I thought I would explain that a little earlier.
There's a story in here too, a little anecdote
that someone told me recently.
I was in Hawaii in a deserted valley
with some straight, very verdant cliff walls going up,
and it was a scar--
well there were two scars coming down.
And I asked one of the few persons who
lived in this valley where the scars came from
and he said, well, one fellow was driving a road grader
and he got a little bit too close to the edge.
And the other one involves the story
that I'm going to tell you, which
involves a political conflict between some locals,
some Hawaiian locals who were more politically
conservative than the people that they had a conflict with.
And then also there's a little quote
from Darwin, a quote from the Origin of Species.
And let me read that to you so you'll be ready for it
when it comes.
Darwin said, "I am almost convinced,
quite contrary to the opinion I started with,
that species are not, it is like confessing a murder,
immutable."
So you see he had this very simple short sentence
about the light bulb coming on.
But in it he inserted all these guilty parenthetical
expressions.
The poem is called "For Overcast Skies."
It is when sunny too hot if dry and when
rainy to cool but slippery, therefore
overcast skies constitute the best conditions pour le
bonheur humain.
But it takes one a while to realize these things.
When I was young, I wasn't fit for much
except going for pizza with the guys.
But I was good at that.
To paraphrase Voltaire, had I not existed,
guys going for pizza would have had to invent me.
Now I am wiser, happier, and also sadder though
just a little bit.
Indeed, the wisdom may consist in realizing
one can be happy and sad at the same time.
I talked to a guy who used to be a hippie.
He'd been camping in his van with other hirsute
types on the Big Island of Hawaii
when some locals, not eager to be bombed again by the Japanese
and outraged at the van's peace symbols,
pushed it into the Waipi'o Valley,
while the hippies, tripping on this really great acid
thought, Groovy, it looks like those dudes are destroying
our van.
He was sad he'd lost his means of transportation.
But happy that he has a good story to tell.
Besides, all this had taken place years ago.
Same thing when Darwin discovered
the principle of evolution.
A cloud of shame came between him and his happiness.
In the second draft of On the Origin of Species, 1844,
he wrote, "I am almost convinced, quite
contrary to the opinion I started with,
that species are not, it is like confessing a murder, immutable.
You monkey's uncle, you knew you were doing something wrong, you
and your adorable--"
OK, people always hate me when I say I was in Hawaii, and this
and that.
But I have in-laws there, so you see
there's a price to be exacted.
I talked to a lot of different people in the Arizona cities
I've been, and part of this grant involved
community service, which I thought
meant picking up trash by the side of the road
when they first offered it to me.
But it turned out no, that I would talk to some high school
students and separate them from their angel dust
and their switchblade knives and enlist them
in the cause of poetry and turn their lives right around.
So the verdict isn't in on that yet, but I did my darndest--
One poem that I tried to teach them really
quickly is a poem I call A Marriage, which means simply
that you get two things that don't have
a thing in the world in common and you put them together
and you make a poem out of that, which
also happens to be like some human marriages as well.
But I'm only expert in the poetic kind,
so this was the kind that I taught to these young punks
and punkettes.
And here's one.
It's called The Cows Are Going to Paris: A Pastoral.
What happened was I was on a train in England actually
and saw some cows lurching toward the train.
It was one of those small, small English tracks with the fields
virtually just inches away.
And the cows came up to look as cows will do.
And I think some more curious cows in the back
pushed and caused the others to lurch forward.
And for a split-second, I thought oh, my God, the cows
are going to get on the train and commit cow mayhem.
And so I began to write this poem called
The Cows Are Going to London, the cows are going to London.
And it kept being that one line.
So somehow I got them across the channel.
And it worked out better with them going to Paris.
Your chronometrical note here is that in the last stanza,
I'll be referring to a celebrated painting
by Watteau called "The Voyage to Cythera,"
which shows some comely young men and women about to leave
the Isle of Love.
They have to go back to the real world.
They have to leave the earthly paradise that's
depicted in the painting.
And they look very sad about it.
They're going to have to go back to the world of bills
and backaches and they're looking over their shoulders,
and they want to stay there.
The Cows Are Going to Paris.
