About three or four years ago, I embarked on the project
having reached my early middle age
of trying to become a minor American poet by doing
what everybody was doing, then that's
writing a long sequence, a long book like sequence
of boring poems.
[LAUGH] And fortunately this didn't work out,
but some parts of it survived.
And I want to read one part of it.
It was to be called Lives of of the Saints,
and the poems were little vignettes,
most of them concerning artists, anything from painters to jazz
musicians to whatever who at some point in my life
had meant something to me.
I wanted to say include some details about their own lives
but also express something about what they've meant to me.
These are five-- this is five sections from it,
five fairly short sections.
Each of the sections has a sort of an outer and inner voice
so I could call and response.
I suppose it's a poem and a kind of a comment on that poem,
see what you have to know about them.
Mozart, the first one concerns, and all you really
have to know, if you didn't, is that Mozart was probably,
along with Keats, the intuitive artist to whom the music just
simply seemed to flow from him.
But he died a pauper, was buried in a pauper's grave.
The second concerns John Clare, who
was an English poet about over a century ago,
who spent the last half of his life
in a madhouse where he was subject to fits of psychosis.
The beginning of that section that begins "dear sir"
is the last letter that Clare wrote from the madhouse.
Tolstoy wanted to be a saint.
And he was, oh I'm sorry.
I've forgotten what I wanted to say about this.
Films are mentioned in the Tolstoy section.
One of the earliest films that were made
were of Tolstoy's funeral. A few quotes also
from Tolstoy, short stories in it.
Osip Mandelstam, Russian poet, died in exile
in the labor camp, Stalin's Russia.
And Robert Schumann, who was also something of an innocent,
I guess as John Clare was and also spent
the last part of his life mad.
His music is so banal he must be so simple.
[LAUGH] OK, "Lives of the Saints."
"This is the rain on Mozart's grave, shearing to glissandi.
Where do you little lie, exhausted, whole, and wholly
done?
Sweet Amadeus, when I sip my bourbon, weaving myself
toward pure abstraction, the recollection of emotion
without the tired events--
I'd trade my part in this to bear your song.
Even the most, last, broken, human moan,
you were so friendly, and your pillow was a stone.
This is Mozart, a curtain of rain,
the turning heads of certain women,
the sweetness of bourbon, sweetness of music,
the pure politeness of oblivion."
And John Clare's letter.
"Dear sir, I am in a madhouse and quite forget your name."
He's replying to someone.
"I'm in a mad house and quite forget your name
or who you are.
You must excuse me, for I have nothing to communicate or tell.
And why I am shut up, I don't know.
I have nothing to say so must conclude.
Yours respectfully, John Clare.
Was this his letter into the earth?
Was it wholly composed of solitude?
It was wholly composed.
Did he bear extravagant pain whose
poems of such light fragrance as to be--
dear sir, forgive us-- small?
You are minor, sir, and would not offend.
I am respectfully yours.
Under the gathering luminous clouds,
he walked his ground, thought, another reigns.
I must not--
Tolstoy-- be myself, and fled from home.
We have the early flickering films, the morning strangers,
waving.
All day he lay at Astapovo Station.
Over and over--
I do not understand what it is I have to do.
Yes, one good deed, a cup of water given--
prevailed his gentleness, his pride who would not bow--
the light, a small tin lamp without a shade--
to read himself.
I have no passport.
I am a servant of God.
The age demanded acquiescence.
Stalin's cock, a stone.
The heart of Mandelstam, in exile, pumps and dries.
The bells of Petrograd, the bells of Leningrad
limed with ice, are hollow.
Silent stalks the frozen snow.
We throw our matches three times in our Yankee vodka,
hoping for a conflagration.
Anger!
For Mandelstam, for Mayakovsky, Anna Akhmatova!
For timid Mandelstam, three times a fool,
accused and blessed--
poet, Russian, Jew.
I am Chopin.
I enclose a little time.
I bow and play.
The sea, the chandelier, this room, the sky,
the cliffs at Sourash, even the whole of Europe blown black,
spin--
the music speeds, retreats.
And I'm Robert Schumann, mad and done.
Yet must a little time, go on.
Now at the hour, we lately lie awake.
Give us that surety on which our fragile art depends.
I am Robert Schumann, bewildered,
woken by a strange sonata in a foreign bed.
Give me a little time, eternity, and I will mend."