I don't have any poems about academic life, really,
or deans or professors or anything, except one.
And it's very recent.
And I'll never publish it.
It's only six lines long, and I stole the first three
from Oliver Sigworth.
But I'm going to read it anyway.
Oliver Sigworth is an enormously witty man.
But many of you, perhaps, don't know that because he
doesn't usually share his wit.
He's a professor in our department.
He doesn't usually share his wit with others.
He talks to himself.
And he mutters under his breath as he's walking down the hall.
And he says these wonderfully witty things.
So if you run along behind him and are very quiet and listen,
you can hear these wonderfully witty things.
The first three lines of this little six line poem
are something he said.
And he was referring to the architecture of some
of the buildings near this one, but I won't tell you
in which direction.
You'll be able to figure it out.
It's called "Point of View."
Professors who work in buildings with tall, narrow windows
have tall, narrow minds.
Each has an office with only one view,
and there is no point to it.
That's a joint poem, me and Oliver Sigworth.
Now that was a joke, but I do have
a poem called "Point of View."
It's a new poem.
And I'm going to start with it because it exposes me
as a frustrated painter, I suppose.
I think most poets are more or less frustrated painters,
in one way or another.
I've never had any training, but I'm
fascinated with painting and with visual arts.
I'm always concerned about the manipulation of light
in a poem, as in a painting, whether it
comes from outside the painting or whether it
comes from inside the painting, or so on.
As a matter of fact, I once had a poem
in which I think I created the most unusual source of light
in any poem that I know about, written recently anyway.
And I'm not going to read that poem.
But I think I can remember the last stanza.
And it was about my life on the farm as a child,
where I was raised.
And it says, the last stanza, we knew we would never be famous
or anything out of the ordinary.
But for a while, after grandpa dropped the flashlight
into the outhouse hole, we had a kind of glory.
It continued to shine, pointing straight up from down there,
and our most private moments were illuminated.
So this "Point of View" poem is about the visual process,
I suppose.
And the opening line or two, a couple of lines,
may be confusing.
I don't know if this is true of all horses,
but I used to have a horse when I was a child who
had the most beautiful eyes.
They were blue.
It was a sorrel horse.
And there was a line of little, like, rosettes across the iris.
Now, I don't know if that's common, because this horse went
blind, eventually.
And it may have been the disease I was seeing.
But it was very beautiful.
That's just in the first part of the poem.
"Point of View"
See with the eyes of a horse whose
irises are rows of blue flowers: the world is green and edible.
See with the small eyes of a pig:
the world is dim and narrow.
People are tall and hungry.
See with the eyes and glass eye of an old stove
while the fire in its belly looks out
at a combustible world.
See with the eye of a window facing east, light and darkness
rising, never coming down again.
See with the eyes of a believer who
does not believe what he sees, but sees what he believes.
See with the eyes of a painter who paints what he cannot see
until he has painted it.
See with the practical eye of a woman's sex:
the world is hard but not durable,
fails when most needed.
See with the curious eye of a man's sex:
many worlds full of mystery, the same secret hidden in each.
See with the eyes of a lover who sees
his reflection in a thumbnail and falls in love.
See with the eyes of a prophet who
sees a hammer approaching a thumbnail
and a new nail growing beneath it.
See with the bright eye of a lake, the sky,
and reflect it, the mountains, and reflect them.
See with the dark eye of a lake, great depths
where fish undulate.
Let that eye go to sleep at night while the other eye stays
open, a trap for the moon.
I wanted to start--
[APPLAUSE]
I wanted to start with that because it ended with the moon.
And I noticed, after I'd chosen the poems to read this evening,
they all have the moon.
All except maybe the last two have the moon in them.
And it's obviously one of my things.
I'm very concerned about the moon
and, again, the manipulation of light,
the moon as a source of light in the various poems.