When they boarded the train at Corbet and Fontainebleau,
the people were frightened and ran out
into the fields and meadows and chewed the grass in terror.
And now, the cows are going to shop at the galerie Lafayette,
stroll in the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume,
see plays produced and directed by cows.
A farce in the manner of Georges Feydeau,
for example, in which a certain Monsieur Bull wishes
to deceive his wife.
So he arranges to meet the wife of a friend
in a hotel of low repute.
The only one who can betray him is another Monsieur
who stutters whenever it rains.
And of course it rains, "ma-ma-ma-moo", he says,
"mama-mama-mama-moo".
The cows are delighted.
They have never thought of the rain
as having so much meaning until now.
And when the deceived Monsieur grabs a sword in order
to pierce the innards of his false friend,
the cows are absolutely enthralled, it having never
occurred to them that the slaughter of their species
could be occasioned by anything other than the desire
to eat or make money, that it could have rage as its cause,
a feeling of betrayal, the breaking of a heart.
Meanwhile, the people from the train
have made themselves comfortable under the trees.
The diet of the cows is nourishing and unrefined,
and somehow it seems natural to stand in small groups
for hours saying nothing.
Indeed when the cows return to the fields and meadows,
the people will not get back on board
and must be prodded before they enter the cars.
Having been to the city, the cows
understand, to them, the people are
like the nymphs and shepherds in the painting by Watteau,
who are made to leave the Isle of Forgetfulness
and so set out for the fallen world,
but slowly and not without a mournful backward glance.
Another little tip I've been giving to the high schoolers
is to simply retell stories that they've had in mind for years.
The family stories or the stories
that they dine out on or hog-face out on,
or pig-face out on, or whatever it is that they do.
And here's mine.
This is the story that I've been telling for years.
Although like almost everything else in these poems,
it's something that I stole from someone else.
I guess I told that to the high school kids too,
don't let that stop you.
But this is a story that--
this will be the creepy part of tonight's presentation here,
a couple of creepy poems coming up.
This is a story that man in Florence, Italy, told me,
FSU has a foreign study program in Florence.
And the director at that time had some people over,
some faculty over for dinner and began to tell.
It's absolutely horrifying story as the light went down
and the hills grew black and cold.
Somehow their hills grow blacker and colder than our hills,
or maybe it was the story itself.
What happened was that this man had been married
and had a child.
And he and his wife were absolutely desperate to get
away from the child.
They just wanted an evening out.
They were married, graduate students
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and they
were suffering that the pain that all of you
feel if you've ever been married and had a child and you
don't know people with just squadrons of teenage girls
that you can draw upon to use as babysitters because--
The problem is if you're 25 and you have a six-month-old child,
the people who are old enough to have teenage girls
are not going to be in your peer group,
so they just couldn't find anybody.
You'd think in a city that size they could, but they couldn't.
And so finally they resorted to the yellow pages
and found a church babysitting service.
Sounds good, doesn't it?
Well, hold on for a second.
The poem is called Your Famous Story.
The table has been cleared, and the guests
are sitting around the fire with glasses
of brandy and chartreuse as you begin
to tell your famous story, how you and your wife
were desperate to go somewhere, anywhere
after the birth of your first child
and finally found a service in the yellow pages, a church
group that would send a babysitter, a gentle woman,
a grandmotherly type who came highly recommended,
someone who had raised children of her own.
You went to a movie and a coffee house.
And when you got back, the sitter
was just as you had left her, calm and smiling,
assuring you that everything had been fine,
that your little girl was an angel.
When you left saying that she must not
have changed the baby's diapers or she would have seen
it was a boy.
The sitter looked at the wall and said in a voice
you had never heard before, that while the baby might
have been a boy when you left, he was certainly a girl now.
You dashed upstairs and tore off the baby's pajamas,
but of course he was fine.
And that evening you told your story for the first time
to the police, and then next morning, the church group.
They hid nothing, said the sitter
had a history of threatening children with knives.
But they were told all that was in the past,
and now the good liberal church women
were trying to rehabilitate her with lay counseling
and the offer of regular work.
There was a hearing, and you told your story again.
The babysitter went behind walls.
