If you're one of the very few people in Southern Arizona who
did not get a copy of our schedule,
I have a stack here on the edge of the stage
and also on the refreshment table.
And I hope you will stay for refreshments after the reading.
Also, we'll have books for sale after the reading tonight.
Our next reading is two weeks from tonight
in this auditorium.
And it will be a reading to honor
the winners of the annual student poetry contest.
That's it 8:00 o'clock on February 8.
Writers at Work will have their first reading
for the semester next Wednesday night in this auditorium.
And the readers are Patricia Preciado Martin,
the author of Days of Plenty, Days of Want,
and Peter Brandwold, an MFA student here at the university.
I'm not going to read you the paragraph that I sent out
in the news release because it's there
for you to read for yourself, except to mention
that, as you know, Carolyn Kizer is the 1985 Pulitzer Prize
winner for Yin.
And one of her most recent books is translations
called Carrying Over.
She's been everywhere, and she's done everything.
And she's won all those nice prizes
and stayed humble and modest in spite of it all and kind.
I have been working at the Poetry Center
since the fall of 1970.
So I have had an opportunity to meet many famous people.
And most of them are kind of kind, and most of them
are very generous.
But of all the poets who visited for us over the years,
as you know Carolyn is here now on the faculty,
but she has visited for us in the past,
Carolyn Kizer is the most generous poet who
has come to the Poetry Center.
Shortly after her first visit, she
learned that my husband was going to be out of town
just before she was due to go to a reading in New Mexico.
And so she came and stayed for a week
and taught all of his classes just as
a gesture of friendship.
And another time when she came for a reading,
our usual schedule is to ask visitors to teach or meet
with--
to entertain questions-- two classes
and to meet with students for individual conferences for two
hours.
And Miss Kizer was going to stay over to the following Monday.
So she met with her students on Wednesday in their conferences
and made them all come back on Monday for another conference.
And many of the poets who come say
I'll do anything but student conferences, anything, anything
but that.
We had the pleasure of stopping in her house last summer
for breakfast.
I admired the dress she had on.
And she said, oh, I have another one just like it, here.
And gave it to me.
So when I say that Carolyn Kizer is a generous person,
I really mean it, and kind.
And it's a great pleasure to introduce her to you.
[APPLAUSE]
Well, as usual, when I'm about to give a reading,
I haven't the faintest idea what I'm
going to do, because it adds a certain suspense to the evening
and makes it more interesting for me if not for you.
So there may be brief hesitations from time to time
while I'm deciding what I'm going to do next.
But first of all, I want to say that I
want to dedicate this reading to my husband whose birthday it
will be beginning midnight tonight.
And he is a very perfect, gentle knight.
And I'm very--or [?? Knechte ??]..
I believe the [INAUDIBLE] say.
So I'm going to begin by reading a poem to him.
It's called "Afternoon Happiness."
I was most annoyed when the New York
Times said this was a piece of light verse.
Actually, I don't see anything wrong with light verse.
And I'm always annoyed that none of the anthologies
ever include that genius Ogden Nash in serious anthologies
of poetry.
If you're funny, forget it.
You're supposed to come and get your culture fix.
And it's all very serious and earnest,
and nobody's supposed to have a good time, right?
Well, with this poem, I tried to begin it with a light tone
and have it get a little heavier as it went along.
In other words, I was having fun.
I don't go along with Ogden's theory
that poetry is a game entirely, but I
do feel that after you've been at it for a while,
you ought to you ought to be able to get
some pleasure from it too.
And I got some pleasure from it in writing it for this man
that I love so much.
Also, I invented the form.
And I find in my old age, I have a certain facility
for goofy rhymes.
And one of my favorites is in this poem where I rhyme funny
with Cyril Connolly.
It takes years to do that, years of practice
to be able to do that.
Right, OK?
"Afternoon Happiness."
At a party, I spy a handsome psychiatrist and wish,
as we all do, to get her advice for free.
Doctor, I'll say, I'm supposed to be a poet.
All life's awfulness has been grist to me.
We learn that happiness is a Chinese meal, while sorrow
is a nourishment forever.
My new environment is California dreamer.
I'm fearful I'm forgetting how to brood.
And Doctor, another thing has got me worried.
I'm not drinking as much as I should.
At home, I want to write a happy poem on love
or a love poem of happiness, but they won't do.
The tensions of every day, the rub the minor abrasions
of any two who share one space, ah, there's
no substitute for tragedy.
But in this chapter, tragedy belongs to that other life,
the old life before us.
Here is my aphorism of the day: happy people
are monogamous even in California.
So how does the poem play without the paraphernalia
of betrayal and loss?
I don't have a jealous eye or fear and neither do you.
In truth, I'm fond of your ex-mate,
whom I named my wife in law.
My former husband, that old disaster, is now just funny.
So laugh we do in what Cyril Connolly has called
the endless nocturnal conversation of marriage,
which may be the best part.
Darling, must I love you in light verse
without the tribute of profoundest art?
Of course, it won't last.
You will break my heart or I yours by dying.
I could weep over that, but now it
seems forced here in these heaven hills, the mourning
doves mourning, the squirrels mating,
my old cat warm on my lap here on our terrace, as from below
comes a musical cursing as you mend my favorite plate.
Later, of course, I could pick a fight.
There is always material in that.
But we don't come from fighting people, those who scream out
red hot items in their hate.
