A few nights ago, I was talking on the phone
to a young poet friend of mine named Willie.
I said, Willie-- he doesn't have any connection
with the university-- and I said, "Willie, I'm
going to be doing a reading at the university Wednesday night.
Why don't you come down there?"
Willie said, "Oh man, gee, that'd be great.
That sounds like a lot of fun.
Are you going to be there?"
So Willie, if you're out there in the fog somewhere I'm here.
This is me.
I read here last time in 1970.
And since then I've read a lot of places
and pretty much all over the country, enough at least
to know that this is probably the best and most challenging
audience for poetry in the United States.
And I get that not only from my own experience
but from what other poets have told me.
It's not just because of its size
but because of its quality.
It's a literate audience, sophisticated audience,
an audience that knows poetry pretty well--
I'm going to try to get this out of my eye.
And it's an audience which can be critical, quite critical.
I've seen this audience respond with the great rolling volumes
of silence at times--
things like that.
So it's a challenging audience.
And I've enjoyed watching it grow over the years.
It's been wonderful.
Some people think that this audience is made up
mostly of just people in the English department,
creative writing, and so on.
But it isn't.
This audience is a cross-section audience.
We let everybody come here.
There are even people from the speech department.
The speech department is very, very strange.
I don't understand it.
But I understand that there's, sort of, two speech
departments.
It's, sort of, bifurcated in some way.
And people say it's like two chocolate cakes,
and one is plain and the other one has all the nuts in it.
And I think that the people from the speech department who
come to these readings are from the one
with all the nuts in it.
But they are very interested, the speech department.
I think we are, in the English department,
we are a little bit conservative and a little bit stodgy.
But in the speech department they burn their building down,
and they do interesting things that we don't do.
We just don't have that much imagination.
They have a woman teaching over there, is very dear to me,
and she's usually in this audience.
They call her Mad Mary Maher.
Her close friends call her Crazy Mary.
But she has a course called "Body Language."
And I tried to take it, but they said my body was too old.
And they wouldn't even let me audit.
I went over and peeked in the window,
but the gardener sprayed me with the hose.
And they have a fellow over in the speech department
called Goliath Williams.
And his real name is David, but they call him Goliath.
He teaches a course, it's just called "Communications,"
and he teaches it with a baseball bat.
He got his training at the state prison working with me
two or three years ago.
They say it's a very memorable course.
We're kind of conservative in the English department,
and we don't really have that sort of interesting people.
We have some interesting secretaries though.
And we have one secretary, she's very attractive,
her name is Pat.
And there's a strange thing about her--
I have never seen her in all the years
she works here when she didn't have
a pair of scissors in her hand.
I don't know why exactly, and she's
always in this defensive posture, like this.
I think she has had some trouble with some of the faculty
members.
But I think things are looking up in the English department.
I think we're going to get more interesting as time goes on.
We have a new chairman of the department,
and he's very young.
And we like him a lot.
He's very energetic.
He's very young.
He came this summer and for the first week
he wore short pants to work, and somebody finally sent him home
to put his long pants on and they
discovered he didn't have any.
He's very young.
But we always have, at least, an interesting dean and--
well, liberal arts dean.
Well what I really mean to say, I guess,
is that the most interesting thing about the dean
is his wife.
His wife is very interesting.
She's very beautiful.
And they tell me she's a psychiatrist.
I guess she must be very bright.
Everybody says it's a good thing that the dean's wife is
a psychiatrist so he doesn't have to go out for treatment.
I think I just saw the dean.
I think I blew it.
Well, that's the way it is with deans,
they're always snooping around instead
of staying in their office doing whatever it is they do.
I don't know what that is.
But they snoop around, and you can't recognize them
because they look just like normal people.
Almost.
It's amazing how few poems have been
written about college deans.
Have you ever thought about that?
I think there's a moral in it.
I don't know what it is.
But I do know of one, and I think I'll read it.
It's by one of my favorite poets, by Kenneth Patchen,
and it's called "The Cowboy Who Went to College."
It's very short.
I'll try to read this a little bit the way
Kenneth Patchen read it, but nobody can really
read like Kenneth Patchen.
He was probably the best reader--
one of the two best readers of this century.
"The Cowboy Who Went to College."
"There was a cowboy who went to college, where somebody
spilled ink on his horse.
He went to the dean in charge of such things
and was told by that gentleman that that gentleman had just
popped out to the can again.
"Oh, he has, has he!"
says the cowboy.
"And me thinking it might be an accident-- why, hell, it's
part of the damn curriculum!"