Your son grew up healthy and strong,
and now he dines out on the story you are telling us now,
the night coming down around your house
like a hand that closes around the heart, opens a little,
never lets go.
I'm still in love with that idea.
Sure.
You had this criminal past, we'll fix it.
Honest.
So use those yellow pages for the pizza services, audience,
and not the babysitting services.
Second creepy poem.
It's called After Midnight.
And I'm reading it because it gave Peter Wild a long distance
creeps.
He wrote me and said he said he had the chicken skin,
and so I figured I would try it and see
if I can unsettle him here.
From the heart of this house come
sounds, the soft bump of a receiver,
the almost noiseless swish of the cord against the wall.
Someone is hanging up the phone in the kitchen.
Yet you are asleep, your nightgown
bunched around your waist.
And we are alone or should be, and I am afraid, though
not for us.
I think it must be someone who is in great danger.
I think it must be someone made crazy by pain.
I think it must be someone who has been wandering
from yard to yard and is now in our kitchen
calling people in other cities, other countries,
other worlds, saying, "A child is missing,"
or "Everyone is dead in there," or "I don't love you anymore."
How about it Peter?
Still work.
OK.
All right, it's all I ask.
It's all I ask.
Another poem I did for this-- this
was a group of high schoolers in Scottsdale.
And what I did was read them some poems
and talk about some general principles.
And you can't give high school kids the creeps,
so I didn't even bother with the creepy poems there.
But I read them a couple of more comic pieces.
And then I asked for questions, which
is always a big mistake, because first guy puts his hand up.
And he says, what's it like to be a wretch and an outcast
and to have people look down on you
and think of you as a scum bum and--
so I'm always so cool-headed in these matters.
And I got defensive and angry and said, look, look--
I've got an 85 Toyota Corolla factory air, an AM radio.
I'm OK.
I have a house.
I take my family on vacations and--
But then I realized that my questioner was right,
that there is a kind of marginal status
that poets ought to have, and they ought to cling to it
and hang on to it and keep getting themselves
on the outside, keep positioning themselves on the outside
and looking in.
And I had this one poem I think that speaks to that issue.
And so I so I pulled it out, and read it to them.
The poem is called "Still the Only Investment Guide You'll
Ever Need."
And it begins with the idea--
this is outside of the poem but it leads into it--
begins with the idea that everybody loves a poet.
Whenever people find out there's a poet in their midst,
their hearts leap up and they're happy because--
I don't know why.
Maybe they feel he is a wretch and an outcast,
and they feel superior.
I think in my more weepy and romantic moments
that I tell myself it's because they see the poet as being
a lineal descendant of Homer and Milton
and all of these sort of shaggy ancestors there in our past.
So everyone I've ever met has always
been absolutely delighted to meet a poet except this one
person, who was somebody I was trying
to buy a house from in Tallahassee, which is small.
One's name, even one's photo, appears in the paper every once
in a while.
And so most people have been around Tallahassee,
for any period of time, have a little bit of an idea who I am.
So I think this guy was probably sizing me up and figuring,
well, he's a poet.
He can't be too bright.
I'll work him over.
So we began to negotiate.
And I actually think that I was getting
the better of this fellow, which of course, brought out
the worst in him.
The only time I was ever scorned for being a poet
was when I was trying to buy a house
and negotiations fell through and the seller got angry.
And he said, "You're a poet, aren't you?"
And I admitted I was, knowing something terrible
was coming next yet unable to deny my passion, my livelihood,
my identity no less.
But what he said was no worse than that I
should go back to my poems and leave the cold hard world
of business to men like himself, real men, practical types who
understand how things work.
You think poets don't understand how things work?
Mr, I know you backward and forward, that's for sure.
You're the kind of guy who thinks his wife is ugly
and his kids are dumb, and who sits next to me on the airplane
and says, "Is there any money in that?"
After I confessed my secret.
See, I never wanted you to know I
was a poet in the first place, even
though I'm proud of what I do.
I work hard, take chances, hell I'm up all night sometimes.
What's more I'm an American poet, got a lot of dark humor
in these poems, a lot of narrative
and more colloquialisms than you could shake a stick at.