No, Love, the heavy poems will have
to come from temps perdu, fertile with pain,
or perhaps detonated by terrors far beyond this place
where the world rends itself, and its tainted waters
rise in the East to erode our safety here.
Much as I want to gather a lifetime thrift
and craft, my cunning skills tied in a knot for you,
there is only this useless happiness as gift.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Please don't applaud because if you
applaud one more than others, then I
think that one you don't like.
We get very upset about things like that
because we want you to love everything we do.
The next poem is called "The Blessing."
And I'm going to dedicate it to my graduate workshop,
and they're going to know why when I read it.
The occasion of this poem was that when
I was living in Chapel Hill, my dear
father who lived to be 100, was working on his 90s
at that point.
And he was getting a little vague around the edges.
And I had my two daughters with me.
And he was calling us by the names of his sister, who
had been dead for 40 years, and his first wife, who had
been dead for longer than that.
And I was being called by my mother's name.
And my girls were being called by various other female names.
And my 17-year-old, who wasn't really terribly
sure who she was, found this extremely upsetting.
But my 20-year-old said, Mother, isn't it wonderful?
We're all the same woman.
So the poem is dedicated to Ashley, my oldest child.
Daughter, my mother, you have observed my worst.
Holding me together at your expense has made you burn cool.
So did I in childhood, nursed her old hurts and doubts.
Myself made cool to shallowness.
She grew out as I grew in.
At midpoint, our furies met.
My mother's dust has rested for 15 years in the front hall
closet because we couldn't bear to bury it.
Her dust-lined, dust-coated urn squats among the size 11
overshoes.
My father who never forgets his overshoes has forgotten that.
Hysterical-tongued daughter of a dead marriage,
you shed hot tears in the bed of that benign old woman
whose fierce joy you were.
Tantrums in the closet, taking upon yourself
the guilt the split parents never felt.
Child and old woman soothing each other,
sharing the same face.
In a span of 70 years, the same mother wit.
I must go home, says my father, his mind straying.
This is a hard time for your mother,
but she's been dead this 15 years.
Daughter and daughter, we sit on either side.
Who's which?
He's not sure.
After a long silence, don't press me, he says.
Mother hysterical tongued, age and grace burned away
your excesses, left that lavender sweet child who
turned up the thermostat on her electric blanket,
folded her hands on her breast.
You had dreamed death as a silver prince,
like marrying Nehru, you said.
Dearest, does your dust hum in the front hall closet?
This is a hard time for me among the umbrella points, the canes,
and overshoes of that cold climate.
Each week, she denies it, my blithe mother
in that green cloud free landscape
where we whisper our dream secrets to each other.
Daughter, you lived through my difficult affairs
as I tried to console your burnt out childhood.
We coped with our fathers, compared
notes on the old one and the cold one,
learned to moderate our hates.
Risible and suffering, we grew up together.
Mother, my daughter, I have been blessed
on both sides of my life.
Forgive me if sometimes, like my fading father,
I see you as one.
Not that I confuse your two identities
as he does, taking off or putting on his overshoes,
but my own role.
I lean on the bosom of that double mother, of the ghost
by night, the girl by day.
I between my two mild furies, alone but comforted.
And I will whisper blithely in your dreams
when you are as old as I, my hard time over.
Meanwhile, keep warm your love, your bed, and your wise heart
and head, my good daughter.
I have reached, as one of my classes
knows perhaps too well, the age of autobiography.
And I'm writing a series of poems
about the women who have been important in my life.
And I'm torn between reading the one about my nurse, Gerda,
and the one about my mother's hairdresser, Pearl.
I may read both, but for now, I'll read Gerda.
Does anyone here speak Swedish?
Good.
I think my accent is deteriorated
since the age of eight.
But at any rate, I managed in Sweden.
And the epigraph is in Swedish.
It's from an old children's prayer, and it goes like this.
Gud, som haver barnen kär, Se till mig som liten är.
Vart jag mig i världen vänder Star min lycka i Guds händer.
It means roughly God, who takes particular care
of little children, hold me in your hand tonight.
It's a great improvement on if I should die before I wake,
don't you think?
What a terrifying thing to learn when you're a little tot,
right?
All right.
This is "Gerda."
Down the long curving walk, you trudge
to the street, stoop-shouldered in defeat, a cardboard
suitcase in each hand.
Gerda, don't leave, the child cries from the porch,
waving and weeping.
Her stony mother speaks again of the raise in salary denied.
Gerda demands $10 more than the 25 a month
she is being paid to sew, cook, keep house, dress and undress
the child, bathe the child with the rough scaly hands
she cleans in Clorox, sing to the child in Swedish,
teach her to pray, to count her toes in Swedish.
40 years on, the child still knows how.
Is a great hit with children under seven in Sweden,
singing a folk song, praying, counting toes.
For $25 a month in 1933, Gerda makes for the child
her favorite, fattingmand, a mix of flour,
milk, and eggs you cut in strips, then fry
in fat, then dust with sugar.
The child helps Gerda cook, so she knows that.
In Stockholm, the child will inquire of fattingmand,
but like lost Gerda, it does not exist.
Deep in the Depression, the child
fears for her as Gerda trudges down
the walk, four blocks to the bus,
then the train to Minneapolis.
What will she do?
Gerda, trained as a nurse, found no work before she came to us.
$25 a month to sew a quilt for the child, covered
with fabulous animals feather-stitched
in blue and white.
