Now I'm going to read for a very few minutes
from yet another book about which maybe I'll
say of three or four things because
of the strange nature of the poems
in it and because of the--
which you'll recognize the fairly quickly when I tell you
about the titles of them--
titles of these poems are titles like arrogant, sentimental,
fat, on a diet, generous, driven, manic, depressive,
meticulous, lazy, et cetera.
It's true about us, I imagine, that we
have trouble living without having stories
that we use to explain ourselves to ourselves, to our friends.
That we have the stories that we use to explain
why the world is the way it is.
And that the stories are absolutely necessary to us
and they're never quite accurate enough.
These poems are simply a collection
of small stories that we--
of that sort.
And I want to read a very few of them.
Most of these are quite short.
Because of the nature of these titles, there are--
in which the titles promise very exact and precise definitions
and the nature of reality, which is to say that it resists
exactly precise definitions, there's--
one is invited in writing such poems
to use aphorisms and mottos and folk sayings and so forth.
And so many of these poems have epigraphs,
which is a practice I'd never used before.
But the nature of these poems seem to call for it.
And I've taken them from everywhere, Flaubert, Eudora
Welty.
In the case of this poem, Jake LaMotta, the famous boxer.
The poem is called, On a Diet.
And the reason why Jake LaMotta would be quoted about diets
is that when he was fighting, he always
had trouble making his weight.
And there would be a kind of countdown in the sports pages.
And the hipper newspapers would sometimes send somebody out
from their woman's page--
it's now known as the lifestyle page--
and interview him about his diet.
And he would give tips on how to lose weight.
And the epigraph for this poem is one of those.
Eat all you want, but don't swallow it.
On a Diet.
The ruth of soups and balm of sauces, I renounce equally.
What Rorschach saw in ink, I find in the buttery frizzle
in the saute pan.
And I leave it behind.
And the sweet peat smoke tang of bananas and cream
in clots and chocolate.
I give away the satisfactions of food and take desire for food.
I'll be traveling light to the heaven of revisions.
Why be adipose and expense et cetera, in our waste et cetera?
Something like the body of the poet's work,
with its pale shadows, begins to pare and replace the poet's
body, and isn't it time?