I do what Whitman did, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos
Williams, and you belittle me?
You traitor, you communist.
Shame on you for hating your country so much.
Look, I'm not angry.
I feel sorry for you.
Frankly, you've wasted your life.
You used to write poetry, why did you stop?
A deal is a deal.
It just leads to other deals.
But a poem is a summary of everything
that the poet feels and knows up to that point
in his or her life.
A poem therefore is the greatest economy, a bargain.
It's like two for the price of one, only better.
See what I mean?
You're not a real man after all.
Let's face it.
You don't know how to handle your money.
The high school students always like
that because they see their parents in there
often somewhere.
I'd like to say something about the male sex, which
is that when they do not have their clothes on, audience,
they are ugly.
I came to this astonishing conclusion
after signing up at a health club
and getting a chance to hang around with a lot of naked men
and study them.
The title of this poem is one that students
of musical history will recognize as a James Brown song
title.
The title of the other one, "Still the Only Investment
Guide You'll Ever Need" is the title
of a book by Andrew Tobias.
If you don't know already, titles
can't be copyright, which is why my next book of poetry
is-- it's either going to be called
the Bible or the dictionary, I'm not quite sure.
But one of those or maybe the biblical dictionary
or something like that.
This one is called "Money Won't Change You,
But Time Will Take You Out."
It doesn't take very many visits to the men's locker
at the pool where I go from my daily swim
to realize why it is that men chase women.
First, there is the baggy skin, ultimately too white
or too red, then the hair, thin or gray,
or worst of all, a near transparent almost colorless
color like oatmeal.
And the overall effect of being grizzled
like once shaggy beasts gone balding and slack in the gut.
The men look like big possums, patchily haired and irritable,
or livestock whose hides have been scraped and boiled
on the way to a final cure.
Then you have your wins, your buboes, your bosses,
your separating pustules.
And the penises, great warty ropes, or stupid one-eyed slugs
asleep beneath the ponderous overhang of belly.
I am thinking of asking permission
to change on the women's side.
With the express understanding of course,
that I would be as business like theirs,
I am across the hall with members of my own sex.
But what if the women turned out to be
as unwholesome in their appearance as the men?
What if they were themselves a bunch of buffaloes?
Today in the newspaper, a woman described herself
in the personals section as, "smart, silly,
and good-looking."
But time gives us such a blackening
as it would scour the height of an alligator and the newspapers
themselves make us stupid.
Silliness is all that is left to us.
Silly means foolish or unreasoning these days,
but in Middle English it meant blessed, look it up.
A little while back, I came across a wonderful anecdote
about a meeting of the conductor Toscanini
and the composer Strauss, an anecdote
that I checked out through several different biographies
and found that they were wildly varying accounts of it.
But I picked the one that worked into the poem best.
It has to do with Toscanini's use of his trademark Hamburg
hat.
Toscanini apparently was a right-minded fellow.
Strauss had something of a reputation
as a Nazi sympathizer.
And Toscanini did not like Strauss
and was rude to him in a very effective way
that you will hear about shortly.
But really this poem starts with a more common feeling, one
that I'm sure each and every one of you
has felt in the last week.
It's a feeling that comes with sitting
around a table under a single bare light bulb and thinking,
I've got to do something noble.
I've got to learn how to teach people to read,
or I've got to volunteer at the health clinic,
or help the homeless, or do something like that,
wanting to do something better.
That's how the poem begins.
It's called "Soft Black Hat."
I feel like doing something especially high-minded tonight.
Only the little ones--
only the little things are the ones that
are often the most attractive.
For instance, you can pull the head off a mechanical chicken
and mount your friend's picture on the mechanism
and wind it up and watch your friend bounce around
on the kitchen table until he falls off.
And you wouldn't even have to dress up.
As Thoreau says, beware of any enterprise
that calls for new clothes.
Clothes are nice though, and sometimes you
can use them to make a point.
As when Toscanini met Richard Strauss, composer
of the Rosenkavalier but also a Nazi sympathizer and said,
"I take my hat off to you as a musician, R. Strauss," here
removing his trademark Hamburg, "But as a man,
I put it on again 10 times," which he did on off on off
until he had finished.