Now after 50 years, it hangs on the wall of the child's
grandchild in a Chicago house.
Then when the child awoke, addled and drunk
with nightmare, she dragged the quilt from her cot,
stumbled, sniffling, into Gerda's room
to be taken into her bed, soothed back
to sleep by the rough, antiseptic hands.
The child wakes up to naked light.
Ageless Gerda's steel-gray bob shakes into place.
She owns no mirror.
Blind Gerda gropes for her steel-rimmed spectacles
as the child sees with fascinated
love the curd in the corner of each of Gerda's eyes.
It is a magic substance the child
has improvised on a favorite tale; Hans Christian Andersen's
Snow Queen.
She thinks of it as the good cream
curd, the reverse of the splinter
in the eye of little Kay.
Everyone, like the brave child in the story,
everyone like Gerda.
Modest Gerda dresses in the closet.
Then the two on tiptoe steal to the child's room,
so the stout, handsome mother will not waken.
Then Gerda bathes the child, scrubs her hard all over
with the loofah, dries her carefully
on the big warm towel, pulls on her panties of white cotton,
then the dress smelling deliciously of Gerda's iron,
the dress Gerda smocked at night while the household slept,
then the pastel sweater Gerda knitted her.
The child sits on the edge of the bed
while Gerda brushes then twists the child's fair hair
into two fat braids secured with rubber bands.
The child, so much fairer than her parents,
nearly believes she's Swedish, is pleased then
and 40 years on to be taken for Scandinavian; Gerda's own.
Now Gerda pulls up the white anklets, fastens the sandals.
Down to the pantry, where the child climbs into her chair,
Gerda sets three places; one for the child,
one for the child's imaginary playmate, one for her.
And they eat the lovely oatmeal Gerda cooked the night before.
30 years on, her father will remark,
your mother was jealous, so we let her go.
Of course, I could have raised her wages.
Gerda ran the house.
The child's throat fills with bile.
As casually, he continues, I always
let your mother decide these matters.
Smug, he used the phrase as if the abdication
of his parenthood had been a sacrifice.
What did he know of the child's needs or passions?
So Gerda left the house, the yard, the garden,
the child's home long torn down, a place that no longer exists.
35 years on, the child stumbled among the weeds
in search of the path down which her Gerda walked or a trace
of the porch where she once stood, bereft.
The child's eighth year, like Gerda, disappeared.
Hazy recall of illness; asthma, the wheeze,
the struggle for breath, and the louder rhythmic wheeze
of the oxygen, of the weeks in bed,
lying inert, nothing remains, only the pallid joys
of recovery, jello, and milk.
Ice cream three times a day, was this a bribe?
Dreamily sucking a spoonful of melting vanilla,
only these splinters of a vanished year.
It must have been then that the ice house
dream began, her first and last recurring dream.
The child stands in a little room of ice.
Outside, a song begins, impossibly nostalgic,
played on a concertina or harmonium.
As the dream goes on, slowly, slowly, the walls move in,
the ceiling presses down till she
is encased in a kind of upright coffin
of milky, iridescent ice.
Entranced by a vision of green hills
and pure blue skies without, she conceives freedom and flight.
She must memorize the tune as the ice moves in to touch her
on every side and on her head.
As the last haunting note is played, the child wakes up.
Of course, the tune is gone.
It is always gone.
For 10 years, the child nurtures a secret plan.
At last, she boards a train for the East,
waits for the layover in Minneapolis,
hurries to a payphone armed with change, opens the directory,
faints to see four columns, closely printed,
of Gerda Johnsons.
How could there be more than one?
Ranging her nickels on the metal counter,
she calls from the top as the hands of the clock spin
round, Gerda, Gerda.
Half a page with answers none, or ancient whispery Norse
voices down a tunnel of years, and oceans crossed
and cold home villages abandoned long ago.
Then she runs out of change and time.
A train to catch.
She weeps at terminated hope, nourished so long,
as the old filmstrip runs again.
Gerda, you trudge down the walk forever.
The child, no matter how she calls and cries,
cannot catch up.
Now from another life, she summons you out
of the Earth or ether.
Wherever you are, Gerda, come back
to nurse your desolate child.
After I read that in New York, a terribly nice man came up to me
and said that he was a genealogist.
And he said, I can find her for you.
And I said, my dear sir, thank you, but she would be 90,
and I don't think there's a chance she'd still
be on this planet.
I've always been something of a political poet,
and hope I always will be.
One of the nicest things my husband ever said to me
or said to somebody about me was when after a reading,
someone came up and said I love that political poem,
and my husband said they're all political.
And I hope that's true.
They're certainly meant to be.
I'm going to do a slightly non-chronological thing here.
I'm going to read a poem about the overthrow of the Allende
government in Chile, the democratically-elected
government, which we in our wisdom
and our CIA managed to destroy with the results that are still
clear of torture, oppression, fascism, et cetera.
Now this poem is one of those poems that is a given.
It was almost like taking dictation.
I just wrote it down.
Actually, it was a dream.
And I woke up, and I simply started writing down the dream.
There is a character in the poem, however, named Barbara.
Her real name is Barbara Probst Solomon.
And everything that I say about Barbara and her adventures
in Spain actually happened.
She and Norman Mailer's kid sister, both of them
17 or 18 years old, managed to rescue some loyalist soldiers
from a Spanish prison.
That is in the poem as you will see.
"October 1973."
Last night, I dreamed I ran through the streets
of New York looking for help for you, Nicanor.
But my few friends who are rich or influential
were temporarily absent from their penthouses or hotel
suites.
They had gone to the opera or flown for the weekend
to Bermuda.
At last, I found one or two of them
at home preparing for social engagements.
Absently smiling, they tried on gown after gown
until heaps of rich beautiful fabric
were strewn over the chairs and sofas.
They posed before mirrors with their diamonds and trinkets
and floor-length furs.
Smiling at me from the mirror, they vaguely promised help.
They became distracted by constantly ringing phones,
by obsequious secretaries bustling in
with packages, flowers, messages,
all the paraphernalia, all part of the uninterruptible round
of the rich, the nice rich, smiling soothingly
as they touched their hair or picked up their phone
extensions.
Absently patting my arm, they smiled, it will be all right.
Dusk fell in the city as I ran weeping into the streets.
I ran to the home of Barbara, my friend, who, as a young girl,
rescued four loyalist soldiers from a Spanish prison.
In her teenage sweater set and saddle shoes and knee socks,
she drove an old car sagging with loyalist pamphlets
across the Pyrenees all the way to Paris without being caught.
And not long ago, she helped save a group of men
from Franco's sentence of death.
In my dream, Barbara telephones Barcelona.
I realize this isn't quite right,
but I just stand there paralyzed,
as one does in dreams.
Then dimly, from the other end of the line,
through the chatter of international operators,
we hear artillery fire, the faint tones of lost men,
cracked voices singing "Los Cuatros Generales"
through the pulsation of the great twisted cable
under the ocean.
Agonía, agonía, sueño, fermento y sueño.
Éste es el mundo, amigo, agonía, agonía.
No, Barbara, I scream.
We are not back there.
That's the old revolution.
Call up the new one.
Though I know that every day your friends, Nicanor,
telephone Santiago, where the number rings and rings
and rings with never an answer.
And now the rings are turning into knells.
The church bells of Santiago tolling the funeral of Neruda,
his books desecrated, his poems looted,
his autobiography stolen in his house on Isla Negra.
And among the smashed glass, the broken furniture,
his desk overturned, the ruined books strewn over the floor,
lie the great floral wreaths from the Swedish Academy,
the wreaths from Paris, South Asia, the whole world over.
And the bells toll on.
Then I tell Barbara to hang up the phone.
She dials the number again, then turns to me
smiling, smiling like an angel.
He is there.
Trembling, I take the phone from her and hear your voice,
Nicanor, sad, humorous, infinitely disillusioned,
infinitely consoling.
Dear Carolyn.
It is Nicanor.
And the connection is broken because I wake up
in this white room, in this white silence,
in this backwater of silence on this Isla Blanca.
Nicanor, Nicanor, are you too silent
under the Earth, Brother, Brother?
Thank you.
And now I'd like to talk about the background a bit,
the background of Spain.
The poem is so self-explanatory.
I don't need to say anything about it.
This is called the "Valley of the Fallen."
And it has a number of epigraphs.
The first one is from Benjamin Welles.
It's curious too because he was the son of Sumner Welles, who
was Secretary of State under Franklin Roosevelt, who
said the most terrible mistake that the Roosevelt
administration made was to remain
neutral during the Spanish Civil War
when the Germans and the Italians
were providing arms and men and planes
to Franco to overthrow the loyalist government.
As you will see from this, Benjamin Welles
was rather different.
In this Valley of the Fallen, one finds the soul of Spain
beautiful and severe.
When the great bronze doors, 11 tons each,
swing open for state ceremonies, 10,000 worshippers
can assemble there at a time.
Only Franco and his intimates know the cost
of this monument with its adjacent Benedictine monastery
and its lavishly fitted center for social studies.
1.
My new friend Maisie, who works where I work,
a big, pleasant woman, all elbows and peasant skirts,
has a young child and debts and struggles on her own.
Not 21, I am her confidante.
Gallant, intrepid, she soldiers on.
But in the ladies restroom or when we munch our sandwiches
at our adjoining desks, her bitterness erupts,
the bum, the bum, who, when she was pregnant, knocked her down,
stole money from her purse to spend on drink,
and still harasses her with drunken calls in 1946.
One day, I have to ask, Maisie, why did you ever marry him?
Gazing into her large, pale, blue eyes that
brim with rue, well, you see he fought in the Abraham Lincoln
Brigade.
Oh, I say.
I would have done it too.
Part 2.
When I say I wouldn't go to Spain till Franco died,
I've told a whole biography; my age, my politics, my Red
and red haired mother whose green eyes barked
at the sins of tyrants everywhere.
My father who was consul for the poor and radical
against the bigots and the hater burnt up the courtroom
with his tongue of flame.
McCarthy got around to us much later.
So Spain burst in while I was still
a child, my introduction to the world.
At 17, my first love, Frank, gave me
some records, battered '78s, the off key songs
of the international brigade.
I still sing them, remember all the words
in Spanish, French, and German.
The Peat Bog Soldiers accompanied by harmonica
in a Barcelona basement.
Freiheit, we sing to a guitar.
You can still hear the thuds of the bombardment.
I sing and listen till the tears run down.
That's 40 years of tears.
700 men worked every day for 10 years to dig this place,
and many of them were political prisoners of the regime.
Franco lies now in a tomb before the high altar.
And all day long, the monks, the nuns, and the soldiers
file through.
Jan Morris, 1979.