That settled R. Strauss's swastika loving ass for sure.
But villains are hard to come by, especially
in a big country like America.
Signore Toscanini was lucky since Herr Strauss sought him
out in his dressing room at La Scala and not vice versa.
With you, it might be different, but scoundrels seldom
come to me for my disapproval.
So maybe each of us should work on his or her specialty,
conducting whatever and become the kind of person others flock
to, hero and villain alike, though the latter would not
always look villainous.
Indeed, they'd try to be as presentable as possible.
Therefore, it is our duty to be better-looking than they are.
We'll be like Toscanini: artists, humanitarians,
snappy dressers.
Being as close as I'll ever be possibly to Las Vegas,
I'd like to read a poem called "Dracula
in Las Vegas," which features the caped Count as a hero
and puts him up against Elvis, who is a monster in the poem,
and I suppose was a kind of nocturnal monster
at the end of his life, bloating and growing fatter and eating
too much and doing all the things that we
heart healthy types know that we shouldn't do.
So there's a part that is a little difficult
to follow in which Elvis undergoes a transformation.
And I'll try to lead you through that
with a little bit of dispatch.
Just hang on, hang on because that part will--
when you get to the part where you get confused and lost,
hang on because it'll be over very shortly.
What happens is that there's a epic struggle
and Las Vegas is redeemed.
I'm sure they're very interested in being redeemed
by David Kirby, but that's what happens at least in the poem.
As Dracula is killing the pimps of Las Vegas,
begging them not to sell their sisters into bondage
and then flying into a rage and tearing their throats out
when they laugh at him and call him a jive chump,
Elvis is crawling out of the penthouse window
at the Hilton International.
Tonight he is going to make his stand before the over 30
crowd, pacing back and forth like a cat footed killer.
He's going to give them all he's got
and then wipe the sweat from his face with scarves and fling
them into the audience.
But right now he's crawling down the side of the Hilton head
first, wrapped in a red monk's robe over black nylon pajamas
and patent leather boots, his eyes
screened by tinted aviator glasses with the initials EP
across the bridge.
He reaches the sidewalk and lands lightly
on his feet just as Dracula steps
forward and raises a hand as if to say, stop.
"Ma-aa" cries Elvis like a mountain lion with an arrow
in his ribs as behind him appear the dead of the desert,
the naked Paiute Indians who bet their wives on the toss
of a stick.
The horse soldiers in blue, their skin
hanging from their faces, the Mormons
who slaughtered gentle immigrants from Arkansas
and the strength of a revelation.
Dracula shakes his head.
"I see you are afraid to face me alone," he says.
"I've got to have my power," Elvis snarls.
"I've got to have my dynamics. " "You lounge lizard,"
says the sanguinary count, "whatever happened
to my Transylvania twist?"
Elvis screams and writhes like a man in flames.
The monk's robe changes color, becomes light blue and vaporous
like the screams of millions of television sets on Sunday
night when America sat down in a body
to watch Ed Sullivan wring his hands
and bring out Elvis in his prime,
along with Lesley Gore, the Doodle Town Pipers, Gary Lewis
and the Playboys, and Mary Hopkins
singing "Those Were the Days."
And the robe becomes bluer still as it
gathers at the legs and waist, settling over
the shoulders like a jacket from which someone has forgotten
to remove the hanger, the lapels as lumpy as cold gravy,
the suit as blue now as the jowls of former US President
Richard M. Nixon, whose head floats where Elvis's did.
The eyes wide, the lips silently mouthing the words,
"I am not a crook."
And then freezing in an inaudible
scream as the dead of the desert burst into laughter
and melt dervish-like into the first rays of the sun.
Something stirs at Dracula's foot, a green shoot,
then another, and another.
A carpet of grass rolls across the desert,
a tide of vegetation broken here and there by shade trees
and pools where the chorines and the croupiers bathe,
the call girls, the mobsters come down from their meat
hooks, all children again, children in the slowly warming
air.
OK, just got two more for you here
to wake you up and get you out.
I have a poem about coffee.
This poem appeared in a little magazine find--
magazine called Fine Madness, which is published in Seattle.