Part 3.
My husband and I shudder a bit and smile.
He's an architect, has seen photographs
of Franco's grandiose memorial, the Valley of the Fallen.
At first, the thought appalled, but we've
decided it's part of architecture, part of history
too.
So we drive the road from the Escorial,
climb tiers and tiers of stairs, take in the view.
The whole vast place is virtually empty,
save for a handful of tourists like ourselves.
Down the long gloomy hall, not as grotesque as we expected,
muted lights, chisels score the vault
so that we'll know they tunnel through the mountain, Franco's
slave labor, some, the very men who fought him.
But at least they buried him.
We reached the circular altar with its flame.
First, the grave of José Antonio Primo de Rivera,
who fathered the Falange.
On it, a huge, ugly wreath from the Italian Fascisti.
I wouldn't be surprised if asps crawled out
beneath its leaves of artificial bronze, but still, at my age,
I'm surprised that the old evil lives.
Behind this, the Caudillo's stone.
I say, I'm going to spit upon his grave.
John tilts his head towards the honor guard, impassive,
armed, white gloved.
He knows me well enough to know I just might do it.
But instead, I speak this curse: Franco, I spit upon your grave.
On the way out, we use the men's room and the ladies' room,
try to buy postcards, but it's closing time.
Then drive back to Madrid where I read poems
to the kids at the university in a classroom scarred
with revolutionary slogans four years old
that no one's bothered to erase.
I sing of Lorca, Chile, and Neruda, and the wars we lose.
The Valle de los Caidos can be included in your trip
to the Escorial.
Like a modern day Valhalla, the crypt
is cut through 853 feet of living rock
and surmounted by a 492-foot cross of reinforced concrete
with an elevator to the top.
Admission, 75 pesetas with two in a car,
100 pesetas for more than two.
Open 9:00 to 7:30.
Fodor's Spain, 1987.
And this one is called "Ingathering."
It's dedicated to Spain, but it might well
be dedicated to Portugal and to Greece.
The poets are going home now, after the years of exile,
after the northern climates where they worked,
lectured, remembered, where they shivered at night
in an indifferent world.
Where God was the God of business,
and men would violate the poet's moon,
and even the heavens become zones of war.
The poets are going home to the blood-haunted villages,
to the crumbling walls still pocked with a spray of bullets,
to the ravine marked with a new cross where their brother died.
No one knows the precise spot where they buried him,
but there is a place now to gather, to lay wreaths.
The poets will bring flowers.
The poets are coming home to the cafes,
to the life of the streets at twilight,
to slip among the crowds and greet their friends.
These young poets, old now, limping,
leaning on canes, or the arm of a grandchild,
peer with opaque eyes at the frightening city, the steel
and concrete towers sprung up in their absence.
Yet from the open doorways comes the odor of grapes fermented,
of fish, of oil, of pimiento.
The poets have come home to the melodious language that
settles in their heads like moths alighting, this language
for which they starved in a world of gutturals,
crude monosyllables barked by strangers.
Now their own language enfolds them with its warm vocables.
The poets are home.
Yes, they have come back to look up
at the yellow moon, cousin of that cold orb
that only reflected their isolation.
They've returned to the olives, the light,
the sage-scented meadows, the whitewashed steps,
the tubs of geranium, the sere plains,
the riverbanks spread with laundry,
the poppies, the vineyards, the bones of mountains.
Yes, poets, welcome home to your small country riven
by its little war, as the world measures
these events, a country that remembers
heroes and tears, where in your absence,
souls kept themselves alive by whispering your words.
Now you smile at everything, even the priests, the militia,
the patient Earth that is waiting to receive you.
Now I think we'll be funny.
Some friends of mine were doing an anthology
on food and cooking and kitchen and so on.
And they said, oh, Carolyn, you're
so sensuous and wonderful.
And you must have a terrific poem about food.
Yum, yum, gulp, gulp.
Well, I didn't.
And I looked at the poems they had collected,
and they were all wonderful and accomplished.
Every lady poet was a great cook.
So I decided to write a poem about failure.
And this is it.
It's called "Mud Soup."
It is written in the meter of Hiawatha.
And this is sort of like eating peanuts.
It's very hard to quit once you get into it.
I will never do it again.
And I certainly had never done it before.
"Mud Soup."
Had the ham bone, had the lentils, got to meat store
for the salt pork, got to grocery for the celery.
Had the onions, had the garlic, borrowed carrots
from the neighbor.
Had the spices, had the parsley.
One big kettle I had not got; borrowed pot and lid
from landlord.
Dice the pork and chop the celery, chop the onions,
chop the carrots, chop the tender index finger.
Put the kettle on the burner, drop the lentils
into kettle; 2 quarts water, 2 cups lentils.
Afternoon is wearing on.
Saute pork and add the veggies.
Add the garlic, cook 10 minutes.
Add to lentils, add two ham bone, add the bayleaf,
cloves in cheesecloth, add the cayenne.
Got no cayenne.
Got paprika, salt, and pepper.
Bring to boil, reduce heat, simmer.
Did I say that this is summer?
Simmer, summer, summer, simmer.
Mop the floor and suck the finger.
Mop the brow with old potholder.
Time is up.
Discard the cheesecloth.
Force the mixture through the foodmill, having
first discarded ham bone.
Add the lean meat from the ham bone.
Reheat soup and chop the parsley.
Now that sweating night has fallen,
try at last the finished product.