It's a poem I think you all ought to be
sending your poems to as well.
It's one of those poems-- it was the kind of poem you sneak in.
It's the second best poem in a manuscript.
You put the first best poem in so
that the editor will of course just
grab it and call the printing factory
and say, stop the presses.
And then you put the second best one in so
that the editor will see how fine the first one is.
And of course, that never works.
The editor, in his misguided way,
never takes the best poem but always the second best.
And so I didn't--
I was happy.
I didn't mind that it appeared at all.
But it didn't feel anything special about it.
But here's where the harmonic convergence comes in.
The day that I was to leave for Arizona,
that is to say a week ago, last Wednesday, October 4th,
I got a letter from Naomi Nye, whom I understand
is to appear here in just a couple of weeks.
And she heard-- the effect of her letter
which to say I really like this poem about coffee
in Fine Madness, which I took as a omen,
not about the poem's success but about the net of poetry that we
all bounce around in, and also about the possibility
for connection because if she could connect with me, then
it made me think that I could connect with you
or that if I couldn't connect with you,
it would not be for any lack of trying on my part.
So here's one more shot at it.
And the poem is called "Bottomless Cup."
The best thing in the world is coffee, especially the cup
I have with my wife every day, three scoops of espresso
and one of American coffee with chicory filtered.
Around town, it's commercially prepared and lousy.
But I drink it anyway in honor of that first cup
which makes the subsequent ones not so bad,
and because I love this stuff.
Of course, various hosts and hostesses in this city
make very serviceable coffee after the dinners
to which I am often invited, having something
of a reputation as a useful hand in the kitchen and more
than passable conversationalist.
But by then it's too late in the evening for good coffee, which
only disturbs sleep thus dulling one's
appreciation of that matutinal cup, the first one every day.
It's silly to get caught up in rituals, I know.
But a friend told me his father recovered from his mother's
death by taking up again the little routines he'd
practiced daily all his life.
So coffee might save me from despair one of these days
since I certainly don't expect to go through it
without my share of blows.
Well, you see that ruins it.
Now, all this coffee drinking has a purpose which it
shouldn't.
I don't even need the stuff to wake
up with being fairly jumpy most of the time anyway.
I suppose I drank it because I want
to be more like coffee myself, the thing people
need when they get up in the morning
and then all day long, something even the poor can afford.
I want to find myself everywhere.
I want to be the thing that's bad for you
if you get too much.
Thank you very much.
I very much appreciate your attendance and your attention.
This is the last poem.
I always-- no matter how much community service I'm doing
and no matter how much trash I've
picked up by the side of the road,
I always try to calm students down,
my students, your students, anybody students
by telling them to start small.
Poetry is hard enough to write without you tackling
the cosmos or truth or beauty.
Start small, and let the effort come in later
when you're refining your small concept.
And this last poem is an illustration of that.
It was stimulated by the visit of a friend of my wife
who was talking to my wife as I was preparing supper.
And in the other room, I heard this friend say, "What's
it like being married to Dave?"
And the title of the poem is "The Meaning
of Women's Laughter."
Through the kitchen's thin walls,
I hear my wife's girlfriend in from California
ask, "What's it like being married to Dave?"
My wife says something I cannot hear,
and then there is a chuckle, two,
a torrent of helpless laughter.
I think of Miss Parham, my third grade teacher,
who used to say, "We're not laughing at you, honey.
We're laughing with you," whenever a child came close
to tears.
Only once, when Putsy Trice came back
from the bathroom with toilet paper hanging out of her pants,
Miss Parham mixed up her prepositions
and told Putsy we were laughing at her.
And it was true.
Only Putsy Trice was a showoff and didn't care.
I care.
Standing in my kitchen, I care whether or not
my wife thinks [AUDIO OUT] It loves someone no matter
how badly they treat you.
And then I hear the voices of the two women
begging me to come in and dance with them.
We do the hitchhike, we do the swim.
The song stops and another starts.
It says, "Sometimes I clown, back up
and do the James Brown."
My wife slips into my arms, and we dip, glide, tango.
The friend from California has left the room.
We kiss long and slow and keep dancing.
Thanks very much.
[APPLAUSE]