Tastes like mud, the finished product.
Looks like mud, the finished product.
Consistency of mud for dinner.
Was it lentils, Claiborne, me?
Flush the dinner down disposal.
Say to hell with ham bone, lentils, New York Times's
recipe.
Purchase Campbell's.
Just add water.
Concentrate on poetry.
By the shores of Gitche Gumee, you
can bet the banks were muddy, not like Isle of Innisfree.
In my copy of the New York Times Cookbook,
that recipe is crossed out, and there's
a skull and crossbones over it.
I sent a copy of the poem to Craig Claiborne.
He didn't seem to think it was terribly funny.
Well, you can't win them all, right?
I suppose I should do a little something
with this new book of mine, which is terribly pretty.
And I would like people to buy it if only to admire the cover,
but perhaps there're one or two things in it that you
might find interesting.
It's a curious melange of languages.
The people to whom this book is dedicated
are Edmund Keeley, who was the great translator
of modern Greek, Donald Keene, who was the peerless
translator of Japanese, and William Merwin, who
was the exquisite translator of French and Spanish.
Now I translate Macedonian, Urdu, Yiddish,
and French African.
Oh, yeah, some Chinese too.
Chinese really is my strongest suit here.
But various people including the dedicatees
suggested that they would like to see
all of these translations gathered together.
So it does make this rather strange, strange book here.
Macedonian is the language of the Macedonian Republic
of Yugoslavia.
Of course, there are Macedonians on the other side of the border
too, in Greece.
But I spent several happy visits at Lake Ohrid in Yugoslavia
at the Struga Poetry Festival.
And I became a close friend of a poet named Bogomil Gjuzel.
I've always wanted to work the name Bogomil in a poem,
and I will yet.
You all know, of course, about the Bogomilian heresy, right?
I looked it up.
Anyway, of course, I don't speak Macedonian
except to order plum brandy, but Bogomil and I
translated his poetry together and translated some other poets
who write in Macedonian.
I was intelligent enough to make a tape of Bogomil
and me translating his poetry.
And this is a direct quote from the tape.
Bogomil: do you understand what I mean
by erection, upright penis?
Me: upright pennies, you mean like when we were children
and put them on the railroad tracks
so the train would flatten them?
[LAUGHTER]
Bogomil: total consternation.
Me: total lack of communication.
Bogomil, no, full penis, cock.
[LAUGHTER]
So some of you, including my current landlady, Jane Miller,
escaped from the Iowa Writers' Workshop
although this, of course, took place
in the International Writers' Workshop, this poem, which
is called "Flood at the International Writers'
Workshop."
Bogomil was born in 1934.
He is an eminent playwright as well as poet in Yugoslavia.
One of my favorite stories about Bogomil
is that he won the national playwriting competition at one
point when Tito was in power.
And Bogomil told me in great indignation
that they canceled the production of his play.
And I said, well, what's it about, Bogomil?
He said, well, the curtain goes up,
and it's a setting like the Garden of Eden.
And there is God who is naked, who's sitting on a chamber pot
wearing a Tito mask.
And I said, oh--
[LAUGHTER]
How incomprehensible of them to cancel the performance.
But he couldn't see why they didn't go ahead with it.
But anyway, they didn't.
"Flood at the International Writers' Workshop."
I haven't been out of doors for 31 days since the sky
started crying--
[AUDIO OUT] playwriting competition at one
point when Tito was in power.
And Bogomil told me in great indignation
that they canceled the production of his play.
And I said, well, what's it about, Bogomil?
He said, well, the curtain goes up,
and it's a setting like the Garden of Eden.
And there is God who is naked, who's sitting on a chamber pot
wearing a Tito mask.
And I said, oh--
[LAUGHTER]
How incomprehensible of them to cancel the performance.
But he couldn't see why they didn't go ahead with it.
But anyway, they didn't.
"Flood at the International Writers' Workshop."
I haven't been out of doors for 31 days since the sky
started crying.
By now, the Earth must be a pair of pliers
with tatters of human flesh stuck to its jaws.
I imagine myself on a seesaw, balanced so lightly
that if even an atom fell on it, let alone a bomb,
I would be hurled like a stone from a catapult straight back
into the trap of Macedonia.
My people, are we God's voracious eye
suspended in the air like a traffic light,
which, as it blinks, directs the flow of nations?
Right now, I'm only that greedy eye of legend
which, on my side of the scale, outweighs the world.
In the ark, our elevators work erratically.
Every deck is bursting with trapped livestock.
On the first floor, insects have turned into neurons
without any owners.
On the second, saurians form a mythic chain
to swallow each other, so they will all disappear, but too
feeble to achieve total consummation.
On the third floor, the mad vegetarians roaring with hunger
lay waste the frigid airs.
On the fourth, the carnivorous flowers
make plans to devour God.
On the fifth floor, this lone Macedonian
mangled their language, recreating Babel.
And every line that occurs to me sinks
like a plummet when it should splash about like a happy dog
and, like a dolphin, jump through its trainer's hoop.
But I'm dense when it comes to featherweight words.
The verb should be in a state of constant erection,
in equal readiness to strike or stroke.
The adjective stick to the noun like a lizard catching flies.
And the noun should swing both ways,
while the conjunctive is a universal passkey.
So the sky sobs on like an hysterical child,
like the she-dragons of my legends.
The gutters gurgle and gargle.
The drain pipes are subterranean Mississippis.
The words refuse to swallow us any longer now we have set them
to quarreling among ourselves.
Trying to strangle each other, they bite off their tongues.
They have burned to tell us everything they know,
but being dumb now, drooling idiots, speechlessly,
they copulate with rainbows.
I'll read one more of Bogomil's poems.
This one is called "My Sister's Letter."
When it was published, I had to publish it under my name
saying that it was after Bogomil Gjuzel
because it could have gotten him into a great deal of trouble
at the time it was written.
But now, I can give it its correct attribution.
It's called "My Sister's Letter."
Your letter wrecked my day.
I read and reread it till the words blurred into gibberish.
How can I be expected to go on writing
when you refuse to explain what happens at home?
We are separated by thousands of miles of silence, hereto,
I'm imprisoned in ignorance.
I'm expected to put my ear to this alien Earth
as we used to do as children listening
for the tremor of unseen trains.
Haven't you learned by now that even the ground
has learned how to dissemble?
No train arrives.
Only a false vibration.
The land has learned to hold its breath, play dead.
Thanks very much for your silence.
Now I'm utterly dismayed.
You go on spinning sentences out of emptiness.
Are you trying to be the poet instead of me?
Somehow, I managed to survive the day.
I've had practice staying alive.
What choice do we have?
Deep into sleep, swamped by a sea of nightmares.
A voice I thought was yours awakened me screaming, help,
help.
Having fallen on the bed without undressing,
I could have rushed down into the lobby, aroused the desk
clerk to call the police.
But who would have believed me, phantom victim
of a phantom cry?
Help, once again, and then the voice broke off.
Thoughtfully, I put on my pajamas.
Why does any of it matter?
Even the dead still cry out in their sleep, protest injustice,
screaming from the grave for vindication.
Still persecuted by the living survivors who defame them,
who conspire to pretend we are all deaf to the dead.
But at least they don't send me empty letters
so that I tremble with all they fail to say.
I'd like to read a poem now by Rachel Korn.
This is from the Yiddish.
A book of Yiddish poetry was commissioned by Irving Howe.
And we were sent literal translations of the poems,
very careful ones, and tape recordings of the poets
reading the poems so that we could
hear the rhythms and the rhymes and so on.
And then what we did with them were carefully checked and sent
back.
I then read at the YMHA with Rachel Korn
and another group of Yiddish writers, all of them very old.
And after the terrible background of the Holocaust
from which these few emerged, I expected
to see a group of crumbling and broken men and women.
So I dressed down for the occasion, as they say.
What a joy then to be instantly eclipsed by Mrs. Korn,
an erect and handsome woman in a glittering gold
dress with sable cuffs.
This poem is called "Keep Hidden From Me."
The best poems in this anthology have been translated.
I mean the best translations in this book are by Adrienne Rich,
I might say, in case any of you are interested in it.
This is in couplets.
Keep hidden from me all that I might comprehend.
Oh God, I ripen towards you in my unknowing.
The barely burgeoning leaf on the roadside tree limns
innocence; here endeth the first lesson.
Keep from me, God, all forms of certainty,
the steady tread that paces off the self and forms it,
seamless, ignorant of doubt of failure,
hell-bent for fulfillment.
To know myself, is that not the supreme disaster?
To know Thee, one must sink on trembling knees.
To hear Thee, only terrified heart may truly listen.
To see Thee, only the gaze half blind with dread.
Though the day darken, preserve my memory
from your bright oblivion.
Erase not my faulty traces.
If I aspire again to make four poor walls my house,
let me pillow myself on the book of my peregrinations.
God, give me strength to give over
false happiness and the sense that suffering has earned us
your regard.
Elohim.
Though sorrow fill me to the brim,
let me carefully bear the cup of myself to Thee.
And lately, I've been translating a young woman who
is younger than my youngest child, which
is sort of bizarre feeling.
Her name is Shu Ting.
She's a very popular poet in China,
and she's very funny and witty and charming.
She's very plain with heavy glasses and buck teeth,
but she's absolute such a charmer
that you forget it after you've been
with her for a few moments.
And I would like to read a couple of her poems to you.
They're short.
"Bits of Reminiscence."
She belongs to what's called the Misty school of poetry.
Mistiness evolved as a way of disguising
what you said so that you didn't get sent to prison
or sent off to farm manure 4,000 miles from home and so on.
Things are getting a little less misty now, I guess.
She and a poet named Bei Dao are the two most eminent poets
of their generation, even though at this point she's only 35.
"Bits of Reminiscence."
A toppled wine cup, a stone path floating beneath the moon
where the grass was trampled.
One azalea branch left lying there.
Eucalyptus trees begin to spin in a collage of stars
as I sit on the rested anchor, the dizzy sky
reflected in my eyes.
A book held up to shut out candle light, fingers lightly
in your mouth.
In the fragile cup of silence, a dream, half illuminated,
half obscure.
This is called "Missing You."
A multicolored chart without a boundary.
An equation chalked on the board with no solution.
A one stringed lyre that tells the beads of rain.
A pair of useless oars that never crossed the water.
Waiting buds in suspended animation.
The setting sun is watching from a distance.
Though in my mind there may be an enormous ocean, what emerges
is the sum; a pair of tears.
Yes, from these vistas, from these depths, only this.
And I will close now with a poem that hasn't been published yet.
It's called "Twelve O'clock."
At 17, I've come to read a poem at Princeton.
Now my young hosts inquire if I would like
to meet Professor Einstein.
But I'm too conscious I have nothing to say to interest him.
The genius fled from Germany just in time.
Just tell me where I can look at him, I reply.
Mother had scientific training.
I did not.
She loved that line of Meredith's about the army
of unalterable law.
God was made manifest to her in what
she saw as the supreme order of the skies.
We lay in the meadow side by side, long summer
nights as she named the stars with awe.
But I saw nothing that was rank on rank, heard nothing
of the music of the spheres.
But in the bliss of meadow silences, lying on insects
we had mashed without intent, found overhead
a beautiful and terrifying mess, especially in August
when the meteors whizzed and zoomed, echoed in little
by the fireflies in the grass.
Although, small hypocrite, I was seeming to assent,
I was dead certain that uncertainty governed
the universe and everything else including mother's temperament.
A few years earlier, when I was four,
Mother and Father hushed before the Atwater Kent
as a small voice making ugly noises through the static
spoke from the grille, church window-shaped to them.
Listen, Darling, and remember always;
it's Dr. Einstein broadcasting from Switzerland.
I said, so what?
This was repeated as a witticism by my doting parents.
I was dumb and mortified.
So now when I'm asked if I would like to speak to Einstein,
I say I only want to look at him.
Each day in the library, right at 12:00,
Einstein comes out for lunch.
So I am posted.
At the precise stroke of noon, the sun sends one clear ray
into the center aisle, he just appears, baggy-kneed, sockless,
slippered, with the famous raveling gray sweater,
clutching a jumble of papers in one hand, and in the other,
his brown sack of sandwiches.
The ray halos his head.
Blake's vision of God.
Unmuscular, serene, except for the electric hair.
In that flicker of a second, our smiles meet,
vast genius and vast ignorance conjoined.
He fixed, I fluid, in a complicit yet impersonal
interest.
He dematerialized, and I left, content.
It was December 6th, exactly when,
just hours before the Japanese attack
the Office of Scientific R & D began
its hugely expanded program of research into nuclear weaponry,
racing the Germans who, they feared, were far ahead.
In fact, they weren't.
Next night, the coach to school, the train express.
Instead, pulls into every hamlet.
Grim young men swarm the platforms going to enlist.
I see their faces in the sallow light as the train jolts,
then starts up again, reaching Penn Station hours
after midnight.
At dinner in New York in '44, I hear the name of Heisenberg.
Someone remarked, I wonder where he is.
The most dangerous man alive, I hope we get to him in time.
Heisenberg, I kept the name.
Were the Germans still or the Russians yet a threat?
Uncertainty, but I felt a thrill of apprehension.
Genius struck again.
It is the stroke of 12:00.
And I suppose the ray that halos Einstein halos me.
White blond hair to my waist, almost six feet tall
in my best and only suit.
Why cavil ?
I am beautiful.
We smile.
But it's taken me all these years
to realize that when I looked at Einstein, he saw me.
At last that May when Germany collapsed,
the British kidnapped Heisenberg from France,
where he and colleagues sat in a special transit camp
named DUSTBIN to save them from a threat they never knew.
A mad American general thought to solve
the post-war nuclear problem by having them all shot.
Some boys in pristine uniforms crowd the car.
West Pointers fleeing from a weekend dance.
Youth's ambiguities resolved in a single action.
I still see their faces in the yellow light as the train
jolts, then starts up again.
So many destined never to be men.
In Cambridge, the Germans visited
old friends kept apart by war.
Austrian, English, Danes, and a happy reunion at Farm Hill,
but then the giant fist struck in the still center
of chaos, noise.
Unimaginable, we thought we heard the awful cry
of God, Hiroshima.
Heisenberg, at first, refused to believe it
till the evening news confirmed that their work had led
to Hiroshima's 100,000 dead.
Worst hit of us all, said Heisenberg,
was Otto Hahn, who discovered uranium fission.
Hahn withdrew to his room, and we
feared that he might do himself some harm.
It is exactly noon, and Dr. Einstein
is an ancient drawing of the sun,
simple as a saint emerging from his cell,
dazed by his own light.
I think of Giotto, Chaucer, all good and moral medieval men,
in yet removed from their historic time.
The week before we heard of Heisenberg,
my parents and I are chatting on the train from Washington.
A gray-haired, handsome man listens with open interest,
then inquires if he might join us.
We were such a fascinating family.
Oh yes, we chorus, sit with us.
Penn Station near at hand, we asked his name.
E. O. Lawrence, he replied, and produced his card.
I'd never heard of him, but on an impulse asked,
what is all this about the harnessing of the sun's rays?
Should we be frightened?
He smiled, my dear, there's nothing in it.
So reassured, we said goodbyes, and spoke of him
in coming years, that lovely man.
Of course, we found out who he was
and what he did, at least as much as we could comprehend.
Now I am living in the Berkeley Hills
in walking distance of the Lawrence lab.
Here where Dr. Lawrence built a cyclotron,
it's noon, the anniversary of Hiroshima.
Everywhere all over Japan and Germany,
people are lighting candles.
It's dark in Germany and Japan on different days,
but here in Berkeley it is 12 o'clock.
I stand in the center of the library, and he appears.
Are we witnesses or actors?
The old man and the girl smiling at one another.
He fixed by fame.
She fluid, still without identity.
An instant which changes nothing and everything forever.
Everything is changed.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]